The Witch's Key (29 page)

“What? Witchit dot com?”

She laughed lightly, and with a wave of the witch’s
key, my body skidded across the clearing to the other side of the
fire pit. “Yes, specifically the Chatter Shack forum. You know of
it?”

“I do,” I said, or thought it. “Though I don’t know
how that information made it to the site.”

She waved the witch’s key again and I sailed over
rocks and matted brush as if floating on a carpet of air. Suddenly
it became apparent that she was working me toward the train tracks.
“Maybe the witch that helped you through the rite of passage has
given you away,” she suggested.

“No!” I said, closing my eyes and forcing the image
of Lilith from my mind so that Gypsy would not know of her. “That’s
impossible.”

She closed the gap between us, stepping close enough
that I might smell the ping of diesel on her clothing. I imagined
she had worked the railroad yards and jungle camps since the first
supposed suicide nearly two weeks ago.

“Then another witch has betrayed you,” she said. She
ran her dirty fingers down my face, scratching my cheek with her
nails until it bled. “I heard of your return to prime and then of
your return to the rails.”

“So then you set out to kill me. Is that it?”

The heels of my shoes skipped across a bed of broken
glass, propelling me another ten feet toward the tracks.

“I had to finish what I started, Anthony. Your father
interrupted me in that shed before I could complete the
reversal.”

“Reversal? That’s quite the euphemism for
murder.”

“You were never supposed to happen. A witch’s
first-born must be a girl if she is to become a witch. Your birth
threatened an entire lineage of future witches. That’s something
your father would have never understood.”

“So, Jersey Jake is my real father?”

“He was.”

“No, he is. That is to say, he’s still alive.”

She glided over the broken glass and rusted tin cans,
stopping once again within a breath’s reach of me. “J.P. is
alive?”

“He is.”

A short distance away, the train that had passed the
Jefferson Street Bridge began bearing down on us. The ground
rumbled low closest to the tracks, but a wide bend in the rails
prevented the locomotive’s powerful headlamp from reaching us
yet.

“Jake’s the one who’s gone back to riding freights,”
I told her, “not me. You’ve been out here killing innocent men,
thinking I might be one among them, when all along, J.P. has been
using my name as an alias.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and she cast her hand
in a broad sweep, sending me flying twenty feet to the base of the
tracks. “You are the one I’ve been looking for. Tonight I shall
eliminate the spoiler once and for all.”

Gypsy pointed the witch’s key at me again, and with a
flick of her wrist, sent me toppling onto the ties between the
rails. I strained to move, but my body remained paralyzed. I knew
then the horror that the others must have felt in their last
moments, wondering how this beguiling young beauty could so coldly
execute the work of the devil. As I lay in frozen confine, she came
to me and cast her vengeful eye upon me. I don’t know what I
expected—certainly not an apology. But any twisted frame of
rationalization might have gone a long way in explaining the need
for such drastic measures. And though it would not have taken much,
she offered nothing, instead, the very key that held my fate became
the ultimate insult. She held it up for inspection one last time
before flipping it like a coin onto the ground only inches from my
feet. I felt its magnetic influence on my body intensify
immediately and realized that the key, not Gypsy, held absolute
control over my powers of movement.

Amber light from the approaching train soon spilled
before me, sweeping onto the tracks like desert winds over rumbling
sands. I watched helplessly as Gypsy turned and walk away, her
blackened clothes fading into moonlit shadows. A faint dizziness
overcame me. The surreal sequence of events seemed to spin in
hollow loops like recurring nightmares in which nothing else
mattered but the ticking seconds and the expectation of sudden
death. I tried calling to her, to plea my case and appeal for
mercy, realizing that in the imminence of final judgment, the will
to survive was as primal as life itself. But the link between us,
connecting my thoughts with hers, had broken, severed when she
discarded the witch’s key at my feet.

