The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Did that make me a witch—that at times I had “the Sight”? Had I in some unconscious moment made a pact with the Devil? Then would my immortal soul be surely damned. I shuddered, thinking of the dream I’d had last night. I prayed it was nothing more than an over-rich pudding that caused it. Unlike other dreams, which dissolve with waking, this still preyed on my mind:

  I had been wandering through the rain—great, drenching torrents—delighting in the knowledge that he was out there, too, soaked to his mortal bones, while the rain touched me not. Still, I hadn’t quite withdrawn as yet, and I was lost here in the dark, not knowing what lay ahead of me—

  I’d intercepted him on the causeway to Dorchester only moments ago—if I could still measure Time—and well nigh drowned him. How could he have chosen to believe her instead of me? Oh, I’d gloried in heaping up the waves around him, affrighting his poor horse till it nigh stumbled off the road and he could go no further, but was forced to return to Boston. Yet all around the voices whispered, “Forgive him, Mary! Forgive!” How could I in my fury? “Then stay here in the half-world!” they chorused. “We’ve no room for you in ours.”

  The blockhouse loomed before me. He’d pass here soon. I longed for the benison of his arms about me—hating and loving all at once. If it hadn’t been for Dorcas—nay, I mustn’t let her meanness trap me into like behavior. I loved him still, e’en though he’d become old and testy and the skin sagged from his chin, and l must somehow break through the mists—

  There! Hooves sloshing on the cobblestones!

  “Will! Will! Whither does thou ride?” I unthinkingly fell into the old-fashioned form of address.

  His horse shied, neighing its alarm. He reined in sharply, then slid to the ground and stood by the animal’s head, holding it in check. “There, Prince,” he tried to soothe the beast, “’twas but a wisp of fog that crossed our path. There’s no one here. What has come over you tonight? Nearly tumbled me off the causeway, you did, and for no reason, although for a moment I thought I saw—”

  He jerked around, his eyes bulging, his face gleaming sickly pale in the half light. “Mary! Nay, it can’t be thee! I must be a-fevered or belike ’tis the Devil come to torment me, making me believe I saw thee upon the causeway, thine eyes glowing like swampfire. Hast thou come to finish what thou left undone?”

  “Will, Will, hear me—I come to ask forgiveness and to forgive! Listen to me—I love thee!”

  “Ah, ’tis indeed a fever in the brain. Methinks she talks to me and stretches out her arms. No longer do her eyes burn, but are wet with rain and tears. Was she innocent after all? Did I wrong thee, Mary?” He dug his fist into the horse’s flank. “Nay, ’tis Satan sends me these doubts. I have not erred. I will not have it that I erred! Be thou Lucifer or the Whore of Babylon—nay, be thou the Mary I once loved, thou canst not turn my judgment into a lie!”

  “Beloved—” I tried again, but the wind carried my voice away as lightning flashed and he fell to his knees.

  “Oh, Lord, my God, Thou who didst bring us, Thy new chosen people, to this wilderness—this promised land—save me from the Tempter!” he prayed, his hands clasped, his cheekbones livid in the gloaming. “Even in all her cunning I loved her. How I longed to set her free, to taste of her body—oh, the fleshpots of Babylon! Did I condemn her because l knew she belonged to another and even if l judged her innocent, I could never know her sweet body? Oh, God, t’is Satan who speaks, undermining my convictions, chastising me for doing Thy work, oh, Lord! Yes, yes, ’twas surely Satan who tempted me to set her free, but I yielded not. I thank Thee, God, that I am not as other men—”

  How unconsciously he mouthed the prayer of the Pharisee! My hand was a wisp of moisture on his brow, which he wiped away as he would the rain.

  “Listen to me, Will! Let not thine ears be stopped up with bigotry and self-righteousness! Hark to thy doubts! Art thou so sure of the Lord’s will? Nay, thou art not and this has wade thee ill, my love!”

