Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (52 page)

“Sorry, ma’am, we’re remodeling, we’ve got no rooms.”

She didn’t see any remodeling going on. She drove home. She could stick it out, what’s the worst that they could do? It wasn’t Salem for God’s sake.

Barbara figured the local moving company might not be the best either, so she talked to the one in a nearby town. She’d seen their sign the night Sharon had taken her to Big Eddy’s. She decided that she was going to move to Houston, job or no job. If she stayed here, she’d wind up using her powers to hurt the panicked sheep. After she left, the move of claiming power would be gone from the office. It would be just like God’s hierarchy—all communication lines straight up to him. No decisions, no use of free will. She would have lost her battle for freedom, which meant in the cosmic sense a tiny loss for the side of the Devil. She wondered if she should invoke him and tell him about it.

It was probably too small a thing to care about, and besides her fight wasn’t over yet. There was no doubt a battlefield waiting for her in Houston—some petty tyrant to lead rebellions against—some mock-up of the heavenly bureaucracy to test her powers on.

But on the other hand, maybe he needed to know. So she lit a candle and she poured her heart out to the Archetype of Human Consciousness, the force always seeking to be free.

They came for her the next night. She knew it was going to be bad about seven in the evening. The sun had set and darkness was beginning to pool up in the low places of the Earth. The birds that graced dark skies were beginning to sing, and with her heightened senses she had felt that tiny shudder the earth gives just as she is falling asleep. The plane would take her away tomorrow, but she doubted it would be that easy.

She called for a pizza. The phone was dead. She looked out her front window. Someone had parked across her driveway with a Ford Bronco. There were a lot of cars in the neighborhood.

What had suddenly made them so fearful?

Had they had a cow that went dry, or couldn’t get it up after having a few too many beers, or maybe their gamble in the stock market hadn’t worked so well . . .

Maybe it was watching movies on TV till they were good and scared—and then calling each other until the wee hours of the morning. Or maybe it was something they had always longed to do. Mankind has a great hatred for anyone who is different. Race, gender, creed. All good excuses to kill.

But not, thought Barbara, to die for.

When it got good and dark, she could hear them gathering on the lawn. She saw lights.

Torches.

Oh good, this really was a movie ending.

They began banging on her door about nine.

She opened the door, wearing a see-through black silk dress, a little too tight, that ended just above the knees. It was all she wearing, let them see what they were about to waste. Not a bad looking broad for forty-five.

Robert grabbed her by her right arm.

They had put a stake in the middle of the yard and piled firewood around it, as she had foreseen in her magical working the night before.

Robert pulled her toward it, she could not smell the roses she grew, not even the sweet tuberoses that usually enchanted the night. She could smell gasoline. She pulled her arm from his, but kept walking toward the stake.

“Do I get a final speech before you roast me?”

Some yelled, “No!” and others, “Yes!” and so she knew that she could speak since they were too weak-willed to stop her.

“I have lived among you for twenty-four years. I don’t see a face here that I haven’t spent pleasurable time with. I have fought for the right, when all of you have fought for inertia. I led the fight against the city council when they wanted to take away our parks, I have fought for every cause that furthers human freedom. And tonight if your pitiful fire were to take me before God’s great judgment seat, I would look Him right in the eye and say, ‘
Non Serviam
—I will not serve!’ Now watch!”

She said a magical word and she flew about twenty feet into the sky. Then she returned.

“See? I can escape. But I won’t. I have other battles to fight, and bigger battlefields to fight on. Go ahead, put me to the torch. Remember the night you burned your village’s freedom fighter.”

For awhile they were afraid of her, but their dull-eyed anger flared and they put the fire beneath her.

She died screaming at first, then suddenly she seemed to be gone from the flames—at least some said so, quietly, years later.

The fire went out and a great cloud of ash blew up and it got in the townsfolk hair, or stained their foreheads, or their hands and arms. Some were stained on their cheeks and others their lips or teeth. They found that when they went home, they couldn’t scrub it off.

