“And maybe some of those young girls weren't so happy,” Faye said. “Who knows? But anyway, one winter a few of them got together to tell fortunes. They shouldn't have, of course. It was wicked. But they did it anyway. One of them had a slave who came from the West Indies and knew about fortune-telling. It helped to while away those long, dull winter nights.” She glanced sideways under black lashes toward Nick, as if to say that she could have suggested a better way herself.
“But it preyed on their poor little Puritan minds,” Faye went on, looking sorrowful. “They felt guilty. And eventually one of them had a nervous collapse. She got sick, delirious, and she confessed. Then the secret was out. And all the other young girls were on the hot seat. It wasn't good in those days to get caught fooling around with the supernatural. The grown-ups didn't like it. So the poor little Puritan girls had to point the finger at somebody else.”
Faye held up her own long, tapering, scarlet-tipped finger, trailing it across the seated group like a gun. She stopped in front of Cassie.
Cassie looked at it, then up into Faye's eyes.
“And they did,” Faye said pleasantly. She withdrew the finger as if sheathing a sword, and went on. “They pointed at the West Indian slave, and then at a couple of other old women they didn't like. Women with a bad reputation around the village. And when they pointed, they said…” She paused for dramatic effect, and tipped her face up to the crescent moon hanging in the sky. Then she looked back at Cassie. “They said… witch.”
A ripple went through the group, of agitation, bitter amusement, exasperation. Heads were shaking in disgust. Cassie felt the hairs at the back of her neck tingle.
“And do you know what?” Faye looked over her audience, holding them all spellbound. Then she smiled, slowly, and whispered, “It worked. Nobody blamed them for their little fortune-telling games. Everyone was too busy hunting out the witches in their midst. The only problem,” Faye continued, her black
eyebrows now raised in scorn, “was that those Puritans couldn't recognize a witch if they fell over one. They looked for women who were offbeat, or too independent, or… rich. Convicted witches forfeited their worldly goods, so it could be quite a profitable business to accuse them. But all the while the real witches were right there under their noses.
“Because, you see,” Faye said softly, “there really were witches at Salem. Not the poor women-and men-they accused. They didn't even get one right. But the witches were there, and they didn't like what was happening. It hit a little too close to home. A few of them even tried to stop the witch trials-but that only tended to arouse suspicion. It was too dangerous even to be a friend of one of the prisoners.”
She stopped, and there was a silence. The faces surrounding Cassie now were not amused, but cold and angry. As if this story was something that resonated in their bones; not a cobwebby tale from the dead past, but a living warning.
“What happened?” Cassie asked at last, her own voice subdued.
“To the accused witches? They died. The unlucky ones, at least, the ones who wouldn't confess. Nineteen were hanged before the governor put a stop to it. The last public executions took place exactly three hundred years ago… September 22, the fall equinox, 1692. No, the poor accused witches didn't have much luck. But the real witches… well…” Faye smiled.
“The real witches got away. Discreetly, of course. After the fuss was over. They quietly packed up and moved north to start their own little village, where no one would point fingers because everyone would be the same. And they called their little village…” She looked at Cassie.
“New Salem,” Cassie said. In her mind, she was seeing the crest on the high school building. “Incorporated 1693,” she added softly.
“Yes. Just one year after the trials ended. So you see, that's how our little town was founded. With just the twelve members of that coven, and their families. We”-Faye gestured gracefully around the group– “are what's left of the descendants of those twelve families. Their only descendants. While the rest of the riffraff you see around the school and the town-“
“Like Sally Waltman,” Deborah put in.
”-are the descendants of the servants. The help,” Faye said sweetly. “Or of outsiders who drifted in and were allowed to settle here. But those twelve houses on Crowhaven Road are the houses of the original families. Our families. They intermarried and kept their blood pure-most of them, anyway. And eventually they produced us.”
“You have to understand,” Diana said quietly from Cassie's side. “Some of what Faye has told you is speculation. We don't really know what caused the witch hunts in 1692. But we do know what happened with our own ancestors because we have their journals, their old records, their spell books. Their Books of Shadows.” She turned and picked something up off the sand, and Cassie recognized the book that had been on the window seat the day Diana cleaned her sweater.
“This,” Diana said, holding it up, “was my great-great-grandmother's. She got it from her mother, who got it from her mother, and so on. Each of them wrote in it; they recorded the spells they did, the rituals, the important events in their lives. Each of them passed it on to the next generation.”
“Until our great-grandmothers' time, anyway,” said Deborah. “Maybe eighty, ninety years ago. They decided the whole thing was too scary.”
“Too wicked,” Faye put in, her golden eyes gleaming.
“They hid the books and tried to forget the old knowledge,” said Diana. “They taught their kids it was wrong to be different. They tried to be normal, to be like the outsiders.”