Season of the Witch Read online

  SEASON

  OF THE

  WITCH

  CHARLEE JACOB

  NECRO PUBLICATIONS

  2016

  – | – | –

  Also Available from Necro Publications:

  Dread in the Beast: The Novel

  Dread in the Beast: The Short Story Collection

  This Symbiotic Fascination

  Soma

  Still

  Geek Poems

  Guises

  Containment

  Up, Out of the Cities That Blow Hot and Cold

  Vestal

  Heresy

  Skins of Youth

  – | – | –

  SEASON OF THE WITCH © 2016 by Charlee Jacob

  Cover art © 2016 Travis Anthony Soumis

  This edition 2016 © Necro Publications

  LCCN: 2015934889

  Book design & typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  Assistant editors:

  Tara Cleves

  C. Dennis Moore

  Necro Publications

  5139 Maxon Terrace, Sanford, FL 32771

  necropublications.com

  (Note): Passages from Season of the Witch appear in her collection The Myth of Falling.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, or his agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  – | – | –

  Acknowledgments

  Twilight Zone

  The Outer Limits

  Night Gallery

  Thriller

  Poe

  Monk

  The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

  Wagner

  Vanilla Fudge

  Donovan

  Baudelaire

  – | – | –

  Dedication

  To Jim

  Sewn tome

  Breast to breast

  (even as sometimes

  Hearts need restitching)

  A spun sugar thread

  Unbroken for over thirty years…

  To David

  A lot of time is lost

  Between those dark

  Near Death Experiences.

  I’ll tell you mine

  if you tell me…

  Wait!

  Don’t let me fall—

  Damn! I just

  broke another

  finger.

  – | – | –

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PART THREE

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  – | – | –

  PART ONE

  “It was all about calling up

  what could never be put back.”

  —Pirsya Profana

  – | – | –

  Prologue

  Boy with a match.

  He struck, quickly blew it out, then put it on his tongue. The match hissed. He exhaled a puff of smoke. The mouth muscle produced a tiny blister, not more than a taste bud burned on a pizza slice.

  He didn’t care. Despite a burgeoning girth, he didn’t eat much.

  His skinny friend wasn’t freaked, having seen him do this before. Besides, he had his own kinks.

  See that girl at the bus stop? the friend thought to himself. When she stands on the other side of the bench, it looks as if she hasn’t got legs. I can only see the tops of her thighs. If they were stumps they’d sway, jiggling like a second pair of breasts.

  It was in a kid’s nature to be curious. About life. Death. Pain.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 1

  Two years before.

  Calia Abrams woke up, ass and cunt on fire.

  Did she think of her most intimate parts in those words, because they had used those words?

  (Who were they?)

  What had been done to her?

  (I don’t remember! Don’t want to remember! NO!)

  Dicks and sticks, bones and stones. Broken bottles and broken brick throttles.

  “Hey, they still call this wilding?” one of them asked, giggling and burping.

  Another guffawed, breath nacho-nasty. “Why couldn’t the other one have come to the store, if it was just going to be half the pair? That one’s a fox. This carpet-muncher’s a fatty.”

  “Must be the ‘husband’,” said a third.

  (How many?)

  “Think she straps on a dildo?” asked a fourth.

  Dark parking lot between a bar and a twenty-four-hour market. Calia and Robin had been to both places together.

  She still lay in the dark yet the smell was astringent, antiseptic—a pine additive meant to mask blood and shit. Tubes invaded her nose, throat, and arm veins. Stitches pulled where no one should ever have a needle go in and out. She understood a rape kit must’ve been done but she’d been unconscious, blows to her skull to blame.

  Kicked in the face, then someone else banged the back of her head against the asphalt.

  She’d smelled tar, oil and anti-freeze from cars parked near where they’d thrown her down and stripped her. She fought with everything she had, but there were so many… They hurt her fast and hard enough to knock the breath out of her, disabling her before she could wound one.

  Somebody whined, “Fuckin’ bitch! She broke one of my nails!”

  That was the kicking to the face, pointed-toe Italian leather, probably made out of unborn calf because the hide was so soft. Sure didn’t feel soft…

  Disgusting things they called her. Why? What had she ever done to them? Nothing. She was simply that evening’s drunken redneck entertainment—well-to-do professionals, but yeah, rednecks in the worst way of the word.

