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It’s another terrible, bloodied night in Gallow Green, and all of the clocks are being set to rights.

A cold wind blows down the high street; the windows shudder and rattle in their shutters, the hanging sign for Paisley Sweets swings wildly, and time goes a little blurry.

“Oh, that’s just the storm,” Malcolm laughs behind his desk at the Mac Crínáin & Reid Detective Agency, but there’s a nervous desperate strain to the edge of his voice.

Agnes Naismith huddles in the lee of the funeral home, shoulders hunched against the wind and her jaw stubbornly set, fingers clenched around the handle of her suitcase.

Mr Fulton lurks in the doorway of his shop, watching as autumnal leaves are sent spinning down the street, as if there’s some invisible presence carrying the storm with it.

Somewhere inside the speakeasy, the bartender wipes down the counter and tilts his head, listening to the howl of that wind.

(Hecate, the goddess of witches, is striding down the street with all the doors slamming in her wake, the hours reeling backwards.)

And the McKittrick Hotel looms above them all: a dark silhouette against the setting sun, a hungry beast hunkered on its haunches with tail lashing. It’s waiting and watching, gaslights gleaming in its windows like eyes.

Years ago — he cannot even recall how long — the bartender arrived in town with a single bag and a crumpled hat clutched in his hands, looking for work.

Doors were slammed in his face. People’s expressions were closed off, shuttering just as their businesses did, and they were all so terribly polite as they said No, sorry, we’re not hiring at the moment. ‘Help wanted’ signs were discreetly lifted out of windows.

He had seen the opulence of the McKittrick, but they’re shabbier down here in Gallow Green: their clothing stitched and mended, the men and women superstitiously crossing their hearts against witches. More provincial. He’d thought that meant he could get a foot in the door, but —

The Manderley Bar is a glittering jewel sitting squarely between hotel and town, and they slam their doors against him, too. Despite the fact that he knows every cocktail on the menu and can do double duty as a bouncer if they need. He can even do the fancy flips and twists and twirls of the bottle to delight their rich patrons. He can do card tricks to entertain the ladies.

But his skin is too dark for anything besides the most menial jobs. He doesn’t want to carry luggage. He’ll serve ‘em drinks, sure, but he won’t serve them. Coming up from the south, fleeing the ugly heat and uglier sensibilities, he’d gotten in a fight on the train, then been flung off somewhere in the vicinity of Gallow Green. During the scuffle he’d lost the protective root his grandmaman had tucked into his pocket, and he can’t help the itching rattled feeling that it’s all gotten fucked up since then. His good-luck charm’s gone. He doesn’t see a path forward. He’s getting desperate.

Which is how Hecate finds him one night, and drips poison in his ear.

The man’s been living in a sorry boarding-house bachelor room, where he doesn’t even know how he’s going to afford rent through the end of the week. He’s been watching his savings dwindle away, and he thought they were more accepting here, up north — but there’s a strange tight closed-off nature to the people here in this town. An aloofness. A haunting.

He doesn’t even remember how the woman appeared in his room, and as he blinks, he’s not entirely sure she’s a woman, either, although she’s certainly shaped like it. The (creature? witch?) is tall and statuesque, with long blonde hair, imperious stature, a red dress. It’s scandalously red. Blood-red. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed and her fingers lift his handsome chin, her nails sharp against his throat like an animal’s claws.

“Do this for me, and you’ll be amply rewarded, my sweet,” Hecate purrs.

And so the bartender finds himself making a Molotov cocktail, just as brisk and efficient as if he were mixing Sazeracs again.

That night, the Manderley burns down, and the news is printed in the Gallow Green Gazette that week, and they all murmur what a shame. It wasn’t insured and the owner can’t afford to rebuild, so he has to abandon the project and it remains a hollow, burned-out wreck. All of that alcohol had gone up like a fireball, all whiskey-soaked tables and counters and shelves of top-tier liquor. People whisper that there’s something wrong about it: the opposite of good luck, an ill omen, a hexing.

Hecate and her witches take up residence.

That month, the speakeasy opens to fill the void, and the bartender’s there as customers start to creep through the doors, to whet their whistles and seek their pleasures and gamble away things they probably shouldn’t.

And all the while, the speakeasy’s bartender feels a string knotted tight around his heart, lodged like a fishhook somewhere under his ribcage, tying him to that queen of witches. But at least he has a job now.

