Richard Godwin
Witch
The witch put a spider in his heart.
That was before they froze him in the lab.
Salvation they called it.
The story went like this.
Every night she put his dinner down in front of him. Blood and the stale smell of almonds.
He looked at her:
‘Thanks-’, searching for the word, vomit rising in his mouth like a lump of meat, ‘mother’, something he said but did not own, like a thorn in his soup, like an ill-fitting shoe.
He used to repeat it sometimes like an incantation:
‘Mother’.
Its spell was dead.
He walked aimlessly for miles. Miles to nowhere. And one day he found her out. Found her in her blood poison.
He overheard her talking:
‘I bore him for the flesh’, she said.
She was speaking to the old man with the eyes she knew so well.
‘Yes, and needed him for it. His blood, his -sap’, she paused, chewing on the word like a cud, ‘yes, sap, I needed, for - the work.’
‘We are nearly there’, he said, metal knife clicking against plate, the smack of pleased palate.
He could see him reaching out his withered hand, the skin bloodless, the yellow fingernails like talons.
‘A good cut of meat, excellent, indeed, if I may say so.’
He wiped his chin, the napkin red and viscous.
‘The meat you give me is always superb, and soft’, he said.
He could see her fat fingers moving on the threshold of the table.
‘Witch’, he said, ‘witch’, and muttered himself away from there.
Sometimes in the night he would hear her cackling. It sounded like a cracked spine.
She had made him feel sick the first time she suckled him.
‘Here’, she said, ‘suck here’.
The nipple hard and rubbery in his mouth, tasting of rusting metal.
So many nights he felt the spiders creep.
Creep around the walls of his room, over his face and dance across his eyelids. He would count eight. Once, he caught one, popping its bloated belly hard in his clenched fist, and stared at the poison and juice running between his fingers.
‘I’ll make her eat this’, he said.
He killed them all.
Still, she sat there in the dark, rocking in the chair, her shawl black across her arm.
When he said goodnight, her response was always the same:
‘Every boy loves his mother’.
But he had found her out.
Hers was the enterprise of sorcery, and she knew so many spells without speaking.
Burying his wife had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.
Her tombstone always brought her words back to him:
‘She’s tried to destroy me from day one’.
From the moment she’d met his wife, she had catalogued her failings, wasting no opportunity to undermine her.
The illness had been sudden and unexpected: on holiday she had fallen ill and died. He promised her he would look after their son.
‘And keep him away from her’, she said.
Strangely, the old woman doted on the young boy, crooning to him and rocking him in his crib with a regular and unusual motion.
The priest would visit once a week and chatter to her downstairs.
He would hear snippets of their conversation.
‘The Bible says it all’, she said.
‘Yes, the passages are clear.’
The crisp flick of a page being turned.
‘And the Old Testament speaks clearly of the lies to come, the impostor’s spirit tricking the faithful into believing.’
‘Yes’, he said, ‘there are many views, the exegesis is the key.’
The priest would avert his eyes in his presence. He would finger and play with the symbol he hung about his neck.
Once, returning to the house, he caught them both looking at his sleeping son.
‘What are you doing?’
‘A grandmother can look at her grandson’, she said,
‘Why him?’
He pointed at the priest.
‘Religious men like children.’
They scuttled out of there.
When he announced he was moving out, her annoyance was tangible.
‘You’re not taking my grandson away from me’, she said. The finger pointing at him: ‘You are mine and he is mine, all that blood and labour earned me this.’
‘He is my son, and I will do with him what I want.’
‘You are not in charge’, she said.
He stared at the finger wagging in the air, the mouth moving.
Inside, between her thin lips, it was as black as blood. He let her talk.
But he had planned his escape.
Sometimes the old woman would arrive, the face wizened, gaunt, hollow eyes, the hands covered in cuts and nicks, plasters and bandages, and they would hide in the shadows muttering. She never spoke to him, only stared and watched.
The priest continued his visits, sometimes together with the old man.
‘He’s made this ring for him’, she said, ‘here’, squeezing the metal onto the boy’s finger.
He started to scream.
‘It’s too tight. Stop.’
‘I’ll do as I like’, she said.
When she had left the room, he removed the ring, examining the markings on its edge. They were familiar to him. He threw it out of the window into the street.
By now he had found the flat.
When she was out he hid his bags behind the builder’s materials next to the scaffolding in the road outside.
It was dark when she returned.
‘Have you eaten?’, she said.
‘No.’
She carried her bags slowly, secretively into the kitchen and closed the door. She always closed the door when she cooked. He waited in the silence, broken only by the hiss and bubble of her cooking. Something pungent, thick, was being prepared.
He could hear the sound of shells cracking, of something hard being sliced. A shriek. The smell of urine. And other noises.
When he went in, she had already served it.
‘I’ve made something for the boy’, she said.
‘I’ve fed him.’
