Warlock Read online

  He covered his face with both palms and breathed, “Ahhh, dear Father in heaven . . .”

  He had found her in the evening when he came home for dinner. She’d set the table, but the plates and silverware were scattered on the floor where the warlock had thrown them. In their place lay Marian, sprawled face-down over the table, her clothing torn away, her smooth pale skin mottled with bruises. Her buttocks jutted upward, splashed with blood and . . . and something else . . . something milky . . .

  The worst of it buckled Redferne’s knees beneath him and pushed him to the very edge of unconsciousness. Marian’s anus yawned open like a mouth, dribbling blood-streaked semen. She had been violated by something obscenely large, far too large to belong to an ordinary man.

  But Redferne knew immediately that his wife had not been the victim of any ordinary man . . .

  He was shocked to find she was still alive, her blank eyes staring. Her face was bloodied and lips swollen; three front teeth were gone and viscous semen sparkled in her mussed hair. Her fingertips fluttered around her mouth as she whimpered, “Enormous . . . dear Jesus . . . enormous . . . and so . . . cold . . . so cold . . .”

  “Marian?” he cried, afraid to touch her, yet afraid not to because she seemed to be fading away, dimming like a candle flame out of wick, and he wanted to stop her, wanted to hold onto her. “Marian, do you hear me?”

  “Hurts . . . it hurts . . . so cold, so . . . so big . . .”

  “I’ll fetch a doctor, Marian, I’ll—”

  She clutched his hand and held it in a desperate grip, staring blindly past him.

  “ ’Twas . . . ’twas Satan’s . . . ’twas Satan’s . . .”

  Her voice became a strangled hiss and what life remained in her eyes drained away . . .

  Redferne swayed on the tower stairs, scrubbing his paled face with trembling hands, the jailor’s keys dangling from his thumb.

  At the base of the tower, the jailor waited patiently, hunched on a bench by the door. The door shuddered on its hinges, assaulted by the wind on the other side.

  “The thumblocks,” Redferne said, handing over the keys. “They shall be kept in place even after he hangs. Even while he burns. When there is naught but ash, only then should they be . . .” Redferne braced himself against a wall to withstand another wave of dizziness.

  The wind rattled the door like a demon demanding entry.

  “. . . only then should they be dug free and returned to . . . to me . . .”

  “As you wish,” the jailor croaked in a gravelly voice.

  Redferne pulled the door open carefully, leaning against it to keep the wind from slamming it inward, and blanched at what he saw outside. Since he’d entered the tower, the village had become a nightmare.

  The sky was a vast swollen bruise; fat clouds bubbled like a boiling soup from one end of the horizon to the other. Sworls of dust danced in the wind like demons released from Hell’s bondage and trees bowed down as if in worship.

  Boards peeled off the gallows like old skin and clattered to the ground, skidding through the billowing dust.

  Thunder shook the ground with a great sickening crack and cats darted wildly in every direction, terrified by the chaos around them. Some were swept up by the wind and blown through the air like dandelions. The wicker basket in which they’d been meant to burn bounced and tumbled in the wind.

  Redferne stepped through the doorway and into the hellish storm, lifting an arm to shield his eyes from the biting grit that flew through the air.

  Villagers ran for shelter, stumbling over cats, arms flailing for balance. A child glided over the ground, screaming, dragged by an invisible rope of wind. Windows shattered and roofs were torn from houses and stores. Women cried for their husbands and men pleaded with God.

  The jailor came to Redferne’s side and clutched the big man’s arm as the gallows completely dismantled and collapsed to the ground.

  Redferne lifted his eyes to the furious sky and his heart felt on the verge of exploding.

  Directly above the tower, the dark clouds were splitting . . .

  The opening widened and a spinning funnel of wind began to descend, shifting right and left as it lowered, but never losing its aim on its target: the tower.

  As Redferne gaped upward, slats of wood ripped away from the tower’s roof and spun through the air.

  The jailor squeezed Redferne’s arm, dropped the keys to the ground, and released a strangled scream. “Aaawww, dear mother of Gaawwwd!”

