Season of the Witch Read online

  Calia opened her eyes.

  She stared at her hands. No bandages, no paws.

  She felt how torn up inside she was, stitches puckering where surgeons carefully removed slivers of glass and splinters from a tree branch out of her rectum and vagina. Part of the clitoris had been sliced away. They’d set her broken right leg, left arm, and six ribs. She’d lost four teeth. One eye was covered after a specialist had been summoned to treat the scratched and detached retina. Time would tell if she’d be partially blind in that eye.

  “Hi there, honey.”

  Robin sat next to her bed, smiling, beautiful. She stood up, leaned over, breasts straining against the top of her uniform. She oh-so-gently kissed her lover’s forehead.

  “Seuter—yet?” Calia tried to ask, then groaned from the torment that was the inside of her mouth.

  Seuter was Robin’s son from when she’d been married years before. He was now very much a son to Calia as well.

  Robin’s smile radiated. “Yes. Seut sends his love and promises to visit after school.”

  Calia tried to shake her head. “Don’t… see me… this…”

  “Sweetheart, he’s a smart kid. He knows what they did. Now, before you suffer a stroke, I didn’t go into details. But it’s on television, the newspapers, radio talk shows. It’s a circus. A hate crime because we’re lesbians. And how some of your attackers were women. The police want to interview you, which, I’m sorry to say, will probably be in less than an hour now that you’re conscious,” Robin said. “Hon, we, I, want these animals caught. Do you remember what they looked like?”

  “Until the day I die,” Calia answered, this time without fumbling.

  Tears rolled down the cheeks of both women. Robin took her hand.

  “There was a security camera in the grocery store’s parking lot,” Robin said. “They’re re-examining the tape. We’re also watching the hospital door every minute to make sure no photographers sneak in, but it’s not easy. Bunch of jackals.” She nodded to the window sill. “Just look at all the flowers, sweetie. Our friends and people at our church, the staff here I work closest with…”

  Vases full of roses, hibiscus, carnations, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, and orchids. She couldn’t smell them. Tubes up her nose.

  Then how had she detected the awful fetors of last night? She assumed it was last night. She hoped she hadn’t been unconscious for more than a few hours. Coma. Brain damage. Scrambled. Cancer and gangrene in other rooms.

  “Will you take some flowers to Grant and Alice?” she asked Robin.

  “Who…?” Robin seemed surprised Calia knew the names of the patients to either side of her. But she nodded.

  Blowback action excrement leaking out of a gangbanger’s guts. Embryonic shreds and pre-lubed condoms. Hopelessness, helplessness, and sin.

  And that perfumed slime from the bodies of those who’d brutally raped her.

  She didn’t smell it now. Yet she felt as if she’d been dragged naked through Hell where every demon with an erection or demoness with a well-manicured fist poked Calia as she went by.

  “The gangbanger—gutshot…?”

  Robin’s eyebrows went up. “He died, I’m afraid. How did you know…”

  “Is—Miss Ali—no voice,” she struggled to ask, wondering about her big white dog hallucination.

  Robin gasped. “You know about her, too? She was tortured in the war in Herzegovina over ten years ago. Just awful. Then she opened a shelter in Sarajevo, for orphans of both sides. She was believed to be a saint, a Turkish Mother Theresa. Now she suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. No brain left. It’s so sad and unfair.”

  Robin’s lower lip trembled. She blinked at tears clinging like diamonds to her lashes.

  “I love you, Cal,” she said, trying to control the emotion so she wouldn’t lose herself altogether. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Love—too,” Calia told her.

  Just for a moment she felt no pain.

  Then it returned with a vengeance.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 2

  Thelonious went into detail as she wept on the other end of the phone. If she didn’t like it, she could hang up. Still, one indulged in certain conversations with a relish. Or was it compulsion? The conversation—the act of talking—an oral thrill, ahhh-capella syllables in hot breath, exhaled across the palate. Consonants crisp as freshly snapped bone.

