“I’m not the best person to explain this,” she said, placing a steaming mug in front of him. “I have to imagine what it’s like for you. For me, it’s just how things are. But I guess I’m all you’ve got.”
Will wrapped his trembling hands around the hot mug. The brew was a murky yellow and smelled flowery. He was determined not to interrupt, not to be evasive or skeptical. Not to think at all, if he could help it. Especially not to think about the scared, broken thing that had or had not been in his kitchen.
“There’s stuff around us all the time,” Sam said, sitting across from him with her own mug of the concoction. “Stuff people don’t see. Maybe they used to when they were young. You did. Friends that aren’t there, the way other people are. Probably we don’t even see them like they really are. Just a picture our mind makes.”
She was already losing him, but he didn’t speak. She seemed to understand.
“Do you remember Toby?”
The name was instantly familiar, yet he had to fight the impulse to disavow. The instinct of ignorance. As if someone else controlled his mind, and had for decades. Relax. Wait for it. The little wooded gully behind the house. The leaves May green. Sam uttering some singsong chant or incantation while they watched her in fascination. They. Two of them. Will, and Toby. Round, chortling and red faced. A little boy, but not a little boy. He didn’t live anywhere but there in the woods.
“Toby wasn’t real,” he said. Already he had broken his resolution.
“Or Alice?”
A plain-looking girl with pale skin and gray eyes. Gloomy and solemn. They let her hang around because they felt sorry for her. She was older, at first. Then she was their age, then younger, then gone. He had not thought of her in twenty-five years.
“She was yours,” Will said, struggling with this. “I invented Toby and you invented Alice. Children have friends like that.”
“They do,” she agreed.
“They weren’t real.”
“Well, maybe they weren’t what they seemed. Drink that.”
He took a sip. It was bitter, and familiar.
“My grandfather has this genealogical research,” Samantha said. “Books he’s collected. Family trees. I look at it sometimes. There was an Alice Hall who would have been my great-aunt. She died in this house when she was seven. Spanish flu. I even found a photograph. Want to see?”
“You think they were ghosts?”
“You know, that’s one of those words. There are these ideas you bring, these...”
“Cultural references,” he supplied.
“Right,” she said. “Thanks, Professor. Anyway, it’s not useful.”
“But that’s what you mean.”
“I know people can leave a piece of themselves behind. Especially if they die young, or die badly. It’s not them, but it’s real.”
“You still see them?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“I’ve seen Alice. Not for a long while. I see my grandmother.”
“When?” he asked.
“All the time. I saw her today, in the herb garden. She’s there a lot.”
Could he go down this road with her? Surely there was a line between opening your mind and losing it.
“Was it Christine you saw?” she asked.
The brew surged in his throat, hot and acid. He managed not to spit up. He had to stop being surprised by her. To accept that she knew things about him, however that might be.
“Why did you say that?”
“Because this is the day she died.”
“Of course,” Will sighed. Feeling foolish. “I didn’t expect anyone else to remember.”
“She was important to you,” Sam said. “You loved her.”
“No. We were seventeen, it was...”
“What’s important to you is important to me.”
“Would you stop with that.” His words had no force. He could not tell her what to feel. That he had become an adult in the last fifteen years, had experienced a full and complicated life completely out of her sight did not seem to matter at all. He had forgotten her, forgotten them all. But she had not forgotten him. And anyway, it now seemed that he had not really forgotten anything.
“Is that how it works?” he asked. “Anniversaries of their deaths?”
“Some say. Some say certain times, or even in certain places, the line between what’s seen and unseen gets thin. There’s whole religions that believe that.”
“Not you?”
“Maybe it’s true,” she conceded. Leaning back and putting her sneakered feet on the kitchen table. “How would I know, when I see things all the time? Mostly I think it’s about the people who do the seeing. It runs in families. Runs in ours.”
“Not mine,” he protested.
“Sure it does, you’re half Hall. Go back far enough, and most of this town is related. And it could be those people who have the sight are drawn to places where the sight is clearer.”
“Like this town?”
“That’s not for warming your hands. Drink, it’ll calm you.”
He took another sip. That familiar bittersweet taste.
“What’s in here?”
