Page 65 of The Witches of Cambridge

When Lauren returned to Carrick’s studio the following week, she found the door locked. No one answered her rapping, and no lights were turned on. She’d come to commission a painting for Lionel’s graduation from medical school, or at least that’s what she told herself. She peeked in the grimy windows, but it was too dim to see anything but shadows. As she sat down on the doorstep she noticed that a neighborhood boy was watching her. He wasn’t the one who’d made nasty remarks in the past, only a local kid of eleven or twelve. “No one’s there,” he said. “Goliath is gone.”

“Don’t call him that.” Lauren’s teeth looked sharp, and her tone was fierce. “It’s offensive.”

“OK,” the boy said. “Sorry.” To make up for his blunder, he added, “He went to New York City.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I heard he’s going to be an artist. He said to give this to anyone who came looking for him. Maybe that’s you.”

The boy took a scrap of paper from his pocket, handed it to Lauren, then ran off. “He is Goliath,” the boy shouted over his shoulder. “He’s stronger than anyone else.”

Lauren stayed where she was, sitting on the cement stoop. She had never needed a love potion. It had happened without magic. He had written down an address on Greenwich Street. I’ll be here. Now she knew the word he’d refused to tell her until she could figure it out for herself. It was love, and it had always been, and if she had dared to be honest with herself, she would have known it all along.

Lilith House rattled and fell apart. Hot water went cold, the telephone stopped ringing, blankets fell off beds, closets appeared to be ransacked. Lauren had received a formal note asking her to deliver her research notes, needed for the summer’s ancient Persian excavation. She was asked to leave the notebooks in a lab on the top floor of the museum. She hadn’t told anyone she’d received a letter of acceptance to begin graduate studies in the Anthropology Department at Oxford. She hadn’t even told Lionel, for she had misgivings. She kept thinking about Greenwich Street and had gone so far as to buy a train ticket to New York, which she kept in her purse. She hadn’t decided yet what she would do after graduation but she had written a note to Carrick. What if I get there and the door is locked?

It was after hours at the museum, and Lauren unfortunately ran into the janitor when she opened the door. “You don’t work here anymore,” Tim Randall said bluntly.

“I just need to leave some papers,” Lauren told him.

Randall had been at Harvard for twenty-three years and he still hadn’t met a student he liked. A few of them had gone so far as to break things they shouldn’t have touched in the first place. “Fine,” he said. “But don’t make me regret it.”

Lauren walked past him, making sure there was room between them because of the way he looked at her. Witch-hunters looked at women they distrusted that way. Men who were convinced a girl like Lauren had no business taking charge of anything, least of all an exhibition at Harvard. The museum’s magic was especially in evidence when it was empty of students and visitors. Artifacts appeared to be illuminated inside their glass cases; though they’d been unused for so long, they were brimming with histories of enchantment. Lauren traipsed up to a lab room on the fourth floor and set her notes on a desk. She noticed that the crow who had followed her was on the window ledge. He was tapping at the glass in a most annoying manner. She couldn’t help but think of Amelia Bell, who had been in mourning her whole life long.

It was then that Lauren noticed an odd pattern appearing on her dress. When she looked up, she saw a thin layer of red on the ceiling that was falling down upon her like a terrible rain, and that was when she knew a spell had been cast. There were red freckles scattered over her face and streaks of red on her bare arms. Ocher was a pigment that had been used for over 300,000 years to open the doorway between life and death, and to open the netherworld, the world we stepped into when we left our own. When she heard the door of the lab close, Lauren hoped it wasn’t the janitor, and then she almost wished that it were.

“You’ve come to see me,” Professor Sharpe said.

She hadn’t been in touch with Sharpe since the night she’d broken off their relationship. “I’m leaving my notes. No point in their going to waste.”

Lauren’s chin was raised defiantly, even though at this moment she felt a wave of fear. She thought of Claire, Ashton, and Emily having disappeared; all of them had worked in this lab. She thought she heard their voices. That’s when she knew she had made a mistake.

Sharpe opened the white cabinet against the wall to reveal several glass bottles of an inky black liquid. “My main interest is the result of a transfusion from someone like you.”

