The Price Guide to the Occult
Leslye Walton
They have been called many things.
Years ago, when their nomadic ways led them north to where the mountains were covered in ice and the winter nights were long, the villagers called to them, “H?xa, H?xa!” and left gifts of lutfisk and thick elk skins. When they moved farther south, they were Sangoma and as honored as the village’s own traditional healers. In the east, they were the fearsome Daayan; in the west, they were called La Lechuza and were rumored to have the ability to transform into birds. They’ve been called healers and seers, shape-shifters and conjurers. Wise ones. Heretics. Witches. They’ve been welcomed and revered as often as they’ve been feared and despised. History books throughout the world are filled with tales of their spilled blood — blood spilled willingly or unwillingly.
A family by the name of Blackburn was known to be particularly talented. Their talents delved deep into the realms of intrigue — clairvoyance, telekinesis, divination. They used their gifts to heal the sick or to ease the passing of those they could not heal. They used their gifts to help build towns or to defend them. Some of them were lovers, some of them fighters; a fair few were both. For centuries, over lifetimes, the truth of their power seemed everlasting, a blooming flower that would never wilt, a full moon that refused to wane. That is, until Rona Blackburn made the fateful decision to move to an obscure island off the Washington coastline and brought that long line of impressive family talent to a rather catastrophic and unexpected end.
Anathema Island sits at the tail end of the San Juan archipelago that winds through the cold waters of the Salish Sea. The word anathema refers to something dedicated to the gods. Coincidentally enough, it can also indicate someone accursed, someone damned, someone doomed. A fitting name, it would seem then, for an island buffeted by rain-bearing winds and cloaked in a sky so gray that the ocean and the heavens seemed one and the same. It was a place so remote and so inconsequential that cartographers rarely bothered to mark it on maps.
The island’s absence from atlases didn’t matter to the swell of Lhaq’temish families who’d inhabited it for centuries. But that flourishing community fled and scattered throughout the archipelago like leaves in the wind with the arrival of eight daring settlers, who never bothered to ask if the land already belonged to anyone else.
Mack Forgette, having failed to find his fortune in the gold mines of Canada’s caribou country, was the first of the eight to arrive, in 1843. Soon after came Jebidiah Finch, an experienced farrier. The man they all called Port Master Sweeney had been a trapper. It was his keen eyes that kept watch over the small dock on the southwest corner of the island. Forsythe Stone, an evangelical pastor, imagined leading his fellow islanders away from the debauchery and immorality that tend to infect men left to their own devices. Avery Sterling was a talented carpenter. Simon Mercer came from a long line of farmers. Otto Birch, the good German, migrated from a small town in northern California. And they all considered themselves quite lucky with the arrival of Doctor Sebastian Farce, his black medical bag, and his opium ampoules.
Each man claimed his own piece of land — a few hundred acres on which he kept goats and sheep — and built a small shack where he slept with his boots on. A meal was a piece of hard cheese or jerky carved with the same knife used to dig out splinters and ingrown toenails. They shat outdoors alongside the goats.
It would be another few years before their wives and children would join them. And so, it was in this way that the menfolk of Anathema Island lived. Until one blustery day, at the cusp of yet another long, hard winter, they received a rather unexpected and uninvited guest.
“She was alone you say?” Jebidiah Finch asked.
Port Master Sweeney nodded. “If you don’t count the two dogs, if you can call them that. They were some six hands tall, like mythological monsters. But they were nothing compared to her. I’ve never seen a woman so large. She towered well over my head. At first, I thought one of you unlucky bastards might have ordered himself a bride, but it seems the woman is here on her own.” The port master shuddered then, remembering the other unmistakable feature of this giantess: one glass eye that twisted angrily in its socket. The glass eye a shade of violet not found anywhere in nature.
“Perhaps the lady is a witch,” Otto Birch suggested.
The other men laughed, but the port master did not join them.
“Yes, tell us, man,” said Mack Forgette. “Where might we find this heretic?”
“I am pleased to say that I do not know” was Sweeney’s stoic response.
Avery Sterling turned to Sebastian Farce, who until then had been sitting in quiet contemplation. “What do you make of this, Doctor?”
“She may be an unusual woman,” the good doctor said after a moment, “but she is still a woman. How much trouble can she cause that we men would not be more than able to counter?”
“I do not think it wise to underestimate her,” the port master said, still shaken. “Mark my words, Rona Blackburn will prove to be a violent and capricious windstorm. God willing, she has no aim of staying!”
Oh, but Rona Blackburn most certainly did.
Rona soon picked out her own plot of land — one hundred eighty acres that stretched along the bottom of a rocky hill and only a stone’s throw from the shoreline. Quickly, much more quickly than natural for a man much less a woman — even one of Rona Blackburn’s stature — a house appeared. She filled her new home with reminders of her previous one on the Aegean island she had loved so much: pastel seashells and a front door painted a deep cobalt blue — a color the yiayias always claimed had the power to repel evil. Then she set up her bed, made a pit for her fire, and erected two wooden tables. One table she kept bare. The other she covered in tinctures and glass jars of cut herbs and other fermented bits of flora and fauna. On this table, she kept a marble mortar and pestle, the leather sheath in which she wrapped her knives, and copper bowls — some for mixing dry ingredients, some for liquid, and a few small enough to bring to the mouth for sipping. And when the fire was stoked and the table was set, she placed a wooden sign — soon covered in a blanket of a late December snow — outside that blue front door.