An Introduction 21 страница

Aunt Nancy smiled and thanked him very prettily and he laughed again, because she was so old and foolish that she didn’t even know an impossible task when she heard one.

She hobbled back to her cabin in the woods. She sat on the porch and looked at the stars and sang a little song:

Cottontail and sly-fox

Terrapin and titmouse,

Come one, come all,

To your Aunt Nancy’s house.

And all the animals of the farm and forest began to creep forward as she sang, because Aunt Nancy knew plenty of words and ways already.

The next day Aunt Nancy returned to the big house with the smile of a coyote, the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake, and the cry of a spider. But the man spurned her payment, claiming it was a trick or a ploy, that she was a witch and he would see her burned at the stake before he taught her a single letter. He ordered her to leave, and Aunt Nancy left.

But every evening after that, when the man read books to his children before bed, there was a spider watching him from the window, black as night and cinder-eyed. And, in time, Aunt Nancy taught her great-granddaughter her letters.

Hide away, hide away, hide away with me,

Hide away, hide away home.

A song to avert an unwanted eye, requiring sympathy & the Southern Crown

Beatrice Belladonna wakes just before dawn with her head pillowed on the soft meat of Cleo’s shoulder. Cleo is still sleeping, her heart thudding slow and even in Bella’s ear.

Bella pulls herself to one elbow and studies her, not counting the seconds: the clever arch of her brow, the polished shine of her skin, the hollow place where her collarbones meet. Bella thinks of all their long afternoons together at Avalon, annotating and translating, adrift in a private sea of words and ways.

Ashes, now, all of it. Men are probably wading through the wreckage at this very moment, smearing the remains beneath their boots. Laughing at the lost hope of witches.

The thought is a knife in her stomach.

She finds herself standing, slipping back into her stinking dress from the night before. She looks back once at the sleeping sprawl of Cleo’s body, an offering at an undeserving altar, before tip-toeing down the narrow stairs.

Her sisters are still sleeping, nested close together. The binding between them seems to hum as Bella passes, and for a dizzy second she feels two hearts beating beside hers, two chests rising and falling, as if they are no longer entirely separate from one another. It ought to worry her, but there’s a rightness to it, like three strands braiding together.

Bella catches the pale ghost of her own reflection in a hall mirror. Her face is subtly different, as if Cleo worked some arcane spell in the night: her hair is loose and long, her cheeks warm, her lips bitten pink. If this is the consequence of her sinfulness, perhaps she ought to sin more often.

Bella leaves her reflection behind and steps into the spice shop proper. She rattles briefly behind the counter, emerging with a pair of dull silver shears, and is inching toward the door when a voice stops her.

“Leaving already, Miss Belladonna? ”

She wheels to find Quinn’s mother perched on a stool with a steaming mug curled in one hand and a black silk wrap around her head. She clucks her tongue. “Without so much as a thank-you. ”

Bella tucks the shears behind her back, a guilty schoolgirl. “Thank you, Miss…”

“Miss Araminta Andromeda Wells. And just where were you going? ”

“I—nowhere. ”

Miss Wells considers her for a second or possibly a century. She sighs. “Come here, girl. ” It does not occur to Bella to disobey. “I’d send you through the tunnels, but the doors only open for Daughters, and you don’t have the mark. ” She taps Bella’s wrist, right where Cleo bears her scarred pattern of stars. “This’ll have to do. ”

Bella stands very still as Miss Wells hums a tune beneath her breath. She removes an ink-pen from her dressing gown pocket and draws a shape on the soft white of Bella’s palm: a spiral of lines and diamonds, a starry crown. Bella thinks it’s the same shape Cleo drew on the brick wall on St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue when they ran from the rioters. She closes her hand tight around the marks, warm with witching.

“Thank you, Miss Wells. ”

“Cleo’s a good girl, ” Araminta answers, somewhat obscurely. She amends, “Well, no, she isn’t. She’s always been curious as a cat and twice as sly. But she’s mine, and she deserves…” She trails away, pursing and unpursing her lips, before finishing, “Make sure you come back. ”

Bella gives her a grave bow, hand over her heart.

The streets of New Cairo are still, the houses shut tight against the madness of men with lit torches. The stale, dead smell of smoke hangs thick in the air.

