Hocus Pocus Read online

  “ ’Tis her life force!” said Winifred. “The potion works.” She stretched her arms toward her sisters. “Take my hands—we will share her.”

  Fingers entwined, the three witches advanced upon Emily. They leaned forward and inhaled deeply. Curls of amber light drifted away from Emily and down their wretched throats.

  Thackery dragged himself to a nearby ladder and managed to prop himself up, but the world sloshed around him and he couldn’t think of how words were supposed to be strung together. He watched his sister, though, and felt that his heart would break.

  The sisters took a final inhale and the light around Emily disappeared behind their lips. Emily’s narrow chin tipped forward and her body went limp. Her face was suddenly drawn and sallow, her skin threaded with thin gray veins as if her blood, too, had been stolen from her.

  Thackery lurched toward her but only managed to vomit onto the floor. He tried to look away from his sister, but he couldn’t help staring at her in horror. Emily. Dead. Dead and shrunken like a frail old woman. Thackery vomited again. He hadn’t eaten since supper, and the thin bile from his stomach soured his tongue.

  Sarah Sanderson spun about, running fingers through her newly golden curly hair. “I am beautiful!” she squealed. “Boys will love me!”

  Mary’s plump face looked nearly pleasant, thanks to the color creeping back into her cheeks. She pouted her red lips, which still twisted to one side. “We’re young!” she laughed, clapping.

  Winifred hurried to pick up a mirror. Her face fell, and for a moment Thackery suspected she wished she hadn’t been so generous in sharing with her sisters. “Well,” she said, “younger.” Then a surge of energy seemed to ripple through her, and she raised both arms in triumph. “But it’s a start!” She cackled.

  The sisters promenaded together while Thackery continued to drag himself onto unsteady feet.

  “Oh, Winifred,” cooed Mary, “thou art a mere sprig of a girl.”

  “Liar!” Winifred crowed. “But I shall be a sprig of a girl forever,” she said, twirling each of her sisters, “once I suck the life out of all the children in Salem!” She turned to face Thackery and beamed, then advanced on him. “Let’s brew another batch,” she suggested.

  “You hag,” he growled. “There are not enough children in the world to make thee young and beautiful.”

  That made Winifred stop short. “Hag,” she repeated distastefully. “Sisters, did you hear what he called you?”

  Thackery wanted to point out that he’d been speaking specifically to her, but she spoke again before he could muster the energy: “Whatever shall we do with him?”

  “Barbecue and fillet him,” suggested Mary.

  “Hang him on a hook,” said Sarah, reaching for his chest, “and let me play with him.”

  “No,” snapped Winifred, and then, more softly, she called for her book. The heavy tome floated through the air to reach her. The book was bound in scraps of thick, tanned human skin and roughly stitched together with thread that made the seams look like scars on a dead man’s face. A metal clasp on the book’s cover encircled a bit of puckered leather in the shape of an eye. “Dazzle me, my darling,” she crooned. The book opened of its own accord, and she paged through it until she found the perfect spell. “His punishment shall not be to die, but to live forever with his guilt.”

  “As what, Winnie?” her sisters asked, delighted.

  She stepped toward Thackery, and though he tried to evade her walnut-brown eyes and the sight of her large teeth and narrow pursed lips, his ears filled with her chanting: “ ‘Twist the bones and bend the back,’ ” she said, and her sisters murmured a soft spell beneath her words. Thackery winced, but Winifred went on: “ ‘Trim him of his baby fat. Give him fur as black as black. Just . . . like . . . this.’ ”

  Thackery felt his body twisting and turning in on itself, felt his bones snapping and reshaping into smaller, thinner versions of themselves. The last spell had felt like lightning beneath his skin, but this felt like a terrible bubbling in his marrow, and even as he screamed, he heard his voice come back in a shrill yowl.

  The house rattled with the pounding of fists on its doors and windows, and through his pain, Thackery heard his father’s voice. But it was too late.

  He dragged himself to safety under a chest of drawers and let the pain sweep over his body and through his mind, spiriting his consciousness away.

  The verdict was settled before the trial began, but the Sanderson witches’ case was not helped by their refusal to show remorse.

