Spring of 1692
Old Witch Gaol, before dawn
The rot and the damp and the sour reek of the cell that was once so foul to her now folded into the background, something she'd managed to tune out.
Lils sat with her back against the stone wall with her knees drawn up, turning over the events of the day like a well-worn worry stone.
She’d actually done well. That was the part that kept nagging at her most. She’d kept her voice calm, hadn't once answered with anger, and she hadn’t named anyone. She’d given Hathorne nothing to hang her with, dodging both of his traps.
And he hated her for that maneuvering. She could tell.
Here was the thing she finally understood about the trials: cleverness didn’t matter. She’d read these trial transcripts and never absorbed the one, core lesson that was screaming at her now, so very clearly— the court wasn't interested in fairness or justice, and it didn’t want a clever answer. It wanted to condemn a witch.
God alone will judge. And to think, she’d been so proud of that line.
Bridget shifted in the far corner, straw rustling. “Thou art awake still,” she nudged.
“Can’t sleep.”
“Aye.” A pause. “I understand, child."
Lils thought about Stevon, about what he’d say if he could see her now.
She’d done her best. She really had. It just turned out that doing your best and getting out were two completely different things.
Above the village, the first gray light was coming, the dark going thin at the high slit of the window.
Stay in the in-between, she thought, with no idea yet what it meant. Until.
The bolt scraped back.
◆◆◆◆
Old Salem Village Meetinghouse
An Hour After First light
The meetinghouse was just as full as before, the same hum of a crowd that had come to watch. Lils kept her chin up and her face like a dead lake as the guard walked her to the front. Grey rock, she thought. Be a grey rock. Don't give them anything.
But something was different this time, and it took her a moment to place what it was.
The girls were gone.
No Ann Putnam crumpling to the floorboards, or little Abigail convulsing beside her. The absence of them made the back of Lils’s neck and arms prickle.
And then, the understanding dropped down through her like a stone into a deep well.
They didn’t need the girls anymore, because the screaming had been the opening act. The testimony was finished; the machine had what it wanted from them and had moved on. Whatever was about to happen in this room didn’t require her to be tormented in front of anyone. It barely required her at all.
Magistrate Hathorne sat raised above them, his face already flushing that raw-meat red, eyes glittering with the same awful relish. He looked, Lils thought, like a man who hadn't been losing any sleep at all.
“Eliza Proctor,” he said.
But he wasn't addressing her, he was speaking to the room, the way you’d announce a name.
“We shall hear the witnesses against the accused,” Hathorne declared. “Let the first come forward.”
And that's when Samuel Proctor stepped forward, out of the crowd.
◆◆◆◆
He didn’t look at her while he walked the length of the meetinghouse with his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the magistrate, and he passed within arm’s reach of her without so much as a glance.
She had a sudden flash of his hateful face close to her. I sever all ties with thee.
“Goodman Samuel Proctor,” Hathorne said. “Thou art brother to the accused.”
“I am.” Samuel’s voice was steady, carrying. “Though it shames my family’s name to say it so.”
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“And thou hast evidence to present before this court?”
“I have.”
He reached into his coat, and Lils knew what it was before his hand even came back out.
The pentacle necklace. Stevon’s necklace, now hers.
It dangled from Samuel’s hand, the silver catching a glint of light and swinging, and Lils felt her whole body go cold. The constable had taken it from her at the search. A witch talisman, he’d declared. She hadn’t known it had passed to Samuel, to be used here as evidence against her. But of course it would, she should have thought of it.
“When first this creature came to Salem wearing my sister’s face,” Samuel said, “I saw this upon her breast at the market, and I believed, and God forgive my foolishness, I believed it our late mother’s amulet. A keepsake stolen from our home, but a Christian thing nonetheless.”
He held it up, rotating it slowly in the light so the room could see.
“I was wrong. It is a Devilish thing as you can see, Magistrate.”
The crowd leaned in as Lils watched Samuel's face flicker into fear and revulsion that he even had to touch the necklace at all. He truly believed this was a cursed necklace... in any other context, she would have laughed. But right now, it wasn't remotely funny.
“It is no amulet of my mother’s,” Samuel said, voice booming. “It is the Devil’s own star that the cunning folk and the witches wear against the cross. I have asked the minister, and he confirmed it to me.” He held it higher, and his hand was not entirely steady — “THIS cursed thing is what hung at her throat. This is what she pressed her thumb against and whispered to, and sent the devil to torment Salem."
This elicited gasps from the crowd, as well as a few loud prayers and shouts.
She wanted to say it. That’s not what it is. It was my friend’s, and his mother gave it to me at his funeral. It has absolutely nothing to do with you, you absolute —
She said nothing instead. She took several deep breaths through her nose and willed herself into being a grey rock.
