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Stevie moved her hands when she talked and her bracelets jingled in time with her words. She claimed it was “the Italian in her”. Vee wasn’t totally clear what sort of parasite Italian was; her initiation into human ways had been too rapid for in-depth learning or a broad knowledge base. All she knew was that she could watch Stevie’s hands for hours.
MomCamila expected her at five. She only had another hour to stare.
“We’ll have to make the auditions open to everyone,” Stevie was saying, “since it’s through the school. But I doubt we’ll get many applicants, everyone in Gravesfield gets sick of witches by fifth grade,” her uneven smile revealed the gap in her teeth. “Luz, I think you’re a shoe-in for the main role.”
Vee jolted uncomfortably. “I am?”
“Yeah!” Zenith was the enthusiasm to Stevie’s calm, their brightness contrasting perfectly with Stevie’s dark colors and wry demeanor. “You killed it as Goodwife Elderkin back in elementary school; they still haven’t staged a repeat performance.”
Knowing what Vee did about Luz Noceda that could have been literal or figurative. She’d grown less resentful of the girl whose life she had stolen since realizing how brave she was (braver than Vee could ever be) but really, seventeen snakes for show and tell? You could make your point with just one!
“Good,” Stevie said with her whole chest. “That play was written in the fifties and it’s the cheesiest, most misogynistic thing since the actual witch trials. We’re going to put on a much better version of the story.”
Flat on his back in the dirt, Dan gave a vague, “Tell ‘em, girlie.”
“Yeah,” Vee agreed, nodding excessively. Anything to cover for the fact that she hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on.
Stevie had grabbed them at lunch and, grinning ear to ear, declared that Ms. Moore the drama teacher had agreed to let her stage her play about the town witch trials. She’d called an emergency friend meeting after school, to discuss planning. Dan, Zenith, even Claire and Rose the huffy cheerleaders were attending, though they hadn’t looked up from their phones yet.
Witches in Gravesfield weren’t real witches. Vee learned that early on, after a brief panic attack and a stressed round of internet searches (thank you Bing!) In the human world, “witch” was a word that humans used to attack humans that they didn’t like, the same way that witches on the Boiling Isles called each other “half-a-witch” or “shifter spawn”. Centuries ago, the humans in this town had gotten so paranoid and upset with each other that they’d killed a bunch of their neighbors, believing they were witches with evil powers. In reality, they were mostly old ladies.
(Sometimes when the wardens wanted to torment their prisoners they’d tell stories of the hunts that had driven the basilisks to extinction. Of basilisks in hiding being dragged from their homes and petrified in the town square for crimes against magic. You aren’t safe outside, they’d say. They’d tear you limb from limb.)
There were a few statues in the town dedicated to key figures in the trials; an old stone one of two young men and new bronze one of the youngest victim, a 19 year old girl, her face turned toward the sky. Vee passed them regularly, on the way home from school or running errands. Their ears were round—they were just humans who’d been unlucky.
But there was so much to learn in the early days—what a backpack was, how to speak Spanish. Her wiki-dive into the witch trials quickly became a spelunking expedition into the bowels of American history, so though she learned a lot about the charter of the original Connecticut Colony (as well as what a colony was!) she knew only the broadest strokes of the town’s dark past.
“You’ll play Trinity Hopkins, of course,” Stevie continued, as of Vee had any idea who that was, “and here’s the coolest thing about my script—the Whittle brothers don’t appear at all. It focuses on the aftermath of their supposed “disappearance”, without centering them. Rose, I know you played Juliet and can do a death scene so maybe you can audition for Remember?”
Rose, who was laying across her girlfriend’s lap, glanced up. “I have always wanted to be hung,” she said thoughtfully. “Not in a weird way, of course.”
“Just as planned,” Stevie rubbed her hands together. Again, her silver bracelets clicked, drawing Vee’s eyes. “It’s all coming together.”
“Stevie,” Vee tugged at her sleeve. “Can you at least give us the play’s plot first? I want to know what your version is, before we get too deep in planning.” Rule one of being human, never admit ignorance, bluff whenever possible.
As she’d hoped, Stevie looked delighted. Her dark eyes gleamed like pools of blood in the night—a metaphor that Vee thought she’d like. “Right, so it starts with Trinity coming home and having her breakdown, talking about seeing the brothers stolen by a witch and dragged down into hell. I cribbed a lot of quotes from Preacher Hopkins and Dagget’s accounts of the exorcism, here,” she shuffled around in her black backpack, pulling out a thick sheaf of paper with a triumphant cry.
Putting on a tortured accent, she read, “The man had ears sharp like the devil’s horns, and a tail was hidden under his great coat. Fearing god, and most of all fearing evil’s influence, I fell back. Yet I watched as Brother Whittle approached him. They conversed awhile from a distance and I feared all my neighbors were in the devil’s hands. More words were exchanged and the stranger produced a hellish tyrian flame, and Brother Whittle crept closer. Then he fell upon the stranger, grasping him about the waist and beating him goodly, and his brother came out of the bushes to help him. When the two of them had thrown the stranger to the ground there was a groaning from the earth and a nictous liquid swelled from the ground, the blood of the land itself. Much afeared, I closed my eyes and when I opened them I could not see any of them, not the brothers or the devil they had grappled with.” She finished with a flourish, dancing her fingers across her eyes, a magician hyping up a disappearing act centuries old.
