The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Not if I could help it! I was glad to escape now, even though it was tempting to linger and learn the identity of the expected caller.

  “Thank you, but I’m not one to inquire into the future—I have too much trouble with the present,” I said, stepping out onto the porch.

  “You still distrust me, don’t you, Mitti,” she sighed. “That’s not very wise. Rowan confides in me. I could do a lot for you. Blood doesn’t make a mother-daughter relationship, you know.”

  She might have plucked that sentence right out of my dream! A sense of unreality clung to me as I drove away, so absorbed in my thoughts I almost didn’t notice the car headed in the direction from which I’d come, except that it wasn’t Greg’s Beetle. Then with a slight shock I realized the driver was Quentin Jackson.

  Chapter Twelve

  Early morning frosts heralded the approach of autumn. Dana and I dragged out all the old sheets, drapes, blankets and bedspreads we could find to cover up our tomatoes and other tender plants at night, hoping desperately to tide them over until Indian summer so we could finish canning. With Darcy in charge, we made forays into the woods after, dead trees, which Darcy felled with a chain saw.

  Rowan was a freshman in the Richland Center high school. The bus picked her up early and she was seldom home before four. Sometimes, however, she’d get off the bus in town and go to a friend’s house or—uneasy thought—Iris’ store. So far as I could tell, she always went with a group, but the memory of Iris’ swimming pool and the treacherous river beyond haunted me.

  Between canning and logging I hadn’t had time to read Greg’s script and I realized I needed to study more of Salem’s history. I was running out of excuses to give him. I dreaded the task, as though there might be something I didn’t want to discover in the dark pages of Salem lore.

  A heavy drizzle cancelled the logging one morning and robbed me of my last excuse; so after lunch I snuggled down on the sofa with Greg’s script. Rowan, who was home with a cold, was studying in her room. In front of me on the coffee table were reference books I’d brought down from the tower. On a warmer day I would have preferred to study up there, but in this weather I’d opted for a seat near the fire with a woolly pup curled up beside me.

  Greg had set his first scene in the kitchen of the Reverend Samuel Parris, where his half-Carib, half-Negro slave, Tituba, was clandestinely tutoring the young girls of Salem Village in the mysteries of obeah and witchcraft. For sensitive nine-year-old Betty Parris and neurotic twelve-year-old Anne Putnam, steeped as they were in strict Calvinist teachings against the wiles of Satan and the evil of witchcraft, Tituba’s stories of hauntings and spells were all too vivid…

  I closed my eyes and tried to envision that kitchen. If I was going to design the set I would need more background. I began thumbing through the books I’d spread out on the cocktail table, finally selecting Witchcraft at Salem by Chadwick Hansen:

  “Early in the year 1692,” it said, “several girls of Salem Village…began to sicken and display alarming symptoms…fits so grotesque and violent that eyewitnesses agreed that the girls could not possibly be acting… ‘Their motions in their fits,’ wrote the Reverend Deodat Lawson, ‘are preternatural…as a well person could not screw their body into…being much beyond the ordinary force of the same person when they are in their right mind… Their arms, necks and backs…were turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.’

  “There were other symptoms…temporary loss of hearing, speech and sight; loss of memory, so that some of the girls would not recall what had happened to them in their fits; a choking sensation in the throat; loss of appetite…they saw specters who tormented them in a variety of ingenious and cruel ways. They felt themselves pinched and bitten, and often there were actual marks upon the skin…

  “For some time the physicians were puzzled, but eventually one of them…Dr. William Griggs of Salem Village…produced a diagnosis. ‘The evil hand,’ he announced, ‘is upon them’; the girls were victims of malefic witchcraft…

  A loud pop issued from a wet log in the fire, answered by a slash of icy rain against the windows. Then a floorboard creaked behind me. I looked up briefly, saw nothing, and started to settle back into my book when I became aware of a shuffling sound behind the sofa. Macduff sat up, low growls in his throat, then dived under the sofa.

  A mewing sound set my heart to beating again. Dana’s cat?

