Before the Devil Fell

by Neil Olson

  Bathed in milky light, the room behind was reflected in the wavy glass of the window. Dim and distorted. The four glass-fronted cabinets. The array of steel and ceramic pots and pans on the far wall. The rusting kettle on top of the ancient gas stove. The white refrigerator. The figure in the dining room doorway. Slender, with brown hair to her shoulders, and a white T-shirt stained red in front.

  Will?

  The voice was hoarse. Strained but recognizable. Her nose had been crushed by the dashboard and her neck had snapped. Who had told him that?

  Will?

  Scared, pleading. She did not know where she was or what had happened. She wanted him to explain, to comfort her. He had no comfort. He shivered again and closed his eyes. There was a slow, unsteady shuffling of feet across the linoleum, approaching him. Her legs had been broken in multiple places. How did he know that? Who would have been cruel enough to tell him details like these? And yet stories circulated after traumatic deaths. In small towns. Rumors, gossip, truth and invention hopelessly mixed.

  Will?

  The nerve endings in his neck and back began to ache, awaiting her touch. She must be right there behind him. Arm outstretched. Small, cold hand, bloody fingers about to brush his skin. He listened for her breath, but his own blood roaring in his ears drowned out everything. Her coffin had been closed. He had not been able to see her a last time. Not that it would have been her, just an abandoned husk. Why should he not look now? How could it be worse than what his imagination had created and recreated over sixteen years? She needed him. Didn’t he hear the pleading in her voice? Where was his courage?

  Will opened his eyes and turned around.

  * * *

  She took a long time to answer the door. When she did, she said nothing, just looked at him. Looked long and carefully at his face. He could only guess what she saw there. Will could summon no words, but it didn’t matter. She did not need to be told.

  “Come in,” Samantha said at last, stepping out of the way.

  Will didn’t move. Just swayed in place, three or four feet from the open door. Some instinct had propelled him to this spot, but now his momentum failed.

  “I need to understand what’s happening to me,” he said at last.

  “I know,” she replied, reversing her motion and stepping onto the porch. She took both of his hands in hers and drew him to her. “Come inside now.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  “I’m not the best person to explain this,” she said, placing a steaming mug in front of him. “I have to imagine what it’s like for you. For me, it’s just how things are. But I guess I’m all you’ve got.”

  Will wrapped his trembling hands around the hot mug. The brew was a murky yellow and smelled flowery. He was determined not to interrupt, not to be evasive or skeptical. Not to think at all, if he could help it. Especially not to think about the scared, broken thing that had or had not been in his kitchen.

  “There’s stuff around us all the time,” Sam said, sitting across from him with her own mug of the concoction. “Stuff people don’t see. Maybe they used to when they were young. You did. Friends that aren’t there, the way other people are. Probably we don’t even see them like they really are. Just a picture our mind makes.”

  She was already losing him, but he didn’t speak. She seemed to understand.

  “Do you remember Toby?”

  The name was instantly familiar, yet he had to fight the impulse to disavow. The instinct of ignorance. As if someone else controlled his mind, and had for decades. Relax. Wait for it. The little wooded gully behind the house. The leaves May green. Sam uttering some singsong chant or incantation while they watched her in fascination. They. Two of them. Will, and Toby. Round, chortling and red faced. A little boy, but not a little boy. He didn’t live anywhere but there in the woods.

  “Toby wasn’t real,” he said. Already he had broken his resolution.

  “Or Alice?”

  A plain-looking girl with pale skin and gray eyes. Gloomy and solemn. They let her hang around because they felt sorry for her. She was older, at first. Then she was their age, then younger, then gone. He had not thought of her in twenty-five years.

  “She was yours,” Will said, struggling with this. “I invented Toby and you invented Alice. Children have friends like that.”

  “They do,” she agreed.

  “They weren’t real.”

  “Well, maybe they weren’t what they seemed. Drink that.”

  He took a sip. It was bitter, and familiar.

  “My grandfather has this genealogical research,” Samantha said. “Books he’s collected. Family trees. I look at it sometimes. There was an Alice Hall who would have been my great-aunt. She died in this house when she was seven. Spanish flu. I even found a photograph. Want to see?”

  “You think they were ghosts?”

  “You know, that’s one of those words. There are these ideas you bring, these...”

  “Cultural references,” he supplied.

  “Right,” she said. “Thanks, Professor. Anyway, it’s not useful.”

  “But that’s what you mean.”

  “I know people can leave a piece of themselves behind. Especially if they die young, or die badly. It’s not them, but it’s real.”

  “You still see them?” he couldn’t help but ask.

  “I’ve seen Alice. Not for a long while. I see my grandmother.”

  “When?” he asked.

  “All the time. I saw her today, in the herb garden. She’s there a lot.”

  Could he go down this road with her? Surely there was a line between opening your mind and losing it.

  “Was it Christine you saw?” she asked.

