Chapter Text
They said that drowning wouldn’t hurt her. Witches don’t drown, they said, so she wouldn’t even feel a thing. It doesn’t matter how much Petra insists that she is no witch. She can scream and shout and cry as much as she wants. They won’t be convinced until they pull her lifeless body from the lake. They do not care that the rope cuts at her skin and blood drips from her wounds. They do not care that they have gagged her so tightly that tears spring from her eyes. They do not care for her at all. In their eyes, she is a witch and there is nothing worse than a witch.
She cannot say when the accusations happened. At first, it was just whisperings. Girls from the next town over claimed to have been possessed by the Devil. Petra hadn’t paid any attention to the rumors then. She figured, like most people at the time, that the girls were just playing a horrible but harmless prank. She didn’t believe the girls’ words had any weight to them, but the whispers came closer. She would hear them early in the morning and they would follow her well into the night. She soon became familiar with everyone’s sins and their stories of the Devil.
There was talk over the town. The stories were always told in hushed whispers, hands cupped over mouths and nervous eyes darting this way and that. They always began the same way: I saw the Devil …
I saw the Devil with Goody Browne.
I saw the Devil with Elias Jones.
I saw the Devil with Amos Fairbrother.
Petra ignored them as best as she could. She figured that the rumors would end the way they began: as just rumors. She had no idea that they would spiral out of control in the way they did. The whisperings turned to talk and talk turned to action. Soon, people were pointing fingers at each other, blaming each other for things as serious as sin or as strange as a dream. Neighbors no longer greeted each other on the street, instead eyeing everyone they passed warily with heavy suspicion. Wives and husbands quarreled openly with one another, each accusing the other of infidelity. Friends turned on each other if one looked at them the wrong way. One could only trust their family and even then you would have to be cautious.
The accusations became more than just words when a girl collapsed on the road after being dragged out of a shop by the shopkeeper’s wife. The shopkeeper’s wife had caught the girl in bed with her husband. The wife had grabbed the girl by the collar and dragged the kicking and screaming girl to the center square to be shamed. The woman had shouted the girl’s crimes for everyone to hear and in response the girl had collapsed.
People had shouted that the girl had died from the shock. Others said it was because the shopkeeper’s wife had handled the girl too roughly and the girl had died from a concussion from being dragged about and beaten over the head. Still, others said the girl had gotten what she deserved. Nothing was ever said of the shopkeeper who had taken the girl to his bed in the first place.
Nobody expected the girl to sit up so suddenly, her face blank and void of any expression. She looked out at nothing and no one. Without warning, she began to twitch erratically, her limbs flailing every which way. People surrounding her began to pin her arms and legs down, shouting that she would hurt herself if she didn’t stop while some others declared that she must be having a seizure and that someone must call for a doctor. Above it all, the girl started screaming. At first, it sounded like gibberish. Nobody could make sense of it until they began to listen closely
‘Twas the shopkeeper’s wife! I saw the Devil with the shopkeeper’s wife. She danced with the damned Devil so that I might sleep with her husband and let her escape her loveless marriage!
Perhaps if the girl had made such a statement before the rumors of their sins and the Devil began, nobody would have paid it any mind. But the Devil was on their mind and the shopkeeper had brought his sin to their door. If they did nothing about it, sin would overtake them all. They had to banish the sinners and the Devil that had come with them.
This is how the first trial began. The townspeople had dragged the shopkeeper, his wife, and the girl to the court. Everyone stuffed themselves into the courthouse. There were so many people to watch that there was hardly any room to breathe. Everyone was there to watch what would happen, to see if the Devil would win or if the sinner would somehow find redemption.
The trial was filled with kicking, screaming, crying. The girl fell down in fits every time she had to speak. When she was being questioned, she would fall into a trance. Sometimes she spoke in her own voice. Other times she would speak in the voice of the Devil, her voice thick and raspy as if it were coming from deep within her. All the while, the shopkeeper’s wife would shriek and cry, claiming that the girl was just putting on an act. If it was an act, it was a damn good one.
The court determined that the shopkeeper’s wife be sentenced to death for dancing with the Devil. It mattered not that her husband had committed adultery. He was a poor sinner who had been the victim of witchcraft, the judge said, but his soul could still be saved. A witch, however, could never be saved because she had already traded her soul to the Devil. There was no saving a witch. A witch must be killed, the judge reasoned, for there is nothing worse than a witch.
