The Bewitching

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.

The story went that when the college acquired the building and turned it into a dorm, the peacocks had been part of the deal. A superstitious old dean reckoned they were lucky.

It was the summer that made her anxious.

Often, she was sad for no reason.

She’d preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,

She waved at one of the undergrads, who was loading her car, and set off toward Briar Hall, cutting through Briar’s Commons, which the students called the Witch’s Thicket because a witch had supposedly lived there in the time of the Salem trials. Or else the Devil dwelled under a tree.

Salem was a few train stops away from the college, but there didn’t seem to be a real basis for the story about the witch.

As for the Devil, he seemed to live everywhere in New England. There was a Devil’s Rock and a Devil’s Footprint and a Devil’s Pulpit.

She thought about Nana Alba’s tales of witches and the particular tale that had haunted Minerva since childhood.

The Vanishing

You simply live through it,

I have been toying with writing a novel based on certain experiences of mine, which, as I indicated when we met in Providence last summer, were of a most eerie and disturbing nature.

The working title is The Vanishing,

It wasn’t that she meant to cut him off—she simply figured she’d reply another time, and it was hard to go on dates when she didn’t even want to change out of her pajamas.

It was interesting how Nana Alba had also told her a story of a disappearance that was tied to witchcraft,

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches,”

If Minerva said she was feeling like shit, Patricia would offer her a Jell-O shot, suggest that she join the beer pong game, or any number of inanities.

They were her friends, or they had been until the last month, when she’d avoided them, too wrapped up in academic pursuits and thesis burnout to seek their company.

She shouldn’t have come. Not in her current mood, not with the anxiety that kept simmering in her belly.

Nana Alba used to call these feelings portents and said they should be heeded.

“Yeah, yeah. I remember now. The ghost-story girl. What happened?”

“Witches’ stories,” she corrected him. “I said I was studying Tremblay’s work and wanted to explore its connection to New England’s witchcraft folklore.”

“It’s the witching hour. Midnight, no?”

Anytime someone yelled I’m so wasted!, it sounded like nails on a chalkboard rather than careless glee.

“Carolyn should be around tomorrow for brunch, if you’d like to come to the Willows. You can ask her about Tremblay.”

She broke out in laughter. She had an invitation to the Willows. After weeks of dead ends, she would meet Carolyn Yates.

On the night of the new moon evil witches liked to dance against the treetops; that was what her great-grandmother used to say. They’d slip out of their human skins and grow wings, turn into balls of light, and cavort in the sky. The teyolloquani, the most fearsome of all, drank the blood of their victims and ate their hearts.

Nana Alba talked frequently about that type of witch in the last months of her life; she kept repeating the story about her own brother’s vanishing.

That’s what their name means, “heart eater,” Nana Alba had said. Listen, this story, you should hear it and learn how to fight them. About how to know them. Know the signs. A true witch...

There were no warlocks haunting the treetops at Stoneridge, but there had been that curious feeling, the portent, and it had guided her to the party. Luck, perhaps, was at hand.

My father believed some of the same things. He’d put a bowl of salt by the door to keep witches out, or else a pair of scissors under the bed.”

“Virginia Somerset was wealthy and very different from Betty. That was her name, the girl who vanished. They were roommates.”

“When did she disappear?” “December of 1934.”

“That is Virginia’s painting. One of her Spiritualist images. Edgar kept it.” “Edgar?” “My husband, Edgar Yates, was briefly engaged to Virginia. We all knew each other.”

“Virginia’s mother had been a Spiritualist and she’d passed away in 1929. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Virginia clung to ideas of paranormal activity and life after death. She believed in automatic writing and painted under the influence of spirits. I never understood her paintings or her drawings.”

It’s her journal for 1934,”

“I will make a deal with you, Miss Contreras. You may read Betty’s journal and the manuscript, but you can only do so in this room. You cannot remove them from this house.”

Some moments return to us, intact and incandescent, undimmed by the passage of time. It is like that when I remember that December of 1934 and the night that Virginia Somerset went missing.

“Can’t blame you for the initiative. That’s what Carolyn said: you’re a girl of great initiative. She appreciates courage,”

Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.

After Ginny’s disappearance I would know the shape of shadows.

“I’m your roommate, Ginny Somerset. I like dancing and painting and designing my own clothes, I speak to ghosts, and I can draw your natal chart. I’m a Spiritualist.”

Carolyn was my friend. Yet I loved Ginny.

This might be why she has lingered in my thoughts for so long: because she was my first love. It was a one-sided, silent love, and yet it was true.

Yes, when I think of it, it must have all started during the Halloween Ball, even before the séance. That was when I spotted that terrible darkness in Virginia’s eyes. The seeds of tragedy had taken root by then.

“A woman at the market. From Los Pinos, I’m pretty sure. She talked about evil spirits and said she saw a shadow. She spooked me, I must admit, and then she held on so tight I did not know how I’d get her off me.”

Why did he have to speak of such things?

tell. I flipped through it quickly, I couldn’t read the whole thing, but she talked about lights in the trees. It’s the same stuff they said about witches in Mexico.”

Dropped out and didn’t transfer or stay in touch with his sister. How odd.

She had that terrible split second of panic in which she did not know what shape a man’s rage might take.