by Skylar Finn
The Witches of Mount Hazel
Skyler Finn
Contents
1. Premonition
2. The Comeback
3. The Other Pennsylvania
4. The Madness of Margo Metal
5. Family Reunion
6. The Witches of Mount Hazel
7. A Lesson in Magic
8. Smoke and Ash
9. Sneaking Out
10. House of Stone
11. Peter’s Theory
12. Margo’s New Assistant
13. Fire With Fire
14. The Dinner Party
15. The Only Cure is Common Sense
16. Trouble Afoot
17. Spleenwort
18. No Rest for the Wicked
19. The Briar Rose
20. Fight or Flight
21. Protocol for Dangerous Witches
22. The Legend of the Dark Horse Inn
23. Gwyneth’s Choice
24. The Blacksmith’s Daughter
25. An Unexpected Guest
26. Hell Hath No Fury
27. Common Denominator, Samantha Hale
28. Duplicity
29. Martha’s Memory
30. Gwyneth’s Offer
31. The Only Dry Place
32. The Other End of the Earth
33. Margo Moves In
34. Desperately Seeking Tamsin
35. The Room Behind the Curtain
36. What Happened to Colin
37. The Unseen
38. Gwyneth’s Plan
39. The Curse of the Dark Horse Inn
40. The Dark Coven
41. Sisters of Darkness
42. The Root and the Branch
43. The Only Light in a Dark Place
44. The End of the Eclipse
45. Incarnate
46. Revelations and Resolutions
47. No Ordinary Girl
1
Premonition
“Samantha! Where is that girl? I just saw her. Samantha Hale!”
I was hiding under my desk, where I had just swallowed three aspirin and washed them down with black coffee. It was my sixth straight day working fourteen hours for Coco Z, the most intense PR lady in all the land. I would have taken the pills at my desk but then Coco (no one knew her last name, probably not even her husband) would have interpreted it as a sign of weakness.
In theory, I could have taken them in the bathroom, but I only went twice a day, when Coco called her nanny to check on her triplet daughters. I don’t think Coco went to the bathroom at all. It was one of the many reasons I was convinced she wasn’t actually human, but rather an AI invented by Elon Musk to maximize efficiency in public relations: The Coco Z: Presenting the Next Generation of Corporate America.
I heard her Louboutins click rapidly out of the room, and I knew it was safe to emerge. I popped up at my desk and quickly smoothed down my hair before assuming The Position: I sat at my desk, spine ramrod straight, with my earbuds in to receive any calls (Coco always purchased the latest iPhone for everyone on her team, the caveat being that it must remain glued to your person twenty-four hours a day) while I stared deep into the depths of my tiny MacBook Air. This was also provided courtesy of Coco, with the understanding that any downtime I had was to be spent keeping up-to-date on our current roster of clientele: making sure no nudes had leaked, unfortunate Tweets had gone viral, or sexts had been made public by vengeful exes.
Coco clicked back into the room. I imagined her as the Terminator after all his flesh gets burned away and he’s just a staring red robot eye clicking around on metal feet.
“Samantha!” she exclaimed. “Have you been in here this whole time?”
“Yes,” I said innocently as I elbowed the bottle of aspirin into the top drawer of my desk. “Why, were you looking for me?”
“Hmm,” she said, scratching her head, as if puzzled. Her poker-straight, ink-black bob with its signature streak of hot pink was shellacked to her scalp like a helmet. I had long suspected it was a wig. The fact that it seemed to lift up a few inches from her scalp as she scratched it only served to further fuel my Coco conspiracy theories.
“You know, I think I took too much Adderall this morning, Sammy, because I was moving so quickly I didn’t even see you,” she said. Coco often dipped into the triplets’ supply of performance-enhancing cognitive therapy medications in order to keep her empire running like a well-oiled machine.
“Maybe you should drink some water,” I suggested. The fact that Coco ran off amphetamines and Coke Zero was a source of concern for me. In spite of the fact that I often felt like a winning greyhound, sprinting after a mechanical rabbit to avoid being put down, I was also deeply fond of her: her bossiness, her intensity, her pink-streaked wig.
I never knew my mother, and I had a tendency to form affection for even the most tyrannical of my female mentors. I guess I had what you might call mommy issues. Coco was my boss, but she was also my current pseudo-mother—unbeknownst to her, of course. It wasn’t something I talked about. I didn’t want to get fired.
“I had a bottle of Voss this morning,” she said dismissively.
“Coco, that was twelve hours ago,” I said. “You’re supposed to drink six to eight glasses a day.”
“Did you know that Clearly Canadian is making a comeback?” she asked, ignoring me. A favored tactic of hers. “I just saw some in that bodega around the corner. I ordered six cases of it this morning.”
“That carbonated blackberry stuff from like 1998?” I asked.
“Yes! Isn’t that fabulous? I’ll drink water again when it gets delivered on Monday,” she said.
“Coco, that’s three days from now,” I said.
“Who cares? Did you make that call yet?” she asked.
