The 5th Witch (19 page)

“You could say that. But look—we’d better be getting on.”

Annie tapped the witch compass three times with the pinecone. Then she opened the lid and began to
circle slowly around, offering the compass to the north, the east, the south, and the west. Dan and Ernie shuffled respectfully out of her way.

As she circled, Annie whispered an incantation under her breath.

“
Salt and needle, show the way, point toward the witch I
pray. Salt and needle, spin and spin, find the one with devil’s
sin. Find the one who drank his seed, and on whose
blackened lips did feed. Salt so white and needle bright, be
my guides and be my light
.”

After a while she stopped circling and carefully shifted the witch compass from side to side—first to the left a little, then to the right—until its needle stopped trembling. It pointed almost due west.

Dan frowned at it, and said, “You think you’ve picked her up?”

“I’m sure it’s her. The attraction is so amazingly strong. Hold the compass for yourself. Can you feel it? It’s almost like it’s
humming
. And look—the needle isn’t even swinging from side to side, which it would do normally, because it would be attracted to other witches in the area, too. This witch is totally dominant.”

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

They climbed into Dan’s Torrent. Annie held the witch compass in the palm of her hand and directed them.

“Turn right onto Sunset, that’s it. Keep going.”

Traffic on Sunset was crawling along at its usual laidback pace, and Dan impatiently drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You still got her?”

“No problem. Stronger than ever. She can’t be too far away.”

A ’73 Eldorado convertible with seven young students in it was driving in front of them at less than ten miles an hour. “Look at these bozos,” Dan complained,
and gave them a piercing
whup-
whup-
wheep
of his siren. Immediately, a scattering of hand-rolled joints were tossed out into the road. Dan overtook the students and left them looking at each other in relief and bewilderment.

They drove as far as Stone Canyon Road, and then Annie said, “Right here. Up toward the Hotel Bel-Air.”

“Looks like they’ve given this witch a pretty ritzy place to stay,” Ernie remarked, as they drove between the palms and the jacaranda and the fragrant orange-blossom bushes.

“Not the hotel, though,” said Annie. “Farther up the road, to your left.”

They passed the entrance to the Hotel Bel-Air. Somebody was holding a wedding by Swan Lake, and they could see a flower-decorated pavilion and the bridegroom in his white tuxedo, waiting for his bride to appear.

“Don’t do it,
muchacho
,” Ernie muttered under his breath. “One day for sure you will wake up and find a two-hundred-seventy pound woman lying next to you, with a long hair growing out of the mole on her chin.”

“What are you talking about?” said Dan. “Your Rosa, she’s absolutely beautiful.”

“You never met her mother. I have seen the future, and it grows a hair on its chin and puts on weight.”

Beyond the hotel, Stone Canyon Road became steeper. On the right-hand side, the houses were huge and immaculately decorated in pink and cream stucco, with sprinklers chuffing softly onto their emerald lawns. After they had taken the left branch, however, the road became narrower and overshadowed by oaks.

They found themselves driving between two gray stone walls. The roadway was unswept, and their tires crackled on dry twigs and swathes of fallen leaves.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Dan asked Annie.

Annie held the witch compass to his ear. “No doubt about it. Can you hear it?”

Very faintly, the witch compass was giving out a high-pitched whine, like somebody circling the rim of a wineglass with a moistened fingertip. “It’s actually
excited
,” she said.

They turned a corner and found themselves faced by two cast-iron gates. Beyond the gates, the driveway sloped even more steeply upward until it reached a large yellow house with flaking yellow shutters and eight tall chimneys. To the left of the driveway was a thick wooded area, and it was obvious that neither the woods nor the gardens had been tended for years.

Ernie said, “Hey, I
know
this house. It used to belong to Ben Burrows when he was starring in
Friends
and Family
. I had to come up here when I was a rookie because some young guy had been sexually assaulted with a snooker cue and drowned in his pool.”

“I remember that,” said Dan. “Pretty much finished Burrows’s career, didn’t it?”

“Well, people’s private life, that’s their own business,” said Ernie. “But he always used to make out that he was so straight.”

Dan climbed out of the SUV and went across to the intercom box beside the gates. He pushed the button and waited, but there was no reply. He pushed the button again. “Don’t think that damned thing’s working.”

