Sow Read online

  “You got it.”

  Maybe there is something wrong with me, he thought. She seems completely normal.

  “And Richard? Be a love and open that window…it smells funny in here.”

  He did everything she asked, happily so. Seeing her like that filled him with hope and calmed his nerves. Jesus, maybe he had some kind of fever going. Maybe he had better quit with the caffeine and nicotine and make with three squares a day and some sleep. He made her food, whistling all the while, putting the dishes and silverware on an antique platter she had picked up at a yard sale. When he went back into her room, she was reading that witch book again and the air in there was hot, stale, and unpleasant.

  “Holly?” he said, already knowing.

  She looked up at him, eyes gleaming like dirty nickels. “It’s about time, Richard. It’s about high fucking time.”

  The hag was back.

  She stared holes through him, made him bleed inside. He could barely hold up the tray, those metallic eyes of the Holly-thing drilling through him, getting down into his guts and poisoning his soul. He tried to pull in a breath, but the air was grainy and dusty, his lungs full of soap flakes. Holly did not blink and she did not move…a sightless and lewd thing painted on the accordion board of a freak house, gazing out with pickled eyes and smiling with gnashing yellow teeth.

  “Bring my food,” she said finally. “And close that damn window before I freeze to death.”

  Richard, his belly filled with curdled cream, walked over to the bed and set the tray down before his wife. Like an automaton, he stumbled over to the window and shut it…then, something unfolding in him, something pissed-off, he took hold of the sash and threw the window up all the way.

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said,” he told her, turning and meeting her gaze with one of his own. “I just don’t agree with it.”

  Her reaction was instantaneous.

  He had known Holly for eight years. What was sitting on the bed was not Holly. Her face was like a pallid moon ringed by a corona of dead straw that might have been called hair. Her eye sockets were swollen red and the eyes themselves a dirty and tarnished silver. Her mouth was pulled into a contorted snarl.

  Richard almost fell over.

  And then he did when the window he had just opened came slamming down, hairline cracks threading through the glass. A vase with dried flowers on the bureau shattered, chips of green glass raining over the carpet.

  Holly shrieked: “You are not the one who will make the decisions! You are not the one who will tell me what is and what is not! I will be the one that does the telling! I will do the telling and the calling and sowing…do you understand, you little fucking worm? And what I can call and what I can sow are that which you will not want to know of!”

  Richard had pulled himself up, leaning against the wall for support. “Where’s my wife? What have you done with my wife?”

  “It is not what we have done with your little wifey, but what we’ll do with her.” She began to laugh and the tray of food he had brought went sailing through the air and slammed into the wall, tea and eggs and cereal running down the paneling in a wet and globby mess. Richard could not say he saw her throw it. It may have thrown itself. “Now bring me some food, the food I like. I want meat, Richard. Not cooked or smoked, but raw and juicy and well-marbled. Do not drain the blood from it. I wish to taste the saltiness of the meat and sip the red juices. Do you understand me? Do you understand what our babies need?”

  Richard stumbled to the door, whatever strength he’d found evaporated now like a puddle. “Please—”

  “Shut up! Do not crawl and cower, you make me fucking ill!” Holly said. “And Richard? Know this and know this well. No more defiance or what you dream of will be given flesh and what coils in your lap will call you by name.” She cackled then, the sound of glass crunched underfoot and knife blades drawn across rusty iron. “Don’t piss us off, Richard.”

  7

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” Richard said a few days later.

  Maitland sipped his beer. “Buddy, you lost that years ago.”

  “I’m serious, Mike. I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  Maitland saw that he was and choked off any smart-ass comments he was thinking of making. Richard looked like hell. He was losing weight, dark crescents set beneath each eye. His hands were shaking and there was a look about him that was, well, frightening. Like an accident victim about to go into shock.

  “Tell me,” Maitland said.

  Richard just looked at him and maybe through him at something on the other side that was scaring the shit out of him. “It’s Holly. It’s trouble with Holly.”