“What call?” I asked.
“The one I was going to ask you about when I was looking for you earlier.”
“You haven’t asked me to make it yet,” I said, exasperated. Sometimes working for Coco was like one long, drawn-out who’s on first routine.
“Oh, right. I need you to call Les Rodney at Empire Records. He’s got a lead on a client. He just signed her, and he’s being very mysterious about it, which means he’s either baiting me or has something to offer. I need you to find out which one it is.” She winked at me and smiled her shark’s tooth smile.
Under my layers of poreless foundation (Coco liked her girls to look airbrushed, “like you’ve been Photoshopped!”), I felt myself flush. It was disguised by a thin veneer of bronzer, another Coco staple. (“I like my girls to look fresh off the Riviera! Try to look like you enjoy the same jet-setting lifestyle as the talent we represent.”)
Les Rodney was the one-man army behind Empire Records, a digital label with an extensive catalog of glittering pop stars. His Instagram consisted largely of heavily filtered candids of him sunning himself on his yacht: bleached grin, cognac swirling in one hand with his other resting lightly on the thigh of his flavor of the week. He was a man who wore rings. Many of them.
She introduced us at a Christmas party, telling me to network, but under no circumstances whatsoever to date him. He knew everyone and everything, and was a complete and total womanizer.
“Not just a womanizer, but a straight-up girl-eater,” she said. “He’ll tell you you’re his one and only when you’re one of only five, and he’ll expect you to accept this. And you will, because you’re replaceable. Don’t get attached. You’re too smart for that, and he’s only trying to seduce you in order to get information. About me.”
She told me all of this, but I still believed him when he said I was unlike any other woman he had ever met and he would gladly renounce his ways and hang up his hat in exchange for a date with me. I later found out he s
aid the same thing to his other three girlfriends, all of whom knew each other and were friends. They invited me to brunch and told me they went to Johnny Brenda’s every Saturday if I wanted to join them. I did not.
“That won’t be a problem for you, will it?” Coco asked. She looked at me knowingly over her Oliver Peoples tortoiseshell frames. Coco knew all that went on in this town. She was kind of like Santa that way. I’m pretty sure she knew when I was sleeping and when I was awake.
“No, of course not,” I said brightly. “Why would it?”
She smiled at me, pityingly, I thought. She would allow me to cling to what remained of my pride. Coco was kind that way.
“Good,” she said. “Tell you what, call him after you get home tonight. The triplets have a soccer game in the morning and I’d like to get my beauty sleep, so why don’t you get out of here early?” It was eleven o’clock at night. “Maybe stop on the way home and get yourself a pedicure or something. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Treat yourself for a change.”
“Okay,” I said to her already-retreating back. Her coat was snow white without a fleck of dirt on it. I didn’t know how she did it. I’d studied her for months now and was still no closer to learning her secret.
I checked my phone as Coco disappeared into her office to call for a car. She had no license and had driven only once in her life, six months ago to an emergency vet when her Pekinese, Jujube, ate six tins of caviar. Coco promptly crashed her husband’s 330i and totaled it. Both she and Jujube survived, and she hasn’t driven since.
My dad had called me. And texted me. And sent me a link to a Forbes article about streamlining my workflow. He was slightly overprotective of me. Just slightly.
I changed the sound setting on my Coco phone from extra loud to vibrate. I made sure it was in the pocket of my jeans and not my coat so I would notice if it went off, just in case. As I did so, I imagined my looming call to Les Rodney and felt overwhelmed with embarrassment just thinking about it.
He would, of course, think I was calling for some reason other than PR. I would just have to try not to think about it until I had to do it, and then I would never think about it again. Denial is a powerful tool if you know how to wield it.
On my way to the train, I stopped at the bakery at the end of the block to get a cupcake. So I could, as Coco put it, “treat myself.” It was my birthday.
“Are you inside yet?” my dad demanded over the phone.
“Dad, it’s fine,” I said, exasperated. My dad hated that I lived in Devil’s Pocket, even though it had long been gentrified, like every other neighborhood in the city that had once had any sort of color, character, reputation, or other sign of life. My father was constantly pushing me to move to Rittenhouse Square, ideally in the same building as him, where I could meet a nice investment banker or hedge fund manager and settle down. “I’m inside. The alarm is set. My gun is loaded.”
“Good,” he said, satisfied. “Make sure you keep it somewhere handy. Don’t put it in the nightstand unloaded, like all my friends’ daughters do. You’re a smart girl, you know better than that.”
“I will,” I said. “Hey, Dad? I have to make a quick phone call for work, can I call you back?”
“Of course,” he said immediately. “Take as long as you need. I’m going to be up all night working on this merger, but I’m planning to take a break at one. Do you have plans for your birthday? I’d like us to get dinner someplace, but it might have to wait till tomorrow evening, if that’s okay with you.”
“Yeah, I don’t think anything will be open at one in the morning, Dad,” I said. “Sunday night is fine. I’m going to have a drink with my girlfriends tonight.”
