With the confidence of a safecracker, she lifted the lid to the water tank and set it on the floor next to the toilet. Straightening her hands into two spatulas, she reached into the tank and lifted out a bone-dry gray rectangular box, about ten inches by twelve and a half inches and five inches deep, braced at the corners, with a hinged flap about six inches from the top. Glued to the narrow end, a small label read “The Trial of Alice Bonham.” She set the box on the toilet seat and replaced the lid to the tank, and then rubbed her hands on the skirt of her dress. Red paper rust, as if from leather bindings, floated in the air and fell to the floor.
“Are we to call you Alice?” the old man asked.
“She don’t talk,” said Jane.
“Don’t or won’t,” Dolly added. “You’ll not get a word from her.”
The old man cleared his throat. “Well, then, I shall call you Alice since you seem to be the scriniary, or the keeper of that archive.”
Alice nodded to her comrades across the room, and with delicate gravity, she donned a pair of short white gloves that had been hidden in the fabric near her décolletage. The box itself was crammed from front to back with documents and papers. Taking a small brown book from the front, Alice handed it to me. A water stain in the shape of Cape Cod or a bent arm marked the cover, and antique typefaces belied the design conventions of the seventeenth century: a mix of fonts for emphasis and that strange custom of substituting an f for an s. I had to correct the text as I read it aloud to my companions:
THE DISPLAYING OF SUPPOSED WITCHCRAFT. Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, And Divers persons under a passive Delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a Corporeal League made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, Or that he sucks on the Witches Body, has Carnal Copulation, or that Witches are turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, The Existence of Angels and Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirits, the force of Charms, and Philters; with other abstruse matters. By John Webster, Practitioner in Physick. London
Printed by J. M. and are to be sold by the Booksellers in London, 1677.
“That’s rich,” said Jane. “The part about raising tempests.”
Dolly smacked her on the meaty part of her arm. “And how witches can turn themselves into cats or dogs. I had a little dog once, what was his name?”
Peering over my shoulder, the old man read the title page for himself; the whispering movements of his lips reverberated like a flight of hummingbirds. “Ah, but you miss the point, ladies, by concentrating upon the sensational. That book is a treatise on how the whole matter of witchcraft is but a deception, and how witches are really just hysterics, and our belief in such matters a case of melancholy and fancy, is that not so, Miss Bonham?”
I had never believed in all that hocus-pocus, ghost stories, fairy tales, and had long ago prided myself on being entirely rational and having an orderly mind, so I was pleased to hear the old man refute such claims and to discover long-ago works, like Mr. John Webster’s, devoted to drawing attention to, and exposing, the fraudulent and irrational. As if she could read my mind, Miss Alice Bonham stood in the center of the room and began to spin, slowly at first, but soon pirouetting like a ballerina, then dizzy as a dervish, her dress flashing like a siren, her hair whipping across and hiding her face. And as she spun, she attracted the shattered glass on the floor like metal filings to a magnet, or a reverse centrifuge. The jagged splinters did not skewer her, but clung to the fabric of her skirt till it glistened and was festooned with reflected light. As she slowed her revolutions, the pieces leapt from her body and back into place on the medicine cabinet until at last the mirror was restored, the shards coming together in an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, the seams fused as if nothing had ever disturbed the perfect surface. Steadying herself, Alice sighed deeply, steam escaping from her heels like an old-fashioned locomotive come to rest, and we were dumbfounded by the trick.
The old man took me aside. “Perhaps,” he whispered, “I spoke in haste.”
With the room restored to its former state, a hush descended as we waited and watched for Alice’s next move. She stepped to the gray box and produced a single sheet of paper covered with writing in a fine hand, and giving it to Jane, she encouraged her with a nod to read it aloud.
Salem Village
6 June 1691
Loving Sister,