His analysis of the chemical structure of witches’ ointments and healing potions was extensive, but he couldn’t re-create the purity or the power of their blood. Amphibians produced toxins that were useful, and the carbon skeletons of such things could be reproduced, but when you reproduce magic you get something darker, something unnatural, something that allows you to believe you can take a life. You use the left hand without the right, darkness without light; you can take what you want without giving a damn about who and what you will affect. That is the thrill, that you cannot be drowned or stopped, you have more magic than anyone, you can sit and watch the furnace burn when you dispose of bodies. Bits of incandescent bone will glow as white as chalk and you won’t feel anything at all, not a bit of guilt or regret, but when you gaze out the window you won’t be able to see the stars anymore. They will have disappeared from the sky.

In order to possess his own magic, Sharpe had already taken the blood of three witches, and his transfusion experiment had been a success, for as their blood belonged to him now, so did their magic. He could shut windows and doors with a look, he could control minds, he could bring back dead creatures, whether they be birds or cats; perhaps he would try a human next. He had elemental powers and had made it rain, sleet, and snow; he could cause a tornado if he wished. Recently, he’d hatched a plan to go to the offices of the FBI in Washington and offer his help in tracking down radical writers and actors. He was an expert witch-hunter; he knew what you thought and what you felt, and he didn’t care if you were ruined. He practiced life-and-death magic and expected that the government would show their gratitude, that he would have whatever he wanted, and what he wanted never ended, for he could never be satisfied.

When he grabbed her, Lauren called up a spell, but she couldn’t manage to free herself and the incantation dissipated as if it were a spiderweb swept aside. He forced her onto the cold metal table, using ropes to make certain she couldn’t move. The room was dripping with black magic; it was running down the walls, it would thwart any enchantment she might call up. She thought of Cora Bell, who had been hanged from a tree less than a mile away, and of Amelia, who had painted her house black and worn mourning clothes all her life. She thought of how empty Lilith House was and how many of their sisters had disappeared, one at a time, one for every year.

The ocher was bringing Lauren to the threshold of the netherworld. The door to death was many things, but on this evening, Lauren’s vision was a black book that was opened to a page without words. That was how her life would end tonight. Sharpe was placing a needle into the vein on the inside of her elbow. The book opened wider, and she saw the cherry trees in her garden just as they were in Carrick’s painting, blue as a bruise. She saw her brother sitting in the old wicker chair watching over her and Ava pulling her back to the sidewalk on the night when they both might have lost their lives as they crossed the street. She saw her grandmother telling her not to forget to live and her parents walking down the brick path that was always hidden by hedges, not looking back, entering the realm from which there was no return.

Sharpe placed a cloth that had been soaked in ether and alkaloids that resembled belladonna over Lauren’s face. He then poured a potion into her mouth, a mixture of digitoxin and bufotoxin and foxglove. She had stopped struggling. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t move.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Lauren heard the professor quote from Exodus. The book had closed, and she was inside it; there were no words for her to call out anymore.

Jamie dreamed that he’d lost Ava. He had always been the crow in the tree, unable to return to the one he loved, and now he spied a white crow perched on a telephone wire. He had his brother’s car, so he drove to Lilith House. No one answered the door, and it felt as if the house had been completely deserted. The heirloom Mather watch Jamie wore no longer told time, so he had trained himself to observe the sun’s position in the sky, but darkness had fallen and he felt lost. At last he spied Ava on her way down the street with Jack.

“I thought you were gone,” he said, relieved, embracing her and not wanting to let go. But Ava was in a panic and she backed away.

“It isn’t me,” she said. “It’s Lauren who’s missing.”

They both got in Jamie’s brother’s car and followed the flight of the white crow to the museum, parking on Divinity Avenue. Of course this is where Lauren would be, Ava thought. Her favorite place on campus.

Jack leapt from the car as soon as the door opened, racing to the back door of the museum. The world was green, but on this night everything looked black. The ghosts of the missing girls who had been trapped in the museum were in the trees. Ava saw them in their white dresses, urging her on. The netherworld had opened its doors.

Jamie hunched down so that Ava could hoist herself onto his back and climb through a window that had been left ajar. She dropped through to land in a dark hallway. Jack barked so wildly that Jamie lifted him inside the window as well, then he called for Ava, but she had already gone on, with Jack at her heels. She had always been meant to rescue Lauren. It had been true on the night they met and it was true now.

In the dark corridor, Ava reached to take a pin from her hair, then cut her palm, allowing her blood to spill onto the floor as she spoke an ancient incantation. Veritas omnia est. Truth is all and everything. The pool of blood became a tiny stream that ran along the hallway. Ava had to hurry in order to follow the trail, which led to a laboratory door on the fourth floor.