  “Not the baby—”

  Richard shook his head, pulling off his beer. “Not in the way you’d think. I’d even welcome something like that. At least, at least it would be normal.”

  “Maybe you better just tell me.”

  They’d been friends for years. They’d bowled in the same league, played slow-pitch together. Drank a lot of beer and had a lot of talks. Richard had been the best man at Maitland’s second wedding, even though that had only lasted a few months like most of his relationships. Richard couldn’t think of anyone in the world he trusted as much as Maitland, yet the idea of saying any of this, of actually putting it into words, was almost more than he could take.

  “C’mon, Richard. You can tell me anything.”

  “Can I?”

  “Yes.” He meant it.

  “Okay…okay, here goes. Holly’s been, well, not herself lately. And I don’t mean she’s been moody or even a little bitchy like pregnant women get, I mean she’s been someone else entirely. In fact, I think she’s possessed.”

  Maitland sat there, waiting for the inevitable punch line. “You mean…what? By like a demon or a spirit or something?”

  “Yes. Or something.”

  “C’mon, Richard, this isn’t funny.”

  “No, it sure as hell isn’t.”

  So he let it all fly. He opened his mouth and he couldn’t seem to clamp it shut once the words and madness started to pour out like floodwaters overflowing a levee. He nearly drowned Maitland before he was done. But he got it out. Holly’s other personality, her demands for raw meat and blood, the apparent instances of telekinesis and possibly even telepathy, the idea that their baby had divided like an amoeba. Every weird and unlikely and downright impossible thing he’d witnessed in the past three or four weeks.

  “I bought her this fetal Doppler, Mike. It’s one of those things you can listen to the baby’s heartbeat with…only I think she’s using it for something else.”

  Maitland finished his beer. Even so, his throat was dry. “Like what…what else could she use it for?”

  Richard grinned over his stein of beer. “She…she listens to what the babies are saying. I heard her the other night. She was talking to someone in there. I stood outside the door, listening, but it was all muffled. I couldn’t hear, so I…I cracked the door a bit and she had that Doppler probe on her belly and she was sitting there, Mike, sitting on the bed…her eyes all silver and gleaming, this terrible grin on her face. She was nodding and nodding, saying shit like, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I can hear you, my angels, I can hear what my babies say. There will come a time and a place, yes, and then we’ll have what was promised. Oh yes, my angels, we will have the blood and the meat of all the sons and the daughters, all those little bones will be ours to covet…we will not be denied our birthright, we will not be denied soft pink throats…’ That’s what she was saying, Mike. That’s what I heard her say like, like she was just repeating what was being told to her.

  “I…I was scared, Mike. I’ve never been so completely scared in my life. And that voice she was speaking with, it wasn’t her voice…it was an old voice, raw and grating like that of some hag.” Richard pulled down his beer, studied the emptiness of his mug like maybe he was looking into himself. “Then…Holly fell silent and she turned and looked
at me…and those eyes, Jesus, Mike, I’ve never seen eyes like that before. So empty, so dead, so soulless. Puppet eyes. And she said, ‘Oh yes, yes, my babies, you’re right, the little worm is listening to us, snooping on us. You’ll not bear witness against us, Richard, because no one would ever believe you. The time is coming and soon when those of true faith will be called upon.’”

  “That’s enough, Richard,” Maitland said. He looked angry. He looked like he wanted nothing better than to slap Richard right across the face and maybe keep slapping him. “I’ve heard enough. Now, I want you to take a breather. I want you to sit there and think about what you just told me and then I want you tell me if this is the truth. Because if you’re messing with me, I’m going to come right over that table and kick your ass so hard your mama’s gonna roll over in her grave and say ouch. And if you’re telling the truth…then, well, you’re scaring the living shit right out of me.”

  It didn’t take Richard long. “I’m telling the truth.”

