The Witch Haven

by Sasha Peyton Smith

  Lena told me this was a history class. I never cared much for history at school, but I am teetering on the edge of my chair with excitement for this lesson. If magic exists in the world, surely it has influenced every significant historical event. Were there magic Revolutionary War heroes? A Helen of Troy capable of destroying ships with her very soul? My mind is racing with the possibilities, but my excitement turns to confusion and disappointment when the instructor begins her lecture on witch-owned apothecaries in the seventeenth century. Maybe I just entered on a dull day. That would be my luck.

  Some girls take dutiful notes, and the sound of fountain pens dipped in ink scratching across parchment fills the classroom like a chorus of insects. Others, like me, stare at the chalk-covered board, our eyes glazed over.

  I’ve been sitting for forty-five minutes listening to the significance of witchcraft to women’s economic development in pre-industrial America when I can’t take it anymore.

  I shoot my hand up in the air. I never used to ask questions in school, but I’ve never had questions I cared this much about before.

  The other girls snap their heads toward me. The teacher raises her eyebrows. “Yes?”

  I ask the same question I asked Maxine. “Who else has magic? It can’t just be us.”

  “Magic is exceedingly rare,” she says with the patience of a primary school teacher.

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “I apologize, Miss Hallowell, but this is our lesson for the day. I encourage you to make use of the library. How lovely it is to have such an engaged pupil.”

  The rest of my questions die on my tongue. I’d forgotten how rotten it is to be made to feel stupid by a teacher. She’s right; it was rude to interrupt the lesson—it’s just I don’t remember the last time I was this excited to learn.

  After class, in the break before dinner, I go to the library, anxious to see what else I can find about magic in the books that reside there.

  I was numb inside before yesterday, but now a light of hope fills my chest, and I can’t contain it. I don’t want to. It’s nice, feeling this awake.

  Evening is falling fast, and the whole place is lit with candelabras like a cathedral. I wander up and down the aisles for what feels like forever but find only gothic novels and encyclopedias. There doesn’t seem to be a mention of magic anywhere in this library that feels steeped in it.

  There are a few other girls in the library, but none of them are reading; they’re just sitting, legs propped up on tables, chatting or playing cards. I follow them to dinner a while later, more confused than disappointed by my findings.

  It’ll be fine. I’ll be a better student. Today, I have magic running through my veins, and that is enough.

  At dinner Lena laughs a little at one of my jokes. Maxine shares a piece of cherry pie with me. I smile, and for the first time in four months, it doesn’t feel like I’m pretending.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning I bound out of bed and rush downstairs for breakfast. Over cinnamon buns and steaming tea, I jiggle my foot under the table, anxious to learn today’s new lessons. Lena meets me at the dining room door, and like yesterday we walk together to Practical Applications.

  Also like yesterday, Mrs. Roberts circles the room, doling out needles, buttons, and thread.

  Dutifully my classmates pull out their textbooks and flip to the same page we opened to yesterday. And Mrs. Roberts walks around, examining our progress with the needle-threading spell. Still Lena’s pronunciations are deemed sloppy. Still I’m told I lack necessary focus.

  “Would it be possible to take the books out of the classroom, so I could study after hours?” I ask Mrs. Roberts.

  She clicks her tongue “No, dear. Why strain yourself?”

  “Because I wish to improve.”

  “How… ambitious.” She shakes her head and continues on her way, ending our brief conversation.

  In Mrs. Li’s class Sara and Cora tell us more about the fire.

  It was awful.

  They lived.

  They feel awful they lived.

  The silver lining, they say, is that the horror they experienced has led to greater oversight and protection for factory employees. They heard there’s a whole department now devoted to monitoring the safety of garment workers. It seems strange to me that their friends were burned alive and they’re satisfied with a bureaucratic solution, but perhaps Sara’s and Cora’s hearts are less bitter than mine.

  The room is claustrophobic, and I don’t want to talk about my feelings.

