The 5th Witch Read online

  Michelange DuPriz stepped forward and draped a sisterly arm around her shoulders. This evening, Michelange DuPriz was wearing an indecently short cocktail dress in a vivid scarlet satin and silver earrings with scarlet beads on them that looked like drops of fresh blood. “Since you cannot move from your table,” she said. “You should enjoy your dinner.”

  Fred Manning and his dining companions were all struggling to free themselves, but the knives and forks had been driven into the tabletop with such force that it was impossible to budge them. Leonard Shapiro had turned gray with shock, and the women were both weeping. Three or four men came across the restaurant to help them, but Lida Siado raised both hands, her fingers spread wide, and growled, “No! Leave them alone! These people have to learn their lesson.”

  A tall, silver-haired man shouted, “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to, lady? You and your friends have caused enough trouble already. Just get the hell out of here before we throw you out!”

  Mayor Briggs said to Vasili Krylov, “Please, Mr. Krylov…if we’re going to run this city together, we can’t have public scenes like these. Please, as a favor to me, let them go.”

  Orestes Vasquez said, “Who said anything about running the city together, Mr. Mayor?” Vasili Krylov let out a staccato laugh.

  The silver-haired man was trying to tug out the steak knife that had pinned Krystie Wallis’s and Sylvia Wolpert’s hands together. “Oh my God!” Sylvia Wolpert moaned in a shaky contralto. “Oh my God, that hurts!”

  “I said to leave them alone!” Lida Siado called.

  “And I said for you and your friends to get the hell out of here!” the silver-haired man retorted.

  Lida Siado raised her left hand again, fingers spread wide. But then she squeezed them together in a tight fist and started to tap at the little drum she wore around her neck.

  The silver-haired man ignored her and kept up his efforts to pull out the steak knife. Most of the other diners had risen to their feet now and were clustered around Fred Manning’s table, trying to free them. More diners were crowding in from the garden.

  “You think you are brave?” Miska challenged them. “You think you can defy us? Do you want to learn a lesson, too?”

  “I don’t know who the hell you think you are,” a redheaded woman shouted at her, almost screaming. “But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get out of here before somebody here does you a serious mischief!”

  “Oh, it’s mischief you want?” said Miska. “Serious mischief? Me and my friends, we are very good when it comes to serious mischief!”

  “Did you call the cops, Damon?” somebody asked the maitre-d’.

  “I tried to call on my cell,” said another man. “I can’t get a signal, only static.”

  “Me too. Did anybody try to call for the paramedics?”

  “What’s happening here? Who did this? Fred, hold on, buddy. We’ll get you free!”

  “Sylvia, try to hold still, okay? It won’t hurt so bad if you try to hold still.”

  “Who let these freaks in?”

  “More to the point, who’s going to throw them out?”

  Amid the confusion, Lida Siado continued to tap at her little drum, and the tapping could clearly be heard over the shouting and the arguing and the sobbing. She began to make her way between the tables toward the silver-haired man, her hips sinuously swiveling as if she were performing some kind of erotic Colombian dance.

  “Hey, keep away, lady!” one man shouted.

  “Yeah, back off!” yelled another.

  But she continued to glide forward, tip-tap! tip-tap! tip-tap! She looked so strange and intimidating that none of the diners tried to stand in her way. When she reached the silver-haired man, she stood directly in front of him and held out her fist until it was only two inches away from his chest. To begin with, the silver-haired man ignored her, but she kept her fist where it was, unwavering, and now she was tapping her drum slower and slower. Tip-tap! Pause. Tip-tap! Pause.

  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 tables
poonful 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.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “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.”