Hathorne’s eyes were shining. “Let it be recorded that the accused was found in possession of an instrument of witchcraft.” He didn’t ask her to confirm or deny. He didn’t ask her anything. “The witness may stand aside.”
Samuel folded the necklace into his fist, and for one moment his eyes finally came to hers. His expression was unreadable and then he looked away, and stepped back into the crowd, and was gone.
◆◆◆◆
“Let the next witness come forward.”
The sheriff.
He was a broad, tired-looking man, and he came forward with the particular reluctance of someone who didn't want to be there. He held a rough cloth sack in one hand.
“By the magistrate’s order,” the sheriff said, “I searched the home of Goodwife Martin, where the accused was given shelter these winter months.”
A murmur went through the crowd. Lils felt panic bleed through her. No. No no no no.
“And what didst thou find there?” Hathorne asked.
“The house was near empty, Your Worship.” The sheriff said. “The widow Martin and the boy in her keeping are both gone. Fled, or hid, we know not. We found no person within.”
Relief hit Lils so hard and so fast she nearly swayed. Gone. They got out. Goody got Levi out. Wherever they were, root cellar or the road to Andover or somewhere Lils would never know, they were out, they were beyond the reach of this room.
“But,” the sheriff said, “the house was not empty of everything."
He reached into the sack.
No, Lils thought. No, no, no, what did I — I had everything on me, I had it all in the cell, what could possibly be left at Goody’s that —
And then she remembered, with slow, sick clarity.
A dead phone upstairs, as useless as a brick.
She’d left it. Of course she’d left it. It had died weeks ago, gone black and stupid and worthless, and she’d shoved it deep in the bottom of her things in the loft and forgotten it. It was effectively a brick, a paperweight, a dead slab of glass and aluminum from a world three hundred and thirty-three years away.
The sheriff pulled it out and held it up.
In the light of the meetinghouse, against the tallow smoke and the small dirty windows, Lils’s phone looked like exactly what it was: an object that did not belong to this universe. Black and impossibly smooth, its edges too clean, a rectangle of a darkness no Puritan hand had ever made.
The crowd went silent. Even Hathorne leaned forward.
“What manner of thing is it?” the magistrate breathed.
“I know not, Your Worship.” The sheriff turned it over in his thick fingers, frowning at it like it might bite. “It hath no purpose I can name. No blade, no use. Smooth as a black mirror, and cold. I have never seen its like.”
Please don’t, Lils thought. Please, please don’t —
The sheriff, perhaps to demonstrate its strangeness, perhaps just out of the helpless human urge to do something with an object you don’t understand, rapped it sharply against the wooden rail of the witness stand.
The screen lit up.
It was nothing. It was a dying battery’s last electric reflex, a final spasm of charge jolted loose by the impact — a thing Lils could have explained in one bored sentence to anyone from her own century. The screen flared a pale, cold, sourceless white, a glow that came from inside the black mirror, lighting the sheriff’s astonished face from below, and held for one extended moment....
The meetinghouse erupted.
"WITCHCRAFT!" The sheriff dropped it on the rail with a clatter and snatched his hand back. The dying screen was still flickering its ghost-light across the crowd. “Witchcraft! It glows by no flame — it glows of its own dark spirit!"
The room came apart as people surged backward, benches scraping, voices shouting over each other in prayer and terror. Hands flew up to make the sign of the cross. A child started to wail. The Devil’s own light, the Devil’s own light.
And Lils watched her cracked iPhone flicker its last breath and closed her eyes.
“...Shit,” she whispered.
The gavel came down, the crack of it like a snapping bone.
"Silence!" Hathorne was on his feet, and his face had gone past red into a mashed grape, almost purple, and his eyes were blazing with the glee of a man who has finally been proven right about the darkness he always knew was out there. “I command SILENCE in this house of God."
The room shuddered into quiet, broken only by a few muttered prayers and children's cries.
“Eliza Proctor.” Hathorne's voice rang out and this time, he was looking right at her. “The court has seen enough. We have heard the witness of thine own brother. We have seen the Devil’s sign that thou didst wear, and the Devil’s own light that thou didst keep beneath a Christian roof.”
No need to hear from me at all then, Lils thought, distant and clear. You never once asked me a single thing.
“By the power vested in this court, and before God Almighty,” Hathorne declared, “I find thee guilty of the abominable crime of witchcraft.”
The white light at the edge of her vision, the one she’d imagined surrounding her yesterday for protection, was now just the white glow of her phone before it went dark for the last time.
“Thou shalt be taken from this place and held until the appointed day. And upon that day thou shalt be carried to the gallows, and there thou shalt be hanged by the neck until thou art dead.”
He cracked the gavel once more.
“May God have mercy on thy soul.”