by E. M. Moore
My eyes narrowed even though every sense in my body urged me to flinch, to close my eyes and wake up in Neverland. I stood marbleized like a great goddess statue.
Light wind tracked a hair across my face and burned my eyes, but I still didn’t blink.
The red in their eyes flickered brighter and brighter until it singed the cloudy white.
A lightning bolt encased in a circle. The same symbol from Dad’s journal.
All force gave way within me and I toppled over, landing outside of the circle and onto the crunchy grass.
Even with my eyes closed, I saw nothing but the symbol etched there. It flamed out, the red reaching for me.
I screamed.
A hand came down on my shoulder, startling me. I tensed for another scream. Flames. No more flames.
“Shh.” The voice was calming. “Shh, Sarah. It’s okay."
My heartbeat slowed and I blinked a few times. Drake’s face hovered above me as he brushed a few strands of hair off my forehead. Eyes sick with worry, he peered down, crouching on all fours like a kneeling angel.
My eyes burned as tears rushed there. “I saw…I saw…”
“It’s okay, Sarah. I’ll take you to Rose’s, okay? Everything's fine.”
People crowded around. When the ones with the hoods popped into view, I dug my heels into the ground again and pushed back. “No…no.”
Drake forced my shoulders onto the grass.
One of the hooded figures towered over me and threw back the black cloth of the hood. “She broke the circle!”
Her mouth white-lipped, the girl reached out, tore an object from the high priestess’ hands, and came at me. I tried to lunge backward, but Drake still held me down.
I bucked, but nothing happened. I had no strength to fight.
I saw the girl clearly now along with the object glinting in her hands.
It was Jennie and she came at me with a knife.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Isabella
1639
The signs will be there for all to read
when man shall do most heinous deed.
Man will ruin kinder lives
by taking them as to their wives.
And murder foul and brutal deed
when man will only think of greed.
Women they shall falsely accuse
so their suffering will bemuse.
After the steps of her mother left the bedroom and before the full morning rays of sun shone through the window, Isabella sat at her desk, waiting.
The picture in Isabella’s head repeated over and over. Mrs. Shipton with her fire eyes blazed before her, darkening as her singsong voice repeated these lines, casting her prophecy like the weaver pieces together his threads, each string working together to complete the vision.
During the night, she convinced herself of it being a dream. A dream it must be. What evil force could make her lose her senses, not sure, if she woke or slept?
Isabella calmed herself by thinking of Thomas. He would surely see no reason to be scared. One word from him would silence her fears.
The ink from her quill stained a circle around the point, which still rested on paper. The dark liquid spread outward, tainting the perfectly lined prose.
Eyes transfixed on the door, Isabella stood from her perch. Her legs pricked, beginning at her thighs and creeping down to her toes. Splotches of stings bloomed just beneath her clammy skin. With each step, the pain flared.
“Mother,” she called out, “I wrote this for you.” She looked down, not knowing why she spoke. It was a letter for Thomas in her hands, not for her mother.
A scream pierced the air. Her scream.
The prophecy Mrs. Shipton sang last night was written on the paper she clasped in her hands. It was written on her parchment, on her desk, and in her own hand.
Women they shall falsely accuse
so their suffering will bemuse.
The door clattered open. Mrs. Lynne rushed through once again.
Isabella dropped the paper and staggered back, her feet hit the stool and it banged backward onto the wood floor.
“Isabella? What is the matter?”
She gaped at her mother. Words did not come. How could she explain about Mrs. Shipton? “I did not write that.”
“Write what, Dear?”
“I did not write the nonsense on that piece of parchment.”
Mrs. Lynne hugged her daughter tight, rubbing circles on her back. “You have had a rough night. You are not needed for chores this morning.” She kissed her head. “Go back to sleep.”
Mr. Lynne’s uneasy step came in. “What is the matter here?”
“Isabella has had nightmares and I think she may not be feeling well today. She says that she did not write.”
“Write what?”
“Father.” Isabella approached him, hands shaking. “There is writing on that parchment. How it got there, I know not. But it was not of my doing."
She pointed to the paper on the floor and Mr. Lynne bent over to retrieve it. He read the poem and looked up from the paper at his trembling child. “What is this?”
“Mrs. Shipton has written it.”
“Mrs. Shipton?” His eyes narrowed to slits. “How did she come to be in your room?”
Tears poured from Isabella’s eyes. “She was not, Sir. The nightmare I had last night. She was in it and she said those words. She sang them around a fire.”
“That is just a dream.”
“She is a witch.”
“Isabella!” Mr. Lynne’s voice bellowed. “Do not throw out accusations. There is too much of that at present.”
“But Father, I—”
Mrs. Lynne stepped forward, reaching out. “What does it say?”
He snatched the paper from her reach. “‘Tis nothing, just nonsense.”
Mr. Lynne took one last look at the two of them and turned on his heels.
Out the door he went and into the main hall. He threw the piece of parchment on the hearth and watched it shrivel up and burn.
CHAPTER NINE
Sarah
Jennie grabbed the hilt of the knife with both hands and slashed down. The knife sunk into the earth right off my left hand.