  The brew surged in his throat, hot and acid. He managed not to spit up. He had to stop being surprised by her. To accept that she knew things about him, however that might be.

  “Why did you say that?”

  “Because this is the day she died.”

  “Of course,” Will sighed. Feeling foolish. “I didn’t expect anyone else to remember.”

  “She was important to you,” Sam said. “You loved her.”

  “No. We were seventeen, it was...”

  “What’s important to you is important to me.”

  “Would you stop with that.” His words had no force. He could not tell her what to feel. That he had become an adult in the last fifteen years, had experienced a full and complicated life completely out of her sight did not seem to matter at all. He had forgotten her, forgotten them all. But she had not forgotten him. And anyway, it now seemed that he had not really forgotten anything.

  “Is that how it works?” he asked. “Anniversaries of their deaths?”

  “Some say. Some say certain times, or even in certain places, the line between what’s seen and unseen gets thin. There’s whole religions that believe that.”

  “Not you?”

  “Maybe it’s true,” she conceded. Leaning back and putting her sneakered feet on the kitchen table. “How would I know, when I see things all the time? Mostly I think it’s about the people who do the seeing. It runs in families. Runs in ours.”

  “Not mine,” he protested.

  “Sure it does, you’re half Hall. Go back far enough, and most of this town is related. And it could be those people who have the sight are drawn to places where the sight is clearer.”

  “Like this town?”

  “That’s not for warming your hands. Drink, it’ll calm you.”

  He took another sip. That familiar bittersweet taste.

  “What’s in here?”

  “Mayweed. Willow bark, a little honey. Few other things.”

  “My mother used to make this.” Will remembered at last. “Something like this. When I was upset. Mayweed and honey. Hers was sweeter.”

  “Of course s
he made it,” Sam said, getting up and going to the cabinet. “I’m sure she made all kinds of remedies you don’t recall. She’s a Hall woman.”

  “Meaning she’s a witch?” he asked sharply.

  Sam gave him a long look, the overhead light making a bright halo of her hair. Then shook her head slowly.

  “That’s another one of those words I don’t use.” She came back to the table and put the sticky honey jar and a spoon in front of him. “Here you go.”

  “They don’t burn them anymore,” he taunted. “They have ceremonies out in public. You can go down the road to Salem and join a coven.”

  “I don’t need to go to Salem to do that,” she said quietly, sitting again.

  “No?” he asked, his false bravado curdling instantly.

  “They’re here,” she confirmed, her voice firm and a little scolding. “In all of these towns hereabout. And most of them do not do their business in public.” She closed and opened her eyes. “I don’t consider myself one of them.”

  “What word do you use?” he asked.

  “Hall women are healers. Going back generations. Back to Maine, anyway. Probably back to England. They’re in tune with whatever place they live. The trees and plants. The herb lore, the energy. They might do some songs or chants, but I think of that more like prayer. You know? Ritual. They heal, they help people.”

  Will could feel himself falling into her words, the spell of her words. The idea of this community of women, healing and enfolding him. It’s a lie, the voice in his head said. And he shook himself, as if from a dream.

  “That’s a nice story, Sam. But my mother was a drug-addled hippie. She was no healer.”

  “Every generation reinvents what it means. You think our ancestors weren’t eating and smoking herbs and bark and flowers? Just to see what they did? You think magic mushrooms were just invented?”

  “Come on,” he said. “Your ancestral healers testing medicinal properties is not exactly the same thing my mom and her buddies were up to.”

  “They had the impulse, but they lacked teaching.”

  “What teaching?”

  “There’s supposed to be a knowledge-keeper every generation. Or more than one, maybe, who passes this stuff on to the next generation.”

  “That stopped at some point?”

  “I don’t know if it stopped,” she said, not looking at him now. “But maybe it stopped being done the right way.”

  She knew more than she was saying. Which was odd for straightforward Sam.

  “No one taught you,” Will said. “But you know how the system is supposed to work.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How? Who told you that much?”

  “My grandfather, for one.”

  “Tom Hall?” Will said, taken aback. “Told you this stuff?” But then it made sense, if you looked at those old family tales in a different way.

  “Of course,” she replied. “He studied local history. Knew all about the seven families. He always smiled when he talked about it, but he knew. Old Mrs. Price too.”

  “Margaret?”

  “Not her,” she scoffed. “Her mother. She was always nice to me—I don’t know why.”

  “Maybe she saw something in you,” he suggested. Wondering now if Margaret Price’s seeming agelessness was not simply his confusing generations.

  “I think that might be it. It wasn’t that she liked me so much, but she would look me over real close. Ask me questions. As if she sensed something.”

  “Your witchy strength.”

  “Whatever,” she replied. “I guess she did teach me things.”

  “Spells and incantations?”

  “No, nobody taught me those. But I learned a few on my own.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  She looked uncomfortable again. They were getting near what she wanted to talk about, but oddly it was him having to pull it out of her. That was fine. The tea was calming him, and they had already come this far. He might as well hear it all.