  * * *

  The next class period is a marked improvement, in that at least it is a change of scenery. In one straight line, all eighteen of us follow Mrs. Vance, our history lecturer, through the gate and out onto the streets of Queens. Forest Hills is hardly bustling in the same way Manhattan is, but it is a relief to be outside, to crane my neck up and breathe in the sky.

  On the grassy north lawn of Forest Park, our class settles in a circle, fanning our black skirts out around us. Above, the fall sun blazes, and even though the air is cool, I’m soon sweating under my cape. The grass is covered in browning leaves, and I pick at their drying edges while Mrs. Vance lectures. I’ve always hated autumn, hated watching the earth die.

  Mrs. Vance picks up where she left off yesterday. Witches in early America used their powers to help run cottage businesses, but they were always careful not to be too successful, lest anyone get suspicious.

  I pick and pick and pick until my skirt is covered with leaves and sweat is snaking down my neck. Mrs. Vance doesn’t offer time for questions, and today I know better than to ask any.

  I go to dinner that night without much to say to anyone. I make a few jokes, hoping to shake my foul mood, but Lena doesn’t laugh, and Maxine sits with her other friends.

  The next morning, I rise with considerably less buoyancy than yesterday.

  Mrs. Roberts doesn’t hand out needles today but wooden stirring spoons.

  We spend an hour making them stir nothing in the air, swishing and twirling over our work benches.

  The next day we banish dust from a coffee table.

  The day after that we levitate a rug for dusting.

  “Do we ever learn to do more than keeping house?” I lean over and whisper to Lena on a Thursday afternoon.

  “That wouldn’t be very practical,” she replies with dense sarcasm. We share a knowing glance, but I don’t push the topic further.

  On Friday we make a rose bloom, and for a second it’s so beautiful, it takes my breath away, but then Mrs. Roberts launches into a story about a friend who uses this trick to ensure her flower arrangements are always perfect for her dinner parties, and I am bored once more.

  History isn’t any better.

  Mrs. Li’s class is worse.

  * * *

  On and on for two weeks, I go to class. I make small talk with Lena and Maxine, who seem to tolerate me well enough, and every day my excitement withers like a rose forced to bloom too soon.

  How foolish I was for thinking I was the recipient of something good. Or how selfish and ungrateful I am for being bored with magic in less than a month. Either way, I’m not acting like what Mrs. Carrey would call a “a girl of quality.” I have a warm bed to sleep in, more food than I could eat in a lifetime, and magic is real.

  How is it possible that I am still unsatisfied?

  At night, when I can’t sleep, I allow myself to stare up at the canopy of my bed and let the rage wash over me. What on earth is wrong with me that this is not enough? I’ve felt anger before, but I’m beginning to fear I well and truly hate myself.

  It is there in the dark that I pull the note marking my brother’s birthday and the day of his death out from under my mattress and run my thumb over the sharp crease of the parchment. I imagine the dark figure sneaking into my room, standing over my sleeping form. In my fantasies, I wake up and see their face. I dream they tell me everything, that they help this all make sense. But I’m
left alone in the dark in a cold room with only a small square of paper, a cat sleeping at my feet, and more questions than ever before.

  And it’s on a perfectly unremarkable, gray Monday morning, when I realize I can’t bring myself to walk from Practical Applications to Emotional Control. My feet simply won’t cooperate. I’d rather live through the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire than hear Sara and Cora talk about it any longer.

  I tug my cape around me and think seriously about walking out the front door and never coming back, but somehow I know it won’t be that easy.

  I had so much hope, but the light has dimmed, and I feel as empty inside as I did in the days after learning William had died, like my insides have been scooped out. It’s there on the staircase that it hits me: I’m angry at myself for getting my hopes up. How stupid, Frances, I curse at myself. Haxahaven seemed so sparkly, I let myself forget that I am not the sort of person who gets nice things. My eyes well with fat tears as I climb the stairs. I don’t let them fall until I shut the door to my room behind me.

