The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Read online

  “I do have a lot to learn about the world,” she said with a mischievous smile.

  “Sure, what if we went to the police station here, and—”

  Her eyes wildly dilated and for a moment he thought she’d bolt from the booth, but she just crouched down against the window, making herself as small and unnoticeable as possible.

  Outside on the raindamp pavement, two old ladies were watching them. One of them wore a bright flower-print dress on her sunken contours. They passed on by, their faces hidden by the umbrella.

  By degrees Rue came out of her fearful, crouching stance.

  “Did you know them?”

  “Maybe—I’m not sure, but I’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to take me with you—out of this town.”

  “You are on the run.” He grasped her wrist, but a woman at the next table gave a shocked look and he let go. “You know I’ll have to take you to the authorities.”

  Her mouth twisted into a smile, though her eyes had lost none of their terror. “Shall we inform them where I was last night?” she asked, her tone all innocence.

  It was a moment before the anger came, before he realized just how neatly she had trapped him.

  * * * *

  It was hot, the sun quickly drying the rain and creating a steam-bath atmosphere. Rue sat quietly, every so often turning to look out the back window as if she thought someone might be following. If she thought he’d forget the humiliation of this morning—

  As he drove his anger cooled a little. He remembered her fear of those harmless old ladies, and how she’d cried out at night. He’d been thinking of stranding her along the road, but what if someone really dangerous picked her up? What she needed was help, maybe even the help of a psychologist. He resolved to keep her with him till he reached Salt City. Maybe he could reason with her, find someone to give her the help she needed.

  The day was drawing to its sweltering close but he had every intention of reaching his destination before he slept, even though it would probably take half the night. The road here overlooked a large state lake. Wind chopped the waves a little, and there was a cooling breeze through the car windows. “Can’t we stop here, just for awhile?” she asked. He’d been thinking of the same thing. Grunting an ungracious assent he took the side road that would lead them down to the beach. As he turned off the motor, the noise of crickets scratched uneasy patterns on the silence. From here the highway was hidden and the narrow strip of sand beach was bordered with weeds.

  Rue opened the door and slipped from the seat just as he told her to stop. She ran through the thigh-tall weeds until she reached the beach. Grudgingly he followed. The sun was clear amethyst seeping into a heat-blanched sky, the wind brushing at the gritty feel of his skin. When he thought again of Rue, he saw her jeans and t-shirt lying empty on the damp sand. She was just shedding her panties and he saw her narrow buttocks just before she splashed into the dark water. He sat down in a dry place, loosening the collar of his shirt and laying aside his glasses. He sat with his head in his hands for some moments wondering if his concern for this stranger was because he wanted to ignore his own problems. Then he asked himself “what problems,” because it followed if you had no life, you had no problems.

  * * * *

  When he looked up, the shadow-webbed water was unbroken; no head bobbed there. With an awful feeling of loss he ran along the edge of the water. He saw nothing at first, then something that could be a body floating. He shucked his trousers, shrugged out of his shirt, and splashed toward the dark floating something, ripples casting back a thousand shards of broken moonlight. She was face down in the water, turning lazily. He struggled to turn her over, his feet seeking uncertain purchase in the mucky bottom. He thrashed in the water, pulling her toward shore. Her skin was waxy-white in the dim moonlight, her limbs lax, her face totally devoid of expression. Frightened he hugged her close for a moment and when he could detect no breathing, he opened her mouth and with a forefinger checked for obstructions. He put his mouth on hers, breathed gently in.

  Her lips moved; one small hand clutched the back of his neck and her tongue darted delicately between his lips, so startlingly that he didn’t move away. He felt her other hand, small and cold, move down his stomach, insinuating itself under the waistband of his sodden briefs. It was as if the world as he knew it had come apart. Cricket noise subsided into a burst of deafening silence. In his arms he held the delicate, almost sexless body of a doll…or a child, but when he looked into the face, something incredibly ancient and wise looked out at him, certain of a response. With all this, there was still an element of surprise in it when his hands, gritty with sand, found her breasts.

