The Witches of Worm Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  To Libby,

  who is still

  gentle and secret,

  and to Ruthie,

  who left memories

  of early magic

  INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

  In the early 1970s, just before I began writing The Witches of Worm, I started to notice how many young people were using a huge national upsurge of interest in all things “supernatural” in rather negative ways: to attack society in general and their own parents in particular, and to excuse their antisocial behavior by blaming something or somebody else, often their own unhappy childhood or the corrupt society in which they lived. “Something made me do it” had become almost a national alibi.

  My initial inspiration for the story came from reading The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials by Marion L. Starkey. This book contains a carefully documented account of the Salem trials and of the part played in them by Ann Putnam. Ann, who was twelve years old when the accusations began, was the ringleader of the “possessed” children who were ultimately responsible for the deaths of twenty innocent people. In reading the book it occurred to me that many young people of the seventies were, like Ann Putnam, using the beliefs and superstitions of their time to control and manipulate those around them. Like Ann, Jessica in The Witches of Worm allows herself to do cruel, even evil things and excuses herself by saying, and almost believing, that “something made me do it”—the “something” in Ann’s case being the accused witches, and in Jessica’s her “evil” cat.

  And in the end? Many years later Ann confessed that she had known she was not possessed, except by her need for attention and power. And at the end of The Witches of Worm, Jessica discovers some truths about herself, and about the strange pet whose name is Worm.

  The Witches of Worm is a serious and in some ways a rather frightening story. I was, at times, frightened by the writing of it. But I believe it includes a message that is no less important today than it was in 1972. The message, as stated by Mrs. Fortune, is that we invite our own devils and we ourselves must exorcise them.

  Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Chapter One

  “I’M SORRY, JESSIE BABY,” JOY SAID.

  Jessica looked up from her magazine and stared at her mother, a point-blank unwavering stare that said something important by not saying anything at all. But it didn’t matter, because Joy wasn’t looking at her anyway.

  Joy was looking down into her glass. She was standing over the register in her stocking feet, warming up after a cold ride home from the office in a cable car. Her long blond hair swung down from her bent head, partly covering her face, and the heat from the register made her short skirt stand out like a dancer’s tutu. Standing there like that, with one foot tucked up, she looked like a dancer, or else a fashion model—or even a movie star. In fact, according to some people, she looked exactly like one particular star—a sexy blond Swedish actress who played in pictures with English subtitles. Jessica couldn’t say about that because the movies were the kind she was too young to get into, but she was certain of some other things. She was certain that no one would guess by looking at her, just what Joy really was. No one would suspect that she was only an overworked, underpaid secretary, for instance, and they’d be even less apt to guess that she was Jessica’s mother. No one ever believed that at first, because Joy didn’t look like anybody’s mother, least of all Jessica’s. But she was—believe it or not.

  My “believe-it-or-not” mother, Jessica thought as she stared at Joy. Sometimes she called her that out loud, but when she did, Joy always seemed to take it as a compliment. Joy had started it herself, actually, by introducing Jessica that way. “And this is my daughter, believe it or not,” she would say to people—all kinds of perfect strangers. And none of them ever asked why they might not believe it. Nobody had to ask. It was perfectly obvious why it was hard to believe that Joy could have a twelve-year-old daughter. It was also obvious that, while Joy looked like a Swedish movie star, Jessica did not, and probably never would. But when Jessica called Joy her “believe-it-or-not” mother, she meant something a little different.

  Still staring down into her after-work scotch and soda, Joy shook her head slowly and sighed. “I’m really sorry that——” she was beginning again, but Jessica didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. She picked up her coat and book and went out the door. She didn’t hurry because she knew that Joy was not going to call her back to hear the rest of what she had started to say. Joy would not call her back because they both knew that Jessica knew the rest of it by heart.

  If Jessica had waited, Joy would have said one, or all, of a number of things. She would certainly have said she was sorry that, since Alan had asked her out to dinner, there would be a lonely TV dinner for Jessica again that night. Then she might have mentioned some other things she was usually sorry about: that her job kept her away from home until so late, and that they had to live in a city apartment rather than a real house. If she were feeling particularly dramatic, she might have gone on to say that she was sorry she was such a lousy mother, but she guessed she’d never really been cut out for motherhood. Sometimes she even cried a little; Jessica knew that part by heart, too.

  Jessica knew it all by heart, and she also knew that none of it was going to change, no matter how sorry Joy might be. Some of the things Joy was sorry about were things she couldn’t change even if she wanted to; and most of the rest were things that might have been changed once but that couldn’t be now. Like the fact that Jessica Ann Porter had been born twelve years before. That was one of the things it was a lot too late to change.

  Halfway down the hallway on the second floor, Jessica stopped, simply from force of habit, to listen to Brandon. If Brandon was at home, he could usually be heard, even when he wasn’t practicing his trumpet, as he was obviously doing at the moment. Jessica stood still, listening.

