Grace: Hedge Witch (written June 26, 2023) — fiction
another name slithered in beneath the surface when I wrote this: i hadn't noticed until now
below: Bratislava, Slovakia 2022
To bind the demon that had been haunting her for the past year, Grace only needed three more ingredients: the throat of a circumcised but unbaptized Christian, the head of a goat that has lain with a woman, and a dispassionate male sex partner for the ritual’s climax.
The goat had been the easiest part. Her assistants had carefully packaged the head and put it in her freezer.
The sex partner was more of a challenge. She usually liked to recruit overeager incel types, preferably virgins with severe acne and belly fat. They were always so grateful to her. How pathetically they squealed out with pleasure! The semen they released inside her was a powerful elixir that she and her assistants stockpiled inside carefully labeled mason jars, organized neatly by Zodiac on the top shelf of her bedroom mini-freezer. She could use these samples in a variety of spells whenever the stars aligned. There was powerful energy to be harnessed when she was having sex with an ugly person she hated, but the coming ritual required that she direct her hatred elsewhere.
So she wouldn’t be able to rely on any of those desperate and hideous boys from school this time. She would hate them too much; she would lose control of her emotions and willpower, and loss of control was deadly in magic. Besides, her coming task called for a real wizard, not a frenzied fourteen-year-old virgin thrusting fanatically for thirty seconds. True practitioners were the only masters of their own will. She needed a man who could manipulate his lust with mechanical and scientific precision in the service of a spell. A real sorcerer would be able to totally control his passion and keep his mind wholly focused on the complex mechanics of magical ritual even while fornicating with her in the middle of the most stimulating orgy. He couldn’t, however, simply be inert. On the contrary, he needed to be able to work both her body and his own into the kind of unbridled ecstasy that would have any lesser soul screaming out uncontrollably, and he needed to pass through this wave of sexual hysteria while correctly reciting the evocation. So long as she was also able to maintain total control of her own willpower, their ecstasy for each other would combine with their hatred for the demon to yield an irresistible emotional force. This was the weapon that she would fire upon the demon who was still lurking somewhere in the astral light.
But where was she going to find a man like that? Her history teacher came to mind. He was the only real sorcerer she knew.
Her acolyte Dimitry might be able to pull off the third ingredient. The blood on his hands had already proven his hysterical loyalty. He would kidnap that stupid little Christian boy. Then again, she could just do it the old-fashioned way, the way the witches sometimes did it in the movies.
****
Larry was fourteen years old and soon to be baptized in the swimming pool adjacent to the high school auditorium where his megachurch held services. His parents were staunch Baptists who believed that baptism should come later in life when a person is more able to truly understand what it means to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and Larry was ready.
The love he felt for Jesus often overwhelmed him. He could not hold back his tears during worship. While his parents and siblings were singing along to the Christian rock music booming from the stage, Larry entered into frantic convulsions. He would reach out desperately for the ceiling, tears streaming down his face, and he would cry out the rockified hymns until the thudding of the Holy Spirit against his chest became so intense that he passed out and had to be carried unconscious out of the auditorium past the annoyed faces of parents judging his parents.
His mom was embarrassed by him. Larry had already been suspended from school for screeching at a Muslim boy during math class, a story his mother knew well.
He and little Mohammad had been close playmates for months. His mom was happy about their friendship. “This is why I picked a school that was at least a little bit diverse, but not too diverse,” she thought to herself. “It’s good for Larry to socialize, a little bit, with religions and races different from his own.” Then one day at lunch Mohammad told Larry that he wasn’t a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Larry was stunned for the next hour. He couldn’t even speak. The teachers were concerned enough to send him to the nurse. That very morning, the whole universe had seemed so much brighter. The future after “death” was an eternal afterlife in Heaven where he, Mohammad, and all their other friends would sing worship songs to the Lord for all of eternity. Now he realized that Mohammad was going to suffer indescribable agony for trillions of years. Probably Mohammad was just the one of several friends whom demons would torture even after the universe ended. Larry loved them so deeply and couldn’t imagine eternity in Heaven without them. Mohammad was standing at the edge of a cliff about to collapse into the Lake of Fire.
