Devil's Magick

He heard singing. At first, it was like birdsong- thin in the air. Then it was a woman. He turned eastward, orienting himself to the sound. It was the early moments of dawn, the sky just beginning to blue on the horizon.

Unable to sleep, he had been walking his property with a bow and knockers for rabbits. But the song led him to the edge of what was walkable and into an off-season field, whose grass had grown just under his nose.

It was odd how far he had already walked and how clear and close the singing seemed. He checked under the oaks, thinking the woman might be under near the thicket, but she wasn’t. Still, he heard her singing, put his bow over his shoulder, and began out across the field. The voice took him to where the area turned to rocks, and a shallow stream marked a harsh transition into the forest. He ducked down behind a large gathering of stone and reed grass when he saw her.

The singer was a woman, naked in the morning light, singing in a foreign tongue that was lyrical and bell-like. She had tamped down a circle in the grass where she danced and spun. She jumped onto a large rock and back to the grass with a twirl.

She was the nude color of the solid moon with wild hair that played at an illusion of red and gold fire. She wore the blue mists of dawn like the draped clothes of women from the far east. She threw her head back and laughed in a way that all else in the world seems to hush and lean in. The colors in the river rock flickered with pigment and brightened, grass the deepest green, soil a rich purple. The river itself gurgled and chuckled. And before he realized it, he was midstream towards her and staring.

His whits paused him as she stopped her dance and turned to look. Something boyish and frightened in him urged to turn and run to the parish and report that he had met a witch in the woods. He had heard stories as a youth of women who danced naked in sacrament to pagan gods and demons. Witches.

His fear left him when she locked her eyes on his. Bright green. He set his bow on a boulder that protruded from the stream, then lifted his hands to show he carried nothing. Her eyes went to an iron dagger at his hip, and he removed that too. Her rigid posture melted, and her smile beckoned him forward.

She met him at the edge of the stream, took him by the hands, and stepped him into her circle. She began to sing, and with it, he heard the stones hum-hum-hum. He felt unright in his head, but her laugh broke his ebbing fear and made him burst out in hysterics. She began to spin him round and round, singing as the colors swirled and blurred. Then all about him, he saw faces of onlookers.

Some were human; others grinned with animal-like faces and elongated limbs. Beautiful and strange. They peered out from behind rocks and trees. Others sang and danced, watched and laughed- with solid eyes of green and blue and black, glowing like the whispy dots of iridescent insects. He stopped their dance to greet the onlookers, but the moment he ceased, they were gone, and the world was pink in the coming sunrise.

The woman looked at him amused and questioning.

He laughed and took her hands once more. “I thought maybe you were a witch, but now I realize I was mistaken. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“One of who?” She grinned.

“The Hidden Folk. One of Faerie."

She threw her head back with a laugh, and the whole world stopped again to listen. She ran her fingers against his cheek, and he felt the golden light of dawn on his skin. All was yellow and gold glory as she touched him and smiled. “Which eye do you see me in?”

The question took him from the ecstasy of her moment. He closed his right eye and saw her smiling at him, then tried the left and saw nothing but the sun coming up over the foothills.

“I don’t understand I-”

“Tell me so I may lay a kiss on it.” She said.

“The left, my lady.”

She took hold of his head, leaned in, and pressed her lips to his eyelid. Then the tongue of a beast came from her lips, her grip tightened as he fought, sharp and hot it burrowed into the socket scooping the eye from its place and into her mouth.

He shoved her back, screaming and clutching his empty socket, scrambling over the rocks, falling backward into the stream. He felt the socket burning and itching like something was digging tendrils into the flesh. Then he felt it press the inside of his eyelid and out between his grasping fingers- a fat-headed flower. He ripped it with a scream and saw bloody in his hands, a marigold.

He heard her laughing, a vile and wicked sound, looked for her on the bank but saw nothing but a ring of crows perched high in the trees- the source of her laugh.

“What is this devil magick!?” He yelled, getting to his feet and taking his knife and bow from the boulder. “Show yourself!” The marigold press open his eyelid again as another head sprouted and pressed from the hole. He looked around, shielded his remaining eye from the bright golden white of the full morning sun upon the foothills.

Nausea took him and bent him over- to the laughing delight of onlooking crows. He gave the bank one last look for the woman and ran to the parish.