The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells

Chapter 1 Carrie

This is not a firsthand account. Or even a second, or a third. This tale has been passed down and passed down, discussed around hearths, embellished, and clipped until I sat down to record it in the book . . .

—Tabitha Morgan, July 19, 1929

I clutch the keys between my fingers. The cottage in front of me is quiet and watchful, small windows tucked into the folds of granite walls. I hesitate, taking a moment, feeling the edges of metal in my hand, the cold damp air as I draw it down my throat, the light as it snatches at the October clouds above. I needed this moment. It’s grown inside me like a nettle, this need, curling around me all these years, stinging me as I turned the other way. But now that the moment is here, I find it is full of ghosts.

I turn the key in the lock and fumble with the handle, my fingers slipping over the worn iron, and push. The hinges protest, but the door gives with a low sigh. Inside it’s dark and cold, so much colder than the outside world. I feel the cool air twine around me like an arm, guiding me in, pulling me past the doorway. Perhaps it is Ivy, my grandmother, welcoming me back. I let my eyes adjust, finding the wide flagstones, the crooked staircase.

And I step over the threshold.

My boots clatter on the floor, echoing down the hallway as I move past the staircase. I run a hand over the wood, feel the smooth varnish, then the rough patches where time has worn it away. It’s familiar in the way a dream is upon waking. I haven’t been in this house in ten years, and somehow it seems smaller. Frailer than it did ten years ago. Without the true owner of the place singing in her sweet, reedy voice as she potters around, the cottage holds an air of neglect. Of being left too long in the dark, all forgotten.

I shake off the cold, drawing my coat a little tighter across my chest, and take the door on the left into the front room. The fireplace is littered with the remains of a bird’s nest, and a chair lies on its side, as though hastily tipped over. I reach out and right it, but a leg comes off in my hands.

“Oh, Ivy . . .”

I sigh, dropping it back on the floorboards. I don’t bother trying the light switch. The electrics won’t work. Cora, my great-aunt, said as much in her letter.

In a rush, I move to the next room, to the kitchen spread across the back, circling the old farmhouse table and peering out of the back windows. And there they are, the giants that loom over me in every dream, every nightmare. The reason perhaps that I have been running for so long.

The mountains.

I lean over the sink, gazing up at them. The three peaks of the mountain range dwarf this cottage. Full of secrets. Full of stories and whispers and trails you should never wander from. Even now I can hear Cora’s warnings, Ivy’s old tales, the whisperings in the school playground, passed down and passed down. I dig my fingers into the ceramic edges of the sink and feel the first stirring of something. Something that perhaps I no longer want to run from.

Home.

I push away from the sink and cross back into the hallway. Then I climb the staircase, hoping with every tread that my boots don’t crash straight through. The rooms upstairs are just as I remember. Peeling wallpaper, bare floorboards. The kind of rooms that hold so many memories, pressed like words into their walls. I trace the shape of a yellow flower on the wallpaper, and it bubbles up underneath my fingernail. Then I check the doorframe, feeling the notches marking our heights as we grew into ourselves. The ones marking mine and . . . hers. Jess’s. I pull my fingertips back, stuff my hands into my pockets. The nettles curling inside me tighten.

The view is even more lovely from upstairs, and I move to perch on the window seat, bunching up my sleeve to wipe at the condensation gathered in the corners of the glass. Ivy’s garden is choked with weeds. Even her roses have withered, their rambling limbs draped over an arch. It isn’t just that it’s October. Ivy used to sing to them, and I was sure they turned toward her as she moved around, taking a clipping here, a petal there. Now Ivy is gone, and her garden mourns.

My breath catches, and that ache, deep in my chest, sharpens to a point. I press my palm into it, close my eyes, and will my own memories away. The memories of what I have lost. What will never get a chance to grow. It all feels more vivid here, like a cut reopened, spilling scarlet.

In a moment, I’m up and back down the staircase. I bunch the keys in my fist and lock the door, then drop them into my coat pocket. I eye the caravan, still attached to my car on the other side of the field. I could go inside. Make a cup of tea. Figure out what to scrape together for dinner and start to make sense of it all. Ivy’s will is in there, the terms laid out in precise black and white. The cottage and this muddy field are all mine, but I have to come back and renovate it. I have to stay a winter, a whole winter in this place. I have to return and make peace with Woodsmoke.

But . . .

No. Not yet. I turn to the north, to the mountains. If I don’t greet them, if I turn away and pretend they’re not there, I know what could happen. I know the old tales. It’s a curse and a gift being a Morgan woman with this knowledge. But we all know, really. Everyone in Woodsmoke has grown up knowing that magic isn’t some intangible, wonderful thing. It’s real, it has consequences, and it echoes around this mountain range. This ancient place, where magic seems to grow thick and wild. Some people in the town like to think they don’t believe, but I’ve seen them scratching at Cora’s door. I’ve seen the outcome when her warnings are not heeded. We all have. I square my shoulders and start walking toward the mountains.

There’s a trail that begins at the edge of this field, then winds up through the thicket of undergrowth and trees. My feet find it before I do, and I am careful not to step off it. The breeze ruffles the leaves, all russet and gold on the ends of spindly branches, surrounding me with a flurry of sound as I walk. I breathe in, out, drawing the sharp cold down into my lungs, focusing only on the path, my boots, the quickening thrum of my heart.

