Lauren glanced at her watch and headed toward a niche formed by two ceiling-high bookshelves along the back wall. The shelves were filled with books as ordinary as Diet for a Small Planet and as extraordinary as Witches Heal: Lesbian Herbal Self-Sufficiency. Some were classic, leatherbound editions; others were obviously self-published. She pulled out an herbal encyclopedia and began to flip through it.
“If all goes well, our book’ll be on these shelves soon,” a soft voice said in Lauren’s ear as she was enveloped in a huge bear hug. Pressing Lauren to her with one arm, Jackie waved the other at the book niche.
Despite her apprehension about the project, Lauren felt a leap of exhilaration at the thought of a book with her name on the jacket. She disengaged herself from Jackie’s voluminous wool cloak and smiled at her friend. Jackie was a handsome woman whose comfort with herself exuded from her every pore; she wore no makeup and no dye streaked her silver-white hair. Jackie’s attractiveness lay in her intelligence and enthusiasm for life—and she was astute enough to know it.
“Can’t you just see it?” Jackie asked, her eyes shining. “The Lost Coven of Rebeka Hibbens: Hoax, Sorcery, or Social Psychology? by Jackie Pappas, PhD, and Lauren Freeman, PhD.”
“As long as we don’t end up with a book that doesn’t need ‘hoax’ or ‘social psychology’ in the title,” Lauren said. “Not to mention the question mark.”
Jackie’s laugh pealed across the store. “Your open-mindedness is staggering.”
“Well, you’ve got to admit this is getting pretty far from our original idea,” Lauren said in what she knew to be a vain attempt to buttress her position. Their initial concept for the book was a multidisciplinary investigation of an actual historical event: six women and one man convicted of witchcraft in Cambridge in 1692, who vanished from their prison cells on the eve of their executions and were never seen again. The original proposal had set out an outline for the first half to contain a description of the events, followed by chapters posing historical, social psychological, anthropological, feminist, and supernatural explanations of the disappearances. But ever since Deborah Sewall—the co-owner of RavenWing and the self-proclaimed reincarnation of Rebeka Hibbens—had told Jackie about The Chronicle of the Coven, Jackie’s plans for the format and content of the book had changed.
Jackie studied Lauren carefully with her open, childlike gaze, a gaze that was strangely congruous with the fine web of lines around her eyes. “You can’t possibly believe we shouldn’t take a look at their chronicle,” she finally said, shaking her head at Lauren in mock despair. “Even a ‘rational’ scholar couldn’t resist a little peek.”
“Of course I want to look at it,” Lauren said. “I just think there’s a danger if we begin to take the chronicle, or this Deborah and Cassandra, too seriously.” Cassandra Abbott was the other owner of Raven-Wing; she claimed to be the reincarnation of Millicent Glover, also a member of the lost coven.
“I’m just keeping an open mind.” Jackie’s tone clearly stated that Lauren was not.
Lauren looked down at the herbal encyclopedia she still held in her hands. Immortality and reincarnation—as well as the power of the herb violaceae to “reduce growths, benign and malignant”—were a bit much for her to buy. “How come no one ever claims to be the reincarnation of a garbageman or a peasant?” she asked. “How come they’re always the reborn soul of some extraordinary person?”
Jackie sighed. “I just got off the phone with Nat. That’s why I was late. He’s talked to a few people in the publishing house and apparently they’re all very excited about our new slant on Rebeka Hibbens.”
“Aren’t you all jumping the gun a bit?” Lauren asked. Nat Abraham was their editor at Boylston Press. He had already told Jackie that if the chronicle contained even a fraction of what Deborah had hinted at, he wanted the supernatural explanation to be integrated throughout the book rather than relegated to a single hypothetical chapter. And now it sounded as if he had the publishing house behind him. “We haven’t even seen the chronicle—let alone read it. The whole thing could be complete bunk.” Lauren closed the encyclopedia and placed it back on the shelf.
“That’s why we’re here.”
“I don’t know, Jack,” Lauren said. “I’m just afraid that if we put too much supernatural in Rebeka Hibbens, we’re going to lose our credibility.”
