Witch Water (38 page)

Fanshawe glared at her in the moonlight.

“Like you said, what have a got to lose?”
She chuckled to herself. “Okay.”

Fanshawe finally detached the ball from the
pedestal. He handed it to Abbie. “Take that back to the
car…
carefully.
”

By now Abbie didn’t even challenge her
confusion, but when she took the globe… “Hey, this feels like it’s
got something in it.”

“It does. Take it to the car.” Fanshawe
leaned against the pedestal, then began to rock it back and forth
until it dislodged from the ground. With a grunt, he hoisted it
up.

Abbie stared at Fanshawe. “Come on, Stew.
What’s in the globe?”

Fanshawe huffed, dragging the pedestal. “The
ashes of Jacob Wraxall’s heart,” he replied and then trudged down
the hill back toward the car.

Abbie, with her mouth hanging open, stood
there for a while holding the ball.

Eventually, she followed Fanshawe.

««—»»

You will give to and take from the
same,
Fanshawe recited Letitia Rhodes’ strange prophesy as his
shovel bit down into earth. He wondered if it was really true that
they buried people six feet deep.

If so, he was in for some work.

When Abbie had seen what he was doing, she
scurried away, either back to the car, or as far away from him as
she could get.

Oh, well.

This was the second stop before his return
to New York: the cemetery behind the community church. He dug at a
gravestone which read GEORGE JEFFREYS RHODES.

“I will give to and take from the same,” he
whispered aloud, digging. “Yeah, I guess I will
…”

As it turned out, the coffin lid was
uncovered beneath less than two feet of earth. It didn’t take very
long for Fanshawe to unseat the tiny casket and take it back to the
car.

All in a day’s work,
he thought,
thunking closed the Audi’s trunk. He wiped his hands off on torn,
urine-damp Dolce & Gabbana slacks, then got back behind the
wheel. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to find Abbie in the passenger
seat, looking shell-shocked.
Can’t say that I blame her…
He
pulled away and drove off in darkness.

Not a word was spoken until they were on the
freeway.

“I’ll explain everything in time,” he
said.

She looked at him, mouth still hanging
open.

“But let me ask you something. How do you
feel about kids?”

“
What?
” she croaked.

At once, Fanshawe’s enthusiasm bubbled
forth. There was
so much
of it. “And why should we beat
around the bush? We’re not getting any younger, you know. Hell.
Let’s get married,” and then he eyed her with intensity.

She looked like a mannequin in the
dashlight. “Stew, I just watched you dig up Letitia’s Rhodes’ dead
baby.”

“So?”

Abbie rubbed her face.

“I told you, I’ll explain all that,” he
said. “But not now. You’re not ready for it yet—you’ve just got to
trust me on this.”

She tried to say something but couldn’t.

“You want to know what this is all about?
I’ll tell you. It’s about transposition. It’s about metamorphosis.
We have the opportunity to shed our old skins and become the new
us.
It’s not much different from what you were saying
before. Why should we force ourselves into society’s mold instead
of being what we
want
to be in our hearts?”

Abbie paused in the ceaseless drone of tires
over asphalt. “What are you in
your
heart, Stew? A
warlock?
Is that what this is? You want to be a
warlock
and you want me to be—what?—your
sorceress?
”

Fanshawe reflected. He’d never felt so
wonderful in his life. “Like I said, I’ll explain everything when
you’re ready.”

“This is crazy!” she exploded. “That’s got
to be it—you’re insane, certifiably insane! You’ve got the trunk
filled with a bunch of occult-looking shit I’ve never seen before,
you tell me Jacob Wraxall’s
ashes
are in the Gazing Ball,
then you dig up a
dead baby
and practically in the same
breath you want to get married to a cokehead and have
kids!
Do you have any idea how
crazy
that sounds?”

Fanshawe remained calm behind the wheel.
Several miles beyond the guardrail, the lights of a town dazzled.
“Take this and look at that town,” he said. He handed her the
looking-glass. “
That’s
how crazy I am.”

Outraged, Abbie recognized the glass. She
put it to her eye and pointed it at the nighted town beyond.

And fainted.

