Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (20 page)

“No,” said Emma. “Only Zelia can see her. That’s what Papa said—she’s just too sick. But why don’t we look—” and we knew what she was going to say. Why don’t we look in the mirror?

The cottage was surrounded by men from the tobacco fields, who had been summoned to form a posse. “Stay away from here, girls,” said Judge Beaufort. “That thief’s been sleeping in our cottage—can you believe his nerve? We found a blanket and some food, even some books. We think it may be old Sitgreaves, the one with that idiot girl. He hasn’t been seen for a while. But it looks like he slept here last night. This time, we’ll send him to the prison in Raleigh, and that girl of his should have gone to the asylum long ago. I’ll make sure of it, when I find her. But until we catch him, don’t you go walking out by yourselves, do you hear?”

We looked at each other in consternation, because—where was Mouse?

“Miss Gray,” said Rose. “Let’s go talk to Miss Gray.”

The roses had fallen from the La Reine and lay in a heap of pink petals on the grass. The garden seemed unusually still. Not even bees moved among the honeysuckle.

“Something’s not right,” said Emma.

“Nothing’s right today,” said Rose. “Who wants to knock?” No one volunteered, so she knocked with the brass frog, which was as polished as always. But no one answered. Instead, the door swung open. It had not been locked.

The Randolph house was empty. The sofa in the parlor, where we had eaten with a witch for the first time, the table in the laboratory where we had sat, learning our lessons, all were gone. Even the cats, which had only been partially there, were wholly absent.

“It was all here yesterday,” said Melody. “She was going to show us how to make dreams in an eggshell.”

“I found something,” said Rose. It was a note, in correct Spencerian script, propped on the mantel. It said:

Dear Emma, Rose, and Melody,

Please stop the milk. Don’t forget to practice, and don’t worry. Sophia and I will take care of each other.

Sincerely, Emily Gray

We looked at each other, and finally Melody said what we were all thinking—“How did she know?” Because it was evident: Miss Gray had known what would happen.

We went to Mrs. Balfour’s funeral. Even Melody sat in one of the back pews of the Episcopal Church, beside Hannah. The organist played “Lead, Kindly Light.” We ignored the sermon and stared at the back of Justina’s head, in the Balfour pew close to the chancel, and then at her face as she walked up the aisle behind the coffin. She was paler than we had ever seen her, as though she had become a statue of herself. In the churchyard, she watched her grandmother’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and when Reverend Hewes said “Dust to dust,” she opened her hand and dust fell down, into the grave, on top of the coffin. Then she placed her hand on her mouth and shrieked.

We found her in the privet grove that had been planted around the grave of Emmeline Beaufort, Beloved Wife and Mother. We didn’t know what to say.

Justina looked at us with the still, pale face of a statue. She had never looked so beautiful, so like a Balfour. “I shot her,” she said. “She tried to strangle me—she said she saw the Devil in my eyes. But I had Grandpa’s gun, I’d been carrying it in the pocket of my robe for weeks, and I shot her through the heart.” Then she half sat and half fell, at the same time, slowly, until she was sitting on the grass, leaning against the gravestone.

“But the masked man—” said Rose.

“And the silver—” said Emma.

“That was Zelia,” she said. She looked at her hands as though she did not know what to do with them. “Zelia scattered the silver before she went to get Dr. Hewes. She told me to lie still, and that there’d been a thief. But there was no thief—only me!”

We were silent, then Melody said, “She must have been going mad for a long time. You could have told us.”

We heard the privet shake. “Don’t you pester her no more,” said Zelia. “
Allons, ma fille.
Your duty here is done.” She helped Justina up and put a shawl around her shoulders, then led her away. But just before they left the privet grove, Zelia turned back to us and said, “And don’t you forget to stop the milk!”

The next day, as we hid behind an overgrown lilac in the Caldwells’ garden, Emma told us that Justina was gone. “To Italy, to find her father, I think. Papa saw her off on the train. Zelia was going with her.”

Melody said, “I warned you about eating with witches. First Mouse and then Justina. It’s as though they’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Italy’s not off the face of the earth,” said Emma.

