Witch Water (35 page)

“There he is!”

“Wizard! Get thee hence!”

A rabble of men shambled southward down the
street. They carried torches and pitchforks. Fanshawe’s heart felt
like it turned inside-out—he raced across the dirt road, into the
alley he’d crossed earlier, but—

BAM!

Muzzleflash bloomed at the other end of the
alley. More enraged townsmen leapt toward him over the rubbish.

Out of here,
Fanshawe thought. He
backtracked, jerked north, began to sprint, but stopped in his
tracks.

More townsmen poured down the street. He was
being converged upon by all accessible directions…

I’m caught, I’m dead,
he thought.
Patten and his deputies were the first to seize him. The grossly
overweight sheriff’s pocked face and red, bulbous nose looked huge
in the moonlight. When Fanshawe raised his flashlight, Patten
slapped it away. “Thy tools of Lucifer are of no use to thee,” the
lawman said, “for
our
tools—faith—be empowered by Almighty
God who hast power to rub thee to dust!”

Another man in a tri-cornered hat
chicken-winged Fanshawe from behind. Now over a dozen men encircled
the scene, shouting, waving torches. “To the barrel I say!” one
shouted. “Wither has Humphreys taken his cur?” someone else asked.
And another: “Whilst we pass this night in our beds, ’tis best that
this warlock pass it in the
belly
 of the dog!”

Fanshawe couldn’t think beyond the
contemplation of that massive dog. Several men spit on him, and one
prodded hard him with a stick. Fanshawe yelled when the man
propping him up yanked his elbows higher to twist his shoulder
joints.

“Pray, Sheriff, Humphreys and his cur be in
ye fields!”

“We’ve not time to wait!” Patten blared. “We
must kill this sarvant of Satan before he speaks hexes upon
us!”

Fanshawe strained in his captor’s clench; a
frantic glance to the Wraxall house showed him Rood and Evanore
peeking out a front window. They were grinning.

“Keep him in thy clutches, Cooper,” the
sheriff said. “Hold him fast and still…” Patten was unscrewing the
cap on an unlit lantern. “Let him decide if hellfires be so hot as
this!” and then the lantern was upended over Fanshawe’s head.

His face wanted to suck in on itself. A
thick, fishy smelling oil saturated his hair, then drooled down his
face and chest. Next, his pants were unfastened, his underwear
pulled out, and more oil was poured. “No doubt ye fiend hath
defiled many a Christian woman with
this,
” Patten said, “and
put many a devilish babe in her belly. Well, warlock, here be
recompense!”

The crowd surrounding Fanshawe quickly
stepped back, then he was released. He only had time to attempt one
lunging step before—

“Burn the monster!” Patten ordered.

—a lit torch was plunged right between his
legs.

Flames erupted from his groin; Fanshawe was
suddenly dressed in a suit of fire. His hair smoked off his head in
a single burst; his face crackled and shrunk. The more he wheeled
about in the street, the hotter the flames grew.

“Aye,” someone said approvingly, “tonight
Humphrey’s beast shalt have
cooked
meat for its supper…”

Fanshawe’s eyes popped. He could smell his
own flesh burning, and as for his genitals, they shrunk and bubbled
like marshmallows dropped in a campfire. Amid pain a thousand times
worse than anything he could imagine, his fiery face turned to
something like slab-bacon and his mouth opened and he screamed
louder than a trumpet—

««—»»

—and collapsed, rolling in turmoil. Each
time he let out a breath, smoke expelled. But as he flailed in the
dirt—

What the—

He realized that the pain that had cocooned
him was gone, and where his eyes had popped, he could now see the
perfect, star-flecked twilight above. Fanshawe turned over and sat
up…

He was intact.

No oil soaked his hair and clothing, and the
porky smell of flesh roasting had vanished. His hands went to his
crotch to find it dry and his slacks still fastened.

Then he looked up and saw the Gazing Ball.
The metallic orb atop the pedestal was stained and tarnished, not
clean and brand-new as he’d seen it last. Fanshawe heaved a sigh
and dropped his face into his hands.

