Spellbound

by Jackie D

  The woman crossed her arms and put her finger to her mouth. “Hmm…well, is there a particular subject you’re interested in? The Three Books of Occult Philosophy is one of our best sellers.”

  Raven watched her as she spoke. Her eyes were the color of sapphires. She had never seen anything as blue or as striking in a living person. She had a small dimple on her left cheek that only seemed to appear when she smiled fully. She seemed to have a habit of biting her lower lip when she was thinking, which Raven found both sexy and adorable.

  “Do any of those sound interesting?”

  Raven blinked, bringing herself back into the moment. She flashed back through the last several seconds, trying to remember the question. “I’m sorry, what?”

  She lifted one eyebrow and tilted her head. “I named five or six books that people with a passing curiosity seem to like. Did you not hear me?”

  “I’m Raven, Raven Dare.” She stuck out her hand.

  The woman hesitated but shook her hand anyway. “I’m Hazel Abbot.” She squinted. “Dare? That’s an interesting last name. Where is your family from?”

  “Virginia.”

  Hazel walked to the other wall of shelves and selected a book from the top. “Are you familiar with Virginia Dare, the first English child of Roanoke?”

  Raven was more than familiar. That was the source of her family curse, the very reason her bloodline was tied to the supernatural. Virginia had made a bargain with Morgan le Fay, the Queen of the Witches, centuries earlier to spare her life. In exchange, her bloodline would be compelled to traverse the globe for all time, driven to send evil entities back to their realm. That was why she was here and why the curse must end with her.

  Raven was about to explain that she was vaguely familiar with the story when the door opened, and four young women entered, loudly proclaiming that they needed a book of Wiccan spells. Hazel held Raven’s eyes for a breath. They were filled with questions and a bit of concern. But the girls were too loud to ignore, and Hazel finally turned her attention to them.

  Raven took the opportunity to leave, refusing to look back. She didn’t want to know if Hazel was watching her as questions still loomed in those bright sapphire eyes. She didn’t know what feelings had just been exchanged between them, but they felt all too comfortable, too much like home.

  Raven needed to get away before she accidently let her guard down and put herself and an unsuspecting Hazel in danger.

  * * *

  Hazel wanted to tell Raven to stop. She didn’t want her to leave. She wanted to talk to her, discover what caused the flash of pain in her dark eyes when she asked about her last name. Nevertheless, the flurry of giggles and questions from the young women kept her rooted in her spot. She handed them book after book and did her best to answer their obscure questions. This was a regular occurrence in Salem. People came from all over to dip their toe into the unknown, if only for a weekend. Moreover, it was her job to oblige as her livelihood depended on it.

  When it was all said and done, they had purchased an array of texts and a few candles, and asked if the famed graveyard was open after the sun went down. Hazel told them that it was not and that they should stay clear, leaving the dead to rest. However, as they spilled out onto the street and into the darkness, Hazel knew where they were going, and no amount of rational warning would prevent it.

  She walked to the window and flipped the sign to Closed. Still, she took the time to linger after turning off the main lights, hoping to see Raven somewhere on the street. She tamped down her disappointment after searching for a few moments and headed upstairs to her apartment. She was hungry and still needed to hem her torn dress.

  She put some leftovers into the microwave and went to her closet to retrieve her sewing machine. When she opened the closet door, she noticed a book she’d never seen before lying against the shelves. It was wrapped in an old, worn cloth. Her heart jumped into her throat, and she ran to the kitchen for her cell phone to call the police. Someone had been in her apartment. She was ready to dial when reasoning started to weave through her thoughts. The only entrance was through her front door unless someone wanted to scale the side of the building, and that would have been noticed by all the people milling about the city all day. Her door had been locked, and there was no other sign that anyone had been there. Maybe she had left the book in her closet, and it had merely fallen. She received shipments of books from all over the world. Perhaps this one had caught her interest, and she had brought it upstairs and forgotten about it.