  That very same night—a dark, drizzling end to All Hallows’ Eve—the three sisters stood on barrels stinking of fish, three lengths of rough rope looped around three guilty necks, and they cackled and teased the crowd as their sentences were read under the light of flickering lanterns and hungry-looking torches.

  “They’re mad,” said the tray maker to the milliner. “When did they turn so mad?”

  “When they sold their souls to the Devil in a despicable tryst with yellow hellfire and wickedness,” said the milliner, as if he’d been there.

  “Hmmm,” mused the tray maker. “It seemed to help Sarah’s complexion, though.”

  It began to rain then—fat drops that soaked woolen tunics and ran into well-worn boots. The judge—who was also the priest of Salem and two bordering townships and, in his humble opinion, severely overworked and underappreciated—tried to speed things along.

  “What say thee, witches?” he demanded.

  Sarah Sanderson tittered on her barrel. “We say thou weren’t so judgy when coming to us last May for a potency potion. . . .” She cast her eyes below the man’s round stomach and batted her lashes as the crowd broke into whispers and shifted from one soggy foot to the other.

  “Lying jezebel!” cried the judge.

  But before Sarah could retort, the father of dead Emily spoke up. “Winifred Sanderson,” he said. “I will ask thee one final time: what hast thou done with my son, Thackery?”

  “Thackery?” asked the eldest witch. In the dim torchlight, her face looked like chalk against the scarlet of her curls.

  “Answer me!” he shouted. His arm was around the shoulders of his wife, who wept openly into his damp jacket.

  “Well, I don’t know!” Winifred protested, then gave her sisters a knowing, secret smile. “Cat’s got my tongue!”

  The Sanderson witches shrieked with laughter at Winifred’s joke. As the sound of it died down, Sarah chafed at the rope around her neck. “This is terribly uncomfortable,” she said.

  Winifred cleared her throat, and before anyone in Salem could stop them, the Sanderson witches began to sing and chant in unison: “Thrice I with mercury purify and spit upon the twelve tables.”

  “Don’t listen!” cried the judge. “Cover your ears!”

  The gathered mass rushed to heed him as the sisters spat into the crowd.

  “Don’t drop the book!” someone shouted, but it was too late. Elijah Morris, the judge’s apprentice and a boy who’d lost his best friend to these wicked sisters only that morning, covered his ears, too, dropping Winifred’s leather-bound spell book as he did. The heavy thing sank into the mud with a satisfied squish. A moment later it flew open of its own accord, hundreds of pages shuddering and chuckling in the wind.

  Mary and Sarah looked gleefully at it, the latter clapping her slender hands.

  But Winifred, the eldest, let her gaze linger on the back of the crowd, her brown eyes piercing and gone almost black but her expression somehow bemused, like a cat who’d just transformed her master into a crippled mouse. Then her attention snapped back to her spell book. A laugh tumbled out of her broad chest. “Fools!” she crowed, relishing the word. “All of you! My ungodly book speaks to you: On All Hallows’ Eve, when the moon is round, a virgin will summon us from under the ground.” Her delight bubbled over into her sisters, who giggled and beamed alongside her. “We shall be back!” Winifred proclaimed. “And the lives of all the children of Salem shall be mine!”

  White lightning cracked across the sky, and the executioner, dressed all in black, kicked down the barrels, Sarah, Winifred, and Mary dropping in quick succession. Their bodies shuddered and their toes stretched on swinging stockinged legs, and at last they were still and singing no more.

  As the crowd began to shuffle off, the spell book was closed and lifted. As the book rose, the eyelid on its cover blinked open and the watery green iris searched out its rescuer.

  Through a film of cataracts and rain, the spell book’s eye saw thick dark curls obscuring a face, and then it was tucked beneath an arm and secreted away.

  NOCK-KNOCKS,” said Dani, grinning up at her sixteen-year-old brother as she trotted down the sidewalk. Leaves drifted through the air around them—thin slips of yellow and broad, shaggy orange things the size and shape of their dad’s hands—and the morning was just starting to break open and turn the world gold.