“Whoo!” Dan clapped, though he stayed flat on his back, hair splayed in the dirt.
“Oh,” Vee thought she understood now. “They probably fell into a pool of Titan’s blood.” She’d listened to the people who experimented on her. When you were trapped listening was all you could do. When he personally supervised Emperor Belos tended to talk to himself, chattering away amiably like you weren’t even there. You could pick up a lot by staying still, suppressing your screams, and pretending to be the dumb animal he clearly saw them as.
“Luz,” Zenith said, “I love your energy, bestie. But it’s pretty obvious that it was a coverup. I still think their uncle murdered them. He and his wife didn’t get charged with witchcraft afterwards for nothing.”
Personally, Vee stood by Titan’s blood. But on reflection she was pretty sure that didn’t exist here (they didn’t even have a Titan), so she kept her mouth shut. Instead, she practiced her listening, that long honed skill. Humans were at least better company than Belos.
Claire raised her hand and popped her gum. “Well I think that they ran away. Remember in seventh grade Honors social studies, Zen? Mr. MacByrne was talking about the census records, how Whittle and White and Whit are inconsistent because they were probably a translation of a Dutch name. And their family owned, like, no property, and the historians think one of ‘em had been in trouble for skipping sermons, since their uncle got fined for it twice. I bet they ran to New York and lived their best lives and Trinity Hopkins got pressured into her confessions so her dad could crack down on witches her thought were in the community.”
Even Warden Wrath at his most vindictive didn’t look as triumphant as Stevie in that moment. “See! These are the questions I want the audience asking. When you focus on the testimony and the witch hunt that followed instead of the brothers, who might not have even existed by the way, you open it up for more historical vagueness. It’s not the story of good and evil we were sold as kids, with the well-dressed little boys wandering into a coven of dancing wicked witches. It’s about what happened after.”
Dan covered his eyes with the back of his hand. “Stee, I love you but please do not put your conspiracy theory imaginary Whittle brothers in your play. I don’t want you picking another fight with the APUSH teacher.”
Claire played her girlfriend’s curls, scratching the top of her head like Camila petted the feral old cat who lived in the woods. “Yeah, they def existed, Stevie. Kisses and all that, but I don’t think you could kick off a witch hunt that killed nine people over two made up boys, not in a town as small as Gravesfield was back then.”
Nine people. That was a lot by the standards of the Boiling Isles, where petrifactions were so rare they were a grand event (at least these days). It was perhaps not so many for humans, who covered this planet like flies. There were several billion of them, a number that Vee, raised on Isles with a population of barely two million (and that was counting every thinking creature however strange), could barely conceptualize. They killed each other in masses even witches couldn’t manage. The Earth 400 years ago was somewhere closer to the Isles, she thinks, smaller, crueler, more personal.
The jingle of silver brought her out of her trance. “Don’t worry,” Stevie said, “They’re not imaginary, at least not explicitly imaginary,” she ducked as Dan threw a pinecone. “It’s open to multiple readings, okay? It’s very post-Crucible modernist unreliable narrator.” Vee understood all of those words but not in that order.
“Are you going to do all the witch-trial victims or just Remember?” Rose asked. “Because if it’s a big role we’ll need to schedule rehearsal after 5 so I don’t miss too much practice.”
“I kept it limited to Remember,” Stevie replied, “All the others, Matthias and Anneke Whittle, Ruth Sage, Abigail and Berenice Webster—they get mentioned. But I thought it was better to focus on her, since her story is the most compelling.”
When Rose nodded it was… sad. “Yeah. Yeah. When I think about her— poor girl. She was just a few years older than us. They killed her for nothing.”
Rose was the cheerful sort, peppy, always on top of her schoolwork, a bit of a germaphobe. She asked other people to throw away her lunch because she got grossed out by the school trash cans and when Fisher had his Heelies accident and there was blood everywhere she’d almost fainted. Vee had never heard her with such vehemence in her voice before.
Camila texted her, In the parking lot! Thought we could go shopping then swing by the library on the way home and pick up a movie. XO
Vee typed back, can you go to the store without me? my friends are still talking and it’s important
She received a severed hand making a thumbs up sign. This was, in human lingo, good.
“They had reasons,” Dan mused, “Just not good ones.”
“Yeah,” Stevie too seemed caught up by the mourning mood. She shuffled her script, straightening the loosely bound pages till they lined up perfectly. “I thought we could lean into her being Pequot, that’s another reason I asked you, Rose. Not to typecast you or anything.”
Rose was sitting up now, all her attention on the matter at hand—though Claire was still holding her hand. “No. I get it, I would have been more offended if you didn’t ask me, only Native girl in the school. It’s all about her and Trinity then?”