  Hesitantly, she walked back to her closet and peeked around the corner as if she was a secret agent. The book had fallen open, asking to be inspected. She took a deep breath and rubbed her arms, which had abruptly covered in goose bumps. She dipped her head back around the corner, eyeing the text again. It’s just a book. It’s not like it can hurt you . She took a step closer and stopped. Then another step. The book was there, begging to be read. Finally, she sat down on the floor legs crossed and flipped it open.

  When she ran her fingers down the leather binding, they began to tingle as if she’d just run them over a candle. Warmth spread through her body. The pages were old and discolored, some torn, and the ink had all but disappeared from a few. She flipped it shut to see the cover. The emblem that stared back at her looked precisely like a necklace her grandmother had worn. She rushed to her jewelry box and retrieved it. She sat back down with the book and examined the intricacies of each. They were an exact match: a large knotted oak tree with a cross designed from an infinity symbol on the trunk.

  She opened the book, and her head began to swim. This was a family history of some kind, a history she’d never been privy to and that her mother had never bothered to divulge. She opened her phone and called her mother. It went straight to voice mail, which was no surprise. Her mother was on a trip with her best friend that she’d waited and saved a lifetime to take. They were exploring the world, visiting places like Africa, Australia, Greece, and Japan. She was three weeks into the three-month voyage, and Hazel had only heard from her once. They were very close, but her mother had warned that her cell reception was spotty, and she would call when she was able.

  Hazel felt a bit betrayed by her mother but then realized that she might not have any knowledge of the book either. After all, the book matched her grandmother’s jewelry, nothing she’d ever seen on her mother. She flipped it open and started from the beginning. The names of women she had never heard of filled the pages. She focused on one, Sarah Hutchinson Cooper, a great-aunt several times over, who had been a part of the Salem Witch Trials. Her fingers lingered over the name, feeling as if she owed her an apology for what she had been forced to endure.

  Hazel had walked the streets of Salem her entire life. She knew the stories, the history, the gory details, but she never knew that her flesh and blood had been part of the tragedy. She’d been told that her family didn’t settle here until ten years after the famed event, but she knew now this hadn’t been the truth. A bit of anger rumbled inside her stomach as she traced the words. As she touched each one, it illuminated slightly. Surprise and fear caused her to shut the book and shove it away.

  Her heart was pounding in her throat, and she felt a severe headache creeping toward her eyes. She wrapped the book back in the cloth and brought it to her kitchen table. She’d have to look at it later; it was all too much for one night. She needed to sit with this new information. After a long day, her mind was clearly playing tricks on her. She needed to eat, shower, and go to bed. She assured herself that this was all happenstance. The light playing tricks on her eyes, probably a symptom from an extraordinary headache she was experiencing. A perfectly reasonable explanation existed for all of this, and she’d figure it out in the morning. Things always looked better in the morning after a good night’s sleep.

  She lay in bed, doing her best to ignore everything that happened that day, feeling as if the book was calling to her. A small hum rang through every inch of her body, willing her to re
turn to the book. She did the only thing any reasonable person would do: she put her earbuds in and listened to her favorite audiobook, waiting for the familiarity of the words to lull her to sleep.

  * * *

  “Yo, what are you doing napping in front of everyone?” Sarah felt a tap on her calf.

  When she opened her eyes, she had to shield them from the blinding midday sun. She barely made out the backlit figure of a Puritan girl chomping like a cow on its cud, holding a strange device between her hands.

  “Wherefore am I not jailed?” Sarah’s voice was gravelly, as though she’d been asleep for a hundred years.

  “Britany and Ashley are working at the jail.” The girl rolled her eyes and scratched at her pink hair stashed under her crooked white bonnet. “We’re supposed to be walking around greeting tourists. Are you drunk or something?”

  Sarah gasped at the suggestion. “Not a drop of draught hath ever passed my lip.” She sat up slowly, still light-headed and unsteady. “But I am a bit bewildered.”

  “Why are you talking like that? We’re on break.”

  “I am Sarah Hutchinson Cooper. It pleases to make your acquaintance.” She held out her hand as she gingerly got to her feet, but the girl hadn’t noticed as her attention was fixed on the peculiar device. “That charm doth bewitch you.”