They all stayed in the next day, scrubbing their flesh, bleaching their hair, or polishing their teeth. They washed and they remembered her screams and they remembered the good she had done and they washed. And they washed.

Then the next day they took to avoiding one another on the streets. It was a little embarrassing to meet people in daylight after the burning. There was a run on scarves, big hats, and trench coats. The motel was genuinely full of one half of the town’s married couples, who found the idea of looking at (or being looked at by) the stained spouse too painful.

The tattoo parlor did a lively business afterwards, but the ash stain would show up through the new tattoo after about a month.

They moved away from the town after that, hiding themselves in big cities and going out only at night in scarves and hats and long coats.

You may have seen one of them in your city. They will occasionally look up and see a bit of ash floating in the air—maybe from a wholesome suburban chimney—maybe from a fire that the homeless have made in a barrel. They’ll be looking at the ash, like a feather from a black angel’s wing, and they’ll run.

Sometimes they scream.

Ursula K. Le Guin is now a living legend. But before the Earthsea Trilogy,
The Left Hand of Darkness,
The Lathe of Heaven,
the awards and the honors . . . it all started with her first published story—this 1962 tale that combines time travel, Paris, the quest for knowledge, and a male practitioner of magic. It’s also the only story in this collection with a man who might be termed a witch.

The etymology of the word
witch
in English is rather complicated (and, for some, controversial), but the word seems to have originally applied to both men and women. By 1601, however, terms like men-witches or he-witch were being used, so
witch
was taking on a primarily feminine meaning. In modern English,
wizard
(originally meaning “philosopher, sage” with the “magical power” connotation beginning around 1550) and
warlock
(the base word wærloga primarily meant “oath-breaker”; the “-ck” ending a “male witch” meaning emerging from Scottish in the 1560s) are now commonly used for “male witch” in fiction and film.

April in Paris

Ursula K. Le Guin

Professor Barry Pennywither sat in a cold, shadowy garret and stared at the table in front of him, on which lay a book and a breadcrust. The bread had been his dinner, the book had been his lifework. Both were dry. Dr. Pennywither sighed, and then shivered. Though the lower-floor apartments of the old house were quite elegant, the heat was turned off on April 1st, come what may; it was now April second, and sleeting. If Dr. Pennywither raised his head a little he could see from his window the two square towers of Notre Dame de Paris, vague and soaring in the dusk, almost near enough to touch: for the Island of Saint-Louis, where he lived, is like a little barge being towed downstream behind the Island of the City, where Notre Dame stands. But he did not raise his head. He was too cold.

The great towers sank into darkness. Dr. Pennywither sank into gloom. He stared with loathing at his book. It had won him a year in Paris—publish or perish, said the Dean of Faculties, and he had published, and been rewarded with a year’s leave from teaching, without pay. Munson College could not afford to pay unteaching teachers. So on his scraped-up savings he had come back to Paris, to live again as a student in a garret, to read fifteenth-century manuscripts at the Library, to see the chestnuts flower along the avenues. But it hadn’t worked. He was forty, too old for lonely garrets. The sleet would blight the budding chestnut flowers. And he was sick of his work. Who cared about his theory, the Pennywither Theory, concerning the mysterious disappearance of the poet François Villon in 1463? Nobody. For after all his Theory about poor Villon, the greatest juvenile delinquent of all time, was only a theory and could never be proved, not across the gulf of five hundred years. Nothing could be proved. And besides, what did it matter if Villon died on Montfaucon gallows or (as Pennywither thought) in a Lyons brothel on the way to Italy? Nobody cared. Nobody else loved Villon enough. Nobody loved Dr. Pennywither, either; not even Dr. Pennywither. Why should he? An unsocial, unmarried, underpaid pedant, sitting here alone in an unheated attic in an unrestored tenement trying to write another unreadable book. “I’m unrealistic,” he said aloud with another sigh and another shiver. He got up and took the blanket off his bed, wrapped himself in it, sat down thus bundled at the table, and tried to light a Gauloise Bleue. His lighter snapped vainly. He sighed once more, got up, fetched a can of vile-smelling French lighter fluid, sat down, rewrapped his cocoon, filled the lighter, and snapped it. The fluid had spilled around a good bit. The lighter lit, so did Dr. Pennywither, from the wrists down. “Oh hell!” he cried, blue flames leaping from his knuckles, and jumped up batting his arms wildly, shouting “Hell!” and raging against Destiny. Nothing ever went right. What was the use? It was then 8:12 on the night of April 2nd, 1961.

