Witch Water (22 page)

Fanshawe’s heart beat faster and faster.

Strange censers of incense eddied trails of
greasy mist about the vista of hidden carnality; while men,
obviously spent by their previous trysts, re-aroused themselves by
applying unidentifiable balms to their genitals. Yet another woman
traversed along on dirty hands and knees, to fellate every man in
vicinity. Eventually, she made her way to the watchful figure
between the trees, and provided the same ministration. The figure
stood still as a wood carving, yet its evident orgasm so
overpowered the woman that she collapsed in the dirt, a gush of
fluid flowing from her agape mouth. Two men rushed up then, grabbed
her by the ankles, and pulled her back into the copulative fray,
conscious or unconscious—it hardly mattered…

Fanshawe’s mind swam at the sights. The
visions stoked his sickness like a bellows to a coal bed; he stared
and stared and stared, reveling in every perverse image. He was so
intoxicated by the sights that he’d forgotten his purpose, his
“experiment.”

He didn’t care.

Eventually, the debauchers slowed, then
flopped to a halt, drained of all energy; they collapsed upon one
another in a sweating, lust-sullied pile. Fanshawe let the
looking-glass’s circular field trail upward. Where the block-like
sentinel had stood between the trees, there was now just a drift of
sooty smoke that only
seemed
to adhere in a vague semblance
of the figure’s shape.

Did the smoky area where its face had been
smile?

Fanshawe was not himself now. He felt
black
inside, he felt drugged by what he’d seen—

And I want to see more…

In the distance, a dog barked, but Fanshawe
didn’t care. He moved to a lower hillock with a more direct view of
the inn. All the windows were black, save for one.

Mine,
he realized.

In the light of many candles, Jacob Wraxall
sat at a desk, writing with a quill pen. A shadow slinked across
the back of the room but Wraxall remained intent on his writing.
Then, hands landed on Wraxall’s shoulders from behind—small,
graceful white hands, connected to lambent white arms; the contact
sufficiently surfaced the Van Dyked man from his writing muse, and
then he turned.

He turned to embrace his naked daughter.

Evanore moved around into view; she was
naked, glittering in a mist of sweat. Her breasts seemed inflamed,
nipples jutting conspicuously as pink rivets, which Wraxall leaned
upward to take into his mouth. The witch’s long, shining hair
spilled over her bare shoulders like blood. Her eyes closed to
slits as she focused on her father’s tendings.

Fanshawe zoomed in closer, in spite of the
impossibility of what he was seeing.

He’d seen porn movies less overt. Evanore’s
curvaceous form turned, leaned, and then she brushed her father’s
sheets off the table.

Then she traversed, facing him as he
remained in his chair. Her thighs parted automatically, and then
her fingers clasped behind her father’s head, urging him forward
and down.

Her stomach sucked in and out, her breasts
heaved. Wraxall performed oral sex with the voracity of an animal
eating…and apparently with some exactitude. The younger woman’s
head rolled around, her body grew more and more tense from the
waves of pleasure. Then, as the crescendo approached, she locked
her ankles behind her father’s neck, lifted her buttocks off the
table, and…

Fanshawe heard her shrieks of release all
the way up on the hillock.

This can’t be…but it is…

Finally, he allowed the impossible truth to
consciously occur to him:
I’m watching a warlock go down on his
daughter three hundred years ago…

Evanore lay back flat, hanging off the
table; Wraxall seemed pleased in the aftermath, and slowly glided
his hands adoringly over his daughter’s body, which lay out before
him like an opened newspaper. Eventually he rose, leaving Evanore
immobile and quite sated. Aside, he poured himself a glass of
wine.

What’s going on now, I wonder,
Fanshawe thought, his eye glued to the glass.

Wraxall had looked upward, and called
something out. Behind the desk, then, a rope ladder fell into view,
and down the ladder came another man, much younger than Wraxall,
dark-haired and clean-shaven. The man, like Evanore, was naked; he
was also obviously aroused from some activity in the attic, yet
Fanshawe didn’t want to think
why
he was aroused.
Callister Rood,
Fanshawe realized.
Wraxall’s
apprentice.
But whereas Evanore’s body was glazed in sweat,
Rood’s was splattered in blood.

