Kijiji

For nine months, across the whole world, the witches had been attempting to contaminate and control all of humanity. No-one, world-wide, knew who was a witch and who wasn't; and so we were all crossing streets whenever we saw another person, male or female, coming our way, fearing any potential hexings. We knew the witches were out there, in the world, and that we, if we gave in to them, would become mere vectors, zombie-like, in their plot to take over the world. Commerce and social life became impossible; everyone knew of a restaurant or concert-hall in which hundreds or even thousands of people had been exposed to the Evil; and, consequently, most of the shops and businesses‑those called 'non-essential'‑had been ordered to close down by our thoughtful rulers. The whole world stopped, and many made analogies to Salem, Massachusetts, and their long-ago problem with witches, but that had been only a local phenomenon; this time around, the witches were taking airplanes as well as broomsticks to spread their poison, and that had all happened before anyone really knew it was even happening. We were in the middle of a new World War: humanity versus the witches.

"Can you hear me? Can you see me?" Vick pathetically called out, his eyes looking not at the camera but rather at the monitor in front of him, as if his image and voice were registering upon something more real than just the dull photoreceptors of an array and the brainless granulates of a diaphragm, monitor being showing a representation of a woman, a woman named Tress, from whom he had been tragically sundered for a whole two months. She was looking good and she was looking hot. He hadn't forgotten how she had looked, though he had spent some time afraid he would not recall it, or that she must have changed in the sixty days, and the worrying had gotten to him. But now he had a machine that allowed communication of an advanced technology. He saw her nodding and smiling. Was it really working? "Can you hear me?" She nodded again, vigorously this time. Her mouth opened. She was saying something. "I can't hear you!" he cried. Then he caught on. She was saying: Turn up the volume. Vick took the little knobby thing that was attached to one of his speakers and turned it and then her voice came in and she was laughing at him.

He red-faced apologized: didn't know about the volume!: then rolled his eyes and she rolled hers and all was right as things could be when there were witches flying around the world, probably cackling like mad, itching to spread disease and death. But really: life goes on, doesn’t it? Worse things have happened, and you have to carry on or something.

"So you got it to work," she said through the electronics.

"Yes‑it wasn't that difficult. Pretty easy. The hard part was getting the camera in the first place."

She was drinking tea. "Delivered, right?"

He leaned back expansively. "Yes, the carrier must have battled the witches all the way to my door."

"Where'd you get it?"

"A website called, uh, Kijiji. Used, Cheap."

(He didn't want to tell her he had actually been rather ripped off. The camera itself was only $10, but the seller had hidden a huge shipping fee way out of proportion to the price. I won't tell you how much the amount was, for fear of embarrassing him, me, and probably you.)

"Is it good-looking?"

"I don't know. Curiously enough," he said, philosophically: "it's the only thing in the world that I can't show to you. Anyway, it's all black, with a little purple light. I plugged it in, and it works. Unless my eyes are deceiving me."

She smiled. "Your eyes are not deceiving you." A pause. "It's not red?"

"What?"

"The light. Isn't it red?"

"No, it's purple."

"They're usually red."

"I guess I got the, ah, fancy model. Anyway, I'm glad my eyes aren't deceiving me, girl o' my dreams. What's your situation in your house?"

"Everyone's gone to bed.... I'm all alone."

It took Vick a moment to get over this fact. He didn't know how these cameras worked, though. Were they always recording? He didn't think that likely, because he would have had to have given the file a name. At least, he figured that made sense. But still: steady as she goes. They'd known each other for quite a few years, and it appeared they were just about to get into some more serious business when the witches struck and they were parted. For two months he'd been expecting this witch stuff to get solved; he figured they'd all get exhausted and bored and move onto other things, but they hadn't. People were still dying with their chests and lungs crushed by the weight of the evil creatures. In the meantime, Vick and Tress had been communicating through the marvels of email, and it was only in the last couple of weeks that the idea of a webcam came into his head, though Tress had confessed she'd already had it in hers.

