Halloween Night, 2025
Up in the old part of town where the ancient graveyard of the first settler families pressed against the woods, rain echoed all around.
This wasn't the touristy part of Salem, with its witch-themed shops, ghost tours, overpriced candles and costumed witches posing for selfies. That part of town was still buzzing under cheap plastic ponchos, tourists and locals out late on Halloween night.
Lilith Proctor stood alone, staring at a name on a gravestone. The air smelled like damp moss and rust, the kind of smell that soaked into your clothes and refused to leave.
What would her best friend think of what she was doing right now? Probably that she'd lost her mind.
But he wasn't here to stop her, and that was the problem.
Lils played with the silver pentacle necklace that his mother had given her before they buried him. She said, he’d want you to have it, as she placed it in Lilith's palm.
No, she thought bitterly at the time. He wouldn't want that, because he'd want to be alive to wear it himself.
She tucked the pentacle necklace underneath her shirt, and it was cold on her skin. But Lils wasn’t here to reminisce, she was here for something else.
◆◆◆◆
ELIZA PROCTOR
Salem, Massachusetts
Born 1676
Hanged 1692
◆◆◆◆
“Hey again,” she said as she approached the headstone, kneeling down and shrugging off her backpack. Rain immediately soaked through the knees of her jeans.
“Sorry I’ve been talking to you so much lately. I know you’re dead and all and probably can’t hear me, but...”
She trailed off. What was she supposed to say? But my best friend died and it makes me too sad to visit him, so I’ve been coming here instead?
Sixteen years old when she died. Sixteen, just like Stevon had been.
But opposed to Stevon's grave, there was no epitaph. No “beloved daughter” or “gone too soon” or any of the lines people add to graves to make death seem a little less brutal. For Eliza, it was just a name, two dates, and the method of execution.
Lils had walked past this grave a million times growing up in Salem, never giving it a second thought. Just another dead Puritan in a town full of dead Puritans.
But then Aunt Ivy had mentioned that ancestry project from UMass, how they’d traced the family line, how Eliza Proctor was actually related to them. A distant cousin or great-great-great-whatever-aunt, connected through her brother, Samuel Proctor.
Lils glanced at her watch. Three more minutes. Three more minutes, and then she could start the ritual.
She thought briefly about what those Puritan judges would think if they witnessed actual blood magic on All Hallows Eve and smiled.
Wet leaves had gathered over the old headstone and Lils brushed them away with her boot. Her phone lit up. A text from Lucy, wondering when she'd be back home. She powered it off and shoved it deep in her backpack.
The drizzle turned into a downpour, and Lils didn’t move. Just let the rain soak through her black hoodie—the one from the road trip through Seattle she and Stevon went on earlier that summer. The one that still smelled like him if she didn’t wash it, which she hadn’t.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She had to do this tonight. There was no other window.
Or a least that’s what Aunt Ivy’s grimoire said. The grimoire that had been in their family for five generations, so there was that.
◆◆◆◆
This was the one night of the year when the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest, and Lilith wasn’t planning on leaving without trying.
Something had been pulling at her for weeks now. Months, maybe. A feeling like someone was tugging on an invisible string attached to her chest.
Not a voice exactly, more like white noise on a frequency she could almost hear. Like someone was trying to call her from very far away and the connection kept cutting out.
She knew it sounded unhinged, knew grief could make you believe weird shit. But this felt different, somehow.
Lils crouched by Eliza’s grave and started pulling supplies out of her backpack. Tarot deck, cedar bundle, black salt, tourmaline for protection. And the thing she definitely wasn’t supposed to have borrowed: Aunt Ivy’s ceremonial athame, the silver knife with the sharp blade and the handle wrapped in leather.
Aunt Ivy was going to kill her for taking it. If this worked though, it would be worth it.
She’d only ever done minor spells before...a glamour spell to make her hair extra shiny the day of homecoming, that one time she and Stevon tried a banishing spell for math homework (it hadn’t worked, much to their disappointment).