It grows stronger as Bella draws closer to the city’s heart, muffling sound, obscuring the first gray streaks of dawn. There are people in the streets now—paper-boys and maids, workingmen heading west, street-cleaners and lamp-lighters—but they move with hunched shoulders and red eyes, as if the whole city is recovering from a night of drunken rage. Their eyes slide over Bella as if she is made of glass; none of them see the black-winged bird that keeps pace with her, high above.

A block south of the square she starts noticing white dust gathering in the cracks between cobblestones, clotting the gutters. There is a dizzy second when she mistakes it for snow before she recognizes it for what it is: ash.

At the final corner Bella ducks into the doorway of a closed shop. A gray drift of ash is gathered on the threshold, with a single rose petal lying atop it. The petal survived the fire with its edges only lightly charred, the center still soft pink. Bella bends and slips it into her skirt pocket.

She keeps her hand pressed over it as she peers around the edge of the shop and into the square.

The tower stands tall and terrible, strangely naked without its cloak of roses and ivy. The windows are desolate holes, revealing the hollow heart of the place that was once a library, a haven, a home. The woods around it are a smoking graveyard, the burnt stumps of trees leaning like headstones.

It seems to Bella she hears women weeping, softly and steadily, but the only people present are the men who pluck at the still-smoking ruins with shovels and rakes, sifting tentatively through the ash as if they are expecting vengeful witches to come soaring out of the coals on flaming broomsticks.

Someone stands among them, staring up at the corpse of the tower with a small, contented smile, like a man at the end of some long and arduous journey. He strokes the spine of the black dog beside him, who stands with her tail tucked between her legs.

Gideon Hill.

The last time Bella saw him he was ordering her sister’s arrest. The sight of him now is another knife-twist in her belly, a hot rush of hate.

She withdraws the silver shears from her skirt and studies them. She isn’t a librarian anymore and her library is nothing but ash, but surely she can still evict a misbehaving patron. Surely it’s easier to lose something than to find it.

Bella glances up at Strix, circling so high above the square he could be mistaken for a crow unless you catch the hot gleam of his eyes.

Bella whispers her grandmother’s words and snips the scissors once in the air. A simple charm for a hedge-witch hiding her potions or a child hiding her petty crimes, for secrets kept and truths untold.

The black tower and the gravestone-trees vanish in a fold of elsewhere. This time there is no binding to hold it close, no jar of earth and leaves, and the tower falls deeper and deeper, a coin dropped in a bottomless ocean.

Hill’s men are left holding their rakes and shovels and blinking stupidly at one another, but Bella isn’t watching them. She’s watching Gideon Hill himself. His neck stiffens, the satisfied smile becomes a snarl. His colorless hair wisps into his face as he turns around. “Where is it? Who—”

Bella enjoys a second of savage satisfaction, but his expression is wrong somehow, unhinged in a way that makes Bella duck back behind her doorway. It reminds her of their daddy when one of them thwarted him: red fury stretched thinly over gray terror.

But Hill hasn’t been thwarted. He’s already won everything there is to win; what is there to fear in a vanishing ruin?

A dark twist of movement catches her eye. The shadow of the doorway is writhing as she watches it, sprouting hands and fingers, a malformed head. Bella doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, as the shadow passes over her. It doesn’t seem to see her, but the head rolls back and forth like a hound with a scent, searching.

Bella runs.

“Tonight, I think. As soon as it’s good and dark. Are there tunnels that lead out of the city? ”

Agnes wakes to the soft murmur of voices and the yellow slant of daylight. Through a doorway she sees Bella and Cleo sitting together at a scuffed kitchen table, their legs intermingled.

Cleo doesn’t answer immediately, but lays her hand on the table, not quite touching Bella’s. “Yes. But I’d rather you stayed. ” Her voice is soft but somehow urgent, intimate. It occurs to Agnes to wonder where her oldest sister slept last night.

“But we’re putting you in danger just by being here. ” Agnes watches Bella’s hand creep toward Cleo’s, as if it possesses a mind of its own. “Someone is bound to notice three white women and a newborn living in your mother’s spice shop, no matter how well we disguise ourselves or how thoroughly we hide. And we know now our wards won’t hold against Hill forever. ”

“So we’ll find other safe houses and move between them. Renew the wards twice a day. The Sisters will help, and maybe the Daughters—and what about Agnes’s man, who delivered you to my doorstep so efficiently? ” Agnes’s man. What a novel, rather appealing arrangement, to own a man rather than being owned by him.