  She never disconnected, no matter how often he called—and he did that nightly. She’d be suitably stunned, sobbing at his excruciating details. Where he cut. How deeply. What it smelled and tasted like. How many octaves their screams stretched into.

  Thelonious enjoyed shocking her. She sounded so decent.

  “Am I very naughty?” he asked.

  She moaned. “You’re evil. If I ever wondered what that meant, now I have no doubts.”

  Thelonious imagined how she looked. Deliciously large breasts, big doe eyes, like the woman whose destruction he’d phoned to tell her about. Fuck my corruption with the nectars of your hatchery. I’ll cum all dark like a tamarind from sweetly soured hell.

  “Evil? I was made that way by an all-powerful force. You know, in my childhood when Satan made me wet the bed and taught me how to fill idle hands with action. I want to marry my sister, bury my mother, carry my wounds around to share—” He heard her take a breath. “I bleed necrotic Northern Lights and carry extraordinary talismans of prunishly wrinkled clits between each side of my mouth in tooth and cheek. Smell my breath all fish, pubic hair between my teeth like anchovy bones…” He invented as he went along, spontaneous. “I can’t resist. It’s psychotically pre-ordained, sloppily manacled along the dripping food chain.”

  “You could resist if you had a shred of humanity in you,” she countered, tearfully indignant.

  He responded, “Then I wouldn’t have the pleasure.”

  “What? The pleasure of wrecking a life? That’s a turn-on for you, you creep?”

  How masterfully sickened she was: pauses between words, fighting emotion to struggle past the choke in her throat.

  “The predator hath no greater thrill. Using the hands, teeth, dick. But I also like calling you to break your heart with it,” he replied. “Such a wussy pussy, wet at both ends are you? I could come over for a cunt-hunt!” She didn’t answer. He went on. “Red—and every shade of it—is such a beautiful color, arousing, primal, shimmering as when you stare at a solar eclipse and almost go blind just to focus on this forbidden thing. Make you go mad as some melted eyeball priestess, make you cough blood up from heartbreak as you cradle some twat’s pieta parbuckled requiescat in pace.”

  Her weeping through the crackles of static indicated it was, indeed, breaking her heart. Thelonious stroked the cell phone as if it were the hard pubic bone, full of squishy blood-fart poems. He heard her blow her nose, the rustle of a dainty tissue. Attention to the game’s tiniest details, man, she’s good.

  He pictured her mascara dripping, the smell of freely-running mucous, sharp flavor of salt in her mouth. A good cry was an experience in suffocation. Like pinching someone’s nostrils shut, palm pressing on the lips to crush a delicate blossom.

  “Wow, what a rush.” He chuckled, as impressed with her as she appeared to be with him. He giggled close to the cell, at epiphany’s most ebon edge. But he wouldn’t fall over it. No, he’d already jumped over it, to return and leap again. Down to the lake of fire and back for more thrills in darkly revelationary skydives.

  Plastic clacked against his teeth. He’d get a phone soon that took pictures. When he received some royalty money. Then he could send Justine shots so she wouldn’t think he was a liar.

  “How could anybody be that sick?” He heard another tissue pulled from its dispenser, followed by a silken tearing. Reminiscent of handling lingerie. Manhandling. Ripper ripping. Listening, he imagined that ruined flag of underthing, jerking into it. An act he’d confessed to her tonight. It didn’t seem like violence there. Just t
hat the girl had melted ice cream in her panties. And she used a vanilla douche so when he sucked the panties, it was sweet, sweet cream.

  “You think I’m the most evil man you’ve ever talked to?” Thelonious glanced at his watch, speckled with blood. On the line forty-seven minutes.

  She groaned in a note that actually made his fingers tingle. A sonic siren! Could one of her screams shatter glass? “I’ll never be able to forget this. I’ll have nightmares and you’ll be there.”

  “The world is a dark place. Dark like the trunk of my car, the basement of my house, my heart. The car is dark and dry, the basement is dark and wet, but my heart is just dark and dark. Get what I’m saying, Justine?”

