The 5th Witch (17 page)

The silver-haired man stopped trying to pull out the fork and turned to her. Whatever he saw in her eyes, he stared at her, and kept on staring at her, as if he had recognized death.

Tip-
tapp!
Longer pause. Tip-
tapp!

Lida Siado was still smiling, but she was smiling because the silver-haired man was beginning to realize what she was doing to him.

Tip-
tapp!
Even longer pause. Tip-
tapp!

He stood up very straight and clamped his right hand against his chest.

“Please,” he said.

“Too late,” smiled Lida. “I told you to leave these people alone, but you wouldn’t.”

“I have a wife,” said the silver-haired man, trying to maintain his dignity. Tip! “I have two—I have two beautiful daughters.”
Tapp!
“Grandchildren. Five grandchildren.” Tip!

Nobody in the crowd of diners understood what was happening, but most of them were producers or directors or actors, and they sensed that some kind of drama was being played out. The catcalling died away.

“John!” said one of them from the back of the crowd. “John, are you okay?”

Tapp!

“Please,” repeated the silver-haired man. “Please, I’m sorry.”

Even with his hand pinned to the tabletop, Fred Manning was silent. He looked at the silver-haired man, and then he looked at Lida Siado. Eventually, he said, “John? What the hell’s going on?”

Lida Siado turned to Orestes Vasquez and said, “
Qué
pensa, Fantasma Blanco? Debería él vivir o morir?
”

Orestes Vasquez shrugged. “
Incluso aquellos quenos
desafian deberían tener su lugar en él cielo
.”

Lida Siado turned back to the silver-haired man. She was tapping her drum very, very slowly now, and he was holding on to the table for support, and his lips were turning blue.

“He said that even those who defy us should have the chance to visit heaven.”

“No,” said the silver-haired man. He held out his hand and cupped his fingers around her fist, as if he were trying to massage his own heart. “No…
please
.”

But Lida stopped tapping, and he gripped his chest, and his head tilted back as if he were gargling, and he swayed.

“
John!
” said Fred Manning, but the silver-haired man let out a thin catarrhal rattle and collapsed sideways onto the floor. There were screams and cries of dismay from the crowd of diners, and Mayor Briggs roared, “Go find a paramedic—anybody—even if you have to flag down an ambulance!”

Lida Siado stalked back to stand beside Orestes Vasquez, and Miska returned to stand beside Vasili Krylov, and Michelange DuPriz stood beside Jean-Christophe Artisson. In between all of them stood the elderly woman in black, with her black cloche hat. Her face was mostly in shadow, but her skin was deathly white, and her mouth was puckered with age.

She reached out to each of the witches in turn with her wrinkled black satin gloves and patted their hands, as if she were giving them her approval.

Back at Fred Manning’s table, Krystie Wallis and Sylvia Wolpert were still sobbing with pain, and Leonard Shapiro was sitting with his head slumped forward, but nobody dared to help them, not while the mobsters and their witches were still here.

Mayor Briggs said to Jean-Christophe Artisson, “Please…I think you’ve shown these good people what you’re capable of.”

“But you know, Mr. Mayor, we came here for dinner, and we still haven’t eaten.”

“Please. Don’t you think they’ve suffered enough?”

“Okay…maybe you’re right. It isn’t good for the digestion to eat in a place where everybody is so tense. What do you think, Orestes?”

Orestes Vasquez shrugged. “We can go to the Water Grill, yes? I think anyhow I prefer the Water Grill. I feel like some of those clams in tomato sauce.”

Michelange DuPriz said, “
Sekonsa
. We should let these persons finish their meal.”

With that, she unfastened the clip of her red satin purse and took out her small, black enamel box. She opened it and tipped about a tablespoonful of gray powder into her hand. Stepping into the center of the dining room, she began to scatter the powder in all directions. As she did so, she sang in a high, shrill, discordant voice: “
Sel pa vante tèt il di li sale…nan tan
grangou patat pa gen po…
”

Jean-Christophe Artisson leaned close to Vasili Krylov and said, “She is singing that in a time of famine, people will eat anything.”

Michelange DuPriz circled around the whole dining room, scattering powder onto every table. The diners shrank away from her as she approached them. None of them made any attempt to stop her, and some even stumbled backward into their friends as they tried to keep as far away from her as possible.

At last she rejoined Jean-Christophe Artisson, and then she turned to face the dining room, her face triumphant. She raised both hands and let out a long, quavering shriek.

