Suffer a Witch

by Claudia Hall Christian

  “Are you an elder, then?”

  “I suppose,” her father said.

  “If you grew up with the elders, why do you have to look at archeology to learn about them?” Em asked.

  “I learned our stories from the elders,” he said. “I want to learn our truth.”

  “Truth again,” she said.

  “It’s a family thing,” he said.

  “It’s not an immortal thing?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s our thing.”

  “But I thought you didn’t think I was your child,” Em said.

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Then why . . .?” She stopped talking when he smiled.

  “You were like this as a child,” he said. “You needed truth. I thought we had raised you with the truth, so you longed for it. Truth is like bedrock. When you have it, it’s all you want.”

  He shrugged.

  “I wasn’t thinking well that day,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “The only child I had ever been father to was leaving with an imbecile for a new colony fraught with savages, wars, violence, and pedants like Henry Rich,” he said.

  She smiled. A wind blew off the sea. For the briefest moment, she felt as if she were standing on the deck of the ship that took her to America. In a blink, she was sitting with her father on Rousay again.

  “It will be hard for me to let you return to your beloved Boston,” he said.

  “I guess I was hoping I’d meet my people,” Em said in a low voice.

  “There aren’t as many of us now. ”

  “Why?” Em asked.

  Her father sighed and shook his head. He turned his body away from her to look at the ocean.

  “Why aren’t there more of us?” Em repeated.

  “My opinion is that we don’t live on Rousay anymore,” he said. “But that’s my opinion only.”

  “Why would that matter?” Em asked.

  “We’re not fertile,” he said. “At least I haven’t been. You?”

  “I had two boys, but that was before . . . all of this,” Em said.

  “And the others?”

  “To the women’s delight and the men’s disappointment — nothing,” Em said.

  Her father grinned, and Em smiled. They drank their tea. Her father took a deep breath and turned to look at her.

  “Maybe after you’re here,” he said.

  “My body is in Boston,” Em said.

  He nodded, and they fell silent. Disappointment welled inside her. She’d wanted to know everything, to connect, but her father was controlled and silent. She felt he would answer her questions if she asked them. She just wasn’t sure what question to ask that would get him talking.

  “Buddha?” Em asked.

  “South Asian princeling,” her father shrugged. “Beautiful being with great ideas, but still a prince.”

  Em scowled. She opened her mouth to ask another question, when her father started talking.

  “I know what you want from me,” her father said. “You want to know what your place is in this world. You want to know where you fit.”

  “But?” Em asked.

  “I can’t give that to you,” her father said. “We fit in this world because we were placed here by the creator, your God. We must find our own lives and give them meaning.”

  “Like humans,” Em said.

  He nodded.

  “A few of the witches want to end this,” Em said.

  “Sure,” her father said. “Did they choose it?”

  “I don’t really know what happened,” Em said.

  “Tell me,” he said, evenly, but she felt the power of his command.

  “I remember being hanged,” Em said. “They . . . they hated me. It was so shocking to me.”

  “What was?”

  “How much they hated me,” Em said. “I think I said something about my innocence, but . . . George was dead. Giles, my husband, was dead. My children had been tortured nearly to death to get them to testify against me. I was exhausted. I wanted relief.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I woke up in the crevice,” Em said. “I was under a couple of the women and on top of everyone else.”

  “You touched them after you woke up,” he said.

  Em nodded.

  “That’s how they became quasi-immortal,” he said. “Witches.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “After the first death, our kind has the capacity to make people witches,” he said.

  “Abominations,” she said.

  “That’s how we thought of them when I was a child,” he said with a nod. “But I’ll tell you — I’d give anything to have made an abomination out of your mother.”

  “Me, too,” Em said.

  Her father nodded, and they sat in silence for a few minutes. Her father’s eyes went vague, and his face reflected his longing for her mother.

  “How did they become witches?” Em asked.

  “That’s right,” her father said with a smile. “That’s what we were talking about. The thought of your mother pushed everything else out of my head.”

  “Yes.”

  “They became witches because you were first reborn into your power. That’s what we call it — ‘reborn.’ At the moment of rebirth, you had the capacity to make anything you touched quasi-immortal — a witch.”

  “And now?” Em asked.

  “Surely you’ve tried it,” he said.

  “Giles,” Em said. “He likes young, inexperienced women. He’s tried to make them stay that way.”

  “That is not the way it works,” her father said. “We grow and change; we just don’t age and die.”

  “Ever?”

  “Well, clearly, we can die,” he said.

  “How is that possible?” Em asked.

  “I don’t know,” her father said. “Science will probably consume my next cycle. For now, my focus is learning from our ancestors through archeology. Who knows? If you find me in 2014, I might be a geneticist at the University of London.”

