Witch-Hunt
Witches are where you find them. But where is that?
(Page 4 of 4)
By the time we got where we thought Edge Falls ought to be, it was quite dark. We stopped to ask a man who ran a shop that sold everything from pickled pigs’ feet to toilet floats where the falls were. He pointed and said about seven miles farther on we’d see a sign where we should turn. We followed a paved road, carefully checking every possible turn, until about ten miles later our road joined with a major highway. We stopped at a filling station where the owner told us the falls were about seven miles back the way we’d come. Satan couldn’t have planned it better. We went back and forth across that ten mile stretch of road, flashing our lights around every turnoff, forging down gravel roads then scurrying back with our heads down low hoping the rancher our noise had disturbed wouldn’t start shooting. Aggravation! Finally, back at the toilet float shop, we noticed, just a few yards off the road, a huge hand-lettered sign, partially obscured by the darkness, reading Edge Falls. An arrow pointed down a dirt road that ran perpendicular to the paved road we’d been on. Dolan and I looked at one another, shook our heads, and started on.
It was already well past ten. The ceremony wasn’t supposed to start until midnight but we wanted to get there enough ahead of them to get the car out of the way and find a safe hiding place for ourselves. While we hadn’t been especially worried about time all the while we were fruitlessly searching up and down that road, now that we were on the right track, it seemed like we should get there as soon as possible. I pushed the car to 65, supersonic speed for the bumpy country road we were on, and found myself sliding to a dusty halt just two inches shy of a stone wall beside a narrow cattle guard.
After that I slowed way down, but the near accident had broken the confident veneer Dolan and I were affecting for one another’s benefit. Sudden noises from the dark woods made us catch our breath. An odd reflection in the headlights made us stop to warily investigate; we found nothing and that became ominous. But sure enough, seven or eight miles into the woods, we found another large sign, lettered by the same hand as the first one, which announced a left turn for Edge Falls and a dollar charge. We stopped by the turnoff which was nothing more, at least as far as we could tell in the dark, than a short access road leading to a small cabin now lit with a yellow bulb above a plank door. Somewhere in the woods beyond the cabin we could hear the sound of rushing water. We had arrived. Now what?
I don’t know which one of us thought of the plan or why it seemed so logical at the time. What we did was drive back about twenty yards where there was another, smaller dirt road, back onto it, cut the motor and the lights, and wait for something to happen. We were literal-minded enough to assume the witches would not fly in but have to come down the same road we had. At that point we would get out of the car and secretly follow them on foot.
Dolan and I sat for a while staring into the darkness. It was so dark I couldn’t see the hood ornament on the car. It was so quiet that we spoke in whispers as we passed the thermos back and forth. We could not see one another in the darkness.
“You ever get tricked into going on a snipe hunt?” I asked him.
“Oh yeah.”
We told snipe hunt stories for a while, then the conversation sagged, dwindled, ended. It was dark everywhere, as if black velvet had been cast across the world. The sudden, though quiet, forest sounds, the hoots and rustlings and soft whistles, were the kind of noises movie plainsmen can always identify as animal or enemy. We could not tell that difference. Was that an armadillo poking among the underbrush? Or was it something else, someone, creeping toward us through the darkness? The beasts of the forest night we could contend with. We sat in silent fear of our fellow man.
And that, I realized, was just what a witch would have us do. Witches were real, all right. They hid in the puniest, most fearful regions of the soul. But expecting to find witches at Edge Falls, real witches, made as much sense as chasing after snipe with a gunny sack. I started the car and drove down to the cabin on the way to the falls.
We stopped by a tall fence fifteen yards from the cabin door. A small, thick man, country as a bluetick hound, stood just inside the cabin.
“We heard there was going to be a religious service down at the falls,” Dolan shouted at him. “Seen anybody?”
“Naw, I ain’t,” he shouted back. “If I do I’m gonna run ’em off jest like the last bunch.”
“What last bunch?”
“Last Hal’ween. Two ’er three a them weirdos showed up an’ wanted to get down to the falls. I told ’em to take off them silly costumes an’ git on home. Bunch a damn fools is what they was.”
Evidently one old country codger had stopped all the minions of hell John Todd had prophesied. God works in mysterious ways.
That was in late winter 1972. I had pretty much placed the story on the back burner after the Edge Falls fiasco. The people who had told Dolan about the meeting said they had all been there, but we just couldn’t see them. Fine. It seemed to be a good time to quit for everyone concerned. But seeing The Exorcist brought the whole experience lumbering back again.
With the exception of The Sound of Music, The Exorcist is the most financially successful horror movie ever made. It is a movie with absolutely no merit except that it has seized on the one gimmick essential to successful horror films—the creation of an evil force the audience can believe is real. Many people believe the devil does, or might, exist. If he exists, why couldn’t he take possession of a little girl? And if he took possession of her, why not ... of you? From that point special effects and makeup do the rest. But tastes in evil are fickle as tastes in clothes. Remember that King Kong, which is a bundle of laughs today, was truly frightening to the audiences of its time. The Exorcist, too, will become such a joke, though a decidedly less enjoyable one.
But that will be then, and now is now. As I drove back from seeing the movie, looking for a gas station that had something to sell, I heard on the radio that a man in Mississippi, following what he took to be the instructions of a voice from God, murdered six members of his family. It occurred to me then that things might have gone from frantic to hysterical in San Antonio as well.
I was both disappointed and relieved to discover, as I mentioned in the beginning, that the situation at Castle Hills was more relaxed. Book-burnings, though they were hardly to the point of being regarded as skeletons in the closet, were at least not in the plans for the immediate future. No more talk about the young anti-Christ—suspicion now had it that the anti-Christ is Henry Kissinger. I asked Malcolm about the temple the Satanists were supposed to build. “Well, John Todd called me from California and asked if I’d seen the Unitarian church being built here.” And that was when he was warned about saying things he wasn’t sure of. (There is, as a matter of fact, no Unitarian church being built in San Antonio.) The church had been had, but belief was not shaken. The older, placid minister I mentioned at the beginning told me he had seen men possessed crawl on the floor and howl like a dog. This minister had a practical, down-home air about him, the kind of man who would know both a good cold remedy and how to wire a house. Yet this otherwise down-to-earth fellow found the devil’s hand in behavior I would tend to pass off as the result of strong drink, an extra Y chromosome, or too much television. It reflected a deeper division than a mere difference of opinion. We did not take to one another.
And witches turned out to be in very short supply. Looking for witches is like looking for murderers or saints—the real ones won’t come forward. It may be there is a genuine, hard-working witch-craft cult in San Antonio, picking up new members, meeting regularly, casting spells, the whole bit. But I doubt it. The few I ran across are pretty much the kind of people witches have always been from the very beginning right up until last year—the lonely, the lost, the disoriented, gathering a follower or a friend here and losing him there. Let them go their way. They would be completely negligible if their mere presence didn’t inspire book-burnings on church parking lots.
My two separate witchhunts had fizzled and the church that inspired them was taking a lower profile on the subject. So what is to be made of all this? I offer only this moral: in Ceylon, where firewalking is a semi-religious act thought possible only after long meditation and abstinence from meat and alcohol, a group of non-believers claimed it was merely a layer of ash over the coals that made firewalking possible. They ate meat, drank, did not meditate. They walked through the fire unharmed. And were set upon immediately by the religious for desecrating the shrine.
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