Eventually Larry went back to class. There was Mohammad sitting casually at his desk, even rolling his eyes at Larry’s entrance, and meanwhile his soul was in danger of literal hellfire. Love for Mohammad surged through his chest and nothing else in the world mattered, only saving his best friend’s soul.
“Please!” Larry screamed at him. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled to him. “You have to listen to me! Please! You’re going to go to Hell! You’re going to go to Hell! Please listen to me! Please!” Every time he said the word “Hell,” his crying escalated into a gurgly blubbering. Snot poured from his nose.
“Get this fucking Islamophobe away from me!” Mohammad shouted.
“Racist!” shouted a girl with a Pride flag on her t-shirt. “He’s a racist! He’s a white supremacist!”
Other students began to stand up and add commentary. “What the fuck!” “Oh my god!” “You’re such a fucking freak Larry!” “What the fuck is wrong with you Larry!”
Larry was sobbing on the carpet. He realized then that all the people around him were probably going to burn forever. He was petrified by his inability to save them. All his love was just then only for Mohammad, from whom he could not bear the idea of being separated for so many hundreds of trillions of years. He grabbed Mohammad’s ankles and drenched Mohammad’s shoes in his own tears. Mohammad stepped back, and Larry reached forward again. But his hands and arms were shaking so violently that he hardly even knew where his fingers were. He couldn’t see through the moisture in his eyes as he tried to save his beloved friend from eternal agony. Even after Mohammad had backed away several feet, Larry kept writhing and twisting around on the ground, groping at the space between them like a sad, scared, and confused little animal. Why couldn’t God save his friend too? He was ashamed of the blasphemous anger he was feeling. A teacher grabbed him and took him away.
“Don’t ever speak to me again you Islamophobic piece of shit!” Mohammad shouted after him.
I love you, Larry wanted to say, but devastation overtook him as the teachers forced him into the hallway. The harder he tried to save Mohammad’s soul, the more he would destroy their relationship here on Earth. It was too late to go back on what he had already said. He knew for sure that Mohammad was never going to hang out with him again, not to mention all the other kids who had witnessed that event. A sense of hopeless loneliness overwhelmed him and he was unable to sleep.
Larry spent the next few weeks locked up in his bedroom awake all night praying to Jesus. He often dreamed that he was screaming at Mohammad to please listen to him and be saved, and Mohammad would just look at him indifferently. Or worse, Mohammad would call him names like “racist” and “white supremacist” and “Christian nationalist.” And all the while, enormous waves of molten lava would be drawing closer and closer to Mohammad. Larry screamed and screamed and screamed until he woke up in his bed with a weary sense in his chest that he had spent the last hour shrieking for dear life, his heart thumping even harder as he realized that his dream was more like a prophecy.
How did Mohammad and the other godless kids at school not understand Christ’s love for them? How did they not know that joy in Jesus? Larry loved them all so much and he wanted them to be saved like he was. He wanted them to feel the happiness of salvation and the Holy Spirit. Jesus had died for him, had suffered for him, had forgiven him for all his sins, and who else could claim to love him like that? Didn’t Mohammad want to be loved like that? How badly he wanted them to feel that kind of unconditional love showering down upon them! He wanted them all to be joyful in Heaven together, forever singing songs to the King Jesus Christ.
When he emerged from his week of solitude, all he could talk about was how grateful he was to the Lord Jesus Christ for saving him from his sins. He had taken his salvation for granted. He hadn’t been grateful enough for everything God had done for Him. He worried He hadn’t loved God enough until just this very moment when he was finally appreciating God’s gifts to him. He deserved to go to Hell just as much as the little Muslim boy did, but Jesus had saved him. It made him feel so loved and special. His love for God seemed to dictate his every thought: Praise Him! Jesus Christ is Lord, Amen! Jesus, the King! Amen! To God be the glory! How I love the Lord’s righteousness!