  And her gangrapers…men and women. My God, how could any woman commit so filthy and degrading an act to one of her own gender?

  It was a nice bar, too—a place where Calia…an architect…and Robin…a nurse…went occasionally after going to the market. The attackers had seen the couple, holding hands, dancing, sharing quick kisses. No big public displays of affection yet everyone knew they were a couple. (It was the 21st century.)

  Thank God Ro
bin hadn’t been there.

  They’d mentioned her. Why couldn’t the other one…a fox.

  Calia hadn’t even gone to the bar tonight. Never without Robin. She’d just gone to the market, upset that Robin had recently been assigned to the night shift.

  Had they waited to ambush the couple? Or was this white collar slime just that drunk? They’d never been hostile to the couple while in the bar.

  In the darkness Calia managed to hold up her hands. Heavily bandaged in white gauze, they seemed luminous by machine lights, as if…

  Where are my fingers?

  Her hands had become paws, like those belonging to a large white hound.

  Don’t panic. It’s the meds you’re pumped full of. Morphine, imagination, post-traumatic stress. It’s terror on a cellular level. Maybe she was brain damaged. Scrambled.

  Where was she? Was this the hospital Robin worked in? The city had two main hospitals and the market’s parking lot was equidistant between them. Calia’s assailants could’ve taken her purse, her I.D. No way for anyone to know her, especially since they’d left her unconscious. They might even have believed her dead.

  A memory of a soft voice, like a cloud melting down around her. Robin whispering in the ER: “Sweetheart, baby, I’m sorry. We’ll take good care of you. Just lie very still. If you can hear me, everything’s going to be okay.”

  Calia sniffed. They must’ve bathed her after completing the rape kit. If they had time to do the kit. They would’ve needed to quickly prep her for surgery, considering the internal injuries.

  She still smelled her attackers. Beer, scotch, tequila Jell-O shots on their lips. Varying perfumes and after-shaves, not a drop of it cheap, now clinging to the hair follicles on Calia’s skin. The semen from six different males and estrus from four females. The odor of crisp linen, water-silk, fuzzy cashmere. Their shampoo, deodorant, cosmetics—even paraffin from where one of the women got a bikini wax earlier that afternoon.

  It seemed as if these ten monsters were still in the room with her, leering, blaspheming against her right even to exist, laughing because they knew they’d forever own her mind.

  Now, in the room to her left, she caught a horrid stench. In there the patient’s body rotted from within, eaten alive by cancer, the reek of each metastasizing, disintegrating organ as raw meat left to funk in the sun for weeks. ‘Grant’ had lived in the same house for twenty years, above a toxic dump long since abandoned. Each day he’d walked to a nearby lake to fish for his supper, the water also polluted from the seepage from the dump.

  To her right, an abused child, gangrene in old wounds upon the arms and legs. ‘Alice’ still wore the odor of the tiny cage her parents had held her prisoner in, lying in her own waste, fed on the cheapest canned cat food. The neighbors finally found the girl after their cat kept trying to get into the basement across the alley.

  How could Calia smell this? Much less identify the circumstances? She’d never been psychic or anything.

  She climbed out of bed. Actually, she leaped.

  But the tubes on me…?

  Calia glanced backward, seeing her bruised and battered self still there, eyes closed, one covered, her head practically hidden under wraps of mummy white.

  She sniffed, wrinkling her nose. Defilement was an awful odor. It stank all the way to the soul.

  Calia passed through the closed door of her room and—why am I on all fours? Up the corridor, she ran. No one saw her. Not even those she passed right through. Not even the young patient on the gurney, struggling, screaming, gut-shot, on his way to a trauma team in a surgical theater.

  (Why did they call a surgery room a theater? Grand Guignol. All singing, all dancing, all gouging and hacking!)

  Gunpowder, cocaine, shit squeezed out of blasted intestines. All from burgers-by-the-buck and chili-cheese dogs.