The stew was glutinous, almost solid.
The spoon slurped as he dipped it in, noticing the filaments that dangled from it as he pulled it away, the food stretching and adhering to the metal in globules.
‘What’s the matter? Not good enough for you?’
‘What am I eating?’, he said.
She looked at him, saying nothing.
Her face impassive as a mask.
Then they heard the crash.
Outside a woman was lying trapped under some poles which had collapsed.
A man had stopped to help.
‘The whole thing just fell’, he said, ‘I saw it.’
Inside she sat in her rocking chair still rocking.
He hadn’t eaten his food.
After she’d gone to bed, he took his son and put him in the car. He collected his bags from behind the mess left by the scaffolding.
As he drove away, a curtain twitched at a window. A plump hand held its hem.
Some days passed in which he enjoyed the illusion of freedom. His son was happy and the flat satisfied their needs.
Then, he saw him, the old man on the corner of the street. He knew it was him. The next morning he found himself lying on something cold and hard.
Surgical equipment surrounded him. He felt metal against his hand. The lights overhead were harshly bright.
A masked face looked down.
Something sharp was pressed into him.
He could hear voices.
‘Ethylene glycol.’
A floating freezing sensation passed across him.
‘Check the blood circulation.’
He could sense other people in the room but he could not see them.
Time passed, the clock hand dragging slow poison in his mind, the hours ticking away into oblivion.
An insect crawled its way to eternity across the white wall, telling its life story. Stasis reigned and in the ice he heard them talk. Always the masks and peering eyes.
‘He is in suspension.’
‘Yes, and our work is nearly complete.’
‘And after his son has served his purpose?’
‘We show him salvation.’
Then, the darkness. Black but suddenly warm. He felt the room close in on him. How long? Heat. He could feel his fingers move. He arose from the metal bed as he heard the clunking noise and power was resumed in the lab.
The lights flickered on spectrally, illuminating the equipment. He felt sick and frozen and grabbed a coat from the cupboard.
Pacing to and fro, he rubbed the life back into his body, the blood back into his veins.
He noticed the day, how much time had passed. His son.
Then, the door opening as he hid.
Their voices.
‘The power cut could have jeopardised our work.’
‘Yes, but it is nearly finished Father.’
He watched the deformed movements of the old man and the priest as they entered.
Their voices were far off and evanescent.
Coming from behind them he smashed the metal waste bin down onto the priest’s skull, shedding bone and sinew that stuck and stretched away to nothing. On the floor he stamped on his throat.
A gurgling noise was all that could be heard as the old man scuttled away. Over by the door he caught him. A few blows were enough to puncture his head to a burst melon. He left him twitching on the floor.
Then, away, stealing clothes from the corridor and outside to a cab which he paid at his flat, forcing a window at the back.
His son was gone.
For strength he ate. He washed and went to the house.
There, in the street, he could smell them, moving like spiders in the dark. At the door the old woman met him.
‘Come to-’, she said, stopped in mid-sentence by the arc of the razor he pulled from his pocket, slicing neatly through the air then throat with a whistling sound that ended in tearing.
As she fell she dropped her knife.
‘Lost for words, bitch?’, he said, leaving her on her knees, hands around her own throat as if wrestling with herself, the gash thick as a piece of sliced meat.
Then, upstairs before he thought it. And the room, locked, the symbol hung upon the door. He pulled it off, casting it downstairs and kicked the lock in.
There she stood by the rocking cradle still rocking, leaning with blade over his son, repeating the words over and over.
As she heard him at the door she turned, eyes dead as stones.
‘Get out. You cannot stop me.’
‘I can and I will.’
‘He is mine, you do not interfere, boy.’
‘Try doing it like this, witch’, he said.
He met the pointed finger, plump, hung in mid-air pointing, always pointing, with the arc of blade and swept it away, clean of hand and with it the ring falling to the floor with a thud.
He could see his son behind her, lying there, not moving. His bare chest marked and ready for the incisions.
‘You are too late’, she said.
‘You thought you’d cut his heart out, did you?’
‘You understand nothing.’
‘I understand’, he said.
One push was enough to send her through the arched windows, her bloodied hand reaching pointlessly into space, surprise etched on her face. Splinters of glass flew away, embedding themselves into her as she fell, the yell hollow and shrill.
There below the ground smashed her, where she lay when the police arrived.
He turned and lifted his son from the cradle.
The boy stirred and stretched his arms.
Examining him, he saw that she had only marked him. No incision had been made.
He held him to his chest until they took him away. He had started to feel cold again.
In the police car their questions were too far away to be answered.
‘Were you involved in an incident earlier at a cryonics lab?’
He stared blankly at them.
One word kept repeating itself from their mouths: ‘matricide’.
He wondered what it meant.
And in his cell, he moved beyond time, for the clock was not real. He had moved beyond time before when frozen and could wait.