He thought sorrowfully about the atheist boy from school who would never feel this kind of all-consuming joy and love for the Lord. That poor soul! Larry cried for him and prayed for him every morning and every night. On the playground, the doomed boy had demanded “proof” for God. It seemed like such a ridiculous question. What proof did anyone have of the wind? Sometimes like a summertime breeze and other times like a thunderstorm, the Holy Spirit worked real and measurable effects upon Larry’s soul and body. The atheist boy didn’t know this because he had never interacted with the Lord like Larry had. There was such a void, such a vast emptiness and meaninglessness, to that boy’s life. He prayed that Jesus would open the atheist’s heart so that God’s presence would become as undeniable a reality as the enormous snowstorm that was then burying his hometown.
The snow had finally stopped falling and he wondered how much had accumulated. What a waste for a storm like this to hit on a Friday night! He fantasized about a snow day with his playmates. And yet it also seemed like a special gift from God on the night before his baptism. The Lord knew how much Larry loved snow, after all, and there would be something so beautiful about a miracle like this.
Hoping to enjoy the beauty of the snow at night and perhaps even go for a walk in the snowy night, he stood at his bedroom window and looked down into the backyard. A cloaked figure, pitch black and fully hooded, glowed beneath him in moonlight and sparkling white snowflakes. Bright auburn hair spilled out in front of her shoulders. When she pulled her hood back to reveal her beautiful face, one he recognized as his personal choice for hottest girl in the high school, the boy felt blood building in his penis.
She smiled at him, hushed him, and beckoned for him to come outside. His parents were asleep.
****
They tied him up naked in her history teacher’s basement. They bound his hands and feet together while porn streamed ceaselessly on the big screen in front of him. Her goal was to spend several days working up his sexual energy so it would be ready for explosive release the night of the ritual.
“You were a fool for taking him that way,” Mr. Janus told her as they locked the basement door.
She shrugged indifferently. “I wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. It was worth it. You heard about how he was screaming at that Muslim kid. Larry spreads hatred and bigotry. He deserves to die.”
Mr. Janus noted how she seemed to lose control over her emotions when she got going about Larry. If she wanted any hope for success, there was no way she could use him for this ritual.
He poured them each a whiskey and joined her in the living room. They could hear the moans and screams coming from the pornos streaming endlessly downstairs. Grace chuckled as she imagined that Puritan fuck writhing around unable to touch his throbbing erection, humping hopelessly into the air. She was going to have some fun with him. She and her attendants would put on a show to enhance his torture.
“You know, I have Larry in one of my classes,” Mr. Janus said. “Well, had,” he added with a chuckle.
Grace giggled and moved closer to him on the couch. “No!” she said, smacking him jovially on the chest.
“Yes, it’s true,” Mr. Janus said.
They clinked glasses. “To the destruction of Christianity,” Grace said with playful solemnity.
“Indeed,” Mr. Janus agreed, “to the destruction of the Christ followers!”
They each took a hefty swig. Their free hands rested a few inches apart on the couch between them.
“That was the Emperor Julian’s crucial mistake,” Mr. Janus said.
Oh dear, Grace thought, suppressing an annoyed sigh. Here we go with the Julian thing. She chugged the rest of her whiskey, leaned forward, and started preparing a joint on the coffee table. She glanced around at Mr. Janus’s massive collection of occultist works. He claimed to possess the last copies of some ancient manuscripts. He said these had been passed down through his sect of sorcerers since Roman times.
“Julian wanted to stop Christianity, and he could’ve done it,” Mr. Janus said, beginning one of his standard rants. “But he went too easy on them. You can’t go easy on Christians. They are roaches.”