  “You will always be a watchmaker to me,” Em said.

  “That was fun,” her father said. “I still do it.”

  “What?”

  “Fix old watches,” her father said. “Now it’s my ‘hobby.’”

  Her father laughed.

  “Who would have thought that I would ever have the time and energy to have ‘hobbies’?” Her father shook his head and grinned.

  “You don’t take breaks from the world?” Em asked.

  “No,” her father said. “When one life ends, I move to another place in the world. This is my first time back on Rousay since we lived here after the London fire. I take it you take breaks?”

  “We take breaks,” Em said. “We used to take them only every fifty years. But we took more than that in the 20th century.”

  “Oh?”

  “Giles set Salem on fire in 1914,” Em said. She glanced at her father when he laughed. She smiled. “You laugh, but he was seen. The whole ‘Salem Witch Trial’ thing was big then, and . . .”

  “He was recognized?” her father’s voice rose with disbelief.

  “He was,” Em said with a smile. “He had to get out of town. A few of the others went with him. Then Sarah Good was working in a molasses factory. Her supervisor tried to assault her. She got upset, and her powers caused it to . . .”

  Em gestured with her hands that the tank had exploded and made a sound that imitated the blowing molasses tank.

  “She was supposed to have died,” Em said. “The rest of us got out of town fast.”

  “When was that?” her father asked.

  “1919 — the Great Molasses Flood,” Em said. “

  “Where do you go?” her father asked.

  “We used to go to a more wild part of the US,” Em said. “Now, we own an island in the Bahamas. John Willard got it when he was the captain of a pirate ship. I bought it from him for a dollar.”

  “But you r
eturn to Boston?” her father asked.

  Em nodded.

  “Always to Boston?”

  Em nodded.

  “Why Boston?” her father asked.

  “I thought I had to be close or lose . . .” She stopped talking when her father laughed. “Why is that funny?”

  “I thought the same thing,” her father said.

  “It’s not true?”

  Her father shook his head.

  “We are what we are, Em,” he said. “Even your friends, the other witches. They are what they are. We can live anywhere.”

  Em nodded.

  “Still, it must be nice to have people around who grew up when you did,” her father said. “People who speak your same language, know your history.”

  She looked at him.

  “I’m a little jealous,” he said with a smile.

  “Is there a way to reverse it?” Em asked.

  “For those who want to move on?” her father asked.

  Em nodded.

  “You have to wish it, Em,” her father said.

  “I’ve tried,” Em said.

  He scowled. Leaning over, he held her hands between his.

  “You can have whatever it is that you wish,” he said. “Anything. Let’s try it.”

  “Gold,” Em said.

  He nodded. She opened her hands, and there was a single gold Kroner.

  “Try it yourself,” he said.

  She picked up her teacup. Closing her eyes, she wished for another cup of tea. When she opened her eyes, nothing had happened. He smiled.

  “See! It doesn’t work,” she said.

  “You truly are my daughter,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You are trying to bend the laws of the world,” he said. “When you call for gold, it appears because it exists in the world. You can call for a guppy or a sea turtle, and one would appear.”

  He opened his hand to show her a juvenile sea turtle. Picking it up by the shell, he set it in her hand.

  “Tea exists in the world,” she said.

  He smiled. Picking up the turtle, he closed his eyes to wish it gone. He opened his hands to show that they were now empty.

  “You mean I can’t ask for things that need to be made,” she said. “I can call a tea bag.”

  She closed her eyes and focused on her hands. In a moment, she felt the rough edges of her favorite Earl Grey black tea bag. She opened her hands to show him.

  “You can call hot water to you, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.

  She smiled.

  “You can call something like tea to you, but you’d have to know where it existed,” he said. “For example, let’s see what your George is drinking.”

  He held his cup. In a moment, it filled with Guinness beer. He took a sip.

  “It’s confusing,” Em said.

  “And you just want some tea,” he said.

  Em nodded.

  “Your friends,” he said. “They can leave only on the anniversary of their making.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, there are some rules,” her father said with a smile. “You can only undo things on the exact anniversary of your making them.”

  “So my hanging anniversary,” she said.

  “The anniversary of their transformation,” he said.

  “September 22,” she said.

  He nodded. They sat in silence for a moment before she went inside to make more tea. When she returned with two full mugs, he was watching the stars again.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I’m here because you made it so,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You had to have come looking for me. That was the criterion. Why did you come looking for me? You said earlier that you’ve been thinking about a few things.”

  She nodded.

  “What is happening in your world that would bring you here?” he asked.

  “A man has entered my life,” Em said. She turned her body to face him.

  “A lover?”

  “Not mine,” she said. “He claims to be the child of one of the witches, Alice Parker. She fell pregnant in prison.”

