Book of Shadows

CHAPTER 15 Killburn Abbey

Samhain is coming. Last night the circle was thin and pale without her. I need her. I think she's the one.

"You know, some kids actually get pregnant when they're sixteen," I muttered to Mary K. on Sunday afternoon. I couldn't believe my life had come to this: sitting in the back of a school bus packed with a bunch of jolly, devout Catholics on our way to Killburn Abbey. "They have drug problems and total their parents' cars. They flunk out of school. All I did was bring home a couple of books!"

I sighed and leaned my head against the bus window, torturing myself by wondering what had happened at the circle the night before.

If you've never spent an hour on a school bus with a bunch of grown-ups from your church, you have no idea how long an hour can be. My parents were sitting a few rows up, and they looked happy as pigs in mud, talking and laughing with their friends. Melinda Johnson, age five, got carsick, and we had to keep stopping to let her hang out the door.

"Here we are!" trilled Miss Hotchkiss at last, standing up in front as the bus lurched to a wheezy halt in front of what looked like a prison. Miss Hotchkiss is Father Hotchkiss's sister and keeps house for him.

Mary K. looked suspiciously out the window. "Is this a jail?" she whispered. "Are we here to be scared straight or something?"

I groaned and followed the crowd as they tromped off the bus. Outside, the air was chill and damp, and thick gray clouds scudded across the sky. I smelled rain and realized no birds were chirping.

In front of us were tall cement walls, at least nine feet high. They were stained from years of weather and dirt and crisscrossed by clinging vines. Set into one wall was a pair of large black doors, with heavy riveted studs and massive hinges.

"Okay, everyone," called Father Hotchkiss cheerfully. He strode up to the gate and rang the bell. In moments the door was answered by a woman wearing a name tag that said Karen Breems.

"Hello! You must be the group from St. Michael's," she said enthusiastically. "Welcome to Killburn Abbey. This is one of New York State's oldest cloistered convents. No nuns live here anymore—Sister Clement died back in 1987. Now it's a museum and a retreat center."

We stepped through the gates into a plantless courtyard covered with fine gravel that crunched under our feet I found myself smiling as I looked around but didn't know why. Killburn Abbey was lifeless, gray, and lonely. But as I walked in, a deep, pervasive sense of calm came over me. My worries melted away in the face of its thick stone walls, bare courtyard, and caged windows.

"This feels like a prison," said Mary K., wrinkling her nose. "Those poor nuns."

"No, not a prison," I said, looking at the small windows set high up on the walls. "A sanctuary."

We saw the tiny stone cells where the nuns had slept on hard wooden cots covered with straw. There was a large, primitive kitchen with a huge oak worktable and enormous, patterned pots and pans. If I squinted, I could see a black-robed nun, stirring herbs into boiling water, making medicinal teas for sisters who were ailing. A witch, I thought.

"The abbey was almost completely self-sufficient," Ms. Breems said, waving us out of the kitchen through a narrow wooden door. We stepped outside into a walled garden, now overgrown, sad, and neglected.

"They grew all their own vegetables and fruit, canning what they would need to last through a New York winter," Ms. Breems went on. "When the abbey first opened, they even kept sheep and goats for milk, meat, and wool. This area is their kitchen garden, walled off to keep out rabbits and deer. As is typical in many European abbeys, the herb garden was laid out as a small, circular maze."

Like the wheel of a year, I thought, counting eight main spokes, now decrepit and sometimes indistinct. One for Samhain, one for Yule, one for Imbolc, then Ostara, Beltane, Litha, Lammas, and Mabon.

Of course, I was sure the nuns had never intended to use the Wiccan wheel in their garden design. They would have been totally horrified by it. But that's how Wicca was: ancient and gently permeating many facets of people's lives without their being aware of it.

As we walked down the crumbling stone paths, worn smooth by hundreds of years of sandaled feet, Mrs. Petrie, the herb gardener, was practically in rapture. I walked behind her, listening as she murmured, "Dill, yes, and look at that robust chamomile. Oh, and that is tansy; goodness, I hate tansy; it takes over everything…."

As I followed her, I swear a wave of magick passed over me. It lifted my spirit and made the sun shine on my face. Each bed, though no longer tended, was a revelation.

I didn't know the names of most of the plants, but I got impressions of them. A few times I bent and touched their dried brown heads, their broken seed pods, their withered leaves. As I did, shadowy images formed in my mind: boneset, feverfew, eyebright, meadowsweet, rosemary, dandelion again and again.

Here in front of me were the sparse autumn remains of plants with the power to heal, to work magick, to flavor food, to make incense and soap and dye… My head swirled with their possibilities.

Kneeling, I brushed my fingers against a pale aloe, which everyone uses to help with burns and sunburn. My mom used it all the time and didn't worry about witchcraft. A shrubby bay laurel bush stood nearby, its trunk twisted with time and age. When I touched it, it felt clean, pure, strong. There were thyme bushes; a huge, dying catnip; caraway seeds, tiny and brown on brittle stems. It was a new world for me to explore, to lose myself in. Tenderly I touched a gnarled spearmint plant.

"Mint never dies," Mrs. Petrie said, seeing me. "It always comes back. It's actually very invasive- I grow mine in pots."

I smiled and nodded at her, no longer feeling the chill of the air. I explored every path, seeing empty spaces where plants had been or where their stems still stood, awaiting their rebirth in the spring. I carefully read the small metal plates, each with a plant's name handwritten in a feminine, even cursive.

My mom came and stood next to me. "This is so interesting, isn't it?" I felt she was trying to make amends.

"It's incredible," I said sincerely. "I love all these herbs. Do you think Dad would give me a little space in the yard so we could grow our own?"

My mom looked into my eyes, brown into brown. "You're that interested?" she said, glancing down at a tough, woody clump of rosemary.

"Yeah," I said. "It's so pretty here. Wouldn't it be cool if we could cook with our own parsley and rosemary?"

"Yes, it would," my mom said. "Maybe next spring. We'll talk to Dad about it." She turned away and went to stand next to Miss Hotchkiss, who was discussing the history of the abbey.

When it was time to get back on the bus, I had to tear myself away. I wanted to stay at the abbey and walk its halls and smell its scents and feel the drying leaves of plants crumble beneath my fingertips. The plants called me with the magick of their thin, reedy life forces, and there, outside the gates of the Killburn Abbey, it came to me.

In spite of my parents' objections, in spite of everything, it wasn't enough for me to learn about witches. I wanted to be one.