  “Sorry,” the girl said as she chewed. “I just switched over to a Samsung from an iPhone, and it’s a bitch getting used to it.”

  Sarah smiled, thoroughly confused at the explanation. “I feel as though I have waked but am yet in a dream,” she said, glancing at the parked cars lining the street. “Art thou real?” She reached out to touch the young woman’s sleeve.

  The girl eyed her with apparent judgment. “Look, I’m gonna get back to work before they fire my ass. My mom’s making me pay my spring tuition, so I need this corny-ass job. Be at the Meetinghouse by three forty-five. The trial starts at four.”

  Sarah was mortified. “Aye. ’Tis no dream then,” she whispered to herself. “They mean to clap me in shackles and send me to the gallows, yet. I must find Ayotunde.”

  She glanced around again, troubled by the unaccountable changes in the village. The people walking about were dressed in garish colors, children were loudly laughing as though possessed, and women’s hair hung free and flapped about in the early autumn breeze. How long had she been asleep? And how had she arrived outside on the bench from her jail cell?

  As she stepped off the curb, a strident wail startled her back toward the bench.

  “Get in the crosswalk before you get clipped, idiot,” shouted the man passing by.

  “So many shiny, horseless carriages. Heavenly Father,” she said, placing her hand over her heart pounding beneath her dress. “The devil hath indeed arrived in Salem.”

  She grasped fistfuls of her garment and lifted it so she could hurry off down the road. She wasn’t sure where she should go. Surely, the marshals would be at her homestead awaiting her return. She thought to run to Bridget Bishop’s house, but last she knew, Bridget was also jailed and marked for hanging. Had she been able to escape, too?

  As she wandered the streets, she searched the crowds for Ayotunde. She began to realize her incantation had worked. Sarah had clearly transcended time, but the question was, how far had she transcended? Her heart sank when she remembered Ayotunde saying she hadn’t the power to physically transcend with her.

  Seeing Ayotunde again had brought about memories of the most joyous time in her life, when she and her family’s house servant would work together on the homestead baking breads, sweeping the floors, and preparing meals for her father and older brothers. On summer mornings, she and Ayotunde would steal away into the fields to gather wildflowers. Sarah’s heart warmed at the memory of her fifteenth summer when she and Ayotunde, who was somewhere in her twenties, had wandered to the outskirts of her father’s land, talking about young Thomas Cooper’s interest in Sarah.

  “The boy want to marry you, Miss Sarah,” Ayotunde teased.

  Sarah giggled. “He hath not asked for my hand. And I would give it not even if he had.”

  “His father bring him around when he have business with yours,” Ayotunde said. “The boy surely be smitten with you.”

  The teasing made Sarah uncomfortable. She hadn’t liked to think of leaving her father’s home or Ayotunde. Times like those when they could enjoy a respite from the drudgery of domestic work and Bible study alone together near the woods were the happiest she could remember.

  Ayotunde had torn up a handful of purple-petal wildflowers and approached her. “Miss Sarah Hutchinson,” she began, mimicking a man’s voice. “I give these to you and ask you be my wife.”

  Sarah giggled again at Ayotunde’s sporting. She curtsied and sniffed the bouquet. “Their fragrance doth make my heart happy.”

  “And you be the fragrance of my heart, Miss Sarah.”

  It was not the first time they had exchanged such playful banter. As springtime had brought warmth to the colony, so had it warmed Sarah’s heart for her childhood companion. As the sun lowered in the afternoon sky in the summer of 1677, they had held each other in a lingering glance, Sarah studying Ayotunde’s bright smile rarely seen in the company of others, and her deep, black eyes full of the same taboo yearning Sarah had recently recognized in herself. Without regard for or fear of custom, piety, or social regulation, Sarah allowed her body to tilt forward ever so slightly until her lips met Ayotunde’s.

  Now, standing on the bustling streets of Salem, Sarah licked her lips as if she were experiencing the kiss again just as she’d felt it more than fifteen years ago.