I knew it. She’s got a black heart too. Just
like me…

It was a comfortable thought.

Fanshawe smiled. He switched on the
satellite radio and filled the car with a quiet violin
concerto—
Vivaldi,
he suspected.
Or maybe Corelli.
Then he put on the cruise control, leaned back in the plush seat,
and drove.

EPILOGUE

ONE YEAR LATER

Since he’d been a young child, Fanshawe had
always admired Manhattan’s triangular Flatiron Building on Fifth
Avenue, so after his first salvo of speculative stock market buys,
he’d easily purchased the spectacular twenty-two-story monument as
his own. This, he decided, would be his new home, on the entire top
floor. In the cusp of unparalleled luxury was where he wanted his
child to live and to learn.

Several chambers of that massive penthouse
suite had been reserved for Fanshawe’s “research.”

Further market speculations had officially
made him the wealthiest man in the world, in fact, exactly six
months after his return to New York, which Fanshawe found not only
satisfying but quite appropriate: six being the
imperfect
number and the emblem of his new Benefactor.

Abbie—if only temporarily—had overcome her
cocaine addiction, not via rehab but more provocatively by forced
abstinence. Fanshawe had locked her in a posh, luxury-stuffed room
and kept her there until the birth of their son three months ago.
The love he’d felt for her early on—like most things pertaining to
human relationships—had moldered as quickly as a dog turd in the
sun.

When he wasn’t touching base with his
multiple companies, he pursued his new and wondrous calling with
unrestrained zeal: following in the alchemical and
occult-scientific footsteps of Jacob Wraxall. And as for his
impoverished, pitiful obsessions of old? Those paltry urges no
longer existed. He had far more crucial things to do now, things
which excited him exponentially more than peering at woman in
windows.

He’d mounted the Bridle in the building’s
center court, whose security and privacy he’d seen to at tremendous
(but now inconsequential) expense. Jaunts back into the past,
however, were no longer needed, and the miraculous Bridle’s
inscribed orb no longer contained the ashes of Wraxall’s heart.
Those ashes were now kept in a memorial urn mounted in the
bedroom.

Instead, the orb contained the ashes of the
heart of one George Jeffreys Rhodes. With this instance, luck had
accompanied Fanshawe, along with Mrs. Anstruther’s information that
Letitia Rhodes’ unfortunate baby had been
embalmed
with town
donations—hence, the infant’s heart had not decomposed. Thanks to
the intricacies of the first of the Two Secrets, Fanshawe was able
to transplant himself selectively into the future rather than the
past. The limits of this occult traversement was seventy-one
years—the life span that would otherwise have been enjoyed by
Letitia Rhodes’ son. It took some rather strenuous mental
conditioning, meditation, and certain “oblations” (Fanshawe
thrilled
in reducing New York’s homeless population), but
after only a few weeks of this, Fanshawe found that he had received
the blessing he’d asked for, just as Wraxall had said he would.

When his heart felt the blackest, he pushed
himself
forward.

Six months ahead was enough, and then only
five minutes in the public library was all it took. He’d gone
online, looked up the year’s best low-to-high earners on the Dow
and NASDAQ, and returned to his own time with enough data to make
billions on the marketplace. He knew that as he honed his talents
(and further conditioned the
blackness
of his heart) his
reconnaissance surveys would take him more and more distantly into
the time ahead of him. Indeed, he would amass more riches than any
man in history.

Lucifer, be praised,
he thought.

««—»»

“It never gets old,” Abbie said in a hush.
Midnight had tolled minutes ago, when Abbie had taken her usual
place at their huge bedroom window twenty-two stories up. She was
scanning the guts of Manhattan (back when it was not called
Manhattan but instead the Isle of Manna-Hatta by the Wappinger
Indians) with one of the looking-glasses. She was utterly
engrossed.

“What’s that?” Fanshawe said, not quite
hearing her. He closed the door behind him.

“The view. It’s just so spell-binding, I
never get tired of it. It never gets old.”

IT doesn’t but YOU do.
He walked up
behind her and gazed out into the nighted city with his naked eyes,
watching the dazzle of millions of lights and millions of people;
yet knowing that what she saw was equally beautiful in an opposite
way. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Which glass are you
using?”

