Salem, Massachusetts

  Courthouse, Second Story floor, 1692

  Young Calamity bit her nails as prosecutor and magistrate, Thomas Hitchman, invoked hellfire and brimstone. She did all she could to avoid witnessing the sweat sliding from under his periwig and the spit shooting out his mouth, keeping firm eye contact with her mother, Felicity Dyer, who was a-squirming in the clutches of two other judges.

  From his chair with a back that shot up twice his height, Thomas aroused passion from all in attendance. Surrounding him were ten standing judges, dressed similar: powdered faces, long coats, and wigs. They were throwing their arms forward in agreement. As for the audience, the accusations and murmurings proved some life existed inside the puritan men in felt-hats and breeches and women in aprons and petticoat dresses.

  “There’s spectral evidence you are a witch,” he shouted at Mrs. Felicity Dyer, a plain, skinny woman. Thomas continued, “Are you going to look at those little girls in the front row, who you’ve tortured with your apparition in private, and now call them liars in public?”

  It wasn’t long before Calamity had no nails left for chewing. For all her resentment toward the plaintiffs, she half envied them. The word of girls her age had never been given such weight, certainly not hers. She wondered if she had the courage to read aloud the note she’d written on her mother’s behalf. She wanted to inform them how hard Felicity worked to keep the house.

  ***

  “One minute, Calamity,” her mother would say, rinsing their linen, soap and water saturating her roughened hands.

  Calamity, then ten, noted her mother’s patience for her pleadings to get attention, when in fact, that “one minute” away from chores never came. She would give a speech declaring her mother’s patience to the entire courtroom if Thomas’s accosting would ever stop.

  “How do you know some dark entities didn’t take my form to harass these girls?” Felicity said in tears.

  “Unlikely so,” he rebuked. “Your own husband submitted this book of witchcraft into evidence, testified that he found it under your bed!” He slapped the book to the ground, and a burning smell took the room when another judge set it to flames. “So, Mrs. Felicity Dyer, will you spare yourself with a confession, or do we need to add pressure?”

  The young girls, who’d accused her, shrieked and contorted their bodies. One, Temperance Baker, grabbed her blonde curls and seemed to be fighting with them as if they were snakes.

  Calamity examined the paper she fidgeted; her little hands barely visible under the large white cuffs of her dress. Should she tell the truth, then and there? The book that her father had given to the court had been Temperance’s.

  ***

  She remembered clear as day, she and Temperance lying between green linen that draped down from the canopy. The hard bed board beneath feathers held her first and only sleepover and a night where confessions were promised to be swapped.

  “Nobody pays attention to me,” Calamity confided to the preacher’s daughter, both in their night gowns.

  Temperance took it in, then under her long nose, a mischievous grin crossed her face. “I know how you can conjure something that will show more devotion to you than you can ever ask for.”

  “Something? Someone, you mean,” Calamity said, excitement rising inside her bosom. She locked her lanky hands.

  Temperance shook her head. “I sneaked a book that I found in dad’s library under this very bed. You can use it to summon a dark entity watcher.”

  Calamity covered her mouth in shock. “No, your dad has been railing against dark entities in his sermons. He says they’re trying to overtake Salem.”

  “That’s why he has these books, to study his enemies. But what he doesn’t know is I got a hold of this one when he wasn’t looking. I’ve met them, Calamity. They watch over me when I sleep.”

  Calamity rolled onto her back and gulped. When she agreed to a night of revealing secrets with her only friend, she never imagined any of them could be this dark.

  “Please keep this book for me,” Temperance pleaded. “Dad has noticed that it’s missing, and it won’t do me any good if he gets it back. But you…if you take it, you may attract a special watcher.”

  Calamity said nothing. It was too good to be true that anyone would spend time with her, and should be no surprise that if they did, they would want the most catastrophic things in return. Those eternal seconds of silence seemed to unnerve Temperance. She warned, “Don’t even think about destroying it, or all the dark entities will come after you.”

  ***

  Calamity’s contemplation was disrupted by her mother screaming in a hoarse voice. “I’m not the one torturing those girls. Forgive me. But I think they’re lying.”

  The judges threw her to the floor and, at Hitchman’s instruction, piled pounds of bricks on top of her. With it all bearing down on her breasts, she said, “You will carry ten times the weight I feel, magistrate, if you don’t repent.”