  Redferne turned to the pathetic little man and saw him pointing, recoiling in horror. Following the direction of the jailor’s trembling finger, Redferne’s gaze fell on the lintel above the tower’s door.

  The tremendous gusts were shearing off splinters of the old wood—

  —and the red hex mark was flaking away, disintegrating in the wind.

  Redferne bent down, swept the keys off the ground, and screamed at the jailor, “Summon the others! Quickly!”

  He shoved the jailor away from the door to find the magistrates and hurried into the tower, bolted up the steps, skipping two and three at a time, growling a word as he climbed, dragging it out to a long gut-deep roar. “Waaaar-lock!”

  At the top of the stairs, Redferne stabbed the key into the lock, wrenched it to the right, threw open the iron slab, and braced himself in the doorway.

  His breath was violently sucked from his lungs by the storm raging inside the cell. Wind screamed in through the three windows and whipped around the circular cell, kicking up a whirlpool of filth and cockroaches and spiders. Bars of gray light shone down through the long openings torn into the roof. Bats fluttered their wings uselessly as they spun about the cell, some of them thrown against the wall so hard their insides splashed over the dirty stone.

  In the center of the maelstrom, the warlock hung upside down on the staff—

  —from only one of the thumblocks.

  His left arm and leg were free and the thumblock dangled from his toe; he hung like a monkey from the lock joining his right thumb and toe above the staff. As he swayed in the wind, his hair writhed about his head like snakes from the skull of Medusa.

  But the warlock’s partial freedom was not the worst of it, nor was the demonic leer he turned to Redferne when the witch hunter entered the cell.

  The worst of it was that Redferne thought he could see through the warlock’s face . . .

  He seemed to be . . . disappearing . . . as if the wind were blowing him away as it had the hex mark.

  Redferne rejected the possibility as an illusion created by the hellacious wind slamming into his face and cried, “May God damn your eternal soul, Warlock!”

  “Yes, Redferne!” the warlock shouted back through his vile grin. “Yes, precisely! God damns . . . but Satan always saves his own!”

  Redferne stepped out of the doorway, staggering into the cell with nothing against which to brace himself, fighting his way through the wind toward the warlock—

  —who seemed to be blowing away with the wind like a mist . . .

  It was no illusion.

  Redferne was determined to stop him, prevent his escape and see him receive the punishment he so deserved, even if he had to throw himself on the warlock and personally wrestle him from the Devil’s hold.

  Through the wailing of the wind, Redferne heard approaching voices behind him and heavy footsteps quickly mounting the stairs.

  “I’ll see your wife in Hell, Redferne!” the warlock cried, still grinning.

  Redferne reached down for the whip at his side, pulled it loose, swept it back over his shoulder, then cut the air with it. The whip snaked around the warlock’s free leg; Redferne pulled it taut and dragged himself along its length.

  “Marian awaits me there, Redferne!” the warlock shouted—

  —and the sound of his wife’s name being uttered by such a corrupt and godless creature made the inside of Redferne’s skull burn like fire. His eyes burned with tears and his teeth ground together in his head. As he
neared the center of the cell, fighting the wind’s strength, he could see it was no illusion at all.

  The warlock was fading away like a dream.

  A nightmare . . .

  “Redferne, what the devil!” a voice shouted behind him.

  The others had arrived, but Redferne could pay them no attention now.

  The wind tore strings of saliva from the warlock’s grinning, fading mouth as he laughed and bellowed, “Marian awaits me with legs a-spread!”

  Redferne could bear it no longer. With one final pull on the whip, he heaved himself forward and landed on the warlock and—

  —felt the wind cut into his pores, blow into his ears and out his eyesockets, which felt about to spit out his eyeballs. It blew through his muscles and into his bones, through his entire body as if be were nothing more than a pillar of smoke, weightless and without anchor, clutching his whip with one hand, an arm wrapped around the warlock’s neck—

  —thinning now, fading—

  —voices calling him in the distance—

  —“Redferne! Redferne, come! Come now!”—

  —growing farther and farther away until—

  —he felt nothing.