“Questionable,” Grace commented. “Christianity thrives on martyrs.”
Mr. Janus glanced at her. “And yet here you are about to make one.”
“You’re always saying I need to prove myself by killing one,” she said playfully. “Now I’m actually doing it. Besides, no one is going to know what happened to him.”
“Really?” Mr. Janus turned his body toward her. He couldn’t help but glance down at her cleavage. Her dress today was much more revealing than winter would ordinarily call for. “So if I understand the ritual correctly, you are going to kill him in front of ten witnesses. And you actually showed your face at his house! How can you be sure you weren’t seen?”
“My acolytes are completely loyal,” Grace said, offended by the insinuation.
“You’re going to give them the power to blackmail you,” Mr. Janus said, visibly sickened. “Your hold on the coven will be in jeopardy. The Christians will be looking for him and before you know it a witch hunter will show up. People laugh at Larry, but there’s an aura about him. And eventually Christians will always gravitate toward that kind of fanatical behavior because they’re all a bunch of psychos. If he’s missing, they won’t stop looking for him. Eventually they’ll find you and you’ll be arrested. Just hope you’re arrested by the police and not the witch hunter.”
“So you think I just shouldn’t even use him for my ritual?” she asked, starting to feel worried.
“Well you see, Daniella, that’s the most ridiculous part about it,” said Mr. Janus. “You can’t even use him for your ritual. You’re such a fool, Grace. You are such a fool.”
“What!” she exclaimed. “I have studied the spell for hours! We discussed this already. He is an uncircumcised Christian boy who has not been baptized but is about to be baptized. The energy in a sacrifice like that will be greatly appetizing to the demon. It’s basic magic.”
“The reason you can’t use him is the same reason why you have done all this so recklessly,” Mr. Janus said, exhausted by the immaturity of his pupil. “You know as well as I do that you’ll never be a true sorceress if you don’t have complete control over your emotions. You have to use emotion, but you can’t let emotion control you. It is detrimental to your magic. And you, Daniella, are being controlled by your emotions. You did not choose him because it made the most magical sense and you know that!”
He paused but Grace did not respond. He saw her arrogant smile slowly fading from her face.
“You chose him because you hate him in particular and you wanted to kill him in particular!” he accused. “You allowed your hate to control your magical practice. And now you are going to engage in a spell which will require you to completely dominate all your emotions and direct them toward precisely the end you want, and if you fail, you could become possessed or die. Yet for the sacrifice, you’ve introduced this boy that you personally hate. You think you can be dispassionate? You will not be able to control that hate. You will misfire. You will be possessed.”
Grace stood up and began pacing nervously in the room. Goddamn it, she thought. How could she be so fucking stupid not to realize this? Now what the fuck was she supposed to do? She felt especially ashamed to have committed such an intense mistake in front of her mentor. This was supposed to be the ritual that would convince him she was ready for her initiation. It would have been even more impressive to him if she could have convinced him to participate. But he had lost so much confidence in her. He was openly mocking her. She was never going to be able to enlist him for the ritual.
“You still need to kill him,” she heard Mr. Janus say from behind her.
She turned and looked at him.
“I’ll just have Dmitry do it,” she said. He’d killed a few people.
“No,” Mr. Janus said. “No you won’t. There is still a way to use his death magically. You know what.
She hesitated. “The elixir!” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” he said. “The most powerful elixir. The one you yourself so brilliantly conceptualized.”
