That Day in May
(April-May 2018)
11-Witch's Tale
As soon as Stan and Sheila returned—and Tripper gratefully ate a bowl of Puppy Pep dog food—Ford spread out on the table the print-out that Agent Trigger had sent him.
The forty-seven pages included a thirty-two-page booklet, obviously home-made, with a few crude sketches showing how the mechanism of the Tarot Witch fitted together. That he set aside. Instead, he concentrated on three different pages.
The first, a photographic copy of what looked like an ancient parchment, showed lines of archaic-looking handwriting, with some of the s's replaced with f's. It began,
A Warnyng to the Unwary, to flye from the Deftruction yt if to come, if ye Deuill, yt hath latterly Haunted Middlefield, and that Men calle Gryzzelle ye Wytch, be not speedily caft out of ye Towne, or elfe Hang'd.
"This is really old," Wendy said. "I can barely read it."
Ford nodded. "From a late decade of the sixteenth century, I believe. On the last page of the letter is a penciled note from Mr. Braun noting that the three sheets of parchment were found inside the Tarot Witch cabinet when he first bought it in the 1950s. More troubling is this." He showed them a photo of a similar parchment—except instead of writing it bore a black blotch, ink, oil, or a charred surface, larger than the palm of his hand.
"I can't make head nor tail out of it," Stanley complained, leaning close and adjusting his spectacles. "What's this messy stain here? This paper wasn't found underneath an old-fashioned outhouse, was it?"
"Ew!" Dipper said. "Seriously?"
Ford said, "No, what looks like a stain on the parchment is actually what Agent Trigger identifies as a scorch mark. If it were any more intense, the material would have burst into flame. I cannot be certain, but I am assuming that this was appended to the three-page letter about the witch Gryzzelle. The emblem has been obliterated, but the partially readable lettering resembles the symbol that the alchemist and wizard John Kelly called an Enochian Sigil of Summoning, a very dangerous magical symbol that if read will summon a demon."
"Wait, this is confusing," Wendy complained. "I thought we were talking witches."
"We are," Ford said. "Many a practitioner of the magic arts has attempted to call a demon into existence to do his or her bidding. It never works out well. And I wonder if this particular symbol might have been a rare, truly ancient emblem that relates to a rather notorious biblical figure. What do you know about the Witch of Endor?"
Wendy and Dipper exchanged a puzzled glance. "Uh—where the Ewoks come from?" Dipper asked.
Ford stared blankly at him. "No, it's in scripture. When Saul's kingdom was surrounded by a hostile Philistine army, he tried everything to get a glimpse into the future, because he dreaded battle. When his usual forms of divination, casting lots, dreams, and consulting the Urim and Thummin—"
"Worst law firm ever," Stan explained.
His brother blinked. "No, they were—never mind. When everything else failed, Saul ordered his servants to find someone who had a familiar spirit.."
"Like a cat," Stanley put in.
Ford's expression grew a little haggard. "No, not an animal. That's just a familiar. A familiar spirit. I suppose one would say that means a demonic force or entity. Saul's inquiry led him to a woman living in Endor, a town north of Jerusalem. Now, you must understand that in previous years, Saul had exiled all fortunetellers and magicians from his land. Though the king disguised himself, the woman recognized Saul and, knowing he was an enemy of magicians, she at first was disinclined to attempt what Saul wanted—"
"What was that?" Wendy asked. "I think I know but tell us."
"He wanted to summon the spirit of the prophet and advisor Samuel, who had died some time before. Samuel had been critical of Saul but had given him good advice, advice that too often Saul had ignored. The woman—the scripture does not specifically call her a "witch"—performed some ritual under the direction of her familiar spirit, and the spirit of Samuel rose out of the earth and gave Saul a dire prophecy that both his army and he would die if they fought the Philistines. Because Saul had promised the woman that he would not punish her if she did what he asked, he departed and left her alone. Sure enough, the battle ended in defeat for the Israelites, and Saul himself died."
"So the Witch of Endor was a necromancer?" Dipper asked.
"OK, that's somebody who talks to dead people and gets answers, right?" Stan asked.
"Yes to both questions," Ford said.
Wendy asked, "So the fortune-telling machine is the Witch of Endor?"
"No. I really believe the animating force in the automaton is the demonic spirit that was her familiar. Let me explain. The Witch of Endor is mentioned only on one occasion in, um, Wendy, you'd know it as the first Book of Samuel in the Old Testament."
"Get ready for the lecture," Stan said.
Ford simply continued: "Except for that brief biblical story, the Witch of Endor disappears from history. No one knows what became of her. However, in the course of the First Crusade, about the year 1099, one Othos or Othus, a Norman knight serving Prince Englebert of Tournai, captured a grotesque old woman when Jerusalem fell to the Byzantine forces. The scanty histories mention her as always being shrouded head to foot in black vestments and a veil. She seemed to glide rather than walk, and observers thought she was a ghost, an apparition, not a person with a real body. One legend is that anyone seeing her face would die before the following sundown. She has no name, properly speaking, but the Byzantines called her 'Daimona,' meaning 'Evil Spirit.'"
"Was she a robot?" Stan asked sarcastically.
