The Witching Elm (A Memento Mori Witch Novel, Book 1)

by C. N. Crawford

  At least, until they began an excited discussion of the Purgators’ blood magic and Fiona’s traumatic date the night before. On top of that, Mariana’s skull-adorned ensemble suggested that she was only too happy to spend her free time in a cemetery.

  “So their chests just burst into flame?” Mariana toyed with her skull ring, asking for the same details for the third time.

  “Yeah, and I could smell the burning, and then Jack whisked me through an underground passage.”

  Tobias looked away from the window. “How did he know about the tunnel?”

  “I don’t know. He said it was a Hawthorne family thing.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Tobias crossed his arms and resumed staring at the backs of buildings whirring past. “He’s peculiar.”

  “Well, he thinks you’re a witch,” muttered Fiona.

  “Philosopher,” Tobias corrected with a note of irritation.

  Mariana turned to Thomas and tapped his knee. “So you said you were going to tell us on the train. About why we’re going digging in a cemetery.” The excited look on her face was a little unnerving.

  “You’re quite morbid, you know that? Shouldn’t you be into shopping and pop music or something?”

  “Don’t patronize me.” Her voice was scathing as she narrowed her black-rimmed eyes.

  Thomas held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. The last thing he needed was goth rage on top of the terrorist threat. “Sorry. All right, the poem says ‘the King, his voice extinguished after death.’ I figured out what that means. See, King Philip—”

  Celia looked up from her fashion magazine. “Wait, who is King Philip again?”

  He sighed. Something about this part of history was hard for Americans to remember. “You know the first Thanksgiving, yeah?”

  She sneered. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “Right. The Native leader who helped the Pilgrims in the 1620s—his name was Massasoit Ousamequin, leader of the Wampanoag. Massasoit was his title, like king, but it stuck as his name. There’s a giant statue of him in Plymouth. He saved the Pilgrims from starvation. That was King Philip’s father.”

  Mariana stared at him. “So if his dad saved the English, why did they cut off his son’s head?”

  “It was fifty years later. During that time, the English and the Natives clashed over land rights and hunting. And the English panicked about losing their Englishness. Being hanged, drawn and quartered—one of the worst executions the Puritans could think of—was reserved for those who’d gone native.”

  “Rough. I didn’t know the colonists pulled people apart with horses.” Alan grimaced as he took his seat across the aisle.

  “Massasoit had made a strategic alliance with the English,” continued Thomas. “The Wampanoag had been ravaged by disease. But the English numbers kept increasing, and the Wampanoag numbers kept decreasing.”

  “So did the war start over resources?” asked Mariana.

  Thomas nodded. “The English started demanding that the Native population give up their weapons. They wanted more land, so they provoked a war.” The teenagers were leaning toward him now, listening intently. “Things really got started when they hanged three of King Philip’s closest advisors. The war raged for several years after that.”

  “How does this relate to the poem?” Alan rested his hand on his chin.

  “When King Philip was captured at the end of the war, the Puritans cut off his head and mounted it on a stake. They quartered his body and scattered the limbs.”

  “Brutal.” Alan rubbed his hand over his mouth.

  “The Puritans were dreadful,” added Tobias. He seemed to be in a bit of a mood today.

  “The Natives in the area believed that the soul resided in the head, so beheading someone meant their soul was doomed to endless wandering,” Thomas continued. “And the English believed that remaining unburied would achieve the same purpose. The King’s head still rotted outside Plymouth decades later, when a Puritan named Cotton Mather came along.”

  “His grandfather founded our school,” said Mariana.

  “Cotton Mather was a cranky old bastard, and he wasn’t overly fond of King Philip,” continued Thomas. “He ripped the jawbone off the skull in a fit of pious rage.”

  Tobias turned to stare at him. “So what does the poem mean?”

  “Your magic works through language, right? It was like Mather was scared that the old King still had some power, some magic to fight with. So he silenced him. The poem said the King, his voice extinguished after death. They’re talking about Cotton Mather stealing the jawbone. Made whole above the one who made him mute—this part is the instruction. The spirits want us to make King Philip’s skull whole over the corpse of Cotton Mather.”