  “She stands before me still. Her lips move, but I cannot hear. How the Devil works to delude me and I am ill, very ill. I cannot proceed.” He pulled himself up from his knees by clinging to the horse’s bridle. “Come, Prince, we’ll return to Sewall’s house!” He hoisted himself into the saddle and started off toward Boston, but I ran before him, weeping and pleading, knowing that soon I must be drawn back into the mists. “Will—Will—”

  He covered his eyes with his arm. “Satan, get thee behind me! I bruised thy heel today. Get thee gone, Mary! I know thou dost belong to Satan!”

  I felt myself slipping away. My chance had gone.

  “Nay, William, I belong not to Satan! I belong only to God—and to thee!”

  * * * *

  I had awakened with that cry. Isaac beside me had not stirred, but I lay there in the dark, pondering this dream that had no meaning, yet left me with such unutterable despair. Now, as I mused by the fire, I roused, shuddering from the memory of that dream. Next time I made a pudding I’d cut down on the suet…

  There was a pounding on the door. Now who would be out on a miserable day like this?

  “Let me in quick, Mary! I ha’ bad tidings!” Bered!

  “Come in, little brother,” I bade him, although at six-foot-one and forty-two-year of age he was scarcely little. “’Tis nothing ill with Thankful or the children, I hope.”

  “Nay, they thrive.”

  “And your trade also?”

  “Too well. There be always a need for tombstones.”

  “Then have yourself a plate o’ stew whilst ye tell me.”

  He waved it away. “Rebecca’s been cried out on! She be goin’ afore Justices Hathorne and Corwin the morrow!”

  Not my Rebecca! My saintly older sister, who knew more of the Scriptures than any other woman in Salem Village!

  “How can they? Why, she be nigh two ’n seventy! And she so weak wi’ stomach pain! Who has done this? Tituba?”

  “Nay, ’twas Mistress Ann Putnam who first brought the charge and set her daughter and the other maids to cryin’ out that Rebecca’s shape torments them.”

  Ann Putnam, wife of Thomas. She’d e’er been queer, that one. Thinkin’ her dead babes’d been killed by sorcery. And the young Anne, a pale, fidgety, delicate child, was her mother’s tool. As for Thomas, he was troublesome, jealous that the fortunes of the Nurses and the Estys had prospered while his own had declined.

  “And what did Mistress Putnam charge?”

  “She claimed little children’ve been risin’ from the grave in their winding sheets, cryin’ ‘Rebecca Nurse murdered us!’”

  “But that’s daft, man! Can’t the magistrates see that?”

  “What wi’ girls seein’ visions and bein’ bitten and pinched and vomiting pins, the magistrates’ll believe anything.”

  “It’ll kill Rebecca,” I cried, “her bein’ so feeble and deaf. She’ll not hear the questions and she’ll say the wrong thing and—oh, Bered!” I dropped my head against his great chest. “’Tis one o’ God’s own they’ll be tryin’!”

  He folded his arms around me. “Aye, Mary, e’en without this she’d not be likely to last the year out. But ’tis you I tremble for.”

  My head jerked back. “Me? Whatever for?”

  “Things are bein’ said—about how you cure people the doctors can’t, how you consort with that salvage woman, and how you saved Granny Peabody’s dog from being hanged. There’s no trust left among us. We look at our neighbors and wonder—be they in league wi’ the Devil? If my cow sickens, be it a spell? There were little ado when Tituba accused Sarah Good. She’d uttered enough curses to do for a hundred witches, but when they arrest as faithful a church member as Martha Corey, no one is safe.”

  “Aye, ’tis true,” I recalled. Hadn’t Martha’s own husband testified against her, all because she hid his sad
dle so he couldn’t ride into town to gawk at the afflicted girls? “Giles should be cried out on himself—‘twould serve him right!” I said angrily.

  “Gently, Mary, gently,” Bered cautioned me. “’Tis for hot words like that people ware bein’ accused. Forsooth, they be diggin’ up things long forgotten—like Goody Corey’s mulatto son.”

