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

by C. N. Crawford

  “They’re getting sicker.” His father’s eyes darted all around—looking at Tobias, and the grass, and the sky, and back to Tobias, but he wouldn’t look at the basket. “I must ask the philosophers to heal them.”

  But when Tobias looked at his mother and sister, he could see that their lips were blue, their skin was gray, and their chests no longer heaved with breath.

  “Tobias!”

  His eyes opened, and Alan stood over him. He lay in his room again, and he exhaled. His chest was hollow with sadness.

  “Tobias, something’s happening in the dining hall.”

  “What?” The image of the knocking heads faded from his mind.

  “Munroe is stirring something up.”

  Tobias struggled to get up, feeling drawn back to his bed as if it were quicksand, but after a few moments he stumbled to his feet and followed Alan out the door. He ran his hands along the walls as they shuffled through the halls and down the stairwell to the dining hall. As they entered, he saw Munroe standing on a long wooden table. She was in a tight red dress instead of her uniform, and her arm was bandaged. Dozens of students gathered around her.

  “I think we all know what’s going on now.” Her voice was a low hiss. “The tree that won’t come down, the terrorists who disappear into thin air. This isn’t ordinary terrorism. This is witchcraft!” She held up her bandaged arm as she prowled back and forth on the table, her feet bare. “You all saw what I did. I have the power to repel them.”

  “Go Munroe!” someone shouted appreciatively.

  She stopped pacing. “But there’s one here among us. What happened to Sully? What happened to Ms. Bouchard?” She turned to look at Tobias, folding her arms. “Maybe Tobias can tell us.” She bent forward, addressing him as if he were a child. “Tobias, can you tell us what happened to Sully after you punched him?”

  Everyone stared at him, and some students edged closer.

  “Where are you supposed to be from?” Connor stepped toward him. “My dad is English. You don’t sound like him.”

  “Where is the principal?” Tobias whispered to Alan.

  “He hasn’t left his office since the last attack,” Alan whispered back. “Let’s get back to our room.”

  With bags under his eyes, Mr. Grunshaw trudged into the dining hall, ordering Munroe off the table. But as Tobias and Alan hurried back to their rooms, Tobias could still hear the excited shouts about the Mather Witch echoing through the corridors.

  39

  Thomas

  Surrounded by crooked stacks of papers, Thomas shoveled another forkful of chicken tikka masala into his mouth. As he chewed his cold dinner, he glanced at the mud he’d tracked into his kitchen the day before. Under the gray Rhode Island sky, he’d spent six hours digging through the dirt for the jawbone. It was the spot where King Philip had been killed—where the war had ended. Yet for his efforts, he was no wiser as to the location of the jawbone.

  He’d just taken another bite of chicken when the phone rang, and Fiona’s name appeared on the screen. “Hello?”

  “So you didn’t find anything?”

  “I pretty much just flung earth around for six hours. The wand did nothing. I’m just glad there was no one to see me waving it around. Anyway, the location didn’t fit our pattern.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a little stone memorial there. It ruins the whole pattern of unmarked sites. The things you found were based on clues of what was missing. The gallows was unmarked. This one had a sign.”

  “So maybe that wasn’t the end of the war that we’re supposed to look for?” said Fiona.

  “People usually refer to King Philip’s death as the end. After his body was dismembered, the Puritans sold off his wife and children as slaves in Bermuda. The Wampanoag still live in New England, but he was the last King.”

  “So what are we missing?”

  “Some sources place the end two years later, in 1678. I’m not quite sure why.” He took another bite of his dinner.

  “How do wars get officially ended?”

  “There was a treaty. I guess the end location could be where they signed the treaty. I really don’t relish the idea of an earth-flinging trip in Maine, though.”

  Fiona went silent for a moment.

  “Are you still there?” he said.

  “You know that war in Iraq?”

  He sighed. “I’m familiar with it, yes.”

  “They hung Saddam Hussein after they invaded, right? I was just thinking, maybe the Puritans hung some people at the end, too. After the treaty, to get rid of any last enemies.”

