More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches. That was what Nana Alba used to say when she told Minerva bedtime stories;
Could someone plateau at twenty-four? Could your brain shrink? She felt tired and listless all the time. Often, she was sad for no reason. She was in grad school, obtaining an English literature degree from the same college Beatrice Tremblay had attended. It was her childhood dream come true.
She’d ambled through Peter Straub’s Hampstead, H. P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, Stephen King’s Derry. Imaginary towns, but towns based on real locations, real places.
She’d preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends, and instead of asking for a quinceañera party she’d managed to persuade her mother to buy her a first edition of Tremblay’s The Vanishing and a cache of other horror novels, which she’d spotted in a dusty used bookshop on Donceles among a slew of old, forgotten titles.
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. The stories contradicted one another as all good oral narratives must.
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.
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
...more
Minerva’s great-grandmother had also been haunted by a vanishing that had occurred decades earlier, a tale smeared with violence yet always out of focus because Nana Alba never provided a proper ending to her narrative. It always looped back to the beginning. Until the very end, until she was on her deathbed and whispered the final, quiet dénouement. Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.
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.
Next to him were portraits of other ancient department heads, their names engraved on bronze plaques: Stephen Graham Jones, Philosophy; Nicholas Mamatas, Classics; and so on and so forth.
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.
Stories have a rhythm to them. A beginning, a middle, an end. Mysteries beg for answers, narratives demand conclusions. Perhaps this is why Ginny made such a powerful impression on me: her story had no proper finale. It was a never-ending loop, a perfect circle. Open one door and Ginny has eloped, heedless, into the arms of a secret lover. Open another door and Ginny has walked into the snow, mad, her mind finally cleaved by a secret malady. Open another door and Ginny is the victim of a terrible crime. A stranger glides down the snowy road, drags her into a car, murders her. Open another door
...more
The Native American tribe that carved Dighton Rock—perhaps the Mashpee Wampanoag—left us a story, but we cannot interpret it properly, for we lack an understanding of its symbols, its metaphors. Nevertheless, such markings upon rocks indicate a place of importance, a place of power, and a place of memory.