  Brandon hadn’t been playing the trumpet for very long—only a little over a year. Jessica knew exactly how long it had been because he had started only a short time before the day he had turned into a stinking traitor. She could never forget when that had happened. In that one year Brandon had learned to make the trumpet blare and crow loud enough to disturb everybody for blocks around. Jessica put her hands over her ears, for the shout of the trumpet pierced the walls as if they were tissue paper. It sounded just like Brandon, she thought. He’d always done a lot of shouting.

  When she reached the main floor, Jessica walked quickly and quietly. As she passed the Posts’ apartment, she could hear a dull whine of conversation and she hurried faster, imagining the door opening and the sound swelling out like a tidal wave to engulf her.

  At the rear of the building, passing the door to the apartment where Mrs. Fortune lived with all her cats, she stopped briefly and sniffed to see how bad the cat stink was that evening. Then she went on more quietly, because Mrs. Fortune, in spite of her age, had incredibly good ears. At least, she seemed to know everything that went on in the entire apartment house. But maybe, as Brandon had once suggested, it was only the cats who had good ears, and Mrs. Fortune got her information from them. Jessica could never tell whether Brandon was serious or not when he said
weird things like that, but she could believe almost anything about Mrs. Fortune. She was that kind of person.

  Outside the rear entrance to the apartment house, Jessica stopped and stood still, breathing deeply. Sometimes it made things seem better if she could get away and breathe long slow breaths of outside air. But today it only made things worse.

  It was a terrible day, dank and windy—the kind of chilling August day that often betrayed the city’s tourists, sending them shivering home to their hotels in their light summer coats. Jessica coughed and shoved her whipping hair back out of her face. The air tasted gray and poisonous, heavy with fog and city smells, and the sound of the wind was sad and angry as it swept down the alley and around the walls and fences of the Regency Apartment House. There was something threatening about the sound, as if the whining moan was full of strange half-spoken words. Shivering, Jessica buttoned the top button of her coat, shoved her book into a pocket, and hurried across the yard.

  The back yard of the Regency was small and, except for a narrow strip near the building, very steep. The steepness was a part of the sharp rise that soared up directly behind the apartment house, up to a flat hilltop known as Blackberry Heights. Some of the most expensive houses in the city were in Blackberry Heights, and Joy was always wishing that she and Jessica could afford to live there. But since there was no hope of that, the next best thing was to live at the foot of the Heights, where you could share in some of the advantages. There were, for instance, the advantages of good schools and a good address. That was what Joy said. As far as Jessica was concerned, the main advantage was having a cliff for a back yard.

  Beyond the cat-proof fence that enclosed the Regency’s private patch of hillside, the slope of the cliff became very steep and wild. Only weeds and ugly scratchy bushes grew there, struggling for a roothold in the almost vertical stone. A climber struggled, too, slipping and sliding, unless he knew the secret footholds, dug in the distant past by Jessica and Brandon. Anyone who knew those holds and followed them carefully halfway up the face of the cliff, came upon the entrance to the secret cave. That was where Jessica was going.

  As she reached the last foothold and boosted herself up to the threshold of the cave, Jessica turned suddenly and peered downward, shading her eyes with her palm. Her face tightened into an expression of terror, and her voice shook as she said, “They’re still following. They’ve found the entrance to the pass.”

  Moving quickly backward, she assumed a different expression, concerned but calm now, and determined.

  “Courage lad!” Her voice had deepened. “We still have one ace in the hole. Roll out the catapult.”

  Switching back into the part of a frightened boy, she began, “Oh, sir, there’s hundreds of them. And they have spears and crossbows and——” She stopped then, in mid-sentence, with a shrug and a disgusted laugh.

  “Idiot,” she said in her own voice. She had to be an idiot to go on playing those silly games. It had been dumb enough that she had done it when she was younger and was just going along with Brandon’s crazy ideas. But to keep on doing it—as she did now and then—all by herself! She shook her head. “You’re really cracking up, Jessie Baby,” she told herself.

  Sitting down on a ledge, she looked around. The cave had not changed at all since her last visit. A natural crevice, hardly more than five feet deep, it was just high enough to stand up in. Jessica and Brandon had used it in a lot of their games. It had been Injun Joe’s cave, the Open Sesame cave, and many others. Once they had planned to enlarge it and turn it into a real cavern, but days of digging had produced only a tiny closetlike addition, so the project had been abandoned. They had gone on using the cave, though, until Brandon had given it up, along with everything else they had shared together.

  The cave was just Jessica’s now, and she still went there from time to time—not really to play stupid games anymore, but usually just to have a quiet place to read. Reading was one useful thing left over from her friendship with Brandon. That was what their games had been really—acted-out stories from books. Jessica had read so many of them to learn her parts that she had developed the habit—the habit of reading just about everything. And it was a good thing, too, considering how little else she had to do anymore.

