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“Oh, come on! It’s nighttime! There’s a fire! It’s the full moon, and there’s a Vesper who hasn’t heard the origin story!” Zale cried out. A few of the other teens nearby heard him because they began to egg him on.
“Tell it, Zale!”
“Wait, don’t start yet, I need another drink!”
“If I wanted to listen to more love letters to Sedgwick Cove, I could have just stayed home,” Nova grumbled, but she settled in comfortably against the log, evidently resigned to the fact that she would hear one anyway.
“This is great, you’ll love this,” Eva told me, nudging me with her elbow and smiling broadly. “It’s like, the official bedtime story of Sedgwick Cove kids.”
I smiled back, wondering if I’d heard it before when I was very young. Sure enough, as Zale cleared his throat and raised his arms for silence, I felt a strange twist of déjà vu in my stomach; and I could swear, without being able to recall ever hearing it before, that this story ran like blood in my veins.
“Before the witches came there was only the Darkness,” Zale began, and he dropped his voice melodramatically. I had just enough time to note that we seriously could have used his talent in our drama club before I got lost, along with the rest of the listeners, caught up in the web of words that he wove.
“The Darkness gathered in this place. It found much to strengthen it, to sustain it. Here, the veil between worlds was thin, and that closeness with the powers of the beyond fed and nurtured its power. The Darkness grew stronger, spreading its roots under the sand and between the rocks, claiming the Cove as its own.”
Someone nearby giggled nervously. I gave in to the illogical urge to tuck my feet up under me rather than leave them in the sand, as though one of those roots of Darkness might even now be slithering under the sand, like a serpent waiting to coil itself around my ankles.
“Who knows how many years the Darkness slept here, growing and feeding, a hibernating beast, until…” Zale threw back his head and raised his arms, waiting…
“UNTIL THE WITCHES CAME!” The response rose up all around me like a battle cry, followed by snorting, laughing, and general merriment. Someone flung a beer bottle into the flames, causing them to leap higher. Eva whooped. I couldn’t help but laugh, and just a bit of the tension was broken.
“Until the witches came,” Zale repeated, nodding his head approvingly. “They came by the sea, their power both blessing and curse. Whether they were drawn here by that same lure of power, or came upon the place by accident, none living can tell us; but step into the sands of the Cove they did, and they knew at once that they were home. They did not know what slumbered here, only that this place fed their magic and nurtured their power. They grew here, and thrived here, until, at last… they woke the Darkness.”
No laughter broke the tension now. Zale muttered under his breath, and I saw him reach into his pocket and extract something pinched between his fingers. He threw it over his shoulder into the flames and an unnatural hush fell over the group, like someone had thrown a muffling hand over the beach itself. It took me several seconds and a confirming nod from Eva to realize that Zale had performed a spell. I watched him eagerly now, more caught up in his tale than ever.
“At first, the witches did not know the true nature of what they had awakened. They knew it was of the Darkness, but they also knew that darkness and light must exist together, entwined in an endless dance. They were willing to share this place with the Darkness, each taking only what they needed to nurture their own existence. But the Darkness was greedy. It was not content to exist alongside the witches. It was hungry for them. It could see that their power was great, and the Darkness wanted that power for its own. It had grown too swollen, too greedy. It wanted to turn them, to consume them.”
My imagination conjured a great beast emerging from its hibernation, something fierce and violent and hungry. Instinctively, I scooted closer to Eva on the log, and she pressed her side against mine, evidently just as happy as I was to have someone beside her while Zale spun his tale. Her eyes shone beneath the glorious halo of her natural curls, which had long ago sprung free of her headscarf.
“It was only after the witches lost one of their own to the Darkness that they understood they could not coexist in this place. But nor could they leave the Darkness to grow and spread unchecked. They had to find a way to bind it, to protect both their home and their magic from the Darkness that would seek to usurp them both. And so they called upon their sister witches and their deepest magic. They gathered upon the cliffs and summoned the elements…”
“Earth! Fire! Air! Water! Spirit!” came the sudden cry from all around the campfire, causing me to yelp in surprise, and drop my soda into the sand. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, as they shouted out the familiar refrain from the story they all knew as well as they knew their own names.
“And so it was, that the witches of Sedgwick Cove called up their deepest magic and bound the Darkness, so that it could not spread, and could not grow. And all these years later, the witches of Sedgwick Cove stand sentinel, guardians of the deep powers of this place, and bringers of the light. As stand the witches, so stands the Cove.”
The chorus rose up again around the fire in a raucous reply, “So it has been, and so shall it be still!” And then the circle broke into a barrage of clapping and whooping and laughing, while Zale gave a deep bow, and batted away the various objects now being lobbed at him in a combination of appreciation and hijinks.
I turned to Eva. “That’s what bedtime stories are like around here?”
“Yup.”
“And I’m assuming you’re all in therapy for your chronic nightmares, or is there just a potion you can take for that?”
She waved her hand impatiently. “Oh please. Have you ever read a fairy tale? All traditional children’s stories are basically nightmare fuel. At least ours is true!”
“Is it, though?” I asked, unable to repress the question before I blurted it out.
She cocked her head to one side. “Of course, it’s true. Can’t you feel it?”
She said it so matter-of-factly, and it gave me pause. I’d been so busy doubting everything I’d been told, so sure that I had to push back against it, to question everything, that I hadn’t given much thought to how I felt. Feelings were unreliable. They made it impossible to be objective, and in my mind, objectivity was as close as we could come to truth. But as I sat there under the stars, the salt breeze in my hair and the sand between my toes, I realized that the storyfelttrue in a way no fairy tale ever could—a truth I could feel running in my veins and tingling in my fingertips. I might not be ready to acknowledge the possibility of my own power, but there was no denying the deep power of this place.
I looked at Eva and nodded. “Yes. I think I can.”
“Well, what did you think? Your family history, courtesy of Zale MacDowell Productions,” Zale said, plopping back down into the sand again and gesturing around him, as though the entire beach was nothing more than a prop of his own creation.
“It was awesome,” I said with a golf-clap.
“It was tolerable,” Nova corrected me.