  Heard nothing.

  Saw nothing.

  Redferne was one with the storm . . .

  STATE OF CALIFORNIA

  CITY OF LOS ANGELES

  Year of Our Lord

  Nineteen Hundred Eighty and Eight

  1

  Strays

  It was a night to stay indoors, a night for hot chocolate and a good book behind secure doors and windows.

  An enormous harvest moon hung low on the horizon as if weighted down by its girth, surrounded by glowing pinholes in the black velvet sky.

  The Santa Ana winds blew in from the east and swept through the city, the wrath of an offended god, whipping around or over anything they could not overturn.

  Freeways—the veins and arteries of the Los Angeles organism—were clotted with traffic accidents and streaked with the blood-red lights of emergency vehicles. Tumbleweeds bounded over guardrails and onto the freeways, slamming blindly into bumper-to-bumper cars.

  The winds split at corners and rushed down the streets of residential neighborhoods, hissing through trees and shrubbery, shuddering windowpanes and rattling doorknockers.

  A bicycle propped against a fence trembled in the gusts, came to life for a moment, and rolled down the sidewalk with invisible feet at the pedals, teetering, wobbling—

  —then falling on its side, skidding a few more feet over the concrete.

  A red wagon sped the length of a driveway, its black pull-stick jittering on the cement, then crashed into a garage door.

  The wind rose above trees, cracking branches like weak bones, and made power lines dance wildly between poles, sending bursts of sparks shooting from bulky transformers; it swept down and kicked up sworls of sand on the beaches—

  —where huge incoming waves collided angrily with equally huge swells of backwash in explosions of shimmering white froth.

  It screamed through the canyons between downtown skyscrapers, sweeping the streets and sidewalks with unseen brooms.

  A small dog dragging an untended leash slid lightly down a sidewalk along Melrose, barely moving its legs as it passed a quaking phonebooth in which the telephone rang even though the receiver swung pen-dulously at the end of its cord.

  Above the sidewalk, a neon sign that read NEON SIGNS threw a spark as the wind tore it away from the storefront. It fell slowly to the ground and imploded on impact, bringing two cars to a brake-squealing halt. Sparkling neon gas shot through the air like electric confetti, arcing above the street and scattering on the other side in front of a small café where—

  —Kassandra Kaye rubbed lotion over the dry flaking skin of her arms, sitting in a window seat.

  The café was empty except for Kassandra and Debbie Cole, who was folding linen napkins at the next table. Both wore lavender waitress uniforms and badges embossed with the stylized pastel logo of Rick’s Café American.

  Kassandra watched the neon gas squirm over the sidewalk outside and scowled.

  “Fuckin’ Santa Anas,” she muttered.

  “Fuckin’ Santanas,” Debbie corrected. “Everyone makes that mistake. It’s Santanas. Means ‘devil wind.’ ”

  “You’ve been trying out for too many game shows, girl.” The lotion soothed Kassandra’s itchy skin, replacing the moisture that had been sucked away by the relentless winds.

  Melrose was uncommonly bare; only an occasional car drove by and the café hadn’t done any business for hours.

  Kassandra called over her shoulder toward the office in back, “Hey, Rick! Why don’t we just close early and shake this place? Nobody’s out tonight.”

  “I’m on the phone,” Rick replied, his voice muffled.

  “ ’Course,” she mumbled. “ ’Course he’s on the phone. Probably setting up a date for later when he leaves us here in this . . . mausoleum.”

  “You’re whining again,” Debbie said.

  “I’m not whining. I don’t whine. I bitch. I’m bitching.”

  She capped her lotion and wiped her moist hands on the linen napkin Debbie had folded neatly and placed before her minutes ago. She stood, tossed the rumpled napkin on the table, and headed for the locker room.

  When Debbie saw the used napkin, she groaned, “Kassandraaa . . .”

  “You’re whining again.”

  In the locker room, Kassandra removed her uniform and changed into her trashy-chic streetclothes, folding her uniform and stuffing it into a shoulder bag.

