Page 16 of The Women of Wild Hill
“Have you seen her?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes,” Flora said. “But only at the window. She’s never come to me. Did she tell you anything about the key?”
It seemed to take Flora a moment to recover from Phoebe’s nod.
“That’s wonderful. Bessie hasn’t spoken to anyone in ages. What did she tell you?”
“She said the key wouldn’t work until my daughter is with us at Wild Hill.”
Flora could no longer conceal her shock. “Your daughter?”
“I don’t understand.” It unnerved Phoebe to see her mother go so pale. “What does it mean?”
Flora scooped Phoebe up off the pillows and squeezed her tight. “It means that one day your daughter will be the most powerful of us all. I can’t wait to see what she’s able to do.”
NEVER AGAIN DID FLORA REFERto herself and her daughters as The Three. She didn’t live long enough to find out what gifts her granddaughter would be blessed with. But Flora did speak to Bessie as she’d always wanted. The ghost appeared to the girls’ mother on the day she died. That’s when Flora learned what The Three would do.
The Old One
In my time, men believed all witches served Satan. They couldn’t imagine women were capable of wreaking mayhem on our own. So they claimed we were following the devil’s orders when we made the butcher’s pecker stop working or the farmer’s heifer birth a two-headed calf.
Now when faced with misfortune, most men turn to science for answers. They don’t burn women anymore, which I reckon is progress. They search for a rational explanation instead. They usually find one, but sometimes, to be honest, a witch is to blame. We all know which herbs will make dicks go soft.
I have been around for a very long time, and I’ve eavesdropped on many a learned man. The truth is, women will always confuse them. Witches or not, they’re not sure how we work. Women are clearly in league with nature. Even our cycles follow those of the moon. We create life out of little and intuit things that men don’t. We terrify them because we possess powers they aren’t able to plunder. Because they’ll never be able to do what we can, they decided long ago to declare us inferior.
So fearful were men that they needed their god to grant them dominion. Women would be ruled, though their desires run contrary. And all those fishes and fowls were theirs to do with as they pleased. If you take men’s word for it, everything on earth was created for either their sustenance or their pleasure. The big bearded god in the sky put it all here for them to eat, smoke, and fuck.
Men have told themselves these stories for so long, they’ve becomeconvinced of their truth. But that will end soon enough, and they will be made to regret their arrogance. For the Old One moves slowly, but when she chooses to smite, her aim is unerring. These men tremble at the power of their terrible god. But no human has ever dreamed of the swarms she can summon.
The four centuries I’ve witnessed have been a blink of her eye. The Old One’s time is closer to that of the trees she created to act as her sentries. Now, at last, they’ve had a chance to report what they’ve seen. The beings the Old One expected to steward her garden have destroyed it instead. There is not an inch of the earth nor a drop of ocean that they haven’t befouled. They have murdered whole species—some for food, others for sport, and most simply by negligence. They’ve yoked other creatures and enslaved their own kind.
When humans first huddled around the fires they’d built, they honored the Great Mother who fed and sheltered them. They carved her voluptuous image into stone and painted her creations on the sides of their caves. Then, while the Old One toiled elsewhere, they began building cities and worshipping muscles and spears. They claimed nature was meant to be conquered by masculine power. Women existed to satisfy urges and deliver them sons.
The Old One, in her wisdom, had foreseen this might happen. So she gave women a touch of her magic, and she chose a handful of bloodlines to endow with great gifts. As time passed, these families grew more powerful—the way fruits become sweeter and poisons more potent. She wanted these women to be close to the earth. She taught them how to harvest her medicines and read her signs. A chosen few learned to summon storms, channel energy, and speak to the dead.
These skills did not go unnoticed by the men, who lacked them. Over the ages, kings, popes, and priests tried their best to rid the world of such rivals. Untold thousands of us were tortured, burned, or hanged by the neck. Yet the killings couldn’t end the threat. Wherever a witch perished, the soil soaked up her power and passed it along to the nextworthy candidate. When the witch hunters realized they wouldn’t be able to murder every powerful woman, they endeavored to convince the world that we didn’t exist.
But we did. And we do. I’ve haunted Wild Hill for four hundred years, but I don’t belong to this place. Wild Hill is inside the Duncan blood. No witch has done what their family will do.
Only The Three can balance the scales.
The Reaper
Across the grounds from the caretaker’s house stood a giant guardian oak. Centuries before the Duncan family arrived on Wild Hill, its gnarled roots had broken up through the soil. They reached out in every direction, searching for something that must have proven elusive, before plunging back into the ground. At the base of the tree, the roots formed a seat so perfect it could have served as a throne. This was where Ivy would go when she had important thinking to do.
“Why do you come here?” Brigid asked one day when she found her aunt leaning back against the tree’s trunk with her eyes closed.
“This old tree has seen everything,” Ivy told her. “It knew the tribes that lived here before the Dutch and the English. It was watching when the first European boats arrived on this shore. It saw what happened to Bessie and everything that has taken place here ever since. It knows humankind better than any one of us ever will. When I sit here, I know I’m in the presence of wisdom.”
After that, it was Brigid’s favorite place, too. But she loved the oak not for its wisdom but because she and the tree shared something else in common. Like Brigid, the oak knew what it felt like to bear witness and be helpless to act.
AFTER SHE DISCOVERED HER GIFT,Brigid saw many more people pass. None of the dead were friends or loved ones. They werestrangers she happened to brush against in the grocery store or the library. She saw a man fall off a ladder and a woman lose consciousness behind the wheel. Worst, she watched a young child be hit by a bus. In each case, her predictions were met with anger or confusion. The victims and their families never believed her until it was too late.
Brigid lived in terror that she would see someone in her own family die. Every day, she reminded herself of what Aunt Ivy had taught her. Until a vision arrived, there was no reason to worry. Those she loved were perfectly safe. She tried not to think about the other thing Ivy had hinted at. Sometimes, while in the embrace of Wild Hill’s giant oak, Brigid would wonder if she’d ever be called upon to take a life. She decided, if asked, she’d simply refuse. The Old One could show her things she did not want to see, but she couldn’t make Brigid kill.
Not long after she made that momentous decision, Brigid murdered the first of many men.
IT WAS THE SUMMER SHEturned thirteen and Phoebe twelve. They were allowed to leave Wild Hill on their own and walk into the village of Mattauk each Friday. There, they would eat burgers and fries at the diner on Main Street and buy giant gobstoppers at the five-and-dime, which they would suck down to their chalky cores while reading the store’s comics for free.