The world slowly dims, peeling back to twilight, but I don’t stop. I walk faster, rushing up the trail that hugs the side of this mountain. My breath is ragged now, my lungs bloom with flame, burning all my other thoughts away.

I burst out of the trees and find myself on the edge of the world. A stretch of mud and grass slopes down and down, all the way to the little town of Woodsmoke. I lean against a tree, catching my breath as it fogs out in front of me. Dragon breath, we used to call it. On the walk to school along the familiar track, with barely enough space to walk side by side, every autumn, every winter. We would breathe out fire and laugh and laugh.

I miss Jess’s laugh. Once I was sure I heard it, walking the streets of Paris at twilight four years ago, and those throaty notes lured me to a café with tables sprawling across the pavement. Of course, it wasn’t her. But I stayed there all evening, nursing cups of hot chocolat and cream, listening to the ghost of her laugh on someone else’s tongue.

Pushing my hair behind my ears, I walk slowly forward, testing each footfall, and take in the sweep of life below. Woodsmoke is a tapestry of tiny lights, chugging chimneys, and ancient, winding roads threading into its heart, the town square at the center. I watch as more lights turn on, picturing the families, the wood burners, and the cozy domesticity of it all. I thought that was where I was heading once, before I grew into myself.

The fire inside me smolders, charring my edges, but I focus on the town below. As I begin my next chapter in this place, the layers of memories drift through it like smoke. I stand over Woodsmoke, breathing in the scent of loam and wood, watching as the lights of the town blink below me like stars. And I tell myself I can do this. I can restore Ivy’s cottage. I can do what was asked of me in her will and then finally, maybe, I can let this place go.

That will be my new beginning.

A noise, like footsteps, like a sigh, presses against my back and I turn sharply. For an instant, I believe I can see a shape. Someone rangy and tall. Someone almost familiar. But as I narrow my eyes, heart leaping against my ribs, all I see are shadows. I check my feet hurriedly, making sure I haven’t strayed from the path. But it’s still below me, trailing back down the mountain, the vein I will follow back to the real world.

I drag my gaze away, back to Woodsmoke and all the life spread out there like constellations in the dark. And the hope, so long extinguished, unfurls inside me once more. I carry that hope all the way down the mountain. Back across the muddy field, tangled with weeds and scrub. Back to the caravan I borrowed from my parents, with the chipped Formica table and stovetop kettle.

I create a makeshift dinner, the old saucepans and wooden spoons clattering in the eerie silence, then inhale an entire packet of rich tea biscuits with a cup of strong tea. I fold myself into fleece-lined pajamas, pile three blankets over my head, and get the letter out, smoothing down its edges. I should have gone to her first, I realize. She will know I’ve arrived and will wonder why I haven’t seen her. Cora Morgan, Ivy’s sister, is like that. After reading it through again, I tuck the letter under my pillow, turn out the light, and try to gather sleep to me. But sleep is just as elusive here as it has been everywhere else for the past ten years.

I worry all night that I strayed from the path without meaning to. That something followed me back, that the figure I glimpsed in the dark was real. I can hear scratching outside, and it follows me into my dreams. As though someone is tapping at the frost-laced window, bearing a warning to heed.

Or trying to get in.

I toss and turn, wishing I’d sprinkled salt and dried lavender around the caravan. It’s all too easy for a vengeful spirit, for something other and twisted, to slither in if a proper warding isn’t in place. And in the space between dreams and waking on this cold, dark night, it seems real.

Frost steals over everything in my dreams like a spell. Ivy’s forlorn garden. Her roses and their withered, thorny limbs. The creaking, narrow staircase. The bubbling wallpaper. Even Ivy, her mouth full of warnings as she stands in the lounge in her cottage, her hands all twisted together, voice too quiet for me to hear. I try stepping toward her, try catching a single word. But I’m stuck, stuck to the floorboards, stuck in this spider’s web of frost, just like her. It creeps down from the mountains, reaching for my skin, snaring my legs, my chest, tangling in my hair. Still, Ivy bellows.

And I cannot hear.

When I wake, winter has come. I fight my way out of the blankets, drawing in lungfuls of soothing air. It’s stifling in the caravan, the walls too close, the ceiling too low. I drag a hand over my face, banishing the cobwebs of dreams, and shuffle around the small space, making coffee with the old whistling kettle, shrugging into my coat, pulling on my boots.

I clutch the rough ceramic sides of my favorite coffee mug in my hands, the one I found in a small pottery in Ireland many years ago. I let the steam curl around my face. Then I step out into the frost.

The field is a painting. All I see are droplets of glitter, the ground, the middle distance, the sky overhead, sparkling with dew. Frost is a scent you cannot bottle. It’s sweet and sharp all at once, laced with memories from childhood, from early morning breakfasts, from the moments my heart thumped with the knowing that it was here at last.

I hold out my hand, my fingertips already nipped by cold. The chill draping the air is early for this time of year, not yet November. I smile for the first time since I arrived and breathe it in, that scent of frost and cold. And I’m sure in that moment that despite my long absence, despite the way I left this place and how it’s haunted me ever since, this is my homecoming. This spell of early winter feels alive and wild with magic.

The mountains have welcomed me home after all.