Witch Pricker - part 2

http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/witch-pricker-part-1

They walked out of the house, stooping to avoid hitting their heads on the low door frame.  The rain had stopped and on the square by the church, a crowd of about fifty people had gathered – men, women and children.  As the priest, followed by Josiah drew near, the crowd parted and exposed what they had been hiding.  Three women bent double and covered in ragged and soiled, brown garments.  Their arms were tied behind them and a rope that was tethering the women together by their ankles was held at each end by two men who stared impassively ahead.

As he got closer, Josiah could see that the women’s crookedness was not due to age or illness, but to exhaustion.  All three had the white-grey faces of the wholly sleep deprived.  The crowd had been clamorous with jeers and taunts, but as Josiah stood in front of the women, it fell silent.  He could smell the feral dirt on the women; but below that, he could also smell their fear, a thin, rancid odour, emanating from every pore.

With the priest by his side and kneeling on the ground to steady himself, Josiah unbuckled his bag and drew the witch pricker from its pouch.  At the sight of it, a collective inhalation of breath came from the crowd.  This was what they had come together for.  He placed the witch pricker on the open flap of his bag.

He stood in front of the first woman to his left, his back towards the crowd.  She was thin, of late middle years and her dark grey hair ran wildly down her back.  Her face was fox-like, long-snouted and narrow.  She looked at Josiah, meeting his gaze steadfastly.

He coughed as he began the process, starting with the reading out of what he was going to do.  He did this in his usual measured, authoritative tone.  Then he took his gloves out of his bag and after putting them on, he lifted up her dress, taking the weight of its material and gathering it roughly in the gap between her arm and the side of her body.  Her nakedness was revealed.  As always with these women, on capture she had been shaved and dried blood nicks and scabs were scattered across her torso and her legs.  He scrutinised her body, looking for the weakness he knew he would find.  And there it was.  The small, raised mole on her left thigh.

He picked up the witch pricker and raked it across the mole as the woman flinched.  He jabbed it into her thigh and with a flick of his wrist to hide the blade, seen only by him, the witch pricker came away clean.  He showed it to the priest at his side and then to the woman, but she showed no reaction.  He turned round and held it aloft to the crowd.  The silence was broken by whoops and shouts and Josiah pushed the woman over on to all fours, this movement jolting the other women who were still tethered to her.

The second woman was older.  This was Mother Wright the priest had whispered in his ear, a plump, loose fleshed woman of at least seventy years.  Her face was furrowed with the deepest of lines and her eyes were a pale blue, faded to the colour of ice.

As Josiah lifted her dress and gathered it like the other, she turned her head and looked away from him.  This time, the mark he could use was not so apparent.  He studied her slack, doughy flesh, but saw nothing.  He asked the men if they could turn her round and she almost stumbled as she was rotated.  Her back and buttocks were now in view and Josiah saw what he was looking for.  A purple, raw looking lesion at the bottom of her spine.  Again, he completed his task and the absence of blood heralded guilt.

Josiah had not looked at the third woman, but when he did, he felt shaken.  She was far younger than the others, black haired, slight and (Josiah surprised himself by observing) beautiful.    Looking into her face, he noticed her solemn, grey eyes.  She looked terrified, like the wild animals from the woods that sometimes ventured to their borders, only to see his farm animals trapped in their pens and enclosures.

He felt something stir within him and he was not sure if it was shameful lust or something else that he did not quite recognise.  In the moments he was looking into her face, the emptiness of his life gaped open.  He saw the solitary path he followed, the life without a wife to warm him or children to continue his place on this earth.  The aging man living alone with his wet nurse and his cows.  Looking into her face, he saw the possibility of another life, a fuller life and the idea beguiled him.

He picked up the witch pricker, but he hesitated at the thought of lifting up her dress.  He felt that it would be he who was walking the wrong path if he did.  But the process had to be adhered to, so, feigning another bout of coughing, he asked one of the men guarding the end of the women’s tethers if he would lift her dress up and hold it on his behalf.

His eyes scanned her body and it was the body of a child, slender and without flaw.   In that one moment, he felt heat, embarrassment and a need to save her.  And then he saw it.  The scar under her left breast.  This time, he didn’t flick the blade, but allowed it to remain out so that blood would come.  But something was different; there was no blood where blood should be running.  He tried once more and again, there was no blood.  This had never happened.  This had never happened to him.

The woman looked up at him and the feeling he had inside surged up.  Holding the witch pricker in both hands now, Josiah made to jab it into her flesh, but he curved it sideways slightly, ensuring the blade cut into the flesh on his own fist.  His blood trickled down on to the woman’s stomach, his consummate sleight of hand going unnoticed by almost everyone.  Everyone, apart from the woman.  Meeting his eyes with her grave, grey ones, she soundlessly mouthed, “Thank you, sir” and then she lowered her gaze.

Josiah stood back, so the crowd could see the running blood, bright on the woman’s white stomach.  Their reaction was a muted gasp.  He gestured to the man holding the woman’s dress to let it fall down and as it did, she shrank into it, into herself.  The priest spoke to the man who was still on the one end of the women’s tether and asked him to sever the rope tying her to the other women.  The man took a sword from a loop on his belt and cut through the rope.  The crowd had begun jeering again and their volume grew as the two older women were led away.  The women had their heads bowed and acknowledged no one.

