March of 1692
Gallows Hill, Salem — Near Dawn
They came for her while it was still dark.
Lils had hardly slept. She’d laid awake most of the night with the pillow pressed to her nose, listening to the hammering on the hill go quiet at last, which was somehow worse than the sound itself. It was now built and waiting.
When the bolt finally scraped and the lantern light cut in, she was almost relieved to be done with the waiting.
“On thy feet, Proctor.” It was the thick-necked guard again. Behind him, she could see another shape — Bridget, already bound, already up. They were taking them together, then.
Lils did not let go of the pillow until the last possible second, when the guard’s hand closed on her arm and there was simply no way to bring it.
“Leave it,” the guard said.
Lils dropped the pillow mournfully. Goodbye, soothing chamomile and lavender.
◆◆◆◆
The cart ride up the hill was short and brutal, the wheels jolting over frozen ruts. Lils and Bridget sat pressed together in the back with their bound wrists in their laps, back to back.
The crowd was already gathered on Gallows Hill. Lils had read about this, had sat on Aunt Ivy’s porch three hundred and thirty-three years from now and read about the crowds that came to watch. She had felt the appropriate, yet very distant horror back then. Here and now, she could hear the low, slightly excited hum of people who had come to witness the accused die and tell themselves it was God’s work.
The scaffold stood black against a sky that began behaving rather oddly.
Lils noticed that dawn had been breaking as they rode up… but now the light seemed to be moving backward, the gold draining out of it. The crowd began to notice it too; she could hear the murmur change, see heads tipping back.
The sun was coming up, yet something was sliding across it.
An eclipse, Lils thought, with the odd, floating clarity she’d been moving through all morning. She had known about Ostara, the equinox, but not about the eclipse. An eclipse at dawn. She didn’t know if there had been one historically... she didn’t think there had been.
But the moon was clearly taking a bite out of the rising sun, and the light on Gallows Hill was going thin and silver, shadows doubling, and a primitive dread moved through the assembled Puritans, because to them this could mean either a sign from God Almighty... or witchcraft.
Magistrate Hathorne stood at the foot of the scaffold, and even he looked unsettled, his red face gazing up at the darkening sky.
“Make haste,” he yelled over to the executioner, and Lils understood: he wanted it done before the crowd’s fear could curdle into something he couldn’t control. Let's get the witches hanged, now.
The executioner took them up together.
Lils could hardly believe she was climbing these steps beside Bridget Bishop, the older woman with her shoulders square set. They stood side by side, the ropes fitted one and then the other, the coarse fiber scraping Lils’s neck.
This was it then, this was the terrifying, wrongful death she had read about in detail and was now going to experience for herself.
Bridget turned her head slightly and found Lils’s eyes.
Then, a crow cawed loudly, flying out from the opening of a portal, cracked wide open.
◆◆◆◆
It started at the crossroads below the hill. The old crossroads, where the two tracks met by the broken stone wall — and Lils felt it first, like a cold wave. The thrum behind her chest that she’d carried since arriving in old world Salem swung all at once and pointed her like a magnet toward the meeting of the roads.
The atmosphere tore, splitting into two different temperatures.
It appeared as a seam splitting down the middle of thin air. A silver light poured through it, and the crowd’s murmur rose to something high and frightened, people falling back and away. Where the crossroads had been there was now a depth, a corridor of dark running off into a distance, with impossible lights twinkling. The lights of modern-day Salem.
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And out of the gaping mouth, stepped a girl with long, dark hair. She was cloaked and briefly unsteady on her feet, as if she’d stepped off a moving cart.
There was a dapple grey horse standing not ten feet from the tear. A cart horse, abandoned by some farmer who’d run with the rest of the crowd. The girl saw it and moved for it, caught the reins, and swung herself up onto its back.
She wheeled the horse toward the scaffold and drove it forward, scattering what was left of the crowd in front of her.
The horse skidded to a stop at the base of the scaffold and Lils looked down at the rider, shocked to see a face that resembled her own. For one suspended moment, they simply stared at each other across three centuries and every impossible thing that had happened in between.
Oh, thought Lils. Oh, it’s her. It’s Eliza.
The same dark hair, the same Proctor-deep blue eyes. It was nearly the same face Lils saw in the mirror each morning, only this face held a fierce, desperate purpose, the reins in one fist and the athame in the other. And no crescent moon scar by her eyebrow.
They were both here, in the same dark morning, in 1692 — the swap not yet complete, the door open and holding them in the threshold of the Ostara eclipse. Hekate, or some type of magic, was granting them a small gift before the portal closed.
Eliza held a small blade aloft, which caught the silver eclipse-light and glinted.
“ELIZA,” Lils yelled out. "Help us!"