There was a heavy chain wound tightly around the gates to hold them together, but there was no padlock. Dan opened the Torrent’s tailgate and took out his tire iron. It took him three or four minutes of wiggling and grunting to lever the chain loose, but eventually it rattled to the ground, like a thick metallic snake. He
pushed the gates apart, and they drove slowly up toward the house.

“This place has such a bad aura,” said Annie. “I mean, is it my imagination or is it actually
chilly?
”

“You’re not imagining it, it’s cold. It’s these trees, blocking out the sunlight.”

Dan glanced toward the woods. As he did so, he thought he glimpsed a pale fawn figure between the oaks. It flickered so quickly between the tree trunks that he couldn’t be sure if he had seen it at all, but it looked tall and attenuated, kind of
stretched out
, with a pointed head or maybe horns.

“Did you see that?” he asked Ernie.

Ernie was busy peering at the house. “What’s that,
muchacho?
”

“I saw somebody in the woods. Or
something
.”

Ernie turned around in his seat and stared for a while. “I don’t see something. You sure you saw something?”

“Don’t worry,” said Dan. “I’m a little keyed up, is all. Most likely it was only a deer.”

They reached the wide-shingled turning space in front of the house and stopped. Close up, they could see how neglected the property was. The yellow stucco was flaking off the outside walls, and the chimneys were throttled with ivy. The windows were dusty and blind as an old woman’s eyes, and many of the shutters were hanging at crazy angles off their hinges.

They climbed out of the Torrent and walked up to the front porch. Annie was still holding the witch compass, and she suddenly said, “She’s close, Dan! She’s very, very close!”

They approached the double front doors. The varnish was peeling off them in shriveled ribbons, like a skin disease.

“Dan, be careful,” Annie warned. The witch compass was singing so loudly now that all of them could hear it. It set Dan’s teeth on edge.

Ernie unholstered his gun and cocked it.

“Dan, she’s here!” said Annie.

Dan glimpsed a quick, blurred movement on his left. He swung around and glimpsed a pale face staring at him out of one of the grimy downstairs windows. The face vanished almost at once, but he had seen who it
was. The fourth witch, in her strange overhanging bonnet, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

He strode over to the doors and furiously jiggled the handles, but they were locked.

“Ernie,” he said. The two of them stood side by side, and gave the doors a hefty double kick. They heard a thunderous echo inside the house, but the doors stood firm.

“Again!” said Dan, and this time they heard one of the catches splintering and a bolt pop out of its socket, and the doors shifted inward by two or three inches.

“Again!” The doors burst apart, and the two of them nearly lost their balance.

They found themselves in a musty, high-ceilinged hallway, with a black-and-white marble floor and a wide staircase that led up to a second-floor gallery. The floor was littered with dried eucalyptus leaves and streaked with grit, which the wind had blown under the door. The black cast-iron banisters were caked with elaborate lumps of quail droppings.

“Where is she?” Dan asked Annie. He approached the first door on his left with his gun upraised. “I saw her at the window—she must have been in this room here.”

Annie was slowly waving the witch compass from side to side. “No…she’s not in there, not anymore…but she’s definitely near.”

The witch compass started to sing yet again. Annie pointed it toward the far end of the hallway and then gradually tilted it upward.

As she did so, the fourth witch materialized on the gallery overlooking them. She was silhouetted against a yellowish stained-glass window, but they could tell who she was by her bonnet and her tattered cloak and the staff with a cat’s head on top of it she was holding in her left hand.

Dan pointed his gun at her and shouted, “You! Come down here! Make it real slow. I want both hands where I can see them.”

“
You’re trespassing
,” said the witch. Although she was at least twenty-five feet above them, Dan felt as if she were whispering close to his ear, and he was tempted to turn around to see if she was standing right next to him, too.

“
This is a private house, my friend, and you were not invited
in
.”

“We don’t need an invite. We’re police. You’re under arrest!”

“
Under arrest? On what charge?
”

“Make that ‘charges’—plural. Conspiracy to commit multiple homicide, for beginners.”

“
Oh, yes? And what else?
”

“You want the whole list? Conspiracy to commit arson, conspiracy to commit assault, conspiracy to deal in narcotics and illegal firearms. Not to mention larceny, fraud, forgery, pandering, criminal damage, and threatening behavior.”

“
You’re going to prove that I’m guilty of such misdeeds?
And how exactly are you going to do that?
”

“I’m not here to discuss this with you, lady. I just want you to come down here with your hands where I can see them.”

