The Devil in Salem: Part 2

“Can I help you?” Lucas asked.

“I wonder if I can help you,” said the cloaked figure in a hoarse voice.

“What do you mean?”

“I heard you say you would give anything to have a servant do the work for you.”

“I did say that, yes, but I don’t have much money. My business–”

“Yes, your wood shop doesn’t bring in a lot. I’ve seen it in town. I’m not asking for money. You see, my son needs to gain experience in order to get a job before anyone will hire him. If you teach him the trade, I’ll let you keep him around the house to bring in firewood and do whatever else you might need.”

“Sounds like a deal to me,” Lucas said.

The cloaked stranger nodded to his left where another black cloaked figure stood. The new figure removed his hood to reveal a handsome young man. His face was red, most likely from the cold, and his black, wavy hair flowed loosely around his face, giving him the appearance of a caveman.

 “What’s your name, boy?” Lucas asked the young man.

“Damon.”

“Ok. Why don’t you start by chopping up more wood while I get these pieces? Together, we’ll be able to bring more to the cottage.”

Damon grabbed the axe, which was sticking out of the log where Lucas had left it, and started chopping more wood while Lucas restacked the already cut pieces.

“I’ll leave you to your work, then,” said the first cloaked figure

“And I won’t have to pay?” Lukas said, looking up from his work.

“Not as long as you let him stay at your cottage with you and you have him working for you in your shop. I’ll count that as compensation,” the unnamed figure replied, and he stealthily disappeared into the woods, almost as if he had never been there at all.

It didn’t take long for Damon to chop an armful of firewood, which he gathered up and, grabbing the axe, followed Lucas back to the cottage. They returned the axe to the tool shed and brought all of the wood inside to revive the fire.

“What a handsome young devil you are!” Maureen said when Damon entered the house.

“Thank you, Miss!” Damon smirked.

 

“Maureen, you won’t believe what happened!” Lucas said to his wife and, while Damon tended to the fire, he told her all about what happened in the woods with the mysterious cloaked figure.

“Now I won’t have to be doing all the heavy duty work myself! And I have help in the shop. Maybe it will increase profits,” he said.

“Is there anything else you’d like me to do tonight?” Damon interrupted.

“No, I think that will be all. Why don’t I show you to the guest room? It’s never used, so it’ll need a bit of dusting,” he explained apologetically, leading the young man upstairs and pointing out the other rooms along the way. Since Damon didn’t bring any personal items, Lucas lent him some nightclothes.

This poor family must really be in trouble, Lucas thought, if they’re sending their son off to work without any possessions.

When Lucas went to his room, his wife was already lying down in bed, facing away from the door. Lucas slide in beside her and put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her.

“You might have consulted me before bringing a strange man into this house,” she told him.

“How was I supposed to do that? I was in the middle of the woods, chopping wood for our fire! And besides, he’s a boy, and this family seems to need help.”

“I understand you were in the middle of the woods,” she said, turning towards him, “and yes, it was a good thing you brought him here. But before agreeing that he could live here, you could have asked them if we could discuss it. They must live close by if they were in the woods.”

“So what do you want me to do? Should I send him back home tomorrow or can he stay here and help us, and learn my trade? It might bring more income if I have someone helping me in the shop.”

Maureen stared at the blanket.

“He can stay,” she sighed, not looking up.

And with that, the couple went silently to bed.

The Devil in Salem: Part One

Lucas was sitting in the armchair next to his wife’s in their small colonial Salem cottage next to the woods. He was reading The Devil in Salem by Will Getyu. Even though he refused to believe in nonsensical things such as women selling their souls to the Devil and writing their names in his book with their own blood, he loved learning the history of the Salem Witch Trials and reading about the gullibility of the people who truly believed that those girls were being attacked supernaturally.

Maureen, bundled in a thick shawl that she had made herself, was knitting a scarf next to him and staring into the dimming fireplace, occasionally glancing from it to her husband as if to say, are you going to go out and get more wood? He pretended not to notice and continued reading.

Finally, Maureen said to her husband, “Love, I think the fire needs more wood.”

“Why not just turn the heat up?” Lucas asked, knowing her response.

“This cabin is old. Turning the heat up could cause a fire.”

He knew she was right, so he got up out of his warm, comfortable spot, tossed the book onto the chair, and headed for the coat rack. He didn’t understand why she couldn’t ever get the wood, but he supposed it was proper for the man to do the job. He’d been getting the wood for the fireplace and making the majority of their income with carpentry for the entire 31 years of their marriage. Why should he expect that to change now? It’s not that she does nothing: she sells her knitting to the neighbors. But, he thought, I’m not as young as I used to be, and it would really be nice to have someone else do the dirty work for once.

Lucas decided he’d rather bring back large pieces of timber than collect all the sticks that were close to the cottage, so he went out to the tool shed to grab his axe and then headed into the woods, his boots crunching on the snow and dead leaves.

Deep in the woods, it was cold and the wind was picking up. Lucas was starting to regret taking the time to find a log to cut up when he could have just looked for kindling. “I’d give anything to have a servant do the work for me,” he muttered, bending down to examine a log he’d found. As he raised the axe to cut the first chunk off the log, he thought he heard rustling behind him.

He started and turned around but no one was there. He turned back and continued his work. Then he heard snow crunching. Again, he looked but no one was there. He continued cutting up the log until he had plenty of good sized chunks for the fire.

