The Witch of Dark Hollow

"This is the work of the Devil!" the parson cried, leveling his finger at Judith Greene. "She's put a hex on this girl!"

"Witch!" roared the crowd.

Tobias, meanwhile, could not wrest his gaze from Deborah. Her skirt had come well up her legs, which kicked and scissored. Her hands clawed madly, ripping off her cap, tearing at her clothes. She shrieked again, and began spewing obscenities.

"Fuck! Dirty fucking cocksucker! Jab my cunt!"

The uproar became bedlam. Several women fainted. Panicked people charged for the doors. Daniel Fletcher struggled against the frantic mass, trying to reach his daughter. The magistrate hammered futilely for order. The parson dashed toward Deborah, but recoiled as she yanked her skirt to her waist.

"She is possessed of demons!" he wailed, ashen.

"The witch, it is the work of the witch!" someone called.

"Filthy pig-fucking bungholes!" Deborah spat. She tore open her undergarments, exposing a honey-colored thatch and a red, inflamed opening. Her buttocks beat against the boards as she bumped her lower body up and down. "Fuck it, fuck it, pig-slut-devil-whore, stuff my cunt with your dog's prick! Shit-eaters! Ass-licking bastards!"

It was there, right there in front of him, only a few feet away! He could see everything. The way it glistened in the lantern-light, the way it seemed to open and close like a hungry mouth as her hips bucked, bucked.

Tobias lurched forward. His wandering eye bulged. His tongue slavered over his thick lips. "Help me!" he shouted. "Help me, the witch, she's controlling me! She's in my head! Ah, for the love of mercy, help me!"

Brother Ezekiel, grimly resolved, made another move toward Deborah. Tobias drove his fist into the parson's stomach, doubling him over.

"No, oh, no!" Tobias howled. "Parson, no, I didn't mean … I can't stop!"

Deborah's frenzied gaze fell hot and smoking upon him. Normally, she wouldn't spare him so much as a greeting. Her hands flew down, not to cover, but to part her hairy nether lips wide. "Fucking horse-cock son of a whore!"

"Someone, help me!" Tobias yanked at his breeches. Wooden buttons popped and skittered.

More women screamed and fainted as he hauled his prodigious, plum-headed organ into view. In Deborah's eyes, he saw sudden fright, sudden awareness, but by then it was far, far too late. His knees hit the floorboards with a sound like thunder.

"No!" That was Daniel Fletcher, fighting to get to them, but he tripped and crashed headlong. He only just raised his head in time to witness as Tobias dropped onto Deborah's body.

She was wonderfully warm and springy-soft beneath him. Tobias held the base of his hefty prick with one hand and groped the other along her furred lips. He could smell her, feel her wetness, and his fingers sank into a place, the place. He set his cockhead there and thrust it in as hard as he could.

Deborah screeched, and he felt some blockage give way inside. Then he was buried deep, buried all the way. She was scratching at him, striking his face, but he barely felt the blows. One of her breasts was bare – as white, as full, as soft as he had suspected – and he stuffed the large, pale-pink nipple and as much of the surrounding flesh as he could into his mouth. He pumped up and down, in and out, overwhelmed by the delicious clasping slide and give of her.

He knew he couldn't last long, not like this, his first time ever to be with a woman. And not just any woman! The idea that he was doing this to Deborah Fletcher, in front of her father and half the town, spurred Tobias in ever-greater peaks of excitement.

"No … unh … oh!" Deborah groaned. But she quit gouging at him with her nails, and swung up her heels until they crossed at the small of his back. "Oh, yes!"

"Stop him!" Daniel Fletcher begged, stretching out a pleading hand.

"It's the witch's doing!" a woman's voice shrilled. "Hellspawned wretch, release them!"

Tobias pounded harder into Deborah. She was raking at his shoulders now, and jerking up to meet each downward thrust. He went faster, faster, and then his loins seemed to explode. His seed gushed out of him, filling her, overflowing her, running in sticky streams down the crack of her bottom as he continued plunging his softening length into her. She writhed against him, snarling that he had better not stop, it had better not be over.

But it was, for he slipped limply out and lay atop her, breathing heavily. Deborah cursed him, slapped him. Moments later, many strong pairs of hands dragged him off of her. He was flung, stumbling on weakened legs with his breeches around his ankles, to collide with a bench.

**

A semblance of order was finally restored to the town hall once a very stunned and chastened Deborah Fletcher was led away by her equally stunned father. She was to be confined to bed, strapped down if necessary, until they were sure that the witch's influence had departed her body.