"No, but she wasn't truly human, either. She is mentioned only once in the contemporary account of the fall of Jerusalem, but curiously, in 1100 a mysterious figure, likewise shrouded all in black, is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as an advisor to Henry Beauclerc, fourth son of William the Conqueror. At that time, Henry's older brother had become King William II of England. The two did not get along, and when in August 1100 William died in a hunting accident, Henry became King Henry I of England."
"And the robot lady?" Stan asked.
"Not a robot then, a spirit of evil. What follows is mostly conjecture. Only one source tells about a mysterious woman with an elderly voice, one who wore black robes and a black veil and never revealed her face. She advised Henry and at his request created a cursed arrow. In an infernal ceremony, she had anointed the arrow with the blood of a sacrificed child. She gave the arrow to King William, telling her an enchantment would make it hit whatever target the archer aimed at. In turn, William gave the arrow to a nobleman named Walter Tirel, an expert archer, on the morning of a deer hunt, possibly intending for the arrow to kill Henry. Instead, Tirel loosed the arrow at a stag, he said, but the arrow 'as if bewitched,' circled in the air and shot William himself through the heart. When Henry received the crown, he granted the mysterious woman freedom of the realm. Her name, in Norman French, was Démone."
"What does that prove?" Stanley asked.
"Nothing but traveling from Jerusalem to England in just over one year, and during wartime, would have been quite a feat in those days. And the descriptions and the names imply that it's the same woman—or entity, anyway. After that she pops up time and again in European history."
Ford went on to explain that more than four hundred years after William II's death, the spirit apparently was in Milan. "Filippo Maria Visconti, then the Duke of Milan, like Saul, had a burning need to gain a view of the future. He commissioned the first known Tarot cards in Europe, a great artist created them—seventy-eight cards with arcane meanings—and then, in exchange for a terrible promise, the muffled spirit enchanted—or possibly cursed—the cards. From that point on, the cards and the witch were linked."
"What promise?" Wendy asked. "What did the spirit want from this guy?"
"The same thing that drove Bill Cipher when he was imprisoned in the Nightmare Realm," Ford said. "It—she—wanted a body. Physical form."
"What did this duke do?" Stan asked. "Kill someone?"
"In a sense," Ford said. "He gave the Witch a human body. His wife—died under mysterious circumstances. After that, the black-shrouded female figure seemed for the first time obviously had physical form. Visconti, though, tried to trick her."
"How?" Dipper asked.
"The Witch found herself in the body of a woman who was already dead. She'd wanted immortality in a human body. Instead—she found herself trapped in an animate but decaying corpse."
The witch dropped out of history after 1550. The letter that mentioned Gryzzelle, the Witch of Middlefield, was the next possible mention of the familiar spirit. If Ford's suspicion was correct, someone in that English village had used an ancient cabalistic symbol to call the spirit to him or her. The three pages spoke of a figure swathed in black that people glimpsed in the town.
And then terrible things began to happen—inexplicable deaths, senseless destruction of buildings and livestock, and so on. The letter ended with a call to rid Middlefield of "Gryzzelle," but other sources took up the tale. On a cold winter day in Middlefield, a mob of angry citizens broke into the house of the supposed warlock or witch behind all the destruction, but they didn't find the person. Instead they saw the black-dressed figure slumped on the floor in a corner. When they stripped away the rotting fabric, they found "a Foule stiynking Corpse."
"There's a break in the trail, but from my research, I think the next appearance of the spirit," Ford said, "comes from London in the 1780s and 90s. It involves a Frenchman who had fled from the Terror, a skilled artisan, who made mechanical contrivances—as they were called—so complex that observers thought they were animated by witchcraft."
The craftsman, Pierre l'Ingénieux—"Not a name, but a descriptor, 'the ingenious,'" Ford explained—brought with him the fortune-telling automaton. "You see where I'm going with this," Ford said.
"Yeah, think so," Wendy said. "The familiar spirit lost her body. So in, uh, ghost form, she goes to this Pierre whoever and inspires him to make her a body made of metal."
"With human elements," Ford said. "At least the hair, and perhaps the leather flesh—they were, well—they came from people. When the automaton could manipulate the enchanted deck of cards, they put the demonic sentience into the machine, they infused her with consciousness. What Soos didn't know was that after the machine came into Braun's possession, he did not allow her to use the real cards. Someone in the past had left a warning that the ancient deck should not be used. Instead, Braun supplied only a commercial, non-magical deck. For some reason that Braun couldn't, or at least didn't explain, he left the enchanted deck in its own wooden box, stored in the bottom compartment of the automaton."
"So—Soos made it possible for her to come to life?" Dipper asked.
"Dude, please don't tell him that, ever," Wendy said.
"Bottom line, Poindexter," Stanley said. "What does the Witch want now, and how do we send her to hell? 'Scuse my French."
"We must take away the cards, and if we can, destroy them," Ford said. "That won't destroy the animating spirit, but it will at least remove her power to curse us. As to how we send her—um—away—well, now she has accumulated quite a lot of power. And I think she doesn't care for existence in a machine. She—she wants a body. I think that, there in the Museum—she's trying to build herself one that will last until she can possess one of us."
Stanley stood up. "Then we gotta hit her now, before she gets stronger."
"First," Ford said, waving his brother back to his seat, "we need a plan."
"You sure you're the smart brother?" Stanley asked. "'Cause I already got one."