“It might as well be,” said Rose. “And it’s all her fault—Miss Gray’s. I wish she’d never come to Ashton.”

Eventually, when it looked like the thief who had killed Mrs. Balfour, whether or not it was old Sitgreaves, would never be found, we were allowed into the cottage again. The first thing we did was look into the mirror—it was the only mirror we could look in, all three of us, without arousing suspicion. “Show us Justina,” we said, and we saw her on the deck of a ship, looking out over the Atlantic, with the wind blowing her hair like a golden flag. But when we said, “Show us Mouse and Miss Gray,” all we saw was a road through a forest of birches, with a low mist shifting and swirling beneath the light of a pale sun.

We practiced, at first. But Emma’s mother decided it was time for her to come out into Ashton society, so she spent hours having dresses made and choosing cakes. Emma said that the latter made up, in chocolate, for the boredom of the former. And Melody said that she had to prepare for school, although she spent most of her time scribbling on bits of paper that she would not show us. Rose practiced the longest, and for the rest of that summer she could fly out of her bedroom window, which she did whenever she was sent to her room for punishment. But eventually we could no longer talk to birds, or turn gold into pebbles, or see the Battle of Waterloo in a mirror. We realized that we would never be witches. So the next summer, we became detectives.

In traditional fairy tales—at least as we know them today—witches are invariably evil and they are usually old and ugly. Since we know those stories so well, this anthology intentionally avoids stories based closely on fairy tales. There are, however, two exceptions. One is Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle.” This, from talented newcomer Cory Skerry, is the other. Both involve great cruelty. Skerry’s story offers some explanation as to how his “witch” was, perhaps, driven to her savage psychopathic actions.

Those accused of witchcraft in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries could seldom be considered insane by modern standards, but their accusers—those who claimed to be bewitched or possessed—may well have suffered from mental disorders. Those who persecuted the alleged witches (and, similarly, conducted the Inquisition or killed those they considered heretics), were, in their day, considered pillars of their faith and community. From our perspective they were sadistic torturers and murderers. Like the woman labeled as a witch in this story, they believed they were doing the “right thing.”

The World Is Cruel, My Daughter

Cory Skerry

I still have their eyes in jars, on the shelf in the kitchen. Every morning the beads on my necklace clank together while I fry myself a fishy concoction of duck eggs and marsh tubers. Behind me, light pours in through the large hole in the side of my house and illuminates the staring eyes. They are three colors—blue, brown, and green—and it is the last of these that accuse me while the others stare cattywampus at the floor and ceiling.

I could shake the jar with the green eyes, so they look elsewhere, but I don’t.

When my daughter was one year old, I loved her for her smile. Anything could tempt her to joy—my own smile, the noises of cooking food, the proximity of the black kitten I gifted her upon her arrival.

What a fool I made of myself, contorting my face and making unladylike sounds. All I needed was another giggle and the game would go on. She couldn’t yet ask questions I couldn’t answer and was delighted by the information I volunteered. “Kitty,” “No, it’s hot,” and “Boo!” all brought smiles. Even when she disobeyed me, I never struck her. My disappointment was enough to bring her to tears and she would pour herself dry on my bosom before looking up once again with a hopeful smile. Did I forgive her?

Of course I did.

When my daughter was five, I loved her for her eyes. They were the impossible purplish hue of forget-me-nots. We don’t have them in the salt marsh where I built our tower. Her eyes told me what she would say before she said it. But sometimes she still surprised me.

I bit my tongue when she asked me why our house had no windows on the bottom floor. She still hadn’t conceived of a “door.” I knew she would ask some day, but then, on that cool April morning, I wasn’t prepared.

“The sea rages in the winter, poppet. We don’t have room for her to live with us, do we?”

My daughter giggled and returned to her innocence, but her question haunted me for years, until she was twelve and I loved her for her hair. It hung lustrous as silk, curled at the ends like pumpkin tendrils, glinted like sunlight caressing the sea.

This is when her questions grew children of their own, broods of what-ifs and how-comes. One day it was, “Why haven’t you any hair, Mother?” She stroked her own golden locks, which now swept her ankles, as she waited for an answer.

