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

by C. N. Crawford

  “Pretty soon the supermarkets will be full of Harvesters,” muttered Alan.

  Tobias sat cross-legged across from Fiona. “You said you’d heard Bess’s name before?”

  “Her gravestone is at King’s Chapel. They say it might’ve been the inspiration for The Scarlet Letter.”

  Tobias frowned. “Well, I guess the poem isn’t in the school anymore. What did she say? We’re looking for something that’s not there.”

  Alan threw back his head, covering his face with his hands. “This is a disaster.”

  They stayed up as long as they could, trying to come up with a new plan, until Alan and Fiona fell asleep on the floor. Tobias lay down near them on the beast-embroidered rug, tucking himself into Fiona’s blanket, but sleep wouldn’t come. He understood what Fiona meant about wanting it all to stop. But with Rawhed’s Harvesters serving their god just a few hundred feet away, it wasn’t about to get any more mundane.

  29

  Fiona

  For over a week, students languished within Mather’s gates as heavily armed police scoured the city for the terrorists. The Boston Police Commissioner assured the public that his best analysts were reviewing video footage and asked for a few more days of lockdown. As the days passed, residents and shop owners grew restless, and the Commissioner announced that the terrorists had fled the area. In a national address, the President promised the criminals would be hunted to the ends of the earth.

  Fiona wondered how much, exactly, the government knew. Was it true what Munroe had said—that a secret task force hunted witches?

  Late Saturday afternoon, she left the school gates for the first time since the attacks. Jack had texted her that morning, asking her to meet him by the waterfront for the promised sailing trip. An excursion into the harbor, he’d said, would grant her some respite from the bloody images in her head.

  In the Common, memorials had blossomed around trees—bouquets, candles, and American flags. From the news, Fiona had learned that the man she’d watched strangled to death had been a Swedish designer named Karl. Among the flowers, people had left pictures from his life: swing dancing with his girlfriend, snuggling his cats, and posing in colorful porkpie hats.

  As she walked north through the park, she peered over at the smooth, white branches that grew ever higher, now twelve feet at least. No one could explain the tree’s presence. When work crews had failed to remove its impenetrable roots and branches, people had begun to murmur about magic. They whispered that sorcerers had summoned a cursed plant—maybe even a weed sprouting from Hell itself.

  All the park rangers could do was erect metal fencing around the tree, though its boughs had soon cleared it. As the tree grew, so did the crowd around it, a swarm of red-eyed wanderers raving about “the truth.” Around them, FBI agents in black jackets lingered, staring at passersby through dark sunglasses.

  Walking past the Common, Fiona quickened her pace, planning exit strategies through the doorways and alleys around her. She clung to the keys in her pocket, allowing one to protrude from her fist. The Harvesters could reappear at any time.

  She breathed easier as she approached the waterfront. Jack waited by the dock, wearing a navy-blue pea coat and a gray scarf. He stood by a medium-sized sailboat. She smiled, hugging her coat around her against the salty wind.

  “Have you ever sailed in the harbor?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Your parents have a boat and everything. That’s awesome.”

  He looked into the clear blue sky. “The weather’s supposed to be good for it.”

  For someone who’d grown up in South Boston so close to the harbor, she had very little experience with water, despite her mother’s best efforts to enroll her in swimming lessons.

  Jack took her hand to help her into the boat. “I think this is the only real way to see the city.” He guided her toward the cockpit. “And it’ll be nice to get away from the Common after everything that happened.”

  She sat on a cushion, and he gave her a bottle of sparkling cider to open while he hoisted the sails. She struggled with the corkscrew, and after a few minutes she placed it to one side. She gazed out into the harbor and at the distant islands dotting the horizon.

  “Does anyone live on the harbor islands?” She held onto a gunnel for stability as the boat bobbed over waves.

  “On some of them, yes. Not as many as there used to be. There were once Native populations, but diseases wiped them from the islands in the early 1600s. And then there was Deer Island.”

