Witch-Child

by Gerilyn Marin

  Even without opening them, I can see the edges of the pages. They are of slightly different, irregular sizes and the edges are uneven, as though each page was torn from a larger piece of paper by hand.

  "Wow," I breathe the word. The books have a strangely ominous appearance in the innocent setting of a sunlit living room.

  Or that could just be because of what's in them.

  I give a quick look around, trying not to get distracted by impressive things like crystal lamps, large Oriental vases, and plush, spotless, Persian rugs.

  Mom obsesses over those shows about the things rich people decorate their homes with, and I sometimes end up watching with her. Guess he wasn't kidding when he said his family had money.

  "Um, shouldn't we do this someplace where your parents won't walk in on us?"

  "Nah, they're in Jersey until tomorrow," he says as he lets his backpack fall to the floor and drops onto the couch beside the table.

  "Oh, okay." I clear my throat a little awkwardly, a bit of unease stealing over me. I cover my feelings by simply nodding, before dropping my own bag beside his and taking a seat on the floor across from him.

  It isn't as though I'd expected to have anyone hanging over our shoulders, and perhaps I shouldn't have just assumed that his parents would be home on a normal parent-schedule. But knowing they're not here for the entire day—that Grey and I are alone here for the remainder of the afternoon—gives the house a whole different feel.

  Good thing this isn't a date.

  There are three books aside from the register, so we have them equally divided, two in front of him, two in front of me. I ignore the register and delicately open the book beside it. This one appears to be a journal, like Bridgette's, except not as well crafted. Like it was something stuck together by someone that simply needed to make a book out of whatever might have been lying around.

  The pages are thick and rough beneath my fingertips, not too different from the old newspapers we went through just a few days ago.

  "That's not the one," Grey says, gently tugging the book I have from beneath my hand and pushing a different one toward me.

  Frowning thoughtfully, I skim the first few pages. I'm not really sure what I'm reading. There are a lot of panicked words about confinement and differing energies, whatever that means. Shaking my head, I pretend I don't feel the weight of Grey's stare on me as, I guess, he waits for me to get to the part he was talking about when he'd wrecked a totally pleasant lunch period by informing me that he'd opened the books without me.

  I turn a page and my breath catches in my throat as I find myself staring down at some sort of magical circle. I only recognize what it is because of trips I've taken with Wendi to an occult shop in one of the neighboring towns.

  Well, I know what it is, but I have no clue what it means.

  "What does this have to do with Jack?"

  Grey nods slowly and picks up one of the other books. After gingerly flipping through it for a few stretched and silent moments, he clears his throat.

  "'Twenty-sixth day of April, 1843. We have come to the decision something must be done about this creature. However, in dealing with an inhuman being, we must resort to inhuman means.'"

  "Inhuman means?" I echo, my brow furrowing.

  He nods again. "That's all I read. I figured if I went any further, you'd really be mad at me."

  "Okay, but what does that have to do with this?" I ask, pointing at the circle.

  "I'm not positive that it does, but bear with me a second. All living things give off energy, right?"

  "Right." Sure; I even read once that these scientists had gauged a spike in the energy given off by broccoli—broccoli—that showed it could register what humans would think of as pain or fear. Still not sure what made them decide to hook electrodes up to veggies, but then I'm no scientist.

  "Okay, well, maybe different types of living things give off different types of energy." He gives me this look, like he's suddenly unsure of my intellect. "You follow where I'm going with this?"

  "Something that isn't human would have a different energy than a human?"

  It's the only thing that makes sense. In this context, anyway. I can't imagine any other conversation in which that assessment would make any sense at all.

  "Yep." He drops his gaze back to the book in his hand. "This is a journal, but it's not. It's more like a log of decisions and events. Belonged to someone named, um . . . ," he turns to the first few pages, "Samuel Maris."

  "Maris?" I rise up on my knees and sort of scoot-walk around the table to lean over Grey's arm and read the name for myself.

  "You know the name?"

  Nodding, I move from the floor to the couch cushion beside him. "Yeah. I mean, we may not know a lot of our history, but we know names. Like, um, Samuel Maris was a town official."

  "Huh," is all Grey says for a moment. He returns to the entry he'd originally been reading aloud and continues.

  "'We fear killing the creature may not be possible. One of the witch-children assures me that the death of this thing will only cause misery to those who bring about its end. Though resorting to such means goes against sound judgment, the safety of our townspeople is at stake.'"

  I blink a few times and shake my head. "Witch-children?"

  "I-I don't know that means," he says slowly. Once more, he turns to the beginning of the book and starts skimming through the pages.

  Now I feel how Grey must've felt when I'd been looking up his ancestor on the computer. I want to know, but I don't want to look; as if the weight of my stare on the pages will make whatever information they contain worse, or more devastating, or whatever. I'm watching his face; even though the book is right there, I don't want to read it for myself.

  This is probably the reason I'm hyper-aware of the way he suddenly forces a small gulp down his throat.

  "Did-did you find something?"

  He nods and shrugs, his gaze flitting from the page to me then back again.

  "Yeah." Pausing, he draws in a breath and looks around, like he doesn't know how to say whatever it is.

