Teen Witch_(0)

“I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is.”
“How do you know, then, that you are not one?”

-Examination of Bridget Bishop, Salem Village, April 19, 1692

***

“Abbie Hobbs is a witch,” Ruth said.

Phoebe was standing with her locker open, brushing her hair. She hadn’t even noticed Ruth was there until the girl blurted out something about Abbie, and it was a few seconds until Phoebe registered what it was. “Um, okay?” Phoebe said. “Did she join the Wicca Club or something?”

The final bell had rung, and the corridor was full of rushing students. Ruth looked over her shoulder, as if checking for anyone listening in. Then she whispered, “Not like that. I mean she’s a real witch. Like from history class? In Salem?”

Phoebe put her brush down and closed her locker. She and Ruth suddenly seemed to be at a kind of standstill while the rest of the world hustled by around them. She wasn‘t sure where this was going, but she already didn‘t like it. “There were no witches in Salem,” Phoebe said after a while. “That was the point of the lesson.”

“But what if there were?” Ruth said, leaning in. “What if they’re just really good at hiding? How would we know?”

Phoebe backed up a step. “Ruth, I don’t know you that well. If you’re really freaking out or something, maybe you should talk to your parents. Or a priest, I guess?”

Other than the fact that she was 18, a senior, that their lockers were right next to each other, and that they shared a history class, Phoebe barely knew anything about Ruth at all. But Ruth was one of the students who had tried to force the pagan kids to move their club activities off of school grounds last year, Phoebe remembered, so maybe this was some kind of religious panic thing.

“My parents don’t believe me,” Ruth continued. “Nobody would believe me except you.”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Because you know Abbie. You know what she can do.”

That was true. Normally, Phoebe would believe any nasty thing another girl had to say about Abbie. Normally…

“There are lots of them in class,” Ruth continued. “And she’s their leader, and they want me to join them. Have they, you know, come to see you? Do they ask you to do things with them?”

The hall was emptying out now, the sudden silence punctuated only by the occasional slamming of a locker door. “I haven’t talked to Abbie in months. You’re freaking me out, Ruth. You don’t look good.”

“I can’t sleep,” said the other girl. “She comes every night and keeps me awake.”

“Abbie sneaks into your room at night?”

“It’s not really her. She’s like a ghost when she comes. I hoped you‘d seen her too. Now you don‘t believe me.”

Pity and revulsion had a tug-of-war for Phoebe’s feelings. The bags under Ruth’s eyes made her look even spookier than usual. In spite of herself, she got closer to the other girl again.

“I believe you. But you’ve probably been having nightmares is all. And we just finished studying colonial witch trials, so of course you might dream about them. I’ve had nightmares just like that.”

That part wasn’t true, but the lie couldn’t possibly hurt.

Ruth was picking up her bag and her books. “Don’t tell anyone I talked about this, okay?” the girl said. “Especially not Abbie?”

“This is the last thing I want to tell anyone about, ever,” said Phoebe.

“If she hasn’t come to you yet, she will soon. She wants you. I can tell.”

With that, Ruth turned and practically ran away, leaving Phoebe alone in the corridor except for a row of 100 silent lockers.

“Witches,” she said out loud. “Great.” As if a public school needed any more problems.

The parking lot was, likewise, nearly empty when she got there, except for clumps of wet autumn leaves. It had dumped rain all day. The weather had been getting weird ever since the school year started; storms almost every day, and even hale a few times.

The only other person she saw leaving was Mr. Dane, parked right next to her. He was always late in the morning and ended up parking with the students instead of taking the extra five minutes to go around to the faculty parking. It happened so often that other teachers had started calling him ‘the freshman.”

“Hi, Mr. Dane,” said Phoebe.

He looked up at her twice. “Hello Phoebe,” he said. Mr. Dane (his first name was Frank) taught civics and social science, and she‘d had him last year, when she was a junior. He was young, cute, a little gangly, and his hair was perpetually cow licked. “You’re late leaving today too?”

“I just had the weirdest conversation and I couldn’t get away,” Phoebe said. “One of the other girls said that there are witches in class. Real ones, I mean; midnight sabbats and deals with the devil, that kind of thing.”

“Who said that?”

Phoebe almost answered, but at the last second she remembered the spooky look on Ruth’s face when she asked not to tell anyone. “Hmm. I probably shouldn’t say.”

“Ahh. Can‘t let the black cat out of the bag,” said Mr. Dane, and mimed locking his mouth and throwing the key over his shoulder.

It started raining again driving home, so much that Phoebe had to slow down. Some religious channel was the only thing that seemed to be coming in on the radio:

“It is a woeful piece of corruption, in an evil time, when the wicked prosper and the godly party meet with vexations. But adversity teaches us to war a good warfare, to separate the precious and the vile.

“It is the main drift of the Devil to pull all down! But Satan will not prevail, though he be aided by wicked and reprobate women. Christ will defend us from the power of death, and from the inward enemies of our own sins—”

She turned the radio off.

It was late by the time she got home. The wind sounded like it wanted to take the roof off the house, and the chimney leaked. She called out for Mom, but of course she wasn’t home. Mom was working a day job and a night job, and between them she only had one night off in ten. Phoebe was mostly on her own these days.

She changed out of her school uniform, then fed the cat (Belladonna) and started making dinner. Phoebe wasn‘t much of a cook, but she‘d memorized how to make six specific meals, and she rotated them every time Mom wasn‘t home. She made exactly enough for two people, leaving Mom‘s in the fridge every night, where it was almost always still uneaten the next morning.