  When he came back to reality, the droning insect song, the clammy gray sand, still holding the random sketchmarks their bodies had made, the brittle weed bending in the wind, he saw Rue sitting beside him, her face showing a drowsy satiety, her hands moving over the contours of her own body. “You won’t have it back,” she said, but not to him—to the darkness beyond the crazily waving shadows of dry weeds, as if someone were standing there listening. But no one was. “It’s mine now. To use as I will. To enjoy as I wish.”

  When he looked at her, she fell silent, reached for the t-shirt, though the dampness made it translucent. He was half afraid to touch her, but he moved closer, staring into her face with a kind of horror. “Who are you?” he asked, not admitting that the question might as well have begun with a what.

  “What do you think I am? Do you think I’m a witch? Maybe I am.” She hugged herself. “I like this place. I do. And I like you and Frankie…and the others, so very many new others. So many, many new things to try.” She rose and danced a little along the deserted beach, a moving white shape among the capering shadows that paced her.

  * * * *

  He slept in the car, waking with damp and wrinkled clothing a crick in his neck, and an indelibly soiled conscience. He’d half hoped Rue had gone off somewhere on her own, but she came climbing up the bank to the car, smoothing down her coppery hair, if he hadn’t known better, the child he’d accompanied down to the water the night before, except he knew better. She’d stopped to upend her sneakers, tapping the sand out of them. “It’s not the end of the world, you know,” she said as if sensing his mood.

  “I just never quite thought of myself as a child molester,” he said.

  “Some things are real,” she said, “and some things are only masks, hiding those things we don’t know how to look at.”

  He didn’t try to figure that one out; he just drove. There were only ten more miles to his destination when he felt too tired to go on. Leaving the highway for a small sleepy-looking town, he found a motel on the edge of it and pulled in.

  “I’m dirty and tired,” he said angrily.

  Wind kicked up dust from the bare ground around the cabins. A lean and battered-looking orange tom-cat slunk from behind an untrimmed shrub and watched them for a moment with yellow-glass eyes, then withdrew. “I don’t like this place. I think he recognized me.”

  “Go on alone then. Find some other sucker to pick you up.”

  “No, I want to stay with you.”

  His eyes burned and stung, a gauzy grey web work appearing on his peripheral vision. He signed them in, noticing that he’d written Mr. and Mrs. Humbert Humbert. He showered, turning the water on as hard and hot as he could stand it, but that didn’t seem to affect the lethargy that was claiming him. When he came from the bathroom, his skin was tingling. Rue was on the bed, her hair bright against the pillow, the curtains of the open window drifting flimsily onto and off her body with its duskily freckled fair skin.

  “I was foolish to try and run from them,” she said with a welcoming gesture. “The worlds lie close, as close as we are to each other now.”

  In her arms he dreamed. He was stifling in a small, dim, odorous ro
om. In the odd perspective of dreams he saw a face, wizened as a dried apple, the jaw immense, the brow foreshortened with two green gleams where eyes should be beneath a bristling line where two eyebrows grew together over the bridge of the nose. Two other figures moved behind the first, and he thought that one of them wore a gaudy flower-print dress. A glass beaker filled with purplish liquid bubbled over a blue flame. He watched as a hand as skinny as a bird-claw brought something small and futilely writhing and dropped it into the beaker. He thought the figures clustered close together to enjoy its struggles as it was boiled alive. A casket, broken and encrusted with mold, began to vibrate wildly, dark rotting fragments flaking off it. From it a skeleton, all discolored bone and dried sinew, was struggling to rise.

  “Sister-Cindy, bring the pot,” said one of the entities in a hysterical half-shriek, and an amorphous blur, growing taller as it came gliding, resolved itself into a witch-shape. It poured the still-steaming contents over the skeleton’s grinning skull, the stuff melting down the bones like candlewax, clinging, and forming a human shape. A moment longer and he would recognize it.