  She inhaled. He pictured her doing this through her open mouth. She tried not to breathe through her nostrils because of an imagined stench he’d conjured: intricate odors arising from guts spilled by a length of heavy chain squeezed about a fragile abdomen. That same chain jammed like rancid old love beads (link by rusty link) up the rectum, squeezing as the flesh-pipe prolapsed. She held that breath for ten seconds, letting it go, clearly finding it awful.

  “You should take yourself off the streets before you do this again—”

  “I like strawberry douche better. And if she uses mint, why, the cum makes it taste like Bailey’s Irish Cream. ‘Course, you’re an egg, you’ve got a New York Egg Cream. That adds the O. I had trouble figuring out how to have the X to suck until I realized from way back in college chemistry that xanthine is a nitrougenoud compound you get in urine, blood, and other animal secretions. We’re ANIMALS, Justine.”

  “—doctors trained to understand twisted people like you. No! You shouldn’t get off so easily. It would be better if a cop shot you, or a mob ripped you to pieces. Peel your skin like a rotten orange, dig out your heart and brain with their fingernails. Feed you to dogs.”

  Bloody passionate! Even if she didn’t understand that to diagnose twisted people like him, the doctors first have to see inside what had twisted him. That was simply impossible.

  Justine made him buzz. He pictured the phone trembling at her end as she suggested ways in which a righteous public might finish him. He touched his jeans where he was rigid, a suitable heft implying comfortable power. The tool of one in charge—not the victim. Never a victim.

  “How inventive,” he broke in to argue. “I love how one fiend’s savagery brings out the best in normally dull people. But Justine baby, you can’t kill evil like me.”

  He smiled. Forty-eight minutes and counting. “She found that out. Silly cunt even had a tire iron under the front seat. Couldn’t kill me. And she prayed. Didn’t work. Prayer ain’t what it used to be. Not after I cut off her hands. One has to be patient when stretching an asshole until two hands’ll fit inside. Not the pussy, of course… that’s where the eggs go. But into the rectum for the hands, lacing and breaking the fingers as they form X’s. Why do people think they must put their hands together to pray? Of course, fingers twisted into X’s—and what might they be praying to? Anyway, I’ve wondered about people, thinking prayer comes from the steeple of their hands. Shouldn’t it come from the heart? Oh yeah, I took that, too.”

  “Stop it!” She’d become hysterical. “You bastard. Don’t go into it again. I’ll die if you repeat it all.”

  Her intense shock level nearly made him cringe. Or tingle.

  “I’m listening for it with every word I say,” he told her softly.

  “Listening for what?” She sounded suspicious, the noise of her tissues like that of Hail Mary’s being wrung from lisping penitents.

  “For your heart to cra———aackck!”

  He started with the first words from this night’s litany.

  “She reminded me of someone, they all do. The way she wore her lipstick. Those cheekbones. Breasts with rose pink nipples, outlined against the cotton shirt. Pants so tight they hitched up, riding the tender cleft with every step. Maybe someday it’ll strike me… who they remind me of… Maybe it was just every whore who dressed tight so her own clothes would twitch her off. It triggered the same old reaction in me, everything turning black and white, missing every other breath. So I followed her out into the parking lot… little dots of cum marking my fly. Wondering if she douched and what flavor it was.”

  Justine screamed.

  In response, a glass of beer shattered on the table next to him. His jaw dropped. Sonic siren, all right.

  Forty-nine minutes. $150. Grinning, he hung up.

  Not bad, Thelonious considered, turning around to the messy work awaiting him, warm in its last pose. It took longer than forty-nine minutes for a body to get cold, even if not in one piece. Temperature wasn’t important. The camera didn’t know the difference.

  “There are plusses to invoking shock,” he said to the model as he snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves.

  He stooped to gently re-arrange the black satin teddy. Already badly stained, the prop wouldn’t see a second shoot. Neither would the model. (No biggie. He tended to choose a type so they rather resembled one another.)