Most of the diners had their eyes fixed on her, so they didn’t realize at first what she had done. But then one woman let out a low moan of disgust, and a man shouted, “Oh my God!”

On every plate in the restaurant, the food had been transformed into something gray and glutinous, something that moved.

Several people had to turn away, their hands clamped over their mouths.

“I thought that you must be bored with lamb and
beef and salmon,” said Michelange DuPriz. “So as a special treat, I have given you a dish that is much more unusual. Unborn Siamese cats, served rare.”

With that, she took Jean-Christophe Artisson’s arm, and they paraded out of the restaurant, followed by Vasili Krylov and Miska, the elderly lady in black, and Orestes Vasquez and Lida Siado.

When they were gone, Spago was in an uproar, with people shouting and screaming and arguing. The maitre-d’ came up to Mayor Briggs and said, “What just happened? I don’t understand. I saw it with my own eyes, but it was impossible.”

Mayor Briggs dragged his napkin out of his collar. “Everything’s changed, Damon. Everything’s different. Black is white, and women can make you cough up toads.”

A weeping woman was led past them by her husband, mascara streaking her cheeks.

“If you think I’m ever coming to Spago again, you’re seriously deluded,” the husband told the maitre-d’. “Wolfgang Puck is going to be hearing from my lawyers.”

“Please, none of this was the fault of the management.”

“It was a nightmare. A
nightmare
. If my wife has to go back into therapy because of this—”

Mayor Briggs bowed his head and closed his eyes.

“Dear God,” he said, and he didn’t care who heard him. “Dear God, have mercy on us, please.”

“It can’t be,” said Annie.

“Do you want to see it again?” Dan asked.

“Yes, please. Can you freeze it? That moment when she looks at the camera.”

Dan played the DVD again. When the withered old woman turned her head and glared at them, he froze it. Annie went down on her knees in front of the television and peered at her closely.

“I’m sure it’s her, especially with that cat’s head on a cane. But I don’t see how it’s possible.”

“This is a witch, Annie. Witches do impossible things all the time. You know that more than anybody.”

“Yes, but even witches are mortal. They grow old like anybody else. They die like anybody else.”

“What are you saying?”

“I have a picture of this woman, in a book. At least I’m pretty sure it’s her. I’ll go find it.”

“Do you want me to come with you? You know, in case of maggots.”

“If I see even a single maggot, I’ll scream blue murder. I promise you.”

While Annie went down to her apartment, Dan sat in front of the frozen picture of the witch he had seen
at Chief O’Malley’s media conference. Her face was triangular with high cheekbones and a narrow nose and a jaw as sharp as a gardener’s trowel. She looked more like a rat than a woman, especially with those jagged teeth. The glitter in her eyes was one of contempt, but one of cunning, too.

Malkin went close to the television and stared at the witch. She mewed, and her white fur bristled.

“Don’t like the look of her, hey?” said Dan. “Me neither. If she licked a lemon, I bet the lemon would pull faces.”

Although he knew that the picture of the witch was only shuddering because he had frozen it, he had the uneasy feeling that she was breathing and alive, and that she could see him.

Annie came back into the living room carrying three books—two of them new, one of them old and bound in cracked brown leather. “Here,” she said, and opened one of the new books—
An Illustrated History
of Hartford
. She pointed to a small reproduction of a seventeenth-century woodcut, depicting an elderly couple, both of them shackled, standing in front of a bench of five magistrates. A jury was listening intently to what they were saying, and the court was crowded to the doors with spectators.

“This is the trial of Rebecca Greensmith and her husband Nathaniel in December 1662 for witchcraft.”

Dan looked at the woodcut closely. There was no question that the woman in front of the court bore an extraordinary resemblance to the woman whose image was hovering on his television screen.

“It can’t be
her
, though, can it?”

“I don’t see how. This was December 1662—nearly three hundred fifty years ago. Apart from that, Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were both found guilty and hanged on Gallows Hill.”

“What were they supposed to have done?”

“It says here that Rebecca Greensmith saw her husband being followed through the woods by a strange red creature. He told her that it was a fox. But later, when they were out looking for a missing hog, she saw him in the company of two dark creatures, one blacker than the other. They looked like dogs walking on their hind legs.

“Her husband also brought home logs on the back of his cart that were too heavy even for two men to lift, even though he was ‘a man of little body and weak.’”

“So this Rebecca Greensmith—she gave evidence against her own husband?”

“He was her second husband, and I get the impression that she didn’t like him too much. I also think that she was trying to get clemency for her own dealings with the devil.