  Thomas dropped his fork on his plate, spattering bits of fluorescent-orange masala sauce on his shirt. “Fiona, you’re a genius.” He dropped his phone on the table, hit the speaker button, and began rifling through a stack of papers.

  “What’s happening?”

  “When I was looking for the execution spot of the three men at the start of the war, I found a book that chronicled all the executions around Boston Common.” He shuffled through the papers around him as he spoke. “I found it!” He held up a page photocopied from a book called Boston Common: A Diary of Notable Events. “The diary stopped naming the Natives they killed after a while. There were just too many of them. After Matoonas had his head cut off, more were killed every few years. The descriptions get more and more vague—some Indians captured were hanged. At least forty were killed after King Philip’s capture.”

  “So the last execution could be the ending point?”

  “Two years after King Philip died,” said Thomas, “there were nine random executions I couldn’t figure out. It just said nine Indians shot on Windmill Hill. It was in 1678. They must have been captives of the war, maybe high-ranking Pokanoket Wampanoag members.”

  “That must be it! The ending point. The whole thing started and ended with executions.”

  “Any idea what Windmill Hill is?” he asked.

  “Tobias said there was a mill in the North End in Maremount, one that runs on imprisoned spirits. There are parallels between both worlds left over from the old days. Maybe that’s Windmill Hill.”

  He paced around his apartment, excited now. “What part of Boston would that be?”

  “Copp’s Hill, I think.”

  Thomas straightened. “Copp’s Hill? Cotton Mather is buried there. In fact, Cotton Mather is probably buried with the jawbone he ripped off. I should have thought of that to begin with. We’ll get everything we need in one place. The minister and the jawbone.”

  “It’s within the police perimeter. When are we going?”

  “Get your worst clothes ready. We’re going grave-robbing tonight.”

  * * *

  Close to midnight, Tobias and Fiona met Thomas near Windmill Hill. They joined Thomas to cast their shovels into the earth in the old burial ground. Thomas brought a duffel bag for transporting the King’s jawbone and minister’s bones, and Tobias dragged along a few shovels.

  When they arrived at the cemetery, an iron fence blocked their entry. Thomas stood guard while Fiona and Tobias clambered over the spiky gates before he followed them in. On the hill’s peak, the cemetery overlooked the Charles River on the northern side, while narrow triple-decker houses loomed over a cramped street at the southern edge. Crooked graves jutted from the grass in meandering patterns interspersed with a few maple trees, just beginning to bud. At one time, a gallows must have stood here near the windmill, and at the base of the hill, a ferry would have taken passengers across the river to Charlestown.

  They searched through the cemetery while Tobias illuminated the graves with a sphere of light. After a few minutes, they found the Mather family tomb near where they’d entered. A few drops of rain fell as Thomas appraised the stout brick memorial. Lightning speared the sky over the river.

  “It’s not just a grave. Cotton is below several feet of cement.” The rain fell harder in heavy drops.

  “We’ll have to dig through the side.” Tobias handed him and Fiona sh
ovels.

  Thomas’s clothes were already damp in the rain, and the wind chilled him, but he thrust his shovel into the hill along with Tobias and Fiona, who argued over Tobias’s determination to return to Maremount by himself.

  “I’ll go with him,” Thomas said when they’d dug several feet into the earth. “I’m the only adult. Plus, I know how to fight even without magic.”

  Arms throbbing with fatigue, they worked into the night, piling up mounds of mud beside the pit. They shoveled as the storm battered them with rain, and they continued after it passed. At last, in the very early hours of morning, Fiona’s shovel hit something hard: a collapsed wooden casket. When Thomas pulled the splintering pieces apart, he found a skeleton clutching a jawbone.

  “It’s here.” Thomas reached down for the jaw. He handed it to Fiona, and then placed Cotton’s muddy bones into his bag, one by one.

  “Careful,” said Fiona.

  “I got it.” He fed pieces of the ancient minister into his duffel bag.