Through it all, Judith Greene had remained in her seat with her hands bound, her legs tethered, her eyes blindfolded, and her mouth locked shut by the leather and steel of the scold's bridle.

Leah could not believe the raw boldness of the witch. Bad enough, the things she had done, but to cause something like this! Nearly everyone in Dark Hollow had witnessed Deborah's fit of hysterical possession, seen the daughter of the wealthiest man in town bare her nethers to the world. Half of them had been helpless onlookers as the evil found poor Tobias and compelled him into ravaging her. A dozen people had been injured in the chaos, three of them seriously.

"Why did she do that?" Leah asked in a whisper to Sarah Parsons. "She must have known it would surely seal her fate."

Sarah, who had sat motionless and wide-eyed throughout, exhaled shakily. "Perhaps she already knows she's doomed, and has nothing more to lose."

"But they'll hang her for certain!"

"They would have anyway."

"Such vile deeds." Leah would not admit, to Sarah least of all, that the scene had caused a resurgence of lewd desire in her own loins. She blushed hotly. The memory of the previous night – and worse, that morning! – was still very near in her mind.

"It'll be the ruin of Deborah," Sarah said.

"It wasn't her fault," Leah said. "She was under a witch-spell!"

"That doesn't matter." Sarah shook her head and pursed her thin lips sadly. "She's no virgin now, and the entire town knows it. Her father will never find her a decent husband. She'll probably have to marry Tobias. Imagine that! The prettiest, wealthiest girl in town having to marry the ugly stablehand!"

"Well, at least this means I needn't testify."

Sarah clutched her hand. "No, Leah, you must!"

"Why? Haven't they enough evidence against her? Wasn't what just happened here proof enough?"

"They must know all."

"All?" Leah echoed faintly.

"All that you saw," Sarah amended soothingly. "I … I told you, I don't hold you to blame for this morning. You weren't yourself."

Relief washed over Leah like balm. She would have died on the spot if she had to confess to the parson and the magistrate how Sarah had caught her rubbing herself, and how she'd even tried to force Sarah to join in.

"Thank you."

"The rest, though, you must tell them. Last night in the churchyard. How you saw her, and what she did."

"Not today, of course."

"Yes, today! Now!"

"With everyone in such a state?" Leah looked around at the citizens of Dark Hollow and the neighboring towns. About half of the original crowd had returned after Tobias was carted away in disgrace. "It might start a riot, Sarah. Couldn't I wait?"

Sarah thought, then smiled. "I have it! You need only tell your tale to my brother and the magistrate. They will decide if it should be said to the whole town. And after all this, I rather think that they will say it should not."

She rose, and pulled Leah with her.

"Now?" Leah quailed.

"Yes."

As they approached the front of the nearly empty hall, they came face to face with Zachary Greene. He was haggard and defeated, shoulders slumped. Behind him, the gaolers were none-too-gently escorting his wife back to her rat-infested cell. The witch's body quivered. Her blindfold was soaked through with tears. Her posture was one of utter hopelessness and despair.

"Goodman Greene," Sarah said, a trifle coldly.

Leah, thinking of what she had seen this man do in the churchyard, could not look him in the eye. He had not seemed nearly so abject and downcast then, caught up in the dark revelry.

"Oh, Sarah, what am I to do?" he asked. "I know that my Judith is innocent of these crimes. My heart tells me so!"

"But Zachary, you've hardly known her a year. Why ever did you marry her so suddenly? She must have bewitched you."

"No! No, never that. I fell in love, that's all." He sighed. "I cannot explain it, Sarah. From the moment I saw her, I knew that she was the one."

"I don't think that he knows," Leah whispered. "He does not remember."

"Remember what?"

"Where you were last night," Sarah said.

"Home … in bed … asleep." Zachary Greene was a study in earnest perplexity.

"He doesn't know," Leah said. She felt a pang of sympathy for the man.

Sarah sniffed. "Whether he's in this knowingly and willingly or not, it doesn't matter. He was the one to go off and marry a stranger. If he'd found a nice local girl as his bride, none of this would have happened. Now, please step aside, Zachary. Leah must testify. I daresay hers will be the last evidence to fully condemn your precious Judith."

They swept past the bewildered Greene, leaving him looking after them. Leah's mouth went dry as she saw the tall, black-garbed figure of the magistrate ahead. His wig rested perfectly in place, and he looked aloof, far above the petty insanity that had so recently gone on in this hall.

