Page 14 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER SIX

On the last night of October the blue dusk came early. Darkness fell across the lawns and hedges, yet light was cast by the candles set in pumpkins on porches and in front windows. Already the streets of Cambridge were swarming with children going house to house in pursuit of magic. They knocked on doors begging for candy, collecting chalky, sweet Necco wafers and fireballs that burned their mouths and turned their tongues red, racing across lawns, and shrieking like goblins. The boys were dressed as cowboys and spacemen; the girls were either princesses in sparkly pink or witches in black capes and hats, with the witches far outnumbering the princesses. Residents of the city locked their doors when their children were done trick-or-treating, and they set out bowls of apples on their front porches, for apples were said to be witches’ favorite treat, and such gifts were said to help ensure there would be no tricks played, no soot coming down the chimney, no one jumping off a roof, no children roused by dreams of women dancing in the grass.

What was now called Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve had originally been known as Samhain, the festival that marked the world’s journey into winter’s darkness, celebrated with bonfires and dances. It was a time for welcoming the dead to walk through the world of the living, for it was when the veil between the worlds of the human and the spirit dissolved. Even nonbelievers had to admit there were many more witches in Cambridge than anyone might have imagined, and for these few hours on the last day of the tenth month, the darkly glimmering world belonged to them. They were schoolteachers and nurses and librarians; they had gardens filled with rue and rosemary and lavender and roses; they went unnoticed as they had their coffees at the Peacock Café or treated their children to ice cream sundaes served in cold, silvery dishes at Bailey’s in Harvard Square. Everyone practicing the Nameless Art came to join in the dance on this night, whether they were beautiful or plain, young or old, whether they were bloodline witches or simply women who had faith in the natural world around them.

The path at Mount Auburn Cemetery led past the huge statue of the Sphinx, made of a single block of granite from Hallowell, Maine, and erected in 1872 to honor soldiers who had perished in the Civil War. They went past Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s gravesite, past the statue of the loyal dog where people often left sticks, past the mulberry bushes, and walked into the garden of life and death to celebrate Samhain, as the boundaries between the real world and the world to come opened. On all other nights, local teenagers came to the cemetery to drink beer and run riot. If they were lucky, they might have clumsy, fevered sex beneath the willow trees, but on this night, even the most headstrong girls trembled beside the graves, and their rowdy boyfriends, who had claimed to have no fear, ran like rabbits through the brambles in an effort to escape the rustling in the trees and the women in black.

Lauren and Lionel had attended these gatherings ever since they were children, and they still took a childish delight in celebrating Samhain, throwing off their coats and going barefoot, even though the air was chilly. It was said that on this night, spirits of the dead could arise on the cemetery paths, invisible but there all the same. If you remembered the dead, you would be free from the rules and responsibilities that restricted the living. Bring a photograph of someone who had passed and say their name; look into the darkness, and you would find there was still light. You could dance all night and forget your sorrows rather than be blinded by grief; you could be fearless and watch the stars turn white as chalk.

On this night, Lionel was quite silent and not in the least celebratory. Just that afternoon he had been in attendance at an unsuccessful trauma surgery at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. An unconscious nineteen-year-old woman who had been dumped in a heap outside the door to the emergency room had suffered cardiac arrest, and all attempts to resuscitate her had failed. The young woman had undergone a botched abortion, and despite the surgical team’s frantic attempts to save her, she had died. She’d had ID, so at least they were able to contact her family in Wellesley, who had come to mourn her in the waiting room.

When nothing more could be done, the medical students were let go for the evening. They went to a local bar to drown their sorrows, but Lionel stayed behind to sit with the body. He spoke a blessing and paced the room. His instructor, a middle-aged surgeon who’d seen death more times than he could count, had come by after a nurse alerted him that one medical student had refused to leave the operating room. The older surgeon had seen it before, and he’d seen Lionel Bell’s empathetic nature when dealing with patients.

“We do the best we can to go up against the Angel of Death, but sometimes he wins,” he told Lionel.

“The Angel of Death wasn’t the problem,” Lionel responded. “She should have been able to have a procedure here, in a hospital, not in some back room at the hands of someone who was likely not a doctor.”

Lionel thought the surgeon would argue with him, perhaps even report him to the dean of the medical school, but instead the doctor simply shook his head. “Hopefully that will be true someday. Until then, we do the best we can.”

Lionel had forced himself to leave the hospital, but even now, at the Samhain gathering, he couldn’t let the lost patient go. When he’d stopped by the chapel, her grieving parents had told him she’d been a student at Boston University. He’d sat in his car in the parking lot for some time—it was as good a place to cry as any other—then he’d pulled himself together and met Lauren at the cemetery gates, just as they’d always done. To explain his foul mood, Lionel simply told his sister it had been a lousy day at the hospital, but she saw through him. She could still read his mind when he wasn’t careful enough to pull a curtain over his thoughts. “You’ll save more lives than you’ll lose,” she assured him.

“Will I?” Lionel wondered.