This left the one woman, small and alone, standing by Josiah and the priest as the crowd dissipated.  She nodded her head as she moved past them, but Josiah did not notice where she had gone as the priest was deep in his gratitude, praise and farewells.  When Josiah looked round to see the space she had occupied, he realised he had not even learned her name.

He felt transformed, freer somehow; enchanted by the potential for a changed future and he decided to follow wherever the woman would lead him.  He crossed the square again and without a reason he could explain to himself, he went into the house the priest had first taken him to.

The room seemed colder than before and to Josiah, the air appeared as though it was almost crackling with lunatic energy.  He did not know why he had come back here, but he knew he had to see the woman.  He wanted to talk to her, to look in to her eyes and confess his desire for another life.  He wanted to bring her back to the farm, so she could warm its coldness.  He wanted companionship and children.  He wanted her measured gaze and her innocence to wash away the vile trickery of his work.

He felt spellbound and almost sick with what he needed to say to her and to steady himself, he went to sit back on the flimsy bench he and the priest had drawn nearer to the fireplace.  But the mid-afternoon sun, still low in the early spring sky, slanted through the windows across the room and showed him that someone was already sitting there.  It was the woman and Josiah moved quickly to stand in front of her, his breath catching in his throat.

She was leaning on the bench and what he saw was her dress hitched up to her waist and as before, her nakedness underneath it.  Her legs were open wide and she was tracing the middle finger of her left hand around her groin and then moving it to insert it into herself, before taking it out and licking it; repeating the action over and over.  Her eyes were closed and so for hypnotic moments, Josiah watched her unnoticed, his mind crowded with desire and disgust.  He moved backwards slightly and as his boot scraped on the flagstones, she opened her eyes.

Josiah saw the glamour of innocence had fallen from her face and her features looked course and crude.  The sound of her voice was slurred with lust as she whispered, “Come to me, witch pricker.  Come and prick a witch.  You know it is the thing you want.  Let us make a cambion, half demon, half man.  So much sport will be had in its making.”  He retched, dry and hard and the woman was laughing as he stumbled past her and out of the door.

By his horse, Josiah finally vomited, a sour stream trickling over its back hooves.  He collected himself, threw his bag over the horse and as the shadows grew long, he rode out of Grindleshaw.   If there had been any cause to look back, he would have seen the woman standing at the door, dress now adjusted and proper, watching his leaving.  If he had stopped to look more closely, he would have also seen the sadness washing through her grey eyes.

Dusk was falling as Josiah rode back home through the woods.  It was a clear evening after the rain of the day.  He was tired and hungry, trying not to think about the dupe he had been.  Josiah Lytton, illusionist and fool.

As he had left the village, the wild smell of fire had overwhelmed him and with it came the act of will it took to push the thought of the other two women he had condemned from his mind.  The songs of the birds that he heard on his morning’s journey were no longer audible, replaced now by the squeaks and rustlings of the bats that drifted past his face.  He wondered whether nothing was ever as it seemed and if the birds of the daylight turned into the bats of night.

In the near distance, he could see the track to his farm and the palely illuminated windows to his house.  The rising moon highlighted the cobwebs in the raggedy trees and brushing past them, Josiah realised they were always there, but only became apparent in the gleam of nightfall.  As he unsaddled his horse, he thought on all the other things that might always be there, but that he did not notice.

There was a curious thing too.  Leading from the horse and into the woods was a trail of breadcrumbs.  He remembered the bread he had taken from the kitchen in Grindleshaw and when he opened his bag, he saw the hole in the bottom of the bag and empty space where the bread had been wedged.

Martha had left his supper on the table and he ate and drank without enthusiasm.  He could hear the creak of her footsteps on the floorboards upstairs and he knew that, dutiful servant she was, she would be waiting to hear the click of his door to be reassured he was safely in for the night.  However, sleep served no harbour for him and so he went to his kitchen window to look out on the moonlit track in to the woods, the line of breadcrumbs white on the dark earth.

Then, unbelievably, he saw the woman walking down the track, coming towards his door.

She moved straight and swiftly, following the trail of breadcrumbs.  As she got closer, he saw the look of intent desire on her face and in the heat of his loins, he returned the desire.  He knew he could never love her, but he could fuck her and he wondered whether in the end that would be enough.  If she knocked on his door, would he open it?  But even as the thought arose, he dismissed it and he knew he would not.

The woman stopped and looked at him and this time, he was in a position to see the all-consuming sadness on her face.  She turned round and retreated to the edge of the woods and he watched as she altered shape, becoming thinner and taller, changing until she resembled some secret creature that the woods protected.  But it was as if this was not disguise enough and he watched as she stretched further so she became indistinguishable from one of the wood’s ancient trees.

Finally, he blew out the candle, so there was only night.  But he stood there for long minutes, whispering out loud time after time the not quite prayer, “how quickly the dark catches up with us”.