Bella huffs. “And who will feed and clothe us? Our savings burned along with everything else, and none of us have jobs anymore, you’ll notice—”

“I do. And if they stop printing my stories we can steal or scavenge or beg. We’ll find a way. ” Cleo pauses, eyes flicking across Bella’s face, and her voice falls. “You’re no coward. ”

Bella swallows, eyes falling to Cleo’s hand still lying between them, then away. “It’s not a question of cowardice or courage. It’s just logic: We lost. He won. We thought we were the beginning of some grand new story, but we were wrong. It’s the same old story, and if we keep telling it every one of us will burn. Witches always do. ”

There’s an enormous, scathing huh from the opposite doorway. Agnes startles and the air above her twists. Dark wings, the gleam of talons: her hawk, returned from the other side of elsewhere to hover over Agnes and Eve.

He flutters to the back of a chair, glaring at the smallish, sharp-faced woman who stands in the doorway. Agnes’s memory of the previous night is fragmented and feverish, but she thinks she recalls that face hovering above her, singing her well again.

Now her hands are on her hips, her face seamed and bitter. “I should have known. You spend all summer stirring up a hornet’s nest worth of trouble, but as soon as trouble arrives you’re heading for the hills. ”

Bella has her mouth open, but another voice shouts across her, “The hell we are. ” Juniper’s objection is so loud and abrupt that Eve wakes with a startled snort. Agnes struggles upright—the entire middle of her is wrong-feeling, squashy and swollen and aching—and tries to wrap the swaddling back around her daughter before her wails wake the neighbors, or possibly the entire city. But Eve seems to have sprouted several extra arms and legs in the night, all flailing in separate directions.

Juniper scrambles upright, hair standing at wild angles. “It’s all right, baby girl, Aunty June is here. ”

Aunty June proceeds to scoop Eve from Agnes’s arms, swaying and patting. Eve’s cries shrink to muttered complaints and Juniper beams down at her. It’s a soft, half-sleeping smile that Agnes hasn’t seen on her sister’s face since they were girls.

“Sorry, ” Juniper whispers. “I only meant: I’m not going anywhere. I want to fight. ”

“We are aware, June. ” Bella scrubs a hand over her face. “But there’s a time to fight, and there’s a time to survive. If we leave now—”

“And let the bastards win? No, ma’am. ” Juniper’s face isn’t soft anymore.

But a faint frown crosses her sister’s face as she looks down at the baby curled in her arms. Juniper looks burdened and a little bewildered by the burden, as if she’s found herself hauling a heavy load entirely by accident. “And—it’s going to get bad, isn’t it? They’re going to come for all of us, for every woman who knows more than she should, who doesn’t smile when she’s told to. ” Juniper sounds uncertain, feeling her way across unknown terrain. “It seems to me like Miss Araminta’s right. We got them into this mess, and we can’t walk out on them now. ”

A brief, slightly astonished silence follows. Agnes wonders when her wild baby sister started thinking about duty and debt, cause and consequence. Somewhere in the dark of the Deeps, maybe. Or right now, standing with the weight of her niece in her arms.

Bella is the first to collect herself. “That’s very… laudable. But I went to St. George’s this morning—”

“You what now? ”

“—and saw Gideon Hill. There’s something wrong about him, something sick—you were right. He was furious when I sent the tower away again, almost deranged. He’ll keep coming after us. And what happens in November, if he’s elected? What happens when he has more than just angry mobs and shadows? ”

Agnes sees Bella glance down at Cleo’s hand again, her eyes clouded with worry, and understands that it isn’t herself she’s afraid for.

Agnes thinks of August running through the rising riot, searching for her, and the relief on his face when he found her; of Eve staring up into her eyes, solemn as a Saint; of Juniper’s voice breaking as she promised to take care of her. Of the terrible risk of loving someone more than yourself and the secret strength it grants you.

“Well, ” she says mildly, “I’m staying. ” Above her, the hawk croons.

Several sets of eyes swivel toward them. Bella adjusts her spectacles. “I thought you were done with all of this. ”

Agnes shrugs. That was before Eve, before her familiar flew out of the darkness to her, before her life cleaved into before and after.