“You absolutely will,” Lauren said with certainty. Healing was his gift and his skill, and it always had been.

Lionel had been considering love’s many forms and had come to think of it as a saving grace, the reason to be in this world. When he went to the clubs on weekends, he was no longer in search of encounters that never lasted beyond a night. He wanted more, and he often found himself thinking of the scenes he’d witnessed during his hours in the hospital. The wives who sat at their husbands’ bedsides, the overwhelming emotion that sifted through the rooms where children were born and men and women died. He no longer wanted to meet someone new every Saturday night. He wanted true love, the real kind, the kind that would last.

When he thought it might never happen, he’d stumbled onto exactly what he’d been looking for. Lionel was headed down an alleyway when the private club he visited, frequented by Harvard professors and students, was warned about a raid. As he sprinted away into the soft darkness, a panic rising in his chest about what an arrest could mean to his career, he tripped and fell. When he lifted his eyes, he found a detective standing over him. The light was behind the officer, and at first Lionel thought a dark angel had come upon him. Perhaps he’d died, and the angel was there to lead him to the next world, but when the detective reached down to help Lionel off the ground, he saw that his companion wasn’t an angel. All the same, this man was everything, angel or not. Lionel knew it as soon as they exchanged a look, which contained all that was reckless and all that was divine.

“You should avoid this place,” the detective told him. They were close enough to feel the heat from one another’s bodies. The detective was perhaps twenty-five, with dark Irish looks and surprising green eyes. He was a local boy, and his accent might have made Lionel laugh if this was a different situation, but it wasn’t. “It’s dangerous,” the detective went on. There were police officers searching every room in the club, but this young man had just made detective and he’d stepped outside on this evening, unwilling to arrest people merely for being themselves. “If you wind up in jail,” he told Lionel, “there will be little I can do for you.”

“What can you do for me now?” Lionel found himself saying. He felt as though he were drowning, but he didn’t mind. He would drown a thousand times if need be to remain in this man’s presence.

And then it had happened. A single wild kiss before the detective ran off as though he’d been stung. Lionel had been in a state of shock, unsure of what was a dream and what had been real. After he made his way down the alley, he went to the riverside and took a tab of lysergic diethylamide acid on a thin sheet of paper that dissolved in his mouth. He had been in a study at the hospital to see what benefits LSD might have, and he’d been a perfect subject, expanding his mind.

The chemical compound lysergic acid had first been used in experiments in Switzerland on ergot, the fungus that grew on rye and other grains, a property said to have been the cause of the Salem witchcraft trials. It was likely that ergot had caused hallucinations among those who testified in Salem, causing them to insist they had witnessed strange and evil practices—women visiting them in their beds, undocumented attacks, yellow birds speaking in human voices—claiming that a dark, invisible world existed side by side with our own. When Lionel tested the chemical on himself, it was as if a door had been thrown open and he could grasp the heart of the universe. There were times when he thought he might shatter and break, but on this night his mind and heart had both opened. He stared at the dark, muddy water of the Charles River, and it was as though he’d been kissed again, a thousand times over, and then he understood what love was; it wasn’t a choice, it was like the air that you breathed. As they walked along the cemetery path, Lionel and Lauren were both thinking of love, and each was stricken by loneliness. Love was not just a human condition, witches felt it, too. But what was the point of love, that’s what Lauren wanted to know. Didn’t it just mean you had more to lose? Ava was walking behind the Bells with Jack beside her when she suddenly stopped. Jamie Mather was perched beside the statue of the steadfast dog who stood guard over his master’s grave.

Lauren looked to see what had captured Ava’s attention. “What the hell is he doing here?” she asked.

“Isn’t it evident?” Lionel had spied Jamie staring at Ava.

“I’ll catch up to you,” Ava told them as she set off toward Jamie. His being there wasn’t an accident. After reading about his family, Ava had felt at last she had reason to contact him. She’d had Maureen leave a note on his dinner tray asking him to meet her at the cemetery.

“You’ll regret it,” Maureen had told her, and now Lauren said the very same thing. Ava’s two friends were opposites, but when it came to Jamie, they agreed that she should stay away.

“A Mather should always be avoided,” Lauren called after Ava, who was already headed down the path, not listening to the words of warning. “Love will ruin her,” Lauren said sadly as she and Lionel watched Ava disappear into the dusk.

“You’re wrong, you know.” Lionel understood that his sister was still the girl she’d been, the one who had always feared the cruelty of the world, who was drawn to the Crooked Path to protect herself against attachments and grief. All the same, he had promised himself he would always do his best to be honest with his sister. “It’s people that ruin things, not love.”

Each time Ava took a breath as she approached Jamie she felt her ribs would shatter.

“Here you are,” Jamie said when she sat beside him on the gravestone next to the faithful dog. As for Jack, he kept his distance.

“I didn’t know if you’d show up,” Ava said.

“I thought I’d better show. I had that dream again, only this time you were running away from me. Probably a good move.”

Ava had dreamed the exact same thing. “My feet were bleeding.”