With his hands full of wood, he turned back to go to his house. All of a sudden, the path was blocked by a cloaked figure who wore only black. Lucas dropped the firewood. The figure for some reason reminded him of the illustrations in his book, even though he couldn’t tell at all what the person looked like. It just stood there as if staring at him.

The White Cat: a Love Story

One sunny spring morning, a merchant asked his son and daughter to go off into the woods and pick some flowers for their mother's birthday. They went separate ways, the brother staying along the path while the daughter wandered to a beautiful meadow she had seen through the trees. While she was picking wildflowers there, the girl thought she heard the bushes rustle behind her. But when she looked, no one was there. Thinking nothing of it, she continued to pick flowers.

Later that morning, the merchant's son returned home. His sister was nowhere in sight. The merchant and son searched the woods but could not find her anywhere. On their way home, they were discussing what to do and whether they should tell the mother when who should be standing in the doorway but the girl herself.

"Where were you?" her father demanded.

"Picking flowers for Mother," she replied.

"You had us worried! Never do that again!" he told her.

She told him she was sorry and that she would not frighten him like that again.

Over time, the merchant's son noticed that his sister was acting quite odd. He asked her one day why she was acting so strange.

“I’m acting the way I normally act,” she told him. “You clearly don’t know your own sister.”

 He apologized for upsetting her, holding out his arms in an attempt to comfort her. She hugged him back, and when they pulled out of their embrace, he locked hands with her and glanced under her left arm for the strange birthmark his sister bore: a single golden hair. There was no such hair on this girl. The merchant’s son knew this could not be his sister.

That very afternoon, he asked his father and mother for leave to go off and see the world, not telling them his theory so as not to alarm them. They granted his request, and he rode off into the country to seek his sister.

Meanwhile, far away, a white cat prowled anxiously around in an enchanted tower, looking for a new escape. The fairies of the surrounding enchanted wood had tried explaining how she was part of a prophecy in which humans and fairies were to be united. The fairies did not know exactly what the prophecy entailed, but they knew she was the one to fulfill it. However much they begged her to understand, she refused, hissing and clawing at any of them that came too close.

She had even tried to escape, before they turned her into a cat. She had woven a ladder from the yarn they had given her to occupy herself in her confinement. But the fairies, quickly discovering her plot on one of their daily visits, found the ladder stuffed in her mattress. They then turned her into a cat and undid her work so that all she could do was paw at it. The white cat spent her days playing with the string or licking herself, always taking longer to run her rough tongue over the golden hair under her left foreleg.  

She was homesick, constantly reminded of her family by the half-full basket of flowers, now dried up, that lay on the table in the center of the tower room. She passed time perched on the windowsill, watching robins and blue jays fly by, singing joyful tunes. Sometimes she just wanted to jump from the tower.

I wish they had turned me into a bird so that I might fly home, she thought to herself. The fairies are much smarter than that, though. Otherwise I wouldn’t be stuck in here while my family enjoys that imposter’s company.

Not many days passed before her loneliness came to an end.

It was a day like any other if you’re a cat trapped in a tower: sunny, with birds chirping and everything happy and free while she was miserable and lonely. The white cat was staring hopelessly out of the window when all of a sudden, a man appear from the trees, riding towards her imprisoning tower on a white stallion. When he was close enough, she mewed as loudly and forlornly as she could. He looked up and noticed her pacing the length of the window, unable to get down.

“You poor thing!” the man exclaimed. He dismounted and rummaged in his hunting bag for some rope, tied a large loop at one end, and flung it up towards the window latch in the hope that it would not only catch but that it could support his weight. As if by magic, it only took one try and he was up and in the tower in less time than it took to find it.

The man stayed with her in that lonely tower, tossing the ball of yarn so she could chase it and stroking her soft fur. He was so captivated by the sweet demeanor of the cat that he continued to visit the tower every day. He would have taken her, but he didn’t know who owned the cat, and he was not the kind of person to take something that did not belong to him.

She didn’t speak at first, for fear of frightening him away and never seeing him again. But one day, they were both so comfortable with each other that she started talking to him. At first he was shocked, but he cared too much about her to mind this magical quality. He listened as she explained her situation to him, how she had been kidnapped by the fairies and left in the tower. The only thing she didn’t tell him was about the prophecy.

He stroked her fur to comfort her. She purred. When he left that day, he lay awake that entire night thinking of any means to save the white cat from this horrible treatment.

The next day, he went to visit her again and tried to bring her out of the window with him. But the fairies had put a spell on the tower preventing her from leaving while she was in the form of a cat. The spell had to be broken before she could leave the tower.

So the man continued to visit her. Eventually he realized that he had fallen in love with her and did not want to leave her. She pleaded with him, knowing that he had duties he must attend to. He consented, but before he left, he asked her for a kiss. “I know you’re a cat, but you are the sweetest being I have ever met, and I love you.”

“I love you as well,” she said, and moved closer so that he may kiss her. And when he did, she transformed back into a maiden before his eyes! The tower started shrinking, the walls around them falling away, until they were standing on the ground, her hands in his, with a pile of stones lying next to them. He knelt down on one knee and asked her to marry him, and she could only nod and cry.

At this time, the merchant’s son happened to ride up to that very spot. “Sister!” he exclaimed, dismounting and running up to her.

“Brother!” she said, doing the same. And so it was settled. He brought his sister and her fiancé back home where the imposter, seeing the spell broken, disappeared altogether. Everything was explained and the wedding date was set.

When the wedding came, even the fairies showed up to bless the happy couple. It was discovered that the handsome young man was part fairy, so that the union between him the merchant’s daughter did indeed fulfill the prophecy.