  When he finished, he helped the two teenagers climb out of the slippery pit. Hoisting himself out, he saw Tobias’s body tense as he stared into the heart of the cemetery. Thomas followed his gaze. In the night sky, three pale green moths with long, curving tails flew toward them through the moonlight.

  Fiona rested on her shovel. “What are those?”

  The moths fluttered to a tomb below a tree, and Thomas’s breath caught in his throat as he watched them rupture into human forms. It was that vertigo feeling again—only this time, his heart thudded in his ribs.

  Standing before him, all three men had close-cropped beards, wearing somber clothes with wide, white collars, tapered hats, and vines coiled around their limbs. In the front, a robust blond man with a bulbous nose stood taller than the other two. Behind him were two dark-haired men whose similarly slender frames and piercing blue eyes suggested they were brothers.

  Thomas fanned out his arms. Tobias stepped forward in line with him.

  The blond spoke a word in Angelic, and a torch ignited in his hand, illuminating his golden beard from below. The three Harvesters stepped closer, stopping only a few feet from Thomas’s face.

  “We seek the blasphemous Leviathan’s skull,” said the man with the torch.

  Thomas could hear Fiona’s panicked breathing behind him. He gripped the duffel bag in both hands, suddenly wishing he’d trained to fight three men at once. Would Tobias be any good in a fight?

  The Harvesters chanted in Angelic. It sounded like separate spells, and the flame grew larger. The blond held his hand into the flame, pulling out a ball of fire.

  “Run!” Thomas jumped forward, punching the blond in the jaw. The man fell backward, unconscious. Though the brothers continued chanting, the fireball sputtered out.

  Thomas turned, rushing after Tobias and Fiona, who scrambled over the cemetery gate. They sprinted toward the main road, hurtling down the hill toward sparse early-morning traffic.

  At the intersection, Thomas hurled himself in front of a car that screeched to a halt inches before him. He shouted to Tobias and Fiona to get in and wrenched the passenger door open. The driver, a middle-aged white woman, screamed in terror as he jumped in. Behind him, the back door slammed.

  “Drive!” Fiona yelled, but the woman kept screaming, staring at Thomas as she cowered against the driver door.

  He looked out the window and could see the three Harvesters coming toward them as the morning sky lightened. The blond hurled a fireball. It thudded against the rear window, and the woman’s screaming intensified.

  “Drive!” Thomas shouted.

  The car lurched forward as the woman slammed her foot on the gas.

  “It’s okay,” he said over her wails. One of the kids should have been in the front seat. “We’re not trying to hurt you. There were some terror—”

  “Was that a gunshot? Is this a gang thing?” the woman sobbed, swerving back and forth over the double yellow line. “Can I just give you the car? I have money.”

  He put up his hands in a gesture of peace. “We don’t want the car. We’ll get out soon. It was the terrorists.”

  She gasped for breath, sobbing.

  Fiona leaned forward from the back seat. “We’re only seventeen. We go to private school. He’s getting a Ph.D. We’re not in a gang.”

  The woman glanced in her rearview mirror at Fiona’s face, and her breath began to slow. “Terrorists were after you? The witches?”

  “They were in the cemetery.”

  After a minute of crying, she said, “You should call 911.”

  “We did already,” Thomas lied.

  She sniffled. “Oh my God. They’re everywhere.”

  As the sun rose, the woman dropped them off near Mather Academy, and the three of them snuck into the Adepti room. They sat on the floor. Thomas slumped against the wall.

  “Nice punch,” said Tobias. “They have a much better fire spell than we do, but it seemed like the punch interrupted it quite well.”

  “Thanks. Nice running.”

  Tobias rubbed his eyes and smiled faintly. “I thought I ran away quite manfully.”

  “I guess Rawhed knows about the bones,” said Fiona. “Do you think he can find us here?”

  “I think I should bring them to Maremount right away,” Tobias said. “I just want a few hours of sleep.”

  Fiona yawned. “We’re coming with you. You need the whole coven.”

  “I need to talk to Bess,” said Tobias. “She wanted cake. Do you have any here?”