Wraxall, with his glass of wine, stood back
in the attitude of a spectator. At once his gaunt face was overcome
by the lewdest grin. No words were spoken; Rood acted through the
instinct of experience. He stepped up to the table where Evanore
lay worn-out, placed her ankles on his shoulders, and—

No holding hands in the park for this
guy…

Rood’s rough, automatonic intercourse
revitalized Evanore to her former promiscuous self. She squirmed on
the table, back arching, her hands smearing the splatters of blood
across Rood’s muscled chest. Each hard thrust vibrated the woman’s
breasts and inched the table across the floor. Wraxall’s mouth was
moving—was he giving verbal orders to his apprentice? Corrupt
delight filled his sharp green eyes and, next, he’d approached the
writing-table with a candle, tilted it, and let scalding droplets
of wax land on his daughter’s belly and breasts. Evanore was soon
shrieking again, contorting on the table, her toes curling; Rood
contorted a bit himself, his own back arched now, cords in his neck
standing out. When his thrusts grew almost too brutal for Fanshawe
to watch, they slowed to a halt. Rood fell into the chair behind
him, exhausted. But Evanore only leaned up, grinning and licking
her lips, and diddling with some final sensations with her own
hand.

Fanshawe felt winded himself watching it
all.

Yet there was still more to watch. The
following effort seemed like something in concert: the
blood-smeared Rood stood up, Evanore rose with him, then Wraxall
himself came around. The three of them stood directly before the
window.

They looked right back at Fanshawe and
smiled.

Fanshawe wobbled in place and stumbled
backward. The impact of what he’d glimpsed—those three grinning
faces—made his heart skip beats; it took several moments to
straighten himself and realign the looking-glass, but when he did
so—

The trio had dispersed from their place at
the window. Wraxall was now standing in the background, as if in
supervision. Meanwhile, Rood was ascending the rope ladder, after
which Wraxall tossed a length of rope upwards. The rope was
snatched, then it tightened, as the now unseen Rood began to pull
on it. Slowly, and in hitches, a slim, nude figure—a teenaged girl
or boy—rose upside-down, gagged, tied up, eyes wide in horror.

Another verification.
Abbie said the
diary they have verified that Wraxall snatched local children…
But was something different? Fanshawe wasn’t sure but it seemed
that the candle light was darker now, and Wraxall’s clothes were
different. Then he noticed another window—on a lower level—with a
light on that hadn’t been on before. In the frame, Evanore could be
seen fully clothed in a plaited dress with puffed shoulders. She
was intently reading a large book.

Fanshawe took his eye away. Evanore seemed
to have gotten dressed and moved downstairs
very
quickly.

He looked again. Evanore’s window was dark,
and so was the window where Wraxall and Rood had been raising the
abducted child aloft.

Logic, of course, did not register with
Fanshawe now. How could it?
How can I expect things to make
sense when I’m insane?
he was candid enough to ask himself. He
lowered the glass, took a breath and rubbed his eyes, then looked
again.

The scene in the room that would eventually
be his
shouted
back at him. Instead of frenetic sex taking
place on the writing-desk, a body lay sprawled, its ruffled shirt
ripped apart, revealing a chest that looked rotor-tilled. The face
of the corpse remained out of view, but great jettisons of blood
seemed to have been fired against the papered walls.
A
bloodbath,
Fanshawe thought.
But who is it?
Again he
lowered the glass, to think.

What’s happening to me? Why am I seeing
this? I HAVE to be insane,
he thought, but he didn’t finish the
rest of the intimation:

What if he
wasn’t
insane?

He got the gist now that each time he
lowered the glass and then re-raised it, some shift in time took
place—not time now but the time-period he was viewing. That would
explain Evanore’s near-instantaneous relocation, and Wraxall’s
different apparel so quickly after he’d been grinning out the
window. Now Fanshawe saw Evanore naked in yet another room, on the
far end, lowering herself into a wide-lipped bathtub, but in this
glimpse, her breasts were even larger, and she was extremely
pregnant. The next glimpse showed Wraxall himself strolling about
the yard, pipe in mouth, as he contemplated the stars.

And the next glimpse?