"Do you think the witches are doing all this stuff merely to keep us apart?" This sentence was very much in accord with how they talked over email. They would make plausible statements that were on the edge of absurdity. "Are they after us and only us? Is the rest of it, all the societal collapse, merely a means to an end?"

Tress said: "I don't know. If it's true, it's textbook romantic."

Vick sighed heavily. "All these lives lost, just for you and me."

"Our possible union must have threatened the constellations."

"The bad signs, that is to say."

"Yes, the bad signs. The constellations we've only heard about in the Malleus Maleficarum."

"Ooh, university language."

The banter went on like this for quite some time. Then they managed to arouse one another to the extent that they vowed, without ever having used the words, to have video sex, some sound-and-vision masturbatory session, before too long.

"Why not now?" she asked.

Vick stirred in his seat. Indeed, why not now? All the roommates were asleep, so why not?

He said: "So, I can only see your face. And the upper part of your ... torso."

"My torso," she repeated.

Just then Vick (and Tress through the connection) heard a tremendous kerfuffle of some sort going on in his living room. He quickly shut down the camera and microphone and went out. Something had indeed happened. About seventy books had come away from the bookshelves and they were presently precariously balanced in a single column in the middle of the room, and swaying as if they'd just been touched. Vick called out: "Hello?" but none of his roommates answered. He moved to the column and wondered quite how it had gotten there. It must have been an elaborate practical joke, played upon him by a roommate who wasn't actually sleeping yet. Could it have been Kate? Or was it Tom, or maybe Stanley? It had to have been one of them. Anyway, it would all be rationally explained in the morning. There was nothing really to worry about. Vick patiently set about returning the books to their proper places as midnight approached and he just made it to be in time.

 

A frightful dream Vick had next morning.

Initially, he found himself naked in a dimly-lit room, tied down to a huge oak table with cheap plastic handcuffs. Away off in an echoey part of the establishment iron chains could be heard rattling, along with various moans and the odd scream. Away across the room he could see the back of a naked hunchbacked old woman with wet or greasy hair. She was manipulating some implements, and by the sounds of things they were made of steel. Then she turned, revealing her pocked and blood-smeared face, to slowly approach the oak table, all the while muttering: "You murdered me, Harry. Didn't you? You murdered me." Vick saw the knife she held, the biggest knife he'd ever seen, and watched as the old crone took his penis in her bony hand and sawed right through it. "I'm going to stuff your cock in your mouth," she told him. "Because of what you did to me and Janice. Suitable. Very, very, suitable."

That scene dissolved away or Vick's mind got distracted or something and he then found himself in the living room of a house he'd never been in before, at least not to his knowledge. A moan led him to a corner of the room, and there behind the couch he saw the armless and legless body of an old woman. Vick said: "You okay?" and the woman started shrieking.

He awoke in a sweat, and the shrieking melded with the squeaky sound of the cold water tap on the other side of the wall, in the bathroom. He shook himself rapidly to get the visions out of his head.

As he put on some clothes, he laughed a little at himself. A cold water tap! And all that dreaming‑which probably only lasted ten seconds anyway‑got caused by it! He was still laughing, ready to tell his little anecdote, when he went downstairs into the kitchen to find Kate and Tom eating cereal out of their bowls, both with their eyes glued to their phones.

"Hey guys," he said: "You won't believe what the cold water tap upstairs made me dream."

Kate appeared to ignore him in order to say to Tom: "There's a pattern to it. Given: the witches are killing people mostly at night."

"Which, given, makes a great deal of sense, considering all our knowledge of the witch's craft." said Tom. "They're tied to the moon, and though the moon does not create night, given, it is more easily visible at night, and thereby it can be worshipped more easily during the times when the sun is on the other side of the earth."

Kate mused: "Amazing how it all fits together, isn't it?" She looked to the window, beyond which the witches conspired. "Seems there's nothing we humans can't figure out. Given."

Vick forgot about his dream‑didn't matter in the least‑and asked: "Were there a lot of deaths last night?"

