An excerpt from the Journals of Sir Herne Stanton of Lower Sothcotshire (England). Adapted & Translated from the New Latin by Hector Stanton, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1810.

Page 43

They burned the witch at noon.

I had supposed an event of such gruesome nature would be held at sunset, or even the traditional witching hour of midnight, but Padre Crudele, cleric to my kind hosts, la famiglia di Reserva-Caratare, tells me that when one wishes to dispatch a strega, or any other the consort of the Devil, noon is, by far, the safest hour in which to do so.

While il signore’s peasants built the pyre, Padre Crudele, ever helpful, informed me that the woman to be burned that day stood accused as the servant of a powerful vampire.

"Accused," said I, shocked, as any man of science would be in the face of such seeming summary judgment. "Had she no trial? Have you no scientific proof of her guilt?

"What if the woman is innocent?"

The cleric shrugged his shoulders in an annoying manner he seemed to have borrowed from his Gallic cousins, and said, "If she is innocent, she will not burn. God will save her."

God. I almost laughed at that, but stifled the impulse knowing such disrespectful sentiments would offend my hosts, who are—from il signore Antonio, himself, to the very least of his mud-grubbing peons—unfailingly devout.

Rene, a philosophe I met while in Paris told me that we stand upon the threshold of an Age of Reason; an age in which the words of Socrates and Plato will live again, and the Reason which ruled their times will perfume the very air we breathe, saturating our bodies and souls with a strength of purpose and purity of thought which, in later years, shall shine as the very Apex of human history.

As I looked out over the angry, louse-ridden crowd, their faces alight with brutish fancies of blood and flames, I thought, "From this shall spring an Age of Reason? From this tainted muck? From this salted mire?"

The ghastly spectacle of the hungry mob made mockery of the majestic predictions of the philosophe. Such grandiloquent talk was ether, shimmering and insubstantial—Apotheosis to the empirical evidence standing before me. The fine dream of an Age of Reason which had, all unbeknownst to me, taken root in my heart, withered before the mob, like a tender shoot beneath the summer sun. I turned my face away, disgusted by the barbarity of the spectacle.

Padre Crudele, sensing my disgust said, "If she is innocent, and prays to God, He will save her."

The woman they tied to the stake looked innocent. Despite the depredations of her jailers, and the filth of the basement in which she’d been held, she looked clean, pure. She cried as they tied her to the stake, but did not raise her face to the skies to plead for divine mercy.

Instead, she kept her head down so that her golden hair made a curtain around her face. A slight breeze lifted it and I saw that she was speaking. I squinted my eyes and strained my intellect to puzzle out the words her perfect lips were shaping, and was quite surprised to see that it seemed to be English.

"Ashes, ashes …" Her lips formed the words as the tears ran down her face.

I wondered what she meant by that. At the time, I could only recall the rhyme my nurse sang to me whilst I was still in swaddling-clothes. "Ashes, ashes, we all fall down."

What could she have meant by that? Was it, perchance, a spell of some sort? Was the woman truly a strega?

I did not have time to observe more closely because, once the fire began to bite into her tender flesh, she clamped her mouth shut and opened it only once more. The flames engulfed her dress, her hair, her skin and, for one small instant, she seemed a woman made not of flesh, but of fire. Only her face was untouched.

Her beautiful mouth opened onto a scream, a garbled plea, at last, for divine mercy. I thought the first word she said was "Jean".

Was she pleading with Jean the Baptist, or with St. John to intercede on her behalf in Heaven? The second word even sounded, methinks, like an injunction to God, himself. Whatever the words, her entreaties came too late, for, shortly thereafter, she succumbed to the fire and her body shriveled to a blackened corpse.

Again, I turned my face away in disgust only to find Padre Crudele watching me with a slight smile upon his countenance. He gestured to the still-burning pyre. "You see, my dear man of science, she was not innocent, else she would not have burned."

"Like the laws of Heaven, the burden of proof is on our side.

"Now," he said, shaking off the weight of the young woman’s death with another odd shrug. "I pray you, Excuse me. I’ve a goodly amount of Holy Water to bless before sunset…"