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  SHADOWS

  By

  Jonathan Nasaw

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Part One - All the Wild Witches

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  Part Two - Echoes in the Forest

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  Part Three - Your Book of Shadows

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  Part Four - For Every Evil

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  EPILOGUE

  SHADOW

  JONATHAN NASAW

  A DUTTON BOOK

  DUTTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Dutton, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First Printing, October, 1997

  Copyright © Jonathan Nasaw, 1997

  All rights reserved

  The epigraph on page 3 reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster from THE

  COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, Volume 1: THE POEMS, Revised and edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989).

  ISBN 0-525-94065-0 (acid-free paper)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Bembo

  Designed by Jesse Cohen

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  "Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"

  Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

  —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  PROLOGUE

  ^ »

  Santa Luz

  U.S. Virgin Islands

  October 29, 1993

  The weed woman's grandson reported seeing the devil hiking down the trail from the Greathouse shortly before dawn. When she asked what he looked like, this devil, the boy replied that he was a white man, dressed in black, with eyes like dragon's blood.

  He was not being fanciful here—dragon's blood is the island name for the Cordyline terminalis, a crimson-leaved plant used by the natives of Santa Luz to mark village boundaries. But inasmuch as the boy had spent the rest of the morning gathering a dizzying assortment of psychotropic substances for his grandmother's potions and amulets—psilocybin mushrooms, milktoads, devil's wort, that sort of thing—the weed woman was inclined to discount his story. After all, blood red eyes were not an uncommon sight along that particular rain forest track.

  A few hours later, however, the old Rastaman who lived by the side of the trail in a hut built from a Volkswagen shipping crate came rattling down from the hills in his goat cart, shouting that the Greathouse was on fire. But the dundo track—the sunless rain forest road—was narrow and winding, and by the time the first fire truck arrived at the scene the entire compound had been engulfed in a firestorm so intense that the little yellow sugar birds were dropping from the trees within a radius of a quarter mile, unmarked but stone dead from lack of oxygen.

  As for the inhabitants of the Greathouse itself, it did not appear that any living creature could have survived such an inferno. Upon this, everyone agreed—the local firefighters, the police, eventually the coroner. from St. Thomas, the FBI arson investigators from Puerto Rico, and the Santa Luz stringer for the Virgin Islands Sentinel.

  Everyone, that is, except for the weed woman, who was heard to remark to the Rastaman that she would believe Mr. Whistler was dead when she heard it from his own lips, and not before; and the Rastaman himself, who slept on the beach that night and returned to his hut the following morning to find evidence of an overnight visitor. A loaf of titi bread and a wax paper packet of homemade Jamaican-style jerky had disappeared, along with the stub end of a cigar-shaped spliff the Rastaman vaguely remembered having left in the conch shell ashtray.

  Now it could have been the devil that had stopped by his hut, supped so meanly, and stolen a roach, the Rastaman reasoned—but if so, then the devil had fallen on hard times and was welcome to what he could carry.

  As was James Whistler. But then, as far as the Rastaman was concerned there was very little difference between Whistler and the devil. Except of course that Whistler had more money.

  PART 1

  All the

  Wild Witches

  All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,

  For all their broom-sticks and their tears,

  Their angry tears, are gone.

  —W. B. YEATS

  CHAPTER 1

  « ^ »

  For a woman about to take poison, Selene Weiss was magnificently calm. She fed the cat—which was only a cat—and took a cold shower out behind the A-frame, under the redwoods, hoping to get a jump on the fever that was reported to be one of the side effects of the Fair Lady, also known as belladonna, deadly nightshade, death's herb, devil's cherry, and witch's berry.

  Or, as the Auld Buik, the Herbalis Malificarum put it, somewhat pessimistically, "Burning with fever, nane to relieve her." The other side effects weren't much more encouraging:

  Dry as a bone, mad as a hatter,

  Blind as a bat, crimson as madder.

  Burning with fever, nane to relieve her,

  The witch maun fly, ithers will die.

  What it really comes down to is, am I a witch or am I an ither? Selene mused as she toweled off on the redwood deck. Of course there was no way of knowing for certain, short of the Fair Lady's test. But that was a gamble she was ready to take. Selene had been practicing the Wiccan religion for thirty years—twenty-five as high priestess—but it was time to acknowledge to herself that for the past year or so she'd only been going through the motions. Or worse: during the previous Sabbat Selene had been unable to get through the backward Lord's Prayer without giggling. Muck mudgnik eyth—thy kingdom come—got to her first, though she'd said it a thousand times before. And when she tried to start again, she couldn't even get past Nemma, livee morf.