  Haxahaven distracted me from my true purpose, from the only thing I’m sure I’m meant to do. I won’t make that mistake again.

  I reach under my pillow and feel for the note’s rough parchment beneath my fingertips. No more getting distracted by shiny things and blooming roses.

  Guilt gnaws at me; all I can think is that without me there to remind them, the police will stop looking for William’s killer. Not that I could contact them, what with being a murder suspect myself. My feather bed coughs up a cloud of dust as I throw myself on it. The day slips away, lost to my self-pity, but I bring myself to climb down the stairs for dinner. I don’t know if anyone noticed I wasn’t in afternoon classes. Probably not. No one here seems to notice me much at all.

  The excessive food was a luxury my first days here, but now the waste disgusts me.

  I sit at the table and pick at a plate of red potatoes.

  A yellowjacket lands on a plate of sticky, sliced fruit. It skitters around before taking flight once more.

  I’m not hungry.

  I’m the first one upstairs after dinner, having left my roommates downstairs, where they were still eating and socializing with the other girls. Many of the girls stay up late in the dining room or atrium or sun porch playing card games and gossiping, but I have yet to be invited to join them, and I’m not sure I want to be.

  I’m lying to myself. Of course I want to be invited.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The days tick by, bitter and slow like tree sap. I attend class; I sit quietly, my cape wrapped around me, fidgeting—too consumed with the mystery of the note to pay much attention at all. It feels like a snarl of yarn; if only I could tug at just the right spot, the whole thing would unravel.

  After William died, I checked out every book on policing I could from the library, hoping they might give me some tips on how to solve a crime. I needed a list, a list of things to do to, and then maybe the mess inside my brain, the giant, yawning maw of hurt would be fixed. It turns out finding a murderer who leaves no evidence but chains is difficult, an intruder who leaves nothing but a note proves equally difficult to find. And the hurt is still there too, the mess I can’t untangle.

  The detective books would tell me to analyze the handwriting, so I do, because I don’t know what else to do and I can no longer do nothing.

  I start with Lena, because she’s the closest thing I have to a friend here and seems the easiest place to start. She smiles kindly when I ask to borrow her notes after Mrs. Roberts’s class and readily passes them across the bench. Like Lena, they’re neat and thorough, but the squiggles and swirls in the corner indicate she’s giving less than her full attention to the class. A doodle of Mrs. Roberts with devil horns and a little pitchfork feels like the closest thing to a peek inside Lena’s head as I’ve ever gotten. The handwriting doesn’t match the note about my brother, but I’m not surprised.

  Maxine is next. It’s difficult to make an excuse to see her notes, since we have no classes together, but I finally finagle an old essay under the guise of needing inspiration for a paper for Mrs. Vance’s class. She hands it to me after dinner, wrinkled and stained, like it’s been dipped in coffee and shoved under her bed. Her penmanship is sloppy, the essay marked with crossed-out sections and notes in the margins. “Good luck with that,” she laughs as she hands it over. It’s nearly impossible to read, but it’s immediately clear she didn’t leave the note either.

  I peek at Aurelia’s and Ruby’s papers, strewn across the vanity in our room. No match there.

  I systematically work through my classes for the rest of the week. I ask to borrow so many notes, I fear my classmates may think I’m illiterate. Mabel passes hers over with a smile and an offer to help me study; Sara and Cora offer theirs after a suspicious glance between them. Maria’s are bound in a beautiful leather notebook; Rachel’s are a pile of loose-leaf paper. None of them match, but the handwriting on the note has an unmistakable air of familiarity, so I don’t stop trying.

  I also can’t stop trying because I’m not yet sure what else to do. It feels good to be doing something, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not doing enough.

  In Mrs. Li’s class I share the bare minimum to avoid being called uncooperative, but I’m careful not to say anything too revealing.

  Sometimes I pay attention in history and Practical Applications. The small part of me excited by my power soaks up every word like a sponge, while the part of me that thirsts for more stews in anger at the useless scraps of magic I’m being given.