  I scowl. "Don't make me hit you."

  "Okay, okay. Maris says . . . when the Witch Trials were happening up in Salem," he pauses again, shifting uncomfortably, "well, you know how they say that none of the people who were murdered during the Trials were actual witches?"

  Oh my God, if he doesn't get to the point I really am going to hit him! "Grey!"

  He closes the book, holding the page with his thumb, and lifts his gaze to mine.

  Now I understand. He's not having trouble explaining it; he's trying to prepare me for hearing what Maris has written.

  "The actual witches came here. Witch-children are what Maris calls the descendants of those who fled Salem."

  Like the title Jumping Black Flash, there's this odd sense, as though it should be familiar to me, though I know I've never heard the term.

  Just saying the words makes the pit of my stomach feel hollow as I repeat numbly, ". . . Witch-children."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Timelining

  The two books in front of me belonged to a shopkeeper's daughter named Elizabeth Riordan, one of the people identified by Samuel Maris as a witch-child. The books—her diary and her Book of Shadows—are both in a condition I can only describe as purposefully ragged.

  I'm looking at an actual witch's spell book that is two centuries old, maybe older. I think I read somewhere that families pass down these kinds of books. Realizing that as I touch them makes my fingertips tingle and causes a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach.

  According to Elizabeth, Jack Addison was never killed. Never ran off; never died.

  In a way, it turns out he's been in Drake's Cove all this time. Elizabeth says she bound him—and he’s bound, still—in a sort of layer between life and death, somewhere in town.

  I sit back, away from what I'm reading, and simply stare at my hands for a moment, trying to imagine what she claims to have done. For a re
ally bizarre few seconds, I swear I can feel the very weight of the air around me pressing against my skin. I don't know why, but by reading her words, I have the sense that things I've previously thought of as fantasy movie fluff are actually possible, and for a moment, I'm acutely aware of my surroundings.

  Glancing up briefly from his own reading, Grey asks, "What's up?"

  I can only guess that he hasn't reached Samuel Maris' account of what I have just read from Elizabeth—or maybe Maris didn't directly say anything, because he didn't fully understand.

  "Um . . . ." My brow furrows and I have to look away from Grey as I try to explain. "Okay, remember how you scoffed at me for living in a haunted town, but not believing in witches, like real, have-magic-type witches?"

  From the corner of my eye, I see him close Maris' logbook.

  "Yeah?"

  "Well." Nope, still not sure how to say this, I realize as I finally look at him. "So I just read something, and it's a bit hard for me to believe. No, okay, I'm lying. It's more like I can't believe that I believe it."

  His eyes widen, as his gaze leaps about the room before returning to me. "You're going to have to get that untangled for me to understand what the hell you're talking about."

  "Okay." I clasp my hands in my lap to keep from fidgeting. "There's no record of Jack's death because he's, well, technically, still alive."

  Grey's face shuts down. For a long time, he doesn't say anything.

  I wonder if he thinks I'm making this up, but I really have no clue what goes through his mind when his expression closes off like this.

  "Elizabeth says that . . . um, she used magic to create a seal . . . on him."

  His face becomes expressive again, and it's an expression that would make the word sour jealous. "She did what?"

  Clearly, he gets all this better than I do, so, with the hope that I don't have to go too deep into details, I continue.

  Not entirely sure how anyone explains—and expects to be believed—the idea of sticking a person into a pocket of space, suspended in some sort of magic stasis, I try anyway. "She sealed him, or, well, bound him. Here, somewhere here."

  I pause for a quick breath, and then force my next words out in a rush. "You're right, Jack never left Drake's Cove, but he's trapped, outside of time, between this life and the next."

  Grey props his elbows on his knees and presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. "Are you friggin' kidding me?"

  My eyebrows shoot up and I spare a moment to open Elizabeth's Book of Shadows and push it across the table at him. "You know more about this kinda stuff than I do. You really think I could just, I don't know, pull out of my ass something that seems to make sense to you? I have no clue what I'm even talking about!"

  "I'm sorry, you're right." He drops his hands and looks up at me. "I don't think you're making up anything, I just . . . ." His words trail off as he picks up the Book, but he only gives Elizabeth's writing a cursory glance. "I just got through reading about how Samuel Maris and some of the other town officials forced that girl to use magic on Jack so he couldn't run from them."

  This story is getting more worrisome by the minute. The idea that they bullied Elizabeth Riordan into helping them upsets me.

  The thought that Jack had been magically subdued—which reminds me too much of my first dream, that one where I was limping and I couldn't speak around the burning in my throat—upsets me even more, but I push past it.

  "So you can probably imagine," he says, oblivious to my moment of agitation, though I prefer to think that I just cover my moments well, "hearing something like, 'Guess what? Your mysterious, missing ancestor? Yeah, he's been trapped in some magic bubble for two hundred years,' is a bit much to swallow."

  "Then, what you're telling me is that this," I point to the circle on the page, "is true? Like, actually happened true?"

  He nods, and we sit for a moment as this information sinks in. Once upon a very recent time, this would have seemed not only impossible, but downright laughable, to me.

