64 - The Witch-Hunter

"With all this talk of magic and practitioners," Anya said, as she stepped among the stones to fetch a candle. "It may come as no surprise that Dagon's Hollow attracts a different sort of crazy. Which is how I heard the story of

THE WITCH-HUNTER

Amanda was walking home from the library when a man fell into step behind her. A woman alone, at night. She could sense him behind her, his steps matching her own. She looked for any refuge, but the streets were empty, the businesses closed. Her only hope was to reach the house she was staying at.

He caught her first. The metal prongs of the taser pressed against her lower back. She couldn't even scream, legs not working as she collapsed.

When she awoke, it was on an iron frame. Noise-canceling foam covered the walls, little dark pyramids that would swallow her screams. A tall, lean man, balding early, with a scraggly beard and mustache, dressed in a dark shirt and pants with a priest's collar, was laying out instruments on a table. Knives. Pincers. A little block with screws. A hammer.

"Who are you?" she asked, straining against the manacles that held her to the iron frame.

"I am the witch-hunter," he said, and took out a pair of shears.

She did not struggle, as he cut her clothes from her. He worked in silence, eyes focused on his task. The cold metal brushed her skin, and shirt and bra, skirt and panties, fell into pieces, taken away and placed carefully into a black garbage bag.

"You are accused of witchcraft," he said. "I am here to hear your confession."

Amanda swallowed, but said nothing. The cold intensity of his voice, the weird calm, was offputting.

"I have seen you. In the bookstore. In the library. I have been watching," his lips curled back from his teeth. "I will know the names of your fellow witches. Everyone in your coven. I will hear what obscenities and blasphemies you have committed. And when, at last, I have heard all, and you have confessed your sins, I will grant you absolution—the absolution of fire."

"You're insane!" Amanda said.

The iron frame was a rack. He had built it himself. Worked the crank, and the frame slowly stretched. Amanda's limbs strained, but the mechanical advantage was with the man. She screamed as the pressure slowly grew in her joints. Arms and legs pulled too far. Muscles in her back and thighs tense. He asked questions. She told him to go fuck himself. She went into great details, obscenities spilling forth from her mouth.

He continued to work the crank. The obscenities stopped. Became begging. Screams. She didn't have the leverage to do more than twist in place. Slowly, with mechanical thoroughness, the crank continued. He drank in the sight of her body as the limbs slowly dislocated. He listened as her screams descended to hoarse moans.

Sometimes, he asked questions. She answered. Telling him whatever he wanted to hear. He dutifully recorded her answers. Had she had sex with other women? Yes, she had. She discussed her lewd perversions, the way her tongue buried itself into another woman's most sacred place, which only her husband should ever know, defiling it. She spoke of seducing other women.

Had she had sex with Satan? A pause, then. Another turn. A scream. Then the confession would come forth. Slowly. Sometimes he had to coach her answers. Get her to say the right details. Where? When? The copse of trees north of the railroad tracks. The Sabbath met on moonless nights. She told him of the blasphemous kiss, the osculame infame, and the sweat beaded his brow. When she ran out of things to say, he turned the crank again.

The other instruments waited. The thumbscrews, the pincers. There was a small heating unit in the room, which he had rigged so that he could heat the pincers until they glowed cherry red. His eyes fell across that body, the nipples of the bare breasts, the lewd thatch of hair above her crotch. If she confessed to sodomy, he would be able to feed a hot poker through her ass. The thought of that sent a shiver of excitement up his spine.

His first witch. But not his last. There was so much work to be done in this town. So many witches to find, to draw confessions from.

It was when her hips and shoulders dislocated, and her torso sagged on the frame, that the change came over Amanda. She no longer begged. No longer confessed. Her dark eyes were clouded with pain, and her breathing was ragged, the pain obvious in every movement. Amanda turned her head to see look at him.

Her eyes held him. The pupils changed. They seemed to almost split in two, married only by a bridge of blackness, until they stared out at him like the eyes of goats.

"What in the name of God—" he said.

"No," she said. "Not your God."

Then she spoke, and her words were the scent of his own rank emission after dark and torrid dreams, the scent of blood that flowed from his back during an exultant flagellation, the chalk on his fingers as he wrote the words of the sin of Onan on the board as a young man in the school, the stained panties at the laundry where he had worked for his meager pay. He felt the heat rise to his cheeks, the phantom pain on the scars of his back, as he relived moments of transformative pain and pleasure, and Amanda's eyes seemed to bore into him, unable to look away. Until he was not sure who was prisoner and who was inquisitor.

Then, with a sharp, silent explosion, the spell was ended.

Pain lanced through his body as he sagged in the iron frame. Above him, he saw his own form, his fingers tugged the store-bought collar free and let it fall to the floor. The withering look from those goat-eyes set in his own face stared down at him.

"You wanted a witch? More fool you, to have found one," she said, and reached for the pincers on the tray.

Anya sighed. "We celebrate ****, not as the ending of self, but of a transformation. So few people understand that."

So saying, she blew out the candle.