two later, and a few never came back at all. More precisely, two never came back, but two is enough for it to seem like it might become a habit and, with repetition, a rule. The populace gave the situation some thought and resolved to act decisively.
Even before the two boys’ disappearance, the family of one of them took their son firmly in hand. They waited just long enough for him to put the money he had earned at the widow’s down on the table and then interrogated him, reproaching him for doing day-work for strangers, and especially for a woman who was a stranger.
‘How is she a stranger?’ the youth defended himself. ‘She’s from our village.’
‘Even so, she’s a stranger to us, and, besides, there’s plenty of work for you to do at home!’ His loved ones persisted, attacking him with the subject of his betrothed, who, they said, was in tears from feeling abandoned and in doubt. And then they told him about the various rumours and promised to do everything they could to protect him.
‘Protect me from whom?’
‘From her! So nothing bad happens to you, too – so you don’t, for example, eat those deadman mushrooms.’
The other boy, too, felt the pressure of his relatives, who even threatened to register him with the provincial army and arrange it so he was conscripted as ‘every fifth or third son’.
But clearly the families’ intervention was too late. The hag’s spell had already seeped into the boys’ brains and entirely corrupted them. They came home less and less and then vanished into thin air. One of them, apparently, later sent a letter from somewhere, which the priest read to the family (what, the hag even taught them to write?), and that, basically, was everything that spread among the populace – and stories spread among the populace like mushrooms in the undergrowth.
‘There must be some perverted reason why she didn’t remarry after her husband’s death and instead squeezed the life juices out of her young helpers, who rather than work at home preferred to till her fields, which, amazingly, haven’t suffered any terrible catastrophe, unlike the fields of us honest villagers. People say she can predict the weather and even command it …’ Thus the populace aired their thoughts, first refuting and then justifying them again.
‘But astrologers predict the weather, too …’
‘Sure, but they’re educated; she isn’t.’
‘That’s not entirely true. There was a preacher here who taught her how to read and write; he was even ready to marry her …’
‘So the preacher is why she poisoned her husband?’
‘No, no. The preacher came later, after her husband was well and truly buried, if not rotting in his grave like those black deadman …’
‘Trumpets?’
‘Those deadman trumpets, which trump even from the grave?’
‘But maybe it wasn’t them.’
‘Not the trumpets? Not the preacher? Not her own hand which did the poor fellow in?’
‘But the miller, that greedy miser, wasn’t a poor fellow; he was an oaf!’
‘Yes, he was an oaf. But in the end he was a poor bastard who lived with a witch and didn’t realize it until it was too late.’
‘And later, too, when he was already in his grave, she used witchery to get whatever she wanted. If she needed rain, it rained. If she wished ill on a neighbour, his cow got sick and died. That big storm – you remember that storm, which blew off half our roofs and there was lightning everywhere and five people were killed? – well, it was obliging enough to skirt around her fields and property.’
‘That preacher of hers – and we let him give us communion, too, back then, since back then we took communion from every priest who came around – well, people say he’d have married her if he hadn’t gone off to Württemberg because the authorities were chasing him and the other preachers out of the province. So why didn’t she go with him?’
‘If he had taken that witch with him to the German lands, she would have met the same fate she can expect here with us. All we Christian peoples have at least one thing in common that sets us apart from the Turks and the Jews – we know how to detect witches and have methods for getting rid of them. Which is why, after all these disasters from the Evil One, we had to take action and denounce her.’
At the castle, the criminal judge had the screws put on her in a dank dungeon so that, with the help of a well-tested method based on pincers for peeling off fingernails and a device for breaking and crushing limbs, she would spit out the truth and confess to the commission in attendance that the devil himself had minted the coins with which she paid her young workers and that it was not just labour she extracted from the youths but also, by means of spells, their life force and will – so that once and for all they could get rid of the hag and be free of the shackles of her inhuman power.
‘What happened to her husband and to those two boys will happen to you, too,’ parents warned their sons. ‘One night you’ll go to bed and close your eyes and never open them again, because the moment you shut your eyelids, her hornèd companion will come to your bed and suck your soul out through your guts or through your head and then dance off with it to his dark kingdom. Your heart and any other useful organs, even your brain, she will boil up and mix in with those trumpets fried in pig’s fat; then she’ll go on poisoning honest men and leeching them to herself so they can’t resist, can’t escape from beneath her wings – yes, yes, her wings – for we know what the old hag binds them with. No normal man would desire her unless he was drunk. Nobody wants an old woman for that sort of thing. Old women are good for doing the cooking and watching the children – the grandchildren, to be precise – and for certain kinds of farm work and craftwork, but for the things we healthy men so badly want, old women are no good. We know this because we’re strong and healthy, since everyone knows that men don’t age as fast as women. We men aren’t old until we’re very old, while women get old even when they think they’re still young.’
‘That’s true. We women know this, both those of us who are young and those who are her age or older. Only we know that we’re old, while she lives as if she’s young, as if she wasn’t one of us. And she isn’t!’
‘But even though she’s nearly forty, she has hardly any grey hair – now, why is that?’
‘It’s because of dyes made from stones and plants,’ she stammered in the dungeon as they popped the joints in her arms.
‘And why doesn’t she have bristles on her chin like we do? Why does her skin look so young?’
‘It’s because of creams made from herbs,’ she cried out in the dungeon.
‘Sure, herbs – zeli – but if you stir the word a little, the way she stirs those potions of hers, you get …’
‘Oooh! Nothing good, nothing good at all! Pure evil – zlo!’
During the interrogation, a physician, using a kind of metal horn, examined her for traces of the devil’s seed; he determined that, in his expert view, such traces did exist in a certain greenish, odoriferous mucus. Another piece of important evidence was the birthmark below her right breast. Such a mark is a third nipple, by which the devil imbibes the witch’s milk, which is full of the potions witches pour into themselves so they can suckle innocent young boys and bewitched men. The commission – which besides the judge also included the physician and other honest men from the district – ruled that they had all the evidence they needed to show that the woman was the devil’s whore and that everything she had done was with the sole
purpose of leading faithful Christians into sin and bringing harm to the community, even if that meant harnessing nature with the devil’s help and turning its forces against them.
The witch was given one last chance to prove her innocence. They hung a stone cross around the neck of the shattered, broken woman and pushed her off a bridge into the river, following the common-sense logic that, if she