Brother Ezekiel was not in such a flawless state. He sported rumpled and dirty clothing from the panic and the scuffle. The parson yet held himself gingerly, unable to straighten to his full height after the brutal punch from Tobias.

Leah wrung her hands. Sarah left her side for a moment, long enough to speak a few hurried words to both men.

"This way, Leah," Brother Ezekiel ordered when his sister had delivered her urgent message. He led her into the chamber behind the magistrate's bench. Sarah gave her an encouraging nod and a wave as she went.

It was a small parlor or sitting room, windowless, homey. The parson sat down, rubbing the spot where Tobias had struck him.

"Please be quick about this, Leah," he said. His tone suggested that he doubted a lowly servant could have anything useful to say, and that he was only allowing this to humor his sister. "I will be glad to have this entire unpleasant matter behind us."

"Yes, Brother Ezekiel."

The door opened to admit the magistrate. He snatched a deep breath, blew it out, and fixed bright hawk's eyes on Leah.

"So, then. This is your maidservant, my good man?"

"She's called Leah," the parson said.

"Leah." The magistrate's smile was toothy and yellow. "I understand you have something to tell us. Something you witnessed last night."

"I do, sir."

"Very well."

Haltingly, she related her tale. She found herself speaking more and more softly as it progressed, fear clambering with small icy prickles up her spine.

"And then … she got upon the tomb. On all fours. Laughing. It was the same as the imp's laugh. Like fingernails scraped over slate. Goodman Greene stood before her with his night-shift lifted, so that she could … that he could … insert himself … into her mouth."

The magistrate's dark brows rose. "Insert himself?"

"His … his manhood, sir." Leah stared at the floor, vehemently denying the warm throb in her lower belly.

"Into her mouth, you say." The magistrate frowned, stroking his chin. "How tall is this tomb?"

"It rises some three feet from the earth," Brother Ezekiel said. "Made of stone, with a flat slab for its top."

"How could that be? This bench is three feet in height. Yet how, if a woman were to kneel upon it, could she receive a man's member in that way? Leah, are you quite sure?"

"I am only telling you that which I saw, sir."

"Hmm." He paced to and fro, black robes flaring. "Let us see."

With a swift economy of motion, he moved the bench from the wall to the center of the room.

"Magistrate?" asked the parson.

"A bit of a test." His hawk's eyes caught and held Leah's. "If you would be so kind as to show us precisely how she was positioned?"

"Oh, but sir …"

"We must understand if we are to judge fairly," he said.

"Go on, Leah," Brother Ezekiel said. "Let us finish this and be done."

Slowly, she got up and went to the bench. "The witch knelt upon it like so, on knees and elbows."

"I see. Brother Ezekiel, you're of a height with Goodman Greene. Stand before her as she described. I must be certain we have the right of this."

Clearly astonished, the parson moved in front of Leah. His belt was at a level with her eyes. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Well, magistrate?"

"A moment. Leah, continue."

"Well, sir … while she was … doing what she did, the other man approached her from behind. He was very tall, and I did not recognize him." Leah shuddered. "But then, he threw off his cloak."

"And?" he prompted.

"He was not a man at all," she whimpered. "His legs bent back like those of a goat or a dog, covered in black fur. His skin was scarlet-red. He had … he had an enormous … it wasn't … it was red and knobbed and as long as a man's arm! I saw horns on his head and eyes that glowed, and he crouched down straddling the tomb and … and … drove that hideous thing into the witch as she knelt there."

The parson blinked and looked faint. The magistrate stroked thoughtfully at his chin again.

"You believe you saw the Devil, then, Leah?"

She nodded.

"And that he took Judith Greene from the rear as she used her mouth on her husband?"

Fighting not to cry, Leah nodded again.

"I'm still not certain I understand. The act you describe does not sound possible. Here … parson, if you would …"

Leah jumped as a cool draft hit the backs of her thighs. The magistrate was lifting her skirt in folds and crumples, bunching it on her back. "What are you –"

"Hush. Parson, oblige me by sticking your cock in her mouth, would you?"

"I beg your pardon?" Brother Ezekiel sounded as shocked by the words as was Leah.

"We must know if what she claims to have seen was real. Do it, man, or the witch may go free."

Confusion was writ large on his face, and his motions were like one caught in a strange dream, but the parson began undressing. Leah, stricken with dismayed fright, tried to get off the bench. The magistrate held her in place. She heard his chuckle, felt his hot breath on her cheek.