But blood magic? Aunt Ivy had forbidden it. You’re not ready, she’d said. And blood magic isn't used much in our practice anymore.
A gust of wind cut through the trees above the graveyard, scattering leaves and carrying the scent of smoke. It smelled like something bitter, like burnt herbs. Lilith glanced up.
Somewhere in a distant time, another Proctor girl’s scream echoed through the woods.
No one was there, yet Lils felt the sudden sensation on the back of her neck, as if someone was watching her.
She straightened up, trying to shake it off. Her beat-up black backpack lay beside her, and she unsheathed Aunt Ivy’s ceremonial knife. Lils paused, looking up at the stormy sky and willing herself to do what came next.
Turning the freshly-sharpened blade to her thumb, she pressed until blood welled up, letting it drip onto the grave, onto the patch of earth.
Lilith had spent weeks researching the blood ritual in Aunt Ivy’s grimoire. The instructions were clear: offer blood at an ancestor's grave, speak the incantation, and if the veil was thin enough, contact might be possible.
But there were warnings too. Crossroads Keepers, ancient guardians who appeared when the boundaries between worlds were breached, could appear and help. Or hinder, depending on their judgment.
“Blood of my blood,” she began, reciting the incantation she’d memorized. “Bone of my bone. I call across the years to—”
The ground surrounding Eliza’s headstone was already changing. A darker patch of soil had bloomed outward in a jagged circle, like ink dropped into water. It was warm and Lilith pressed her palm against it, testing. The earth felt soft, almost alive.
“This isn’t a game.”
A woman in a long dark coat had appeared from the fog, materializing so suddenly it was as if she’d stepped out of a curtain of rain. She stood mere feet away, eyes concealed under a wide-brimmed black hat.
Her hands were bare despite the cold and rain, fingers long and pale.
The rain didn’t touch her, instead falling around her like she was protected by an invisible shield. Lils, on the other hand, resembled a drowned rat.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there,” Lilith started.
“These grounds are not yours to disturb.” The woman’s voice was cold, commanding. “Leave here in peace.”
Lils’s voice caught, but she spoke anyway despite shaking. “This is public property. I can be here if I want.”
The woman tilted her head, clearly surprised. Then, slowly, she raised one arm. Pointing.
Lilith’s breath caught as she realized who this was. Everything she’d read about Crossroads Keepers came to the forefront. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not yet. The Keeper wasn’t supposed to appear until after the ritual was complete, if they even appeared at all.
Lils started to turn, but before she could see what the woman was pointing at, lightning split the sky.
The crack of thunder was immediate, deafening. Lils staggered, dropping the knife. The graveyard began to peel away in layers, reality itself unraveling. She felt herself being pulled, stretched, torn through something vast and cold… And then Lilith’s world went black.
◆◆◆◆
When Lilith came to, the tall woman had vanished.
The rain had stopped and the trees around her were bare, skeletal. A murder of crows perched on stacked stone fences, watching her and chattering.
The air was different; colder now. The sky was painted in streaks of pink and orange, the early light of dawn. Lils was lying on a narrow dirt path at the edge of a clearing she didn’t recognize.
She pushed herself up on shaking arms, her head spinning. Ahead of her in the clearing, a young woman was running toward the woods. Behind her in the distance, someone shouted, ”Eliza! Eliza Millicent Proctor!”
A torn skirt and rough linen shift whipped around her as she ran, her dark hair tangled. Lils watched the young woman glance back once, directly at her, before disappearing into the trees.
In that brief moment, Lils saw the girl’s face clearly. It wasn’t identical to her own, exactly, but the resemblance was still remarkable; the same dark hair, same expression, similar eyes.
Lils could have sworn she saw a flash of recognition in that terrified face.
Then the girl was gone, and the clearing was empty except for Lils lying there in the dirt with her blood-stained thumb and Stevon’s pentacle necklace. Thinking she could see a woman approaching her through the clearing, she promptly pretended to have passed out.