  “People lived there?”

  “A long time ago, the Christian Indians were sequestered there during King Philip’s War. Most of them died from starvation. Later, it was a stopping point for refugees from the potato famine.”

  As he spoke, the waves swelled. She hoped she wouldn’t be nauseated. He turned the boat into the wind and reefed in the sails.

  “Did anything good happen in the harbor islands?” she shouted.

  “They used to hang pirates over there. Does that count as good? They left their bodies in the gibbet as a warning on Nix’s Mate.” Jack pointed to a nearby island. “It was named after Captain Nix. He killed and buried his first mate there to protect their treasure.”

  “Was the treasure ever found?” she asked.

  “No, why? Are you looking for some more adventure in your life?”

  “Actually, for the first time, I’m looking for less.”

  “You want a quiet life?” He smiled, shouting over the wind. “A cup of tea and some books in the evening?”

  “That sounds nice. Or watching reality shows about cheerleaders competing to get plastic surgery before prom night.” She should have said something more sophisticated. She should have said shows about English aristocrats during World War I.

  Jack tacked into the wind. He called out a warning to Fiona to watch out for the boom. She looked up as it swung over the cockpit and then stared out over the ocean again.

  Elizabeth Pain must have spent time in the old Boston Gaol with some of those pirates, in a freezing dungeon with iron-spiked doors. In her history class, she’d read about Captain Kidd, the Scottish privateer commissioned by the government to attack French ships. He’d lost control of his crew and slipped across the subtle dividing line between government-sanctioned privateer and outlaw pirate. The rumor was that he’d buried treasure in a number of places. Before Kidd was sent to London to be hanged, he was placed in the Boston Gaol, alongside Quakers, witches, murderers—and perhaps a banshee.

  As she looked out onto the harbor, it seemed to her that she gazed into the very foundations of the city; that it formed a sort of gateway between the Old World and the New.

  Jack tacked again, and spray blew over the side as the bow crested a wave. She could imagine him on a pirate ship, his sober clothes replaced with flounces, red scarves, and jewelry. Her vision was cut short by a violent downward lurch of the boat. This was how Percy Bysshe Shelley had died—flung from a sailboat while thoughts of beauty distracted him. The wind picked up speed, and the boat smashed the waves again as it hurtled forward. Fiona curled up in the driest corner of the cockpit and did her best to suppress her urge to spew.

  He shouted, “We should turn around.”

  Dark clouds gathered on the horizon. For a moment, though most of the sky was the color of iron, a few buttery sunrays lit up the sailboat. Then, Fiona felt the air go colder as roiling storm clouds totally hid the sun. Jack brought the boat about, aiming the bow toward Boston. The ship heeled sharply, and she clung on, looking into the churning water near the lower gunnel. What if she were thrown into the dark ocean? She envisioned an unholy legion of jellyfish ushering her to her final resting place amongst the pirate skeletons.

  “Are you okay?” He shouted over the howl of the wind.

  “Is this normal?”

  “Sorry. It’s a bit rough. The weatherman promised clear skies.”

  “I never learned how to swim,” she yelled.

  “What?”

 
“I don’t know how to swim!”

  He glanced at her as he struggled to steer the boat. “It won’t come to that.”

  The boat heaved in the waves, and she held tight to a cleat. Lightning seared the sky.

  He called out, “The gods must be angry about someth—”

  A boom of thunder drowned him out. Rain started to batter the sailboat. She closed her eyes, and then a large wave buffeted the boat. So much for a quieter life. As the boat plunged downward, she lost her grip on the cleat and felt herself tossed out of her seat. In the next moment, Jack held on to her, and she was steadily seated again.

  As they sailed back to shore through the squall, she held on with a death grip until they reached the dock. She exhaled with relief, stepping out and shivering in her sodden coat while Jack moored the boat.

  He guided her through the rain toward the street, his arm around her shoulders as they walked. Soon, she snuggled against him in the back of a yellow taxi, her teeth chattering.