Eliza’s eyes went to the ropes, the two were strung side by side. The executioner was frozen in place, staring back and forth from the portal to the sky.
Eliza did not hesitate.
◆◆◆◆
She drove the horse up the scaffold steps and rose on its back and slashed.
The athame parted the rope above Bridget’s head in a single stroke and she dropped, gasping, the noose loose, into a heap on the platform. And before the executioner could recover, Eliza wheeled the horse a half-step and rose again and cut Lils’s rope too.
“Get up," Eliza shouted at both of them desperately. Her voice, Lils noticed with a lurch, had Lils’s own cadence under the old formal one now, the two of them bleeding together even in speech. “Both of you. Can you stand—?”
And then the hill erupted, the crowd breaking away in every direction. Some were screaming witchcraft, others yelling about the Devil, screaming that the sky had gone dark and praying. Hathorne was bellowing for the constables. As Lils hauled herself upright and half-fell down the scaffold steps, dragging Bridget with her, a man lunged for the platform. His face was a mask of fury.
It was Samuel.
"NO," he roared, scrambling up after them, reaching for Eliza, for the reins of the horse, for her blade — “thou’lt not — the Devil shall not prevail—”
The horse reared up, and it happened in a half-second.
The animal panicked and came up off its front legs, with Samuel directly beneath the hooves. His face turned up, too slow to see what was about to come down on his head.
And Lils moved, faster than she ever had in her entire life. She threw herself at Samuel using all her weight, a tackle that drove them both sideways off the steps and into the mud.
The hooves came down through the space where his head would have been and struck the wood with a crack like a gunshot.
They landed in a heap, Samuel beneath her.
That’s when Lils watched it happen. Samuel looked up at the rider on the horse, because Eliza was there above them, her face turned toward them in the glimmering silver dark.
Two nearly identical faces, one bound and filthy in the mud on top of him, one cloaked on horseback above him. Very nearly identical, except for one barely perceptible thing... a crescent moon scar near Lil’s eyebrow.
Samuel Proctor’s eyes went from one to the other, the fury briefly draining from his face. He seemed to morph into a frightened little boy in his shock.
“How—” he managed, scrambling backward, away from them. “How can it be so—”
“Don't you know? It is because we’re witches, Samuel.” Lils said.
And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and Samuel passed out in the mud.
Lils laughed then, a brief, cracked laugh. Of course he had passed out.
She looked up at Eliza.
“Eliza, we must spare him,” Lils pleaded. She could feel the pull behind her ribs tightening now, the threshold beginning to close. The cold was beginning to reach for her. “Promise me, don’t let anyone hurt him on the way out. He’s why I even exist. Me and Lucy and Aunt Ivy, and my Dad. The entire Proctor line.”
Eliza looked down at her brother, passed out in the mud, understanding dawning on her. The brother whose cruelty had driven her to a crossroads, who had hunted her, condemned her. He still needed to stay alive.
“He’ll be spared,” Eliza said. “I’ll not have his death if it means you and Lucy and Aunt Ivy never exist.”
Lils began to feel a choking sensation and looked over at Samuel, still passed out in the mud. She turned his face over in the mud and cleared dirt away from his mouth, making sure he didn't choke.
◆◆◆◆
There was a moment, then, as if the in-between was holding the door open one breath longer, as if Hekate herself had reached out a pale hand to give them this.
The two girls looked at each other in the last of the silver eclipse-light, the chaos wheeling around them.
“Thank you,” Lils said. It was so small a thing to say. It was everything she had. “For coming back for me. Please, go to the coast, you know the way."
“Lils!”
Lils turned and saw, at the edge of the green, half-hidden in the chaos, a boy. Levi. He had a second horse by the reins, and beside him was Goody Martin in a traveling cloak. Levi’s face was streaked with tears and he was shouting it across the dark to her.
“I was going to save you, no matter what! I was waiting!"
“I know you were, Levi. Now go — get my cousin Eliza to the sea, and my friend Bridget — they're in your charge now.”
And Lils was dissolving now in the full light of the sun as she walked toward the remaining slit of the portal, the present reaching back through three centuries to claim her. She laughed and cried all at once as the cold closed over her like a wave of deep ocean water.
The last thing she saw was Eliza Proctor wheeling her horse toward the tree line, toward Levi and Goody Martin with Bridget alive and gasping, toward the road that led to the coast and the gray-green sea.
Home, both of them, in opposite directions.
And then old Salem was gone.
...and she felt a wave of cold and smelled smoke come over her, saw the jagged edges of tourmaline and amethyst come up around her, surrounding her like a dark cave. It was then that she heard Lucy’s voice, screaming her name.
Goodbye, Eliza, and farewell.