Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle. Carlos Allende
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Los Angeles, Calif.
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Copyright © 2015 by Carlos Allende
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Set in Minion
Cover design by Carlos Allende
Front cover art Ella Carrotmonster by Samantha McFadden
Back cover art by Terence McFadden
ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-50-3
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Allende, Carlos.
Love , or the witches of Windward Circle : a horror farce / by Carlos Allende.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-942600-49-7
1. Witchcraft—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Occultism—Fiction. 4. Venice (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 5. Horror stories. I. Title.
PS3601 .L4384 L68 2015
813.6—dc23
Al Terencito
Contents
In which we meet the mother and her three daughters
In which the mother begins her confession
In which we are told how the third daughter was conceived
In which we are invited to a ball inside of a cemetery
In which the mother finishes her confession
In which the two eldest sisters move to the city
In which the sisters return to Venice
In which we introduce two new characters, relevant to the story
In which we learn how to summon a demon
In which we make a visit in the name of decency and good morals
In which we attempt to please Satan by means of stealing a child for his supper
In which Miss Josie García gets involved
In which we learn what happened with everyone else
In which we finally meet Richard
In which we again visit the coffeehouse
In which we visit another cemetery
In which we attend a private poetry reading
In which we attend a police hearing
In which we are hosts to a conscience-awareness meeting
In which we stay at the Grand Hotel
In which we stay at Richard’s home for the weekend
In which we go back to the house on the Linnie Canal
In which we wrap up and we say good night
1
In which we meet the mother
and her three daughters
Once upon a time, there was an evil witch that lived in a small town by the sea.
She was a very perverted woman, this witch. Wicked, at her best behavior. She took pleasure in causing distress to her neighbors, killing their pigs and poultry, stabbing onions with a rusty knife, or ruining their crops and shindigs with hail and heavy rain, which she caused by peeing inside a hole dug in the sand and throwing more sand inside. She was a mean and hateful enchantress, with no sympathy for the dim or the silly.
She attended the Sabbath every Wednesday and Friday at the midnight hour sharp, where she reveled in the most vicious and depraved anti-Christian acts: blasphemy, sodomy, and infanticide. She was always the gayest and the most heavily bedecked at these balls, and when it came to presenting her master, the Prince of Darkness, with a list of her evil deeds, she was the first to approach his circle of sinful seducers, and the one who brought them the fattest children, too.
Twice a year, on the eve of May the first and on the eve of All Hallows Day, on October thirty-first, she renewed her vows of eternal fidelity to Satan with a sacrifice of her own flesh—a tooth, a pint of blood, or a finger nail. On Sundays, however, she wore a veil and attended Catholic mass. This is not uncommon among witches, to live a double public life, pointing the specks in the eyes of their neighbors, while carrying a log of hatred and shame inside. She received Communion, sang the Sanctus, and offered the sign of peace, just as Christian women commonly do, so well pretending to be afraid of the Church’s promises to prize the just and punish the vile with the agony of fire in the afterlife, with such an apparent conviction of her faith, that she fooled each and every one of the parishioners—all of them! From her husband, a rather ninny fellow and a drunk, to the priest, a quick-witted gentleman, well-traveled and not too old; from her sisters, rather femsy little dames, to her neighbors, rather proud; from her neighbors’ friends, rather stony, to her sisters’ husbands, rather boring, and—everybody! Except, of course, the One That Can