  “They need to get that fireplace going in the dining hall again,” she said.

  “We should sneak in to light it at night. I don’t think Mulligan knows what’s going on since the terror attacks. He won’t notice.”

  She smiled. “That would be nice. We could have tea and read books.”

  “What would you read first?”

  “Lord Byron.”

  “Oh, right. You like his poetry.”

  She shook her head with a faint smile. “More his life, honestly. I mean, he lived in Venice with a monkey.” She looked out the window as the cab drove past Quincy Market. Armored police vehicles patrolled the streets.

  Jack pulled her closer to him. “You seem to spend a lot of time with that new kid, Tobias.”

  “I guess so.” She sat up a little. “You haven’t really met him, have you?”

  There were little shards of gold in his blue eyes. “I’ve seen him. How much do you know about him?”

  Now there was a question she didn’t want to answer. “What do you mean? Is this to do with Munroe calling him a witch?”

  He sighed, looking away. “I didn’t believe in that stuff, but then the apparition of the tree started appearing, and now it’s growing there. And it’s not a normal tree. The police tried doing some kind of controlled explosion, and they can’t get rid of it.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “And you think Tobias has something to do with the tree?”

  “I don’t know. He says he’s from England, but he doesn’t sound English to me. He showed up at our school, got into a fight with Munroe’s boyfriend, and then the boyfriend died looking like a mummy. Then a teacher disappeared. We still don’t know what happened to her. And there’s a video clip of one of the terrorists from before the attacks. He said something in a weird accent that sounded vaguely English, but not exactly. It sounded a lot like Tobias’s.”

  When he put it all together that way, it didn’t sound good. She frowned, looking out at the Common as they passed it. “He’s from a rural part of England.”

  “I think maybe you should reconsider your friendship with him.”

  She glanced at him, his black curls falling over his forehead as he frowned. She felt her cheeks flush with irritation as they approached the school. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” The cab slowed, pulling over outside the gates.

  Jack smiled wryly as he pulled out his wallet. “I don’t know what I’m talking about?” He pulled out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to the driver. “Keep the change.” He opened the door, climbing out, and Fiona followed him.

  She scowled as they walked through the courtyard. “Maybe you should trust that I’m capable of picking my own friends.”

  He sighed, opening the front door and looking into her eyes. “I’m just telling you this because I’m worried about you. I think you could be naïve about what you’re getting into.”

  Her cheeks burned hotter. Why was it that guys always thought they knew everything?

  “Thanks for your concern,” she said as they went inside. “But I really don’t enjoy being patronized, so I’m going to be naïve somewhere else.”

  She stormed off toward the library. It could have been such a nice afternoon, or at least reasonably nice considering the recent supernatural terror. Why did he have to bring up witchcraft? She would have been better off talking about reality TV or comparing herself to Hitler.

  30

  Thomas

  Voices echoed off the tiles in the Harvard Square T station as Thomas Malcolm stepped off the subway car. Tucked into his wallet were a Harvard ID and a key that he’d managed to procure from another grad student. Over drinks in South Boston, he’d convinced his friend that accessing Harvard’s Widener Library was crucial to his King Philip research.

  Of course, he hadn’t told Emil the real reason he wanted to visit Widener’s stacks: the library had the most extensive documentation on Maremount in the world, including alleged firsthand accounts. He’d been there years ago with a collaborator when they researched his first book.

  He only hoped that the door monitors wouldn’t notice that the photo ID in his wallet belonged to a white person.

  He walked through the iron-and-brick gateway onto the Harvard campus, following one of the old paths toward the center of Harvard Yard. Until recently, he’d dismissed the Maremount Treatise as a hoax, but with all the weirdness of the past two weeks, maybe the original sources warranted a reexamination. He squeezed past the tourists photographing the statue of the old Puritan, John Harvard, and strolled toward the giant columns of the Widener Library that loomed over the campus.