  “Phantom?” I called. “How’d you get in here? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  No response. Then a goat bleated. Caper? He couldn’t have gotten into the house. Whatever it was was creeping around the end of the sofa. Then a touseled red head came into view—Rowan! A laugh died in my throat as she began rolling at my feet, her eyes glazed and staring. My God, it was happening again!

  “Stop them, stop them!” she gasped, thrusting out her arms. “They’re pinching me. Owww! Don’t bite me! Oh, ’tis Goody Nurse and Tituba after me, don’t you see them?” She lunged forward and grabbed my knee, then slid back, her hand to her throat, gagging and retching.

  I sat transfixed, terrible thoughts racing through my mind. Rowan would have to see a psychiatrist—go into an institution. I fell on my knees and tried to take her into my arms.

  “Rowan, Rowan, darling! In the name of God…

  Her eyes bulged and her mouth contorted. “Don’t say that name!” she shrieked. “My master is Satan! See?” she pointed. “He’s coming toward us. Ooooh, he’s gross!” The anachronism snapped us both out of it. She began to giggle and I fell back limp on the sofa. Macduff stuck his nose out warily.

  “Oh, Rowan, you scared the wits out of me!” I gasped.

  “How was I? I really had you going, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, and if you ever do that again, I…

  She shook her curls out of her eyes. “That’s just it! I want to do it again—in the pageant. This was an audition. I’ve been reading Greg’s script and the part of Anne Putnam is the best teen-age role. I know you’re on the casting committee—”

  “And for that reason I can’t give my daughter the best part. What would the other girls say? They’ve lived here all along and are direct descendants of the witches.” For a moment we had seemed so close. I hated to refuse her.

  “That doesn’t mean they can act,” she frowned. “Iris and Greg and Lucian all say I’d be best in the part. You just don’t want me to do anything I want to.”

  There was no doubt about it—she’d inherited her father’s talent, but if I was to help with casting and directing, how could I in good conscience give her the lead?

  “Listen, sweetheart, you were good just now—frighteningly good, but I can’t give you the part. It’ll be up to the rest of the committee. You’ll have to audition for them and if they think you’re right—”

  She slammed her fist down on the coffee table. “I am right! You know that. But the committee members wouldn’t care about that. Like Mr. and Mrs. Osburn—they’ll want Cissie to have the part and Mrs. Willard will fight for Jessica—”

  “Rowan, let me finish! You already named three people on your side—”

  “Iris isn’t on the committee.”

  “Well, Greg and Lucian are. Leave it to them.”

  She sat down beside me and laid her hand on my arm. “You’ll talk to them, won’t you, Mommy?” It had been years since she called me that. “You’ll vote for me, won’t you?”

  I hated to be honest. “No, I’ll have to abstain. Let the others choose you. Then nobody will have any complaints. Believe me, that’s the best way.”

  The thunderstorm broke. “Damn you!” Macduff scooted under the sofa again. “You hate me because I’m like Daddy. I wish you weren’t my mother. I wish Iris was—o
r Aunt Charity—or anybody but—” She clapped her hand over her mouth, terror in her eyes, as if I might suddenly turn on her. “I—I didn’t mean that exactly.” And yet I knew she had.

  “Oh, Rowan, I love you! You know I want you to have the part as much as you want it.” I took her in my arms, but it was an empty shell I was holding. I released her and she turned and ran out of the room.

  It was some time before I could focus my attention on the script again. I brushed a tear from the paper. If only I could tell Rowan the truth, maybe she’d understand—no, I was weak even to entertain such an idea. Shatter her father’s image? Never! I forced myself to read on. Greg had said he was coming over this afternoon.

  “Tituba,” Greg had written his stage directions with Shavian verbosity, “had deftly interwoven the lore of her Indian and African backgrounds with the superstitions of her English masters, producing heady fare for maidens whose leisure hours were supposed to be spent learning the catechism and scriptures. Life held little pleasurable recreation for the women of those days. The men and boys had the fun of hunting and fishing, but women’s tasks were arduous and dull.”