  The reading spot was a natural stone shelf padded with old blankets. It was near the mouth of the cave, where one could look out through the straggly bushes and see the Regency Apartment House almost directly below. By leaning forward she could see the rear windows of all the apartments in the main building and the shingled roof of the small one-story wing where Mrs. Fortune lived. Jessica sat there often, looking down at the windows, imagining what everyone inside was doing, and wondering what kinds of things might happen to them all someday.

  Sometimes she made up long stories about the future. There was one where she came back to the Regency, after having become rich and famous. She had just purchased the whole block, and as the new owner of the Regency, she had come to tell the Posts that they were fired. She told Mrs. Fortune she could stay if she got rid of the cats, and she told the Doyles that they were being evicted because of Brandon; he was guilty of noise pollution. There was another part about going up to the third floor to see Joy. Joy looked different, older and not so blond. Jessica told her about the beautiful big house in Blackberry Heights that she had just moved into. She suggested that Joy come and visit sometimes. Of course, it would have to be when she, Jessica, wasn’t away making a TV show or something like that. Joy was very eager to come, and she said things about how lonely she had been since Jessica went away and got famous.

  Jessica knew it was really a childish thing to do—making up stupid daydreams like that, and she sometimes made fun of herself about it. “Come on, Jessie Baby,” she’d say to herself—she always called herself Jessie Baby when she was disgusted—“Come on, Jessie Baby. Let’s quit wasting time with fairy tales like that Rich-and-Famous stuff.” But sometimes she did it, anyway.

  Today she started in the middle with the part about evicting Brandon. But even though it was one of the best parts—she’d been adding to it and improving it for over a year—she found that she was unable to keep her mind on it. Things kept happening to distract her.

  Some of the distraction was only a feeling, a restless uneasy feeling that made her waste long moments watching and listening, without the slightest idea of what she was watching for. But some of the distraction was caused by the weather.

  Jessica had never been in the secret cave on such a strange day. As she watched, far off toward the bay a huge dark cloud bank began to grow and spread. Closer in, the wind caught a spreading ooze of fog and wrapped it clean around the Regency Apartment House like an enormous cloak, and then raveled it into snaky fingers that writhed off around corners and down alleys. The wind moaned and cried and then quieted into a furtive stealthy whisper until Jessica found herself straining to hear its secret. Finally she gave up on the daydream and decided to see if it would be any easier to keep her mind on reading.

  She was settling herself more comfortably on her stomach on the shelf when she realized she could still hear the faint throbbing wail of Brandon’s trumpet. Scooting forward she picked out the window of the Doyles’ apartment. Either Brandon was standing near an open window or he was learning to play louder than ever. The sound of the trumpet had never reached her in the secret cave before, but now it came again and again, pulsing up through the city noises like a faint and far away shout. Still shouting, Jessica thought.

  Brandon had shouted at Jessica the first time they met. That was when they were both only five years old. It had happened in the back yard of the Regency, not long after the Doyles had moved in. Jessica had lived there for as long as she could remember, but until Brandon came she had been the only child. Then one morning when she was five, she had come out the back door and found a boy building something on the sidewalk out of a lot of old spools and blocks. She had never seen the boy before, but she had recognized the building materials
at once. They were from a box of interesting things that Mrs. Fortune called her Treasure Chest. The chest was kept in a hall closet and was brought out for Jessica to play with when she came to visit. Mrs. Fortune said that many, many children had played with the things in the box. But for a long time there had been no one but Jessica.

  It was probably because it had always been her Treasure Chest, and also because Brandon ignored her, that she had gotten mad. He was so busy stacking her spools into a tall tower that he didn’t notice her, even when she had made some warning noises. So she had run right through the middle of his building, knocking it to pieces. He had noticed her then. Shouting at the top of his voice, he had run after her and hit her on the head with his fist.

  She hadn’t cried. Jessica never cried—not even then at the age of five. She had not cried or hit back or even shouted. Instead she had quietly said some things to Brandon—some of the worst words she knew. Before she had finished, Brandon had stopped shouting and begun to listen. When she had run out of things to call him and begun to back away, suddenly he wasn’t mad anymore. He had rubbed his nose with his knuckles and the strange high intensity had come into his eyes. A look, she found out later, that meant he was curious or interested.

  “Say that again,” he had said.

  “Say what again?” Jessica had asked.

  “All of it,” Brandon had said. “All of what you just said.”

  “Why? It means something very bad.”

  “Yeah?” Brandon had looked even more intrigued. “What? What does it mean?”

  Jessica had shrugged. “Something very bad. My mother says it when she’s very mad.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I did. She won’t tell me.”

  Brandon had nodded. “Hey,” he had then said, “do you want to help me build a castle?” Just as if he hadn’t been yelling and hitting a minute before.

  That was the way he was then and the way he always was. You could never predict anything about Brandon—what would make him angry, what would make him laugh, or what crazy thing he’d decide to do next. But if you were never sure about what would happen next, at least you were always sure about what was happening at the moment. You never had to wonder, for instance, if he was angry or not. When Brandon was angry, you found out immediately. But then he didn’t stay angry. And afterward everything was the same as it had been before. He was weird that way—different.