Mr. Dare gave Benjamin a long look as he passed.
Benjamin remembered what it had felt like to drown. The water closing in over his face, the stones at his feet pulling him down into the fathoms.
Inside him, Mariot shuddered.
* * *
Benjamin was seven when he first remembered wearing a dress and letting it flap in the summer breeze on the Highlands. The people of her village would smile at Mariot as she passed, she of the quiet and thoughtful nature. Her only claim to whimsy was on the days when the wind rushed through the village. She would always take a moment to herself, close her eyes and let the wind carry her spirit away.
There was never much she felt the need to say and measured the words of her life as though they would run out.
It was another person to share his skin with. Another version of himself. They were the same, but in many ways they were different. Until that time, he had been a normal child, and did as his parents commanded, but Mariot had signaled his curse’s unveiling. The others rose and fell with the tides, but Mariot was the rock upon the shore.
With each new life he remembered, Benjamin changed more and more, but Mariot was always the strongest and the closest to him in times of trouble. Each of them drew something else out of him, or perhaps they brought their own traits into him.
Some of them were hazy mornings seen through the fogs of dawn. Not Mariot. Growing up with her in a different corner of his mind, he felt like he was more Mariot than Benjamin with only one difference. Mariot had been quiet and reserved, and every act was careful. Benjamin himself jumped first and looked for the rocks later, the way rash younger brothers could sometimes be.
Any other town would have called him a heathen. In Salem, he would have died outright. But in Southwyck, the others avoided him. In a town that brimmed with curses, Benjamin was an outcast. There were more curses than blades of grass, more than all the raindrops in the summer swells. But curses made you suffer, and that was the bedrock of Southwyck. Those were the teachings of the Church, and the truths that all who prayed for salvation every Sunday knew.
There had been curses in Southwyck for at least three generations. It was the first of the Massachusetts colonies, the longest-lasting, for no matter how severe the winter squall, nor how vicious the drought, Southwyck survived. The curses survived.
The first generation knew nothing about the things that slithered through the woods. Ones you did not trifle with. The ones who leveled curses.
They heard the tales of Roanoke, and the elders of Southwyck would nod their head in understanding. There was a price for dealing with darkness.
* * *
Heresy in Southwyck was pliant like the willows that wept at the town corners, their blossoms swaying with curse-driven winds. In other places, in other times, heresy was foundation and stone, but in Southwyck it changed by the day. The tolerance of the village was weighed by the Reverend’s scale, on where his judgment fell.
Most families kept their secrets locked up tight. They confided in the Reverend, and let him make his decisions. But every survivor of Southwyck knew to hide their curses and never to speak of their shame. Except for Benjamin. Everyone recognized the disgrace of the miller’s son.
Father kept his hand gripped on Benjamin’s shoulder all the way back into the village. The town moved in slow procession, each family closing in on itself. They all knew what the curses would do, and they all knew the sacrifice that entailed.
Mercy Dare had died, but her family’s suffering was not at an end. Curses could not be killed: they merely slipped from their chain of bones and crawled into a new victim. Another Dare would fall upon the sword.
Benjamin knew there was a warning there for him. Even in a town full of oddities he was an outcast, and it was more than just his curse. When he tried to speak of it, his mouth could not shape the words to describe the pit in his stomach. He was just a Return that hadn’t drowned yet.
It bothered him often, the strange feeling. No matter how much he drew on Mariot, or Claude, or any of the others, they had never felt how he did. The feelings were foreign even among his other selves. They were them, and he was him, and even among himselves he could not find respite.
Benjamin knew better than to confide in his parents, a truth he’d learned many years before. An innocent time. “I let the plague take me,” he’d whispered to Papa, the words twisting in his mouth as tears streamed down his face. “Ah begged Him to unmake me. Then ah died.” Father could not place the accent, though Benjamin remembered the kingdom of Castilla and of a boy too scared for war.
Father had switched him bloody for that.
Benjamin shook his head, clearing away the dark memories. He scuffed his foot through a puddle as they passed, and Father yanked him closer, hating even this momentary step out of line.
Reverend had never liked him, Benjamin thought. There was something wild in him, something that the slick man who hid behind his learnings and his books could not break upon the rocks. Benjamin had more in common with the willows that swept across the border to the woods, the trees that swayed and never came down no matter how virulent the storm. No matter what they did to him, he bent and survived.
The Reverend didn’t like those who questioned, or those who thought deep. Benjamin was the only one in town who did not swallow the lies that put the rest to an easy slumber. Benjamin saw the Returns for what they were: not just a sacrament, but a message for the witches that created them. The curses were witchborn, the only legacy they had left. Silencing them, one last gasp of air at a time, was the only power the Reverend had.
The truth was that no matter how many bodies sank into tumultuous waters, curses did not drown. They ached to live, and traveled from one life to another. Sometimes they slept, waiting until a family had another child. Others found an already cursed child and quickened inside him, growing stronger.
