The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

by Alexandra Bracken

  But I had only gotten a quick look at the picture in Granddad Redding’s study. This guy…It could be Uncle Barnabas. It had to be.

  “If he’s him,” I began, turning to look at Nell, “who are you?”

  She opened her mouth, but Barnabas was faster. “Nell is my daughter. She and I…recently became acquainted after her mother’s sad passing.”

  I was glad I was looking at Nell when he said that. The smug expression on her face seemed to dissolve into one of pure pain. It vanished just as fast, but it had been there.

  Of course she was upset. She lost her mom. What was worse than that? I hadn’t seen my mom in three days and I missed her—I couldn’t imagine never seeing her again.

  Toad began to weave between her feet, as if trying to soothe her.

  “All right,” I said, “but what am I doing here?”

  Uncle Barnabas nodded in Nell’s direction, and a strange looked passed between them. Some kind of silent communication. Without a word, she stood and went toward the beds, hopping up on one to pull down the large Redding family tree.

  “With stories like these, it’s best to start at the very beginning,” Uncle Barnabas said. “Tell me, Prosperity, what do you know about the family curse?”

  “I know that she was born in 1945, despises puppies, and enjoys trying to kill her grandchildren with daggers in dungeons.”

  Uncle Barnabas stared long enough that I started thinking he’d inherited Grandmother’s No Laughing Unless It’s at Other People’s Pain gene.

  Then his face broke out into a huge grin. He laughed from deep in his belly, shaking the couch. Beside him Nell just crossed her arms and stared at the wall.

  “Nice of you to take this seriously,” she muttered. “But what did I expect? You are a Redding.”

  “Got your old man’s sense of humor, I see,” Uncle Barnabas said, snorting.

  And pretty much nothing else, I thought, feeling a little miserable. As if to echo the thought, the breeze from the window rattled the bottles on the shelf, making them chatter and shiver. I crossed my arms over my chest, struggling to get the words out. “My mom and dad—they don’t know where I am! They don’t know what happened!”

  You have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now!

  I couldn’t even do that. I pressed my face to my hands, ignoring the hot stinging in my eyes. They were going to be so mad at me. If anything happened to Prue…I would never forgive myself.

  Uncle Barnabas put a warm, comforting hand on my shoulder.

  “They’re aware you’re with me and that you’re safe,” he said.

  “You don’t know that,” I said, pulling back and trying to stand. “I don’t know you, you don’t know me—I don’t even know if anything you’re saying is the truth!”

  “You don’t remember me, Prosperity, but I remember you. Even when you were a baby, I’d come to Redhood to catch a glimpse of you from afar. The last time I did it was a few days before Christmas when you were five.” He spoke softly, his hand tightening on my shoulder. “I brought your sister a set of books and you a paint set. I had to leave them outside, because I was too nervous to try coming in, and, anyway, you were all at the hospital with your sister.”

  “That was you?” I asked, shocked. I had found the paint set a few years later while rummaging through a supply closet. There had still been a large red-and-green ribbon on it, along with a gift tag with my name. For whatever reason, maybe knowing it had come from Dad’s brother, my parents had kept it instead of tossing it like I’m sure Grandmonster would have wanted.

  Uncle Barnabas nodded, smiling gently. He turned toward the girl. “Cor—Nell, would you be so kind as to get the letter?”

  She stared at him for a moment, confused. Toad had wandered off and nestled in one of the open armoire drawers, chewing idly on the herbs growing there. At that, he let out a loud purr, his tail pointing repeatedly at the desk. It was only then, when Toad’s wings started fluttering and Uncle Barnabas had no reaction to it, that I remembered what Nell said about normal people not being able to see through…what did she call them? Glamours?

  So—that made CatBat a secret, I guessed. When the man looked at him, I wondered if he saw only a tiny black cat.

  Nell let out a small noise in her throat and nodded, venturing over to the desk. She dug through the rolled-up scrolls, the books with their warped pages, until she pulled out an envelope and retrieved a letter inside. When she thrust it at my face, she didn’t even meet my eyes.