  I learn Haxahaven’s patterns. How to avoid the sunroom after meals, because that’s where Ruby and her cronies hang out. I stay away from the third-floor lounge as well, because of the scratching coming from inside the walls no one can explain.

  Mrs. Vykotsky never calls me back to her office. I spend most of my free time in the library, dwelling on the strange note. I keep coming up empty, and I can’t decide if frustration is a feeling worse than hopelessness.

  I sleep poorly at night. I instead stay awake, running my fingers over the crease of the note again and again just to reassure myself I didn’t dream it up.

  When I do manage to fall asleep, I’m plagued with vivid, confusing dreams. I’m typically in the shop, but sometimes I’m in our old apartment, or in Tompkins Square Park, or even at Haxahaven. In the dreams I always know that something is deeply wrong, but I can’t ever identify what. Finn, the boy with the curly hair and intense gaze is almost always there, too. He watches me through narrowed eyes, and I wake up covered in cold sweat, feeling like I haven’t slept at all.

  * * *

  The second note arrives on an uncharacteristically cold Tuesday.

  I leave dinner early, planning on reading a novel in the peace and quiet of my empty room, but I must doze off while the sun is setting. I wake with a start, still in my uniform, lying on top of the duvet, book resting on my chest, feeling as if no time has passed at all. The room is purple with twilight, and there on my pillow, just like the last one, is a folded square of parchment.

  With a zip of nerves, I’m suddenly wide awake. I unfold it quickly, my hands shaking so badly, I almost rip the heavy paper.

  In the same scrawling hand as before it reads, Do not trust the sisterhood. Meet me at the door to the Forest Park Clubhouse. Midnight.

  I stare at the note for a moment, committing it to memory, then I shove it under my mattress, where it joins the other.

  If I were a smarter person, a more reasonable person, someone with consideration for their own well-being, I might dwell on the note, consider my options. But I know immediately what I am going to do. When it comes to my brother, I’ve never had much of a choice.

  This is how I love him now, in the dark with my rage and shaking hands.

  From my window I can see the pitch of a roof poking out from the tangle of trees in the park. As it’s the only building in view, I assume that’s the clubhouse. The wall around Haxahaven, with its rough s
tone, looks easy enough to climb. I can do this. I have to do this.

  I glance at the clock. It’s only just past five in the evening; my roommates must still be downstairs talking or playing cards. What would have happened had they come in and seen the note before I did? What would have happened if they’d come in and seen who was leaving it? It has to be a student at this school, I reason. The alternative is too unsettling to dwell on. But if it is another student leaving the notes, why do they want me to meet them outside the protective walls of the school? I pray I soon have answers.

  After dinner, I slip on a white cotton chemise and slide into the soft sheets of my bed. I’m too awake from having napped and too anxious about the meeting to sleep, but I need to avoid arousing my roommates’ suspicion if I have any hope of sneaking out successfully.

  I lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling and counting down my heartbeats as darkness creeps over Haxahaven.

  Eventually, my roommates filter in. I hear Ruby brush her hair one hundred times and Aurelia wish Lena good night. After what feels like eons, the room fills with the heavy sounds of their breathing and the ticking of the grandfather clock on the far wall.

  It’s only by the watery light of the moon that I can read the golden clock face. At 11:43 I slide out of bed, button my black cape over my white nightgown, pull on gray wooly socks, and lace up my boots.

  It isn’t until I have my shoes on that a terrifying realization hits me. The person who is leaving these notes may very well be my brother’s killer. Maybe they’ve returned to finish the job. But I go anyway. It’s like I’m watching myself from outside my body, screaming at myself to stop, but I can’t make myself listen. Being dead would be better than not knowing forever, I think.

  On quiet feet, I pad across the carpet. For one heart-stopping moment the door squeaks and I hear someone stir, but then the room falls into silence once more.

  Sitting still in the hall outside my room is the small black cat who hid under my bed my first day here. She looks at me like I’m an idiot.