“
Or what? You’ll ask your pretty young friend to put a
spell on me?
”

“Just come down here, or I’ll come up there and get you.”

The witch said nothing, but she raised her cat’s-head staff above her head.

“This is your last warning, lady. Come on down.”

Dan crossed the hallway and started to mount the stairs. The witch swung her staff around until it was pointing at the top of the staircase, and she whispered
something in a quick, guttural voice. She sounded more like a monkey chattering than a woman.

Instantly Dan heard a soft, dry, rushing noise. A huge cascade of insects surged over the top of the staircase and came gushing downward—thousands of them. Dan said, “
Shit
—” and took one step upward, but as he did so he felt a sharp crunching beneath the sole of his shoe. He looked down and saw that the creatures were centipedes, their antennae blindly waving, tumbling over one another as more and more of them came pouring down.

He jumped back down again, his heart thumping in panic. Dozens of centipedes were already swarming over his shoes, and some of them were climbing up inside the legs of his pants.

He thought,
They can’t be real. This is magic, they can’t
be real
. But then he thought of the metallic-tasting quarters that he had puked up. They had been real enough, and so had the toads in Chief O’Malley’s stomach. He stumbled back farther, frantically slapping at his ankles and gripping his pants tightly around the knees in case the centipedes scuttled up any higher.

Ernie retreated, too, stamping on any centipede that came near him, as if he were performing a heavy-footed Mexican dance. Only Annie remained serenely where she was, the witch compass still lifted in her left hand. Although a few centipedes ran over her sandaled feet, she ignored them.

“
I know what you fear the most
,” whispered the witch. “
I know what infests your nightmares. You think you can
come here and arrest me? Go away, fools! Don’t bother me
again!
”

Ernie shouted, “You come down here, lady! I’m not scared of your centipedes!”

“
I know that!
” retorted the witch, leaning over the
banister. “
But I know what you are scared of! If I were
you, fat man, I wouldn’t tempt me!
”

“You got ’til the count of three to come down!”

“
Very well
,” said the witch. She reached into her raggedy cloak and drew something out of it. From the hallway, they couldn’t clearly see what it was, but it looked pendulous and heavy, and it was swinging from side to side.

Ernie turned quickly to Dan. “Are you okay?”

Dan was still crushing the last of the centipedes under his shoes. “I’m okay. Give her three, and then we’ll go up there and snatch her, bugs or no bugs.”

“
Uno!
” whispered the witch. She lifted her arm back, hesitated, and then flung down the thing that she had produced from her cloak. It circled through the air and landed with a thump right in front of Ernie’s feet. Before any of them realized what it was, it scurried wildly to one side, and then back again, squealing and chittering. It was an enormous black rat, still slick with sewage, with sharp yellow teeth and a thick ringed tail.

“
Mother of God!
” screamed Ernie. “
Mother of God!
”

He staggered backward, his eyes bulging with terror. The rat ran toward him, then dodged toward Dan. Ernie pointed his gun at it and fired. There was a deafening bang, and the rat exploded into a bloody tangle of black fur.

“You witch!” Ernie shouted. “You witch—I’ll shoot you, too!”

“
Bring it all back, did it?
” gloated the witch. “
That
morning when you were five, in the barrio? And you
opened your eyes, didn’t you, and there it was, at the end of
your bed? And it ran up under your blankets and bit you on
the lip?
”

“I’ll shoot you, too!” Ernie screamed at her. “I’ll shoot you, too!”

“
Dos!
” whispered the witch. She reached into her cloak and dragged out another rat, which she tossed over the banister without any hesitation. It bounced off Dan’s shoulder before it dropped to the floor.

“
Tres!
” She threw another rat over. “
Cuatro!
”

She pulled out more and more rats, and they came hurtling down from the gallery, hitting the floor all around them, wriggling and squealing and zig-zagging frantically from one side of the hallway to the other. Ernie fired again and again, until Dan was almost deafened and the hallway was thick with acrid blue smoke. Bloody fragments of rat were splattered across the black-and-white marble like a grisly parody of a Jackson Pollock painting—teeth, tails, quivering hind legs, and scarlet intestines.

At last the witch stopped throwing rats and held up her staff again. Ernie was pale and sweaty and panting like a walrus.

