Page 13 of The Women of Wild Hill

Across the grounds from the caretaker’s house stood a giant guardian oak.

Centuries before the Duncan family arrived on Wild Hill, its gnarled roots had broken up through the soil.

They reached out in every direction, searching for something that must have proven elusive, before plunging back into the ground.

At the base of the tree, the roots formed a seat so perfect it could have served as a throne.

This was where Ivy would go when she had important thinking to do.

“Why do you come here?” Brigid asked one day when she found her aunt leaning back against the tree’s trunk with her eyes closed.

“This old tree has seen everything,” Ivy told her.

“It knew the tribes that lived here before the Dutch and the English. It was watching when the first European boats arrived on this shore. It saw what happened to Bessie and everything that has taken place here ever since. It knows humankind better than any one of us ever will. When I sit here, I know I’m in the presence of wisdom. ”

After that, it was Brigid’s favorite place, too. But she loved the oak not for its wisdom but because she and the tree shared something else in common. Like Brigid, the oak knew what it felt like to bear witness and be helpless to act.

AFTER SHE DISCOVERED HER GIFT, Brigid saw many more people pass.

None of the dead were friends or loved ones.

They were strangers she happened to brush against in the grocery store or the library.

She saw a man fall off a ladder and a woman lose consciousness behind the wheel.

Worst, she watched a young child be hit by a bus.

In each case, her predictions were met with anger or confusion.

The victims and their families never believed her until it was too late.

Brigid lived in terror that she would see someone in her own family die.

Every day, she reminded herself of what Aunt Ivy had taught her.

Until a vision arrived, there was no reason to worry.

Those she loved were perfectly safe. She tried not to think about the other thing Ivy had hinted at.

Sometimes, while in the embrace of Wild Hill’s giant oak, Brigid would wonder if she’d ever be called upon to take a life.

She decided, if asked, she’d simply refuse.

The Old One could show her things she did not want to see, but she couldn’t make Brigid kill.

Not long after she made that momentous decision, Brigid murdered the first of many men.

IT WAS THE SUMMER SHE turned thirteen and Phoebe twelve.

They were allowed to leave Wild Hill on their own and walk into the village of Mattauk each Friday.

There, they would eat burgers and fries at the diner on Main Street and buy giant gobstoppers at the five-and-dime, which they would suck down to their chalky cores while reading the store’s comics for free.

The walk home was just short of three miles, and they made sure to leave town well before sunset.

Once, having left a little too late, they’d discovered just how dark it got in the woods that lay between the mansion and town—and how sinister the old abandoned farmhouses seemed in the shadows.

The experience hadn’t been one Brigid was keen to repeat.

Having been gifted with night vision, she’d spotted something watching them from between the cornstalks.

She and Phoebe hadn’t stuck around to identify it.

On this particular day, it was late afternoon.

The sun had only just begun its slow descent to the west, and the girls were taking their time getting back.

Phoebe stopped to pick some chicory growing on the side of the road, which she added to a growing bouquet of wildflowers.

One of the ramshackle farmhouses sat a few yards up the road and Brigid spotted a hornet’s nest hanging from a corner of the porch—a perfect globe of gray paper.

Phoebe had been collecting nature’s treasures since their first summer at Wild Hill.

The shelves in her room were cluttered with seeds and bones and anything interesting that washed up on their beach.

A hornet’s nest would make an ideal addition.

“Be right back,” Brigid told Phoebe as she ran ahead. “I’m gonna get you a present.”

She was navigating the house’s rotting porch stairs when a hornet buzzed past her.

She followed its flight up to the nest that she’d assumed was empty.

Now she could see that it wasn’t. Hundreds of hornets had stuffed themselves inside.

Another person would have fled, but hornets didn’t worry Brigid, who’d never once been stung by an insect.

She was far more concerned about a truck that was slowing down as it approached her sister.

“Hey there, honey,” she heard a man behind the wheel say. “You need a ride home?”

“Nope, I’m fine, thank you,” Phoebe told him, walking up the road to pick some daisies. Wild creature that she was, she hadn’t yet learned to be frightened of humans.

The truck rolled forward to keep pace with her.

Brigid could see the man now. There was nothing particularly frightening about him.

He wore his brown hair parted on the left side.

Glasses with brown plastic frames magnified a pair of gray eyes.

He could have been anyone. A teacher, a mailman, a local pastor.

“You know, a young girl like you shouldn’t be out here by herself. ”

“I’m not alone,” Phoebe informed him.

“Sure looks like it to me.” He was trying to sound concerned, but the act wasn’t convincing. The ignition switched off and Brigid’s heart skipped a beat.

“What are you doing?” Phoebe wasn’t alarmed yet, but she was certainly headed in that direction.

“I’m going to take you home.”