“Mayweed. Willow bark, a little honey. Few other things.”
“My mother used to make this.” Will remembered at last. “Something like this. When I was upset. Mayweed and honey. Hers was sweeter.”
“Of course she made it,” Sam said, getting up and going to the cabinet. “I’m sure she made all kinds of remedies you don’t recall. She’s a Hall woman.”
“Meaning she’s a witch?” he asked sharply.
Sam gave him a long look, the overhead light making a bright halo of her hair. Then shook her head slowly.
“That’s another one of those words I don’t use.” She came back to the table and put the sticky honey jar and a spoon in front of him. “Here you go.”
“They don’t burn them anymore,” he taunted. “They have ceremonies out in public. You can go down the road to Salem and join a coven.”
“I don’t need to go to Salem to do that,” she said quietly, sitting again.
“No?” he asked, his false bravado curdling instantly.
“They’re here,” she confirmed, her voice firm and a little scolding. “In all of these towns hereabout. And most of them do not do their business in public.” She closed and opened her eyes. “I don’t consider myself one of them.”
“What word do you use?” he asked.
“Hall women are healers. Going back generations. Back to Maine, anyway. Probably back to England. They’re in tune with whatever place they live. The trees and plants. The herb lore, the energy. They might do some songs or chants, but I think of that more like prayer. You know? Ritual. They heal, they help people.”
Will could feel himself falling into her words, the spell of her words. The idea of this community of women, healing and enfolding him. It’s a lie, the voice in his head said. And he shook himself, as if from a dream.
“That’s a nice story, Sam. But my mother was a drug-addled hippie. She was no healer.”
“Every generation reinvents what it means. You think our ancestors weren’t eating and smoking herbs and bark and flowers? Just to see what they did? You think magic mushrooms were just invented?”
“Come on,” he said. “Your ancestral healers testing medicinal properties is not exactly the same thing my mom and her buddies were up to.”
“They had the impulse, but they lacked teaching.”
“What teaching?”
“There’s supposed to be a knowledge-keeper every generation. Or more than one, maybe, who passes this stuff on to the next generation.”
“That stopped at some point?”
“I don’t know if it stopped,” she said, not looking at him now. “But maybe it stopped being done the right way.”
She knew more than she was saying. Which was odd for straightforward Sam.
“No one taught you,” Will said. “But you know how the system is supposed to work.”
“Yeah.”
“How? Who told you that much?”
“My grandfather, for one.”
“Tom Hall?” Will said, taken aback. “Told you this stuff?” But then it made sense, if you looked at those old family tales in a different way.
“Of course,” she replied. “He studied local history. Knew all about the seven families. He always smiled when he talked about it, but he knew. Old Mrs. Price too.”
“Margaret?”
“Not her,” she scoffed. “Her mother. She was always nice to me—I don’t know why.”
“Maybe she saw something in you,” he suggested. Wondering now if Margaret Price’s seeming agelessness was not simply his confusing generations.
“I think that might be it. It wasn’t that she liked me so much, but she would look me over real close. Ask me questions. As if she sensed something.”
“Your witchy strength.”
“Whatever,” she replied. “I guess she did teach me things.”
“Spells and incantations?”
“No, nobody taught me those. But I learned a few on my own.”
“Yeah? How?”
She looked uncomfortable again. They were getting near what she wanted to talk about, but oddly it was him having to pull it out of her. That was fine. The tea was calming him, and they had already come this far. He might as well hear it all.
“A few days ago,” he started. “You said that you called me and I came. That night of the storm. When John Payson died. What did you mean?”
“Johnny...” She took a deep breath and continued. “Johnny was spending a lot of time hanging around our house then. You remember that?”
“No. I don’t remember those days very clearly.”
“He was a Payson, but he had Stafford ancestors. And Halls. Actually, he claimed a connection to all seven families. The missing link, he called himself.”
Will finished his tea. He had never added more honey.
“I didn’t think his generation cared about all that,” he said. “Seven families, the history. I thought it was peace, love, drugs and rock and roll.”
“Johnny was a little older. Twenty-eight or nine. He’d been out West, all over the country.”
“Draft-dodging,” Will said, having heard that much before. It was during that same cross-country exile that Johnny stayed briefly with Will’s parents in California, before his dad shipped out to Vietnam.