The shopkeeper’s wife was hanged the next morning. Nearly everyone who had come to the trial came to watch the wife’s execution. They all waited with bated breath as the shopkeeper’s wife stood on the platform, her hands tied and a noose tied around her neck. Even as she cried and wailed to be let go, nobody lifted a hand to help her. Her husband did bother to shed a single tear as he watched. When the platform beneath the woman’s feet finally fell, everyone watched as the shopkeeper’s wife dangled from the rope, her body writhing like a snake. The strangled cries that escaped her throat were agony. It was only when her body stopped moving that everyone let out a shaky, nervous breath.
The shopkeeper’s wife's hanging was just the beginning.
After the trial, accusations grew wilder with more mentions of the Devil and witchcraft. Men talked of seeing women dance naked around bonfires in the forest. Women talked about seeing men sleep with the Devil in their dreams. Even children talked of the Devil, saying that he whispered to them of sin and evil and things hidden in the shadow.
Petra wanted no part of it. The shopkeeper’s trial was already more than enough for her. She didn’t want to see anything more. She kept her distance from the rest of the townspeople. The only person she talked to was her father, who also kept to himself after the trials began to spin out of control. If Petra needed to go out to town and buy groceries, she did so with her hood pulled up and her head down. She said only what was necessary, grabbed what she needed, and went on her way. It still didn’t stop her from hearing whispers about who was on trial now and who would die tomorrow. No matter how much she tried to block the gossip floating around town, it always found a way to her. Foolishly, Petra convinced herself that if she ignored it, it would never do her any harm. She never thought that someday it would be her name that would be passed through people’s lips.
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The villagers said they saw her with the Devil. They saw her laying with the Devil, her flaming hair splayed out beneath her as the Devil fucked her. They said she enjoyed it, that her head was thrown back as she cried out in ecstasy. It didn’t matter that this happened in their dreams or that Petra hadn’t left her house in days or even that her hair is a warm ginger rather than the fiery red that they claim it is. If they said they had seen her with the Devil, then it must be true.
The trial that took place was a circus. Anything Petra said to defend herself was met with jeers and insults from spectators. Whenever she brought up logic and reason, her accusers would bombard her with ridiculous claims that didn’t even make sense to refute. Because she had slept with the Devil, not a word from her mouth was to be trusted. If people blamed her for their cheating spouses, for theft and vandalism, or for assault and battery, Petra would be found guilty even if she was not present at the scene of the crime. It was her fault, they reason, because she was a witch and influenced them to commit crimes they otherwise never would have committed. Petra wants to claim that she is not a witch, but rather a scapegoat that the sinners could hide behind, but she knows her words will fall on deaf ears.
Her sentence is the same as every other person who had been accused of witchcraft: death. Her father wept when he heard the verdict and begged the court to reconsider. Wouldn’t he know if his own daughter were a witch? How could the townspeople have seen her with the Devil when Petra had been with her father the whole time? The townspeople brushed him off when he clung to their trousers, growling at the man to get off his knees and advising him to forsake his daughter for she had already abandoned her soul.
They took her to the lake and bound her limbs so that she could not run. They said they would drown her and told her that it wouldn’t hurt her. Drowning doesn’t hurt a witch, they said. It doesn’t matter how much Petra insists that she isn’t one. They will refuse to believe that she is anything but a witch until they pull her dead body from the lake.
The townspeople throw her in without warning. The last things Petra hears are the cheers of the townspeople as she sinks into the depths. As she sinks deeper and deeper into the lake, Petra can’t help but wish she had been burned at the stake. It would have been more painful, but at least it would have been faster.
Petra tries to keep her eyes open, but the water stings her eyes. She holds her breath for as long as she can, but she hardly goes a minute before her lungs begin to scream for air. Against her will, her mouth opens but water fills her lungs instead of the air she so desperately needs. It’s cold and heavy, weighing her down, and her lungs threaten to burst. She struggles to loosen the ropes that bind her, but knots hold tight against her ankles and wrists. The more she writhes, the more she grows tired. She screams underwater, but no sound comes out. She can feel her limbs growing heavier and heavier and her body fill with more and more pain. She wants it to stop.
Would it be alright if she stops now? Her limbs feel like lead and her lungs are about to rupture. If she stops for just a moment, what would happen next? It would just be for a minute. It would just be like taking a rest. They say death is just like falling asleep. Petra thinks she understands why people say that as her body grows lifeless and she can feel herself drift towards the bottom of the lake. She opens her eyes for one last glance at the cruel world above her. She sees nothing now but a blinding light in a sea of blue. She should swim towards it, towards the surface, if she wants to live, but she knows that it’s hopeless as she feels her eyes begin to close. She doesn’t think they’ll open again.