“Is this book about our credibility?”
Lauren ran her finger along the binding of a book written by someone named Starhawk titled The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. “Without knowing you’re reading the work of a credible source,” she finally answered, “what’s the point of studying history at all?”
“Maybe historical research is about pushing limits—or maybe it should be,” Jackie said. “Getting people—and ourselves—to think in ways we’ve never thought before.”
“I suppose.”
It was a hopeless argument: Lauren’s commitment to the painstaking, rational amassing of historical data based on primary sources was as strong as Jackie’s was to radical experimentation. She would never convince Jackie—and Jackie would never convince her. “So where’s Rebeka?” Lauren asked in the hope of changing the subject, though she couldn’t help adding, “I’ve never met a three-hundred-year-old soul before.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said a deep voice behind her.
Lauren whirled around and saw a tall woman with a wild mane of curly dark hair that was liberally sprinkled with gray. The woman’s eyes were an eerie white-brown, nearly transparent, and they were looking at Lauren with disquieting intensity. “I’m Deborah Sewall,” she said, holding out her hand.
Automatically, Lauren held out her own hand, but her eyes never left Deborah’s. The woman emanated a commanding energy. Her presence was so powerful it seemed to vibrate around her. Like her almost colorless eyes, she was simultaneously seductive and repellent.
“Hi,” Lauren finally said. “Lauren Freeman.”
Deborah nodded and took Jackie’s hand in both of hers. “Please come with me.”
“Where’s Cassandra?” Jackie asked.
“Cassandra’s on a knowledge quest—a stained-glass course in Vermont. We all do it toward the end,” Deborah said. “Knowledge gained at the tail of a lifetime is the most enduring.”
Lauren tried to catch Jackie’s attention to share her astonishment at the confident manner in which Deborah had delivered this decidedly odd piece of information. But Jackie was watching Deborah with an inscrutable expression and did not meet Lauren’s eye.
After pausing to give a few instructions to the teenage girl, Deborah ushered them into a back room that obviously served as both storage chamber and office. The room was long and low and lit only by a small, dirty window on the rear wall. Deborah snapped on a floor lamp; the occult symbols cut into the lamp shade threw odd shapes of light over some portions of the room, while casting deep shadows into others.
Following Deborah and Jackie, Lauren stepped around burlap bags covered with strange letters and stamps denoting their place of origin: the Maldive Islands, Benghazi, Dondra Head. Shelves, loaded down with books, candles, and hundreds of wax figures, circled the room. The shelves held so many dark pockets that the pieces hit by the irregular light were edged with a sharpness that seemed to expand them beyond three dimensions. So this was RavenWing’s dark underside, Lauren thought, wrapping her arms around herself. She wondered if Deborah had an underside also.
Deborah cleared cartons of incense and vitamins from chairs at a long table, then motioned for Lauren and Jackie to sit. She remained standing. “We’ve never shown our chronicle to an outsider before,” she began. “But I had a vision the sages wished us to share our knowledge with you.” Deborah turned her intense gaze from Jackie to Lauren. “Although this gift is not without danger.”
Lauren shifted her eyes to the shelf behind Deborah. It overflowed with wax forms: normal-looking tapered candles; waxen pentacles and pinecones; a very ta
ll, winged caduceus. A life-size mask of a man who appeared to be breathing leaves was highlighted by the lamp’s beam. Meeting the mask’s deep-set, shadowy gaze, Lauren shivered and quickly pulled her eyes back to Deborah’s.
“I see you’re going to have difficulty with what I’m about to tell you,” Deborah said, looking at Lauren. “But you’re an historian—you’ve studied religion, seen its power, its mystery. Tell me,” she demanded, “what is a religion?”
“You want me to answer that question?” Lauren asked. Deborah nodded, and Jackie gave her a whimsical smile. “Well,” Lauren began slowly, “I guess you could say it’s a system of beliefs about how to live life. A set of constructs explaining the unexplainable.…”
Deborah nodded again. “And to explain the unexplainable, one must have faith. All religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, whatever—depend on it. One must believe in miracles, whether they be the virgin birth or the parting of the Red Sea. And our religion is no different.”