I hurled myself backward.
“Wait! Don’t move!” Pushing Drake out of the way, Jennie brought the knife up again and swung it down into the earth on my other side.
Drake charged between us, holding a strong, muscled hand in front of Jennie’s chest. “What the hell?”
She stared him down. “She broke the circle. Now we have to repair it. Take her out of it.” She waved the knife toward me. “Now.”
The leader with the choppy hair stepped up and placed a hand on the other girl’s shoulder. “Jennie, these are guests. They don’t know about the sanctity of the circle."
The witch’s stare fixed on me. Beads of sweat formed on her hairline and her fair skin sponged into pink circles. She didn’t appear any different from earlier today. Same bitchy face and snarky attitude. “She needs to leave.”
“Don’t worry. She is,” I said, placing both hands underneath me.
With Drake’s help, I moved away from the circle and out onto the fringes. Jennie and the leader hovered over the spot where I stood, the palm reader spying over the leader’s shoulder as they spouted some weird incantations and used a candle to make the circle whole again.
The leader smiled at me several times. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go.
“You okay?” Drake whispered. He held me in a hug still, arms completely engulfing me. I felt like a small doll in his embrace.
“Yeah,” I choked out. “I’m good."
“What happened?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t about to tell him I was going crazy. “I don’t…like supernatural stuff.”
“It’s interesting though, isn’t it?”
“Scary witches and spells?”
“No.” Drake drew me away at arm’s length, his eyes sparkling. “Those
stories Courtney told us about the first settlers.”
I racked my brain. I didn’t remember any stories, only cloaked figures with white eyeballs. “I couldn’t really hear her talking."
“You probably drowned her out. Forty-five minutes is pretty long.”
“Forty-five minutes?” Holy crap. Are you kidding me? I thought I had only been here for ten.
A tap on my shoulder made me whirl around to find Courtney smiling. The cloak gone, shed somewhere in the Wiccan magic world, the high priestess almost looked normal.
“Hey, I wanted to come over and introduce myself.” Her voice was so much softer than it sounded from within the circle. I wouldn’t even recognize the two voices as coming from the same person. “I’m Courtney.”
“I’m Sarah.” I tugged on Drake’s shirt and took a step toward the truck.
Courtney kept talking. “I’ve seen you around, just haven’t had the chance yet to say hi. You’re staying with Rose, aren’t you? She’s such a sweet woman.”
I peeked at Drake who hadn’t budged an inch.
Her eyebrows rose. “Are you okay by the way?”
I crossed my arms in front of me. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Sometimes the energy in a circle can be too much for newbs.” Courtney shrugged. “But Jennie shouldn’t have acted that way. She’s new here. She doesn’t get how we do things yet.”
“Yeah, you better watch her,” Drake said. “She’s strange. She said something to Sarah earlier today, too, when we were at the festival.”
Courtney looked over her shoulder. “I’ll keep my eye on her.”
I dropped my arms and rejoined Drake. Despite her eccentric behavior, and the fact that she practiced witchcraft, I actually liked Courtney. Could’ve even been friends with her even.
She stayed a while and talked, eager to answer my long list of questions. When I asked if she did magic, the witch just smiled and said, “Some may call it that. We cast spells during rituals, usually calling on a certain god or goddess to help bring about physical changes in our world. We like to think of Wicca as working with nature though, not particularly magic."
I liked that idea better than the vision I had stuck in my head from all those scary movies like “The Craft”. “Do you know about the history of witchcraft? Like, did convicted witches really get burned at the stake?”
“Actually, that’s a common misconception. The majority of accused women were hung. There are only a few infamous cases of witches being burned. Some of them just happened to be in this village. Were you at the opening night ceremony?"
“Yes.”
Courtney leaned in closer, her smile growing. “That was the reenactment of one of our ancestors. She actually burned on a stake.”
My jaw dropped. A nervous twinge fluttered in my stomach. “Wait. A reenactment? I thought you guys were just burning some doll that represented fear of witches and witchcraft.”
The witch shook her head. “Nope. She represented one of the witches that burned here.”
I stared to where the circle had been. The candles were blown out immediately afterward and now the clearing was as dark as the night sky had become. Now, those that drove up here, started turning their car lights on. Of course, I just happened to be looking directly at one when the light gleamed, effectively piercing my eye.
I shielded my face and blinked. The lights caught on something else shiny. I blinked a few more times to return my sight back to normal and realized the shiny something hung around Marlene’s neck. It was the symbol from my father’s journal.
“What is that symbol I keep seeing?” I asked, gesturing toward Marlene.
She followed my gaze but shook her head. “What symbol?”
“It has like a jagged line, a lightning bolt, maybe, with a circle around it.”
Courtney’s eyes darkened, as if she stared out into an oncoming storm. “No one would wear that here.”
“What is it?”
She blinked rapidly then smiled. “It’s a common misconception. We work with nature. It’s not particularly magic.”
“You said that already. The symbol. What’s that symbol mean?” I pointed again to Marlene’s neck.
“What symbol?”
“The one with the jagged line—”
“Oh,” Courtney laughed, “that one. It’s just a symbol. Means nothing really.”