A man sat hunched at a table in a cold, high room. Through the window behind him the two square towers of Notre Dame loomed in the spring dusk. In front of him on the table lay a hunk of cheese and a huge, iron-latched, handwritten book. The book was called (in Latin)
On the Primacy of the Element Fire over the Other Three Elements.
Its author stared at it with loathing. Nearby on a small iron stove a small alembic simmered. Jehan Lenoir mechanically inched his chair nearer the stove now and then, for warmth, but his thoughts were on deeper problems. “Hell!” he said finally (in Late Mediaeval French), slammed the book shut, and got up. What if his theory was wrong? What if water were the primal element? How could you prove these things? There must he some way—some method—so that one could be sure, absolutely sure, of one single fact! But each fact led into others, a monstrous tangle, and the Authorities conflicted, and anyway no one would read his book, not even the wretched pedants at the Sorbonne. They smelled heresy. What was the use? What good this life spent in poverty and alone, when he had learned nothing, merely guessed and theorized? He strode about the garret, raging, and then stood still. “All right!” he said to Destiny. “Very good! You’ve given me nothing, so I’ll take what I want!” He went to one of the stacks of books that covered most of the floor-space, yanked out a bottom volume (scarring the leather and bruising his knuckles when the overlying folios avalanched), slapped it on the table and began to study one page of it. Then, still with a set cold look of rebellion, he got things ready: sulfur, silver, chalk. . . . Though the room was dusty and littered, his little workbench was neatly and handily arranged. He was soon ready. Then he paused. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered, glancing out the window into the darkness where now one could only guess at the two square towers. A watchman passed below calling out the hour, eight o’clock of a cold clear night. It was so still he could hear the lapping of the Seine. He shrugged, frowned, took up the chalk and drew a neat pentagram on the floor near his table, then took up the book and began to read in a clear but self-conscious voice: “
Haere, haere, audi me
 . . . ” It was a long spell, and mostly nonsense. His voice sank. He stood bored and embarrassed. He hurried through the last words, shut the book, and then fell backwards against the door, gap-mouthed, staring at the enormous, shapeless figure that stood within the pentagram, lit only by the blue flicker of its waving, fiery claws.

Barry Pennywither finally got control of himself and put out the fire by burying his hands in the folds of the blanket wrapped around him. Unburned but upset, he sat down again. He looked at his book. Then he stared at it. It was no longer thin and gray and titled
The Last Years of Villon: An Investigation of Possibilities.
It was thick and brown and titled
Incantatoria Magna.
On his table? A priceless manuscript dating from 1407 of which the only extant undamaged copy was in the Ambrosian Library in Milan? He looked slowly around. His mouth dropped slowly open. He observed a stove, a chemist’s workbench, two or three dozen heaps of unbelievable leatherbound books, the window, the door. His window, his door. But crouching against his door was a little creature, black and shapeless, from which came a dry rattling sound.

Barry Pennywither was not a very brave man, but he was rational. He thought he had lost his mind, and so he said quite steadily, “Are you the Devil?”

The creature shuddered and rattled.

Experimentally, with a glance at invisible Notre Dame, the professor made the sign of the Cross.

At this the creature twitched; not a flinch, a twitch. Then it said something, feebly, but in perfectly good English—no, in perfectly good French—no, in rather odd French: “
Mais vous estes de Dieu,
” it said.

Barry got up and peered at it. “Who are you?” he demanded, and it lifted up a quite human face and answered meekly, “Jehan Lenoir.”

“What are you doing in my room?”

There was a pause. Lenoir got up from his knees and stood straight, all five foot two of him. “This is
my
room,” he said at last, though very politely.