  That was six weeks ago. Tonight's Sabbat was Hallowmas, when the veil between this world and the next was thinnest, and yet here was the high priestess of the coven no longer sure there e
ven was a veil—or a next world, for that matter. The only thing she was sure about was that she couldn't lead a Sabbat in this condition—she loved those most noble ladies too much for that.

  So what do you do when you can't go back, and you can't stand still? she asked herself as she stepped into her hiking boots. She already knew the answer: Either you dance in place like a fool for the rest of your life, or you go on.

  Onward it was. And upward: naked down to her unlaced boots, Selene clomped up the path behind the A-frame that led to the herb garden on the southern slope of the hill. She unlatched the chicken wire gate in the pungent and forbidding rosemary hedge and stepped from dappled shade into the thin yellow light of the clearing. The sun felt voluptuously warm on her bare skin after the morning chill under the redwoods.

  Four feet high by now, the bushy, hairy-stemmed nightshade had fruited only recently. The new berries were purple, almost black; Selene noticed that the deer that regularly jumped the hedge to browse the garden hadn't nibbled at them, famished though they must have been after the dry spring and parched summer.

  Selene asked ritual permission of Hecate, under whose dominion the Fair Lady lay, before testing each berry by rolling it lightly between her fingertips. The first five that were firm and meaty to the touch, as the Herbalis suggested, with their skin unbroken, she plucked from their five-lobed calyx.

  Cupping her harvest carefully in her hands, Selene hurried back down the hill, toed off her boots, backed through the kitchen door, set the berries down on the cutting board next to the stove, and turned on the burner under the small slab of Crisco she had pre-viously melted and left to reharden in a Corning Ware saucepan—the three-hundred-year-old Herbalis explicitly forbade metal pots. It also called for rendered fat of virgin lamb rather than Crisco, but even if she'd been willing to slaughter and render a lamb, Selene couldn't see any way of assuring its chastity, short of raising it herself.

  While waiting for the shortening to melt again to the point of fragrance, Selene quartered the berries with a silver knife. After donning her consecrated black leather apron to protect her bare torso from spatter burns, she dropped the pieces into the saucepan, stirring gently clockwise with a wooden spoon until the melting Crisco was briefly marbled with red streaks. Then, before the shortening could liquefy completely she scooped as much of the streaky concentrate as she could into a miniature apothecary jar, which she corked and left to cool for an hour and twelve minutes—the twentieth part of a day glass, as the Herbalis reckoned it. The remaining bits of berry she mashed into the leftover Crisco, which had melted to a clear liquid; when this had turned pink she poured three teaspoons into a miniature pastry shell, then washed up scrupulously before climbing the ladder to the sleeping loft at the apex of the A-frame.

  Selene had intended to spend the next hour meditating, but instead, lying naked on her back on the waterbed, feet together, right hand covering her privates, left hand over her heart, she found herself thinking about a tidbit she'd come across in her research: according to Plutarch, Marc Antony's army had been involved in one of the few mass belladonna poisonings in recorded history. He that had eaten of the nightshade lost all memory and knowledge and would occupy himself in turning every stone as if it were an entirely engrossing pursuit.

  But it was Plutarch's understated description of the aftermath that sent shivers up Selene's spine: The entire camp soon resembled an overturned anthill of unhappy men, bending to the ground and digging up stones as though their very lives depended upon the successful completion of the task.

  If it came to that, Selene decided, she'd try to make her way up to the rocky vegetable patch on the south slope—it could use a good obsessive picking over.

  * * *

  After an hour, the ointment in the tiny apothecary jar had turned to pink cold cream. Seated cross-legged before her black damask-covered wicker altar, Selene uncorked the jar and dipped her pinky in, grimly applying a dab to the pentacle points of her body: wrists, ankles, the hollow of the throat.

  But as always, the Herbalis required one final touch—the witch's daub, it was called—to the genital region. The more benign ointments could be applied to the clitoris or labia, sometimes with interesting effect, but the indications for the Fair Lady called only for the weeist drap 'tween portals.

  'Tween portals—a portion of the anatomy the books never named. But Jamey Whistler had had a lover's name for it once, a quarter of a century ago; lying back, thinking of him as she leaned back to apply the witch's daub, Selene felt her grimness ebbing.

  "It's known as the tizzent, m'dear," Whistler had explained patiently in the Oxford accent he'd been perfecting since his expulsion from that university. " 'Tisn't pussy, 'tisn't asshole." This had been 1967. Oh, but he'd been a striking man, his eyes wide-set and amused, the color of solder, and his upper lip long and sardonic, more sensual than severe.