"Yeah," said Kate. "In a lot of nursing homes, mostly."

Tom, who had a BSc, said: "Older people are more trusting, and thereby their communities leave doors open and so on. Witches are creatures of opportunity, after all."

Vick glanced out into the living room. "So who was the practical joker last night?"

"Hmmm?"

"Who made a stack of books in the living room?"

Kate looked blankly at Tom and Tom looked blankly at Kate. Together they said: "When?"

"Last night. Some time before midnight."

Tom said: "No idea."

Kate said: "Could it have been Stanley?"

Just then there came the sound obvious of Stanley coming down from upstairs, so all six available eyes turned to the hallway to see him appear, in denim shorts and a blue t-shirt and buffing his black hair with a towel. He said: "Ah."

Vick said: "Were you messing around with the books in the living room last night?"

"No, of course not. I don't think I've ever touched a single one, ever, ever."

This meant, to Vick, that things were strange. He shoved past Stanley to stand surveying the living room. There was there a music system, with compact disks scattered around it, and a little table with a jigsaw puzzle in progress, and the four shelves of books. Kate was standing behind him, also curious, and then she saw some movement amongst the disks: one of them was jiggling slightly.

She said: "Look at the disks."

Vick looked, and so did Stanley. One of the disks was moving.

"Rammstein," said Stanley.

The disk pulled itself out from beneath a couple others‑one by Joni Mitchell, and one by Mike Patton‑and clattered to the wooden floor. And it just lay there.

Kate said: "I never like that record anyway."

BUT then the whole room seemed to rumble. A rubber duck fell off a shelf, a purportedly-valuable three-pence British coin did the same in another corner, while the bay windows, loosely puttied, rumbled, and if the house's occupants had possessed anything of real value it would have been in serious danger.

AND THEN the whole room started to rumble, and a voice was heard to cry, by Vick, by Stanley, by Kate, by Tom: "You killed me! You killed my sister! We will not rest before we are avenged, you mother-fucking cock-sucker!" which would have been, in other situations, a shocking use of the English language.

Kate said: "This isn't normal."

Stanley said: "What day is it?"

AND THEN the rumbling noise increased tremendously, there in the living room, and the mysterious voice that had spoken of having been murdered started to scream loudly about being been murdered. Vick covered his ears, it was so loud. The rattling of everything, earthquake-like, got the cds on the shelves to fall on the floor, making a big mess, and even the cobwebs in the corners of the room succumbed to the gravity of the moment, and fluttered down to whatever it was that was beneath them.

AND THEN the rocking and socking of the place got so severe that Stanley's prized collection of Euro-trash digital video disks started to fall down onto the living room floor. He made a move to gather them, to protect them, to rescue them, but the general chaos kept him firm-footed in place.

The room was suddenly quiet, as if some kind of a point had been made. The dust‑and there was a lot of it‑settled. All anyone could hear was the brainless barking of that dog Baxter who lived across the avenue, who was barking about something obviously stupid.

Tom said: "I think it's over."

Kate said: "Wait."

Nothing happened.

Vick said, quite reasonably: "I think we're agreed that something unusual happened here. We don't know how, or why. We have to bring in some professionals, if we can find some."

Kate was on her phone. "I'm looking up scientists on Google."

Vick said: "Good. Find us a scientist, or maybe even two. They'd probably be interested in this."

 

Many hours later, after eleven but before midnight, Vick sat himself down at his computer and initialized a video call through to Tress. Little indicators of one sort or another flew by too quickly for Vick to comprehend as the telecommunications channel was created. His camera turned on, and he saw himself on his monitor, and in the first moment he also saw, behind him and to the right, a red smear on the white wall that just as quickly shrank to nothingness, then there came the deedle-deedle-deedle that represented the ringing on Tress's side of the connection, and finally there she was, or rather a halfways-decent representation of her, on his screen. She was looking good, all right, but Vick had more on his mind than merely seduction through flattery.

She smiled. "Here we are again."

Vick smiled. "Yes, here we are."