“Run!” Brigid whispered. That was what their mother had taught them.

Flora had been adamant on this point. If someone comes after you, run as fast as you can, she’d always said.

Few women stand a chance against a full-grown man.

No little girls do. But Phoebe didn’t run.

Instead, she turned to face the farmhouse porch as if expecting her sister to save her.

She was still waiting when the man picked her up and carried her away.

Brigid watched as the wildflowers in Phoebe’s hand flew high into the air and rained down on the ground.

Until that moment, Brigid had been scared.

Now she was furious. She was annoyed at her sister for not running when she had the chance—and pissed that she was going to have to step in to rescue her.

But more than anything, Brigid was outraged that some random pervert had decided to steal her sister—and incensed that she lived in a world where the people she loved most could be so vulnerable.

Of course she knew Phoebe wouldn’t die that day.

But for the first time, Brigid realized there might be worse things than death.

Then she felt the sensation of a vision arriving, as though her mind was being pulled forward in time.

There, in the future, she watched Phoebe’s kidnapper die.

Brigid had never been grateful for her gift until then.

At that moment, it didn’t make a bit of difference that she was the one who would kill the man.

When she knew how to do it, she didn’t hesitate.

As Brigid returned to the present, she could hear Phoebe screaming every curse word she knew while the man carried her to the back of his truck.

He opened the slide-in camper’s door, and Brigid reached up and gently plucked the hornet’s nest from the porch.

Then, repeating the motions she’d seen in her vision, she made her way out to the truck on the side of the road.

She could feel the hornets crawling up and down her arm.

They tickled, and she smiled. None of them stung her.

The man had left the driver’s side door ajar.

Brigid carefully tucked the hornet’s nest under his seat.

Then, without rushing, she walked around the front of the truck and crouched down on the opposite side.

The camper door closed, muffling Phoebe’s cries.

Brigid heard the man’s boots on the gravel as he hurried back to the driver’s seat.

The truck door slammed, and the ignition turned over.

When the vehicle took off, Brigid’s confidence cracked just a little.

Then the brake lights illuminated and the truck fishtailed before coming to a halt.

The driver’s side door opened, releasing a high-pitched scream.

The kidnapper tumbled out onto the ground.

A cloud of hornets hovered around him. He tried crawling toward the farmhouse and collapsed in the ditch beside the road. While he swatted away the dive-bombing insects, Brigid opened the camper door and set her sister free.

“Are you okay?” Her eyes scanned Phoebe’s lanky form. A bruise was blooming on one knee and blood oozed from a scrape on the other. But those were the only visible injuries.

“Is he dead?” Phoebe pointed at the man in the ditch. He was still now, and the hornets were losing interest. A black ribbon of them wove through the air toward the farmhouse.

“I think so, but I’m gonna give it another minute or two to make sure. You go on and run ahead. Tell Aunt Ivy what happened. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Now that Brigid had blood on her hands, she wondered why she’d ever been worried. If anything, she’d enjoyed the experience. She looked at the man lying dead in the ditch and gave him a kick. She wished she could go back in time and kill him again.

OVER THE FOUR YEARS THAT followed, Brigid watched dozens of strangers die.

Twice, she did the Old One’s bidding. One afternoon a man with a knife stuck inside his boot tried to follow her home.

She led him deep into a canyon instead and slit his throat with a shard of glass she found on the ground—right where a vision had shown her it would be.

The second time, she drowned a man who was molesting children at the beach.

He was standing in waist-deep water to hide his erection when the Old One sent a large wave rolling in to knock him right off his feet. Brigid made sure he never resurfaced.

Killing came naturally to her. It made her feel powerful.

She had been chosen by the Old One to rid the world of its monsters.

No harm would come to her. Even the visions became easier to bear.

Brigid still didn’t enjoy watching innocents die, but she had to admire death for its ingenuity.

It never once repeated itself. Every exit to the afterlife was completely original—a lovely black snowflake.

When death finally took a loved one, it was long overdue.

Ivy was over one hundred when she decided that if death wouldn’t come for her, it was time to go find it.

At midnight on Beltane, she stripped naked and walked into the sound.

Brigid saw it happen from her bedroom in California.

She, Phoebe, and Flora were on a plane to Wild Hill before Ivy’s body washed ashore, wrapped in a shroud of glistening green seaweed.

They buried Ivy on the hill with her sister, mother, and niece.

Then Flora built a bonfire on the lawn, and the three of them danced naked around it, celebrating their aunt’s long life and legacy.

Brigid toasted death with a bottle of the finest champagne and thanked it for treating her great-grandaunt so kindly.

She’d come to think of death as a beast she’d befriended. It would only be a few short months before Brigid learned how wrong she’d been. Death doesn’t have friends. It’s wild and it always will be. No one, not even witches, can tame it.