Blood and Blasphemy by Gerri R. Gray

Author:Gerri R. Gray [Gray, Gerri R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Occult, Short Stories (Various Authors)
ISBN: 9781948318853
Amazon: 1948318857
Publisher: HellBound Books Publishing
Published: 2019-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

VICIOUS SCISSORS

By Carlton Herzog

I was never one to believe in ghosts or the supernatural. Indeed, I was astounded at the gullibility of people, who, on the one hand, relied heavily on science in their day to day experience, while on the other, subscribed to the misguided belief that we live in a demon haunted world, wherein all manner of unseen things walk parallel to the path of the living.

I was never sure if such nonsense originated in the fear of the unknown, escape from boredom, or pure ignorance. To my mind, science adequately explained the nature of reality, and did not, therefore, require unsolicited assistance from the lunatic fringe. The same fringe that believes aliens travel hundreds of light years just to give Cletus the slack-jawed yokel a colonoscopy above a deserted country road.

My attitude underwent a profound transformation soon after I received a bequest from my great aunt, Clarissa Leeds, a rather eccentric old coot who claimed to be both a witch and a medium. She had, as it were, conferred upon me a family heirloom some four hundred years old. It consisted of an engraved wooden box containing a holy relic in the form of ancient shears. The Roman Catholic Church referred to them as the Maleficarum Placenta Forceps, or the Scissors of Witches.

Mind you I had never met the woman. I could not understand why she gave the box to me rather than any of her other great nieces and nephews. Then again, I’m told she walked around naked, chattering dentures in hand while aping a British accent in the vein of Elizabeth I, Margaret Thatcher, and Monty Python’s Mrs. Dim. She’s the kind of relative that makes you question your bloodline, wondering if your kid will turn out to be a failed entertainer or a loony in a straightjacket.

When you’re a tenured Professor of Linguistics, you necessarily worry about unwanted genetic drift in your bloodline, since the sudden appearance of a drooling doodle-brain would seriously compromise your legacy as a scholar. The bequest magnified those concerns by its very strangeness. For example, the runes on the box were in a language that I had never seen, suggesting the carver was either in tune with the cosmically large or was a simpleton who had married the fine art of whittling with old-fashioned gibberish.

Whatever the case, the box itself was made of yew. Not a surprise, since witches of old revered yews as the home of unseen forces antithetical to Christianity. They believed that Eve supposedly plucked the forbidden fruit, not from an apple tree but from a yew; they also took comfort in the notion that Jesus was executed on a cross made of yew. Supposedly in medieval times, yews were planted in church graveyards because they were believed to inhale and feed on the putrefaction of decaying corpses and their vapors.

But it wasn’t the box that made me blink: It was those shears. I expected them to be dull, old and rusted, an object to be admired by an antiquarian with an itch to clean and polish old metal.

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