“Right,” Sam said. “He studied with some Zen master in Los Angeles. Stayed on Indian reservations, hanging with the medicine men and chewing peyote. When he finally came back, he had hair halfway down to his butt, silver bracelets. All these ideas about space and time and consciousness.”
“You can’t possibly remember that,” Will said. “You were six or seven.”
“I remember a lot. More than other people. But I’m sure I was told things too.”
He noted that even after her scolding, she wasn’t drinking her own tea. He pushed the honey jar at her, which elicited a brief smile.
“Nah. If you can drink bitter, so can I.”
“Johnny came marching home,” he prompted her.
“I’m guessing about this. Nobody wanted to talk about Johnny after that night. But I think he came to see our families, the healers or witches or whatever you want to call them... He came to see it as one more thing, you know? Zen, dream catching, the earth goddess, spirit cults. Just one more piece of the mystical whole.”
“Is that how you see it?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“And unlike those other traditions,” she pushed on, “this was the one he was born into. And there’s my grandfather. Always taking in strays, helping people out.”
“Like he did my mother.”
“And he’s got these shelves and shelves of books about everything.”
Will got it. Johnny was full of ideas. Full of himself and in love with the world, but returning with nothing. No money, his family dead or moved on, except for his brother Doug. He needed someone to help and guide him. And here’s this old guy with a library designed to let the young man explore his theme. Investigate his past for the raw material to make something of his life. Tom probably ate it up.
“My grandfather liked him,” Sam said, answering his thoughts unbidden, “Liked having anyone around who was curious about books and ideas. He was still grieving for Grandma Jane, and I guess he needed someone else to focus his attention on. He and Johnny bonded.”
“Seems like Johnny charmed everyone.”
“He had the knack,” she agreed. “He could dazzle the younger people with his half-assed philosophy, and he could flatter the older ones, like Grandpa or Doc Chester. He would listen to Doc gas on about African tribal rituals all afternoon.”
“It must have been tough for your grandfather. You know, to have Johnny die like that.”
He remembered Tom being around that night, for the aftermath. Trying to calm his mother. Talking to the police. Yet wearing the same haunted look as all the others.
“It was. They were fighting a lot right before it happened.”
She was gazing just over his left shoulder. As if someone there was providing the story. He shivered involuntarily and resisted the urge to look.
“There was a book,” said Sam. “One particular book Johnny got obsessed with. Old. Hundreds of years, I think, with old-fashioned writing. Passed down through the family.”
“The grimoire,” Will said, rather than asked. “The book of spells.”
“I guess Grandpa didn’t mind at first, but after a while they started to argue.”
“Do you know why?”
“Something in the book.” She closed her eyes, then looked at the tabletop. Anywhere but at him. “He had marked one page with a strand of hair.”
“Hair?”
“Yeah, so it wouldn’t be obvious. But Grandpa noticed it. He noticed things.”
“And so did you,” Will added. He placed his hands on the table and leaned forward, to get her attention. “What was on that page?”
“A summoning spell.” She looked at him shyly.
“Summoning what?”
“It was in a whole section of spells like that. Spells you shouldn’t use. Enchantment. Shape-shifting. Summoning.”
“Summoning what, Sam?”
“The kind of spells you needed other people for,” she said, like he was missing the point. “Many voices together, that creates power. I think he was trying them out in your mother’s coven.”
“My mother’s...” He could say no more, his throat suddenly tight.
“What have we been talking about?” Sam said, exasperated. “Coven, conventicle, spirit circle. Call it what you like.”
“It’s not, it’s not about what I like,” he stuttered. “It matters.”
“Only because you’re a teacher. They’re just words, William.”
“It matters what they thought they were doing.” He had to keep wetting his lips to speak. All that sweet calm had burned away, just like that. “I teach myth and folklore. I know what covens are. I know what kind of beings they seek to summon.”
“Those are stories,” she said.
“So it’s not the same?”
