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I placed my candle in the holder on the dust-covered desk, then walked to the bookcase on the west wall. Using both hands, I pried the bookcase away from the plaster. It swung open, letting out a silence-splitting creak of protest. Behind it was the smaller, white paneled door with its brass knob and an old-fashioned keyhole. I tugged the key on its purple cord out of the pocket of my jeans. As I slid the key into the hole, I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure none of my friends had returned. Then I turned the key with a click, and the ice-cold doorknob turned easily in my grasp.
Frigid air rushed up from the basement, along with a musty yet somehow cozy smell that made me think of the basement of the Croton library. The dank room housed all the historical books, and older kids were always getting caught making out down there. I reached back for my candle and held it high in front of me as I descended the stairs, feeling a rush of excitement. I’d been looking forward to this moment all day long.
When my foot hit the concrete floor, I paused. My throat was dry as I looked around. The basement room was a perfect circle. Eleven chairs were set up to face the center, and at that center was the podium, plain and sturdy and made of wood. I walked around the room until I was positioned against the wall directly behind the rostrum. Then I whipped the skirt of Noelle’s coat into my lap to keep from soiling it, and sat.
Inhaling a bit of the musty air, I looked slowly around the room and smiled. Elizabeth Williams had hung out here. She’d been in this very room with Theresa Billings and Catherine White and all the other girls mentioned in the BLS book. I wished I knew what they looked l
ike, and wondered why I’d never thought to try to dig up photographs of them before. They’d had cameras in 1915, hadn’t they? Tomorrow I would have to check the Easton archives and see if I could find any photographs.
I tugged out the BLS book first and opened it to the second page, where each of the members of the first Billings Literary Society had signed their names. Then I slowly opened the book of spells. Near the front was a list of basic spells, and next to each was a little tick, as if someone had checked them off after completing them. Next to some items there were notes, written in a few different hands:
Third attempt successful, or Must be done with two sisters, holding hands.
Some of these notes were in the same slanting script as the BLS book—there was the curled-down tail on the y’s and the flourish on the s ’s. That small scroll to the w ’s, m ’s, and n ’s. The handwriting belonged to Elizabeth Williams.
Carefully, I studied some of the other notes, my eyes flicking back and forth from the signature page in the BLS book to the book of spells. Suddenly, my heart caught. Some of the other notes had been written by Catherine White, Elizabeth’s best friend. Her lowercase a’s and o’s were perfectly rounded, almost like a child’s handwriting.
A shiver of satisfaction went through me, like when I figured out a calculus problem. I paged through the book of spells, glancing at some of the titles. The Forgetfulness Spell. The Swelling Tongue. Spell to Mend a Broken Heart. Then something caught my eye as I whipped past, and I slowly paged back. Written across the top of the page were the words The Presence in Mind Spell.
That handwriting was not Elizabeth’s, but it looked familiar. I glanced back at the list of signatures and picked it out right away. The strokes were thick and confident, the uppercase letters overly large. The spell had been written out by Theresa Billings.
“This is so freaking cool,” I whispered.
I looked around the room again, hugging myself against the cold. I imagined Theresa, Elizabeth, and Catherine at the podium, jotting down notes in the book. Had they really cast spells in this room? Had any of them worked? Was that even possible? Or was it a game to occupy their time?
Biting my lip, I flipped to the incantation near the front of the book of spells—the one that could supposedly turn a group of eleven regular girls into witches. I’d found it that afternoon at lunch, when I’d spent the period holed up in a study carrel at the back of the library. The directions were explicit. Eleven girls dressed in white were required. They were to stand in a circle, each holding a candle, and recite the incantation. A thrill of silly excitement went through me. If it required eleven girls in white to work, then it couldn’t do any harm for me to say it on my own, could it?
“Like it could do any harm anyway, loser,” I whispered to myself. “This stuff isn’t real.”
I took a deep breath and held it, squelching an embarrassed giggle. Then I moved my candle over the page and read.
“We come together to form this blessed circle, pure of heart, free of mind. From this night on we are bonded, we are sisters.” My voice shook with giddy mirth at my own childishness, but whatever. This was fun. “We swear to honor this bond above all else. Blood to blood, ashes to ashes, sister to sister, we make this sacred vow.”
I heard a creak that stopped my heart, and suddenly a gust of wind shot through the circular room, swirling my hair up off my shoulders and extinguishing my candle. Heart in my throat, I scrambled to my feet, the books tumbling to the floor at my toes. The acrid, birthday-party smell of the candle’s smoke curled through my nostrils as heavy footsteps clomped down the stairs, every groan of the ancient planks like an arrow to my heart, every crack heightening my terror. I pressed my back against the wall, wondering if there was any way to use my candle as a weapon. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the candle flickered to life again. I stared at the flame, transfixed, my heart seized with fear.
How could that have possibly happened?
Just then, Noelle arrived at the foot of the stairs. Her hands braced the walls, level with her ears, and she looked at me with a wry expression.
“I knew it!”
“Noelle! You scared the crap out of me!” I blurted.
“Which you deserve!” she said, tromping across the room. “What are you doing? Please tell me you’re not really taking this stuff seriously.”
She wrested the BLS book from my hands and looked at it. “What are you, writing a term paper now?”
I grabbed the book back and, with a trembling hand, shoved the freaky candle at her. As I crouched on the floor, cramming the books into my messenger bag, I took a few breaths to steady myself. Obviously the wind had gusted down the stairs when Noelle had opened the door. And as for the candle … it was just a faulty wick. Or one of those trick candles that could relight itself.
Except I’d never seen one of those that wasn’t birthday-cake-candle size.
“I was just messing around,” I improvised, shouldering my bag as I stood. “I was trying to figure out whether those Billings Literary Society girls really believed in this witchcraft crap.”
Noelle, to my surprise, looked interested. “And? Did they?”
“Some of them, I think,” I said, lifting my shoulders. For some reason, I didn’t want to name names. I felt like I’d be betraying the BLS girls somehow. Opening them up to Noelle’s ridicule. Which was, of course, ludicrous, since all of them had been dead for probably thirty years.
“Yeah, well, people were a lot more gullible back then,” Noelle said, turning and heading for the open doorway. “Come on. There’s still a mess upstairs and I am not hanging out here again if it’s infested with mice.”
