The Bewitching

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“I heard something the other night,” she said, her voice low, and she hugged herself as she spoke. “There was an animal outside my window, but it was no creature that I could recognize. It did not sound natural. And I dreamed of Tadeo last night, only it felt real. I don’t know what to do, something terrible is happening but no one seems to realize it.” “Have you told your mother?” “She doesn’t want to hear it. My uncle rails against superstitions. But something lurks near our home. I can almost feel it watching us sometimes. Whether it’s the teyolloquani or another dreadful creature, I can’t tell.”

Alba, one more thing, and I do not mean to frighten you with this, but in every story I’ve heard about these creatures, once they drink the blood of their victim, the situation becomes dire. The more blood they drink, the more powerful they grow, and the deeper their victim falls under their spell. I advise you to protect your room with the scissors, but also look for your brother’s pistol and keep it by your pillow.”

We held a séance three days after the dance. Some might think it odd to be attempting to communicate with ghosts following the disturbance at the Halloween Ball. But for Ginny, ghosts were not frightful apparitions dangling their chains in the air. She believed in communion with the departed and found comfort in her writing and her sketches, which were supposedly influenced by invisible hands.

“Spirits, might we seek your counsel?” Ginny asked. A loud knock reverberated across the room. We looked around, nervous. Then there came two knocks in quick succession. I gasped. Before any one of us could ask Ginny what was happening, the knocking had grown so violent it made the table vibrate. It was as if someone was punching the surface. I was not holding anyone’s hands anymore; I was pressing down on the table to keep it from being toppled. I thought the wood would splinter under my fingertips. “Ginny!” Mary Ann yelled. The knocking ceased. All was still and quiet. Ginny sat stiffly, palms pressed against the table. Her eyes were wide open. “You are in deadly peril, Virginia,” she said. The words were odd. They didn’t sound as if they came from her mouth. Her lips hardly moved, and the voice seemed to rise from her chest rather than her throat. These words were between a whisper and a croak, coarse and spoken with difficulty. It didn’t sound like Ginny at all. Somehow, during this whole mad ordeal, the candle had remained in place, burning bright. Ginny bent forward, her forehead almost touching the table, and the candle blew out.

That is what I saw, that is what I remember, that is the cornerstone of the theory that she loved Santiago. Yet, when you analyze it, it means nothing. I saw two people talking, I saw a girl coming back to her room. She revealed no breathless affair to me; instead she talked about her boyfriend.

She thought the town was charming. It looked like the towns they depicted on Christmas cookie tins. A place like she’d never visited except in old Hollywood movies where Cary Grant played the hero. But now she perceived a forced cheerfulness embedded in the wood and brick and mortar, and behind it the shape of something sharper and unpleasant. The campus too had begun to shed its elegant appeal, like paint that is peeled away by the elements.

He was a bit vulnerable behind the bluster, she thought. She had a fondness for stray animals and slightly damaged things—the chipped frame of a mirror, the weathered pages of a book that has been kissed by the rain, the sweater that has been nibbled by a troublesome moth—which primed her to look kindly on a man like him. But she ought not to. Strays bit sometimes, and certain old books were suffused with pernicious mold.

She admired, even envied people like Hideo, who could swiftly navigate the world, smiling and laughing and making friends while she was coiled tight inside her head. These days, she felt even more removed from everything, the silence of the dorm and the summer heat that spread across campus lulling her into a restless half sleep.

There was no porch light, so she couldn’t see who was standing outside. But she knew there was someone even if no silhouette lingered at the edges of the kitchen windows.

Isaiah Marsh, lost at sea, she thought. Lost like Thomas, who did not return to his room one evening? Or lost like Virginia Somerset, who walked out of her dorm one cold December night? How many people were lost that way, people who slipped into darkness, never to be seen again?

“There’s a shadow upon you,” the woman said. “A teyolloquani haunts your family.”

“Such a witch is dangerous. No ordinary mischief interests a teyolloquani. You must watch your step. They can turn their enemies into animals, into things.”

“What a teyolloquani wants is to feed on the blood of its victims. It’ll get hold of a bit of hair, or a few nail clippings, and use them to bewitch the person. It’ll make it hail in the summer, or cause restless dreams. It’ll send its minions, like the owl and the serpent, to roam near houses at night. Its victim grows fearful. That is what makes the blood sweeter, the pain and the fear. The teyolloquani ate your brother, that’s what it did. He’s bones in a field somewhere. It’ll devour you too if you’re not careful. Show me your wrists.”