  “I should think she’d paid for that long since,” I said crisply. “She swore she was raped, but who believes a woman? Anyway, she’s a covenanting member o’ the church now. ’Tis more her sharp tongue and her scorn o’ the magistrates tha’s brought this on her. Honesty rankles more than scandal.” I paused. “I didn’t mean that about Giles. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

  He leaned against the door jamb, beads of melted sleet standing out on the wool of his mantle.

  “Let me dry your cloak by the fire,” I begged. “La! For what reason should I be cried out on? I have harmed no one and my children be all legitimate.”

  “Aye, but Tom Putnam looks with a green eye at the Esty farm. And he and his brother remember the lawsuit over boundaries they lost to your menfolk. They’ll get at the Esty men through you.”

  “Then they be cowards in Salem Village!” I exclaimed.

  “And fools, too! Did these ‘chosen people of God’ come here just to fight among themselves? And attack each other through their womenfolk?” I added contemptuously.

  He slumped down on the inglenook and leaned wearily against the chimney place, his long, knotted hands spread on his knees.

  “Tisn’t only that,” he persisted. “Tis you, Mary. You’re a strong woman—you’ve strong ideas—and for that they whisper about you. Samuel Smith still grumbles about the scolding you gave him five years gone. Your tongue can wound.”

  “Indeed! I wish I had wounded him wi’ more’n my tongue! The scoundrel flouted me in me own house. ’Twas no more’n he deserved.”

  “But in Ingersoll’s ordinary he tells how you flew after him, all invisible, tapped him on the shoulder and then rattled a whole stone wall at him.”

  I snorted. “Who pays attention to that drunken prattler?”

  His reply was quiet and chilling. “Just about anyone in Salem Village at the now. They whisper about your simples.”

  “Oh, pooh! Most of them I learned from our mother.”

  “And she accused o’ witchcraft in her time!” The firelight played wizard with his peaked eyebrows. “I never knew her. You were my real mother.”

  “And you my first son,” I said, stroking his gray-streaked hair and thinking how caring for this baby brother had eased the pain of my lost love. “Now, I’ll not let you ride home in this weather on an empty stomach. Do eat a bit o’ this stew. ’Tis fair savory.”

  He dipped his spoon into the steaming bowl absentmindedly. “Make Isaac take you away while there’s time,” he pleaded.

  “You’re as daft as the others, Bered, if you think he’d ever leave his coopering. Besides, I mun stand by our sister.”

  “Ye might do Rebecca more harm than good wi’ the doctors sayin there’s more’n medicine goes into your cures, and people claimin’ they’ve seen you mutter words over your simples.”

  “And if I instill a bit o’ the Holy Scriptures into them, what be the harm in that?”

  “They say you mutter charms from the Black Book.”

  I fished a choice hunk of venison from the pot and added it to his stew. “The Bible’s covers be as black as any book’s and the parson’s clothes as black as the Devil’s himself, belike. All this talk of a Black Man a-makin’ folks sign in his Black Book—who knows but what that meddling Reverend Noyes o’ Salem Town or the Reverend Parris mought be up to some unholy doin’s… My voice trailed off and I flushed with anger and humiliation as the memory of last All Hallows’ Eve in Parris’ meadow came back to me now. I wouldn’t tell Bered. He was too rash—he’d get us all in trouble and I had no proof. Nor could I identify the man in the heavy black hood and cape.

  “You’ve no friend in the Reverend Parris, Mary,” Bered interrupted my thoughts.

  “Indeed! How so?”

  “Sarah Bibber says you told folk you wouldn’t visit our services because you like not lining moneygrubbers’ pockets.”

  “Aye, though I didna call him a moneygrubber. But ye know well his contract allows him to keep for himself any monies given by non-members. ’Tis my right to attend my own church.”

  “True, but ’tis unsafe to flout a man o’ God.”

