Dark Possession

by Carol Goodman

  “Aye,” William interrupted, “that’s where I found this poor lass, enslaved in a sultan’s harem. So, you see, she can’t be the girl you spoke of who married Malcolm Brodie. I was about to be slain when she came to my rescue and pleaded for my life. Only because she was the sultan’s favorite was she successful. Together we escaped and came back here!”

  I wasn’t sure that I relished being made a harem slave, even in a fictional account. Fortunately, I had recently reread a Dahlia LaMotte book called The Barbary Beast, in which an Irish girl was abducted by an English corsair who sold her into a sultan’s harem. I recalled the details of the plot now to give me a more active—and virtuous—role.

  “Yes, I was sold into a sultan’s harem, but I was able to fend off the sultan’s advances by telling him part of a story each night, which again and again I left unfinished, with the promise that I would tell him the end of the tale the next night if he, er, left me alone. I did this for one hundred nights, until I was able to escape with”—I almost said Jack Wilde, the Barbary pirate of LaMotte’s book, who had secretly listened to the Irish girl’s tales and fallen in love with her wit and eloquence, but I caught myself—“William.”

  “I thought ye said she saved you,” Jeannie said coldly.

  “We saved each other,” William replied, with a look that made me blush—and that enraged Jeannie.

  “And in all this did ye forget that ye were betrothed to me, William Duffy?”

  William tore his eyes from me. “Nay, Jeannie, I didn’t forget, but I dared not hope that ye’d remember me in all the long time I’d been away. And I knew that surely a lass as beautiful and well favored as yourself would have married another in these seven years.” William ended with a hopeful look that he quickly masked as a sorrowful one, but Jeannie had turned bright red at what I imagined was an unwelcome reminder of her spinsterhood. If she’d been ready to wed seven years ago, she must be in her mid-twenties by now—in this period, an old maid.

  “Weel,” she said, tossing a lock of her gold hair over her shoulder. “It’s not that I didn’t have my share of suitors, but I held out hope that you would come back. And now …” Her red lips parted to reveal a dazzling smile. “Ye have. My father—and brothers—will be glad to see ye, William. You’ll come with me now. I’m sure your”—she gave me an icy stare—“lady friend can be accommodated at the tavern.”

  William glanced at me imploringly, willing me to come up with some story that would save him from his fiancée, but I was too angry at him for not telling me about her last night to feel inclined to help. Fortunately for him, someone else came to his rescue: a middle-aged (although I realized that middle-aged here might mean thirty) woman who looked strangely familiar.

  “I’ll no’ have ye takin’ my nephew away before I have a chance to box his ears for making us all worry these long years.”

  “Aunt Nan!” William exclaimed. The woman’s hair was longer and not yet gray, her blue eyes unclouded by cataracts, but she was identical to Mac Stewart’s nan, whom I’d met at Shady Pines Assisted Living a few weeks ago—or, rather, three hundred plus years from now.

  “Nan Stewart?” I asked.

  She narrowed her keen blue eyes at me. “Aye, do I know ye? You look a bit like Katy Brodie.”

  I realized my mistake. This woman must be an ancestor of Mac’s grandmother. I didn’t want the village thinking I was Katy, which I assumed must have been the name the fairy girl had gone by. “No, it’s just that William’s spoken of you.”

  William gave me a quizzical look. The number of falsehoods being bandied about was making me dizzy. Nan Stewart may not be Mac’s nan, but she was the closest thing to a sympathetic face in the crowd. I nudged William. “And I’m sure he wants to explain to you where he’s been. Don’t you think we should go with your aunt now?”

  “Aye, a good idea—”

  “You’re not going anywhere, William Duffy,” Jeannie announced, with a stamp of a pretty, slippered foot, “before ye tell me whether or no’ you have come back to fulfill your promise and marry me.”

  “Aye, I’d like the answer to that question, as well.” A broad, grizzled gentleman dressed in finer clothes than the rest of the townspeople had appeared at Jeannie’s side. Her father, no doubt. “Or should I be summoning my lawyer to draw up charges of breach of promise?”