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When Petra wakes, she sits up immediately, gasping for air. Her lungs ache, but she finds they’re no longer filled with fluid. She clutches at her chest, the fabric of her dress still dripping wet, and looks blearily at her surroundings.
Petra finds that she has no idea where she is. She’s in a stranger’s house in an unfamiliar bed, that much she is certain of. It makes her think that she had just dreamed everything up: the witch hunt, the trial, the lake, everything. Perhaps she is still dreaming, she thinks, but she touches a hand to her hair and feels that it’s still damp with water. The smell of the lake still clings to her as well. It makes her feel nauseous.
She sits with her head in her hands as she finds her bearings. Each deep breath she takes makes her chest ache, but she finds it’s better to breathe in air than have her lungs fill with water. Every time she breathes out, she has to cough. It’s like something’s stuck in her throat, but she finds nothing each time. As she takes the time to recover, she glances at the walls of the room. It’s dark, she notices, but she still sees light from the window like the sun is just about to set. The rest of the room is bare with only the bed she sits on and the nightstand beside it. She notices that there isn’t even a candle to light the room in the dark.
When Petra has finally caught her breath, she takes the blanket that had been covering her and drapes it around her like a shawl. The material is thin, but she finds it warm when she wraps it around her.
She should find the person who had dragged her out of the lake and taken her here. Petra should thank them. At least, she thinks she should thank them. It’s too difficult to know who is your enemy and who is not.
Standing is difficult, Petra finds. She nearly topples over when she stands up from the bed. Petra discovers that whoever had saved her from the lake had pulled off her socks and shoes, leaving them discarded at the foot of the bed. Her feet are still wet, leaving footprints against the hardwood floor with every step. The first few steps she takes are tentative and she questions herself every time she puts one foot in front of the other. She doesn’t know how she makes it to the door and practically collapses against the doorframe, grateful to have something to lean against.
She finds herself in a winding hallway with no light at the end. It’s impossible for her to tell what awaits her on the other side. With a deep breath, Petra begins to take a step forward and then another one. All the while, she leans against the wall lest she falls. As she walks the hallway, she finds strange things along the wall. Petra passes by mahogany tables with bottles and bottles of herbs she had never seen before, crystals that glitter brightly even without a light to shine on them, and peculiar cards with intricate drawings on them. Every once in a while she will pass by a jar full of fireflies, the only things that help to illuminate the dim hallway.
She passes by rows and rows of doors. The hallway is endless and all the doors are closed. Petra can only guess what hidden things lay in the rooms. Sometimes she hears things from within, strange creakings or howls of the room. A voice whispers quietly in her mind, coaxing her to pick any door and twist the knob so that she might see what is inside. Caution tells her that she should restrain herself lest she runs into any more dangers. She might not be lucky enough to escape a second time.
It seems that she walks for hours before she sees a light flickering at the end of the hall. It’s warm and gentle, the flickering of a flame different from the illumination of fireflies trapped in jars about the house. She walks toward the light, wondering what she’ll find.
There’s a parlor room at the end of the hall with a fire burning in the fireplace. For a moment, Petra mistakenly believes that the room is empty until she sees that there is a man seated in the far corner where the light hardly reaches. In his hand is a book, but by now it is dark and Petra has no idea how he can read any of the print on the pages. He rests his cheek in his other hand as his eyes lazily glaze over the words. Petra is about to ask who he is, but his eyes flicker upward without warning.
“You’re dripping over the floor,” he tells her. His eyes are a dull gray like the sky right before a storm. There’s a prominent frown on his face that makes him look unfriendly.
Petra can only stand there and stare back at him.
The man sighs and closes his book, his finger tucked inside so that he can keep his place. “The floor is getting wet. Sit by the fire. You’ll dry faster,” he tells her. The strange man points towards the fire with his book. Petra can see the cover of the book, but the title of it seems to be written in a language she can’t read.
Petra stands there transfixed as she tries to decipher the words on the book the man holds. When the man clicks his tongue, she flinches and remembers that he had spoken to her. “S-s-sorry,” Petra stammers and winces. Her voice sounds rough, the sound dying out halfway. It hurts to speak and takes so much more effort to talk, she finds.
Petra shuffles over to the couch beside the fire and quickly takes a seat. She feels immensely better, although the warmth does little to soothe the pain in her throat and the burning in her lungs.
The man clicks his tongue again. The sound is soft, but it’s enough to make Petra flinch every time she hears it. She sees him gesturing for her to get off the couch and she stands up immediately.