“She had already confessed that she frequently performed lewd sexual acts with the devil. At first the devil had appeared to her as a deer or a fawn, skipping all around her, so she hadn’t been frightened. But then he started taking on other shapes, like a giant serpent or a black hog. She said that she would take his penis into her mouth and suck out his semen, which was black, like lamp oil. She said she used to spit the devil’s semen into the loaves she baked, to poison any of her neighbors who offended her.”

“Nice woman.”

“She boasted to the court that the devil was so pleased with her that he gave her greater magical powers than any other witch had ever possessed. She claimed that she could appear in five different places at once, hold five different conversations at once, and eat five different meals. This is called The Quintex, from the Latin word for
five
and the Old German word
Hexe
meaning witch.

“The devil gave her other powers, too. If somebody upset her, she could turn their eyes into glass or freeze their hands and feet so that they shattered, and they would have to spend the rest of their lives with nothing but stumps.

“Mind you, it’s always difficult to tell how much of what she was supposed to have done was real magic and what were the natural hazards of life in Connecticut in the seventeenth century—you know, like going blind from cataracts or frostbite.”

Dan said, “All of this stuff about being in five places at once—she could have been suffering from senile dementia. My old dad’s still pretty coherent, but even he finds it difficult to remember what he was doing the day before yesterday. Come to that, so do I.”

He turned back to the witch’s face on the TV screen. He was sure that her expression had altered slightly. She seemed to be smiling, as if she had been listening to them and was amused by how little they knew.

“Another thing…if she was a real witch and the devil did give her all of that power…they wouldn’t have been able to catch her, would they? They wouldn’t have been able to make her stand trial and hang her.”

Annie opened the second new book,
Witchfinding in
Colonial Connecticut
. A large color illustration showed Nathaniel and Rebecca Greensmith being hanged from a gallows, their eyes bulging and their tongues protruding, with several men swinging from their legs to make sure that the couple was strangulated.

“This picture was painted in 1899, but it says here that it was closely based on contemporary records. And again, look, I know her face is all contorted, but this woman does look just like the woman on the screen, doesn’t she?”

“She could be a descendant,” Dan suggested. “That
would make this woman—what?—about her ninth or her tenth great-granddaughter.”

“Something like that—but look at this.”

Now she opened the leather-bound book, where a faded silk marker had been laid, and here was a full-page woodcut, very plainly executed, of a woman who by seventeenth-century standards would have been considered elderly, maybe fifty-five to sixty years old. She was wearing a bonnet unnervingly similar to the bonnet that the woman on the TV screen was wearing, and a hooded cloak that was decorated with hooks and bows and tattered ribbons, as well as dried stalks of rue and pennyroyal.

Her face was sharp and her cheeks were drawn in, as if she were sucking on something sour. Her eyes stared out of the page with undiluted venom.

On the facing page, there was a blotchily printed text, almost illegible, describing the trial of Rebecca Greensmith and her husband Nathaniel for “familiarity with the great enemy of God and mankind and by his help having come to the knowledge of secrets in a preternatural way beyond the ordinary course of nature, to the great disturbance of several members of this commonwealth.”

Annie sat cross-legged on the floor and carefully read the entire text, tracing her way down the page with her finger.

Dan nodded toward the TV. “Mind if I switch this old hag off now? She’s giving me the willies.”

“Oh, sure. But listen to this—this is the testimony given in court by the Reverend John Whiting, pastor of the Second Church in Hartford. I’ve read about him before. He was like the Eliot Ness of witch hunters.

“‘Having listened to the complaints against Goody Greensmith made by her neighbors, I went in the
company of three men to Nathaniel Greensmith’s farm, south of the little river. There I found Goody Greensmith at her hearth, spinning. I explained to her the accusations that had been made against her and that I had come to remove her to jail.

“‘She refused to come with me and uttered several blasphemous imprecations, whereupon I instructed the men who had come with me to remove her forcibly. Two of them seized her arms, and they were good strong men, Samuel Wyllys and Richard Treat, but they were unable to move her even an inch. It was as if her feet were soundly nailed to the floor.

“‘However, I had come well-prepared for such witchery, and I produced from my satchel the Enochian text, which calls upon the assistance of angels and in the face of which any associate of the devil is powerless. I had in my possession also the rose-colored stone that had been sent to our ministry from England as soon as it became apparent that the devil was so assiduously recruiting new followers in the commonwealth.

“‘I spoke the words, “I reign over you in power exalted above the firmaments of wrath; in whose hands the Sun is as a sword, and the Moon as a fiery arrow. Which measureth your garments in the midst of my vestures and trussed you together as the palms of my hands.”