  “Thirty more pounds,” Magistrate Thomas ordered.

  Calamity leaped up from her bench and screamed, “Please, I have something to say.”

  Before anyone could answer, her father took her by the arm with all the strength of a merchant and dragged her to the dark courtroom front door. She tried to break free, but his thumb sunk in too deeply. She felt her shoulder go out of place. “Mama! Mama! Mama!”

  In dead grass and by a leafless tree outside, the bearded man with a cigarette hanging out his mouth, knelt and admonished her. “I know it was your book.”

  Calamity closed her eyes, heaving in tears and shame. She didn’t agree to keep the book, but didn’t remove it from under her bed, either. Night after night, she lay frozen in too much fear to do anything with it. Her family hardly went to church, and the farmers had been targeting merchants like her dad in these witch claims. If she told anyone it was the preacher’s daughter’s, would they believe her? She feared burning it for the wrath of the dark entities, thought of throwing it out, but was that the right decision? It would live to haunt another family.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She did try to confide in her mom. But stating that in court wouldn’t help Felicity’s case, would it?

  Once, she entered the kitchen where her mother slaved over the stove. Only seeing the back of her mother’s bonnet and plaid, wide dress, she hesitated, noticing she was sniveling. Calamity knew enough to understand her father’s affair and how it hurt her mother, but this could wait no longer.

  When Calamity tapped her mother on the shoulder, Felicity swiped at her but missed. Calamity’s mouth hung in shock. Her mother had never swung at her so quickly.

  Felicity, whining with more than a note of stress in her voice, said, “I can’t take you anymore. I tell you and tell you that I’m busy. I tell you to stay in your room until I call. You just keep…coming...back.”

  ***

  Back in the dead grass outside the courtroom, her father said, “Over and over, I told her to spend more time with you, train you the right way. But she hated the stress that came with you from the day you were born. She was going to leave us both, little girl. Now our land is cursed. Let her die in your stead and never speak on this again.” Tears filled his eyes as he whispered, “Less they discover it’s you who was haunting the victims.”

  ***

  When he paused, Calamity felt the weight of the loneliness she’d been carrying with her every day: her mother had been mentally absent for a long time. No more than a day before the accusations toward her mom began, the words of Temperance resounded in her imagination. “I know how you can conjure something that will show you more devotion than you can ever ask for.” There came a point when the only choice less desirable than opening the book was not opening it. Temperance should know best. She was a preacher’s daughter, after all.

  She cracked it open. Whatever apprehension she had, she had already cried away. She read, “From our darkest deeds, the dark entities are formed. Here is an incantation to summon a newborn. Beware, the newborns have not all been trained on how they should proceed.”

  After reciting the incantation with a mix of excitement and fear racing through her veins, she laughed out loud when nothing happened. The power the book claimed had been a hoax, and she halfway fell for it. She closed her eyes, for the morning would bring a hot, rumbling book burning.

  But it was in her dreams where she heard jungle sounds, and something panting, rushing through branches. At the threshold to life in Massachusetts, green hands peeled back leaves of the white oak trees. A goulash, pointed ear man with an amused smile on his face embraced the starless night. Ahead of him appeared hooded men with green chins and hands, beckoning him forward.

  Her eyes opened to a shadow of a pointed ear being that was present on her canopy. “What are you?” She said, trembling.

  It spoke with a Massachusetts dialect, omitting the letter R. “Ma name is Sam Hill. I’m supposed to be youa watcha?”

  “I didn’t think you were real,” she whispered.

  “Pay padon me, Miss’ Dya, but I want to thank you fa givin me such puppus. Only… watcha is fa these otha dak entities, not me. I’m diffant, like you.”

  “How do you know me?”

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean. I didn’t fly ova hea’ as fast as I could, like other dak entities would. Six owas ago, you called me. All night, I’ve been gathain’ infamation on you, and let me tell you, I am imp’essed. You don’t need a watcha. No, that won’t do, Miss Dya. You need a f’iend. Please. Call me Sam Hill.”

  ***

  Felicity’s final scream rang out the window, plunging Calamity back into a brutal reality. Calamity struggled to breathe, eyebrows furrowed at her father, tears streaming down her face. She felt a knife cut deep into her heart, then far worse, the absence of the piece that had been severed.