  He rubbed his chin as he climbed the great stone steps. Was using someone else’s student ID actually illegal, or just frowned upon? As he entered the library doors, he found a student slouched over a book. Thomas pulled out the ID, planting his thumb over Emil’s photo. The student gave him a cursory nod, returning to his chemistry book.

  Thomas exhaled, shoving the card back in his wallet. He continued through the main atrium and climbed the marble staircase into the enormous library. Winding through the library’s ten levels were almost sixty miles of bookshelves. A student could get lost within the cavernous honeycomb of books, but Thomas knew exactly where he was going. As he reached the top of the stairwell, he turned left, continuing down a long hall until he stopped at an oak door. He fumbled with the lock and opened the door to reveal a much smaller library.

  At the far wall, three tall windows illuminated a large wooden table surrounded by chairs. Oak bookshelves lined the walls, reaching all the way to the ceiling. He crouched toward the bottom of a bookshelf near the windows, scanning the spines for the Maremount Treatise. He glanced over the W’s until he found the author he was looking for: Edgar Waldron. He pulled the old leather-bound book off the shelf, brought it to the table and began leafing through the yellowed pages.

  The narrative began in the Old World. Queen Elizabeth’s successor, King James, had a particular interest in witch-hunting. Thomas knew this story. As a young man, the King’s ship had sailed into a squall, and the terrified monarch blamed the incident on magic. James became paranoid that sorcerers planned a violent death for him, and he personally oversaw the torture of scores of accused witches until they confessed.

  Thomas turned a brittle page to an illustration showing the young King sitting in judgment before cowering women.

  Under Charles I, the persecution of witches had become more intense, and philosophers began immigrating to the New World. Bostonians strolling along the Charles might be surprised to learn that the river was named for someone who’d ordered the torture of suspects by dunking them under water for hours at a time and then burned them alive if they survived.

  When he turned the page, he found a piece of paper tucked into the book. As he unfolded it, he found a hand-drawn family tree of the Maremount royal family. The Throcknell dynasty had begun with King Malchior in 1693, and continued to the current monarch, Balthazar. Below Balthazar’s name, someo
ne had scrawled “Princess—b. 1998?” Thomas folded the paper again, returning it to the book.

  He studied an ink illustration of the King’s famous Witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins. Around his neck hung a pendant. It wasn’t a cross, as Thomas would have expected. It was a chalice. He turned back to the image of James I, who wore the same pendant affixed to the side of a velvet hat. He wasn’t familiar with the iconography. Was it supposed to represent the Holy Grail?

  As he turned another page, a white-haired man in a black suit entered the room. Thomas cleared his throat and tried not to look up. Hadn’t Emil said that no one ever used this room? He stared at the book, trying to feign natural behavior as he listened to the man’s footsteps approach. He didn’t want an embarrassing scene. He was a respectable doctoral student, after all.

  The stranger pulled out a chair, sitting directly across from him. Neatly trimmed nails tapped on the tabletop. “Thomas Malcolm.”

  Thomas jerked his head up as the ruddy-faced man stared at him. “How do you know my name?”

  The man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an issue of the Journal of American Folklore—the very issue that had published Thomas’s Maremount paper.

  The man licked his finger and turned the pages, as though reading a story to a child. “‘Alleged exiles from Maremount report that the first king, Malchior, was a descendant of Merlin. He was chosen in an endurance ritual conducted in the wilderness by a group of aristocratic sorcerers.’” He closed the journal and placed it on the table. His mouth spread into a thin, crooked-toothed grin. “You know a lot about magic, don’t you, Thomas Malcolm?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry—who are you?”

  The man leaned forward, his voice suddenly intense. “We are those who watch. We are those who protect. We shed light into the darkness. We have always been here. And do you know who we’ve been watching recently, Thomas Malcolm?” He pressed forward even further and pointed directly into Thomas’s face, mouthing the word you.