  I looked at William and noticed that he had turned a slightly greenish hue. I felt sorry for him until he opened his mouth and said, “I cannot marry ye, Jeannie, as I’m already wed to this lady here.” He took my hand and held it up so that the sun struck the emerald and diamond ring I wore on my right hand—the ring Liam had given to me. The emerald is the color of your eyes when we make love, he had told me when he put the ring on my finger. I felt a strange stab of disloyalty as William claimed it as proof of our engagement, a feeling that mingled with the rather petty enjoyment of watching Jeannie’s face turn livid with jealousy, and that finally resolved into pique that William had claimed me as his own in the marketplace without consulting me.

  “If that be the case, then you will be hearing from my lawyers. And,” Jeannie’s father added over his shoulder as he steered his outraged daughter away from the square, “the kirk session will be interested to hear this story of pirates. To me, it sounds suspiciously of witchcraft.”

  William opened his mouth to reply, but his aunt put a warning hand on his arm and answered instead. “I’m sure the lad only did what was right, Hamish MacDougal. As for the kirk, I haven’t heard yet that being kidnapped by pirates is proof of witchcraft.” She steered William, who still gripped my hand, in the opposite direction from where Jeannie and her father had gone, leading the way down a narrow alley. When we’d gotten away from the square, I turned on William.

  “How could you claim me as your bride in front of all those people without asking me first?” I demanded.

  William’s mouth dropped at my question. “It was all I could think of to keep from having to marry Jeannie MacDougal. After last night I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Last night I didn’t know you were engaged to another woman!”

  “I didn’t know it myself! I had no idea that Jeannie MacDougal would be waiting for me all these years. Her father is the richest man in town and an elder of the kirk. When I was courting her, she was the most sought-after girl in all of Ballydoon. I’d have thought she’d wed a month after I vanished.”

  “Clearly she isn’t as fickle as you are.”

  “Fickle? Me? I didn’t notice you worrying overmuch last night about your Bill or Liam.”

  “What are you talking about? Bill and Liam were you!”

  “I don’t see how they can be me if I don’t remember them and I have been in Faerie all these years—”

  “Fucking everything that moves!”

  William’s eyes flew open wide at the expletive. “Only because the Fairy Queen made me!”

  Nan, who’d reached her front door, wheeled on us. “Do the two of ye dunderheads want to be taken as witches right this minute with all your talk of fairies?” she cried. “Do you not know that traffic with the fairies is considered an admission of witchcraft?”

  I did, in fact, remember something of the kind from a class I’d taken on the European witch hunts. From 1597, when James VI proclaimed in his work Daemonologie that any occurrence of the supernatural came from the devil, witch hunters throughout the first half of the seventeenth century prosecuted anyone who admitted—often under torture—that they’d had contact with the gude neighbors. The furor culminated in a massive witch hunt that claimed more than three hundred lives …

  “In 1659!” I said aloud. “Nan’s right. The country’s on the verge of one of the worst witch hunts in Scottish history.”

  Nan stared at me for a moment, then wordlessly turned, opened her door, and pulled me through it into a small, neat, homey parlor with cushioned chairs by a fireplace, a spinning wheel, and bunches of fragrant herbs hanging from the low roof beams. She locked th
e door behind us, drew the lace curtains at the windows, and poked her head into an adjoining room—presumably to check if we were alone. Then she took me by both hands, drew me down onto a bench in front of the hearth, and stared hard into my eyes.

  “Who are ye?” she asked. “You do look a mite like that demented girl who wandered out of the Greenwood, but I can see you’re not her. How do you know what will happen in the future, and how did you know me? Are ye one of …” She licked her lips and looked nervously around the room. “One of the fair folk?”

  I looked up at William, who was hovering nervously above us. “Nay, Auntie, she’s the one who saved me from them.”

  “So that is where ye’ve been. I thought it might be the case when ye went missing and that girl showed up in the village the next day.”

  “Was her name Cailleach?”

  “Aye,” Nan said, eyeing me suspiciously. “That’s what she said her name was, but it’s not a Christian name, so we called her Katy. She was not right, puir thing. She was ravin’ about having lost her way to a door and that all her folk would die. I asked her about William, and she just wept the harder and told me he’d been taken by the Queen of Elphame and it was all her fault. I didn’t know, though, if she were raving or telling the truth—and I knew that, if it were the truth, if she kept on like that she’d be taken as a witch. I looked after her until Malcolm Brodie, whose own wife had died the year before leaving him with two motherless bairns, fell in love with her and married her. We thought she’d settled down when she had her own bairn, but then the witch hunters came and she ran away. We never did see her again.” She looked at me. “If you’re not her, what are you? Witch or fey?”