"Camera still working, I see. Mostly."

"What, is it skippy or something?"

"No, it's just that everything's all a little red-tinted."

Vick put his thumb onto the glass cover of the lens and rubbed. All was dark (to Tress) as he felt a certain un-glass-like roughness to the irregular hemisphere. He scraped at it with his nail and flakes gathered underneath. He looked at his nail: red matter.

She said: "You're clearer now, Keep scraping."

Vick licked his thumb: perhaps ingesting a little of the redness, we'll never know: and rubbed at the lens. A pretty good amount of it came off.

She said: "Almost complete, there's just a bit around the edges."

"Like a halo or something."

"Kind of like a halo."

Vick shrugged. "Well, I did buy it used. These kinds of things you just have to laugh away, ha-ha-ha."

"Ha-ha-ha," came an echo.

"Ha-ha-ha," said Tress.

"Problem solved. So, we have something pretty odd happen here today."

"What?"

"The living room went haywire, like there was an earthquake in it, an earthquake which none of the rest of us could feel."

"Golly. What do you think the explanation is?"

"None of us were sure, so we called in a bunch of scientists to help us out."

"Was one a seismologist?"

"No, he was on another house-call. We have to settle for a nuclear physicist, a botanist, and a specialist in liquid fuels. Boy, you should've seen them hustle from their van to the door. I guess it's that they know more about witches than anyone else, and so they figure the witches would want to crush their lungs more than anyone else's."

"Stands to reason."

"They came in and they sat us all down, and meticulously asked us to describe exactly what took place."

"And what was it that happened, by the way?"

"In brief, everything started rattling and falling all over the place, priceless valuables included, and we all swore we heard obscenities‑about getting murdered, nonetheless‑screamed by some unseen person."

"What did this person say?"

"I don't want to repeat it. Take my word for it, it was nasty. So, everything kept rattling, and everything kept falling, and there was this eardrum-busting scream or something in the middle of it, and then it all stopped, the rattling and the noise, leaving just a big mess. That's when we called the scientists in."

"Genius idea."

"So, we answered all their questions, and that all took a good couple hours, because you know how empiricism works."

"I fucking love empiricism."

"They got out a bunch of machines and started taking readings of the atmosphere. They checked the temperature and the humidity. They even managed to download some geological surveys of the neighborhood, which turned out to be extremely useful. After going through some charts they'd whipped up on the spot, and making not a few telephone calls, they told us we'd suffered what's known as a mini-seismological anomaly."

"You told me the seismologist wasn't there."

"No, not in person, but the botanist was dating him, so they were the ones making all the telephone calls."

"So that explained everything?"

"No, there was still the voices and the screaming. It turned out there was a completely coherent psychological explanation for that."

"I figured it'd turn out to be psychological. I mean: come on."

"We'd hallucinated all the sounds, probably cued by some shared childhood trauma. Turns out the literature was clear on it, that we all have shared traumas, and they can get triggered under stress."

"Which was what you were under."

"Absolutely; it was a mini-seismological anomaly."

Tress's glance went over Vick's head. "Oh, is that the Kate you've told me about?"

Vick said: "What?"

"Behind you. Kate? Are you Kate?"

Vick turned to look behind him, then returned to face the screen. "Tress, what are you talking about?"

She pointed. "Don't go pretending. Kate? Gee, Vick, I guess you already got something of a playmate," and she shook her head, sadly, sadly.

Vick said: "There's only me here, Tress," and he glanced up at the little box on his screen that was supposed to be showing himself, but it was on the fritz and it was just a plain blue box.

"This is sure some kind of special gas-lighting you're trying to pull here, dude," she said. "You got a naked woman in your room, and you're saying she's not there?"

Hearing that there may be a naked woman in his room caused Vick to swivel around again. Tress said: "See?"

Swiveling back, Vick said: "No, I don't see."

"This is crazy! She's got her hands on your shoulders!"

"Are you looking at someone else's video feed?"

"She's taken a step back."