Her pride tingled at his praise. So he still remembered the capable side to her. For her independent study with Mr. Janus on occultism, which she was proud to have listed on her official high school transcript, she had developed her own theory about the most powerful sexual elixir. She argued that the blood of a Christian man who had given into temptation, but was still struggling internally in a storm of guilt and fear, had particular value if it was collected from deep inside the throat at the exact moment of the man’s orgasm while he was having unprotected sex with the sorceress herself. Ideally the cut would be early enough that the orgasm would continue before he lost consciousness; his semen should still be pouring into the sorceress. The sorceress herself, and the fact the Christian man was willingly participating in a sex magic orgy, symbolized the forces of evil as they triumphed inside the Christian’s soul when he found himself desperate to ejaculate inside her regardless of the physical or spiritual consequences. She relished the thought of their internal suffering as they couldn’t help but question, at the moment their throats were slit, whether they were about to go to Heaven, as they’d always hoped, or to Hell, as they just then had earned by sinning with such abandon. The semen the subject spilled inside her, charged with the energy of a dying man’s most powerful doubts and fears as he realized that his last deed before Judgment had been to choose the evil he had so long condemned, was the second most powerful elixir. Mr. Janus had given her an A+ and helped her get the paper published in the esteemed journal Experimental Occult.
Now was her chance to actually collect it.
“You know how much that shit would sell for?” Mr. Janus asked. “You could be rich.”
He was testing her, she knew, because a true sorceress would never use magic like that. She couldn’t bear him thinking so lowly of her. “I would never kill someone for love of money,” she said adamantly. “And I would never use magic for personal gain. My magic has only the purest motives.”
She sat back down on the couch. This time a whole cushion was between them.
“I believe that, you know,” he said.
She turned to him. “Really?”
“Really,” he said with a nod. “The goat head is proof of that.”
She cringed internally with disgust and guilt. But she forced herself to keep a smile on her face.
“You were able to overcome so much revulsion and disgust,” he said. “And you were able to do it while executing a very complex ritual. Do you know how much that semen is worth? I hope you saved it.”
Another test, she thought, and this one was even worse because it was based on a lie. She shuddered at what he might think once he caught her and knew the truth. “I would never sell that semen,” she said. “I collected it solely for use in my rituals.”
“I’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars for it,” he said without hesitating.
She sat there staring at him for a moment. He seemed so serious. Maybe it was okay to make some money off her elixirs as long as the buyers had pure motives behind their purchases. But she couldn’t sell it to him even if she wanted to.
“Why do you want it?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. “You’ll just have to trust me,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”
“It’s not for sale,” she said. It doesn’t even exist.
“Forty thousand dollars,” he said, surprising her when he lunged forward in his seat. “Please.”
Forty thousand dollars! Could she somehow prevent him from finding out the truth about the goat head? Could she really trust the acolyte who had fucked the beast in her stead? These questions only made her feel ashamed. Her mentor was so proud of her for fucking a goat, and she couldn’t bear the thought of his disappointment once he found out she hadn’t.
“No,” she said, recoiling a little at the fanatical desire in his face. This kind of desperation did not befit a sorcerer. His suddenly uncharacteristic antics confused and frightened her. Besides, his strange behavior suggested a test. A true sorceress, he always told her, did not seek financial gain, and she was already going to disappoint him if he found out that she hadn’t actually fucked a goat. “No, it’s not for sale.”
“I need that goat semen, Daniella,” he said. “Please. Just tell me how much you want for it. I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars!”
“I don’t want money,” she said seriously. She was a hedge witch, she reminded herself, the kind of old-school sorceress who lived in the woods and mashed up Puritan children into all manner of diabolical potions. She had an agenda much more satisfying than money. She sought to destroy Christianity.
“Then what do you want?” Mr. Janus demanded. His face lit up with mockery. “I thought money was behind your little porno business. Or was that just for art?”
She winced. “I need your help,” she said. She took a deep breath. She knew what she needed to say. I need you to be my sex partner in the summoning. You’re the only man I know who can actually do it. But after a few attempts, she only managed the first two or three syllables. It sounded so ridiculous coming right after he’d ridiculed her passion for pornography as an instructional and promotional tool supporting truly transformational witchery.