  ***

  On dark nights, when the horror of her mother’s execution came to remembrance, a new friend whom she’d summoned from her forbidden book slept next to her, Sam Hill. Green and ghoulish yet charismatic and childlike, he played eye spy with her, and whispered secrets. Spoke with a Massachusetts dialect, omitting the letter “R” in his speech.

  “Evyone will know ma name’s Sam Hill,” he said, wrapped in the quilt. “And I’m gonna be betta than any dak entity eva. May I whispa you anotha secet?”

  She nodded, pale and stoic.

  “You may only see me a few months out the yea’, but even when I’m away, I fantasize eve’y night about us becoming famous and ageless with handsome mo’tal flesh. And I always think about you, my dea’ sista, next to me.”

  “You are too sweet, Sam. It almost sounds like flattery.” She let out a sarcastic gasp.

  “No, it’s t’ue. We will be King and Queen, someday. When I think on these mattas, I get myself so ecstatic, I find myself hasting about and jumping!”

  The corner of her chap lips curled up in an ever so faint smile.

  Five years later, she held to her commitment of running away. All the repenting of the puritans for their witch trials wouldn’t bring back her mother.

  ***

  Back in the wagon, Diamond said, “What happened to Felicity was awful. After Calamity went through all that, how can she be so cold to us, to Dylan?”

  “To really know,” Chip replied. “You have to hear the rest of this.”

  ***

  In the shadows outside the same courthouse where Felicity had been put to death ten years prior, a pirate captain in short, loose pants and woolen stockings chased a crew member in the same attire. They went round the tree, rum spilling out their bottles.

  When he caught up with the crew member, they engaged in a kiss. The mate removed a hat, and long brown hair swung out. Revealed to be twenty-year-old Calamity, she said, “You know I despise that you make me pretend to be male.”

  Captain Azzure’s beard resembled her father’s. His expression carried the same veil of secrecy that Mr. Dyer’s did ten years prior. “Me wife will make you walk the plank if she finds out about us. Besides, we all hide our identities. It’s part of being a pirate.”

  Calamity remained silent.

  “You’ve done so much for me, love. I’d still be working for the English government if you didn’t convince me to work for me. You’re my inspiration.”

  She looked ahead with cold eyes.

  “Why’d you want to come across the river, anyway? Salem’s the same drudgery it was when I found you.”

  Coughing and wheezing from the backstreet turned their attention. A gleam flickered in Calamity’s eyes, then she rushed to the dark unknown. The long-lost and then huffing voice of her “brother,” Sam Hill, drew her further in. He was the reason she came back; his fellow entities had sent word that he was ill and somewhere close to the rickety courthouse.

  “Dea’ sista, you’ve come home.”

  She watched on, quiet but attentive.

  “Please, get me blood. I need powa so I don’t die.”

  “S-sam, I—,” Calamity said, Captain Azzure standing some feet behind her.

  “Oh, I’m weak. Do you know who the magistrate inside is? None otha than Thomas Hitchman. He killed ya motha. Get his blood. Get all thea blood foa me. They desave to die, and I to live.”

  She pictured a book on fire, Thomas’s spit, and her note fiddling, then came the haunting reminder of her mother’s whiny screams.

  Shoulders square, she marched past the tree where’d she’d been playing games with her lover. Azzure chased behind, calling her name.

  “Calamity. That was Sam Hill? I never believed he was real.”

  She said nothing, not after she got a foot on the nearby ship with its jolly roger flag risen. Wabbling the boat, she marched to the cannon then struck it with a flaming torch.

  Midway up the ladder, Captain Azzure said, “Calamity, they’ll be military everywhere. Think about what you’re doing.” One kick sent him down to the ship’s base. “Thomas Hitchman, I dedicate your blood to Sam Hill,” she said. “As foul as it is, he wants it.”

  The hot cannonball exploded, and the courtroom came crumbling down. Instantly, reflections of winged dark entities appeared in the water beneath.

  “Gods of the sea, protect us,” Captain Azzure cried.

  ***

  Chip crinkled the notes from his investigation in his too-confident-to-know-he’s-clumsy manner and missed his shirt pocket a couple of times before successfully putting them away. “This Calamity has killed many since, and has done so indiscriminately, dedicating every last drop of blood to Sam Hill. Be alert and shoot anything that feels evil. Dark entities may take familiar likenesses.”

  Before we could reply, the wagon began to slow down to our destination. I got my bag ready, and Chip cocked his gun.