The train neared, growing ever larger in my sights
through a narrowing field of tunnel vision perverted by the yellow
tint of moonlight on steel. The clanging of metal on metal, the
clatter of the wheels on hardened tracks and the steady drone of a
heavy diesel, all told me that the train was not trying to stop. I
closed my eyes and waited, tensing to the rise in ground vibrations
that teased my nerves and tickled my gut. But the end came not as I
expected. I experienced no sudden jolt or bruising pain. Instead, I
felt the frantic hands of Carlos and Spinelli clamping down on my
arms and pulling me off the tracks just seconds before a CSX
northbound plowed through in a storm of wind and stirring dust.
Freed of the key’s paralyzing grip, I scrambled to my feet.
Instincts drove me straight toward Gypsy’s trail, but Carlos pulled
me back by the collar.

“Wait!” he said, shouting over the noise from the
passing train. “Look.” He pointed into the clearing just beyond the
fire pit. “It’s Lilith!”

I visored my brow with my hand to shadow the
moonlight from my eyes. As Carlos, Spinelli and I observed, Lilith
and Gypsy squared off in the ultimate battle of the witches. The
two appeared armed with a witch’s key, both trained on the other in
dueling fashion. I could feel the static in the air from the
vibrant fields of energy exchanged between them. They hummed like
swarming bees and glowed like phosphorus, cycling in alternating
pulses as if absorbing and emitting shared resources. It seemed
obvious that each were captured in the other’s invisible grip.
First Lilith’s advance pushed Gypsy back to the outer ring of the
fire pit. Then Gypsy regrouped, forcing Lilith’s loss of ground
back to where she started. I edged forward, wanting to intervene,
but Carlos tugged on my collar again and stopped me.

On the southbound track, another train approached,
its headlamps shining on the clearing like a distant spotlight. I
could see then the stark evidence of the key’s violent effects,
which crushed the surrounding vegetation with blasts of circular
forces. All the while, Lilith and Gypsy’s tug-of-war continued;
only now the women’s bodies were flying about like stringed
puppets.

I clenched my fists when Lilith finally pinned Gypsy
to a tree from ten paces out, but then gasped when Gypsy dropped
Lilith over the still hot cinders of the fire. As Lilith clambered
from the hot ashes, Gypsy took advantage and moved in with the
power of the witch’s key in hand. She looked upon Lilith with that
same vengeful eye that she had cast upon me, and I knew then what I
needed to do.

I grabbed Carlos’ gun from his holster and shoved him
aside. As he fell back, I took aim and squeezed off a round that
should have dropped Gypsy like a stone. But the incredible forces
of the witch’s key deflected the bullet, sending it ricocheting
into the woods in a scream. I leveled my aim again, when I heard
Lilith holler for me to stop.

The distraction, though brief, proved fatal for
Gypsy. Seeing me alive enraged her beyond reason. She turned
abruptly, unleashing the powers of the witch’s key on me once more.
The force drove me backward, slamming me into a tree. It pinned me
there, my toes barely touching the ground, my arms locked by my
side with Carlos’s gun still clutched in my impotent hand. Even as
I struggled to catch my breath, I could see Lilith in the
background, moving in on Gypsy. Spinelli joined her from behind,
returning from a sprint down by the tracks. He handed something to
her, but for the life of me I could not figure out what it was. I
looked to Carlos. I knew he pulled his backup piece and had already
drawn a bead down on Gypsy, but the shot I expected never came.

The headlamps from the southbound no longer lit the
clearing as before. The train now rolled parallel on approach,
wheels rumbling like stampeding horses. Gypsy stopped at arm’s
reach before me. Her eyes looked black and hollow, her expression
cold and stark. With indifference to the others, she pulled a blade
from beneath her coat and wound her hand back for the strike. I
tried to speak, to scream, to utter any verbal indication to
convince Carlos that now was the time to shoot, yet his hesitation
seemed to suggest that the witch’s key had somehow rendered him
incapable of action, as well. Gypsy smiled at me wickedly. Veins in
the side of her neck throbbed as if they might explode. Finally, my
voice returned and I saved my last words for her.

“You are forgiven,” I said.

The gesture crushed her smile. Her brows crossed
tightly in a stitched link. She spat at my feet and snorted fire.
“I don’t want your forgiveness,” she answered. “I want your
blood.”

To that I laughed. “Then piss off, you old hag.”