“But you—”
“Are you ready to go?” Drake laid his hand at the small of my back.
I jumped at his touch. Both their faces were on full blast like a circus clown.
This town was so weird. Twilight Zone mixed with Leave it to Beaver and everyone had Botox smiles. The forest could catch fire around us and I was convinced people would still be smiling.
Jennie watched Drake and I as we left the clearing. She motioned for me to follow her to a spot behind a small car. When I didn’t move toward her, she waved at me.
Yeah. Right.
“Goodbye, Sarah,” Courtney shouted. “I hope to see you again.”
The truck lurched and bounced on the dirt road back to the highway. Pete and the others stayed. They shook their heads and waved Drake away, all while eyeing me and sending curious glances my way.
“Drake, if I told you something, would you think I was weird?”
“Probably. If it was something weird.”
He smiled over at me. I didn’t return it.
I stared out the window as the forest broke and the concrete of the road soldiered through it. “There was a symbol in my dad’s journal.”
“Uh huh,” Drake urged.
“It caught my eye and then tonight, at the meeting, I saw that same symbol. It scared me…almost.”
He didn’t speak at first and I watched as the old highway with vein-like cracks split the cement travelled beneath us.
“Hey,” he said, peeling my fingers off the upholstery of the truck. “I’m sure it’s nothing. I just don’t think you’re used to all this…stuff. It’s getting to you.”
I didn’t think that was all of it, but I also didn’t want him to think I was a baby. “Maybe.”
“Why don’t you talk to your mom about it?”
I looked over at him incredulously.
He laughed. “Okay, well, talk to Rose.”
That sounded like a much sounder plan. “Maybe I will.”
***
Rose sat at the dining room table, a newspaper spread out before her. One of the nasty coffees steamed from a mug she cupped in her hands. “No festival duties tonight?” I asked.
“None tonight.”
“Great. I was hoping we could talk about my dad.”
The steam curled up and around Rose’s face, misting her in white shadows. “What don’t you know?”
“Everything.”
“Hmm,” she snickered, “I always thought your mom was kind of a bitch.”
My mouth dropped and a laugh spilled out. Soon, both of us were laughing so hard there were tears in the corners of our eyes.
I pulled out a chair across from Aunt Rose and sat. “I don’t know why she doesn’t want me to know.”
Rose took a sip of her coffee and set it down again. "Probably because she feels threatened. David was such a great person. It was too bad about the accident.”
Rose peeled up the corner of the paper and started to turn the page.
“Accident? I thought he had a heart attack.”
Rose dropped the page, eyes glossing over. “Is that what they deemed it?” She shook her head, the black liquid from the cup rippling her reflection. “Then it was because of the accident he had a heart attack.”
I sat back in the chair. “My mom didn’t tell me.”
“She didn’t tell me either.” Rose stared down at the same article, eyes moving across the words.
“What was the accident?”
Rose spoke in a controlled monotone, relaying everything she knew, which wasn’t much.
My mind whirred. Pictures of scenes I never saw flashed
in and out of my mind like the shutter of a camera. Every detail Rose gave me, I relived it, a ghost next to my father as he lived out his last seconds.
No. It couldn’t be like that.
“Do you think I could see your father’s journal?” Rose asked.
I nodded and pointed upstairs, my body robotic. “In my room.”
Rose’s head bowed and hung over. Her shoulders shook and shining tears dripped one-by-one off the end of her nose.
I grabbed her hand. “Is there something else?”
“Your mom wouldn’t let me do anything. She came up here, took over, and had his body out of Adams so fast I didn’t even know what happened. I was still in shock." Her choked words melted to sobs. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral I was in such a state.”
My heart pounded in my chest with all the fury I’d buried deep. Anger wouldn’t do either one of us any good though. “I read some of his journal entries where he talks about you." I patted the old woman’s hand. “He loved you very much.”
Rose’s head cocked up. “You read it?”
“Some of it. I just got up the nerve to today.”
Rose grabbed my hands and squeezed them. “Can I read it first?”
My aunt’s face crumpled all over again though, balled up like a paper bag, tears streaming out. One second scared or jealous or some other mixed up emotion, and another, alone. Maybe the inability to understand my feelings was a passed down trait. That made me less psychotic, didn’t it?
“Sure, Aunt Rose. You can read it.”
She reached out and I went willingly into her arms, a weight lifting and flying from my heart. I hugged someone my father loved.
“Thank you, honey. Thank you,” she said.
I should be the one thanking her. This was the first time I’d ever felt a sliver of home.
She gave me one last squeeze and we broke away, each of us rubbing our eyes with the backs of our hands. I ran to my room. The journal lay on the bed, open to the place where the symbol was drawn into it.
Rose’s steps echoed in the stairway. I couldn’t help myself. I read the passage next to the symbol. Today I found this painted on the library floor. Auntie Rose kneeled in the middle of it and I thought she was having a seizure because she shook violently. As soon as I stepped into the chalked-in circle though, she stopped and scolded me for coming into the library. I hope she’s not sick. Ever since her neighbor died in that car accident, I think she’s been losing touch with reality.