  No wonder the girls had rebelled! Imagine Rowan and her friends under such restraint! Not that today’s youth didn’t have their problems, but those Salem lasses—hadn’t their actions been a natural bid for attention? What a foolproof way to tyrannize their austere elders! Or could it be written off that way? Were there supernatural forces at work in Salem? Had the girls been bewitched—or, as we would say now, possessed? And the entire adult community at their mercy—teenagers—like Rowan…

  My eyes refused to focus. A gray spectre of steam curled out of the damp log. I forced myself to reach for the poker to stir the smoke out of the fire…

  …and stared at the great wooden spoon in my hand. Steam was issuing from a stewpot hanging in a mammoth fireplace. I tasted the contents critically—a bit more spice, but just a mite. Our supply was dwindling and who knew when a ship would arrive with more?

  The knotted ropes suspending the straw-filled mattress on the bed in the room overhead groaned. Joshua must be waking—he’d been raving sick with the fever during the night, but I’d brought that down with a clyster. Now he would need nourishment. I climbed the heavy oak stairs with a bowl of venison broth in my hand. My son was still sleeping, his forehead cool and moist to the touch. The deep sleep would make him mend.

  I straightened the covers, putting the arm he’d flung out back underneath. There was dirt under his nails, but he’d been so ill I hadn’t had the heart to make him wash. His long form stretched across the bed—only thirteen, this youngest of my children, and already his feet were sticking out at the foot of the bed. Thirteen!

  About the age of those girls who were giving so much trouble in Salem Village. Bewitched? A spanking was what they needed. Still, i’ faith, ’twere not good for young minds to hear Tituba’s tales about sabbaths in the parson’s pasture where the Black Man… Yet those were not just tales, were they? I myself knew too well…

  A picture of Tituba rose in my mind—black darting irises in yellow-white eyeballs that never met you square; thick, sullen lips, perpetually frowning eyebrows, high cheekbones and a high-arched nose. She’d readily confessed, seemingly delighted to incriminate others. Was this her revenge against free women? Oh, she’d been clever. Her first accusation had been against Sarah Good, a general outcast. Time and a worthless husband had beggared and embittered Sarah, so when people refused to give her handouts, she retaliated with curses.

  Tituba’s second victim was higher on the social ladder—Gammer Osburn, a woman of prosperity, but didn’t everyone know she’d lived with her hired man before she married him? And seven other names were in the Black Man’s book, Tituba alleged, but she couldn’t read them. Her description could have been applied to any member of the clergy, who always wore black. A thin, long, pale young face came to mind. Aye, even him! But ’twere not fitting to think o’ him—with me married these many years to another and mother of his nine children.

  It hadn’t been a bad marriage, but neither had it been a good one. The lovesick suitor, once secure in the marriage bond, had become overbearing and insensitive. To him lovemaking was for the fulfillment of his immediate need and the Lord’s commandment. A woman’s feelings were not provided for in Scriptures. Farmer and town cooper he was. I kept his accounts, though it suited him not that I, a woman, could read and write and cipher better than he. Once, when he caught me jotting down notes in a diary, he’d flung it into the fire.

  “Think ye’re better’n your station, don’t ye, lass?” he’d growled. “Ye forget Woman was created to serve Man.”

  I stole back down the stairs and emptied the broth into the pot. Waste not, want not! I piled more kindling on top of the backstick and stirred the backlog. It was a chill, late March thaw—would it had been snow instead of the sleet lashing at the leaded windows. Damp seeped through the walls and ran in rivulets down onto the floor. No wonder there was so much sickness! I must make a poultice of chamomile and mallows in milk for my daughter-in-law, whose breasts had been sore and swelled since her babe was stillborn. And I’d promised some burdock tea and fresh meat to Goody Redington, who was down with the King’s Evil, and some concentrate of foxglove for Goody How’s sinking spells.

  But, except for my sleeping son upstairs, I was blessedly alone today. Solitude never frightened me. True, Indians lurked in the forest around us—salvages considered to be devil-worshippers. What did these simple people know of our Devil? They knew well they were always welcome at my fire, even though Isaac grumbled that they ate up our stores. For what they received, they always gave in return. Yawataw particularly. But then, we’d almost grown up together. Her father, No-Nose, a Naumkeag Indian, had worked at times for mine. He would bring his little girl with him because her mother was dead. My mother had taken the baby Yawataw into our home when her father caught the smallpox that disfigured him—an act many of our neighbors scorned. When No-Nose recovered, he said to my mother, “Indians know you have strong medicine keep away white man’s sickness. Your family not sick. Can you keep papoose well?”