  Max rolled his eyes and swung his bike in a big loop to match her slow progress. “Can you please not?”

  It was Halloween, and the houses on both sides of the little neighborhood street were decked out with cobwebs and tombstones, giant spiders and jack-o’-lanterns—some of which were already starting to sag a little with mold.

  Dani giggled as she ran through the pale tendrils of a ghost horde gathered in a tree.

  “Ta-tas,” she said, a little louder. Her pointed black hat sported a thin orange trim around the brim, which matched her sun-patterned jacket and striped skirt. She’d dressed as a witch, but in her own words, “a fancy one.” The grin she gave Max, though, was more impish than witchy.

  Max glanced behind them to make sure the street was still as deserted as when they had left for school. “Seriously, Dani. Not the place.”

 
He should’ve known better than to talk about Allison Watts to Jack, because Jack still lived in Santa Monica, and Max’s house had a shared phone line and a nosy eight-year-old.

  “YABOS,” Dani squealed.

  Max blushed hard, looking over his shoulder. “I’m going to leave you,” he said. “Find your own way to school.” He spun another loop, catching too much speed on the turn. He stopped short before hitting the curb.

  Dani stopped, too, eyes sparkling with mischief beneath the brim of her witch’s hat. A few strands of tawny hair stuck to her red lipstick. “Then Mom will ground you forever,” she said.

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,” he muttered.

  Dani put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Oh, don’t be that way,” she said. “Then how will you ever see Allison’s bazookas?”

  Max groaned, leaning forward over his handlebars. “Please stop,” he begged. “It’s not even like that.”

  “It sounded a lot like that.” She tugged on his sleeve to get them moving again.

  Max relented, bike wobbling as he pedaled slowly beside his sister. “That’s why you shouldn’t eavesdrop on people,” he said. “You lose context. One day you’ll know what that means.”

  “Does it mean you saving up to run away to Jack’s house and become the next X-Ray Glasses? Because I heard about that, too.”

  “The X-Ray Spex,” Max muttered. “You know, I don’t have to walk you to school anymore if I don’t want to.”

  It was true: one of the few perks he’d been promised about their family’s move from LA to Salem was that they’d live far enough from school that Dani would qualify for bus pickup. But the previous night she’d said the bus made her lonely, and she’d begged him to bike ahead and meet her one stop early so they could walk the rest of the way together. He’d agreed against his better judgment. She was still his little sister, after all, and as long as she’d been going to school, they’d been walking together. But now he was paying the price for nostalgia.

  “But you do want to,” said Dani, dancing through the graveyard on someone’s front lawn. “Or you would’ve said no.” She stepped on a button, and a plastic corpse with matted black hair sat up with a shout, making her shriek and race back to the sidewalk.

  As they rounded the corner, Max saw, at the top of the hill, the skinny blond and the no-necked bonehead known as Jay and Ernie. In the two weeks since his family had moved to Salem, Max had avoided any run-ins with the town bullies, but he could already tell they were the kind of boys whose kindergarten teachers, searching for something nice to say during parent–teacher conferences, would’ve settled on persistent.

  Jay and Ernie’s lackeys seemed to appear out of nowhere as they swaggered down the middle of the road, the embellishments on their faux-leather jackets glinting dully in the morning light.

  “You know,” said Max, wheeling around, “I think Mom told me they’re handing out candy at the side entrance.”

  He felt bad about lying to Dani, but she’d get more than enough Airheads and Pixy Stix later.

  “Hey!” she protested as they approached the annex door. “There’s no candy—”

  But her brother was already gone, speeding off toward Jacob Bailey High.

  Max was kneeling beside his bike, tying his shoelace, when a shadow spilled over his shoulder and onto the grass.

  He tensed, expecting Ernie’s hot pickle breath to hit his shoulder any minute. To buy time, he undid his laces and tied them again, carefully. The pristine white toe and accents of the otherwise black Nikes started to blur as Max considered the best way to slip away unscathed. He wasn’t about to let some mouth breather spit on his new sneakers just to get a rise out of him. He’d only gotten them as a pity gift from his parents when they’d announced their surprise move to The-Place-with-the-Witch-Trials, Massachusetts.