  After the shock subsides, Grey is still a touch angry about this unexpected bit of news surrounding Jack's fate, but insists that we focus on the whole story. Not just the barbaric part that likely involved angry villagers chasing his ancestor through the streets as magic slowly crippled and silenced him.

  Which is the part I'd be stuck on if this was me, but anyway . . . .

  Back to the research we go.

  The damage to the books isn't obvious from looking at the covers, but many pages have been sloppily and hastily removed, so that the only information left behind is that which pertains to Jack Addison. This action seems very odd to me; most people would have hidden the pages and kept the book.

  I'm only able to assume that perhaps she felt the information about the Jumping Black Flash—or Spring-heel, which might just be what I start calling Jack when Grey and I speak in direct reference to the devil-y aspect of his ancestor—contaminated the whole thing and salvaged only what she'd thought was untouched.

  What she'd thought was safe, maybe.

  Samuel Maris' log reads almost the same way as Elizabeth's books—he recorded what was happening just with regard to Jack and the bizarre supernatural phenomena in Drake's Cove. Disturbingly, he claims to have begun the log only as a way to keep a grip on his sanity. He recorded stories from all over town, so I guess that when he thought of his own experiences, he only needed to read over what other folks had told him to realize he wasn't alone.

  Kind of reminds me what Grey said, about why Bridgette Addison—Spring-heel's wife, of all people—had started her own journal.

  The accounts sound like all the same incidents that occur today. Footsteps echo through empty rooms, disembodied voices whisper for anyone who can hear them, items move about without aid of human hands.

  By far, the most unsettling tale is that of a wandering torso. According to the log, Maris' neighbor witnessed this apparition when the man woke up to begin his morning chores. He set foot out of his house and looked up the street to see a human torso—no head, nothing from the waist down, yet it had arms, but no hands—moving disjointedly down the block.

  . . . As if it was part of a whole person, the rest of whom the unnamed neighbor simply could not see.

  Turns out there are some things that will make a grown man run into his bedroom and hide under the covers like a terrified child.

  I wonder briefly what this all has to do with Jack Addison. Why collect these stories and leave them with the only evidence that he'd ever existed?

  Since these books are of value only to Grey and me, we waste little time in pulling the pages free and building a collage of sorts. We piece together a timeline of events leading up to his ancestor's death.

  But I use the word death loosely.

  Maris sought out the advice of the witch-children as to what could be causing the town's disturbances. He tried to make it clear to that he didn't blame them; their families came to Drake's Cove long before these problems started. But Elizabeth was the only one who'd listen; the others, she said, did not want to be pulled into a matter not of this Earth.

  As an inhuman creature, the energy given off by Jack was different from that of his neighbors, and his continued residence in town began to saturate the land. This pulled other . . . things here. Anything unusual that had ever happened could be tied to Jack Addison's choice to make his life in Drake's Cove.

  I suppose this should be no surprise. I recall Grey mentioning that the other towns where the Spring-heels—still no solid clue as to what these creatures actually are—are said to stay are also hotbeds of spooky happenings.

  But . . . Maris was afraid to kill Jack.

  No, that's not quite right.

  "It sounds more like he didn't think Jack could be killed," I say quietly, once more snatching up the page that contains Elizabeth's advice to him on ridding the town of such a being.

  Next to that is a page showing two different magic circles. Yet another has the first circle I'd s
een upon opening the Book of Shadows, and—now that I have the images in front of me—appears to be a mash-up of the first two.

  I can tell the first circle is the one that she used to bind Jack, but her writings are cryptic. I have a little trouble understanding the rest of what she's talking about.

  "Let me see that." Grey frowns thoughtfully as he takes the pages with the circles from me and sets them beside something he's reading from Maris.

  I'm not quite sure what he sees that allows this to all make sense to him, but then, he's been looking into this paranormal stuff a lot longer than I have; maybe he just plain understands it better.

  After a moment, he looks up from the pages, a mischievous half-grin curving his lips as his hair falls into his eyes. "Remember when I called this town-wide ignorance of the past 'creepy collective amnesia?'"

  "Ah," I reply with a forced brisk cheerfulness, "our first argument. How could I forget?"

  "You're cute." He gives a quick shake of his head. "What I mean is that you guys do have collective amnesia. And it isn't just creepy. It's a curse."

  I have absolutely no idea what to say to this, so I just sit, mutely staring at Grey for a few seconds.

  I can't even manage a blink.

  He is clearly waiting for some reaction from me, so he doesn't move, either.

  "I'm—" My voice just up and dies on me, so I take a moment to clear my throat and shake my head before trying again. "I'm sorry, what, now?"

  Grey purses his lips, his gaze flicking from me, to the pages, and back again. "Maybe that wasn't the right word to use. But, it isn't natural." He points to the second circle. "That's what this one is. She caused the amnesia. Elizabeth Riordan did a spell that bound the town’s memories."

  My head feels light and fuzzy, suddenly, hearing these words.

  No one will remember. Was that Elizabeth Riordan's voice? Had I overheard her speaking with Samuel Maris?

  I can't know that for sure. Then again, I've been operating on an awful lot of guesses during this whole devil mess and it's gone pretty well, so far.