  “And Cotton Mather is in Plymouth?” asked Fiona.

  Thomas shook his head. “No. But we’ve got to find King Philip’s skull. We’re supposed to give him back his voice by reuniting him with his jawbone.”

  “Wow,” said Fiona. “Maybe that mending spell will be useful after all.”

  “And I think we need to give Metacomet a proper burial.” Thomas rested his forearms on his knees. “The chopped, the burned, the choked rise from the roots. An army will be raised somehow. Maybe another army of the dead, I don’t know. The spirits of the wrongfully killed. Anyway, whatever the spell does, it needs to happen in Maremount. That’s where Rawhed is, right?” He shifted back in his seat, rubbing his chin. “That’s where Tobias’s people are fighting him, too.”

  The students’ eyes were wide with fascination. Thomas was quiet as he let them digest this information.

  “Whoa…” said Alan.

  “And you think we’ll find King Philip’s skull in Plymouth?” asked Tobias. “Where his head was left on the pike?”

  He glanced out the window. They were close to Plymouth now. “It said ‘the beginning and the end’ at the top of the poem. What if it literally means the beginning and the end of the war? The war started in Plymouth. And there’s a good chance King Philip’s head ended up here after it rotted off the pike. I think we need to look for his skull where the gallows once stood that started the war, and where the pike once speared his head. Both of those things were on the old Gallows Hill, where the cemetery is now.”

  “Cool.” Mariana smiled.

  Thomas rubbed his eyes. He declined to tell them that he’d stayed up all night alternating coffee with whiskey, picking through all the contradictory mentions of gallows locations in old books. He’d begun to neglect his classes in the past few weeks, and unmarked papers towered above a dozen half-eaten bowls of cereal on his kitchen table.

  Tobias frowned. “When we get everything we need, Cotton Mather and the King’s skull, I’ll go back to Maremount to perform the spell with the Ragmen.”

  “On your own?” said Mariana.

  “The Tatters and the other Ragmen have been fighting him all along,” said Tobias. “It’s too dangerous for anyone else to come.”

  “But you’ll need us,” said Fiona. “What if you can’t find the Ragmen? You said they’re in hiding.”

  Tobias shook his head. “You don’t understand what it’s like there.”

  Fiona crossed her arms.

  The train pulled in by a red brick building at the Plymouth station. When it ground to a halt, Thomas stretched his legs and put on a pair of sunglasses against the glaring afternoon sun. Followed closely by his new teenage posse, he walked along South Street and through Plymouth center. He became lost in his thoughts again. If he was correct, the locals had at one time called this Gallows Lane in recognition of the journey some would take to their deaths. In England, at least, convicts were allowed to hop off the cart for one last drink before their demise, thus going off the wagon. He didn’t believe they were afforded any such comforts in the New World.

  He glanced over at the neat colonial houses that lined Leyden Street as they wandered up a small hill, past the old courthouse. Alan sung to himself, drumming on his thig
hs as they climbed the brick walkway onto Burial Hill.

  Trees lined either side of a path leading up the shady hill, and the ground became more densely packed with graves the further they climbed. When they reached the peak, Thomas looked around, clutching the hickory wand. Apart from its large size, the cemetery looked like many other colonial burying grounds, though the view was particularly beautiful. From his vantage point, he could see out to the clear blue harbor where the Pilgrims first arrived. Philip’s head once rotted here, not far from where Plymouth honored his father with a statue.

  After a brief discussion, Alan and Tobias turned to investigate the graves closer to the ocean, while the girls headed down the hill in the opposite direction, spreading out amongst a few tourists. Thomas stood atop the hill with the sunlight warming his skin for a few moments before the shrill sound of a wren recalled him to his mission.