  “Then let him act like one instead of a sniveling, penny-pinching Barbadoan peddler,” I retorted.

  Bered struck his head in despair. “Mary, Mary, if ye cannot bridle your tongue better than that, heaven help you.”

  “Nay, ’twas said only between us. Eat hearty, Bered,” I said, “and give thanks unto the Lord that I don’t live in your cantankerous Salem Village, where the parson can’t keep the young maids out o’ mischief or his congregation content, and everyone in the place clawing and backbiting like a pack o’ wildcats. No wonder they cast jaundiced eyes at Topsfield. Here there be no nonsense o’ that sort.”

  He dipped his bread into the gravy thoughtfully, his eyes troubled.

  “It can spread, sister,” he warned. “It can spread.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I started to taste the stew myself, but a poker had replaced my spoon. What was happening to me? Dreaming in bed is one thing, but while standing and awake? I willed the poker to turn into a spoon again, but it remained solidly a poker. Thoroughly disturbed, I hung it back on its rack. What was reality—my dreams or my waking life?

  I was still pondering when Greg arrived. He glanced at the pile of books. “Doing some research, I see.”

  “Yes. What’s a witch cake?”

  “A witch cake was a concoction of rye meal and urine from the bewitched that was fed to a dog. If the animal got the shakes, the afflicted was surely under the spell of a witch. What’s the matter?” he broke off. “Is my face dirty?”

  I was staring at his glistening countenance. It reminded me of something. “No, not dirty, Greg, just wet. Here!” I took a fresh tissue and wiped off the raindrops.

  “How far have you read?” he asked.

  “Just the first scene,” I confessed. “You said it wasn’t to be put on until next year.”

  “No, but rehearsals begin this fall for the girls; so they can get their parts down pat—really live them.”

  “I’m not sure how good that will be for them,” I objected. “Rowan, for instance—she’s too impressionable.”

  “Really, Mitti, children take these things in stride. They’ll have a ball sending their elders to the gallows.”

  But you remember Rowan the night of the party, I was about to say, then thought of this afternoon’s performance. Had she shammed that earlier one, too?

  “I suppose I’m being overprotective,” I yielded.

  “I brought something to show you.” He took an envelope out of his pocket and extracted some color snapshots.

  “Recognize this?” he asked.

  Why did I have to force myself to look? “That must be the monument your ancestor carved—what was his name?”

  “Bered—Bered Towne. What’s wrong? You’re trembling.”

  “It’s chilly in here. Let’s come closer to the fire,” I said, trying not to remember the rugged man with the sleet melting off his mantle who’d been sitting on the inglenook just now. “There be always a need for tombstones,” he’d said.

  “It—it’s really impressive,” I hurried on. “The coat of arms and the plumed knight especially.” I shuddered involuntarily at the next view he handed me. “So these are the skeletons and hourglass: You’re right—that winged hourglass does look like a vampire!”

  His attention had wandered to th
e books on the table. “These are good references here,” he said, riffling through them. “Don’t expect any of them to agree, however.”

  “Do historians ever? The name of the game is to get a new angle or the book won’t be published.”

  He frowned. “Isn’t it good to get new interpretations?”

  “What happens to the original truth? I’ll bet someday some bright-eyed historian’s going to canonize Hitler and people will believe him because his book’s a best seller. You can’t judge people of the past in the light of our thinking today. If you were to tell a colonist not to drain a swamp because it might hurt the ecology, he wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you were talking about. Or try to convince him that Indians are people with rights, he’d say they are salvages and—”

  He looked up in surprise. “You’ve really been reading up on this, haven’t you?”

  I was embarrassed. “Well, I started. Why?”

  “Because just now you used the old term for ‘savage.’ In colonial times they called them ‘salvages’—like you just did.”

  It had come out so naturally; yet how would I have known that? “I read books by ESP,” I laughed. “I still say it’s unfair to judge our ancestors by our present standards.”

  “Are you trying to justify the witch trials?”