Inside was a dead dove that had been stuffed and stabbed with seven long pins. Alba gasped at the ghastly creation. “What is that?” “This you will place in your room. It’ll repel any evil thing that tries to crawl through your window.” “She placed scissors under the bed and they rusted in one night,” Valentín said. “This is stronger, better,” she said as she carefully slid out a pin from the dove’s body. “Stab your finger with it and slide it back in.” “Why would I ever do that?” Alba replied, disgusted. “Blood has power. It’s why they drink it. The blood of someone who is gifted like you is even more powerful, better than that of others. There’s magic in it. Prick your finger.”

“My father spoke of evil witches. He said they eat the hearts of people because that is where they get their power. And to kill a witch you must cut off their head or carve out their heart.” “Your father was right.”

Make more of them, like this, hide them around your home,” Jovita told her. Alba pressed the handkerchief against her finger. “You mean dead doves?” “Hummingbirds are the best, but doves will do.” “But make them how? Don’t you need an incantation, special powders?” “You need belief, is what you need. You need to clutch the dead bird and stab it with six needles, and at the seventh you tell it, Keep me safe, keep any evil away, and offer your blood, like you did. That’s the crucial ingredient.

Which is to say that Ginny’s interest in matters of witchcraft was by itself not an odd trait, not when you considered her automatic writing or her spirit paintings, but I felt that this was fundamentally different from her other pursuits. There was no joy in this quest, simply a grim determination. There were other changes in Ginny’s behavior as the days advanced. More than once while we were walking together, she looked over her shoulder or turned quickly around as if expecting to find someone behind us. She grew distracted and sometimes I’d have to call her name twice to get her attention. In the mornings she looked tired and dark circles formed under her eyes. She scribbled incessantly in her notebooks.

“I’ve found several dead flies by the windowsill. Two dead moths. Everything is dying in this house,” Ginny said,

Don’t you see, Betty? There’s evil out there. I can feel it, like I can almost feel the cold beyond that glass pane,” she said in a low voice.

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.”

It was the first of December. On December 19, Virginia would go missing. We had less than three weeks left together, though of course I could not know that. Or perhaps I did know. After all, a terrible, restless darkness had been inching toward her every day. I had sensed it, I had almost tasted it, yet I had dismissed it as nonsense. 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.

Music, even when a singer was screaming their head off, was easier to process than random people in the streets or the honking of horns. You could get lost in music.

“An apotropaic mark, also called a witch mark, is a symbol or pattern scratched on the walls of a building to protect it from evil spirits. The word ‘apotropaic’ comes from the Greek word for ‘averting evil.’ “The marks were usually scribed onto stone or woodwork, particularly near doorways, windows, and fireplaces. They have many forms. In England, they often have flowerlike patterns or overlapping circles.”

In the vast majority of cases, her great-grandmother said, witchcraft of the malicious kind does not amount to great harm. Witches may toy with a person, sour a day or two of their life, then move on to other matters. Their magic is often slight. A few witches, the ones born on a propitious day, who descend from a lineage of powerful witches, might attack in more nefarious manners. Yet they are often opportunistic creatures—stealing a hog to get back at a neighbor who slighted them might be the most they would attempt. But a bewitchment, that is a different tale. It is a campaign, a siege. 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.

A creature of passions, a weather vane, that’s what Arturo was. She’d heard her father say as much. He had not meant it as a compliment, but Alba found the image enticing. To be able to turn and be swept away by one’s heart as swiftly as a leaf is carried by a current, rather than taking root like an oak: this seemed to her exciting and commendable. Yet his frenetic energy was different from his anger, and this strain of darkness, of sharp rage that spiked beneath the notes, was not something she enjoyed.

The light filtering into her room, however, was odd. It had a greenish tinge that made her frown. She stepped toward the window and tugged at the curtains, looking out. The light did not come from the moon. It seemed to drift down from one of the peppercorn trees as if someone had hung a lantern among its branches. Unlike the light of a lantern, this greenish glow had no source—it was diffused, as hard to pinpoint as mist. It was, in fact, so faint you could hardly see it, and for one moment Alba thought it was an optical illusion. Yet as Alba looked at it, the mist seemed to coalesce, its color growing stronger, from a faint green to a brighter hue closer to the shade of an emerald. It looked now like a sphere, trembling in the tree branches and burning like an ember. 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. The ball of light let out a long, doleful cry, an ululation that resembled that of an owl. Except she’d heard owls all her life, knew their hoots and the noise of their wings, and this was different. The branches of the peppercorn tree drooped, as if pressed down by a great weight.