  Looking around, he saw that the graves all seemed to face the same direction. Most of the older ones lined the main path. A sign caught his eye. As he approached, he read that two forts had been built on this hill: one in 1621, and the other in 1675 in the heat of King Philip’s War. He could picture a bleak, weather-worn and windowless building on this very spot.

  Celia’s shout interrupted his thoughts: “There’s a skull here with no jawbone!”

  He rushed down the hill to where she stood in front of a gravestone engraved with a jawless skull and crossbones.

  Celia pointed to the stone. “Do you think the missing jawbone could mean something?”

  “It’s a good guess, but I’ve seen this design before. They have them in Boston too. It was some kind of template, I think.”

  She frowned and wandered off. There were thousands of graves on Burial Hill, many of them unmarked. The newer stones displayed weeping willows or angels. The Plymouth colonists didn’t favor the grotesque imagery so beloved of their north shore cousins, though a few death’s-heads and anguished skeletons glared out from the older headstones.

  Thomas walked from grave to grave as the shadows grew longer. Occasionally, Fiona’s friends distracted him.

  “It’s a timber rattlesnake!” Mariana shouted after a long period of fruitless searching.

  Celia jumped backward. “Are they poisonous?”

  “No,” Mariana replied. “They’re venomous.”

  Alan cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Are we still looking for what’s absent? Because it’s pretty hard to look for what’s absent.”

  The air began to cool as the sun dipped lower over the horizon, and the gravestones’ shadows crept down the hill toward the water like long fingers.

  “We might have to catch the train soon,” Thomas called out. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to find an unmarked site.”

  He watched as the rattlesnake slithered through the tall grass, sliding over the graves down the hill. He glanced at the stone to his left. A crude carving of a skull stared out, hollow-socketed, from the curved top of the gravestone. Beneath its vacant eyes was an inverted-triangle nasal cavity, and—oddly—a heart-shaped mouth.

  “Caleb Cook.” He read the name aloud, and his mind sparked with recognition. “This is the grave of one of King Philip’s killers! It’s a connection, at least. This could be the unmarked gallows spot.” Thomas held up the wand as Tobias jogged over to join him. “So what do I do with this? Do I flick it or something?” He almost thought he should be wearing a large, pointed hat and holding a broom.

  Tobias looked over the stone as the others joined around. He pulled the wand from Thomas’s hand and began tracing the engraved skull. “If it’s enchanted, this wand will transform the aura. It will remove the enchantment.”

  When he finished tracing, the skull glowed with a pearly light, and white flames flickered for a moment before dying out. Tobias stood back to watch.

  “Holy crap,” Alan whispered.

  After the flames sputtered out, the clumsy skull carving bulged near the forehead. There was a collective intake of breath as it protruded further, its rough granite surface smoothing over into bone.

  “Oh my God.” Celia gripped Thomas’s arm.

  Before them, the triangular nasal cavity shrunk, and a few yellowed teeth sprouted from the upper jaw. Thomas held his hand below the skull, now almost fully detached from the gravestone. With a final pop, a fully formed human skull—minus a jawbone— separated from the gravestone, dropping into his hand.

  “We’ve got it,” said Alan in awe.

  Thomas brushed the fissures on the top of the skull with his fingers. “I can’t believe this is it. King Philip.”

  He looked at the ancient object before him, its ivory surface covered in a delicate web of mold. He stared into the dark eye sockets. This man—this potential relative—had once struck the Puritans with a terror so deep, some said the memory had led to the mass psychosis of the Salem Witch Trials.

  “We’ve got the beginning,” said Fiona. “Now we just need the end.”

  38

  Tobias

  It was cold cereal for dinner in the dining hall again. Not only were students’ parents unable to get through the police perimeter, but the school cooks were shut out as well. Tobias didn’t eat until 8 o’clock, long after the dining hall normally shut its doors, but there was no one to close them anymore. Only a few teachers remained at the school—those who lived near the Common or within Mather itself. Tobias tried to remember the last hot meal he’d eaten.