He heard a creaking sound, yet all the
windows of the house were dark. Fanshawe scanned the yard with the
glass, then caught a slightly swinging form of some kind. It was in
the back yard, where the parking lot existed now, and from a tree
that was no longer there, a man hung from a rope around his neck.
Fanshawe zoomed forward in the moonlit dimness. The hanged man was
Callister Rood.

For shit sake, what IS this?

Fanshawe paced the hillock’s meager
clearing. Beyond, and without the aid of the glass, Haver-Towne
stood well lit in the sodium light of its street lamps. He picked
one such lamp out and raised the glass to look at it
specifically.

The street lamp disappeared.

He wasn’t even surprised now.
One of Dr.
Tilton’s “fugue-states?”
He’d seen on TV once that a rare tick
passed a virus that caused hallucinations, but at this he laughed
even as he scanned the town’s three-hundred-year-old streets.
Yeah, that sounds JUST like my karma, yes sir. A fuckin’
TICK-bite is making me see all this.

“Sir, pray allow me?” a soft voice drifted
behind him. “Thou oughtn’t take away the glass if thou wish to
fancy my aspect. You need only turn, and elevate thy gaze.”

Fanshawe froze in place at the sound of the
exotic, accented voice. It was a voice he’d heard before—at the
waxworks—but his disorientation blocked out the impossibility of
everything now.
Oh, what the hell?
he thought, laughing. He
followed the instructions.

Evanore Wraxall smiled down at him from the
next hill; she wore a tight black cloak, and was no longer
pregnant. The moonlight somehow made her green eyes look larger,
like an erotic yet vampiric caricature—the image stole Fanshawe’s
breath. Her crude gown stretched against the solidity of her
curves; and the facial expression he’d previously noticed suggested
a classical beauty jammed together with abominable knowledge and
sick-in-the-head carnality.

The image mesmerized Fanshawe.

“Alight from thy deceptions on which thou
hast been weaned, and arise to thy true self, sir,” the woman—or
apparition—said. “Steel thee against the sheep and hypocrites and
weaklings, and stake out the bounty and
claim
it as thine
own—
if
thou dost have the
heart…
”

Fanshawe stared, shaking.

“—a heart so black as to be
stygian,
sir, a black blacker, too, than the very abyss…,” and then the
woman began to peel the crude gown slowly down her body until she
stood nude in the moonlight.

“A heart black enough to butcher
babes,
sir, babes in their cribs—yea, black enough to see
the blood of the innocent without a falter, and to dis-entrench the
corpses of your loved ones as they still lie
ripe,
and to do
so smiling.” Her lips and nipples looked black in the moonlight,
while her skin seemed luminous. “All this we do in ebullience, so
to praise our Master and clutch our reward so devoutly earned.”

She pointed toward another hillock, a sudden
breeze billowing her blood-red hair. Her voice flowed like some
tenuous dark fluid. “Lower the glass, sir, and then look, to descry
the quality on
mine own
heart…”

Mechanically, Fanshawe lowered the
looking-glass, let a moment pass, then aimed it where she’d just
pointed.

Flaming torches bobbed amid rancorous shouts
as colonists stood crowded about the hill. Men in tri-cornered hats
and canvas trousers wielded pitchforks and muskets. From the mob
came salvoes of invectives: “Witch!” “Idolater!” “Fornicatress!”
“The Divell’s concubine!”

Wedges of shifting light and shadow diced up
Sheriff Patten’s badly complected face; his girth threatened to pop
the copper buttons of his star-badged vest. Two other men held
Evanore fast by her arms, forcing her to face her accusers. She’d
been stripped, her initial punishment of branding having already
been administered: blistered shapes of crosses showed on her
breasts, abdomen, and pubis. Her eyes remained narrowed throughout,
and her lips were set in a narrow smile that could only be
described as mocking.

The dour-faced pastor approached with a
small Bible, and when he began to read the Rites for the Condemned,
she parted her thighs, pushed her groin forward, and urinated.

“Despicable harlot! Evil’s sarvant who lives
and breathes to transgress the Creator! May thee be
damned
to torment eternal!”

Evanore answered in a throaty voice, “Drink
thee of this, heartily,” as she urinated harder. “’Tis of
youthful boys
you dream, father. And do please enlighten
your devout High Sheriff that his arousal wilt soon be betraying
him—”