“Look, there are things we know, things that are here.” She chose the words carefully, her attention fixed on him again. “Like Toby or Alice. Call them ghosts, shades, whatever. But there are other things too. Not from here.” Will had the strong impression here did not mean Cape Ann. “Things most of us never see, and never should. But sometimes they cross over. Some are powerful. When we encounter them, it’s overwhelming. Our mind can’t take it in. We don’t even remember what we’ve seen, only that feeling of being overwhelmed. And we give them names. Gods. Angels.”
“Demons,” Will said. Her only response was that even stare.
He sat back in the chair. They were awfully far down the rabbit hole. Did he gather the strength to continue, or rush back to the surface? Would he laugh at all of this tomorrow? He might, but he could not laugh right now.
“And that’s what happened that night,” he said finally. “Johnny brought the spell and they tried to summon one of these beings. My mother’s coven.”
“I think so,” she said.
“But something went wrong.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. Her eyes were damp. Will could not remember ever seeing her cry. Was that right? Everyone cried. She gave him a humiliated glance, then stood up and left the room. His legs were numb from too long sitting in the hard chair. Even standing slowly, he became dizzy, and by the time he reached the hall she had vanished. Yet he knew where to find her.
The study was dim. Just a low light from the desk lamp. Except for the windows and four old framed photographs, every patch of wall was covered in bookcases. Dark wood, dark spines, absorbing light and giving little back. Samantha leaned against the desk, her arms folded and back to the door.
“Is it here?” he asked, his words swallowed by wood, leather and paper.
“I’ve looked for it,” she answered. Not needing him to explain that he meant the book. “The last few days. I haven’t been able to find it.”
“You read the summoning spell.” He saw a rain-soaked girl in the lantern light. The symbols drawn in the mud at her feet. “And you performed it that night.”
“I don’t think I understood.” She turned halfway toward him, her face shining in the lamplight. “I mean, what it was for. I knew what I wanted, and I learned all the steps.”
“What did you want?”
“What every child wants,” Samantha replied. “A friend. It was so easy for other people, but I never got the trick of it. Still haven’t. I didn’t notice at first, I thought I had friends. Then I realized that nobody else could see them. They weren’t the same as real friends. So I learned the spell and summoned one. I summoned you. And bound you to me in friendship.” She glanced at him. “Funny, huh?”
It seemed pointless to say again that he had been running in panic. He had, in fact, run into the field. Right to her. And she had scared him in those days. Though not as much as whatever was pursuing him.
“Something came with me, you said.”
“I saw the lightning strike the pine tree,” Sam answered. “I didn’t realize it had jumped to the house. Then I heard the screaming. And I thought...” Her lips shook, then her whole body. He went to her and put his arms around her. She was rigid at first, unused to being held. Then she relaxed into him. “I thought I did it,” she whispered. “My spell. I thought for a long time that I killed Johnny.”
“No,” he murmured, rocking her gently now. “It was a storm. Just a freak thing.”
“Later,” she said, swallowing hard and talking into his dampening shoulder, “I figured out that they were doing it in the house while I was doing it in the field. They messed up. Or I did, I don’t know. But Johnny died. And something arrived. Maybe what they were trying to call, or maybe something else.”
“You saw something,” he said, still rocking her, closing his eyes against whatever came next.
“In the field,” she breathed. “Behind you. Right behind you. Only a shadow. I felt it more than saw it, but I saw it too. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“You stepped inside my circle, and you were safe. It wouldn’t come closer.”
“You spoke words,” he remembered. Commanding words, but he could not recall what they were. She took a long time to answer.
“A protection spell. It shouldn’t have had any effect on a...being like that.”
“Nothing hurt us.”
“No,” she agreed, pulling back slightly and looking straight into his eyes. “But it didn’t go away either. Did it?”
He felt his body get heavy as his head grew light. Felt he might fall. And then it was her holding him instead of the other way, though they had not moved.
“I can’t go back to that house tonight,” he said, dread nearly choking him.
“No, stay here. Stay with me.”
She had lost her serenity. She was vulnerable in a way he had never seen. A weak and frightened human, like him. He thought of her in the field that night, warding off some imaginary monster. Whatever the true cause of their mutual fright, it had been a brave thing for a young girl to do. He felt a keen tenderness for her in this moment. The little girl and the woman both.
“I am your friend,” Will said.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I forgot.”
“You never forgot,” said Samantha.