“I’m back…”

Rood’s and Evanore’s words refreshed his
memory:
Yet if thy heart be so black as to please ye Benefactor,
then back to thy strange time thou wilt be proper put—

But not before thee hath screamed to rouse
the dead from their graves…

“Well, I sure as shit screamed loud enough
for that when I was on fire,” he muttered. In spite of all he’d
experienced, he jumped up, frenzied with excitement. A glance to
his watch showed him it was ten minutes past midnight.
It was a
lot later than that when I was in the town…
, but then he
recalled what Wraxall had told him about time:

He who masters it OWNS it.

Fanshawe rushed out of the cove and dashed
up to the highest point of Witches Hill.

Below, the town glittered in its lights. He
stared down, knowing that this was the town of today, with its
asphalt streets, its sidewalks, its streetlamps, its tourist hotel
complete with swimming pool.

But that’s not where I just came from…

He squinted and could easily make out
late-nighters sitting at the café, and several more crossing Main
Street into the tavern. He even saw the annoying woman in tights,
and her even more annoying dog, out for a nighttime stroll. At the
town hall, the lights were blinking off, and several people were
dispersing from the front doors. One of them seemed to be heading
toward the inn.
Probably Abbie,
he guessed,
now that her
meeting’s over,
but he couldn’t be sure.

Fanshawe reached into his pocket and
withdrew the looking-glass. He raised it to his eye and looked at
the exact same place in the street where he’d thought he’d seen
Abbie…

Now, of course, she wasn’t there. The town
of three hundred years ago was there instead, and what Fanshawe saw
specifically, on the unpaved street, was the same torch- and
pitchfork-wielding crowd that had just doused him with oil and set
him aflame. At this moment, though, many of the townspeople were
running away as if terrified, while the others stood with
fear-stamped faces and mouths agape. Fanshawe thought he could even
hear
them—

He kept the glass to his eye and cupped his
ear.

“By his magic, he’s escaped into thin air!”
someone shouted.

Another voice: “And out of it he may
reappear when we least expect!”

In the viewing field, Patten waved a torch
back and forth. “Hear me, good Christians—the devil be near at hand
tonight! Take to thy beds! Bolt thy doors and keep thy Bibles
close!” and the parson added with a stammer, “If our pruh-prayers
be sufficient intentful, then God shall keep ye adversary at
bay!”

The remainder of the crowd scattered in all
directions, boots tramping. Seconds later, the street stood empty
and in utter silence.

Fanshawe could hear his own eyes blink.

What now?
he asked himself, but he
already knew the answer…

He swerved the looking-glass to the Wraxall
house.

One window after another stood dark; some
were even shuttered closed. But…what did he expect to see? More of
the atrocious sights he’d witnessed personally? Evanore, nude and
beckoning? Instead, he found the drab, weathered windows blank, and
shutters pale. None were lit—

Wait…

Fanshawe had lost track of which floor he
was surveying; nevertheless, one window seemed to emerge from its
own uniform darkness until the most wan candlelight flickered
within its frame. Soon, in a slowness that could be called
ethereal, a shape moved from within—the shape of a man.

It took Fanshawe’s eyes a minute to
acclimate.

Why am I not surprised?

The man in the window was Jacob Wraxall. The
cuffed and collared sorcerer leaned out the window, peering for
something. His narrowed eyes scanned back and forth, up and down,
until—

He appeared to have found whatever it was he
sought. Very slowly, he smiled, raised a similar looking-glass to
his eye…

Chills that were strangely scalding flushed
their way up Fanshawe’s back. For some inscrutable reason, he felt
that Wraxall’s gesture of raising his own glass served as a
cue
for Fanshawe…

Fanshawe zoomed tighter, until the window
came in close, then Wraxall’s
face
came in close…

Then…closer, until only a third of the
necromancer’s face filled Fanshawe’s circular viewing field,
then—

Even closer.

More. Closer.

Fanshawe zoomed directly into the
lens
of Wraxall’s looking-glass, then he kept turning the
supernatural ring tighter and tighter, delving deeper and deeper,
such that he thought—impossibly—that he was actually zooming in
through the iris of Wraxall’s eye itself…

More!