Vick looked left and right.

"Oh my God!" Tress covered her ears. "What a noise!" She shouted.

"Ssh, ssh. What are imagining you're seeing?"

"Oh, God! Oh, God!" She stared silently for some time, with her mouth hanging open.

Vick said: "I don't know what's happening. What's happening?"

Slowly, Tress said: "She, the woman behind you, cut off her own head. With garden shears. Who was it?"

"I'm telling you, there's no-one here. I am entirely alone. What you're telling me you saw did not actually happen, at least not in this room."

"Well what in the hell was that?"

"How am I supposed to know? I'm supposed to know your fantasies?"

"That was no fantasy of mine, let me tell you."

"I'm no scientist, Tress. Maybe you should go teleconference with one."

She looked down, up again, and shook her head. "This has certainly ruined my mood."

Vick glanced down, lower-right, to the computer's clock. "Yeah, mine too. In any case, it looks like we're almost out of time."

Tress turned her head quickly to the left. "I just heard something outside."

"That's probably only them. Getting ready, revving their witch engines. Will it ever end?"

"Yes, something's out there." She shook herself into a bravery. "And it is late. Damn! I was wearing something special, too."

"What? What?"

She was making a move to close the program's window. "Maybe tomorrow, my love. Maybe tomorrow." And, with that, she vanished.

Vick closed his program's window too. Five minutes to midnight. It was time to get safe and under the covers. As he shut down his computer, he vaguely remembered the dream he'd had in the morning. Wasn't it funny that the human mind is so capable of making patterns out of disconnected events?

 

"'The CWC posted its daily update at six a.m. today. In it, they detail 472 new diagnoses of hexings alongside 78 fatalities, mostly in homes for the elderly and other populations most vulnerable to witchcraft. Head of the CWC Robert Reynolds said in his daily press conference, "Let us once again re-iterate the scientifically-determined protocols for the general population: Firstly, avoid going out at night, most especially to unmarked crossroads. Secondly, whenever possible, wash your hands in diluted hazelnut extract. And thirdly, self-isolate if you show signs of cackling, broom-sticking, or if you sense a desire to stir strange concoctions in a large iron cauldron."'"

Tom dropped his tablet computer on the kitchen table with a pronounced thud. "Every day it's the same thing. The same warnings, the same numbers. When are we going to be allowed to resume our normal lives?"

Kate, who was sitting across from him, said: "We have to be patient. No-one knows how many, ah, asymmetrical cases there are. Anybody could have it, anytime, anywhere."

Vick, who was making a pot of coffee, said: "And those cases, the asymmetrical ones, they set up these vibrational nodes that give the full-blown witches access to certain psychic troughs that run through the mentality of nature."

Tom said: "I didn't know that. Where'd you read it?"

"In The Lancet. Anyway, let me ask something here. Anyone been having weird dreams lately? Id est, last night?"

"I woke up with my pillow gone, if that's what you mean." The speaker of that sentence was Stanley, who was slouching as usual in the doorway.

Kate showed all signs of thinking hard. "Yes. A blonde woman I'd never met before. She wrote down some code on a piece of paper and gave it to me."

"What'd it say?"

"Don't know, it was in code. Then I looked back at her, and her hair was red and shiny. She started screaming and turned away and vanished into thin air."

Tom said: "It must have to do with that seismic thing yesterday."

She balanced a stray spoon on her knuckles and said: "Stands to reason."

The telephone rang to interrupt them. Stanley went out to answer it.

Tom said: "I think the witches are going to run out of victims soon."

Vick: "How so?"

"Low-hanging fruit, my boy. Low-hanging fruit."

Stanley came back. "We're having a visitor soon."

"Who?"

"A seismologist named Jones. He couldn't come yesterday, so he's coming here today."

"What for?"

Stanley shrugged disinterestedly. "Research, I guess."

And that's when someone knocked at the door. Standing Stanley went out and returned with a handsome man wearing thick glasses, who said: "Good morning. You are cited as having had a seismic event yesterday. Is that the situation?"