I let my fingers stray up over the gnarled mass of scars that capped my skull, most of it numb, some of it still tingling with ruined nerves if I pressed it, as if it yet burned. “It wasn’t as beautiful as yours,” I said. “I don’t need it.”

“Yes, but what did you do with it?” she persisted.

For an instant I regretted having given her a library. I’d selected each book with the intention of keeping her life beautiful. But in choosing only the sweetest tales, I’d inadvertently given her the idea that the world was a beautiful place, one she perhaps would be permitted to explore. Now was my best chance to make it clear to my daughter that this was not so.

“Someone else wanted my hair,” I lied, “so she carved it from my head while I slept.”

My daughter was horrified, but it didn’t stop the questions. “But didn’t you awaken?”

“She fed me an herb which forced me to sleep.” My daughter had seen me take tea for my aches and accepted this.

And oh, how I bitterly wished I had been unconscious! Sometimes I still wake from nightmares of fire, my robe tangled and spongy with sweat, surprised I’m not held in the flame with the same pitchfork that left the scars across my back. But my daughter only knew of the false deaths in tales in which the princess is revived by a kiss or justice is dealt to wicked stepmothers. Wicked stepmothers, but not witches. There were no witches in
my
daughter’s books.

She shook her head. Her sweet blue eyes watered. “But why? Why do something so terrible?”

“We are like the stories in your books,” I said. “But other people are not this way; they will value your hair as gold. They’ll steal it and leave pain in its place.”

To distract her from the books, which she would now doubt and scrutinize, I revealed the fourth floor in the tower.

Until she was eight, my daughter only had the run of the first two floors: the kitchen, scented with bunches of shallots, garlic, and fresh herbs; and the room above wherein the gleaming copper tub and waste chute took up one half and the garden and balcony took up the other. At ten, I allowed her into the library on the third floor, a circular room with an abundance of windows.

The fourth floor, the second-to-last, held a variety of musical instruments. We dusted and shined them. She learned to read a second time. The notes came to her easily, as I’d known they would, and she composed songs in her own spirited voice as often as she played classic tunes on the flute, lute, or harpsichord. The latter I had acquired at great expense, commissioning a man to assemble it inside the room before I stabbed him through the heart and buried his corpse under a driftwood log deep in the marsh. If you sit at the harpsichord and look out the window, you can see gulls and terns perched on the log as you play.

By the time my daughter was fifteen, I loved her for her talents and wit. She sang melodies on the spot, making gentle fun of household tasks or the elderly cat’s occasional accidents on the kitchen flagstones. Neither of us begrudged Utney his infirmity; he’d been a loyal companion.

He was her fateful introduction to death.

Over the course of fifteen years, the estuary had migrated to the north, leaving the southern marsh more shallow. At the height of summer, our tower now had toes of exposed mud. It was during this summer heat that my daughter’s heart was broken.

She put down a dish of broth for the cat, but Utney stayed curled by the fire. Her delicate fingers trailed along his neck, but he didn’t lift his head to scratch his chin against her nails.

I held my sobbing daughter, my hands tangled in her golden hair, which now trailed behind her on the floor if she didn’t bind it up in loops or braids.

Some children ask for a new pet when the old one passes on, but to my daughter, her cat was a fixture of the world, as irreplaceable as a piece of the tower. If the roof were torn off in a storm, we’d have no roof—likewise, there were no cats in our vegetable garden, no cats come up on our fishing lines, no cats in the bird traps I hung out of the music room windows.

He was the only cat in the world and he was dead.

I’d never seen her blue eyes so raw. They shone with an arterial flow of tears, bruised where blood vessels had burst. I was almost afraid the grief would kill her.

I boiled the carcass and made her a necklace of Utney’s bones, whispering that his spirit still lurked there and would love her for all her days. She wore the gift gratefully, but it only quieted her sorrow. In silence, his death still burned her the way my nightmares burned me.

And so I climbed out the window in the night and trudged through four miles of dense sawgrass, marsh bramble, and sucking, salty mud.