Witch Hunt

Chapter Thirty




It was sick. Utterly sick.

I was sick.

What the hell was I doing? Dreams of the Witchfinder’s sadistic perversion were not what I had ever expected to find here.

When I came out of the bathroom I sat back on the bed, trying to ground myself.

The ambience had returned to normal. The subtle background of twenty-first-century Essex replenished the room. My laptop buzzed on the floor, and beyond it I could hear the clinking of the kitchen staff clearing up after a regular Wednesday night, the low gurgle of a TV from a room down the hall.

The whole episode had taken no more than a matter of minutes but I felt like the life had been sucked out of me. Ill with shame, repulsed by the sexual quickening, I recalled the unholy sight of Rebecca tortured and bound. Why had she shown me that? It was so disturbing. So damn wrong.

Because that was what happened, said a voice inside my head. It was right. I knew it. That scene was the essence of the witch hunts – a hideous game that pitted the powerful against powerless. The motivation of the hunters was simply conquest.

And what of the pipe? Had he used it to suck their blood? Is that what that was all about? I could not bear to think about it. Especially as it had an uncanny resemblance to the thing that I had unearthed at St Boltoph’s in Colchester. The pipe that Felix had blown. ‘Qui est isti qui venit – Who is this who is coming?’

It was too much to take in.

And I was simply unable to process it. Even as I thought about that pipe, my brain’s survival techniques began to kick in and I found myself in a fog of confusion that began to obliterate parts of the memory. The more I tried to think about it, the less I was able to recall.

Perhaps it was shock. I don’t know. But whatever it was, it left me in a state.

After another thirty minutes or so I realised that I was so shaken and wired I would never go to sleep naturally. So I did something I had only done once since Mum died. I plucked a sleeping pill from my toiletries bag. Within twenty minutes I’d started to relax.

That night as I slept the experiences whirled, weaved and reconfigured my internal compass. Though I didn’t realise it then, by morning a new course had been mapped for my life.

Soon I would cast off.