“‘Thereupon I pressed the stone against Goody Greensmith’s forehead, and she collapsed to the floor, her eyes as white as two pebbles, her wrists and ankles pressed together as if tightly bound by invisible cords. Mr. Wyllys and Mr. Treat were now able to lift her, with the assistance of Walter Filer, and carry her out of the house.’”

“So that’s how they caught her,” said Dan. “An Enochian text and some kind of stone.” He paused and sniffed. “What the hell is an Enochian text?”

“Enochian is the language of angels. It was supposed to have been spoken by Adam in Paradise.”

“I see. And how does anybody know that?”

“The story is that Enochian was communicated by the angels to an English spirit medium called Edward Kelley in the late sixteenth century.”

“By text message?”

Annie didn’t rise to it. “They did it through mirrors, or a rose-colored crystal. Kelley was working for Dr. John Dee, who was Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, as well as being a magician and an alchemist. Dr. Dee was obsessed with the idea of talking to angels, and when Kelley said that he could do it, Dee paid him fifty pounds a year just to sit and stare at this crystal and tell him what the angels were saying, while Dee wrote it all down.”

“The word
scam
comes to mind, don’t you think?”

“Well…people have been arguing about that for centuries. But Enochian is a proper language with twenty-one distinctive letters, and it has its own consistent grammar and syntax. Not only that, each of the letters relates to a specific element and number and planetary force. Kelley was fluent in Latin and Greek, but it isn’t exactly easy to make up an entire language off the top of your head.”

“I don’t know. You should listen to my partner Ernie.”

“This could help us, though,” said Annie. “If the Reverend Whiting really did manage to capture Rebecca Greensmith by using an Enochian text, maybe we could do the same to her granddaughter…if that’s who this woman is, and if we can find out which text we need to do it with.”

“Hell of a lot of ifs there,” said Dan.

“I know. But it’s a start, isn’t it? And we can’t just let these witches run riot, can we? Life in Los Angeles isn’t going to be worth living.”

Dan’s phone burbled. It was Ernie.

“El Gordo! How’s it going, man?”

“You seen the news?”

“No…I’ve been working on this witch thing. What did I miss?”

“Nothing, because this wasn’t
on
the news. But the Zombie and the White Ghost and Vasili Krylov took their witches out to dinner at Spago. They couldn’t get a table, so they turned the whole place upside down.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“One fatality, heart attack. Apart from that, only minor injuries, but they were really weird injuries, like four people had their hands nailed to the table with cutlery.”

“What?”

“Fred Manning was one of them. Oh yeah, and Krystie Wallis, her too. But nobody saw nobody do it.”

“How come this wasn’t on TV?”

“It’s not going to be
anywhere
—TV, radio, newspapers. Our three friends have told the media that if they see one story disrespecting them in any way at all, like even criticizing the pattern on their neckties, then retaliation will be swift and strange and extremely terrible.”

“Is the lieutenant still there?”

“No…he left about a half-hour ago.”

“Okay…I just wanted to tell him that I’ve made some progress on this witch stuff. I think I’ve identified that old woman at Chief O’Malley’s media conference. I definitely think she’s the fourth witch, and all the other witches are getting their power from her. I also think that we might be able to take her out, if we go about it the right way.”

“I don’t like this,
muchacho
. I don’t like any of this. I’m not scared of any criminal. But these witches—”

“We’ll be okay, Ernie. We just have to beat them at their own game.”

“Oh, for sure. You know what my father used to say?
Más vale que digan aqui comó una gallina y no aqui
munó un gallo
. Better to be known as a chicken while you’re alive than remembered as a brave man after you’re dead.”

“El Gordo, I’ll catch you tomorrow. Don’t have nightmares. Witches, they like you to have nightmares. They open the door to your head, man, and they can send in the scariest things you can think of, like spiders.”

“You’re trying to scare me? How old do you think I am? Six?”

“Of course not.”

“Good,” said Ernie. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then he paused, and said, “Do they really do that? Send spiders into your head, when you’re asleep?”

Dan and Annie stayed up until 1:30
A.M
., searching through Annie’s books on witchcraft and Enochian magic. Annie found
An Enochian Dictionary
, as well as the complete text of the incantation that Rev. John Whiting had used to pinion Rebecca Greensmith, in both English and Enochian.

“
Ol sonf vorsag goho Iad Balt lonsh…calz vonpho so-
bra Z-Ol ror I ta nazps
,” Annie read.