“Good,” he said. It was his all-purpose modifier for everything. Having a job was Good. Stability was Good. Dependability was Good. Everything else? Unacceptable. “I’ll let you make your phone call. Remember: be a force. No one respects a spineless pool of jelly.”
“Okay, Dad, I will,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and hung up the phone. It was also his way of saying I love you and happy birthday.
I felt only slightly guilty for lying. Having to “do something for work” was the easiest way out of any conversation with my father, who exited most of our encounters for the same reason. Except in his case, I’m pretty sure it was always the truth.
The truth, in this instance, was that I had a date with Joel Gott before I made the phone call from hell.
After my wine had aerated, I stretched out on the deep-pile rug in front of the fireplace. The original row home had long been gutted and renovated. My father’s fears that I might end up in some authentic and slightly edgy part of the city were completely unfounded. As I drank the wine, I let my mind drift. I stared into the fire.
I didn’t mind working all the time. It kept my mind off my mild-mannered, chaste existence in the middle of a Tinder-fueled city of bustling single professionals. I passed them on the way home, guzzling tequila on Taco Tuesdays, engaged in their arcane courting rituals outside the hippest bars and night spots.
The Les Rodney incident had injured me badly and nowadays, I rarely ventured out unless it was to meet my friends for happy hour or a drunk brunch, typically the morning after said happy hour. But lately, I was starting to feel like a hamster in a wheel. Or a gerbil in a cage. Some type of rodent that scurried back and forth, thinking only of cheese. Surely there had to be more. Even Coco had her triplets. What was my purpose? Did I even have one? Maybe not everyone did.
I wondered what my mother would say, if I could ask her. It was at times like these that I thought of her most. Especially on my birthday. I had no memory of her. Sometimes, I’d get just a flicker—like the edges of a dream or a half-formed memory that I couldn’t quite recall. But only sometimes. Like now, for example. As I stared into the fire, I thought I heard her voice. Samantha? Can you hear me?
The flames seemed to grow higher, brighter, and hotter the longer I looked at them. I had the random and bizarre thought that it was almost like looking into hell. Sparks leapt from the fireplace, but disappeared into thin air before they could land on the rug or burn me. I felt unable to look away, but even if I could, I wouldn’t have wanted to. Shapes were forming in the fire and I wanted to see them more closely.
I was on my hands and knees, inches away from the flames, watching them intently when I realized it wasn’t just shapes I was seeing: there were colors. Blue and gray and brown, which gradually sharpened into an image, as if I was watching TV. The image was a forest. A cold, barren forest in what looked like the middle of nowhere.
I was a little drunk and more than a little fascinated. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid. I wanted to see what would happen next.
In the fire, a girl ran through the woods. She looked over her shoulder. Her long hair was tangled and dirt-streaked, filled with brambles. Her expression was one of fear. My hands felt hot, and I realized I was reaching out as if I could touch her. I quickly drew my hands back as she turned her unseeing eyes in my direction but not at me. She looked like she was looking somewhere behind me.
“Who are you?” she said. She tripped and stumbled backward, falling to the forest floor. She raised her hands to cover her face and screamed.
I felt her fear course through me, and I stumbled back from the fire as she had stumbled
in the woods. I heard a light muffled thud and slosh as the glass of wine tipped over and spilled,
but it barely registered. I covered my face as she had as the fire roared up and out of the
hearth, blood-red, expelling a copious cloud of smoke, before it receded back into the fireplace and went out.
I screamed just as loudly as she had.
2
The Comeback
The room was dark and smoky. My breathing was shallow and rapid. I felt like my heart was going to pound right out of my chest. What just happened?
I looked at my wine. My first thought was that I had been drugged, but the wine had been
corked and sealed until I opened it at home. I’d had nothing to eat all day but coffee and aspirin, so it couldn’t be food poisoning.
There was one other troubling possibility, one I usually refused to let my mind dwell on for long. I’d been thinking of my mother, and I’d heard a voice. It wasn’t the first time it happened, and I usually chalked it up to wishful thinking. But combined with this visual hallucination—or whatever it had been—it could only mean one thing: that I was going crazy, just like her.
It was the reason my father divorced her and took me away. He fought hard in court to gain sole custody; usually, it goes to the child’s mother. I guess he had enough evidence of her delusions to win. But what if what was wrong with her was hereditary? What if it was happening to me right now?
I sat on the rug, shaking, as these terrible thoughts swirled through my brain. The doorbell rang and I jumped about a foot in the air, knocking my recently righted wine glass over again. Who was it? Jill said she’d text me when she was ready to go out, which, knowing her, wouldn’t be till midnight.
I went to the front door and looked through the bay window, which offered an expansive view of the stoop. I blew out an exasperated sigh and considered not opening the door, but I knew he wouldn’t leave until I did.
It was Les Rodney. His white teeth gleamed in the dark night. He was holding a bouquet of Gerbera daisies and a bottle of wine that probably cost more than my car. Assuming I had one.