  He awoke with the curtains flapping above his head, the wind carrying the heavy, dusty smell of rain. Rue was gone, the door standing open. Thunder grumbled as he dressed, and when he left the cabin, the sky was full of sullen cloud. He saw no one. Behind the motel grew a scrub forest, thin trees already swaying in the storm wind. He called out for Rue but there was no answer. Thunder called again, with more authority, and the lightning cast an eerie glow over the trees. The further he went into the forest, the more sluggish his movements became, and at a certain moment he feared to turn and look at the motel because he had the sudden certainty that it wouldn’t be there.

  He caught a fleeting glimpse of two dark hunched figures in patchwork garments slipping through the trees carrying something that looked like a bundle of dry twigs wrapped in black rags. He tried to force his body forward but it was as if the atmosphere had grown thick and liquid and it was all he could do just to move his legs.

  Then he saw Rue, standing in a small clearing. One moment her eyes met his, a kind of pleading in them, the next with eyes as blank as a doll’s. Her skin gone translucently pale, she slumped to the forest floor. Then there were three clustering black shapes, sometimes appearing human, sometimes not, crying out with raucous voices as their black-nailed skinny hands fastened themselves into Rue’s flesh.

  “You’re selfish!” Rue’s inert body was jerked back and forth as they contested it, limbs bobbed lifelessly.

  “Wanted to steal our persona when we all swore to share it.”

  “It’s mine. Let me wear it!” Talon-like hands tore gashes in white skin. When he tried to shout, his jaw seemed frozen. The dark struggling bodies blocked his vision, still tearing and shouting, “Mine, mine!”

  Time was distorted; the lightning when it hit was like a streak of gold melting down the tree beside him. There was a great concussion; a huge door slamming between worlds, and he toppled to the forest floor and lay there stunned.

  When he awoke there was a charred smell in the air, and fire still smoldered at the base of the split tree. On the grass and soaked into the rocky soil everywhere were darkly glistening patches that stained his fingertips red when he touched them, “Who’d have thought she’d have so much blood in her,” his thoughts giggled. And bits of yellowish muscle tissue and mottled lengths of viscera, here and there a shattered fragment of bone. “And who’d have thought she had the g—” The contents of his stomach burned up his throat and were expelled onto the grass.

  * * * *

  He knew that somehow, he must have gotten himself together long enough to escape the motel and to reach the city. He must have talked to someone to rent this cheap room in a moldering old building because he was here and the walls with their uncertain patterns of brown waterstains overlaying faded bouquets were the one reality he had. He rose and shuffled across the room, kicking aside an empty whiskey bottle (he couldn’t remember drinking that, either). He squinted through the slats of discolored Venetian blinds and tried to estimate the time of day, but the sky was overcast, the wind pushing about grimy scraps of fallen leaves. Whatever the time, he was hungry, and he guessed he still had enough money left to buy a meal.

  He went out into the semi-dark of the cramped hallway and began to descend the stairs. On the landing, where the stairs turned, he passed someone, perhaps another tenant, though he couldn’t remember seeing her before—a very old lady in a shapeless black dress, her hand a brown-spotted moth hovering over the stair-rail. He could swear he didn’t know her, but she looked at him lingeringly, and there was a gleam of green in each deep-set eye beneath a bristling thicket of eyebrow.

  THE TRAP, by Henry S. Whitehead and H.P. Lovecraft

  Originally published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, March 1932.

  It was on a certain Thursday morning in December, 192– that the whole thing began with that unaccountable motion I thought I saw in my antique Copenhagen mirror. Something, it seemed to me, stirred—something reflected in the glass, though I was alone in my quarters. I paused and looked intently, then, deciding that the effect must be a pure illusion, resumed the interrupted brushing of my hair.

  I had discovered the old mirror, covered with dust and cobwebs, in an outbuilding of an abandoned estate-house in Santa Cruz’s sparsely settled Northside territory, and had brought it to the United States from the Virgin Islands. The venerable glass was dim from more than two hundred years’ exposure to a tropical climate, and the graceful ornamentation along the top of the gilt frame had been badly smashed. I had had the detached pieces set back into the frame before placing it in storage with my other belongings.