At first, Benjamin believed as the village did—that the Return was the only way to control the curses that castigated them. But now he saw the look in the Reverend’s eye when he chose their death for them.
The Reverend thought he was without peer, as though the whole of him was more than all the others. But Benjamin was full of many others and was not limited to a life of just one.
There had been a time when he thought everyone was made up of a dozen different lives all blended together like blood into the water. But the more he remembered, the more he realized how different he was. And with that difference, he learned the most important attribute in Southwyck: shame.
He learned to read faster than every boy in his class; the lessons were taught by Brother Malley to all the young men in town. Southwyck boys had to be smart. The expectation was superiority from the colonists in almost everything. It was the only way to protect the town and its secrets. But Benjamin didn’t need to learn to read, he only needed to be reminded how, and English somehow seemed easier to learn than many other languages he knew. The people of Southwyck didn’t like that he was smarter than the other boys, or knew things they had never learned. For him, it was remembrance rather than recitation.
It had always seemed to be that way, too. Things just got easier for him with every new lifetime he remembered, though none of them were as close to him as Mariot. She, at least, felt like a sister, and the lines between them that had always been blurry grew hazier the older he became.
It made the town wary, he knew. So he tried to keep his head down. Benjamin learned what happened to boys who kept speaking out of turn. He learned how to hide the beatings, how to pretend to his parents that everything was fine. If it wasn’t a beating from one of the other boys, it was a beating from Father.
He spent his days staying out of his parents’ way, and out of the town’s sight. Most boys his age helped their fathers or worked in town. Benjamin didn’t associate with others his age—or of any age. Too many lifetimes had made him too perceptiv
e for even the most world-weary of adults.
“I thought it would be me,” he said to his parents as they neared the family home. Over his head, they shared a look.
Father cleared his throat. Mother pulled herself away from them.
It hadn’t been him today, but it would be him soon enough. That was clear. The Reverend had boldly said as much in front of the entire town. He was strange, and even a town grown from strange seeds had no way to deal with him.
There was one place, though, that celebrated his oddness. As a port town, Southwyck maintained itself through vigorous trade from incoming ships, and there was a hunger in the colonies for books. In books, he found memories that had gathered dust in the corners of his mind, and found riddles of history he knew to be false. It was surprising how much the world lost even in a day.
Reading gave him a sense of self. There were enough minds to share his head with, but there was little of Benjamin in there. Books allowed him to find his own curiosities and interests that separated him from the others. Without them, he would have drowned years ago.
It was also through books he met Sebastian.
* * *
“What would you wish for?” he asked drowsily. Though they were lying head to head, Sebastian had his hand tangled in Benjamin’s hair, and he traced his fingers through it.
“What?”
“They say before the flames consumed them, the witches spat, and the ground turned dark. That was how the curses began. But they also say that if you brought them tithes of the harvest, they would plant your dreams in the furrows left behind, and come spring there was little they could not realize. If they were here now, what would you ask for?”
It was an unpleasant truth that the town accepted so blithely. They had spurned the witches that had given them favor, and the curses were their repentance. But wishes were a fanciful thing, even for a boy who had lived countless other lives.
It was not a question that Benjamin had ever considered before. That any of them had ever considered before. The part of him that was Mariot, the part that was Claude, all of them recoiled at the openness of the question. It was a question that grew out of hope: dry cracked ground they had never thought to water before.
If they all had one thing in common, it was that they would not know what freedom felt like if it came to call upon them.
He didn’t answer. Sebastian was slow to speak himself and it did not bother him when Benjamin let a thought grow at its own pace.
Benjamin stared up at the willow trees in the distance, and how their branches ebbed and flowed with the wind. He spent a good long time thinking it over, calmed by the feeling of Sebastian’s fingers rubbing absent circles against his scalp. There was a dream he had, one that returned night after night. In the dream, he could not separate Benjamin from Mariot, and it grew so confusing that he tore himself in two and emerged as something else.
“I would be as mercurial as nature herself,” he said once his thoughts grew still. “Some days I am a deafening storm inside, while others I am nothing more than the possibility of a frost weeks before harvest. I am never sure what a new dawn will bring. But this is a place where people hide from nature, tucked underneath their blankets and old-woven thoughts.”
Sebastian stirred, and Benjamin looked up when the hand in his hair disappeared. “I would bring you to thaw,” he whispered.
It was so honest, and so naive, that Benjamin wrapped himself in Mariot and let her soothe away his sudden rush of feeling. She was always better at masking her emotions than he was.
* * *
Sebastian was a dusty-haired boy who’d come off one of the ships when the blacksmith took him in. Even then, the smith had seen the potential for heft in his frame. The smith’s wife and son had died the winter before, and the village talk was that he was lonely. Sebastian saw to that.