  Prosper, the letter began. With a jolt that zipped straight from my heart to my brain, I recognized my dad’s handwriting. The neat, usually uniform letters were messy, as if he’d written this quickly.

  I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but your grandmother refuses to see reason. Your mother and I have taken precautions to ensure that you or Prue, whoever it might be, will be safely out of her reach. Please be good for your uncle Barnabas, and listen to what he tells you. As hard as it will be to believe, it’s all the truth. He will do everything in his power to see that you get the help you need. Until then, it’s too dangerous for us to come to you, or for you to come to us. Do not call us. Do not e-mail. Do not tell anyone your name. Be patient. Be brave.

  And then he’d signed it…with his business signature. Not a Love, Dad. It could be that he wanted to prove, in case I had doubts, that it was really him. I traced my finger over the loops of Percy Redding and wondered why it felt like my heart was pumping ice.

  “Why…why did he send a letter?” I asked. “Why didn’t he tell me any of this in person, or call, or e-mail?”

  “Because of your grandmother,” Uncle Barnabas said. “Because he knew that your grandmother was now watching the lot of you, and had men assigned to monitor your e-mails and phones. I don’t have either, for my own safety and now yours. This was the only way.”

  All of that, unfortunately, sounded plausible. When you had more money than Bill Gates and plenty of time on your hands, you could achieve a whole new level of meddling. My grandmother had bypassed evil and gone straight for supervillain.

  Nell had begun pacing but stopped suddenly, cutting off whatever I was about to say next. “Can you just skip all this babying and get to the part where you tell him he has an ancient demon trapped inside him?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, like the way you’re a witch? Come on. Be real.”

  But even as the words left my mouth, I remembered how hard those invisible fists had shoved and punched at me. And when a faint crackle of light seemed to travel over Nell’s skin and hair, her eyes turning to slits, I sat as far back into the couch as I could.

  She was a witch.

  Oh, crap.

  “Prosperity—”

  “Call me Prosper,” I begged. “Please.”

  “All right, Prosper it is.” My uncle cleared his throat explosively. “What I’m about to tell you may be shocking, too fantastical to be believed, but you have to hear me out.”

  Listening. I could do that. The curtains fluttered around us as a breeze moved in, carrying with it a scattering of bloodred leaves. I smelled the faint cinnamon again, the smoky scent of autumn, and forced myself not to think of anything or anyone I’d left behind in Redhood.

  “Your—our family, I mean,” Barnabas said, glancing at the family tree. “We’ve had dealings with a devil.”

  Yeah, and what else was new? “I know,” I said, holding up my bandaged arm. “Her name is Catherine Westbrook-Redding.”

  But this time, Uncle Barnabas didn’t laugh. “I wish I were joking, but believe this if nothing else—the Redding family’s fortunes in America were no accident. All of this wealth and power and influence came to us because Honor Redding made a contract with a demon—a fiend, as they’re really called—in 1693.”

  “Oooookay,” I said, suddenly thinking of the gallery of stalker photos and articles on the attic’s wall. The engravings. “A fiend.”

  “This kind of fiend is known as a malefactor. They d
raw up contracts with humans to give them whatever their heart desires. In exchange, upon their death, the malefactor will come to claim their soul.” Uncle Barnabas paused, but I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be dramatic, or just making sure my brain had time to catch up. I could barely hear him over the thump, thump, thump of my heart. The scratching of the racks of drying herbs against the wall. “Honor Redding leveraged the souls of his family and every settler in Redhood for a guarantee that the Reddings’ fortunes would not fail.”

  Now that it was autumn, I knew to expect night to sweep in earlier, coating the room. In the silence that followed, it seemed to arrive all at once. With the dark wood all around us, the cramped nooks and crannies, it started to feel less like an attic and more like a coffin. And we were just waiting for someone to close the lid over us.

