Ekron

The Gipsy Witch - 2

The next day, rumors of a witch camping near the village spread. Reasonable people felt fear and a council was called for that evening to evaluate and determine a possible course of action. But innocence can transmute into stupidity when circumstances are appropriate. White magic can be dangerous if you start thinking that all magic is white. That was the case of Illona, a young lady suffering for an unrequited love. She played with crystals, charged them with moon light and lit special candles to avoid diseases in her house. She had hair from her loved one, but her love charms weren't working at all.

Illona appeared in Csilla's tent carrying a lock of hair in a folded hanky and some money to trade. She entered the tent and a scent she could not identify almost made her sick. It was the stench of coagulated human blood, and it came from various places inside the tent. Illona sat in front of Csilla.

The dark witch asked, "Did you come here for fortune or charm?"

"Charm."

Csilla put away the Tarot deck she had in her hands and continued.

"Do you have a personal item from the subject?"

Illona handed her the hanky. The moment Csilla touched it, she imagined six different ways in which she could murder the subject, without even invoking Baal.

"I know we would be happy together, but he just doesn't see me that way," added Illona.

Csilla looked at her with a mix of scorn and disappointment, handed her the hanky back and said, "I don't do love charms, my apologies."

"But the sign says Charm Caster."

"Another type of charms, girl."

"But I need him..."

"Go away."

"Please, I beg you..."

And Csilla, still drunk from the night before, expelled a mass of liquid fog from her mouth, that flew to Illona's neck and started choking her. The dark witch laughed as the girl suffocated to death inside her tent.

When Czesar went to offer her some stew, Csilla was eating the girl's legs and said, "No thanks, I'm already eating."

Czesar threw the dish to the ground and took Illona's arms to take her out of the tent, while Csilla clinched to her legs to keep eating them.

"This has to stop, Mami, you had become a demon, a vampire!"

Czesar let go the girl and showed her mother a crucifix.

"I order you demon! Let go of my mother in the name of Jesus!"

Csilla laughed at him with bloody teeth and said, "Boy, is not the demon possessing me... it's me, possessing the demon!"

Czesar got inside the tent and put the crucifix on his mother's forehead. Csilla stood up and slapped the boy's face with such power that threw him unconscious three yards outside the tent. Her nails cut his face from under his left eye to his neck, leaving three gashes that took months to heal, and left scars that he would carry his whole life. Years later, he told his daughter Agatha that a bear had left him those scars.

As well as there are different levels of evil, there are also different types of it. The miserable, fearful, and insecure type of evil that drive parents to physically abuse their children was incompatible with the glorious megalomania that sickened Csilla's spirit, it was below her in all ways and senses. She authentically felt bad after damaging Czesar, a sense of self-repugnancy invaded her mind, and she sat back in her tent, to drown it in absinthe.

A pair of farmers passed through the dirt road, they saw Czesar lying wounded on the wet grass, and half of Illona's death body coming from the tent. They rushed their steps to give advice to the village.

Csilla drank half a bottle of absinthe and a great idea came to her mind, as clouds began to darken in the sky. She took a half body mirror and propped it vertical on an inner side of the tent. She sat in front of the mirror and put a glass between them. In the glass, she mixed formaldehyde, laudanum, and some of her own blood, forming a reddish liquid. Then she invoked Djaall as many times before.

When her transformation was complete, her body was furry and her eyes were bright red and compound, like those of a meat fly; she looked at herself in the mirror and proceeded to take her eyes off their sockets with her nails. She threw the red fly eyes into the glass and her body came back to human form. The eyes, nevertheless, remained red and those of a fly. She rubbed her fingernails, and a red flame came out of the glass, the formaldehyde mix seemed to boil, and a red vapor came out of it. Then she fainted and fell to a side, eyeless; the red flame extinguished, the liquid in the glass became transparent and the red eyes seemed to look at her from the bottom of the cup.

Sun shone again as the clouds dissipated. Czesar woke up with his face sored, took the rest of Illona's corpse out of the tent and then he saw what his mother had done. He cried, somehow blaming himself for that aberration. He knew a respectable amount of dark magic procedures, by observing and assisting his mother through most of his short life but was reluctant to put them into practice for religious reasons. Forced to put that aside, he took the red eyes from the glass, they had acquired a rubbery texture. He dried them and cut some irregularities, like those closer to the optic nerve, where flesh was ripped up and looked "un-aesthetic", making them as round as he could. He made them copper shells, with wire rings to the sides suitable to connect them with jewelry. He glued them into the shells, leaving the front half of the eye visible outside of each shell.

Then he took his mother's rosary and added the red eyes with their shells as new beads in it. He put the resulting rosary in Csilla's right hand and black crystal balls in her empty eye sockets. Then he knelt to pray by her side until she woke up.

It was already dusk when Csilla regained consciousness. As she had vision, for a moment she thought that her extreme ritual had been just a dream. She tried to stand up, let go the rosary, and her vision went away leaving her in darkness. She emitted a little cry, more of surprise than of fear, so Czesar rolled the rosary around her right hand and her vision came back.

"As long as you hold the rosary, you'll be able to see. Like clairvoyance, but right now and in front of your eyes."

She looked at her image in the mirror and saw her new crystal black eyes. She was amazed, she knew that such procedure was possible, but everyone that had ever tried to perform it, had failed, mostly because they attempted to do it without help or with poor one; putting together the jewelry without vision or necessary skills, led them to errors that made the experiment a disaster, always leading to complete vision loss. Then she looked at the rosary and saw the copper shells with the eyes of Baal; she understood in that moment, the huge amount of power that she had gained, when her original intention was to punish herself and get rid on the demon.

Csilla kissed Czesar on the forehead and apologized for hurting him. Then they heard the noise of a crowd approaching them. They went outside the tent and saw three dozen villagers walking across the dirt road and heading to their location. They were armed with scythes, pitchforks, stakes, and fire.

They yelled, "Death to the witch," as they advanced.