“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me where I’m going.”
The dirt in her throat shifted again. “You’re going underground,” she said.
I tried to move then, but all the strength seemed to have left my body. I couldn’t even raise my gun. In the doorway beyond, two figures now stood: the woman without eyes and the man without a mouth. The mouthless figure nodded to the man now holding me, and he began to guide me firmly toward the stairwell, oblivious to my words.
“No,” I said. “This isn’t right.”
But, of course, there was no sound from him, and at last I understood.
Earless, so that he could not hear the pleas of those for whom he came.
Eyeless, so that she could not see those she fed to the flames.
And the mute judge, the repository of sins, unable to speak of what he had seen or heard, merely required to nod his assent to the passing of the sentence.
Three dæmons, each perfect in its mutilation.
My feet were sliding on the dusty floor as I was dragged by the collar toward the waiting flames. I looked to the doorway of the warehouse and saw a man in a gray suit watching me. It was Mr. Rone. I cried out to him, but he merely smiled his dim smile and closed the door. I could hear the sound of his key turning in the lock. I remembered the papers on his desk, old and dusty. I recalled the absence of a secretary, and a man sweeping the floors whose voice, now that I thought of it, might have sounded something like that of Charles Rone himself.
I was nearly at the doorway when I spoke for the last time.
I looked up at the dæmons standing before me and said simply: “But I’m not dead.”
And at that moment, I felt my right hand start to raise my gun to my temple and saw, in my head, a small, thin man with blood on his shoulder walking to the stairs. Beside me, I heard my dead wife’s voice beside my ear. There was no breath, only sound.
“Let me help you with that,” she whispered. Her hand closed upon mine, pressing my finger against the trigger as she lifted the gun to my skull.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The sound of the furnace filled my head. Its heat rose through the floor and melted the soles of my shoes. Already, I could smell my hair burning.
“Too late,” she replied.
The gun exploded and the world was shrouded in crimson as I prepared to descend.
The Underbury Witches
Steam and fog swirled together upon the station platform, turning men and women to gray phantoms and creating traps for the unwary out of carelessly positioned cases and chests. The night was growing colder, and a faint sheen of frost could already be detected upon the roof of the ticket office. Through the steamed-up glass of the waiting room figures could faintly be discerned, huddling close to the noisy radiators that reeked of oil and smoldering dust. Some drank tea from cheap cups lined with spidery cracks, sipping urgently as though apprehensive that the crockery might yet disintegrate in their hands and shower them with tepid liquid. Tired children cried in the arms of weary parents. A retired major tried to engage two soldiers in conversation, but the men, new conscripts already fearful of the trenches, were in no mood to talk.
The station master’s whistle sounded defiantly in the gloom, his lamp swinging gently high above his head, and the train slowly began to move away, leaving only two other men standing upon the suddenly deserted platform. Had there been anyone to see or to care, it would have become quickly apparent that the new arrivals did not belong in Underbury. They carried heavy bags and were dressed in city clothes. One, the larger and elder of the two, wore a bowler hat, and a muffler around his mouth and chin. His brown coat was slightly frayed at the sleeves, and his shoes were built for comfort and long life, with few nods to fashion or aesthetics.
His companion was almost as tall as he, but slighter and better dressed. His coat was short and black, and he wore no hat, exposing a mass of dark hair that was a good deal longer than would ordinarily have been considered acceptable in his chosen profession. His eyes were very blue, and he might almost have been called handsome were it not for a curious aspect to his mouth, which curled down slightly at the edges and gave him an air of perpetual disapproval.
“No welcoming committee, then, sir,” said the older man. His name was Arthur Stokes, and he was proud to call himself a sergeant of detectives in what he did not doubt was the greatest police force in the world.
“The locals never like it when they’re forced to accept help from London,” said the other policeman. His name was Burke, and he enjoyed the rank of inspector in Scotland Yard, if enjoyed was indeed the right word. Judging by his expression at the moment in question, endured might have been a more appropriate term. “The arrival of two of us is unlikely to make them doubly grateful.”
They made their way through the station and onto the road beyond, where a man stood waiting beside a battered black car.
“You’ll be the gentlemen from London,” he said.
“We are,” said Burke. “And you would be?”
“My name’s Croft. The constable sent me to collect you. He’s busy at the moment. Local newspapermen. We’ve had some of the London boys calling on us as well.”
Burke looked puzzled. “He was told not to make any comment until we arrived,” he said.
Croft reached out to take their bags.
“And how’s he supposed to do that, then, if he can’t talk to them first to tell them that he can’t make no comment?” he asked.
He winked at Burke. Sergeant Stokes had never seen anyone wink at the inspector before, and he wasn’t convinced that Croft was the ideal candidate to be the first.
“Fair point, I suppose, sir,” said Sergeant Stokes hurriedly, then added, for form’s sake: “Don’t you think?”
Burke gave his sergeant a look that suggested he thought a great many things, of which few were complimentary toward the present company.
“Whose side are you on, Sergeant?”
“The side of law and order, sir,” Burke replied happily. “The side of law and order.”
The witch panic that gripped Europe for over three hundred years, beginning in the mid-1400s and ending with the death in Switzerland in 1782 of Anna Goldi, the last woman in Western Europe to be executed for witchcraft, claimed the lives of between fifty and one hundred thousand people, of whom eighty percent were women, most of them old and most of them poor. Such panics were most prevalent in the German lands, which accounted for roughly half of all those killed. Fewer than five hundred died in England, but twice that amount were executed in Scotland, due in no small part to the Scottish courts’ greater tolerance for torture as a means of securing confessions, and the paranoia of its young monarch, James VI.
The most comprehensive guide to the identification, interrogation, and, finally, immolation of witches was the Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer of Witches,” coauthored by the German Dominican Heinrich Kramer and Father James Sprenger, the dean of theology at the University of Cologne. Kramer and Sprenger pinpointed the seed of witchcraft in the very nature of the female species. Women were spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally weak, and motivated primarily by carnal lust. These fundamental flaws found their most potent expression in witchery.
The coming of the Reformation did little to undo such beliefs. If anything, any existing tolerance for the so-called “wise women” of village life was to be stamped out along with any other evidence of old pagan ways, leading Martin Luther himself to declare that they should all be burned as witches.
It would be 1736 before the crime of witchcraft would officially be removed from the books of law in England, almost 120 years after the capture, trial, and execution of the three women known as the Underbury Witches.