  Now, several years later, I was staying half as a guest and half as a tutor at the private school of my old friend Browne on a windy Connecticut hillside occupying an unused wing in one of the dormitories, where I had two rooms and a hallway to myself. The old mirror, stowed securely in mattresses, was the first of my possessions to be unpacked on my arrival; and I had set it up majestically in the living-room, on top of an old rosewood console which had belonged to my great-grandmother.

  The door of my bedroom was just opposite that of the living-room, with a hallway between; and I had noticed that by looking into my chiffonier glass I could see the larger mirror through the two doorways—which was exactly like glancing down an endless, though diminishing, corridor. On this Thursday morning I thought I saw a curious suggestion of motion down that normally empty corridor—but, as I have said, soon dismissed the notion.

  When I reached the dining room I found everyone complaining of the cold, and learned that the school’s heating-plant was temporarily out of order. Being especially sensitive to low temperatures, I was myself an acute sufferer; and at once decided not to brave any freezing schoolroom that day. Accordingly I invited my class to come over to my living-room for an informal session around my grate-fire—a suggestion which the boys received enthusiastically.

  After the session one of the boys, Robert Grandison, asked if he might remain; since he had no appointment for the second morning period. I told him to stay, and welcome. He sat down to study in front of the fireplace in a comfortable chair.

  It was not long, however, before Robert moved to another chair somewhat farther away from the freshly replenished blaze, this change bringing him directly opposite the old mirror. From my own chair in another part of the room I noticed how fixedly he began to look at the dim, cloudy glass, and, wondering what so greatly interested him, was reminded of my own experience earlier that morning. As time passed he continued to gaze, a slight frown knitting his brows.

  At last I quietly asked him what had attracted his attention. Slowly, and still wearing the puzzled frown, he looked over and replied rather cautiously:

  “It’s the corrugations in the glass—or whatever they are, Mr. Canevin. I
was noticing how they all seem to run from a certain point. Look—I’ll show you what I mean.”

  The boy jumped up, went over to the mirror, and placed his finger on a point near its lower left-hand corner.

  “It’s right here, sir,” he explained, turning to look toward me and keeping his finger on the chosen spot.

  His muscular action in turning may have pressed his finger against the glass. Suddenly he withdrew his hand as though with some slight effort, and with a faintly muttered “Ouch.” Then he looked back at the glass in obvious mystification.

  “What happened?” I asked, rising and approaching.

  “Why—it—” He seemed embarrassed. “It—I—felt—well, as though it were pulling my finger into it. Seems—er—perfectly foolish, sir, but—well—it was a most peculiar sensation.” Robert had an unusual vocabulary for his twelve years.

  I came over and had him show me the exact spot he meant.

  “You’ll think I’m rather a fool, sir,” he said shamefacedly, “but—well, from right here I can’t be absolutely sure. From the chair it seemed to be clear enough.”

  Now thoroughly interested, I sat down in the chair Robert had occupied and looked at the spot he selected on the mirror.

  Instantly the thing “jumped out at me.” Unmistakably, from that particular angle, all the many whorls in the ancient glass appeared to converge like a large number of spread strings held in one hand and radiating out in streams.

  Getting up and crossing to the mirror, I could no longer see the curious spot. Only from certain angles, apparently, was it visible. Directly viewed, that portion of the mirror did not even give back a normal reflection—for I could not see my face in it. Manifestly I had a minor puzzle on my hands.

  Presently the school gong sounded, and the fascinated Robert Grandison departed hurriedly, leaving me alone with my odd little problem in optics. I raised several window-shades, crossed the hallway, and sought for the spot in the chiffonier mirror’s reflection. Finding it readily, I looked very intently and thought I again detected something of the “motion.” I craned my neck, and at last, at a certain angle of vision, the thing again “jumped out at me.”