"Steady, there," he said in a low voice. "We must know if you speak the truth."

"I do, I swear it!"

"Open your pretty mouth," he instructed.

The parson, his eyes fogged as if in a waking sleep, stepped toward her with his manhood held out like an offering. It was stiff, a fleshy pole springing from a mat of wiry black hair. The tip protruded a bit from beneath the foreskin.

Leah wanted to scream and run, but a strange lassitude settled over her. She did not feel dazed, but neither could she summon the strength to resist. Instead, as the parson's organ bumped urgently at her lips, she opened them.

"Do what you saw the witch do," said the magistrate. He had released her, and was somewhere behind her.

Unable not to obey, Leah drew the parson into her mouth. She tasted the saltiness of him, felt him twitch, heard him stifle an unbelieving groan.

"Suck him, yes, very nice," the magistrate said. "And I'll …"

Something cold and sharp slid along Leah's backside, slitting open her undergarments so that the pieces fell away and left her bottom bare. She felt the brush of hot fur as the magistrate swung his leg over the bench, straddling it.

Fur?

She saw the terror in the parson's glassy eyes. He was staring over and beyond her, and his face had gone slack. The involuntary rocking of his lower body, moving his erection ever-so-slightly back and forth, kept on. She wanted to spit him out and turn around to see, but she could not move. Only her mouth, as if it had an eager life of its own, kept up sucking and slurping and rolling her tongue around the rigid shaft.

"And then it was something like this?" asked the magistrate. Yet not the magistrate's voice. Darker, ominous, laced with deadly menace.

Leah's skin shrank in on itself, but she remained immobilized. Not even when what felt like a curved and bumpy bar of iron hot from the forge touched her defenseless buttocks could she cringe away. This bar, this rod, rubbed up and down in the crease of her bottom. It moved lower, and when it nudged her nether lips, Leah moaned helplessly.

It parted her, opened her, eased slowly in. The girth of it stretched her, made her feel as if her insides were being driven up into her chest. The slight pain as her virginity tore away was lost in the aching fullness that the magistrate slowly pushed deep.

Brother Ezekiel, for all that his expression was one of absolute horror, thrust himself in quicker strokes into Leah's mouth. His hands gripped the sides of her head, preventing her from turning even had she been able to move of her own accord. She could not see what was behind her, and did not wish to. Enough that she could feel it, the searing length of him nearly splitting her yet moving with surprising gentleness.

A sweeping sensation very like that she'd experienced earlier with Sarah was now taking hold, gathering strength. With a smoky laugh, the magistrate increased the speed of his thrusts. Clawed fingers settled on her hips, hurting, pinprick wounds surrounded by dusky purple bruises. It did not matter … the pain only heightened the incredible pleasure as what seemed a series of soft thunderclaps rolled through her.

Then, although she had not yet finished telling them what she'd seen in the churchyard, the magistrate completed the act. Leaning forward over her trapped form, he released one of her hips and caught the parson by the nape of the neck. Brother Ezekiel's desperate cry was abruptly muffled, as if something was shoved into his mouth.

By craning her eyes as high as they'd go, Leah had an odd-angle view of the two of them above her. The magistrate – or the demon going by that guise – had his scarlet-skinned jaws gaping wide. A tongue that was no tongue at all, but a second male organ every bit as large, knobbed, and inhuman as the one currently filling her, protruded from the fang-lined orifice. Its end and several inches of shaft vanished between the parson's lips.

The three of them heaved and thrust as one, an ungodly creation of limbs and openings and penetrative lances of pulsing meat. Leah sucked hard on the parson's manhood as he quaked and convulsed and shot forth jets of creamy fluid down her throat. She swallowed it down in great gulps. Moments later, her innards were flooded by a molten stream from the magistrate.

Dimly, as from very far away, Leah heard the shrill, tittering laughter of the little imp.

Brother Ezekiel reeled back, making a drowning gurgling noise. His organ popped wetly from Leah's lips. She saw a dark, noxious liquid like bile and old blood coursing in twin rivers from the corners of his mouth.

The parson fell headlong and lay in the grip of fearful spasms. His chest hitched. He clawed vainly at his neck. His back bent into an impossible bow, so that only his head and heels touched the floor. His spine made a terrible snapping sound. His manhood, still partly erect and shining with Leah's saliva, pointed at the ceiling.

A single strangled word, perhaps a plea to the Lord, was the last thing he said before he collapsed in a staring, sightless heap.