He was one of the strongest boys of their age, and the girls in the village would not stop competing for his attention. Being a blacksmith’s wife meant a secure future and each of them devised new ways to chance upon the boy, hoping to catch his eye. How they doted on him when he came into town. It made Benjamin ill.
Benjamin had never had a friend before. The others, Claude especially, had many friends during their lives, but for them it was still different. They bonded over similar natures, or a life of similar understanding. Benjamin had no peer in child or adult. No one understood him. He didn’t understand the things that interested them, and he couldn’t talk so they could understand. He was as much an outsider as Sebastian.
Until Sebastian married, and his children were taken by the same curses as the others, he would always be treated like a stranger in Southwyck. Bringing in new blood was only one way that the town tried to leverage the darkness they passed on to their children—sacrifice another.
Benjamin would never marry. He knew it, even if the rest of the town thought it for a different reason. He was not built like the other boys of the village, any more than Sebastian. But the blacksmith’s son was better at hiding behind a mask, at pretending he was like the rest.
But the two of them, they were something like friends. Sebastian wasn’t one for talking, but he would listen as Benjamin told him all the things he’d read about that day. He couldn’t read as well as Benjamin could, but books fascinated him in a way foreign to the people of Southwyck.
They drew together, a pull that swallowed them until they were all that existed in the world. Benjamin woke every day wondering what he’d have to talk to Sebastian about, wondering when they’d see each other next. But sometimes he worried, and he fretted, and he let himself listen to the gossip around town. That he was an oddity, and soon they would do something about it. But even on those dark days, when he hid himself away, it was Sebastian who found him.
Sebastian knew the truth about the town, about the curses. He knew about Benjamin, and Mariot, and all the others. He had never once questioned, never once turned away. There was always a thoughtfulness in his eyes. A wonder.
After the Return, after his parents had returned to their work, Benjamin wandered across the village and slipped underneath the willows and escaped into the woods. The two of them had many places to hide away an afternoon—since Sebastian could shape iron twice as fast as his mentor, he often freed himself early.
They were near the brook, almost as far as one could get from town without heading farther inland, both of them lying in the grass. Benjamin knew the Return would have Father driving himself into a fury. He would lie low until the fires had calmed. Sebastian had already finished his work for the day, so the pair had all their lives ahead of them.
“They want me to be something other than me,” Benjamin whispered.
Sebastian said nothing. Some thought the blacksmith’s boy simple, but it was just that he chose his words with a sharp-eyed precision. Each was a precious gift he was loath to give away. In some ways, it reminded Benjamin of Mariot, of the way she would wrap up her thoughts and tuck her words into her pockets, only sharing what she could bear to part with.
Not that Sebastian was dull. Sometimes Benjamin could make him laugh like no other, and he could speak whole sentences using only his expression. His eyebrows had a way of communicating complex thoughts in simple gestures, an economy of movement that kept his cherished words to himself.
“Reverend says there are more curses now because we’re wicked,” he added. “Sometimes I think we’re all going to drown.”
“We could leave,” Sebastian offered, his voice a quiet reassurance.
Benjamin shook his head. “They would come after us.” It went without saying that if one left, the other would follow. They had been in tandem since that first meeting, circling one another in ways too elemental to understand. Confusion and fear fluttered in his chest. Benjamin, who had lifetimes of memory to draw upon, could remember no one pulling him in the way Sebastian could. Though he had the
memories of all those lives, the feelings were harder to hold on to, slick and numbing like spring thaw.
“We could go through the Withers.”
At the mention of the forest that pressed in against the town, Benjamin sat up. “Be serious.” It was a pointless chide—Sebastian was never not. Nothing left his lips he hadn’t studied and hammered at until it passed muster.
The stories said the Southwyck of now was not the first, and that the village was first planted in a grassy meadow east of the Withers. The inlet where the Returns fell was once part of the original town, but during the time of their grandparents, the ground had swallowed many of them up and the sea rushed in to take them away. That was why Reverend wanted to drown them. It was where the curses belonged.
Benjamin wasn’t sure about all that, but he knew the stories about what lurked in the Withers better than most. As a child, he’d eyed the woods in the way of forbidden things, and snuck across the threshold whenever he had the chance. Last year, after one of the worst winters in memory the woods had all but come alive with an elemental malice. Children, animals, even full-grown men and women had disappeared. It had been months since anyone hunted Withers game.
People had tried to head down into the colonies, to map the extent of the woods, but it was hard to judge its distance. The woods seemed to ebb and flow like the tide, some years grand and others insular.
Everyone knew the Withers was the source of the curse, or at least all that remained of one. It was where the witches had lived, and where they had died when the town turned upon them. It was the witches who had cursed the town and left a mark on each of their souls. Towns like Salem boasted of wars won against the witches, but if they killed even a single witch, she was a stunted and malformed thing. The witches of Southwyck had never stopped being a threat, even after they were killed.
All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages Page 16
