ladies one could see strolling down the Linda Vista Park in Santa Monica on Sundays, wearing a shawl and a dress with a lace collar.
“Rosa, Victoria!” she said, helping the girls get off the goat. “You look so beautiful!”
The two girls bobbed their heads courteously.
“You two are the most adorable girls I’ve ever seen. You must be so proud,” the wench said to the mother. She boasted an ear-to-ear smile, but her eyes seemed full of anguish. “Let me see your dresses,” she continued. “Turn around… The little ribbons…! Is that a mouse?” She espied a little rodent climbing down Rosa’s hair into her dress.
The girl replied with a giggle.
“How cheeky of you! How very cheeky of you, you enchanting little doll,” the woman pinched Rosa’s nose.
The mother thanked her with a smile.
“Now, look at this little boy,” the wench approached the twins who had just jumped out of the basket. “And his sister. How plump and beautiful! How big are their eyes! How red their lips! What did you do, my darlings? You probably didn’t eat your soup, did you?”
The twins nodded with a sob.
“And did you say your prayers? You didn’t! Oh, don’t you cry, you poor babies. One should do as told. That’s a lesson to learn—a little too late, in your case. And who is this?” The wench noticed the little girl getting off the goat. “Is this your youngest?” She asked the mother.
“Yes, ma’am,” responded the mother, expecting another compliment.
But the greeting witch had lost her smile. “God’s hooks,” she said, covering her mouth and looking at them with pity. “She’s the ugliest child I’ve ever seen. By far! Who was the father, a boar?”
The little girl hastened to bob a curtsy, remembering her mother’s words about how witches are expected to be rude to one other, but her mother pulled her by her arm and turned a disdainful eye back to the hag. The two elder daughters started laughing, but their mother threatened them with a tight fist and they stopped.
“You should at least have dressed her properly,” the wench said, adjusting the little girl’s dress. “And washed her face,” she added, pulling a handkerchief from one of her sleeves to clean the little girl’s face with saliva. She gave up after a few passes after seeing how dirty the cloth got. Putting it back into her sleeve, she gave another look of disapproval to the mother, and then moved on to talk to other witches.
Freed from its load, the goat left to join other familiars. Rosa and Victoria disappeared too, to join a pig chase occurring nearby.
The little girl looked at her mother’s sullen face. How come she was upset, when an insult was the expected thing to hear at the Sabbath? She didn’t understand the logic of the Devil, and the mother didn’t care to explain. The woman took her youngest daughter by the hand, who in turn took the hand of the little boy, who in turn grabbed the hand of his sister, who ended up carrying the basket with the fecal biscuits, and the four set off walking uphill through the crowd, the two children still crying for their mother.
Everything looked strange and confusing to our little friend that night. Earlier, Rosa and Victoria had explained to her what she should expect from the Sabbath. They told her there would be a procession, a banquet and a Black Mass. They said there would be a dance in which all of the witches and the warlocks would sway back-to-back with each other, and then, just before dawn, they would all lose their clothes and have an orgy. The program was correct, that was precisely what was supposed to happen. What they didn’t say was that one event wouldn’t succeed the other, but everything would happen at once, the women would be feasting, fencing, fisting, fighting, flaunting, dancing, and parading long before any of such businesses had either properly started or concluded—all at the same time, for it was more important to just do than to do well, another common, if incorrect, presumption among witches.
A clever eye would note that this party was the most perfect imperfect illustration of a reversal of celestial harmony. It made no sense, but if it did, it wouldn’t be the like of the Devil.
Here, a group of witches marched in a circle, each of them holding a large wooden stake with a hog’s head on top and a cloud of flies flying behind them. Blood ran down the poles covering their arms and faces. There, a pair of witches sang a cantata, squatted under a long table set across four tombs, on top of which another woman swore by all the names of the Emperor of Hell, which are many, that if they didn’t move she would cut off their breasts and eat them. Over there, a group of witches walked backwards, some on two legs, some on all fours, with their chins pointing up and their pubes indecently exposed. Yonder, a few were engaged in seducing a sexton. Many were fighting and a few were snoring, already drunk. Hundreds of spirits floated above them, playing with their hair and clothing, disappearing and reappearing at will. Some of the women sang alleluias to the spirits, as if they were symbols of rejoicing. The demons responded by spreading out their wings as if they were angels in ecstatic merriment. You could feel the breeze they caused when their wings flapped; it was a sudden chill, as if you had left a window open in the middle of winter.
The twins trudged with mouths and eyes wide open, commenting with a squeal or with a scream at everything they saw, or with a “Do it again!” if a goblin did a cabriole or a pirouette they fancied.
“Disgusting,” the mother said, every so often.
The little girl walked openmouthed too, but for all the awe in her gaze, and all of the terror in her heart, she remained silent.
The witches had profaned the tombs and, temporarily revived, a few corpses wandered around, wailing and grieving. Others remained inside their graves, barely showing their heads above the ground, pulling on the few hairs they had, completely baffled, wondering what awakened them before Judgment Day, and what was the spectacle they were being forced to watch.
One of the flying demons yanked an arm from one of these corpses and started using it as a club to pound on a woman.
“Harder!” the witches yelled as the woman received a hit on the buttocks.
A second fiend snatched a head and threw it against the same woman being beaten. Then a third grabbed the poor wench by her feet, raised her up in the air and let her fall inside a pond of water.
The little girl got scared and started crying.
“Do not cry,” the mother said coldly. “That only happens to the weak, to the ones that didn’t finalize their list of evil tasks on time, to those that had relinquished their allegiance to our master. These are our friends—” She pointed to the spirits flying around them, monsters with the faces of goats and lions, bodies full of scales, and bat-like wings ending in elongated spikes like the fangs of a tiger, “—they like us for what we are, not for what we’re supposed to be. As long as you remain true to your own self, they’ll never hurt you.”
At the top of the hill, at the very center of the cemetery, lay a small charnel house inside a fenced section surrounded by a circle of willows. It was from up there that the Lord of all Mayhem and Despair, the Little Master, presided over the chore of Sabbath. To there, as well, was where the witch and the three children headed.
Unearthed corpses dangled from every major branch of the trees surrounding the crypt, eerily lit from the inside, like flashing lanterns hanging from a Christmas tree. These were no ornaments, the witch explained to her daughter, but tools of which the demons availed to contain their essence in order to have
