Witch-Hunt
Witches are where you find them. But where is that?
(Page 3 of 4)
“Uhhh, yes.” I was by cultural tradition at least.
“Praise the Lord for that!” he said. “You know you’re going to be in danger.”
“Well ... yes ... thank you.” I held out my hand to the youth minister.
“Praise the Lord,” she said looking at me expectantly.
“Yes . . . thank you.” I held out my hand to the young woman who ran the day care center.
“Praise the Lord,” she snapped.
“Yes . . . thank you. Thank you all.”
Thank you?
I walked down that long, dark corridor to my car. Unless San Antonio concealed a whole legion of witches, what had really happened was this: a single itinerant, John Todd, had brought about one of America’s rare, frightening book-burnings. Right then he looked more powerful than any witch.
I had been glad to hear Malcolm mention Dolan since he had written the first stories I’d read about this strange phenomenon. He turned out to be someone I liked immediately—tall, fresh-faced, serious, very much aware of himself in his role as reporter.
We had hamburgers in a restaurant along the river. Dolan had earlier asked me, “Do you believe in all this?” When he saw me hem and haw, not knowing where he stood, he volunteered, “Because I don’t believe a word of it.” It made me trust him as a sensible man.
But all writers, and especially reporters, are men of imagination; by the time Dolan and I were half way through our hamburgers his imagination, earlier left behind while we poo pooed the whole thing, had caught up with him. He began telling me about the string of witches he’d interviewed in San Antonio.
They were pathetic, isolated, lonely little people who usually had followings of a friend or two or three. They glorified their meager activities with occult mumbo-jumbo and, far from presenting a united front against Jesus’ people, they each accused the other witches of straying from the true path.
Nevertheless, not quite everything could be so summarily dismissed. The only would-be witch capable of holding together a coven also owned a building near the river. On Halloween night Dolan had seen lights all along the fifth floor of that building. “Now what does that mean?” he asked me and went on without waiting for a reply. “It may mean nothing, may be just coincidence, but we do know this: the elevator in that building doesn’t stop on the fifth floor.” Like a good reporter he had gone the next day and discovered this fact while posing as a potential cheap apartment renter, a role newsmen easily and frequently assume.
There had been other strong occurrences. Dolan’s it-may-mean-nothings became less forceful while his we-do-know-thises became sudden, direct, and confident. But we do know this—the Brazilian voodoo doctor was not in his hotel room that night. And we do know this—that strange girl who said she was a witch didn’t come home ’til way after midnight. “But . . .” he said at last, “I still think it’s just a lot of baloney. There are just a lot of strange things connected with it.”
So. It appeared there were real wackos running around loose in San Antonio—witches, bookburners, and even reporters chasing after them with pencils ready. The high school girl had said her friends were drinking blood. It sounded like something anyone might tell an elderly woman minister who kept dropping around. But on the other hand maybe they did. Maybe it was exactly the young girl whose family was most influenced by the church who would become interested in Satanism, just as a child told never to open a particular door finds opening that door ever more appealing. Maybe the voodoo priest did do something strange that night. Maybe the lights in that fifth floor really were silently witnessing an exercise of black arts. It was at that point that Dolan told me one of the girls he had been talking to might tell him where and when the next great witches’ celebration would be held.
“You’ve got to find out,” I said.
“I will. I will.” No reporter speaking to another reporter could have said less.
And he did find out.
As I drove toward Boerne where I was to meet Dolan the sky changed from grey to greyer and the temperature dropped enough for the cold to stop being a curiosity and start jabbing like something real. It was the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and a dark, dismal one to spend waiting for witches.
The meeting—or ritual or black mass or celebration or sacrifice or whatever else it might be—was supposed to happen at a place called Edge Falls, a genuine waterfall a ways east of Boerne which, when it wasn’t the setting for practicing black arts, doubled as a swimming hole. Neither Dolan nor I had ever been there, but he had some vague directions. The place was supposedly surrounded by woods, so our plan was to watch the whole thing concealed behind trees, then rush back home to write our stories. Provided we were able to rush back home. Dolan had mumbled a little something about bringing a gun just in case.
It was only slightly more than a week since I’d made the trip to see Malcolm. In the meantime I’d played the tapes he’d given me. Todd’s tapes, which he called “Lucifer’s Legions” and “From the Pits of Hell,” were as preposterous as their titles. Judging by the tapes, Todd knows nothing about witchcraft that couldn’t be learned for the price of a cheap paperback. He had evidently discovered how to make a little knowledge go a long way.
But the tape by the woman who had been delivered radiated real conviction. I met her more than a year later and once again everything pointed to her genuine belief in the visions she has seen and still sees and in the voices she frequently hears; at the same time nothing but her belief says they really are there. She’s a slight, birdlike woman in her middle thirties, born a Jew and still active in the synagogue although she has by now been baptized in the Pentecostal church. She lives according to her modest means with her husband and two children in a small bungalow in a new development in northern San Antonio. All her life she has heard voices talking to her and felt from time to time hands on her, and has felt she knew what people were going to say before they said it, as well as having ESP and out-of-body experiences. It would be possible to spend quite a bit of time speculating about all this; but what ran through my mind as I drove toward Boerne was her account of her deliverance from the devil in the very office where I had spoken with Malcolm. She said the angel Michael had torn Lucifer from her after a long bout. He’d had a lizard body, green scales, forked tail, claws. Then she had seen Christ on the cross and behind him the buildings of a great city and she had the feeling of all the centuries past and present joined together behind him. Then she saw black and white clouds battling one another and when they had cleared she saw Christ again, his head bowed, wearing a grey robe, grey it was later revealed to her because our sins muddied his raiments. Heady thoughts for a drive to Boerne.
I met Dolan in the parking lot of the Antlers restaurant right at dusk. We shoved another quick hamburger down our throats and started toward Edge Falls. I had a singular impression of greyness as we drove deep into the hill country, not only from the sky, but also from the road, the leafless trees, the rocky stubble-covered ground, even from the wary deer we could occasionally see nosing among grey rocks. The sky seemed heavy, close to the earth, and we plowed through the lingering dusk and then through the early night without saying much to one another. Apparently Dolan had decided against a gun in favor of a thermos of coffee, a sensible decision all in all and one I approved of. But what if we did get into a tight spot?
My Library