“Although your miracles are,” Jackie said.
“I know it’s hard for people to believe, but you’re exactly right.” Deborah ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it into an even wilder mass around her head. “The Chronicle of the Coven is similar to your Bible. It’s full of knowledge, history, philosophy, religion, magic. It contains the story of our founders. Morality tales. Fables.”
Jackie leaned her elbows on the table and looked up at Deborah. “Fables like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments? Like Lot’s wife turning to salt?” she asked. “Can you tell us one?”
Deborah’s irises paled to a dusty white as she looked past Jackie into a place and time far beyond the walls of RavenWing. “Our most sacred artifact is Rebeka’s lancet. We have many tales of its power to bring forth our immortality—or to destroy us.”
“Rebeka Hibbens?” Lauren asked.
Deborah grinned and Lauren was jolted by the seductiveness of her smile. “Rebeka Hibbens was a very powerful witch,” Deborah said. “Her magic created the lancet that will allow us to break free from the chains of humanness.”
This time Jackie met Lauren’s eye; she shook her head slightly.
“But according to our lore,” Deborah continued, “if the lancet is ever lost or destroyed, the coven will be too. Every member will cease to exist and every soul lose its chance at immortality.”
“Did the lost coven lose the lancet?” Jackie asked. “Is that what happened to them?”
“The coven was never lost,” Deborah said patiently. “And neither was the lancet. One part of the chronicle, ‘The Book of Mahala,’ tells the story of what did happen—”
“Mahala?” Jackie interrupted.
“Mahala is what Rebeka was—is—called by the coven. It’s a term of reverence meaning ‘wise one,’ but it also connotes deep respect and affection.”
“And ‘The Book of Mahala’?” Jackie prompted.
“The book describes what life was like in 1692. Why the coven was arrested. How the escape was accomplished.”
Lauren’s heart began to pound as she listened to Deborah. She glanced at Jackie. How stupid she had been, focusing on the supernatural angle and Deborah’s slightly deranged behavior. She had missed the whole point. This was a primary source from the time in history that fascinated her the most: an account of day-to-day life in the late 1600s written by someone who had lived then, using paper and ink made then, in her own words, with her own misspellings.
Lauren had spent the better part of the past five years reading and studying Colonial history—so much so that she sometimes felt as if she were actually living in the seventeenth century, especially in her dreams, when she imagined she was wandering through smokehouses hung with huge hams or sitting at a foot wheel, spinning flax thread into linen. Even if ninety percent of this so-called chronicle was bunk, it could still provide incredible insights. To discover a new primary source was the stuff of a scholar’s dreams. “Who wrote this book?” she asked.
“Rebeka Hibbens.”
Lauren clasped her hands together; her palms were damp. “What kind of condition is it in? Can we turn the pages? The last three-hundred-year-old document I used was kept under glass and had to be read at the library.”
“The chronicle isn’t actually that old,” Deborah said slowly. “It was written in the late nineteenth century by Harriet Reardon Smith—one of Rebeka’s reincarnations.”
“Oh,” Lauren said, letting her breath out in a rush.
“As the daughter and wife of wealthy men, Harriet got to study art, literature, and history—but wasn’t allowed to use her knowledge,” Deborah continued. “So she poured all her learning and all of what she knew of the past into the chronicle. It’s a masterpiece of social and historical interpretation.” She looked at Lauren as if her colorless eyes could see into Lauren’s soul. “If I do say so myself.”
Lauren’s shoulders slumped and she closed her eyes for a moment. Was Deborah saying she was both the reincarnation of Rebeka and of Harriet? That a book written in the nineteenth century was a primary source from the seventeenth? “You mean this Harriet Reardon Smith wrote down what she remembered from her life two hundred years before—when she actually was Rebeka Hibbens?”
“That, along with the collective memory of the coven,” Deborah said as calmly as if she were commenting on the weather.
Lauren stared at the poised woman before her. How could someone intelligent enough to offer a cogent argument on the functions of religion, someone together enough to run a successful business, be so clearly delusional? Unable to come up with even a semblance of an answer, Lauren turned to Jackie. “It isn’t a primary source.”