“Aren’t you worried for her? ” Juniper tilts her chin at Eve, who is making a faint irritable-bee sound that might be a snore.

“Yes, ” Agnes answers, because she is. She lay awake half the night consumed by stray terrors and uncertainties, convinced the miraculous rise and fall of her daughter’s ribs would cease the second she closed her eyes. But beneath the terror was something else, something clawed and fanged and ruthless that she doesn’t know how to explain.

I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.

She gives her sisters another shrug. “Yes. But I’m still staying. ”

Juniper’s face lights. Her eyes slide back to Bella. “Well? ”

Bella lifts both hands in the air. “Well what? You two can make all the brave pronouncements you like, but what good are they? What good are we? Without Avalon—”

Araminta interrupts her. “You still have more words and ways than nine women out of ten. And”—her eyes slide to the hawk perched on her chair—“I know a familiar when I see one. ”

Bella opens her mouth and then closes it. “And how’s that? ”

Araminta smiles a sly, sidelong smile, and for the first time Agnes sees some of Cleo in her face. “Because I’m the tenth woman. ”

And as she says it an animal appears at her feet, coiling out of nothing: a black hare with ember eyes. Juniper whispers something profane and admiring. Agnes gasps. Bella merely looks intent.

“There’s more witching left in the world than you think, girls, ” Araminta says, and her eyes are on Bella’s. “The kind they can’t burn because it was never written down. ”

Cleo speaks for the first time since her mother arrived. “And if they stay, will we help them? Will the Daughters stand beside their Sisters, Ohemaa? ” Agnes frowns over the last word, but Araminta gives a little grunt, as if the title is an arrow aimed well.

She bows her head to her daughter and Cleo grins back. She turns to Bella. “What do you say? ” Cleo’s voice is low and too warm again, her eyes bright, burning gold. “All for one? ”

Agnes almost feels sorry for her sister, subjected to the heat of that gaze. Bella’s eyes search Cleo’s face, and whatever she finds sends a flush tip-toeing up her neck. Her fingers creep those few final inches to curl tight around Cleo’s.

“And one for all, ” she whispers.

What is now and ever and unto ages and ages,

may not always be

A spell for undoing, requiring a needle & a cracked egg

For three days, Beatrice Belladonna and her sisters remain in the dim back rooms of Araminta’s Spices & Sundries. They’re long, tiresome days: Agnes rests and wakes and rests again, her fever rising and falling like a stubborn tide; Eve alternates between cherubic contentment and fits of aggrieved screaming, as if she was promised some treat and then bitterly denied; Bella sits for hours with her black notebook on her knees, listening to Araminta Wells’s lectures on constellations and sung-spells and the rhythm of witching. Juniper is mostly absent, arriving and departing at odd hours, filling her pockets with herbs and bones from the shop’s stock.

The nights are long, too, but Bella does not find them tiresome. They are smothered laughter and lips, hands and hips hidden beneath the saffron quilt. They are hours stolen out of time, unburdened by the future and unsullied by the past.

(Though sometimes the past slithers in. Sometimes Bella wakes from dreams of cellars and burning barns. Sometimes she flinches from Cleo’s touch as if it’s hot wax, and Cleo lies very still until Bella’s pulse steadies. Afterward she holds her carefully, like Bella has spun sugar for skin. )

By the afternoon of the fourth day Bella is beginning to hope they might be safe. That her sisters were not fools to stay in this vicious, hungry city. That she might wake up every morning with her cheek on Cleo’s shoulder.

But then Juniper staggers into the shop with her mouth thin and her eyes hard. “Outside. The shadows are… gathering. Thickening. I don’t know if they can smell us or track us or what, but I figure it’s time to get gone. ”

They leave as the sun sets, drawing Nut Street in mauve and gray. They follow Cleo down into the tunnels: Bella, then Agnes with Eve wrapped tight to her chest in the manner Araminta taught her, then Juniper, swearing and shivering. Even before her time in the Deeps she didn’t care much for being belowground. Now she detests it.

They emerge long after dusk, filing out of a tiny building that looks from the outside like a garden shed or a pigeon coop, then slipping through a hedge and onto a sedate east-side avenue.