  He shifted the black wig on her head, and eyed the pentagram around her neck—should its trenchant tip pierce the flesh of the right or left shoulder? Perhaps he should remove it from the throat and insert it into an eye.

  Interesting, how a pentagram had several X’s incorporated into it.

  “Do you think it might be nice for my next call to ask her to encourage me?” He didn’t wait for an answer from the bissected mouth. The grim body slipped. Fish hooks holding it together at strategic points threatened to let go. He struggled to keep it from sliding out of position. “Yeah, next time, I’ll request ‘peppy.’ Everyone needs a cheerleader once in a while.”

  Thelonious felt the hardness in his jeans, implacable, irredeemable, an instrument of cruelty suddenly not a part of him except through a catalog of outrages in his mental and tactile memories.

  He stroked the dead woman’s cheek, then sobbed.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 3

  Renae Hawthorne gazed as a greasy cloud slid across the setting sun. Birds. Wrong time of year for mass migration. Could a coming storm have them on the run?

  Air pollution, the sunset was brilliant. A steaming gash in the belly of a sky goddess.

  Turning away, she spied a flash of habit. A nun quickly stepped into a doorway. Except she wasn’t dressed as modern sisters were, in modified Catholic garb. This was full of flapping, smothering skirts. The headgear supported an absurdly broad wimple that resembled plumage.

  Sometimes Renae wore elaborate crosses as part of her Gothic statement. Trappings. She wasn’t Catholic or Greek Orthodox or even Christian. How could she be anything when she didn’t know what she believed? Trappings. Trappist monk, trappist Goth, trapdoor spider.

  ««—»»

  The first plain brown-wrapped package was found in front of a mall fountain on April 8. A seventeen-year-old boy found it, named Russ Underhill. A message had been written across the top in permanent black marker:

  XXX

  OOO

  This Is Pandora’s Box.

  Open It and Forever Fear Hell’s Contents.

  Russ was both repelled and confused. Dried blood. A scoop of meat twice the size of his hand. Very pink. Fatty on one side like a honeybaked pork butt. Rounded as a lumpish hunk off the moon. Pimpled in a couple spots. Otherwise, smooth as a baby’s…

  Smelled of salt. And spoiled sweetness similar to unrefrigerated ham. Also the unmistakable talcummy breeze of Shalimar.

  This was no costly package accidentally abandoned by a rich shopper. Which was what he’d been hoping. He set it down and began to walk away—and was nabbed by a security officer. When he left the package, security thought he might be planting a bomb.

  Not a bomb. A sort-of ham. A single human buttock. The left one.

  A single breast—the right one—was found in a smaller brown package the next morning. Its message:

  XXX

  OOO />
  The Teat That Suckles Wolves

  Feels Their Teeth.

  In black marker, stark against unliquefied flesh, a full set of unsmudged fingerprints belonging to Judith David, a twenty-seven-year-old bookkeeper, disappeared April 6. The police suspected the right breast and left buttock were hers. Blood and tissue samples agreed.

  Now the middle of May. Five victims later—all female. Thirty-six plain brown-wrapped packages with varying cryptic messages had been found across the city. With the XXX and OOO always. Followed by:

  To Be Opened In The Event Of Night.

  or:

  The Demons Of Sunset All Bleed Along The Same Crease.

  There had been one with a slickery scalp inside. That message read:

  Before, I Gave You The De-feeting.

  Here Is The De-gloving.

  During Easter weekend, one left on Friday and another on Sunday.

  XXX

  OOO

  Black Friday, Not Only God Forsakes.

  and

  XXX

  OOO

  She Who Has Risen Will Not Be Crucified Again.

  The Easter package had boiled eggs inside, painted half-black.

  He never packaged enough to make up an entire body, but he always used something that could be positively identified as part of at least one of the missing women.

  The media labeled this one—what else?—The Triple X Slayer. (The cops only let out the XXX, not the OOO.) He’d been busy. Thirty-six packages wrapped and marked as if containing pornography was practically Christmas in Chainsawville.