Kate spoke up. "Yes. Are you the boyfriend of the botanist?"

He pulled at his collar. "We're just dating, actually. When she called, yesterday, I gave an opinion, and I'm here to verify it. Procedure."

Vick said: "The three scientists left us a dossier about the anomaly. Would you like to see it?"

The seismologist said: "Yes, that would be very helpful."

"We all had to sign it in triplicate...." Vick took it down from on top of the fridge. "Here it is."

"Thanks. Do you have a, ah, table where I could study these?"

Stanley gestured for the him to follow into the living room.

Kate said: "He's handsome."

Tom said: "Yes, he's one handsome seismologist."

The four roommates pondered this-and-that, not saying much relevant to anyone, not even wondering why they were all there in the first place, so natural it seemed for it all to occur, when a cry was heard from the living room: "Good God!"

They rushed into the living room to see the seismologist wiping his handsome brow with a white cotton cloth. Tom said: "Something up?"

The seismologist shouted: "Damn right there's something up! This is all wrong! Here on the first page they've got a gamma measurement where there should be a theta. I didn't worry about it much‑I thought it was merely a slip of the pen‑but then on page three it's as if writ in stone that it's a measurement of theta. From that point on, everything gets muddled and inconclusive. Who knows if the conclusions are valid? It cannot be said!"

Vick asked: "So it wasn't a mini-seismological anomaly after all?"

The seismologist said: "Who knows? Maybe yes, maybe no. Oh, I'm so mad!"

Stanley stated: "So no-one knows what really happened."

"No. And no-one ever will. Never, not in a jillion years." He got up and turned to leave. "I may have to break up with that botanist. I mean: really!"

 

To give plenty of time, Vick called up Tress at 10:45 that night. She got on the line immediately. She looked good as ever, if not better. There was a mysterious glow around her, but that was only in Vick's mind. There wasn't any glow in the real world: it only seemed so to Vick.

She said: "So, any weird things today?"

"Nothing to speak of. Though, as it turns out, there was no mini-seismological anomaly here yesterday."

"But I thought--"

"A real seismologist showed up today, and he said yesterday's scientists had made errors. So there's no explanation for any of it."

"Wow. And yet the scientists have been right about everything so far."

"Yes, I know. Everything they're saying about how the witches are attacking is bang-on accurate."

"Maybe that's the anomaly. That they're wrong about something, finally."

"I guess: live and learn."

"Every day, there's something new. So." She squirmed about a bit. "Guess what I'm wearing."

He concentrated and said, "All I can see is that you've got a blue shirt on."

"Yes. It's a blue shirt I've got on. What else?"

"I don’t know. The camera only shows me that."

"Well." She did some more squirming. Then she cried out: "Fuck! There she is again!"

"What, who?"

"The woman behind you!"

Vick turned around to look, and saw nothing in the room. He looked at the camera lens (he'd figured out by then where to look) to say: "I don't see anything, again." (He looked over to the square where he should be seeing himself but it was just blue.) "So what's going on?"

"That bitch who was here yesterday, she's back. Drama queen! Ooh aren't you so special?"

"Is she doing the same stuff?"

"Not quite; she's just looking at me." Tress changed her focus of attention. "Hey! You! Bitch! Why don't you get lost? What do you want? Look, you're not wanted here! Really intrusive! I'm sitting here with no pants on, ready to show my boyfriend my pussy, which he's never seen before, and which he'll like seeing. Do I want to show you my pussy? No, I most certainly do not to show you my pussy! So go away, go someplace else, because you're not wanted here!"

Tress watched and waited for a bit. You could hear a near-midnight pin drop. Vick said: "Is she gone?"

Tress nodded. "She left."

Indeed, she‑or whatever it was‑was never seen again.

Tress continued: "We'll talk about it later. Time is short. The witches will be out in full force soon. Where were we?"

Vick said: "I'm not sure."

He couldn't manage to say what he really wanted to say, which was: "You called me your boyfriend. Your boyfriend."