Nocturnes

I was nearly at the doorway when I spoke for the last time.

I looked up at the dæmons standing before me and said simply: “But I’m not dead.”

And at that moment, I felt my right hand start to raise my gun to my temple and saw, in my head, a small, thin man with blood on his shoulder walking to the stairs. Beside me, I heard my dead wife’s voice beside my ear. There was no breath, only sound.

“Let me help you with that,” she whispered. Her hand closed upon mine, pressing my finger against the trigger as she lifted the gun to my skull.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The sound of the furnace filled my head. Its heat rose through the floor and melted the soles of my shoes. Already, I could smell my hair burning.

“Too late,” she replied.

The gun exploded and the world was shrouded in crimson as I prepared to descend.

The Underbury Witches

Steam and fog swirled together upon the station platform, turning men and women to gray phantoms and creating traps for the unwary out of carelessly positioned cases and chests. The night was growing colder, and a faint sheen of frost could already be detected upon the roof of the ticket office. Through the steamed-up glass of the waiting room figures could faintly be discerned, huddling close to the noisy radiators that reeked of oil and smoldering dust. Some drank tea from cheap cups lined with spidery cracks, sipping urgently as though apprehensive that the crockery might yet disintegrate in their hands and shower them with tepid liquid. Tired children cried in the arms of weary parents. A retired major tried to engage two soldiers in conversation, but the men, new conscripts already fearful of the trenches, were in no mood to talk.

The station master’s whistle sounded defiantly in the gloom, his lamp swinging gently high above his head, and the train slowly began to move away, leaving only two other men standing upon the suddenly deserted platform. Had there been anyone to see or to care, it would have become quickly apparent that the new arrivals did not belong in Underbury. They carried heavy bags and were dressed in city clothes. One, the larger and elder of the two, wore a bowler hat, and a muffler around his mouth and chin. His brown coat was slightly frayed at the sleeves, and his shoes were built for comfort and long life, with few nods to fashion or aesthetics.

His companion was almost as tall as he, but slighter and better dressed. His coat was short and black, and he wore no hat, exposing a mass of dark hair that was a good deal longer than would ordinarily have been considered acceptable in his chosen profession. His eyes were very blue, and he might almost have been called handsome were it not for a curious aspect to his mouth, which curled down slightly at the edges and gave him an air of perpetual disapproval.

“No welcoming committee, then, sir,” said the older man. His name was Arthur Stokes, and he was proud to call himself a sergeant of detectives in what he did not doubt was the greatest police force in the world.

“The locals never like it when they’re forced to accept help from London,” said the other policeman. His name was Burke, and he enjoyed the rank of inspector in Scotland Yard, if enjoyed was indeed the right word. Judging by his expression at the moment in question, endured might have been a more appropriate term. “The arrival of two of us is unlikely to make them doubly grateful.”

They made their way through the station and onto the road beyond, where a man stood waiting beside a battered black car.

“You’ll be the gentlemen from London,” he said.

“We are,” said Burke. “And you would be?”

“My name’s Croft. The constable sent me to collect you. He’s busy at the moment. Local newspapermen. We’ve had some of the London boys calling on us as well.”

Burke looked puzzled. “He was told not to make any comment until we arrived,” he said.

Croft reached out to take their bags.

“And how’s he supposed to do that, then, if he can’t talk to them first to tell them that he can’t make no comment?” he asked.

He winked at Burke. Sergeant Stokes had never seen anyone wink at the inspector before, and he wasn’t convinced that Croft was the ideal candidate to be the first.

“Fair point, I suppose, sir,” said Sergeant Stokes hurriedly, then added, for form’s sake: “Don’t you think?”

Burke gave his sergeant a look that suggested he thought a great many things, of which few were complimentary toward the present company.

“Whose side are you on, Sergeant?”

“The side of law and order, sir,” Burke replied happily. “The side of law and order.”

The witch panic that gripped Europe for over three hundred years, begi

The most comprehensive guide to the identification, interrogation, and, finally, immolation of witches was the Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer of Witches,” coauthored by the German Dominican Heinrich Kramer and Father James Sprenger, the dean of theology at the University of Cologne. Kramer and Sprenger pinpointed the seed of witchcraft in the very nature of the female species. Women were spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally weak, and motivated primarily by carnal lust. These fundamental flaws found their most potent expression in witchery.

The coming of the Reformation did little to undo such beliefs. If anything, any existing tolerance for the so-called “wise women” of village life was to be stamped out along with any other evidence of old pagan ways, leading Martin Luther himself to declare that they should all be burned as witches.

It would be 1736 before the crime of witchcraft would officially be removed from the books of law in England, almost 120 years after the capture, trial, and execution of the three women known as the Underbury Witches.

Croft drove the two policemen to the heart of the village of Underbury, where they checked into a pair of small but warm rooms at the back of the Vintage I

“We haven’t done much with him yet, on account of you gentlemen coming down from London,” he explained. “Lucky it’s been cold, or else he’d be on the turn more than he is already.”

The body revealed to them was that of a man in his early forties, with the bulk of one who labored in the fields during the day, at the di