“Evanore’s—it’s my favorite. To think that
New York City looked like
that
in the 1670s.”

“I know. It’s incredible.”
And YOU, my
dear, are an incredible waste of space.
Fanshawe learned
quickly that “love” was just another mode of passing fancy. After
the baby had been born, she’d served her purpose. She’d become wine
gone stale.

The bowl of cocaine next to her was nearly
gone, while it had been half-full this afternoon. Fanshawe didn’t
care about it now; he’d only cared that she be off the dope during
her term, to protect the baby.

But now?

She can snort a pound of that shit every
damn day for all I care. In fact, I HOPE she does.
He knew he’d
be intrigued to watch her incrementally wither to nothing. She was
halfway there already.

“The Mothersole glass is pretty awesome
too—it goes back fifty years earlier than Evanore’s. Remind me and
I’ll bring it out tomorrow,” but this was just so much idle talk.
He looked at her from behind.
What’s she down to now? A hundred
pounds? Ninety-five?
The unrestrained plunge back into her
addiction had turned her arms to pasta-colored broomsticks; her
breasts had lost half their girth. Her face was a skin-covered
mask.

She paused, raised a solid-platinum spoon to
her nose, and snorted. Then she took to looking through the glass
again.

Fanshawe smiled.

They’d never actually been married; in fact,
no one even knew she was here. And as for Mr. Baxter and any
trouble
he
 might make?

Fanshawe had envisioned the potency of his
calling without delay, and then he’d made certain
arrangements
with certain
persons
amenable to the
discharge of certain
enterprises
 in exchange, of
course, for a previously agreed-upon fee. Within a week of
Fanshawe’s taking Abbie to New York, Baxter, Monty, Howard, and
that asshole in the Yankees shirt had tragically perished in a
fiery car accident.

Money talked, and Fanshawe had developed a
big mouth.

Dr. Marsha Tilton, too, had met with a
regrettable mishap, in her own parking garage, no less. Similar
persons
 had introduced themselves to the astute
psychiatrist, and after hauling her into a van and ra—

Well, what more need be said? Fanshawe
simply didn’t like the idea that she knew so much about his
embarrassing past.

On the other hand, Letitia Rhodes must’ve
realized that Fanshawe had been the mysterious hand-of-charity that
had paid off her property taxes; therefore, she would make the same
deduction once the annual million dollars were wired into her
account. He felt a distinct kinship there, and,
It’s the least I
can do, considering what I took from her…

He stood a while longer watching Abbie stare
enraptured through the glass. Between that and the cocaine, she
couldn’t have been more content.

“I’ve got some work to do now,” Fanshawe
said.

“Goodnight, honey,” she murmured. She just
kept staring out the glass.

Fanshawe left the room.

Perfect…

««—»»

From the east balcony, he gazed out into the
glorious night. What he saw in the stars were promises that
couldn’t be measured…

Later, he raised one of the looking-glasses
to his eye and watched Madison Square Park disappear and be
replaced by dark, tree-crowned hills and dirt-scratch trading
trails which would later emerge as Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Street,
Broadway. Torches flickered on those trails just now, as Dutch
settlers armed with blunderbuss rifles guarded a caravan of
merchant wagons. Fanshawe heard distant drums beating—tom-toms—from
the remaining pockets of obstinate Indians. Periodic shrieks shot
out (war cries?), and low, rhythmic chants. But farther north,
where Gramercy Park would one day spread, the log-hewn walls of
Peter Stuyvesant’s essential first settlement came into focus,
campfires burning bright.

It’s all history,
he thought.
And
I get to see it.

Lately, he’d been thinking. Since he’d
brought Abbie to New York, Fanshawe hadn’t once traveled out of the
country or even out of the city: his apprenticeship was too
important. But now that he was grasping the Art of Deviltry with
confidence, the idea of travel excited him.
Rome, London,
Athens, Hong Kong?
Naturally, he’d bring some of the
looking-glasses with him, to see
those
great cities as
they’d been three centuries ago. And with
his
money and
connections?