  She opened her eyes, startled by the intensity of the feeling. With her senses on overload, she scanned her surroundings, trying to regain her composure. Effigies and emblems of witches were scattered about all over town. She looked down where she stood on the hardened ground and discovered the image of a white witch on a broomstick beneath her feet.

  Had Reverend Hale failed in his efforts to root out the evil they’d feared had taken a foothold in the village? Was she in danger of being apprehended to sign her name to his book by Old Scratch himself?

  Paralyzed by the thought, she stopped walking and picked up her head. The weathered old building before her housed a store called A Witch in Time. “What in God’s name…” After glancing around her to ensure the minister hadn’t been meandering, she approached the brown wooden door adorned with an herbal pentagram wreath. Afraid of what she might encounter when she knocked, she wondered if Ayotunde’s spell had mistakenly sent her to the nether regions of Hell where witches walked freely by day and soared through the air by night.

  Perhaps this was her fate after all, given what Ayotunde had revealed about her before casting the spell.

  When she raised her hand to knock, a teenage couple breezed past. “’Scuse us,” the boy said as they opened the door and went inside.

  Sarah scrunched her eyes shut, anticipating the shrieks of terror about to issue forth from within once the children were captured and forced to capitulate to whatever horrid end the hags inside had in store for them.

  After a long moment without screams, she opened her eyes and rallied her courage to enter. The jingle of a bell above her head heralded her entrance.

  “Hi,” the woman said from behind the register. “Let me know if you need help finding anything.”

  Sarah approached the counter. “Good morrow, Miss,” she said, keeping her voice small. “Pray, how comes it there be witches abounding? Have they stopped the hangings?”

  Hazel cracked up laughing. “You are the best actor I’ve ever seen.” She stepped out from behind the counter and surveyed Sarah from head to toe. “Your look is perfect. You’re all ratty and ragged looking, and your style of speech is top-notch. Did you take a class or something?”

  “Pray pardon?”

  “I hope you’re at the top of the pay scale, because if you told me you stepped right out of a time machine, I’d almost believe you.�
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  “Time machine? What is a machine?”

  Hazel laughed again. “C’mon, you’re killing me.”

  “Killing?” Sarah’s heart sank. “Have you too been condemned to the gallows?”

  Hazel’s smile shriveled. “You’re starting to freak me out a little. Can I help you find something in here?”

  “Miss, I am quite bewildered. Last night I was jailed on suspicion of witchcraft and saw my father’s house servant, my dear Ayotunde, after many a year. And I wake today free, knowing not where I am.”

  “You’re in Salem, Massachusetts,” Hazel said.

  “Aye, but the village appears not as it had before I took my slumber. How am I freed? Where is Ayotunde? And what are those shiny carriages that require not a horse for pulling?”

  “Cars?” Hazel said, hanging on the “s.”

  “Cars?”

  “The shiny carriages that move without horses.”

  “Aye,” Sarah said pensively. “’Tis a black art indeed.” Her thoughts suddenly shifted. “Reverend Hale. What hath become of him? Have the witches run him back to Beverly? I tremble to think on what else they would do to him.”

  * * *

  Hazel wasn’t sure if she should call the authorities and have this poor woman committed for overnight observation. Clearly, she was not acting.

  “Let’s start with names. I’m Hazel Abbot.” She extended her hand.

  “Sarah Hutchinson Cooper,” she said with a curtsy.

  Hazel choked on her own saliva. She glanced around at the other customers, unsure if someone was trying to punk her. She leaned closer, not wanting anyone to hear her. “Sarah Hutchinson? As in the accused witch who was mysteriously able to escape her fate during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials?”

  “It would appear that is I.”

  Hazel’s body flushed, and her hands grew clammy. She recognized the name from the book she had discovered. But there was no possible way they were one and the same. The Sarah Hutchinson in her book, her great-aunt, lived over three hundred years ago. It had to be a coincidence, but everything in her body told her that wasn’t at all the case.