Secret Worlds (35 page)

The figures glided down the road, their formation choir-like, their rhythm without sync. Shapes bobbing into the distance until all I could see were the backs of their hoods. As they turned the corner onto the main road, their unintelligible mutterings faded from my mind.

What
was
that?

But the longer I stood staring at the empty street, the more I questioned what I’d really seen. What if my problem wasn’t that I was losing my mind…but that I already had?

***

THE NEXT MORNING I sat at my kitchen table with a blend of white tea flavored with wild cherry bark and blackberries. I nibbled at an English muffin as I picked my way through the classifieds. Nearly every job for teaching history required experience. How was I supposed to get experience if no one would hire me without already having some.

I had to consider the real reason no one wanted to hire me. Death followed me everywhere I went. My dad when I was six, my mom when I was eighteen, and Mr. Petrenko two years before that. Even the cops considered me a suspect for Mr. Petrenko’s murder.

Mrs. Franklin, one of the first to arrive on the scene behind the flashing lights of police cruisers, hadn’t been quiet in her implications. What she—and everyone—wanted to know was why my clothes were saturated with his blood and why I hadn’t called the police.

I didn’t know who called them. I couldn’t tell anyone I watched him die—watched him die, but hadn’t seen who’d killed him. No one would believe that. I just said I found him that way.

No one believed me, but there was no evidence to say otherwise. When my mother died at my touch two years later, the rumors began.

It had started innocently enough. When I was fifteen, Mom and I moved from Keota to Belle Meadow. Shortly after, Mrs. Franklin showed up in our lives, inviting Mom to her ‘church’ with a promise of a cure for her Bipolar Disorder.

Truth was, I’d lost my mother a couple years before the exorcism. I lost her when she stopped taking her Lithium—medicine was the witchcraft of man, Mrs. Franklin said. After that, life took a drastic turn for the worse. Dishes careening through the kitchen. Fists pounding the floor.

The exorcism was supposed to fix it all. But I’d had enough. I’d wanted my mom back—the woman she was before Mrs. Franklin showed up. I stormed into the church/basement and grabbed my mom’s arm, intending to pull her from her seat and drag her home. I wasn’t sure what I would do after that, but I never had the chance to figure it out. Mom died the instant I touched her.

Many nights after that, Mrs. Franklin and her congregation would gather outside my house, clasp each other’s hands, and try to pray the Wicca out of me. They believed it was my pagan faith that brought a plague of death to our town, though she never considered that Mr. Petrenko had died before my beliefs began.

Mand. Br. Shhh. -kened. Shhh
.

I put a hand on my forehead and pushed my breakfast aside. The voices in my head demanded my attention. Before I did anything else, I needed to silence the overlapping whispers rattling through my brain. If they didn’t shut up, I would go certifiably insane.

If I wasn’t already.

***

THERE WAS ONLY ONE PERSON I could go to without turning to the doctors who had failed me before: Great Grandpa Parsons, my great-grandfather on my father’s side. A man I’d never met.

Only one problem: he was dead, leaving me with nothing more than records and mementos. He’d spent years researching the human mind to find answers about his mother, Abigail. The family called her schizophrenic, but Great Grandpa Parsons insisted her affliction was more complicated.

The thought propelled me from the couch to the fraying nylon cord hanging from the attic loft hatch in the hall. Inside, light spilled through the rusted blades of a stilled fan that blocked the porthole window, exposing unfinished beams and cardboard boxes.

Grandpa Parsons’ old chest rested between two dust-covered lamps near the window. I would have rummaged through these things sooner had the curse presented itself as a whispering from the onset. Instead, I’d spent years chalking the noise up to some kind of post-traumatic stress caused by my mother’s death. I’d wanted it gone, yes, but not nearly as badly as I
needed
to get rid of the voices that replaced it.

The voices in my head rushed by, one thought indistinguishable from the next. I tried a few deep breaths.

Please, GO AWAY.

My stomach churned as I struggled to find a quiet place. After several minutes, the overlapping voices finally faded.

I sat and traced my finger over one of the trunk’s tarnished metal buckles. Then, hands trembling, I unfastened the cracked leather straps and lifted the lid. Buried at the bottom of the chest, beneath old sepia pictures and plastic-sheathed Spiderman comics, awaited a promising book:
Voices—Into the Minds of the Disturbed
.

My fingertips scanned the words as I read, releasing the book’s essence into the air. Having studied old texts, I knew this scent—vanilla, anisole, and sweet almond—wafted from the pages because the paper was fabricated from ground wood. I inhaled with a smile. Books often made better company than people.

My smile faded as I pored over the words for nearly an hour, my posture wilting more with each page I turned. None of the afflictions outlined in the text sounded anything like what I was experiencing.

Big surprise.

I probably needed to look into something current. I snapped the book shut and placed the book back into the trunk. But before I closed the lid, I noticed the corner of a handwritten, yellowed slice of paper with quill pen calligraphy sticking out from between the pages of another book. I gently lifted the document and found a photocopy tucked behind the original.

This wasn’t how old documents should be stored. I slipped one of the old comics from a plastic sheath and eased the brittle paper inside. The plastic cover wouldn’t do for the long-term, either; I would find an acid-free folder to store it in later. I set the original document aside and rested back against the chest to read the photocopy.

My heart knocked against my chest. I searched the trunk for the remaining pages. Nothing. I could almost imagine what it must have been like for my ancestor to be an outcast in her own town. The trial, the conviction, the hanging. Then what? She certainly didn’t rest in peace, not if her body went missing.

I’d read legends of entire families cursed over such things, and now I wondered…was that what the whispering voices were? A
hereditary
curse? A new energy coursed through my body. There had to be more information somewhere. If this curse ran in my family, then finding out what
really
happened to Elizabeth’s body might be my only hope of silencing the unintelligible whispers.