  Her reply was strange. “It is up to the Cow Mother.”

  So came the day I lay a-fevered, with running sores on my hands. My mother rejoiced. “The Cow Mother ha’ blessed thee, Mary, for ye milk wi’ a gentle hand. When the Queen and fine ladies lie abed wi’ the pox, ye’ll be well and strong. ’Tis a secret I learned from the Old Ones.”

  That day, when Yawataw came, my mother took out her knife and made two small crosscuts on her arm. Though her dark eyes were puzzled, the girl didn’t flinch until with the tip of her knife, my mother smeared the cuts with pus from my sores.

  “Aihee!” the child cried fearfully.

  “Nay, I do thee good. Ye’ll be a mite sick like Mary here, but I vow ye’ll ne’er ha’ pocks on thy face.”

  Yawataw did sicken slightly and No-Nose refused to come to work or bring her because he thought my mother had given her the pox. But both of us soon recovered and not long after, when another epidemic hit the Indians, Yawataw went unscathed.

  She was a widow now and lived alone in the forest, but she always believed my mother had saved her from smallpox. So now she brought me the herbs her people used for medicine, always waiting until the men were gone. Then I’d hear an owl hoot and there’d she be with her pouch full of Indian medicine. I traded meat and provisions for her herbs, although I think she would have brought them even if I hadn’t.

  ‘Twasn’t charity I gave her, though Isaac would have called it such had he known, for she paid me in kind with not only her medicines, but with lessons on how to plant and use some of the strange plants of the New World.

  She wouldn’t come today in this weather. Nor would Sarah, my older daughter, who had her own home to tend now. Hannah was helping her cousin who lay in childbed—I saw to
it that Hannah was kept busy, determined not to let her fall into Dorcas’ clutches as Sarah had. Isaac and the boys were making barrels in the barn. My spinning was fair caught up. Dinner was merely a matter of dipping stew onto the plates and thawing out a squash pie. There was mending to do, but that could wait until this evening. I would steal—deliberately steal from this day. How I longed for one of those books I’d heard were read in Boston and London, but Isaac allowed nought but the Geneva Bible and the Catechism in our house. Well, the Good Book was surely the better reading o’ the two, and if my menfolk came in early, they’d see me at my Scriptures and think me the holy woman I was not.

  ‘Twas an old game I played, opening the Bible at random for a message, and it seldom failed me, although, if I landed in the “Begats,” I’d have to try a second time. The heavy cover fell open to the family register, where I’d entered births and deaths and weddings: “Married, Isaac Eastick to Mary Towne, May 12, 1655.” Isaac had scribbled “Esty” above “Eastick.” He liked the short form, but I preferred the old.

  I closed my eyes, slit the Bible open with my hand and ran my finger down the page until it stopped, then opened my eyes: “Thou shalt not suffre a witche to live!” (Exod. 22:18) I nearly dropped the book. What augured this that I should turn to that dread passage so oft quoted by our clergy of late? I tried again—this time in the New Testament, which should be safer:

  “For to one is given by the Spirit the worde of wisdome; to another the worde of knowledge, by the same Spirit.” (1 Cor. 12:18)

  The “worde of wisdome,” our parson had once said, was given to divines like himself and the “worde of knowledge” to the schoolmasters. “To another is given faith, by the same Spirit—” What did that mean? There was a notation in the margin: “To do onely miracles by—” If the Apostles could work miracles, why hadn’t they handed this power down to us? “—to another the giftes of healing, by the same Spirit—” Doctors? Nay, our physicians healed more by leeching than by the Spirit and their patients died as oft as not. Could it be that Paul had provided for spiritual healers within the church? If so, where were they now? “And to another ye operations of great workes—” I looked to the margin again: “To work by miracles against Satan—” Again miracles! In these hard days? Belike they’d be called sorcery. “—and to another prophecie—” Anyone daring to prophesy today would be called a witch and a witch must not be suffered to live.