Fiction

Witchfinder
by Tim Curran

Halloween.

The blackest of all days. An Autumnal parade of the living, the dead, and the never born. A terminal landscape of deathmask pumpkins, shrieking neon wraiths, skeleton forests, and starving faces secreted behind dime store masks of pagan resurrection.

A day when blank, infectious lunacy calls to its own.
Tonight, it called to Anthony Hogarth, the man who kept watch. Halloween to Hogarth was the holocaust of reason, good taste, and godliness. He would watch the children who were not children but cadaver-faced mannequins with plastic eyes take to the gray streets in wolf packs, flesh-eaters with sugar-teeth smiles and vinyl skulls, bearing empty bags and hollowed bellies, skeletal fingers scratching at doors, horror comic faces peering through shuttered windows.

He would think of his wife’s death, the slow and festering decay that had devoured her from within like graveworms. He would think of it particularly on this day, knowing, knowing, mind you, that the doctors were sadly mistaken with their medical delusions of cancer and tumors and cellular leprosy. His wife had wasted away like meat in the sun. True. But it was because of no medical disorder, but because a rag and stick image of her, a witchdoll, had been buried. And as it fell to ruin and rot, so had she. Yes, only Hogarth knew the truth, only he could dare level the ancient accusation of witchcraft.

So it was indeed a black day on many levels. And a particularly black day for a witchfinder. For Anthony Hogarth had been charged with the destruction of witches. Maybe not by the state—for such things had gone to dust now and ignorance was blessed by all—but by a higher power. Regardless, it was his life’s work to stamp out witchcraft in all its grotesque forms.

And Halloween…well, it was the day when a witchfinder didn’t have to look farther than his own street. And this was why Hogarth took to the narrow, phantasm-haunted lanes on this pestilential night of the wild hunt. He would track the witch to her lair.

Quietly then, Hogarth slithered out into the streets, into that profane death house carnival called Hallowmass. His eyes like twin albino moons forever looking inward, he clutched tightly his bag of goodies, his sack of treats.

Shadows of graveyard addiction clustered and snaked by him, moved over and around him with the oily, leathered sweep of snakes. Trick-or-treating disease hordes held in some narcotic stasis of spiritual contamination. Yes, Hogarth saw them with their eyes like dead orange suns, felt the cold hunger of their knifeblade fingers, the smoldering blackness of their ash pit brains, but he did not fear them. Would not fear them. Yes, just mindless human fleas swollen with toxic blood, they were not to blame, really, for what they had become.
"Hey, mister," a clown said to him, "what’re you supposed to be?"

Hogarth offered the child a stern, reproachful look. He cut an odd figure there in his black cloak and square-brimmed witchfinder’s hat. "I am sanity in a world of madness, my boy. Go home, then, to your hearth, to your mother’s knee. The Good Book will offer you salvation. Fear not that which haunts field and forest."
The clown ran off, telling his friends. They laughed, cawing carrion birds. For a time they shadowed the witchfinder, calling out graven insults, but eventually the lure of tooth decay and upset stomachs seduced them to grander pursuits.
Hogarth continued on.

More of them now, the throngs of pagan worship in all their ghoulish splendor. Were they flowers, they would’ve been pale orchids clutched in stiff white fingers. Hogarth felt nauseous, felt disgust knit at the lining of his belly with secret teeth. To see these children…their innocence dirtied and blasphemed beneath garish paint and sharp plastic and molded rubber and all in the name of some savage, ancient festival…it was sickening. Yes, hidden in the dark house of his brain, Hogarth watched a sinister horde pause before him. Ghost, witch, clown, transient, and, ghoul.

He met them, held his ground. "Why do you pause, children?"

"That’s Hogarth," the ghoul whispered. "He’s a real nutjob." Yes, the ghoul was the leader. Hogarth could see that. He was the one. The witch had made this one her servant. Hogarth gripped his bag with gloved-fingers, waited, waited. Thought of the length of rope that coiled within. For he knew the politics of the witch-hunt. A witch had to be strangled first, before being purified by fire, or so said certain traditions.

Closer, Hogarth thought, his mind a blizzard of dementia, come closer.
But no, they ran off. Maybe they knew. Maybe.

A voice in his head, a final and fatigued voice of clarity, told him that what he was thinking was madness, was criminal. For surely they were just children. But Hogarth grimaced at this and locked that voice away in a rusty cage where it would not slip out again. For the voice had been duped, fooled by so-called reason. Children? Yes, of a sort. But they had a mistress, these children, a puppet master who pulled their catgut strings. And Hogarth knew who she was.
And tonight, yes, tonight, would be her burning time.