“Is this close enough? ” Cleo whispers.

“Yes, ” Bella answers.

“Send word once you’re settled. ”

“I will. ”

Cleo runs out of things to say. She simply stares at Bella, tracing her face—and Bella has never liked her own features so much as she does in that moment, in the soft gold of Cleo’s gaze—before touching the brim of her derby hat. “Three bless and keep you. ”

Bella and her sisters are left alone on the darkening street.

The east side is apparently untroubled by the riots and arrests plaguing the rest of New Salem. The houses have dignified gables and clipped lawns and the slightly burnished shine of old money. Their windows send soft lamp-light and the clink of crystal over the empty streets. A man’s laugh floats from one of them, unworried, perfectly content.

Bella’s sisters crowd close behind her in their borrowed clothes and black cloaks, like refugees from some darker, wilder world. An owl and a hawk wheel high above them.

She leads them to a red-brick house on St. Jerome Street, slightly shabbier and older than its neighbors. She knocks twice, and the silence that follows is sufficient for her to doubt every decision that brought her here.

Then the door swings inward and an elderly, sweatered gentleman is blinking up at her. “Miss Eastwood! Pardon me—Misses Eastwood. ” Mr. Henry Blackwell beams at the three of them as if they are unexpected guests to a dinner party rather than the most wanted criminals in the city. “And are those… my word. ”

Their familiars have swept to their shoulders in a rush of black feathers and hot eyes, talons curving like carved jet. Mr. Blackwell’s genial smile shifts toward awe as he looks at them. He gathers himself. “I don’t believe we have been introduced. ”

“This is Strix varia—Strix, I call him—and Pan. ” Bella gestures to the fisher-hawk on Agnes’s shoulder. “For Pandion haliaetus, the western osprey, you know. ”

Behind her she hears Juniper mutter about the injustice of her sisters finding their familiars first if they were just going to give them such stupid long names.

Mr. Blackwell appears not to hear her. He gives each of them a small bow. “Do come in, all of you. ”

The hall is dark oak and dense carpet. As soon as the door clicks behind them Bella begins. “I’m so sorry to surprise you like this. It’s an imposition, I know, and terribly dangerous, but my sisters and I need a place to—”

But Mr. Blackwell is waving a hand over his shoulder at her. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I’ve been worried sick about you, to tell the truth. ”

Bella isn’t at all convinced that amiable, bespectacled Mr. Blackwell understands the gravity of the risk. “If they find us here, you might well be arrested. Your property could be seized, your position terminated. ”

Mr. Blackwell reaches the end of the hall and bends to peruse a bookshelf, thumbing through clothbound spines until he reaches a little bronze statue of a dog, its head shined smooth with use. Blackwell gives a small hah! and tips the dog forward. Some unseen mechanism clicks and whirrs, and the entire bookcase glides smoothly away. Behind it lies a dim, windowless room with a slanting ceiling and several fat down mattresses.

Mr. Blackwell makes a polite throat-clearing noise. “I tidied up a bit last week, got the worst of the cobwebs out at least. I had a suspicion it might be needed. ” At Bella’s wordless, openmouthed expression, he adds, “My grandfather built this house. He told me there would always be someone who needed to hide, and that there ought always be a Blackwell there to hide them. ”

Bella is searching for words that might adequately express her gratitude and relief when Juniper says, “Well hot damn, sir, ” in her burnt rasp of a voice, and Mr. Blackwell leads them into the kitchen, chuckling.

Much later that evening, after Bella and her sisters have consumed a frankly astonishing number of tiny crustless sandwiches and Agnes has retired to the secret room with Eve, her eyes bruised and sleepless, Bella and Mr. Blackwell sit in a matched pair of armchairs with a neglected checkerboard and an un-neglected bottle of chardonnay between them.