…then deeper and deeper and deeper, into the
warlock’s very optic nerve and straight into his brain…

Holy shit…

…then
out
of his brain and
down,
down as if down into the earth. Fanshawe’s vision
descended akin to a drill, boring through, first, soil, then the
rocky crust of the world. He stood electrified as he was forced to
bear this resistless black witness, yet soon the notion of what
propelled him…changed. Where first it had been actions of his own
will that had begun this phantasmagoric trek, he now realized it
was
another
will which had superseded: his vision through
the glass was no longer doing the delving but instead it had been
commandeered and pulled, as though a berserk pair of hands at the
bottom of this seemingly bottomless journey were pulling on a
rope,
and the rope was Fanshawe’s eyesight.

Sensing a terror, he willed himself to
retreat but all that responded to his efforts was an increase in
the evil velocity that had taken over.
Helpless,
 came
the whimpering thought, but with it came a sound like a distant yet
incalculably vast chuckle. From here, Fanshawe descended fast and
sure as a stone dropped into a mineshaft miles deep, dropped, yes,
into darkness.

The darkness was just as incalculable as the
speed by which he plummeted; it was a blackness that existed as far
more than an absolute absence of light but as an
entity of its
own,
that
magnified
as the screaming, plunging
lightlessness rose. Fanshawe was deafened by this speed; he felt
his psyche begin to boil from the unearthly, brain-jarring
friction. Was he going mad? He may have even shrieked laughter as
his senses were pulled further; he managed to think of a
roller-coaster car fired through a cannon barrel, but just when the
“car”—Fanshawe—would make impact and explode—

His soaring vision stopped.

The termination of the manic velocity left
him staring at still more of the absolute blackness of this realm,
but after the passage of some time, that blackness seemed to take
on a
glistening,
like something wet, and then?

It began to move.

It
throbbed.
It expanded and
contracted, and each cycle of this movement brought a sound, an
even
thump…thump…thump…,
and only then did Fanshawe’s vision
begin to back-track, ever so slowly, until he could make out
details
of the blackness, but before those details converged
he already knew what they would reveal:

A heart.

A coal-black, chasm-black heart, beating
within the confines of a chest cavity winged by ribs yanked open
via devilish retractors over which flaps of flesh hung.

Like a camera, then, his vision pulled back
more, to reveal his own head atop the naked corpse lying on a slab
of infernal stone. Yes, Fanshawe saw
himself
lying there in
the subterranean cranny, his chest cranked apart, and when a shadow
crossed the charnel slab—somehow a shadow where no light existed to
cast it—Fanshawe sensed an emanation of not only approval but of
love.

An incogitable finger lowered, to touch the
black beating mass in Fanshawe’s chest. The face of the
cadaveresque thing which symbolized Fanshawe…smiled.

“Back now,” said a voice that existed not as
sound but as darkness. “Ye final verge of thy rigor thee hast
crossed.”

“It’s him!” a voice blared.

“Well, I’ll be!” exclaimed another. “You
were right!”

The voices caused Fanshawe to churn amid the
overwhelming blackness he lay buried in. Like a victim trapped in a
tar pit, he floundered, terrified. Eventually he surfaced—not his
body, his mind.

“Yeah, I was right but I goddamn wish I
wasn’t!” a third voice cracked. Even in his consternation, Fanshawe
knew it was Mr. Baxter’s voice. “And it looks like we caught him
red-handed!”

Fanshawe felt a physical
heave,
then
found himself disarrayed face-first on the ground; the
looking-glass tumbled out of his hand. He blinked his way out of
the stupor, realizing that someone had shoved him hard from behind,
severing the occult tether that had moments ago plunged him into a
raging black netherworld. When he leaned up, exhausted and still
terrified, he saw Baxter standing over him. Beside him were two
other elderly men, one slim, stoop-shouldered, with an overly large
jaw who wore an out-of-date suit; the other beer-bellied, in a
shoddy Yankees T-shirt. In the moonlight, the three men looked down
at him like inquisitors.

Fanshawe was about to speak but—

FWAP!

—Baxter reeled back and kicked him in the
stomach.

“There’s a good one in the breadbasket!”
exclaimed the suited man with a high, piping voice.