  “You think I would hoard cake in my room?” she asked, but even as she spoke Tobias was rifling through her stash of junk food. He produced a plastic-wrapped marshmallow snack, dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day, and a few chocolate cupcakes.

  “These will do,” he said. “I’m going to talk to her now, then I’ll rest for a few hours before I go.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Thomas. He wasn’t fond of the idea of encountering more Harvesters, but he couldn’t let Tobias go into danger on his own, even if it was his home.

  With the cakes in hand, the three of them walked down the stairwell to the tunnel. Thomas’s chest tightened at the sight of the bones and the faltering sounds of children’s rhymes floating through the air. This was like a nightmare.

  A bent crone stumbled toward them through the darkness.

  One for sorrow,

  Two for mirth,

  Three for a secret,

  Four for death.

  “Hello, Bess. I don’t think I ever told you my name. I’m Tobias, and this is Thomas and Fiona. We brought you cakes, like you asked.” He deposited the treats in Bess’s gnarled, quivering hands. “I’ll need to get to Maremount in a few hours.”

  A toothless grin spread on her face. “Lovely,” she said from beneath her tangle of gray hair. “I’ve got a Thomas here too, bless him.” She pointed to a skull resting at his head level. Ashy fungus grew in the sockets. “Killed for buggering his farm animals.”

  Thomas nodded and gave a half smile. “I see. That’s…” He cleared his throat, letting the sentence die out.

  She sat down on a stool and chewed, gazing into the remainder of the cupcake as though it were a crystal ball. “This one’s got cream,” she said after a moment. “I take much pleasure in cakes with cream. You want to get home, crow-boy?”

  “I need to bring something back to Maremount,” he replied. “We’re trying to finish what Wormock started. Thomas will come with me.”

  “I’ll need more of these.” She mumbled something unintelligible and ripped open the green cupcakes.

  “We have more,” said Fiona.

  They thanked her and turned to leave. As they walked out of the tunnel, Thomas heard her wavering voice filtering through the tunnel’s dank miasma.

  Little Tobias crow-boy had a fine skull,

  A bag full of bones, one man full.

  Here come the moths to scare the boy away,

  But Little Tobias crow-boy will die another
day!

  When Thomas reached the tower room, he collapsed against the wall. A pink morning light filtered in from the window, but his eyes closed against it. In a couple of hours, he would join Tobias in the Darkling Tunnel. He didn’t know what awaited him on the other side, but it couldn’t be much worse than what was happening here. Couldn’t be much worse than a night bus full of London teenagers, come to think of it, and he’d survived those.

  On the rug beneath him, a three-headed dragon unfurled a triad of curling red tongues. He stared at the image until his eyes began to close, thinking of the red tongues of fire that sometimes rose from the alley behind his apartment in East London. When he’d first moved there, a small house had stood on stilts over train tracks, and below the tracks was the place for burning cars. As soon as one burnt car was removed, another would take its place. Sometimes, other things were burnt—an old sofa, or a refrigerator full of blackened eggs—and he’d have to shut his windows against the acrid smell. Before he fell asleep, he tried to call up soothing images: the deer in the tall grass of Richmond Park and the burbling garden fountain near the Temple Church.

  40

  Tobias

  Tobias peered over at Fiona lying next to him on the rug. By the slow rise and fall of her chest, she’d fallen asleep. With her tangle of golden-brown ringlets, she reminded him of the wild-haired spirits who grew from sea foam and lured men to their deaths in the wintry Atlantic. She turned toward him in her sleep, and he clamped his eyes shut, suddenly afraid she would awake to find him staring at her face.

  This was it. In a few hours, he’d leave for Maremount with a sack of bones. He’d reunite with his old coven, and together they’d make the King’s skull whole with the mending spell. He sighed, rolling over. The idea of going back to Maremount wasn’t as exciting as it should have been. Here, he lived like a real philosopher, practicing spells in a protected tower room, with all the food he wanted. And there were his new friends here, and Fiona…