She’d woken up with a funny feeling that morning, that old itch in the back of her skull that her great-grandmother used to call a portent. The sight of the red fibers made her want to recoil; something in the color triggered a sense of revulsion she could not explain.

“My grandfather figured we were living near the Bermuda Triangle because of the Black List. It was a sort of scrapbook. Betty and my grandfather kept a tally of missing people. Not just people near Temperance Landing: in all of New England.”

She pictured the New England house, with its white shutters and its cozy kitchen, and there, on the table, the cup of tea sitting on a saucer with no one to drink it. The image was more disturbing than any skeleton or hideous monster featured on the covers of pulp magazines, for it was not the presence of evil that drew the eye, but the absence of something. “The disappearances sound creepier than stories of headless horsemen.”

Thomas Murphy had been like her, she thought. A quiet, studious fellow more comfortable roaming the library than nightclubs. Gone missing, Thomas Murphy. Unnoticed, unobtrusive Tom.

“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.”

Rain drenched the fields and in the evening the fog descended from the top of the mountains, nuzzling the trees, painting the land with wispy shades of gray. Outside, the world seemed wrapped in gauze, and she beheld the fog with wary eyes. 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.

This, she thought, was the tale not of Cupid and Psyche, but of Persephone dragged into the depths of the underworld. This was a chthonic sacrifice. An eon passed and the presence shifted and slid away, receding slowly, nails raking her torso and her legs before lifting from her body. She breathed in and turned her head. In the darkness Alba caught a glimpse of two hungry, large eyes, fixed on her. The eyes had no face; they belonged to a shadow that had the outline of a body, yet she could discern none of its features. No nose, no mouth, no teeth.

The motion of her arms made her wince; a stabbing pain extended through her body. She looked down and saw the nightgown had a maroon splotch upon the chest. It had not been there when she went to bed. Quickly she pulled the gown off her body and stood naked in front of the mirror. Above her heart there was a cut, as if she’d nicked herself with a knife. The skin around the cut was bruised and purplish. Alba leaned forward, her fingers brushing the cut and pressing down on it.

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.” “What words?” “The first word is ‘earth.’ You tell it that you’re holding it with earth. Then you say you’re holding it with water, then with fire and air. You say it again until you reach twelve. Once you’ve begun tying the knots, you can’t stop speaking. That’s the trick. It might try to scare you or trick you, but you must keep going.”

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.

When I think back to the end of 1934, I picture an unending, bone-chilling whiteness. That month of December seems to have taken place in slow motion, as if our lives had been as frozen as the pond where the students skated.

His anguish was obvious and when I nodded he smiled that great big smile that Ginny adored. Poor Edgar! Ginny’s disappearance robbed him of his youth and easy joy; that smile seldom adorned his lips afterward. It robbed me of something, too. Innocence and ease. I can never look at the darkness outside without wondering what lurks in the corners. When the lamps bloom on the street, I peek through the curtains and gaze at shadows. Who goes there, I wonder. What goes there.

She bent down to pick up a pillowcase and when she looked up the world turned into a dark splash of red. The bedsheets hanging from the clotheslines were scarlet and the clouds that drifted in the distance were tinted crimson. It was like gazing through a pane of colored glass in a great Gothic cathedral. Even her hands, when she looked at them, were painted a terrible shade of vermilion, as if she’d squeezed rotten cherries and let the juice drip down her arms.

“I was at the library and lost my way.” She pulled a boot off, then began working on the laces of the other. “The path changed.” “What do you mean?” “I mean exactly that. I was on the path and suddenly it was different, and I wasn’t sure where to turn. It was dusk by the time I left the library, but it took forever to find the path to Joyce House. It kept getting darker and darker and I went around and around.”

“Each day I feel an evil, like an invisible noose around my neck, tightening an inch,” she said, and held both hands up, placing them around her throat. “Something terrible is chasing after me. It’s magic. I’m under a spell and can’t escape it. I don’t know who cast it. If I knew…I’ve asked my mother, but she can’t see, and I’m afraid…but if I don’t discover the answer soon, it’ll be too late.”

“Ginny, we must head back inside,” I said. But when I reached her, she did not look at me. She was staring in the direction of Briar’s Commons. “It’s there. Between the trees,” she said. “What is there?” She raised a hand and pointed, but all I could see was a fallen tree trunk half submerged in snow. I sighed and crossed my arms, trying hard to keep my teeth from chattering. “I tried to see its face, but it hid in the shadows. Wait and you might see it.” Her words made me shiver, for they were low and quiet and had a cadence of suppressed panic, as if she were gazing at a horrible sight rather than a simple fallen tree covered in snow. This, more than anything, hinted at madness.

