The Bewitching

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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.

Minerva had no desire to discuss her problems with her mother, who believed herself a psychoanalyst after reading too many self-help books.

It was the lure of history; she adored older buildings and was repelled by the new.

Preserved like a rose that had been pressed in a book, all scent vanishing but the shape of the flower remaining.

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.

I must warn you that I will also narrate this story in my own voice, in my own way, and at my own pace, which may not seem like the way you might tell it, but it is important that I do it like this, for it will be the lone method that can perhaps render the truth of Virginia Somerset, or as much truth as I can approximate on paper.

We thought things would turn around. But they didn’t. Then, one morning, it was as if we all woke up from a spell, panic-stricken, and realized the ditch we’d rolled into.

It was hard on everyone, but harder for women.

Back then, affluent people still took a dim view of folks who embodied such traits—new money, foreign roots, and the lack of a good Protestant heritage would keep you out of the tonier country clubs—and

It is difficult nowadays to understand the lines traced by someone’s class and background, boundaries as rigid as iron. Traversing them was perilous.

I simply thought it was Carolyn being Carolyn, for she was mercurial and mutable, although that was part of her charm. One minute you’d be infuriated by one of her comments, the next you’d be delighted by a clever retort.

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.

“Well, I’m wondering if you would be happy to see me.” “That’s very bold of you to say, Valentín. I ought to slap you.” “I hope not too hard. Then I’ll see you next week?” he asked hopefully.

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

Then she contemplated the drawer and wondered if she was being stupid. Simply because she had not recognized the cry of an animal did not mean it was a supernatural creature, and her feeling of unease might simply be grief. She was suddenly afraid not of witches and enchantments but of what her mother or her uncle would say if they should discover that she believed a witch was the reason for their misery. Her uncle, especially, would have unkind words for her.

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.

Carolyn was used to high-handed proclamations. Her money, her position, had ensured that she possessed a tremendous expectation of being obeyed. At times she acted like a tiny tyrant. I was used to doing what she wanted. That same money and position were things that I envied and admired, keys to a different kingdom. With her connections, Carolyn could greatly assist me after graduation. But only if we remained on good terms. She knew it, I knew it. And there were moments like this when that knowledge stung.

New England is rife with narratives of the uncanny. Almost every town in Massachusetts boasts a tale of devilry and witches. Some of the protagonists in these stories are innocents sent to the gallows and others are agents of evil. There’s a witch rock in Rochester and another in Peabody, and even though these may be merely boulders left behind when glaciers retreated in distant ice ages, they mark the land in unusual ways.

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.

Old age could wreck the human brain, but perhaps insidious thoughts could ruin it in one’s youth, chipping away at one’s sanity.

Alba’s mother said a woman should not fear blood. Blood was a woman’s destiny anyway, each month there was blood between her thighs, so blood from a bird should not frighten her.

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.

Stepping into the factory was like slipping into the belly of a dead whale and roaming through its carcass, for this place had once been alive and now was nothing but a lonesome shell of itself.

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.

Sometimes it seems pointless. Why write papers that six people are ever going to read about a person who is long dead? How does that benefit the world in any way? I could be doing something more practical, more tangible.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

On the train she drew circles in her notebook and pondered her great-grandmother’s stories. She’d loved those fantastical tales of people transforming into animals and balls of fire flying through the night sky, but they always took place in what was to her an alien world. Long ago, far up the mountains. She’d never thought you could have a modern witch story. It was as if the glass and steel of office buildings repelled them. But in her backpack there was the talisman, and between her hands the notebook with her idle circles. Iron and glass might not be enough.

Beware. Beware. Place wards, lock windows, beware. This room is safe. They’re after you. They’re here—

She remembered when she’d spoken that sentence to him, and she realized the power of such words. Magic wasn’t about powders or birds, like that witch had explained. It was more than the mechanical repetition or a list of ingredients. She’d undone any magic, canceled any wards that might have kept him away, because she’d wanted Arturo close to her.

It was as if the dark held a primeval terror, and upon encountering it my only possible reaction was the limbic response of flight. I ran away, stumbling madly through the snow, unseeing.

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.

But which door to pick? None and all.

Nevertheless, such markings upon rocks indicate a place of importance, a place of power, and a place of memory. It is like this with me and Ginny. Although she is long gone, and although I cannot comprehend the ending to her story, I return to it because it has power and must be remembered for that reason. Therefore, I have set it down as best I can, with the frail implements of paper and a typewriter, that it may preserve a fraction of Virginia Somerset’s memory, as I knew her in 1934.

In the watercolor, Tadeo’s eyes were reduced to a smudge of brown, but they had been almost black, and the painted smile did not match the mischievous smirk that adorned his face when he was teasing Alba. This was Tadeo’s likeness, yet so much of Tadeo had not been captured by the strokes of the brush even if it was the most accurate portrait of her brother. This only intensified the feeling of loss inside her chest. Tadeo was gone, destined to fade from memory and thought.

“I’ll have you, one way or another,” he replied simply. He had a conqueror’s boldness. Doubtless he imagined that the deed to the farm, once in his hands, entitled him to possession of every single item inside it, and every single person. Including her.

don’t need to bargain with you,” he said, as if the sound had broken a spell, and caught her hand, his grip tight around her fingers. “Then kill me now and eat my heart, and that is all you’ll ever have of me. A rotting piece of meat. You’ve toyed long enough with me. Accept my terms, or kill me like you killed the others, and the only pleasure you’ll ever find with me will be in the grave,” she swore.

But she knew a good hunter was an excellent scout who was familiar with the terrain. They were also quiet, stealthy. A hunter must walk soft and slow, think before moving, and wait. Patience is the hunter’s greatest weapon.

“I won’t let you destroy me,” she said. “I will live through this.”

His eyes widened and he yelled for her to stop. She cut off his head all the same.