  “She came back pregnant,” her father nodded. “Surely the child didn’t survive.”

  “That’s what Alice says,” Em said. “My son Benoni’s ancestral granddaughter works at the store. She convinced us to have this John Parker — that’s what he goes by — into the store for a lecture.”

  Em swallowed hard.

  “And?” her father said.

  “A demon came out of him,” Em said. She looked up at her father, and he nodded. “We held a séance for those who were killed and not buried with us. They told us that this demon has disrupted their slumber.”

  “He brought them back,” her father said.

  “He hasn’t brought them to life,” Em said. “But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “They — the spirits — told us that we should find the last one, John Proctor,” Em said. “But I have this feeling that if we find John Proctor’s remains, the others will be returned.”

  “Would that be bad?” her father asked.

  “Yes,” Em said. “After all of this time, I don’t think they could handle it, and . . .”

  Em fell silent. She held her Earl Grey up to her nose to smell the Bergamot.

  “And?”

  “They hanged a lot of women for witchcraft in Boston,” Em said.

  “I’ve heard,” her father said.

  “One of them has haunted the park across the street from my house for more than three hundred years,” Em said. “She asked to be sent on last week, which we did. When she was leaving, she wished me ‘Good luck.’ And before that, she said she wanted to move on before . . .”

  “Before?”

  “She didn’t say,” Em said.

  Her father gave her a knowing nod.

  “What?” Em asked.

  “You’ve met your demon,” her father said.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “We are made of the creator,” her father said. “They are made of the opposite — chaos, entropy, devil, demon — pick a word. Each of us has an opposite.”

  “And the others?”

  “They have only you,” her father said. “That doesn’t mean that this creature doesn’t want some of his own witches. He’s likely recruiting ghosts and other malcontents. They are easier to gain access to because they have so much time and so little to do. They also don’t have bodies to feed.”

  “The others,” Em started and then stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “They are having dreams of Salem Village,” Em said. “They feel like they’re right there. I watched their faces when they told me.”

  “And?”

  “I think they’d go back in a heartbeat,” Em said.

  “There’s nothing to go back to,” her father said.

  “They would rather die than extend this prolonged life,” Em said. “I’ve heard them say that a prolonged life is like a kind of death.”

  “And you?”

  “Life is life,” Em said. “Death is death.”

  “You are suited for immortality,” her father said.

  “Suited or not, it’s what I have,” Em said.

  Her father laughed. Not sure how to respond, Em fell silent. She watched the stars and listened to the surf in companionable silence with her father. She was so focused on the dancing stars that she started when he spoke.

  “Surely, this is of your devil’s making,” her father said.

  “What is?” Em asked.

  “Your witches’ longing for the days gone by and their old homes,” her father said.

  “Why would he doing this?” Em asked.

  “To remove your witches from your side,” her father said. “Increase his odds of winning.”

  “Winning?” Em asked.

  “The war,” her father said.

  “W
ar? What war?”

  “With you,” her father said. “He’s trying to reduce your ranks. He must think that the reason you transformed these people is so that you would have soldiers of your own. I would.”

  “That’s not true,” Em said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” her father said. “He deals in deceit and lies.”

  “We are truth tellers,” Em said. “George said the demon reminded him of a feeling or fog hanging over Salem Village when he returned. He was surprised at the darkness that seemed to encompass the entire region.”

  “Truly?” her father looked surprised.

  Em nodded.

  “That means he’s planned this war,” he said.

  “George?”

  “Your demon,” he said.

  “Where’s he been for more than three hundred years?” Em asked.

  “Planning a war, no doubt,” her father said.

  “What?” Em sat up in her chair.

  “He’s planning a war against you.”

  “Can he do that?” Em asked.

  “He can and will,” her father said. “Every new immortal must face their demon, and it always ends in war.”

  “Why?” Em asked.

  “It’s part of the deal,” her father said with a smile.

  “Have you met your demon?” Em asked.

  “I have,” her father said.

  “And?”

  Her father shrugged and looked away.

  “Did you win?” Em asked.

  “I suppose so,” her father said. “I . . . You remember the plague? The fire?”

  “Of course,” Em said.

  Her father nodded.

  “That was your war?” Em asked.

  “Battles in my war,” her father said. “We came here for me to recover.”

  “Recover?”

  “From the battle,” her father said. “But the demon never stops until . . .”

  Em watched rage and sorrow move across her father’s face until all that was left was resignation. He glanced at her and noticed her attention for the first time. He cleared his throat.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  “It was.”

  “I think the final battle was Henry,” her father said. “My only child left on a boat with Henry Rich. Did he get sick on the trip?”

  “Yes,” Em said. “I never knew what happened. He’d been such a vibrant man, and suddenly he was ill.”