Of course he mocked her, she thought. He looked down on her. Even after all she had achieved in magical theory, she still wasn’t good enough for him, and he was probably right. He was a great sorcerer, and she was still a student porno actress, one who lied to him and repeatedly disappointed him by failing to control her emotions despite years of magical training. So sure, she could solve all her problems if she had the willpower to fuck a goat, collect the semen it left inside her, and fork it over to Mr. Janus in exchange for demanding his participation as her partner in her sex ritual. But she was so convinced that he would refuse to participate, even in exchange for the goat semen, that she did not dare make the proposal. She would be asking him to risk being possessed by a demon if her ritual went wrong, and she knew he did not think highly enough of her as a sorceress to put himself in that situation. Her confidence collapsed, as it did only with him, her greatest teacher, and she could not bring herself to name her price.
“Well?” he demanded. “Say it!”
“Nevermind,” she said.
“No,” he said feverishly. “Not ‘nevermind.’ What do I need to do to get my hands on that goat semen?”
“It’s not for sale,” she said, taking a step back. “You need to chill the fuck out dude.”
“Daniella!” he pleaded, dropping off the couch to one knee. He grabbed her wrist.
“Enough!” she shouted. She jerked free and backed away.
“Please!” he repeated. “I need that goat semen!”
“Jesus,” she said, genuinely startled. What was wrong with him? Was he fucking with her? He did that sometimes. Then again, he was truly very passionate about enlarging his private collection of elixirs. It was one of the things she loved about him. She liked to joke with him that he was such a Ravenclaw. “It’s not for sale,” she repeated, and then she walked quickly toward the basement door.
“This isn’t over!” Mr. Janus called. “If you’ve lost the elixir or want your own copy, I keep something like seven or eight goats in the backyard! I will pay you anything! Name your price.”
As Daniella opened the door, the frantic sounds of a recorded orgy poured out into the living room. Larry was squealing like a monkey in heat. His boner must be unhinged at this point.
“That’s the best hope for your ritual,” Mr. Janus called after her.
“What? The squealing?” She paused and looked back at him.
“No, you little fool,” he said, though he also chuckled at the sounds coming from the basement. “The goat head. If your goat head is from the head of a goat that fucked not just any woman but the sorceress performing the ritual herself, then the magic you work upon this demon will be very powerful indeed. Don’t disappoint me and blow it by allowing yourself to use that brat down there. Kill him and collect the blood pouring from his neck while he orgasms inside you. We both know the power that you can find in that blood. We will use his blood and semen in a different ritual I know of which can also bind your demon. Collect it and bring it to me. Save the goat head. We can store it in my freezer out in the garage.” He stood and offered her a dagger with which she could cut Larry’s throat.
Her eyes darted between his and the dagger. She was suspicious now. She had rarely seen him this enthused and persistent. “We will keep him like this for another week,” she said, gesturing down into the basement. She grinned as she contemplated the psychological torment she would inflict upon him.“I want him to willingly renounce his Lord Jesus Christ as a condition of having sex with me.”
Mr. Janus laughed. He could only theorize as to the power of the boy’s blood if she managed that.
Grace closed the door behind her and walked down the stairs to torment the awful little Christian boy.
Mr. Janus, who had been trying his best to remain calm, rushed frantically to his bookshelves and began pulling down books at random. He glanced at the covers and then tossed them to the side. Finally he found the enormous untitled volume he needed and breathed a deep sigh of relief before bringing it back to the couch. He looked fearfully at the demonic sigil which took up the entire leather cover. When he opened the book, he quickly found the diagram he was looking for.
****
Scene: The witch hunter arrives at the megachurch mid service and demands to speak to the pastor. He also gives a speech to the congregation which provokes a quarter of them to get up and leave. “These are educated, respectable suburban people,” the pastor tries to explain to him. “They don’t believe in witches! You sound like a lunatic!” “But you know I’m not.” “You’ve put me in a very difficult position. We depend on these people’s donations.” Someone saw Daniella beneath his window.