“Yeah, the parallels of the two girls caught up in the witch trials, how much Trinity’s story changed from her first testimony to the one where she started naming names, Hopkins and Daggett’s influence creating a narrative. And, I mean, Remember was close enough to the Whittle brothers for it to have been mentioned in her trial. She has to have least known Trinity, even if they weren’t friends because she was—“
“A slave,” Rose cut in, still with that layer of previously unknown ice to her tone. “No. I think it’s a good story. An important story.” Claire was rubbing small circles into the back of her hand and with every revolution her anger seemed to focus till it was sharp as a knife. “I want to help you tell it.”
“What about you, Luz?”
Now all eyes were on her. Claire, Titan bless her, diffused the tension. “Please no cockroaches or matches again? I don’t think the town has recovered from your Goodwife Elderkin In The Flames of Her Home.”
“Yeah,” Zenith said dreamily “I was at the elementary school volunteering the other day and they still haven’t gotten all the scorch marks off the stage.”
Vee thought. And then she thought a little more, until her friends were all watching her in anticipation. (Luz Noceda was a very contemplative person after camp.) The concept she kept returning to, rotating it in her mind, was that sometimes monsters were people too.
The Coven guards who’d imprisoned her joked about what they planned to do on their off shifts. Once, a few years back, when Warden Wrath had lost babysitting coverage for a day he’d brought his infant son into the cells. He’d sung him lullabies, let him toddle between cages, and told the basilisks not to breath a word or he’d cut their rations for the next year. Then Vee had realized that her nightmares lived and breathed. They bled, they dreamed, and cast themselves as the heroes of their stories.
A very long time ago a human girl had told a story that got nine other humans killed. Maybe it was true, at first. Those Whittle boys sounded like they’d fallen into the Demon Realm. But no human could have been responsible for that journey, and still, so many had died. Vee didn’t have the context to know if this Trinity was a frightened pawn trying to survive or reckless monster, charging forward in their own life while knocking others down. She’d learn, and when there was nothing to learn she’d guess. She was very good at becoming other people, after all.
“I’ll do it, if you’ll have me,” she murmured.
“Nice,” Stevie flashed a secret grin, revealing again her uneven teeth, her pink tongue. “We’ve got this, team. Let’s haunt the hell out of those dead boys’ textual ghosts.”
“My mom says she can help with costumes,” Clair chimed.
“The art club’s gonna love this!” Zenith agreed, typing furiously on their phone. “Especially if you let Kaylee loose on sets.”
“I guess I’ll do light and sound,” Dan said like a man being dragged into a pit of everlasting torment.
Like magic, they wove together a plan.
Meet me at the library when you’re done (smiley face), Camila had said. Vee knew the woman whose daughter she’d replaced was too kind for rejection, but she still feared it. So though she wished someone would pick her up and bundle her out of the autumn chill, she braved it for a little longer.
The path to the library brought her past one of the two statues. The bronze girl—Remember—lived by the old graveyard, a memorial to all the unburied. You had to look for her. But the two boys petrified in stone stood on the edge of the broad town green, watching with their everything with empty eyes.
Vee leaned down, reading the weathered plaque at the bottom of their statue.
Erected in 1905, in memory of the brothers Gravesfield lost.
“You had to come visit them too, huh?”
It was just Stevie standing next to her, a specter in black. Vee still nearly jumped out of her skin—and for a basilisk among humans a sudden molt would be dangerous.
Smoothing back her hair and hoping she hadn’t shown any scales, Vee asked the question that had been bothering her. “What did you mean when you said they might not have existed?”
Stevie laughed. It was always a beautiful sound, raspy and crackly like a fire. “Just a little theory I used to use to bug my teachers and crazy Hopkins at the historical society. Did you know that their names don’t appear in the historical record?”
Vee knew very little about this town. She shook her head.
“Yeah,” Stevie waved her hands as if she could put one of her spells (not real spells! another helpful discovery) on the dead. Her bracelets sung. “They’re always the Brothers Whittle or the lost brothers. In some places it looks like their names were even scratched out. Half of the documents got water damaged in the 1870s which doesn’t help. And this statue—its supposed to be based on a picture of them from 1682, made by an artist who actually knew them, but the picture got bought by a private collector years ago. They’re… they’re ghosts. And I’m sick of them lingering, or maybe I’m sick of them being the only ones allowed to speak.”
They certainly looked like real people. There was something about their faces that felt true-to-life, like they were based off more than stories. “I think they were real,” Vee said, and then, in a runaway spurt of love-addled verity, added, “And I think they went to another realm.”
“Hell yeah, babe. Strict historical literalism is very in right now.” Beneath Stevie’s teasing there was an earnest light in her eyes, she cared what Vee had to say. She gave it weight, just as she had given weight to Vee’s questions that first day at camp, when Vee hadn’t even known how a toothbrush worked.
“I hope they were happy there,” Vee continued. It was easy to talk to Stevie. Because she still had some sense of self preservation, she didn’t say It can be hard to be alone in a strange world.
Stevie hummed and threw her arm over Vee’s shoulder, her bracelets rested heavy against the bare skin of Vee's arm. “You know what, girl? I hope they were happy too.”