  Nell snapped her fingers, and the three lamps in the room turned on. It startled me out of my thoughts. I blinked.

  “Like I said, it’s a bit of a shock, but…” Uncle Barnabas’s gaze flickered between his bony hands and my face. “Do you need something for your nerves? Tea? I have a little brandy—”

  “I’m twelve,” I reminded him.

  “Right, well…right…”

  Nell began to roll up the family tree. I watched the names of my family disappear branch by branch, until, finally, my name slipped by with the rest of them.

  “It’s true,” she said. “It sounds absurd because it is absurd. I don’t think anyone ever gave you the full story. Like the Bellegraves. They sound familiar?”

  Uncle Barnabas’s lips went white as he pressed them together. “Ah. The Bellegraves.”

  “I do know about them,” I said. “We had a unit on Redhood’s history last year. They were the big family that followed the Reddings from England and settled Redhood with them back in 1687.”

  Uncle Barnabas nodded, obviously pleased. “The families were great rivals. Honor Redding tried everything he could to destroy Daniel Bellegrave—sabotaging his crops, spreading malicious rumors about him, stealing correspondence. And still, the Bellegraves flourished. Back then, you know, the town wasn’t called Redhood at all.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying not to give him a “duh” look. I’d only had to hear about this every day of my life since birth. “It was called South Port.”

  “Right. Once the Bellegraves were finally out of the picture, Honor renamed the town in…well, his honor.”

  “And he drove them out by making a pact with a demon?” I said, not even bothering to hide how stupid I thought that sounded.

  “A fiend,” Nell corrected.

  “Okay, sure, a fiend,” I said, trying to ignore the way that word tasted like ash on my tongue. “So what does this have to do with me and Prue?”

  “I’m getting there,” Barnabas said, standing. He made his way over to the corner functioning as the kitchen and began rummaging around in the boxes of tea. He kept me waiting until he had a mug of water spinning around in the microwave. “In order to outmaneuver the Bellegraves,” he called finally, “Honor used a very ancient kind of magic, one he’d only heard about in the stories passed down in his family for centuries. He summoned a malefactor.”

  When Uncle Barnabas came back toward us, it was with one of the computer printouts that had been hanging over the bed alongside the newspaper clippings.

  I took it with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, almost afraid to look. Three men and a woman were gathered around a fire, their hands thrown in the air—toward the winged, split-tongued devil floating above them in the cloud of smoke.

  “Back then, anything that frightened the colonists was labeled witchcraft and devilry. They were never quite able to understand that the Devil—religion, for that matter—has nothing to do with this. Magic has been around for much longer than any of us could know, and flows from a place that exists between ours and whatever might lie beyond.”

  “Like…the Internet?”

  Uncle Barnabas choked on his tea, coughing. “More like another world or dimension. The souls sent there obviously do not return, and fiends are forbidden to talk about their home. So there are no first-person accounts to give us a sure answer.”

  Nell jumped in here. “There are four worlds—four realms—in all. The human world at the top”—she held out a hand, then slid her other hand beneath it—“the fourth realm. The fiend world is the third realm”—she moved her hand again, creating another layer—“the world of ghosts—specters—is the second realm. The first realm is the realm of Ancients, the mysterious race of creatures that created magic and balanced the world when it was very young and full of darkness.”

  “So they live in Earth’s crust, or something?”

  “No!” she said, rolling her eyes. “Dimensions, Prosper. Worlds that exist layered beneath ours.”

  Uncle B waved a hand between us, interrupting the conversation. “No one knows who or what the Ancients are. Ancient civilizations believed them to be gods, but their kind no longer leave their realm. The only thing we know for certain is that they were the first occupants of this world, and to ensure life would survive, they created a new world for the fiends who were ravaging ours. Humans and fiends cannot coexist without destroying the balance between the realms and causing each world to collapse in on itself.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said. My brain felt like mush. “That’s really cool and all, but can we go back to the malefactor thing? Why are they in our world if they’re fiends or whatever?”