  I considered lying, but I felt an instinctive trust of Nan, perhaps because I knew her descendants in the twenty-first century and there were no people more trustworthy than the Stewarts. “A bit of both,” I replied, and then proceeded to tell her my story as honestly as I could, translating the details of the twenty-first century into terms a seventeenth-century woman would understand. She listened patiently, stopping me only when I got to the part about the nephilim. She made me go back and describe them.

  “Aye, I know their ilk. I believe that some of the witch hunters may be those devils. Their kind have been abroad in the country for many years now. They are the ones behind the war on the auld folk and all who hold the old ways. They have outlawed the minstrels and tale-tellers—all those who tell the old stories—because it’s in those old stories that lie the secrets to destroy them. They’re the inquisitors who trick hapless old women into telling tales of the little folk and then accuse them of consortin’ with the devil, because they are afraid that any who know the old ways will know how to destroy them.”

  “That’s what Nan Stewart—your descendant—told me. She said that I had to find the angel stone that would destroy them, but I don’t know where to look. The girl you call Katy must have had it. Did you ever see her with a milky-white tear-shaped stone?”

  “Aye, she wore it in a brooch just like the one you’re wearing.” She pointed at the pin on my shawl and then flicked her eyes toward William and saw the one that he was wearing. “When the witch hunters came and Katy ran away, she left the brooch for her daughter, little Mairi, but it no longer had the stone in it. Malcolm thought she must have taken it to sell. The witch hunters stayed six months, turning neighbor against neighbor, sister against sister. By the time they were done, twenty-four men and women were hanged for witchcraft. And now they’re back again. They’ve taken my cousin Mordag—”

  “Mordag?” William asked. “Why, she’s a harmless old woman. We stayed in her cottage last night.”

  I thought of the unfinished bowl of oatmeal and the spinning wheel knocked over on the floor and the beautiful woven blankets I’d slept under. Although I’d never met Mordag, I felt a pang for the woman being yanked out of her quiet life by those monsters. “Where have they taken her?” I asked.

  “To the dungeons of Castle Coldclough,” Nan replied with a shiver.

  I felt a chill, remembering how the dark ruin seemed to loom over the village, casting a malignant shadow.

  “We’ll rescue her,” I said. “Once I have the angel stone, we can use it with your magic plaid.”

  Nan snorted and plucked at my ordinary and decidedly un-magical plaid shawl. “A magic plaid, what nonsense! I’ve never heard tell of one of those.”

  It was hard to disguise my disappointment. “But your descendant told me that her family used the plaid against the nephilim. She said a fairy woman taught them. Are you sure Caill—I mean Katy—didn’t teach you?”

  “Nay, she couldn’t even spin or knit or weave. Whenever she tried, the wool tied itself into knots. As for the stone … well, you’ll just have to stay here until you find it, I suppose. In the meantime, I suggest the two of you stay out of sight. That pirate story you spun in the town square fooled no one, and this lass looks enough like Katy Brodie that folks will say she’s a changeling. If the witch hunters get ahold of you, it won’t take them long to discover you’re not who you say you are.”

  The idea of being interrogated by a seventeenth-century counterpart of Duncan Laird made my knees go weak. I was remembering the details of that class I’d taken on European witch hunts and the horrific torture devices they used to extract confessions. I suddenly had had enough of the seventeenth century. It had been foolish to think I’d be able to find the angel stone with no clue to its whereabouts. And as for William … I looked at him regretfully. He might look like the incubus, but he wasn’t the man I’d fallen in love with in the twenty-first century.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that I’ll ever find the stone here. After all, it’s just a fairy tale …” My voice cracked on the last words. What was any of this but a fairy tale? My life, my love for Bill—it was all a fairy tale that had evaporated into the mists. “I have to get back and help my friends.” I turned away from the look of hurt in William’s eyes and, like my ancestor before me, fled Ballydoon.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I RAN THROUGH the narrow alley, my bootheels echoing on the cobblestones. When I reached the square I turned to look back, but William hadn’t followed. I squelched the pang of disappointment, raised my shawl over my head, and hurried through the square, ignoring the curious looks of the few remaining stragglers. Most townspeople had scurried back behind their shutters, but a few old women lingered by the market cross in the center of the square, gossiping—probably about the scene I’d played a part in earlier. They’d go back to Jeannie MacDougal, no doubt, and tell her they’d seen William Duffy’s queer wife fleeing the town alone. Jeannie would decide I’d fled in shame at finding myself married to a man who’d been betrothed to another—or that William had repudiated me in favor of his beautiful first love. It irked me that she would interpret my leaving as proof of my shame and her own superiority, but I couldn’t worry about that—or whether or not William and she would end up married. I could look it up in the history books when I got home.