“Thank you. For letting us stay. ” It seems to require unusual effort to enunciate. “It’s a lovely house. ”

Mr. Blackwell plucks an ebony checker from the board and studies it a little morosely. “I thought for a while it might be yours, if you would have me. ”

It takes several seconds for Bella to process this statement, and another several to respond. “You what? ”

“Oh, merely as a matter of convenience! You had no family and I had no wife, and I thought we might be pleasant enough companions, despite the difference in our ages. Of course as soon as I saw you and Miss Quinn together several things became clear to me. ” Blackwell blinks at her, brow furrowed. “I hope I haven’t caused you any distress. ”

“No, it’s just… I never thought…”

Mr. Blackwell gives her another of his affable smiles, but the edges are turned downward. “Someone along the line misled you as to your worth, Miss Eastwood. ” Distantly, through the froth of chardonnay, Bella hears the word nothing in her daddy’s voice. “I should quite like to give him a piece of my mind. ”

“I—thank you. ” She thinks of Juniper, the hiss of scales over straw, the sin she bore for all of them. “But it’s no longer possible. ”

Mr. Blackwell nods, unsurprised. “Good. ”

She thinks of Cleo’s eyes on her face before they parted, studying her as if she were precious, even vital. “Or necessary. ”

“Even better. ” Mr. Blackwell raises his glass. “Give Miss Quinn my warmest thanks. ”

They sip their wine. Bella imagines a version of her life where she never met Cleopatra Quinn, where she married Mr. Blackwell and lived in this pleasant red-brick house until she was a crone in truth, reading witch-tales by the fireside in winter and dreaming of better worlds. She thinks of the old story of the witch who buried her heart in a silver box beneath the snow so that she might never be hurt. A chill shivers up her spine.

Blackwell sets his glass among the checkers. “Did you truly find it? ”

Bella knows from the soft reverence of his voice what he means. “We did. ” She can’t help the note of pride in her voice.

“And is it truly gone? ”

Her voice this time is a graveside whisper. “It is. Although—” She withdraws her little black notebook from her skirt pocket and runs her thumb across the cover. “It has been recently brought to my attention that not all witching was lost, that night. ”

“Oh? ” It’s the same oh? he used to give her over lunch in the College library, which granted her permission to lecture to her heart’s content about the lives of Saints or the execrable handwriting of monks. Bella smiles a small, wistful smile for those quiet, safe days, and tells him more or less everything there is to tell.

She tells him about Old Salem and the sewing sampler and the owl winging toward her through the trees; living in the lost library of Avalon, outside of time and mind, and standing in its ashes; Araminta’s spells, which rely on stars and songs rather than rhymes and herbs, and her growing suspicion that witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.

She tells him far more than she needs to, and he listens with considering nods and small smiles and a few my words.

“I was hoping to ask Araminta about the scarification process and their mother’s-names, but then Hill’s shadows turned up in New Cairo. Oh! The wards! ”

Bella stands so abruptly that her blood thuds in her skull. She reels to the front door and pours a line of salt and thistle across the threshold. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Guard the bed that I lay on.

She’s on her sixth window before she notices the yellowing grains of salt already lying on the sills. “Did you ward your house already? ”

Mr. Blackwell looks a little sheepish. “Not nearly so well as you are, I’m sure. It’s just that fever—the Second Plague, some are calling it now—has been creeping north. It strikes me as uncanny, so I thought perhaps a little uncanniness might keep it at bay. ” He nudges his spectacles back up his nose. “My great-aunt taught me a few little charms here and there. ”

Bella would like to ask more about all this—a man working witchcraft, an uncanny sickness—but at that moment Juniper emerges from behind the bookshelf. She is wrapped in a dark cloak, limping badly without her red-cedar staff, her eyes the green-lit gray of the sea before a storm. She pauses to sweep the two of them a bow before slipping out the front door and vanishing into the deepening night.

“What is she doing, at this hour? ”

“Whatever she can. Whatever might help. ” Bella sighs. “I imagine we’ll read about it in tomorrow’s papers. ”

Juniper has never cared much for reading (or any of the others of Miss Hurston’s three R’s), but over the next few weeks she acquires the habit of reading the paper over breakfast. Or at least the headlines: SISTERS EASTWOOD STILL AT LARGE; NEW SALEM CHIEF OF POLICE RESIGNS AMID RUMORS OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN; HILL’S RALLY INTERRUPTED BY BAYING DOGS AND STRONG WINDS.

The other Sisters tell Juniper that Mayor Worthington is leaning on The Post not to print the most hysterical stories: that the Eastwoods can transform themselves into black birds or possibly bats; that the Crone herself is currently living on the south end, keeping company with colored women; that the Mother gave birth to a little devil-child with hair the color of Hell itself.

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