She drew back the blade, and in that instant a
pulsating force of energy hit us both, dropping me to the ground
and lifting her off her feet. It swept her across the clearing, her
body spinning and tumbling until it came to rest on the tracks just
as the southbound train tore through. I heard the impact even above
the rush of noise that came with the train.

Carlos and Spinelli heard it, too. The look on their
faces confirmed it. And I know Lilith heard it. She stood with bent
knees, still pointing the witch’s key at the spot where Gypsy
landed before the train hit her. I could see then what Spinelli had
handed her moments earlier. It was the key that Gypsy had dropped
at my feet when she deposited me on the tracks. Lilith had doubled
the two of them up to form a sort of super key.

Once the train passed, we all went down to the tracks
to see what was left of Gypsy. We saw her black coat, shredded to
bits along the first forty feet of tracks. Carlos found one of her
shoes and Spinelli found the blade that almost killed me. The only
obvious thing missing was Gypsy. As far down the tracks as we could
see, there seemed no sign of matriarch witch.

“It hit her,” said Carlos. “I saw the train hit
her.”

Spinelli agreed, commenting on the point of impact in
relation to the headlamp. “This far below it,” he said, spreading
his hands out as wide as he could.

I shook my head and dismissed it. “Don’t worry. We’ll
find her.” I turned to Lilith. “You all right? It looked like she
might have hurt you.”

She scoffed. “Please, that old nanny? She didn’t have
a chance.”

“Well, it’s lucky you were here,” said Carlos.
“That’s all I know.”

“Yes. Why are you here?” I asked.

She raised her shoulders and dropped them
nonchalantly. “Me? Just passing through.”

“Sure.”

“Honest.”

I pointed my finger at her and shook it. “No. You’ve
got a lot more explaining to do than that. And sooner or
later….”

“Later,” said Spinelli. “In the meantime, I recommend
that she leave here. I just called in the accident.” He did the
little quote thing with his fingers while pronouncing ‘accident’.
“In about ten minutes this place will be crawling with cops, EMTs
and railroad officials. It might get a little tough explaining
Lilith’s presence.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Lilith, please go straight home
and wait for me. I don’t know how long this will take, but I—”

“Yeah, sure, sure.” She waved me off and then blew me
a kiss. “Send the little woman home. Let the men have all the
fun.”

“Lilith….”

She turned and walked off into the woods, fading with
the shadows until all I could see was a ghost of her silhouette. I
watched it until I was sure it was only an imprint in my mind
before turning to Carlos and Spinelli again.

“So, tell me.” This I asked of Spinelli more than
Carlos. I suppose because I thought he would know the real answer.
“What made you come back after leaving here with Smiley?”

“We realized he wasn’t our man.”

“But he said he was a killer.”

“He is. Remember the story he told us back in the
alley about that hobo who got pitched from a moving train?”

“Yes.”

“He’s the guy that pitched him.”

“What?”

Carlos said, “Yeah, he thought you were out here
tonight because you knew he did it and you were going to take him
in.”

“You’re kidding?”

Spinelli again. “We’re not. The guy wouldn’t shut up
about it. He said he thought you were the smartest damn cop alive
for figuring it out.”

I laughed. “Well, I hope you didn’t set him straight
about that.”

“Oh, we did,” said Carlos. “We let him know that it
was all just a coincidence.”

“Nice. Thank you.”

Spinelli said, “Anyway, we cuffed him to a tree by
the car and came back to warn you.”

“A good thing you did,” I said, “or I would have been
toast.”

“More like jam,” Carlos joked. He pointed to the
tracks. “Or maybe you prefer chum.”

I patted him on the back. “If you say so, old
chum.”

I got back to the apartment sometime between
one-thirty and two. Lilith stayed up for me, which was not
surprising since she often stayed up until the wee hours of the
morning anyway. I found her in her nightshirt, sitting at the
kitchen table, sipping tea by candlelight. Vanilla incense
permeated the room, and soft music hung in the air like a velvet
backdrop. I took my coat off and joined her. She said nothing, but
slid a cup my way and filled it with tea from a ewer. The moment
seemed almost surreal. A sense of déjà vu told me what to expect
next. I would open my mouth to ask her a question, but then she
would answer before the words came out. So, instead, I turned the
tables and opened the floor.