For Hogarth knew one thing and one thing only: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." His creed, his mantra, his reason for existence long after his wife had been taken to the mortuary, victim of sorcery.

Oh, for only a taste of the olden times when the pagans and their witchlore were dealt with in a proper manner. When those blasphemous hags were put to the question. When the inquisitor and his instruments—the boot and the hanging cage, scarpine and thumbscrew, Judas cradle and heretic’s fork—were put to their proper usage. When witches were given a taste of the gallows, the gibbet, the rack, were drawn-and-quartered, broken on the wheel. Hogarth felt he was of direct spiritual lineage to the great witchfinders—Mathew Hopkins, Cotton Mather, Pierre De Lancre, Mathew Hale. That he was present at the execution of the witches of Aberdeen, East Anglia, and Essex. That he witnessed the mass burnings at Osnabruck and Wurzburg.

The good old days.

Hogarth continued on, undaunted, the denuded tree boughs overhead clicking in the wind like deathwatch beetles. The air had a nerve gas musk of rotting, smashed pumpkins. Hollow-eyed revelers watched him from the shadows, their borrowed skins flapping in the wind.

Darkness was pooling now like a contaminated, muddy river, washing the city in a tide of nocturnal filth. The sun was going to its death proudly in the west. Leaves skittered up the walks. The beckoning night world was a cemetery of pitted bones drying beneath the phosphorescent wink of that ancient moon of slaughter. Blood moon. Dead moon.

More trick-or-treaters slavered by him in mephitic perfumes of ectoplasmic stink. Yes, the human trophies of the moon goddess, puppets of the witch.

"Mister Hogarth," a voice said, wizened and wind-blown.

Hogarth seized up tight like ice in a December creek. The sidewalks were empty, the streets desolate. Nothing stirred, nothing dared move. "Who…who calls to me?"

"Who do you think, you little toad?"

The witch. She drifted down from the trees above like a deflating balloon. She was terribly old and terribly young, skin curdled like cream. Emerald eyes of green sacrificial fire watched Hogarth, a reptilian leer was offered. Rats worried the flaps of her moldering shift. She raised her arms and produced a rain of spiders and centipedes. Snakes slid from her fingertips. There was the unmistakable stench of putrefaction, the buzzing of flies.

Hogarth had the rope out.

"Witch!" he called out with an echoing sibilance. "Wiiitttccchhh!"

"There are no witches, Mister Hogarth."

"But you—"

There was a flapping, a rush of wind, an electric motion, and she took to the morose, brooding sky on lace wings, uttering a dry and mewling laugh. Hogarth stood there, a sculpture of cold sweat, colder fear, throbbing lunacy.

She wanted him to follow. He knew that much.

Despite himself, thinking of the graveyard seeds this hag had sewn for his wife, he began to run, staying tight to the black and crawling shadow she cast over the moon-washed countryside.

"Follow me," the voice cried from the stars above. "Follow me, follow me, follow me."

Hogarth did and he could feel it. The dark tides rising within and without, invidious racial memories crashing on barren, blighted shores. Samhain, end of summer, Festival of the Dead. Bonfires burning on desolate hillsides. Dark cloaked figures chanting in sacred, windy groves. Screaming innocents herded into immense wicker baskets and set aflame. Black wind crematorium stink of blistered skin and eyes flaking to cinerary ash. Ancient, malefic gods of depravity and baneful hungers stirring in boneyards, sacrificial pits, blood-washed altars of standing stone. All lorded over by the bloated harvest moon, a grinning candy skull in the sky.

Ahead, he saw the witch land outside a lone house in a shunned, mist-haunted neighborhood of high houses. At last. Hogarth made it there, ignoring the eyes of silver and sapphire that watched him, the beckoning voices of dust. Full of blowing deserts and iced pools, he looked on. Saw and was seen. This sterile palace, this leering jackstraw tumble of gambrel roofs and yawning doorways encircled by a rusting black gate which squeaked and shrilled in a dead, alien tongue. Yes, it squatted there, house of malignant dream and chattering teeth, littered by the debris of lost races. Hogarth decided it looked like some great putrescent Jack-o’-Lantern, grinning doorway of a mouth and shuddered black cavernous eyes. Decaying, falling into itself. Within, orange fire.