  Calia bounded through a female doctor. The woman had undergone an abortion less than twenty-four hours ago. She smelled of clinical flush and the barest scrap of embryonic flesh. This yet clung to a forlorn little corner of the womb, maybe later fermenting into something nasty that never made it to the passage of the stillborn. But it might garner retribution for never having been wanted.

  (How much power could ruined souls possess?)

  A male doctor smelled of lambskin. He’d been wearing condoms every time he had sex in the drug supply closet, since the aforementioned female doctor informed him she was pregnant. He’d performed the termination, angry enough to be sloppy… why there was part of it still inside her.

  An old woman slumped in a wheelchair, drooling down the front of her robe, expression a blank. Her eyes fixed on Calia. In the yellow pupils, Calia saw herself, no, a white dog reflected, familiar and not entirely canine in its features.

  The woman tilted her head and whispered to dog-Calia in a strange combination of crackle and lyric: “Fulmina micant. Tempus matufinum meridianum, vespertinum nocturnum. Per somnum, dea mundum aedificavit.”

  Calia didn’t know this language—Wait, this woman doesn’t know it either. She’s just saying the words…They translated in her mind. The lightning flashes. Morning, noon, evening, night. Through a dream, the Goddess created the world.

  The male doctor walked over to the old woman. “Madam? Did you say something? How may I help you?”

  A nurse, named Selene and a friend of Robin’s, explained, “Dr. Rondale, that’s Miss Ali. She doesn’t talk.”

  “I’m sure she just did,” he argued.

  “No, I mean she can’t. She has no tongue or vocal chords.”

  Calia’s understanding clicked. It was Latin. A dead language. What did it mean?

  For that matter, how was Calia running around as a big white dog while her body remained unconscious, perhaps dead, in a hospital room? She’d seen television shows about near death experiences. Had her spirit left her damaged corpse, taking on an animal guardian form?

  She hadn’t drifted up from her body. There had been no silver cord binding her to the physical self…none to break, severing ties between body and spirit. She’d seen no tunnel, no light. No family and friends who’d died, beckoning her to come to Jesus—all forgiven.

  A pain-and-drug dream. Had to be. Some nightmare after a savage hate crime that, for all she knew, had ended in her demise or left her crippled and scarred for life.

  “Robin?” Calia tried to call. Only a mongrel whine resulted. The old woman chuckled in a phlegm-chunky voice. “Oppido! A mortuis evocare! Dolorum abicere ululatis!”

  Yes! To summon from the dead! Howl to banish grief!

  The crone grinned, her throat, chin, inside of her mouth, disfigured. Calia flashed on the woman’s life: Croatia. Her village had been taken by Milosovich-the-sonofabitch’s Serbian devils, women separated from men. She begged them to spare the youngest girls from the rapists. So they cut out every means she had of pleading for mercy for these children—then raped her too, old woman that she was. Down the throat slick with blood. It was a miracle she’d survived.

  Calia saw the human wreckage in the wheelchair as the old woman’s expression went blank again, a thread of saliva slipping through a crevice in the lower lip.

  What sort of miracle was this? Were there bad miracles?

  Yes. Curses. Blessings were rare. And divinity… Was it so far beyond us it had no feelings other than apathy? Did it even exist?

  Calia had always been reasonably religious, even if so many churches condemned same sex unions. No doubt, certain people would claim her life-style had brought God’s wrath down upon her. People who might consider her assailants to be evangelistic heroes. Any excuse to hate.

  Calia eyed the hospital corridor, mostly filled with staff and patients in white or light institutional green. A tall dark figure—a woman—with long black hair and a long black dress stood out.

  She moved gracefully, stopping beside Calia the white dog, petting her sleek head, stroking the ears and quivering back. Calia gazed up at her, large eyes confused, wondering how only these two p
eople could see her in the dog-shape. One in a wheelchair, the other floating, feet not touching the floor.

  Calia’s bushy pale tail wagged, further disconcerting her.

  Was this an angel to fetch her to that tunnel and light?

  N.D.E.’s often related seeing angels while being out-of-body.

  Angels in black?

  Calia shrieked, “Robin!”

  It was a bark and a whimper.

  The tall woman in black said, “Go back to your room, Calia. Return to your body. Don’t be afraid.”