  I hurried fast out of the town, fueled at first by my urgency to get home and then by the need to keep warm. The sunny day that William had extolled on our way into town—it already felt centuries ago—had become gray and overcast. When I got to the top of the hill, it was raining. By the time I reached the stone cross, I was soaked. I glanced up toward Mordag’s cottage, where William and I had spent the night. The memory of the warmth of the fire—and the heat of his hands on my body and his mouth on mine—flashed through me. He wasn’t Bill. He wasn’t the man I had fallen in love with, but leaving him behind seemed a final admission that I would never see Bill again. Even as I’d seen Bill’s throat cut, watched his blood seep into the ground, I’d clung to a remnant of hope that something of him remained in Faerie that I could reclaim.

  But now I knew in my heart that Bill was really gone. Since I’d saved William from becoming an incubus, Bill would never exist. When I got back to my own time, I might not even remem
ber him.

  Perhaps that was for the best. I pulled my shawl more tightly around my shoulders, bowed my head against the now driving rain, and turned away—into the path of a heavily laden cart. The rain had covered the sound of its approach and it was nearly on top of me, so close I could feel the hot breath of the horses steaming the air. I veered sideways, my ankle twisting in the mud, and stumbled into the ditch on the side of the road.

  The wagon wheels narrowly missed my foot but ran over a corner of my shawl and splashed muddy water over my face. I squawked in protest, my cry taking in all the agonies of the day, a sound so pitiful that I was sure the cart driver would stop immediately and get down to help me, but he only cast a baleful glance in my direction and snapped the reins over the horses’ backs to drive them harder. Anger quickly replaced self-pity. I struggled to my feet, prepared to give this road hog a piece of my mind, but my gaze met not the driver’s eyes but the dazed and hopeless eyes of three women standing in the back of the cart. They were bareheaded in the pouring rain, hands chained, feet hobbled, unable to even huddle close together for warmth. Wet hair plastered their heads and turned their faces skeletal and their staring eyes into empty sockets—as if they had already been tried, convicted, garroted, and burned. Clearly these were more women accused of witchcraft, being transported to the dungeons of Castle Coldclough.

  Their jailer told me that. I knew immediately that he was a nephilim. He loomed over the prisoners, ramrod straight and stock-still despite the rocking of the cart, in a long black cloak and a ghastly mask. It had a long black beak and red glass eyes that stayed on me as the cart continued on its way down the road. But it wasn’t the horrible mask, which I recognized as the kind plague doctors wore, that held me riveted; it was the brooch pinned to the nephilim’s cloak. It held a cloudy white stone big as a goose egg and shaped like a tear. As I stared at it, it began to glow, piercing the gray steaming air like the moon appearing from behind clouds. The angel stone. Every atom in my body called out to it. The light from it seemed to be filling my body, cold water pouring into my bones as if the rain were coming in through my pores. With it came an overwhelming sorrow—the grief of the creatures who had fathered these monsters and the shame of the children whose fathers had turned from them. This sorrow made the grief I’d been feeling for Bill a moment ago seem like a drop in the ocean, but it also made that grief swell into a flood that threatened to drown me. Every sorrow I’d ever felt—the death of my parents, the shame of my grandmother’s coldness and disapproval, the moment I believed Liam had betrayed me, Bill’s death—rose up inside me. It was unbearable. I wanted to throw myself under the wheels of the cart or lie facedown in the ditch until I drowned. I wanted to …