In the yard, hooded children danced and played, singing profane chants amongst a riot of cackling pumpkins, songs ancient when Christ shivered in his cradle. From the trees—blackened, burnt, dead things—skeletons swayed and rattled from nooses, chattering their teeth and clattering their bony digits. Skulls leered from branches like hideous charnel fruit. Bats winged overhead. Ghosts shivered in the air. Cornstalks. Pumpkins. Wreaths of dead flowers. Children, hand in hand, cavorted in a circle around a bonfire. Still others jumped into the air, drifted like feathers over roof and treetop, only to descend once again, giggling, giggling. Grotesque figures hopped and pranced, living dead scarecrows holding black mass beneath gnarled, sacred oaks.

This was the festival. The Witches’ Sabbat.

The degenerate and blighted holiday when youth were sold like fly-specked meat to the powers of darkness. Yes, carved pumpkins, dangling gallow’s skeletons, soulless ghosts and perverse goblins, all given hellish breath now.
Hogarth thought of turning back, sanity safely in tow. His mouth was an arid field of dirty cotton, his throat a dust devil. His teeth rattled like dice on a table and insects worked at his scalp.

He moved through the gate which accepted him like a joint of meat into a starving cannibal maw. An atmosphere of dripping poison rained down on him. He could see hideous dwarfed shapes scurry at his approach. The children laughed and called his name. They gathered around him, a pagan machine of busy hands and fingers and motion and dread. They propelled him up the rotted porch and through the peeling door. Inside, the dim, greasy air was vibrant with menace. Hogarth looked around, smelled mildew and plaster rot, heard the scratching of rats in the walls. Construction paper bones hung from archways, interlocking rings of pumpkin heads decorated the dusty windows.
Above, drifting down the stairs like a spookhouse ghost, a figure, a form, a distorted thing in flowing steel skirts. A saffron-skinned hag freezing him with selenic eyes, a feasting sucking smile on her crudely drawn lips.

But no. Hogarth blinked and blinked again. Just a woman.

"He’s come for the party," the children cried. "He’s come to dance and sing and enjoy."

Hogarth shook and shuddered, madly quoting biblical verse.

"Get a hold of yourself, Mister Hogarth," the woman said and she had mutated completely now, was young and flaxen-haired. "They’ll commit you again if you keep this up."

Hogarth collapsed at a rough-hewn table, the fight pissing out of him. This was the witch’s true lair. Just look around. The cauldron over the fire. The cabalistic symbols scratched into the blackened beams and gray flagstones. The shelves and their bounties of bones and herbs and weeds and dried toadstools. The air stinking of spices, of cinnamon, of flowers dried in urns.

"Here, Mr. Hogarth," the woman said, pushing a cup before him. Something in it steamed and bubbled. "A Halloween tea, nothing more. No eye of newt or cemetery dirt or dead man’s fingers."

The children were laughing and laughing and laughing. A thunderous, booming sound that worked within him, without him, wound him up tight and secure like a wormy shroud. Held him there, imprisoned him. The cup was at his lips. He drank. Good, yes, it was good. Hot and satisfying.

"There are no witches," the woman said and the children repeated it, their faces pushed in close to his now, biological machinations of wax and straw and wood.

"You…you conjured…put a spell on my wife…"

"Fantasy, Mr. Hogarth. No more witches."

The room, the house seemed to lift and sway and breath, become flesh that was not flesh but mist. Distorted, diseased reflection of some verminous dead world. In his ears, a high reedy sound of piping, a call to some distant ceremony of fertility.

The faces pressed in closer, chimney mouths grinning, ice blue eyes winking like fine cut crystal. Chanting, chanting, chanting. Hogarth felt the tea unlock him, soothe him, take him far away and tuck him into a sweet-smelling bed where a child’s pure voice hummed and hummed a morbid lullaby.

"Unmask, children," the woman said, her skullish face described by flickering firelight.

The children, still grinning like hungry cats, did so.

"But…they have no masks on…" Hogarth was saying.

The woman, nodding, nodding. "Don’t they?"

Hogarth began to scream as their faces—still smiling, lips still chanting, eyes still blinking—fell to the floor and what was beneath, what was beneath—

"Tell yourself there are no such thing as witches, Mr. Hogarth," the woman said and her voice was like distant rain on concrete vaults. "Tell yourself and keep telling yourself. No witches, no witches, no witches, no such thing as witches…"

The voice droned on and Hogarth tried to repeat it with his own shrieking voice as the children fell over him like living, breathing cobwebs, as his flesh became a wax that melted and ran and pooled and dripped and became cooling rivers underfoot.

No such thing as witches.