“
Have you had enough yet?
” the witch asked. “
I can do
worse! How about you, young lady? What is it that terrifies
you?
”

Dan glanced at Annie and realized that the witch had
asked
what frightened her. She didn’t seem to know instinctively, the way she had with him and Ernie.

Annie stayed supremely calm. She dropped her witch compass into her satchel and took out a folded sheet of paper and a small white silk purse. The purse was embroidered with green petals and seed pearls, and tied at the neck with what look like silvery-gray hair.

“What’s that?” Dan asked her. “What are you going to do?”

She gave him a secretive little smile. “You’ll see. But get ready to run upstairs and seize her when the moment comes.”

She held up the purse in her left hand and swung it from side to side. At the same time, she sang in a high, shrill voice, “Salt and juniper, marigolds and rue! Silver and primroses, red, white and blue! Balsam ash and a copper coin. Seven times shaken, seven times blessed.”

The witch swept her staff in an angry, chopping pattern. “
Do you think you can catch me with garden herbs
and pennies, you foolish child? Do you know who I am? Do
you know where my magic comes from? It comes from the
very wells of hell!
”

With that, she shouted, “
Thunder!
” and the entire house shook with a devastating clap of thunder. A chandelier dropped from the ceiling and shattered on the floor, and plaster dust came down in billowing clouds.

Annie remained where she was. She swung her little embroidered bag three more times. Then she lifted the thyrsus, the fennel stalk with the pinecone on the tip, and pointed it directly at the witch. In the other hand she held up the sheet of paper and began to read the words that she had written on it.

“
Busd de yad
, the glory of God.”

“
Lightning!
” screamed the witch, and the hallway crackled with lightning. It jerked and jumped from the staircase to the front door, setting off showers of sparks. Dan was thrown back against the wall, jarring his back. Ernie’s hair was standing on end, and his mustache bristled.

“
Mykmah a-yal prg de vaoan!
” Annie called out. “
Ar
gasb tybybf doalym od telok!
”

“
Storm!
” the witch raged at her. At once, it was raining. Hard, cold, clattering rain that came straight out of the ceiling. They were instantly drenched, and Ernie said, “I will kill this woman! I promise you, I will personally drown her with my bare hands!” He said
something else, but his words were lost in another crackle of lightning, which dazzled all of them, and another burst of thunder.

It started to rain even more torrentially, so that water was gushing and foaming down the stairs. Yet as he turned around, Dan could see through the front doors that it was still sunny outside, with only the faintest breeze ruffling the bushes.

“
Mykmah vls de ageobofal y dluga toglo pugo a tallo!
” cried Annie, almost singing it. Then she raised the thyrsus and made the sign of the cross, three times. “I reign over you in power exalted above the firmaments of wrath!” she shouted.

“
No!
” screamed the witch, and covered her ears with her hands.

“A power in whose hands the Sun is as a sword, and the Moon as a fiery arrow!”

“
No! Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!
”

“Which measureth your garments in the midst of my vestures and trussed you together as the palms of my hands!”

“
You don’t know what you’re doing! You don’t know what
you’re bringing on yourself! The power of Satan and all of
his demons! The legions of the night!
”

But Annie made the sign of the cross again, then again and repeated the words “
Busd de yad
. The glory of God.”

A pure white light appeared on the gallery close behind the witch. It grew brighter and brighter, and it made the raindrops sparkle like diamonds and caught them in midair, as if they weren’t falling at all.

The light was so brilliant that it was impossible for Dan to make out what it was, but as it shone brighter the witch let out a choking noise, as if she had a fishbone caught in her throat. She dropped to her knees, then tumbled sideways onto the floor.

“What is that?” he asked Annie. “What’s happening?”

Annie kept on smiling, but she didn’t answer. The expression in her eyes was almost beatific.

For a split second, Dan thought he saw a
face
in the middle of the light—a smooth, dispassionate face, like a Venetian carnival mask—but then it vanished, and the light died away. The rain gradually eased, then stopped altogether. There was one last grumble of thunder, and then the hallway fell silent, except for the witch’s self-pitying moaning and the soft pattering of water drops.

“
The foulest of plagues on all three of you and all of your
families and all of your children, for all eternity!
” whispered the witch. She tried to curse them some more, but she started to cough and couldn’t stop.

“You can go get her now,” said Annie. “But be careful…she’ll probably try to bite you, and a witch’s bite can make you impotent.”