It was stuffy inside the house, which made things even worse, so she opened the back door and promptly gazed upon the corpse of the orange tabby. Its neck had been twisted and broken in such a violent way that at first she did not register what had happened to the animal. It looked like a towel that had been wrung tight. She bent down and touched its head.

What if witches do exist, Hideo? Have you ever wondered about that? Not like in Bewitched, not the funny witches with pointy hats. 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. “What about…what about when you told me about inugami. Remember? They’re similar to familiar spirits and they’re created by sorcerers by killing a dog. My great-grandmother told me a story about something like that, about creating a minion—” “Those are very old stories,” Hideo said, interrupting her. “No one believes in that now.” “Maybe they should. They should believe in familiars and spells and curses and witch marks.”

Finally, she knelt next to the rabbit and placed it flat on its belly. She pinched the hide near the neck and made a cut, then pulled with one hand toward the rear and with the other toward the head. The skin began to tear and separate. It had always amazed her, when she performed this task in the kitchen under her mother’s watchful eye, how easily the skin would slide away, like tissue paper being ripped, revealing muscle and fat, a sharp reminder of the frailty of all living creatures.

A cry made her quickly raise her head. It was the strange cry she’d heard once before, outside her window, almost a growl, and it seemed to come from far away, though when it rang out again, it sounded dangerously close. Something was approaching fast.

It was as if a ripple sliced through the blackness of the night, as if someone had thrown a pebble into the dark and the dark had awoken. Forward slid a shadow and the shadow was a thing that had the body and the head of an enormous dog, with a long snout and pointed ears. As the thing inched closer to the dead rabbit, sniffing and hissing, it seemed to drag with it a veil of shadows, so that she could not see it clearly even as she noticed certain details of its anatomy. She saw the line of feathers running down its bony spine, the talons like those of an owl, the slick skin of an eel, for this was a creature of impossibility, neither mammal nor bird but something in between that moved with the gliding smoothness of a snake. The creature began to bite into the rabbit’s carcass, and she heard the sharp snapping of a bone, the slobbering of a rabid, ravenous animal.

“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.” It was when she tied the fourth knot that the thing in the clearing threw back its head and she noticed its eyes: they were of a glowing green and there was an emptiness to them, as if the skull of the creature had been hollowed out and a candle placed inside it. “I bind you with earth,” she said, beginning the sequence again and tying the fifth knot. The monster kept chewing. Blood dripped from the creature’s mouth onto the ground. When she tied the seventh knot it growled and flashed its teeth, growing restless. Its feathers shifted; it arched its back and spat out whatever was left of the carcass it had been gnawing. Its ears lay back flat against its skull. “I bind you with air,” she said, and tied the eighth knot. It began moving toward her. Slowly. It lowered and raised its head, and when she tied the ninth knot and spoke the ninth phrase it let out a screech that was the sound of a knife being sharpened, metallic, strident. The creature opened its mouth and out slipped its long, forked tongue, and then it fixed its unearthly green eyes on Alba. She felt as though it was grinning. Alba took a step back, her fingers working the tenth knot. “I bind you with water,” she said. The thing stood on its hind legs. It was as tall as a man and for a moment looked no longer like a dog, but like something else, something almost human, its...

“I bind you with fire,” she said quickly, and tied the eleventh knot. 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. She shook her head. “I bind you with air,” she said, and tied the last knot. The thing in the clearing crouched low and began scratching the ground with its claws. It heaved and opened its jaws. She slid the pistol out of the holster while clutching the rope with her other hand. She lifted it. “Father, give me strength,” she said.

The creature’s breathing was loud, laborious, and she approached it slowly. Her left hand hurt from clutching the rope so hard, for she had not let go of it for a second. She looked at the thing on the ground, which shivered and opened its mouth, and shot it a third time in the chest. The green glow of its eyes grew dim. The sleek eel skin dissolved and the claws sloughed off, revealing hands and then quickly a bare chest, and there, on the ground, was her brother. He coughed and spat blood. And she knew in that moment, with a certainty that almost smothered her, that this was indeed Tadeo. He’d been wrapped in black magic and transformed, turned into a horrid beast that the witch could command. Alba had been tricked. The gun slipped from her fingers as she knelt and touched his face. “Alba,” he said. Frantic, she helped him sit up. “I’m sorry, Tadeo. My God, I didn’t know.”