Once dinner was ready, she lit some candles, put on one of Dad’s old records, and liberated a little bit of wine from Mom’s private stash. She meant to just eat and relax for the rest of the night, and maybe watch some TV with Belladonna curled up on her lap. When she switched the set on, though, she was startled by the blaring voice that came out of the speakers:

“Christ hath placed us in this world, as in a sea, and suffreth many storms and tempests to threaten shipwreck. Whilst in the meantime he himself seems asleep!”

Frowning again, Phoebe tried changing the channel. It didn’t work. There was no picture on the set, just a gray and black blur of what was probably the profile of a man. The audio came through clear, though:

“Like young children overbold with fire, whose desperate parents hold them over the danger so the parental bluff might teach them the risk. Yes, all mankind, the whole apostate race of Adam. Even the very elect are by their nature dead in sin and trespasses.” It seemed as if the wind howled even louder overhead.

After several attempts at changing or muting the channel, Phoebe finally just turned the TV off. It hissed as the image on the screen faded out, leaving Phoebe alone in the house, with nothing but the sound of the rain beating on the tin roof.

Phoebe had some more wine and, judging that the bottle was now looking a little too empty not to arouse suspicion, topped it off with a little tap water. It’s a reverse miracle, she thought: wine into water. She laughed out loud, startling the cat out of her sleep.

She decided to read, but couldn’t concentrate on anything. The weird conversation with Ruth still bothered her. It wasn’t just how spooky the other girl had looked; the talk had reminded Phoebe of something that was lingering at the back of her memory, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

Returning her books to the shelf, she found the notebook she’d been using a month ago, during the colonial unit in history class. She flipped through until she found what she was looking for: Folded and creased photocopy pages from the research for the paper she‘d done. She’d highlighted few bits of the old trial records:

“The Juriors do present that Abagaile Hobbs of Topsfeild in the county of Essex in the year of our Lord 1688 wickedly and feloniously made a covenant with the evil spirit, the Devil, and did make contrary to the peace.”

She flipped through a few similar pages:

“She confesseth further that the Devil came in the Shape of a man. She was at the great witches’ meeting in the pasture, when they administered the Devil’s Sacrament, and did eat of the Red Bread and drink of the Red Wine.”

Phoebe paused in the middle of a drink of her own wine. Of course, it was harmless. She poured out the last bit anyway. “Wickedly and feloniously made covenant with the evil spirit,” she muttered.

So that explained it. Ruth must have noticed that one of the defendants in the old trials had Abbie’s same name. The old Abbie Hobbs had been a teenager too. Of course if Ruth was going to accuse anyone of being a witch it would be Abbie. Why she was accusing anybody in the first place was a mystery, but she always was kind of a weird girl.

Phoebe snuffed the candles one by one before bed and then clucked her tongue so that the cat would follow. For some reason she felt completely wiped out tonight. I’ll probably sleep like the dead, she thought, as she lay down…

She assumed at first it was her morning alarm waking her up. But the room—and the entire house—was still dark, and the sound was all wrong; it was a long, low, mournful noise, like a fog horn. When she sat up, she saw that a candle was burning again on the bedside table, and that Abbie Hobbs stood over her bed.

But she didn’t look quite right, Phoebe realized. She was pale and misty and almost blue, and her clothes and hair seemed to drift a bit. “Like a ghost,” as Ruth had put it. Oh God, thought Phoebe. I lied to Ruth about having nightmares like hers and now it’s coming true. I should have told her I have dreams about screwing Mr. Dane like a cat in heat. I’d much rather be dreaming about that…

Abbie looked precisely as she did every day in class, right down to the school uniform. She smiled, a cold expression. “Hey Phoebe.”

“Hey,” Phoebe muttered, putting a pillow over her face. Abbie pulled it away.

“Been a while. You look…” Abbie paused. “The same. I guess.”

“You look like Jacob Marley.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Abbie said.

“Never mind.” Phoebe sat up and yawned. The candle on the table didn‘t have anything underneath it, but she supposed dream wax couldn’t possibly hurt the wood. Abbie was holding out her hand, and instead of Jacob Marley Phoebe thought of the Ghost of Christmas Past, helping Scrooge fly away. Rather than take the proffered hand, she walked to the window herself. That fog horn noise was still going on. “What the hell is that?”

“They’re calling us,” said Abbie. “We’re going to be late. Come on.”

The field behind Phoebe’s mother’s house was empty except for wild grass and the broken down remains of a fence that had once separated two properties. Abbie bypassed it with ease. Phoebe had a little more trouble clamoring over, following Abbie instinctually, never questioning the dream logic. The ground was thick with mud, but there was no rain now, and the overcast was gone, revealing stars that seemed brighter, as if the rain had cleaned the entire sky.

“What a lovely place,” Abbie said. “You could murder someone here and nobody would ever hear you.”

“Don’t tell the landlord.”

Abbie laughed. Then: “I hear someone has been telling you stories about me,” she said.

“Hmm? Oh, that you’re a witch, yeah.”

“Who was it?”

“Just Ruth,” said Phoebe. “The spooky girl with the locker next to mine? We have Ms. Young’s history class together. You do too, technically, but you’re never there.”

Abbie stopped walking. “Little Ruth?” she said. Then, for three seconds, she burst into laughter. “That silly cunt,” Abbie said when she was finished. “I knew it couldn’t be one of my girls. They all know better. Thank you for telling me.”

“Mm hmm,” Phoebe said. She still felt abominably tired. Being tired in a dream, was that a sign that you were going to wake up exhausted? She heard the sound of the horn for a third time. It seemed to be coming from the woods on the other side of the field. Abbie looked back towards it. It seemed they were going towards that sound, for whatever reason.

“Now,” Abbie said. “What to do with you?” She looked Phoebe up and down, clicking her nails in thought.