The Hammer of Witches

Chapter 1 – The Wolf

Sarah knew they would come for her.

She saw a carriage in the distance, growing bigger. It was large with lanterns on the corners. This time Father Jacob had not come alone. He had already arrested dozens of women for witchcraft, but unlike Sarah, none of them were real witches. They had been burned, and she knew this was her fate.

She had not recognized the danger when Father Jacob had first come to Salem. He was the shepherd, and they were his flock. When he’d first preached that the devil walked among them in human form, Sarah felt the same vigilance as many of her neighbors. The church had declared war on these disciples of Satan. This was a call to action, and Sarah agreed with it.

She had always known about the vampires. Her mother had told her stories as a little girl that would make her heart race. They were not fairy tales. Jealous of man, who loved their heavenly father, Satan fashioned the vampire from a rib cracked of both man and wolf. His ambition was thwarted for they were as inanimate as clay. He could not create the soul, the true engine of life.

Yet jealously guarded in the pits of Hades were the souls of the most barbaric despots of human history. From these butchers, Satan gave life to a small army of vampires. He made no others. His rabid ‘children’ despised him and were glad to leave him. Some died, others were killed. Yet by ingesting the essence of human life, the most cunning essentially became immortal.

When Sarah was nineteen, she had first confronted the vampire. As she walked home from the fields with a small group of workers, she’d felt a sudden premonition of great danger.

She turned to watch a small girl that had fallen behind the others, tilting her head sideways to follow a butterfly with her big eyes. Strangely terrified, Sarah was about to call out, but it was too late. She saw a muscular flash of fur and teeth, and a great wolf had silently closed its jaws on the girl’s tiny throat. He held her for a moment as her arms went limp. His blue eyes lit on Sarah’s. There was finally a scream, but it was not the girl’s, nor hers. The child’s mother had turned, and she bolted violently toward the beast. The wolf calmly slid into the wheat fields.

It had been the most awful image of her life before recent events. She had kept vigil with the family in their time of mourning. Sarah knew the animal was not a natural creation of God. She knew the true wolf, hunting in packs, with a shining fear of man in its eyes. This enormous creature had looked at her with contempt.
That night, she fashioned a witch’s ball, which she hung from their window. On the edge of the road where the wolf had attacked, she hunted carefully until she found a single strand of fur. She used it to make an airborne potion, learned of her mother in the hopes that she would never use it. Burning it in a small cauldron, she walked through the fields, letting the wind take the scent of her flaming brew. For miles, the air became unbreathable to this one creature. Soon, the earth would burn under its paws.

But that evil had been small. Sarah could not have imagined the terror of this last year. She was now feared by her neighbors, and hadn’t seen her son in months. She had secreted him away, and didn’t dare to communicate.

Within seconds, Father Jacob would be at her door.

She remembered the other time he had visited. That morning, he had delivered his second sermon to the congregation. Far from denouncing vampires, he stood on the pulpit and claimed that witches were the wives of Satan and destroyers of humans. It was believed by every Christian leader of the day, he said.
This much was true. In Europe, millions had already been burned as witches.

“They are among us,” he exclaimed. “So great is the cunning of the devil that they are here in this very church. A neighbor, a parent or sibling, or perhaps she cleverly offers you her helping hand. Beware! In her heart is dark magic. She has submitted to the vile love of the devil, and she will destroy you.”

Simultaneously conceiving both the problem and the solution, Father Jacob lifted a large book into the air called “Malleus Maleficarum” – The Hammer of Witches. Like the bible, it was among the first books to be mass produced. It detailed how to seize witches, and use their lands to pay for the bailiffs, lawyers and judges. It described how to examine them -- in the nude -- without being afflicted, and how to properly execute them. Morally upright, the church refused to spill blood, and so the prescribed method of death was by burning.

Sitting in church, Sarah felt like her world had indeed been set on fire. She had cured her neighbor’s children; surely they would realize that this was not satanic work? She looked furtively around the church and saw people glaring at her with fear and distrust. Even her son was crying. Perhaps he too was now afraid of her.

They are going to kill me. I am going to die, she thought. As they scurried away from church like fugitives, her son reached for her hand.

Father Jacob had come that very evening. Her agony was inconceivable. She was prepared to beg, to abandon her ancestral farm, to do anything.

“May I come in?”

“Yes father.”

Grimly noticing the boy, legs dangling over a wooden bench, he turned to her and said tonelessly:
“You have been denounced by several parishioners as a witch.”

She bit her lip, feeling so betrayed that several tears stubbornly escaped. It was insanity! There was a cross over her hearth and a rosary over her bed. Her parents and husband were buried under the cross of Jesus. She had been to church that morning, and every other Sunday of her life. Father Jacob continued in the same emotionless tone.

“Two young girls who have been afflicted with evil spirits – witchcraft - came forward today. Bravely they have denounced three other heretic women. One has already confessed.”

Sarah’s tears dried up. She knew that there were no other witches in the village. There were none within a walk of many days. And yet the parishioners had turned on one another. Her urge was to speak the truth.
But the truth was now worthless, and would never matter again. Sarah realized that if he had meant to arrest her, he would not have come alone. She looked at him expectantly. He drew an object from his robes that looked like a decorative vase with unusual carvings.

He asked: “What is this? Do you recognize it?”

“Yes Father. It is a witch’s bottle…a spirit trap.”

“Indeed. And do you know how to use this?”

“Yes,” she said without reflecting, for that alone proved she was a witch.

He nodded, satisfied.

“Sarah,” he said, speaking her name for the first time, “if you can demonstrate to me that you are able to use this then I would like to hire you in the service of the church.”

She was dizzy with confusion. Hired by the church? She had no doubt that her alternative was death, yet she could not use a witch’s bottle unless there was a spirit to imprison.

“How do I prove it to you Father? Does an angry spirit malign you?”

“There will be one,” he stated calmly, turning towards the door. “Next Sunday you will be sent for in the morning. If you succeed, I will pay you well. If not…” He gave her boy a lingering look, and left.

And so, Sarah had done his bidding, and taken his dirty money. With it, she bribed the monks that hid her son. She had summoned her strength, and she had rebuffed him. As the carriage had stopped in her front yard she knew that Father Jacob would want his revenge.

Sarah tried in vain to calm her nerves. Her death was inevitable. Any one of the potions she drank would kill her eventually, and she absolutely must burn before that happened. It would be over soon. If God could only forgive what she had done in the service of the church, she would join her husband, mother and father in afterlife. In the first light of day, she saw the erect figure of Father Jacob, two other men, and….her heart plunged…she saw her son.