  Maitland just nodded. He motioned the waitress over and ordered two more beers and two shots of Jack Daniel’s. When they came, Richard and he drank in silence.

  “All right,” Maitland said. “I don’t know what to tell you. How about her doctor? That might be a place to start.”

  “She refuses to see her doctor, to see any doctor. She doesn’t even want any more ultrasounds.”

  “Okay, there is one thing you could do. But it’s kind of ugly.”

  “What?”

  “Commit her. Have a psych come in and see here. He sees any of what you’ve been seeing, he’ll draw up the papers and all you’ll have to do is sign them.”

  Richard shook his head. “Won’t do any good. Around other people she’s just Holly. I’m the one who’d be committed.”

  “What about medical care?”

  “She has a midwife. Mrs. Crouch.”

  Richard explained that he had only heard the name a few days before himself. Apparently, this mysterious Mrs. Crouch only came by whenever he was out. “Holly said…the other Holly said that Mrs. Crouch takes care of her and I can go back to work, I’m not needed or wanted. She’s also the one, Holly claims, that brought her that book on witches.”

  Maitland just nodded. “I don’t know what in the hell to even tell you. I wish there was something I could do.”

  “There is.”

  Richard said he was going back to the office tomorrow. That Holly would be alone and that was he was betting this Mrs. Crouch would show when he was gone.

  “And you want me to be there when she does?”

  “No, I want you to be parked down the street. I want you to get her license number, something. I want you to find out who this woman is. Please, Mike, I need you to do this. You follow people for a living. It’s what you do.”

  “C’mon, quit the cloak and dagger, I’m just an insurance investigator, I’m not a cop.”

  “No, but you know how to get the dirt on people, don’t you? And plenty of your friends are cops.”

  Maitland shrugged. “I guess I could happen to be in the neighborhood.”

  Richard smiled.

  8

  Richard left before Holly was up the next day.

  He didn’t have the courage to go up and see her when he got home from his meeting with Maitland, but he had a real nasty feeling that she knew all about it. It seemed there was very little she didn’t know about. So he stayed downstairs where he’d pretty much been living anyway. Holly, the real Holly, had not been back in days now. It was just that hag living up in their bedroom, plotting with what was growing in her belly that Richard was certain was not even human.

  When he was safely ensconced in his office, he got on the Internet and researched the Essex Witch. There was no shortage of information. The Essex Witch, real name Alizon Clove, was hanged in the English county of Essex for the crime of witchcraft in 1583. She was supposedly responsible for the hexing murders of a dozen people in and around a place called the Gray Hop Forest. According to her own confession, given apparently without undue coercion, she claimed that she had sold her soul to a pagan devil or familiar spirit named Old Jack Hobb on her thirteenth birthday, been “nigh compeled to,” as had all the women in her family going back to “antient times.” In exchange, she was taught the “olde ways” and the “proven pathe,” given the power of “blight and pox” with which she could kill or cripple any that she chose.

  Alizon Clove was nearly eighty when she was arrested and brought to trial. She had a dire history behind her of witching and was greatly feared in the Gray Hop Forest region. What brought it all to a head was the accusation of fourteen-year-old Jane Penden, the daughter of a local merchant, that Alizon Clove had “bewitched and enticed” her, offering her great rewards “of the fleshe and the soul” if she were to give herself willingly and bodily during the Sabbat to the devil Old Jack Hobb. Alizon Clove told the girl that she would carry Hobb’s children, which would be “of greate and peculiar likenesse to its father” and then, upon its birth, hand the children over to the old witch. Whereupon, she would be granted “any and all favors due unto her.” Jane Penden had been chosen for this because she was a virgin and pure of heart and unblemished of soul.

