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“Anyway, I didn’t see his face this time, either. I knew it was him, though. It’s always him. The dead rat, the dead flies and the moths, the lights in the trees, they’re simply symptoms. He is the disease.”
“Betty, whatever happens, you must believe me. Promise me, please. Even if the rest of the world yells that I have gone mad, please believe me.”
In the end, I had not believed her, despite my steadfast promises. In the end, I left her to face that terrible, hungry darkness on her own.
Thus, other measures must be taken. How do you bewitch someone? Hexes come in myriad shapes. A witch could make an effigy of their enemy, stuff a bottle with nails, or simply draw a sigil on their property.
“My great-grandmother lived to a hundred and one.”
“Salem’s a carnival nowadays. Witch Town USA. All they do is sell memorabilia with cartoon witches sitting on brooms or cute black cats nestled between pumpkins. But back in the day, people took this stuff seriously.”
Minerva closed her eyes and rubbed the back of her neck. She opened them again. On the kitchen table she noticed a dark lump and stepped closer: it was a dead rat, with its feet sticking up in the air.
The phantasmagoric light made Alba think of diseased flesh, of rot and decomposition. She stepped back from the window, recognizing this strange light. She’d never seen it herself, though she’d heard about it enough times growing up to name it: it was the glow of a witch, outside her window, like a hideous, gigantic firefly.
“It was real. It’s a witch. It’s taunting us,”
“It was a bit morbid, how they sat in front of the fire and swapped ghost stories.
“The list had certain criteria, so you’d be disqualified if it looked like it was a run-of-the-mill teenage runaway or something that strongly indicated a crime. There had to be a certain element of the uncanny. I think that’s how Betty defined it.”
There was also that nagging feeling she’d had since the morning. The portent.
“The romance of it. It’s as if you’re conducting a secret, passionate love affair. You know every detail about someone, their every word and thought. When you look at their writing, you swoon over a sentence fragment or a turn of phrase. It’s as if, through the mists of time, someone reaches out and touches your hand.”
Dried cats might be found under roof spaces and floors, often posed as if they were hunting for mice. Margaret Howards indicates that the cats were used as luck bringers or as sacrifices to protect against magic and pestilence.
Written charms are often found in gaps between timbers. Sometimes they might be placed in bottles and hidden behind the walls. An iron nail, wrapped in red wool, was also reckoned to offer protection against witches. A significant amount of ritual might have been involved in the creation of these charms.
Witches trick you, that’s what her great-grandmother had said. They make you follow the wrong path until you tumble into a ravine.
She’d had a portent that morning, a feeling that something would go wrong. After all, her father had told her that days of rain and wind were propitious for casting spells.
The next morning, she must read the Bible and repent.
“Yes, like in that story my grandfather used to tell. We wait until night falls, skin an animal, and lay its dead carcass upon the ground. Then we wait in the shadows until the scent of blood draws the teyolloquani out. When it approaches, we take a cord and tie a knot, then say some words. Then tie another knot and say more words. Once you’ve tied twelve knots it will be trapped. Then you can kill it.”
Time is a treacherous mistress. In our youth it flows slow and deep; the days stretch out endlessly. When we are children, a summer lasts for a century. As we age, the flow of time speeds up. Suddenly, a year vanishes with the snap of one’s fingers. How quickly time eludes us, how easily it tricks us.
A wild animal. Alone. Out riding.
“Maybe he was going to see Alba. The poor devil was in love with her.”
She had not seen Valentín’s corpse; the coffin was mercifully closed. Yet somehow a picture had formed in her mind of his death. Perhaps this was the product of her imagination, or perhaps it was as the old witch from Los Pinos had said: that one could dream and glimpse things that would be, and others that had been already.
The witch would be destroyed. She’d kill it, even if she had to vanquish it all alone, all by herself.
“The path changed.”
“It couldn’t have been her. In her manuscript Beatrice makes it clear that she was with Ginny the day Mary Ann thought she saw Santiago with a woman. Plus, Mary Ann never got a look at the woman’s face.”
You have something, I can see it. You must not give up.”
“Bewitchment. The dead animals, the feeling of being followed…I bet flowers would wilt inside the house.”
“Hexing, curses, whatever you want to call it. My great-grandmother used to talk about this, and Beatrice Tremblay wrote about the exact same thing.”
Spell casters who follow ancient, well-known patterns. Universal concepts. Physics is universal, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter if you’re in Japan or Mexico or Salem, the apple will fall from the tree. What if it’s like that for magic? You find the constants; you make them work. You alter reality.
“Maybe they should. They should believe in familiars and spells and curses and witch marks.”
She had nothing else, nothing but that pistol and the rope and the skinned rabbit. But she’d made up her mind that day; she’d loaded the gun and promised herself she would not return home until the witch was dead.
“I bind you with earth,” she said, her hands working quickly as she spoke. “I bind you with water. I bind you with fire. I bind you with air.”
The creature gritted its teeth. The sharp sound made her wince. She froze in place, her eyes wide. It sounded like Tadeo, it did, but witches always tried to trick you. Her brother was dead, Valentín was dead, and this fiend was not her kin.
“Ginny Somerset cast a long shadow over Betty’s and Edgar’s lives.”
“Santiago, yes, I heard that. I never believed it. It didn’t add up. Not when you looked carefully at the timeline.”
“I was working at a newspaper when Ginny vanished. Naturally, I tried covering her story. Santiago Ferreira lived in a rooming house in Temperance Landing. Like most of the young men there, he had trouble finding employment. We were in the middle of the Great Depression and folks were bouncing from gig to gig. He had little money and no car. “This means that if Santiago and Ginny ran away together, they would have had trouble getting around. Of course, they could have walked to the train station and taken the train, but no one saw two young people walking down the road that day. Nor did anyone
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“Yes. But here’s the problem: How could Santiago be arranging an elopement when he had been missing for five days?”
“When I talked to his housemates, they said he hadn’t been seen since December 14. Ginny went missing December 19.
“The police didn’t care what happened to folks like Santiago; he was just a mill boy, a nobody.
“It was their way of coping. Death hurts, yet the wound heals. But when Ginny went missing, it left a void. No scar tissue could be formed.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a good opinion of her, although she didn’t have a high opinion of me, either. I was the Jew boy who had sneaked into her social circle and since she didn’t bother keeping up appearances with me, I got a good look at her. She was a user of people.
“You saw me trying to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t believe in curses. But you do. You’ve come to die, haven’t you? Silly girl. Well, I won’t kill you. I have no grudge against you.”
“Arturo Velarde. He’s the warlock you seek.”
He killed my Elena.”
He must have honed himself in that time, because as soon as I saw him, I felt his power, and I was afraid because his heart was full of spite. I said, You don’t come back to bother us, you go away. The trouble was, my Elena was not afraid. All she saw was the pretty mister, and even though I told her, Don’t you go crossing that man’s path, she didn’t listen.”
“Teyolloquani, they make their magic with blood. They drink the blood, they eat the heart. If someone is favored, the blood is potent, and my Elena had the gift, too. He ate her heart raw.”
“You know the pretty mister in his suits. You don’t know the warlock that turns his enemies into animals. Or maybe you simply don’t want to see him clear.”
“It’s true. You’re a sorcerer and you killed my brother and you killed Valentín.”
A mystery is the most seductive of poisons; it intoxicates the soul.