  “A few days ago,” he started. “You said that you called me and I came. That night of the storm. When John Payson died. What did you mean?”

  “Johnny...” She took a deep breath and continued. “Johnny was spending a lot of time hanging around our house then. You remember that?”

  “No. I don’t remember those days very clearly.”

  “He was a Payson, but he had Stafford ancestors. And Halls. Actually, he claimed a connection to all seven families. The missing link, he called himself.”

  Will finished his tea. He had never added more honey.

  “I didn’t think his generation cared about all that,” he said. “Seven families, the history. I thought it was peace, love, drugs and rock and roll.”

  “Johnny was a little older. Twenty-eight or nine. He’d been out West, all over the country.”

  “Draft-dodging,” Will said, having heard that much before. It was during that same cross-country exile that Johnny stayed briefly with Will’s parents in California, before his dad shipped out to Vietnam.

  “Right,” Sam said. “He studied with some Zen master in Los Angeles. Stayed on Indian reservations, hanging with the medicine men and chewing peyote. When he finally came back, he had hair halfway down to his butt, silver bracelets. All these ideas about space and time and consciousness.”

  “You can’t possibly remember that,” Will said. “You were six or seven.”

  “I remember a lot. More than other people. But I’m sure I was told things too.”

  He noted that even after her scolding, she wasn’t drinking her own tea. He pushed the honey jar at her, which elicited a brief smile.

  “Nah. If you can drink bitter, so can I.”

  “Johnny came marching home,” he prompted her.

  “I’m guessing about this. Nobody wanted to talk about Johnny after that night. But I think he came to see our families, the healers or witches or whatever you want to call them... He came to see it as one more thing, you know? Zen, dream catching, the earth goddess, spirit cults. Just one more piece of the mystical whole.”

  “Is that how you see it?” he asked, genuinely curious.

  “And unlike those other traditions,” she pushed on, “this was the one he was born into. And there’s my grandfather. Always taking in strays, helping people out.”

  “Like he did my mother.”

  “And he’s got these shelves and shelves of books about everything.”

  Will got it. Johnny was full of ideas. Full of himself and in love with the world, but returning with nothing. No money, his family dead or moved on, except for his brother Doug. He needed someone to help and guide him. And here’s this old guy with a library designed to let the young man explore his theme. Investigate his past for the raw material to make something of his life. Tom probably ate it up.

  “My grandfather liked him,” Sam said, answering his thoughts unbidden, “Liked having anyone around who was curious about books and ideas. He was still grieving for Grandma Jane, and I guess he needed someone else to focus his attention on. He and Johnny bonded.”

  “Seems like Johnny charmed everyone.”

  “He had the knack,” she agreed. “He could dazzle the younger people with his half-assed philosophy, and he could flatter the older ones, like Grandpa or Doc Chester. He would listen to Doc gas on about African tribal rituals all afternoon.”

  “It must have been tough for your grandfather. You know, to have Johnny die like that.”

  He remembered Tom being around that night, for the aftermath. Trying to calm his mother. Talking to the police. Yet wearing the same haunted look as all the others.

  “It was. They were fighting a lot right before it happened.”

  She was gazing just over his left shoulder. As if someone there was providing the story. He shivered involuntarily and resisted the
urge to look.

  “There was a book,” said Sam. “One particular book Johnny got obsessed with. Old. Hundreds of years, I think, with old-fashioned writing. Passed down through the family.”

  “The grimoire,” Will said, rather than asked. “The book of spells.”

  “I guess Grandpa didn’t mind at first, but after a while they started to argue.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Something in the book.” She closed her eyes, then looked at the tabletop. Anywhere but at him. “He had marked one page with a strand of hair.”

  “Hair?”

  “Yeah, so it wouldn’t be obvious. But Grandpa noticed it. He noticed things.”

  “And so did you,” Will added. He placed his hands on the table and leaned forward, to get her attention. “What was on that page?”

  “A summoning spell.” She looked at him shyly.

  “Summoning what?”

  “It was in a whole section of spells like that. Spells you shouldn’t use. Enchantment. Shape-shifting. Summoning.”

  “Summoning what, Sam?”

  “The kind of spells you needed other people for,” she said, like he was missing the point. “Many voices together, that creates power. I think he was trying them out in your mother’s coven.”

  “My mother’s...” He could say no more, his throat suddenly tight.

  “What have we been talking about?” Sam said, exasperated. “Coven, conventicle, spirit circle. Call it what you like.”

  “It’s not, it’s not about what I like,” he stuttered. “It matters.”

  “Only because you’re a teacher. They’re just words, William.”

  “It matters what they thought they were doing.” He had to keep wetting his lips to speak. All that sweet calm had burned away, just like that. “I teach myth and folklore. I know what covens are. I know what kind of beings they seek to summon.”