Excerpt
The Bewitching
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; it was the preamble that led into a realm of shadows and mysteries.
Shortly after Minerva first arrived at Stoneridge, she’d looked toward the thick mass of trees that constituted Briar’s Commons and heard a shrill cry that sounded like an infant’s wail. For a moment she’d shivered in fear, thinking of her great-grandmother’s tales of witches who drank the blood of the innocent on moonless nights. But it had been only a peacock.
She was used to the birds now, the gray peahens and the beautiful males with their dazzling displays of iridescent feathers. They’d sun themselves on the lawn in front of Ledge House and sometimes they’d even sit on the porch of the old mansion. The story went that when the college acquired the building and turned it into a dorm, the peacocks had been part of the deal. A superstitious old dean reckoned they were lucky. Thus it had become tradition to keep a few of them by the dean’s house, though the birds liked to drift toward other buildings and roamed the campus with impunity.
Now as she stood near the window, she heard the same cry.
She couldn’t see where the peacock was stationed. It was likely somewhere by the entrance, watching the last of the students make their exodus from Ledge House.
Her friends had told her she’d never get used to the cold and the snow of New England, hailing as she did from the temperate climate of Mexico City, but she’d handled the winter without misfortunes. It was the summer that made her anxious.
The campus was closing for the season. Within twenty-four hours all the dorms and facilities would stand silent and still, with a few resident directors like herself left to oversee the buildings. The library would be open, albeit with reduced hours, serving the students—mostly grad students—who would not fly or drive home for the summer.
The campus by the sea, with its greenery and its beautiful Victorian houses, with the sun shining and the ducks swimming placidly in the lovely ponds, ought to have inspired joy and relaxation. But everything irritated her. The quiet of the summer was the perfect chance to work on her thesis, if she’d had anything to write about.
Her progress had stalled. She’d done little in the winter and even less in the spring. Her adviser would expect a certain number of pages come fall. Minerva doubted she’d be able to produce much; her outline was a jumble of nonsense.
She couldn’t afford to be anything except excellent. Her tuition at Stoneridge College was covered courtesy of a scholarship for academic high achievers. Her room and board were paid through her work in the language lab, helping Mr. Marshall with the flock of bored undergrads who needed a second-language course to graduate, and supplemented with her job as a resident director.
She’d always been able to juggle dozens of responsibilities without a hitch. Back in Mexico City, when she was in secondary school, she helped take care of Nana Alba. She’d come home, peel off her school uniform and change into comfy clothes, make dinner, give the old lady her medications, then complete her homework while keeping an eye on her. Great-Grandmother Alba died at the ripe old age of a hundred and one, and everyone said a nurse couldn’t have done a better job taking care of her.
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.
They’d said she’d be shocked by the cold of a Massachusetts winter, but the truth was Minerva knew all about New England. She’d lived in it, through the stories of a multitude of writers. 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.
Minerva had studied and saved, researched her options and budgeted, spent countless days paging through the college guides and data sheets at the Benjamin Franklin Library—which contained information on American scholarships available to international students—until she’d found a way to make her grad school fantasies a reality.
Now she was slipping up.
The peacock cried again, as if urging her out. She grabbed her clipboard and headed to the front of the house. She waved at one of the undergrads, who was loading her car, and set off toward Briar Hall, cutting through 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.
Salem was a few train stops away from the college, but there didn’t seem to be a real basis for the story about the witch. 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.
Devil or not, Briar’s Commons had served as the inspiration for
The Vanishing, so it had some artistic merit. She’d felt giddy the first time she looked out the window and saw it, recognizing it from Tremblay’s novel.
A single narrow dirt path cut through Briar’s Commons and connected the eastern dorms with the rest of the campus, or one could take a wider, better-kept road that snaked around the patch of trees and had actual lighting at night. Stoneridge College at one point had tinkered with the idea of leveling the whole area and making a parking lot or a new dorm or something or other. But it caused a panic among local nature enthusiasts and the more ecologically minded students. Instead, the college had expanded west and north. South lay the sea and a couple of stretches of sand that passed for beaches.
Minerva walked briskly along the oak-dimmed path, clipboard in one hand. She thought about Nana Alba’s tales of witches and the particular tale that had haunted Minerva since childhood. The peacock’s cry, the silence of the path, further increased her melancholy. She missed her great-grandmother, had never stopped missing her even though Minerva’s mother said she would. Just like she’d said Minerva would grow out of her teenage blues.
She’d written to her mother that day. She tried to limit phone calls back home with the excuse that long distance was expensive, but in reality it was easier to pretend she was fine and happy when she was typing on the computer or mailing letters. She’d mailed a bunch of photos from around campus to her mother the previous week. That, plus the short email that discussed nothing of importance, should keep her happy. Minerva had no desire to discuss her problems with her mother, who believed herself a psychoanalyst after reading too many self-help books.
Minerva emerged in front of Joyce House, which had the honor of being the oldest structure on campus, built in 1750. It was shuttered, with renovations to begin next year. It dearly needed this renovation; the once picturesque structure was now dull and battered, but she found it entrancing. Often, when doing her rounds, she looked at its upstairs windows and felt an almost electric tug. It was the lure of history; she adored older buildings and was repelled by the new.
They said the building was haunted, but then people said the same of all the old dorms. It did not frighten her. A few months before, close to Halloween, she’d noticed a glow coming from one of the upstairs windows and had ventured inside in the company of a campus security officer. Someone had broken into the dorm and attempted a séance, but they’d run off, probably spotting Minerva when she was waiting for an officer to arrive and escort her inside. They’d left behind a Ouija board and a few candles. It was a fire hazard, and as a result security had boarded up the downstairs windows, since it was terribly easy to lift one open from outside. Minerva had never discovered the identity of the culprits.
The wooden boards on the ground floor marred the looks of the building even more than its age, giving it an air of terrible neglect.
A ways away from Joyce House there was a smaller dorm, this one built in the 1950s when the college was still an all-girls’ institution. That was Briar Hall, with its front door painted green and a cheerful garden gnome standing guard next to a clump of daisies.