  She was twenty—typically twenty: overly fond of makeup, with gawdy goodwill store jewelry dangling and clicking around her neck and from her wrists. She had a shaggy mane of blond hair; she allowed a few strands of it to grow longer than the rest and braided them down her back.

  After putting on her bomber jacket, she hitched the bag’s strap over her shoulder and left the locker room. She stopped outside Rick’s office long enough to say, “I quit—you can rehire me tomorrow,” then headed through the café calling, “Later days.”

  Debbie turned to watch her go. “You’re leaving? But it’s not—you’re gonna leave me with—dammit, Kassandra, sometimes you can be such an inconsiderate—”

  The wind swallowed Debbie’s voice when Kassandra opened the door and left the café.

  Her old Corvair was parked at the curb out front—illegally parked—and a ticket was tucked beneath a wiper blade, flapping in the wind. Kassandra plucked the ticket up and released it to the wind, mumbling, “Whoops,” under her breath.

  Someday, she knew, all the parking tickets she’d thrown away would catch up with her, but that day hadn’t arrived yet.

  Driving home, she considered stopping for some take-out, but decided maybe she’d wait and see what Chas’s dinner leftovers looked like. They were usually better than anything she could get to go. Chas Harcourt, Kassandra’s roommate, was a caterer and worked with food all the time, but he never tired of his work; he always came home and cooked up the best dinners Kassandra had ever eaten. He cooked when he was angry, when he was depressed, happy, anxious, even when he was sick with the flu. In fact, he claimed one of the reasons he took her in was so he would have someone to cook for.

  “If I eat all my food myself,” he’d joked, “I’ll lose my girlish figure.”

  She’d met him at a party in Santa Monica. She was living with Bill Sturges at the time, an actor who went to the party for the specific purpose of impressing a certain casting director. Kassandra made the mistake of impressing him first. Although she had been pursuing an acting career since she was fifteen—always with minimal success—she’d caught the casting director’s eye without even trying. He found her fascinating, monopolized her, and said she might be right for a made-for-TV movie he was working on—something called Mommy’s Secret Past: A True Story—which made Bill furious. He took her aside and told her she was to move out of his apartment that n
ight. He didn’t just tell her; he took her outside beyond the patio and screamed it at her, said that he wanted her things out by the time he got back or he’d throw them in the street.

  She had no transportation and none of the friends she called were home, so, feeling depressed, knowing no one at the party and not wanting to, she stole a bottle of whiskey and a glass from the bar, took them to the kitchen, sat at the table and proceeded to get shitfaced.

  There she met Chas, who breezed in and out, preparing hors d’oeuvres and pastries. The more she drank, the more she talked, and soon told Chas her life story, paying particular attention to her penchant for becoming involved with all the wrong men.

  “I have the same problem,” he said, dressing up a tray of pâtés. “Men are so insecure.” Then, before taking the tray out of the kitchen, he said casually, “I have a spare bedroom. When I’m done here, we’ll go get your stuff and you can move in with me for a while.” At the door, he stopped, glanced over his shoulder, and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t jump your bones, but I may steal your boyfriends.”

  She’d moved in, presumably until she found another place, and had been there for a year and a half. Chas never brought up the fact that she didn’t seem to be looking for another place. In fact, he seemed, in subtle ways, to be encouraging her to stay.

  They’d become close friends, had soaked one another’s shoulders with tears countless times, had fallen asleep in one another’s arms on the sofa after breakups and let-downs, and she couldn’t imagine looking for another place. Unless she could take Chas with her.

  As she drove home, holding the wheel tightly to steer her old Corvair through the powerful winds, she wondered what Chas had cooked up for dinner—

  —and then she remembered.

  It was Grandma’s night to visit.

  She turned the radio on loud and groaned, “Awww, shit.”

  Chas’s house was an odd-angled one-of-a-kinder nestled in a secluded area of Laurel Canyon. Parked in the driveway, Kassandra could see their shadows through one of the front windows: his straight and prim, hers hunched and shaky.