I TUGGED on a pair of Eskimo boots, piled my long hair into a messy bun, and tucked the book Paloma had given me into an organic wool tote. I wasn’t sure of the book’s credibility, but it couldn’t hurt to give it a read. I wasn’t sure how much I could trust Internet sources, either. Besides, I couldn’t afford a computer on my salary, and I couldn’t exactly borrow Ivory’s computer or use the computer at work for this kind of research—not unless I wanted to explain what I was looking up and why.

On my way out the door, a kid on a skateboard rushed the sidewalk, scaring the Inca doves from my lawn. The rapid flutter of wings whipped against the air, startling me, but I shook away my nerves and hopped in my Jeep.

Sunlight beat the sides of buildings to cast a shallow shade, but despite the bright sun, the weather was much cooler than I’d expected. Since Paloma’s book was only intended as backup to more legitimate resources, I stopped by the library and checked out the only two books they had on the witch trials.

Miriam Jennings, the librarian, was all-too-eager to help. It was a fellow outcast thing. In high school, she’d been the one Mrs. Franklin’s church shunned. Apparently, they wanted to save lesbians from burning in hell, too. After all, Wiccans weren’t the only ones who needed such godly help.

I didn’t profess to be a theology guru, but I was certain of one thing: if hell existed, no one as sweet as Miriam Jennings would be sent there. While she scanned my books for checkout, I offered her a small smile and asked her how her partner was doing. The entire exchange renewed my sense of hope. I didn’t need to let people like Mrs. Franklin get under my skin.

Outside the library, an elderly woman gave me a sideways glance, her gaze shifting over the top of her aviator-style glasses to my skirt and boots. I shrugged. Today it was my clothes. Tomorrow, they would think my hair was the wrong shade of blonde, or that I was too short and read too much.

Once back on the road, I turned onto Midland Avenue, heading toward the edge of town—toward my favorite forest trail, where I could connect with nature while I read. The road narrowed near City Hall and curved to the left. The area used to be a graveyard, but when they decided to build a street there, they dug up all the coffins and moved them to the new cemetery, which, even if not uncommon, was still weird.

As I passed by City Market, the darkness of memories I’d rather not remember rolled in. The streetlight turned red, and the whispering curse throttled through my mind. For once, I wished the whispers were loud enough to distract me from my thoughts.

To tourists, the market was merely a place to stop in and purchase a few items for their hotel fridge. Belle Meadow, mountain resort town! They didn’t care about the town’s history in coal mining, and they certainly hadn’t heard about the murder, or how Mrs. Petrenko, now a widow, sold the building to City Market. The windows had been replaced with new treatments, the parking lot repaved, and the inside freshly painted and retiled. But the shell of the building remained, a constant reminder.

For months after the murder, I’d visited Mrs. Petrenko twice a week. She taught me to garden, taught me to identify the different herbs and their natural properties. She inspired me to look at what connected nature with humanity, which ultimately led me to my Wiccan faith, though I was certain that hadn’t been her intentions.

Mrs. Anatoly Petrenko was perhaps one of the sweetest women I’d ever met. And her pelmenis, hands-down, made for the best Russian cuisine I’d ever tasted. A few times, she told me I was the daughter she’d never had. She and Mr. Petrenko had come here to start their own business, and their hardships had gotten in the way of starting a family. For all these reasons and more, I eventually stopped visiting.

I didn’t deserve her kindness.

A car honked behind me—the light had finally turned green. I hit the gas and took off toward the hiking trails.

According to local legend, a girl had once been killed in the forest on this side of town. Eaten alive by cannibals. Bite marks all over her body—not quite human, not quite animal. The local teenage rite of passage was to spend a night in these woods, to face the ghost of the girl or the demonic forest-beings who had slaughtered her.

Of course, it was all a fallacy. We just sat beneath the forest canopy drinking cheap liquor. By adulthood, our fears eased. The poor girl had likely been mauled by a mountain lion.

I parked my Jeep and hiked to a small clearing. I sat on the ground and leaned back against one of the aspens. Cracks in the bark carved a road map to the rusted leaves above, and the sun leered through the tree’s skeletal branches.

I took my books from my bag and laid them out in front of me, inhaling their camphoric, oily smell. I cherry-picked relevant notes from the two library books, trying to find record of my ancestor.

When the library books bared no mention, I opened the book from Paloma. The preface spoke of the more than two hundred people accused of witchcraft. At first, only the homeless and the elderly had been damned. All because Reverend Parris’ daughters had a few temper tantrums. Or maybe it’d been the weather causing ergot of rye, which led to alkaloid poisoning. The result? Screaming, seizures, and trance-like states.

Soon after the early accusations, witchcraft became a weapon against those with enviable plots of land, those too old to be unwed, and those who were simply misunderstood. Twenty innocent people were executed. More died awaiting trial.

A footnote on the page read: ‘Only one true witch was executed during these times. She remains unlisted in traditional history.’

One ‘true’ witch? Who had decided that woman was really a witch, and on what basis?

At the same time, my mind began entertaining ideas. Elizabeth Parsons’ execution had taken place shortly before the Salem witch trials, and all I had to go on was the court document I’d found in my attic. Maybe traditional history books didn’t list her because her body had disappeared. What if she’d been the one assumed true witch? Or was I nuts to consider any of this?

I flipped idly through the pages, stopping at one with markings scrawled along the margins: ‘LC 47’ and, beneath that, a partial address:
793 Basker St.

The home of the previous book owner? If so, they might know more about the book.

A voice interrupted my thoughts:
Can’t you do anything right?