“It all depends on your definition.” Jackie’s voice was thoughtful and deliberate. “Although I guess it really is something new altogether: a primary source written two hundred years after the fact.”
“But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Lauren argued. “If it’s after the fact, it’s not a primary source.”
Deborah cleared her throat. “The Chronicle of the Coven is much more than just narrative history. The chronicle also tells of magic spells and potions and reveals the mysteries of reincarnation, as well as the rites for consummating the Immortalis—the ritual we reenact at the ocean’s edge, under a waxing crescent moon, every one hundred and one years. The ritual that will ultimately secure our immortality.” Deborah paused for a long moment. “And it is here that the danger lies.”
Lauren and Jackie stared at Deborah.
“Something so powerful must have a means of protecting itself.” Deborah looked closely at them both, a slight smile tugging at the edges of her lips. “It is said that anyone who reads the chronicle and isn’t a member of the coven will either die or go mad.”
Lauren forced herself to maintain eye contact with Deborah. “Do you believe that?”
Deborah turned and walked over to a cupboard. She knelt and opened a lower door. “I believe in the message of the sages.”
Lauren watched Deborah warily. Cursed chronicles and visions and messages from the sages. Deborah’s argument about religion and faith and magic notwithstanding, this woman was on the edge.
“Normally, this is kept well hidden.” Deborah pulled an oversize book from the cupboard and placed it on the table. It was a beautiful object, bound on the spine and corners in a rich butter-colored leather, its front and back boards protected by a darker skin. Rough-edged parchment pages poked from between the covers. No title marred the face of the book, for no words were necessary; this was clearly an important and much-cherished artifact.
“One week,” Deborah said, her fingers lingering on the spine. “You may have it until next Thursday—and no photocopying.”
Lauren and Jackie looked down at the handsome book, but neither moved toward it. Finally, Lauren reached out for the thick volume. But as soon as its smooth leather touched her skin, she was overwhelmed by confusion; she felt light-headed and a little bit dizzy.
The book was warm and
worn and smelled of aged paper and secluded library stacks. It drew her as old books always drew her, but this book unsettled her in a way she had never experienced before. As she pressed it between her palms, she felt as if she were surrounded by shadowy figures, disembodied torsos bobbing above dark, rippling waters. She recoiled at the odor of dampness and fear.
Lauren thrust the chronicle at Jackie and stood up. “Thanks,” she said to Deborah. “We really appreciate this, but we’ve got to get going.” As soon as her hands were empty, her apprehension disappeared, but she noticed Jackie and Deborah were looking at her closely.
Lauren was relieved when Jackie stood too. As they stepped aside to let Deborah lead them into the store, Lauren accidentally pressed up against the chronicle Jackie held to her chest. When the book grazed her back, her relief vanished. For from somewhere inside her head, Lauren heard a faraway chorus of voices chanting words she couldn’t discern. And for a moment, she thought she saw the sliver of a crescent moon, shining against an ebony sky.
Three
AS FAR BACK INTO TIME AS SHE COULD REMEMBER, DEBORAH had been blessed with visions. As the years passed, the visions became more frequent and she became more adept at interpreting them. Watching Jackie Pappas and Lauren Freeman descend the stairs to the sidewalk, Deborah smiled. Her vision would now be fulfilled. She had given Jackie the chronicle, and as a result Faith Osborne’s arrival was assured. Although a plummeting raven had accompanied Faith in the vision, Deborah felt no responsibility for the death the raven foretold. The loss of a human life was of no more significance to her than the loss of a grain of sand from a beach.
She opened the latch on the bamboo bird cage and Summerland jumped out onto her finger. She had named him for summerland, the home of the sages, the place where the soul rests between lives, where it is refreshed and made young once again. While canaries were usually high-strung and difficult to tame, Deborah had a way with animals and Summerland would sit on her shoulder for hours. She had even trained him to select Tarot cards for her customers by pecking at them with his beak. The bird’s Tarot choices were startlingly accurate.
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