  He cleared his tray and trudged up the stairwell. The boys’ hallway was dark, though a light at the far end flickered on and off. As he walked down the corridor, something under his feet caught his eye. He glanced down to see small squares of paper littering the floor. He picked up a piece for a closer look, and found an image of a demon cowering before a chalice—Blodrial’s chalice. Printed on the other side in a gothic font were two words: “The Protectors.”

  He stuffed the paper in his pocket and continued toward his room, pausing at Connor’s open door. Connor—the cherub—sat on the floor in front of his computer, his knees curled up into his chest. Tobias watched from the doorway as a news story played from Connor’s laptop.

  A sleek-haired woman spoke solemnly into the camera. “From guns to prayer groups, local organizations are taking matters into their own hands in the fight against terror. Spiritual terror some are calling it, and they’re promising to reclaim the city.”

  Connor glanced back at Tobias, who could see the dark shadows beneath his eyes and that his cheeks were no longer quite as round as they once had been.

  “Munroe’s going to help us.” Connor stared at him, his face expressionless. “Did you hear? She stopped the witches with her blood. It’s because she’s pure. She said there’s a Mather witch.” He turned back to his computer screen, and Tobias continued to his room.

  When he opened the door, he found Alan sitting at his laptop. Alan pulled off his headphones. “Have you seen Munroe’s new cult?”

  “The Purgators.” Tobias pulled the crumpled paper out of his pocket. “I guess they’re going public, now that everyone’s scared of witches.”

  Alan shuddered. “Witch hunters. Fricking creepy.”

  “I told you that Thomas got a visit from one of them, right?” Tobias sat on the floor, leaning against his bed. “Did we ever hear from him about finding the jawbone?”

  “He emailed earlier.” Alan pulled out a small bag filled with a dried herb from under his bed. “He thought the ending we’re looking for could be where King Philip was shot in the Miery Swamp. So he went to Rhode Island by himself and spent all day digging there, but he didn’t find anything.” Alan broke up small pieces of the herb as he spoke. “I’m sort of getting burnt out on thinking about this stuff now. I want to relax for a night.”

  Tobias nodded, and over the next hour, as they reclined against their beds, Alan played recordings by a musician called Brian Eno. Alan shoved a chunk of the dried herb into a clay pipe he’d bought in Lexington—a replica of the type they’d us
ed in colonial days. They smoked as they listened to the music, and it made Tobias double over and cough when he inhaled.

  After they passed the pipe back and forth a few times, Tobias found himself entranced by the music. He realized that neither of them had spoken in some time.

  “What were we talking about before?” he asked, his mouth dry. “Did someone say something about…” He trailed off, unable to remember how he had started his sentence.

  Alan’s eyes were red, and he handed Tobias the clay pipe again. Tobias’s fingers grew hot as he drew smoke into his lungs.

  “How weird was that thing with the skull yesterday?” Alan asked. “Like, it came out of the gravestone. And then we were holding a King’s skull. Wait—was that even real?”

  “I know! What?” Tobias replied, and they both burst into laughter.

  Alan’s eyes were half-closed. “Everything is messed up. The whole tree thing. It’s like, I mean, there’s dead bodies near where they sell fried dough. And the skull. The skull guy used to be a whole King, and now he’s just bones.”

  Tobias blew out a cloud of smoke. “It’s odd to think that someday, we’ll all be dead bodies.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  The conversation died out again, and Tobias listened to the sounds of a piano over what sounded like distant ghosts shrieking. He felt overcome with fatigue, and he crawled off the floor onto his soft bed. His eyelids shut as he rested his head on his pillow.

  It seemed as though his bed floated in a large lake, drifting along on the waves of the music. The sky was a vault of stars, and since his father had taught him, he knew which was the North Star and which was Venus.

  His bed reached the shore, and the sky grew pink as his feet touched the sand. He walked in the field outside Scorpiongate, and his fingers brushed the long grass. Tobias could see a man approaching, wheeling something along. As he drew closer, he saw that it was Father pushing a large wicker cart. There were people in the cart—his mother and his sister. Their heads knocked together as the basket rolled.