  He'd been employing the tizzent more or less as a chin rest at the time—Selene smiled, remembering, as she worked the cork back into the apothecary jar.

  Another hour had passed. The middle-aged witch wandered out onto the deck naked and stoned, her miniature belladonna tart in hand. The trees had a bluish cast in the late morning air, and she could sense a connection, a pleasant fellow feeling with the Steller's jays swooping busily among the redwoods. That would be an effect of the scopolamine, she decided—scopolamine, sometimes used as a truth serum, was one of the active elements in belladonna. Another was atropine, and considerably less benign: the ancients had named it for Atropos, the Fate whose task it was to cut the thread of life after her sister Fates had spun it out.

  But so far the high was strictly a sewing-circle buzz: apparently the ointment alone wasn't going to do the trick. Selene looked down at the custardy pink filling in the fluted pastry shell; she was about to try a nibble when the calm of the redwood grove was broken by a shrill scream and a percussive beating of angry wings: the jays down the hill had taken indignantly to the air to report an intruder. As Selene put down the tart and reached for one of the towels drying across the top rail of the deck, she heard a familiar voice from around the side of the house, scolding the jays right back.

  "Oh, don't get your tailfeathers in an uproar." A slender girl of seventeen or so stuck her head around the corner. She wore a T-shirt and cutoffs; her hair was corkscrewed into dark honey blond honky dreads on top, and cut close around the sides and back. "Selene? You back here?"

  "Martha, my dear! You have always—"

  "Been your inspiration," said Martha Herrick pleasantly. "Yeah, I know." In her arms were three fat bundles wrapped in blue paper—Selene's laundry back from the cleaners. Martha balanced them with her chin as she climbed the last few redwood steps to the deck. "If I had a dime for every time Daddy Don quoted that, I'd be shopping at Nordy's instead of Penney's. And you know what he told me the other day? The Martha in the song was one of the Beatles' dogs. Where do you want these?"

  "Over on the bench will be fine." Selene finished wrapping the towel around her. "How's Don doing?"

  "Sleeping when I left." Sleep was as close to peace as Daddy Don ever got anymore—the tumor wrapping itself around the old biker's cervical spine like a boa constrictor around a tree made sure of that. "The pain was getting pretty bad, so the doctor let us double up on the morphine drip. It helped a lot, but god, he gets so dopey. Last night he thought I was my mother."

  "That's a compliment." Moll Herrick had been a renowned beauty in her day—might still be, for all any of them knew.

  "Do I look that much like her?" Martha, who'd been raised by Moll's sister, Connie, and her husband, Daddy Don, hadn't seen her mother since infancy.

  "Oh, there's a resemblance, all right. Especially around the mouth." Selene reached out and brushed a coil of hair away from Martha's face. Ah, but the eyes, she thought affectionately. It's your father looking out from those gray eyes.

  Martha glanced over at the tart resting on the railing. "I looked up belladonna in Cunningham's Magical
Herbs. He says the shit'll kill you dead."

  Selene dismissed the notion with a flap of her wrist. "Your godmother's a tough old witch, dearie. It'll take more than a little nightshade to finish me off."

  "Fly or die. That's a bitch of a final exam, Selene."

  "I know. I've about decided they ought to have one in every profession. You know, inject the doctors with a fatal disease. If they can diagnose and treat it in time, they pass."

  "And lawyers who flunk the bar get life without parole," suggested Martha. "They have something like that for mountain guides. The last part of the test, you have to hang from your own belay."

  "Well there you go."

  Martha peered a little closer at her godmother. "Wait a minute—are you stoned, Selene? Did you already take it?"

  Selene laughed gently. "Just the daubs. Why, is there a problem?"

  "Sort of." Martha turned away shyly. "I was thinking about it all last night, and I'd kind of decided I wanted to take my initiation at the Sabbat tonight."

  "But darling, that's wonderful!" Selene crossed the deck, holding her arms out to her goddaughter for an embrace while trying to keep the towel in place with her elbows. "Where's the problem?"

  "What if you don't make it to the Sabbat?" Martha muttered into Selene's wild graying hair.

  "My poor baby." Selene patted the girl's shoulder, then stepped back, tugging at her slipping towel, hiking it up under her armpits again and tightening the wrap. "You know I wouldn't miss your initiation for the world."

  Martha brightened, made a feint toward Selene's towel. "Then what are you fussing with this stupid thing for? Like we're not all gonna be bare-ass at the Sabbat anyway."

  Selene clamped her elbows against her sides. "Watch it, petunia. You're not a witch yet."

  But Martha had thought of another problem. "I almost forgot—what about your Tale? Are you too stoned for that now?"