  “You dressed up!”

  Max turned to see Allison Watts smiling down at him. He glanced down at his shirt. A burst of tie-dye swirled up at him.

  “I didn’t, actually,” he said.

  Allison smirked. “Just that California lifestyle?”

  Max grinned. He hated when other people made lame California jokes, but Allison earned a pass because she’d helped him find the chemistry lab on his first day—not that he expected her to remember that now. Allison was the kind of person who helped classmates with homework in the hallway before first period; who always waited the appropriate amount of time before answering teachers’ questions, which turned her into a classroom hero instead of a show-off; and who had an intensity about her that made Max feel like he wanted to be part of her story. He could tell she’d become someone great one day—a president or an inventor or the CEO of a company that made flying cars. So when Allison cracked a joke about California, Max found that it made his stomach flip in a way that interfered with his ability to grimace.

  He opened his mouth to introduce himself, but no sound emerged. That day, like the past three days, he thought about asking her out, but then he thought about her rejecting him and how he’d have to awkwardly extract himself from the situation, which made walking through town with his sister howling about bazookas sound like a fun weekend activity.

  Allison watched his face, which must’ve been cycling through expressions of both hope and abject fear. When he still didn’t speak, her smile softened. “Well,” she said, “I’ll see you around, California.”

  “Bye—” Max called after her, deflated. He told himself she was a human being, not some otherworldly goddess. He told himself he should just talk to her, but the thought made him feel the way the ferry ride to Catalina Island had on his ninth birthday: weak-kneed and queasy. How was it possible that he’d fallen for her so hard in just two weeks?

  As Max shouldered his backpack and walked up the concrete steps, he cut past six of his classmates, all of them crowded together and gossiping about the old Sanderson house at the edge of town.

  “I’m telling you, we should go there before the party,” said a girl in an orange turtleneck. Over the turtleneck, she wore a slouchy blue sweater patterned with pumpkins.

  “No way,” whined her friend, who wore a red vest over a white sweater and looked more excited for Christmas than Halloween. She leaned against the front steps’ metal handrail. “I’m not going anywhere near that house. It’s creepy.”

  Max had to agree with the second girl. He’d seen the Sanderson house the previous weekend on a ride, and its rotting walls and sagging windows seemed to peer out of the woods as he cruised past. He’d also noticed the closed indefinitely signs tied along the wrought-iron fence that separated the Sanderson house—and much of Salem Wood—from the actual town of Salem.

  A boy who wore a brown sweater over a white shirt threw an arm around the shoulders of the girl in the red vest. “I’ll just have to hold you closer, Tess,” he teased, grinning.

  Tess beamed up at him. “My hero,” she sighed, and then snorted. As her head settled on the boy’s chest, their semicircle of friends laughing along with her, Max felt the seed of a plan begin to take root. . . .

  Max wasn’t sure why everyone filing into US History at the end of the day had grins on their faces. The classroom looked as it had for the past few weeks, with orange construction paper tacked to the pushpin boards that flanked the chalkboard at the front of the room. On one side was a silhouette of a frightened black cat, and on another a silhouette of a witch on her broom. Above the chalkboard, Miss Olin had replaced the framed portraits of her four favorite presidents with pen-and-ink drawings of four people involved in the Salem witch trials.

  Miss Olin herself sat at her desk while the class filed in, scribbling notes to herself among an array of miniature pumpkins. There was a creepy little witch doll propped up at the front edge of her desk. It was dressed in a black-and-white Pilgrim’s costume and a pointed hat with an orange ribbon for decoration—exactly like the one Miss Olin herself wore that day.

  Max took his seat in the third row, beside the girl in the red vest and just a few desks away from Allison Watts. After the bell rang, Miss Olin explained—for his benefit, he supposed—that Salem tradition dictated that on All Hallows’ Eve, each class’s history teacher recounted the town’s most popular Halloween story: one that had real witches and bubbling cauldrons and unbreakable spells. The way she said it made Max realize she was trying to express what a great honor this was for her, but he found himself concentrating on not rolling his eyes.