“Set the blanket down underneath you first. You’ll soak the couch and that’s no good at all,” the man complains. He doesn’t move to help her. He just continues to sit there with an irritated expression on his face as he watches her fumble with the blanket.
Petra sits there shivering, this time from the cold of the man’s gaze. She tries her best not to look at the man, choosing to keep her eyes cast downward so as to not make eye contact. Still, she finds herself sneaking glances at the man. His appearance is peculiar to her, although she cannot say why exactly.
From what Petra can observe, the man before her looks like any other man, but there are certain things about him that seem strange. His hair is the darkest black she has ever laid eyes upon, like the sky on a starless night. Somehow, his long lashes are darker still and make his gray eyes look even more striking. His skin is so pale that he looks like he could be a ghost, but Petra knows that he can’t be one. A ghost can’t save someone from the river. Ghosts can’t light a fire. Ghosts don’t act so casually the way this being before her does. He must be something in between those then, Petra thinks, something in between a man and a ghost.
The man is sitting back in his chair and has resumed his reading. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t pay attention to Petra as she shifts uncomfortably on the couch. Perhaps he doesn’t care. He must have gotten bored of his book after a while because he lifts his head and turns his gaze to Petra. “Do you know how to speak?” he asks her with an eyebrow raised.
Numbly, Petra nods her head.
“That answer isn’t very convincing,” he tells her. He sighs and sets his book down on the side table next to him. He sits with his back against the chair, one leg extended out underneath him. The man taps his finger against the arm of his chair like he’s impatient for an answer to a question he hasn’t yet asked. “Name?”
“P-Petra,” she croaks. She coughs violently, covering her mouth with her arm. By the time she’s stopped, she feels lightheaded and breathless.
Perhaps she’s imagined it, but the man’s eyes seem to soften just the tiniest bit. “You may call me Levi,” he tells her. The man named Levi rises from his seat and walks towards another dark room that Petra hadn’t noticed before. “Would you like some tea?” he asks her with his back turned. He doesn’t wait for her to answer and disappears beyond the door frame.
Maybe it’s because she’s exhausted or maybe she’s sick from swallowing all the lake water, but she can’t see past the door that Levi had just walked through no matter how hard she concentrates. There doesn’t seem to be anything on the other side. For a moment, she’s convinced that the mysterious man has just vanished, but she blinks and there he is at the doorframe with a cup of tea in his hands.
The man walks towards Petra but stops right at the chair where he had earlier been seated. He stands there with a frown. “This is yours,” he says rather awkwardly before setting it down on the table beside his book. For once, he looks uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot as if he isn’t quite sure what to do. “Please … come drink it.”
It’s odd for him to offer to serve her only to have her retrieve the cup herself. Still, she does what she is told and rises from the couch. Petra wraps the blanket before her once more. Her clothes are still damp, but she’s much dryer than she had been before. Tentatively, she takes a step towards the man and then another. He stands very still with only his eyes moving as his gaze follows her movements. Finally, she is within a foot of the man, but he remains as unmoving as ever. Petra reaches for the cup and holds it carefully in both hands.
When she looks down, she sees the ocean trapped in the cup. The cup is smaller than her hands, but the liquid inside is deep and dark. It’s bottomless. The more she stares, the more it seems like she can see a little ocean trapped inside, waves of endless dark blue crashing against the sides of the cup. It terrifies her.
Petra nearly drops the cup, but a gentle hand appears beneath the cup to prevent it from shattering on the floor. When she looks up, she sees the man staring at her.
“Drink it,” he tells her. The man raises the cup slightly. “It will help.”
Petra doesn’t know how much she should trust this man. She realizes that she knows nothing about him at all except for the fact that he must have been the one to drag her out of the water. Perhaps that should be enough.
Eyes closed, Petra raises the cup to her lips and swallows the contents in one gulp. The liquid is cold and tastes of salt and the ocean as it goes down her throat. The taste is so abominable that she wants to spit it out, but she can’t. She feels it slip down her neck and into her stomach and the thought of such a strange concoction settling inside her makes her want to vomit. Panicked, she begins to pound at her chest and cough. She expects it to hurt, to fill her lungs with poison, to sting her throat with needles, but she realizes that her chest no longer aches and her throat no longer rasps. When she swallows, she doesn’t feel pain.
Petra blinks at the man in front of her, completely shaken.
“I apologize. It had gone cold while you were sleeping,” the man says as he takes the cup from her.