  According to court transcripts:

  The said examinate Jane Penden sayth, that nigh two years ago, the old woman of the Gray Hop wood, (called Alizon Clove, alias Widow Crouch) did sundry times advise the examinate to give herself bodily to a devil here known as Old Jack Hobb so that he would have knowledge of her and seek coitus wherein she would bear his seed. Hence and beforehand, sayth Alizon Clove, a familiar or imp would appear to her of the name Pigwicken; and that she, this examinate would let him suck at some part of her; and she might have and do what she would. And so not long after these perswasions, to this examinate there appeared unto her a thing like unto a pygmy hog or hideous hobgoblin: speaking unto her, this examinate, and desiring her to give him her soule, and he would give her power to do any thing she would: whereupon this examinate being therewithall inticed, the said Pigwicken did with his mouth (this examinate sayth) sucke at her breast, a little below her paps; the imp knowing hunger of blood and milke; said breast which place did remaine blew halfe a yeare next after: which said Pigwicken hence did appeare to this examinate regularly and of at night in preparedness for said intercourse of the devil Jack Hobb.

  This scant evidence was enough to lead to the arrest of Alizon Clove and her imprisonment in the local gaol. When her hut was searched, the magistrates discovered a number of “claye and haire dolls” with which it was claimed that she had not only witched the locals, but brought about disease and death. There were further accusations concerning grave robbery and ghoulism, divination and child murder. Interestingly enough, the courts were at a loss as to what to do with Alizon Clove. Showing uncharacteristic leniency and insight, she was neither tortured nor sentenced to death. The evidence of the witch dolls in her hut were incontrovertible, given the laws of the time. But other than that, there was only local gossip and rumor and the word of Jane Penden. The “murders” were actually suicides, each of the victims having hanged themselves. Some twelve such suicides in a matter of months would seem statistically unusual, but the courts did not think even these constituted due cause to execute the old woman. Given time and public pressure, Clove would have certainly gone to the gallows, but fate interceded.

  Alizon Clove freely confessed.

  Her confession ran some eighty pages and was recorded by court officials. According to what Richard found on the Internet, the witch’s confession was quite lively and damning. She admitted to hexing all twelve of the suicides, forcing them to take their own lives by application of the “wicked eye” and the “counting noose.” She also admitted to robbing graves for the raw materials of her craft, to extorting local farmers with sorcery, to calling up the spirits of the dead and certain “discarnate soulls” to do her bidding. She said that Old Jack Hobb was a forest devil that had been known to her family “
since olden tymes.” She admitted practicing the black mass, ritual sacrifice, and of holding the Witches’ Sabbat on nights of the new moon. What she would not do is implicate any of her fellow witches, name her familiars, or confirm any of what Jane Penden had testified to. But other than that, she spoke at great length of her guilt and seemed to the court to be “neare anxious” to go to the gallows.

  And in 1584 she did just that.

  And so ended the legend and times of Alizon Clove.

  Richard spent nearly three hours reading through court documents and summaries that had been uploaded to the Web. Interesting stuff. But it didn’t give him any answers, not really. What could something over 400 years old have to do with Holly today? And that was all in England, not here in America.

  Of course, as far as he was concerned, the most damning bit of evidence was Alizon Clove herself. She was also known as “Widow Crouch,” “Dark Alizon,” and “Missy Crouch” to her witch brethren. This Jane Penden confirmed.

  Missy Crouch, witch.

  Mrs. Crouch, midwife.

  Then he knew.

  9

  When he saw it, he nearly screamed.

  It was that bad.

  Just the sight of the thing generated such feelings of despair and horror that he was nearly overwhelmed. He stood there in the doorway to that awful dank catacomb he had once shared with his wife and swooned. Leaned there in the doorway, gasping, trying to find his wind and wondering, dear Christ, wondering what the appearance of this thing could possibly mean.

  Holly was awake, except, of course, it was not Holly.

  It was never Holly anymore. Just that demented hag with the blackening teeth and the dripping quicksilver eyes that would burn a hole right through you if you stared into them long enough. No, not Holly. Something slimy and invertebrate, a lolling white obscenity like a human slug, horridly round and glistening like it was sweating petroleum jelly.