  “When an evil human dies,” Uncle Barnabas began, “their spirit—their shade—is guided down to the realm of specters. Unless, of course, they formed a contract with a malefactor during their life. Then, upon their death, their shade goes to the fiend realm and serves the monsters there in eternal servitude.”

  “There are hundreds of different fiends,” Nell said, “but malefactors are the only kind of fiend that can make the contracts.”

  “What are the contracts for?” I asked, not liking where this was going. This was unbelievable…but then, so was everything that had happened in the dungeon.

  “I’ve heard of different contracts requiring different things, but I know the one Honor Redding signed with Alastor required eternal servitude for the entire family in exchange for the lasting success of the Reddings and an influx of wealth,” Uncle Barnabas said. “In a way, you could say that they punish people by granting their wishes.”

  Nell jumped in. “It’s like a fairy godmother with a catch. Or a genie with a price tag. Their real job is to collect souls to serve the fiends in their world. The malefactors influence other humans through magic, plant ideas, carry sickness—that kind of stuff. After the contract is signed, they not only get to come back for the shades, but they get to feed off the misery of the signer’s victims.”

  Of course it had been Honor. The image of perfection, ingenuity, bravery, and resilience that had been shoved in our faces all of our lives. He was the standard we were supposed to surpass, or, at the very least meet. He was everything to my family, the whole reason they’d survived. I should have known no one could ever be that uncompromisingly perfect.

  He got desperate. He didn’t want to fail. If anything, it made him feel like an actual human, not just the grimacing, nearly colorless portrait hanging in the entryway of the Cottage.

  Suddenly I had a very clear picture of where this story was headed. “What…what happened to the Bellegraves?”

  “Half were killed in the fever that swept through the colony that first winter,” Uncle Barnabas said, with a sharp tone. “The other half starved to death when their crops turned to ash one night.”

  “Jeez.” It wasn’t like I didn’t know my family wasn’t going to win a gold medal for kindness, but that was seriously rotten. “But I still don’t get why I’m here or what happened last night.”

  “I already told you—” Nell began, but Uncle Barnabas silenced her with a wave.

  “Almost there.” He took a long sip of his tea. “You know what happened here in Sa
lem, of course?”

  “Of course! Birthplace of the National Guard!”

  Uncle Barnabas cocked his head to the side, giving me an unamused look. Man. Tough crowd.

  “Well, it’s true,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “Yes, okay, I know about the Witch Trials. I also know they were also held in Danvers, Ipswich, and Andover, and not just Salem Town,” I added, when it looked like Nell was about to correct me.

  “For many years,” Uncle Barnabas continued, still looking unhappy, “the Reddings benefited from their partnership with the malefactor, and there were no problems. Suspicions, though…those ran rampant. When those young girls in Salem began pointing fingers and accusing everyone around them of consorting with the Devil, you can imagine how uncomfortable it made those using witchcraft. And then the witch-hunt fever began to spread through all of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and things took a turn for the worse.”

  I stared at the WITCH’S BREW logo on his mug, and the grinning witch there. Probably wouldn’t have been so happy in the 1690s, swinging from a tree with a noose around her neck.

  “The Reddings, who had never lost a crop, never seen their numbers reduced to nothing by fever, or even suffered bloody conflict with the Native Americans…they, more than any other family, felt the suspicions rise around them like unwanted shadows.” Uncle Barnabas shook his head. “They did what they thought they had to do to avoid being caught, accused, and killed. They broke the contract.”

  It turns out that breaking a contract with a malefactor isn’t as simple as tearing up a sheet of paper or snapping your fingers. You couldn’t even bribe the fiend-demon-whatever into leaving either. You had to engage the services of an actual witch.

  “Dangerous business, hiring a real witch during those times,” Uncle Barnabas said, leaning back against the couch. It sounded like he was half-impressed by Honor Redding’s cunning. “But they found the real deal in Goodwife Prufrock. She gave them the casting they needed to trap the malefactor in a human body.”