“What did you give me?” she asks. Her voice has returned to normal. She no longer sounds like someone who had lost their voice.
“A witch’s remedy for drowning,” he replies and then pauses to observe her closely. The man seems unable to decipher the expression on her face because he asks curiously, “Does that frighten you? That I’m a witch? I’m sure you have figured it out by now.”
So he is a witch, Petra thinks. He is a witch that the villagers had whispered about. He is a witch that has danced with the Devil, has sold his soul in exchange for dark powers, has whispered evils into people’s ears and caused them to sin. Except Petra doesn’t know that for certain. The words that come out of people’s mouths are not always true. There are other things that she is certain of though. She knows that he’s the man who had rescued her from the lake. She knows that he had allowed her to stay in his home. She knows that he had saved her.
In contrast, the people of her village had accused her of treachery and evil. They had ignored her pleas and cries. They had thrown her in the lake and had left her to die, chanting “Witch! Witch! Witch!” as she sunk to the bottom.
There’s a lump in her throat that she swallows down. “No,” Petra finally answers with a shake of her head. Though she trembles, she finds her words to be true. “It doesn’t frighten me at all, what you are. I’ve found that there are worse things than witches.”
The man blinks slowly like an owl, his head tilted ever so slightly. “You’re quite right,” he murmurs and his eyes flicker to the fire that still burns in the fireplace. Petra can see the flames reflected in his eyes and sees him flinch as the fire crackles. The man turns his head from the fire and it casts strange shadows across his cheek. “There are far worse beings than witches in this world.”
Petra watches as the shadows cast patterns and figures against his cheek. They twist and twirl, forming different scenes and stories that she can’t understand. If she stares at them for long enough, perhaps she can understand them.
Levi turns his head to face her once more and breaks her trance. Before he had looked cold and unfriendly. Up close, he looks tired. He has dark bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t slept. His pale skin is stretched across sunken cheeks. The man lifts a thin finger back towards the fire, but Petra notices he doesn’t dare turn his head towards it.
“Stay by the fire until you’ve dried. Sleep there if you must,” he tells her. “Once you’ve completely dried and have no need for it anymore … put out the fire. Please.” The way he speaks his last words … it’s as if he’s pleading with her.
Petra knows not why the man who is a witch cannot put out his own fire. If he truly is a witch, why should a fire frighten him so? A fire seems so trivial in comparison to the powers of a witch, but perhaps the abilities of witches have been exaggerated. As much as she wants to ask the witch about his aversion to fire, she keeps her mouth clamped shut. It isn’t her business and putting out a fire is the least she can do for the man who saved her.
“I will,” she promises, and the witch’s shoulders relax.
Levi gives a nod of his head and bids her goodnight before turning to the hallway that Petra had passed through earlier. He’s nearing the shadows of the endless hall when Petra utters the words she had nearly forgotten to say.
“Thank you!” she blurts, and the man turns around in surprise. For some reason, she finds she can’t look him in the face. Her cheeks flush and she looks at her bare feet on the hardwood floor while she fiddles with the blanket pulled around her. “Thank you … for saving me.”
Her thanks are met with silence and for a moment Petra thinks the man has disappeared down the hall without hearing her, but she looks up to see the man looking steadily at her. Their eyes meet and the two stay there in silence for what seems an eternity before the man gives Petra the briefest nod and disappears down the hall.
Petra settles down on the couch once more, sinking into the cushions and wrapping the blanket tightly over herself. Resting her head against the pillow, she closes her eyes and lets the crackling of the fire lull her to sleep.
That night she dreams a strange dream where she’s submerged in the water and yet somehow able to breathe without her lungs filling with water and threatening to burst. As she walks along the bottom of the lake she is trapped in, she walks past furniture that had sunk below with her. The tables and dressers and couches and chairs look eerily reminiscent of the furniture in the witch’s house. The little talismans and trinkets she had observed are present too, the sparkling crystals and charms buried in the lakebed that she walks upon. At some point, she hears someone screaming. It’s a voice that she’s heard before, but she can’t quite place it.
Petra runs towards the voice. The closer she gets, the more it sounds like a person crying for help. In the distance, she sees flames and a silhouette inside. The sight makes her run faster and it’s only when she arrives that she realizes that she’s no longer submerged in water.
Now up close, she sees the figure in the fire. It’s Levi, unbound but shackled by terror, calling for someone to save him. His eyes don’t seem to recognize her but, desperate for help from anyone at all, he reaches for her with a hand. Petra lifts a hand to help him, but when their fingers touch, she wakes.