He has a job, all right.

The speakeasy is popular.

Perhaps it’s enchantment, or just the fact that they’ve been hungry for something exactly like this. This small town is simmering like a kettle ready to boil over, everyone with their secrets wanting some pressure release, some secret place where everyone turns a blind eye to everyone else.

The servants and workers from up on McKittrick hill drift down through its doors too, welcome in a way they never would’ve been at the Manderley: waiters and porters, working-class men with sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Sometimes they’re graced by Duncan’s soldiers, Malcolm and Banquo and Macduff loosening their ties and playing cards, and the clientele pretends they don’t recognise them, and everyone’s satisfied enough.

Mr Fulton stands on the threshold, but never quite works up the nerve to go in.

On full moon nights, there’s a noise of wild abandon from the ruins of the Manderley down the road, and people lock their doors and pretend they don’t hear, or that it’s the noise of a storm. The bartender waits in the alley outside, smoking a cigarette, his hands oddly steady for all that noise and clamour. He’s standing there in the shadows, loyal, familiar, as Hecate comes sweeping out and presses that vial of tears into his hand, a wicked smile on her face.

They each have their rituals.

James Fulton carefully selects lines of Bible verse, cutting them out of the good book with sharp tailors’ scissors and a steady hand. He hand-sews a verse into each jacket that he works on. (Tonight’s: he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.) After the job is complete, he shakes out the coat, presses his thumb along the seams, and checks that the slip of paper isn’t too visible or noticeable.

He casts his little enchantments, little talismans, little protections for everyone in this town, like sparrows nestling in the palm of his hand.

He gathers up bird bones, and whispers a charm into them before snapping those delicate hollow limbs. He slips into Mac Crínáin & Reid, where Malcolm’s obsessive investigation papers the walls. He blesses a photograph of a missing person here and there; tries to wish them luck, luck, luck.

The nobility and royalty up on the hill don’t need his protection, or don’t deserve it, but he tries his best for his little town living in their shadow.

In the speakeasy, the bartender wipes down the counters. He gathers and re-sets the billiards table, even if the green felt is scuffed and doesn’t play a clean game anyway. He cleans the glasses with a rag that’s seen better days. Gathers and stacks and re-stacks the chairs. Looks at the board, the playing cards hammered into the wall: measurements of loss, each losing hand, each soul bartered away inside the walls of his speakeasy. (They all go to feed her, in the end. Of course they go to feed her. What in the world would the bartender do with a soul?)

He counts his cards and stacks the deck in a precise manner, ready for the next parlour trick.

He’s weary, often. A bartender’s life is already nocturnal, but his is even moreso: he can barely remember the last time he saw the bright light of the sun and felt its warmth on his skin. He’s tired of living under the full moon. Sometimes he misses the heat of the deep south; his bones are cold, and nowadays it feels like they’re always gonna be cold.

On that bloodied, full moon night, the witches are running rampant in the wreckage of the former Manderley. There’s blood dripping off bare skin, the searing burn of a shot, smeared lipstick, an unbuttoned shirt. Tithes paid. Tears collected. A deal with the devil.

Fulton’s little charms are splintering, breaking, and he’s becoming increasingly aware that the storm centers on that side of town.

When he sidles into the speakeasy for the very first time, the bartender’s eyebrow arches practically into his hairline.

“Didn’t think I’d ever see you here,” the bartender remarks, wry, his voice a low Creole drawl.

“Yes, well,” Fulton says, but then tapers off. He’s looking all around the bar, taking it in, his demeanour neat and tidy and calculating the surroundings as if he’d rolled out the measuring tape. He clears his throat, walks up to the bar, leans his weight against it. (A little too-casual, a little too affected. He’s all stiff angles and discomfort.) “I wasn’t sure if the business would survive. But it has, and so this establishment is a part of the town, so it was about time I checked in on it.”

“You know you’re not the mayor or anything, yeah? You don’t gotta do that.”

“It’s under my protection nonetheless.”

Fulton’s gaze shifts, and then lingers too long on the bartender. The other man’s throat working as he swallows. That charming smile, the bright teeth. He’s had his suspicions about the bartender for a while — the Manderley burned down so quickly, this speakeasy started up so quickly — but there’s nothing conclusive. He cranes his head, trying to catch a glimpse of bare skin at the neck of his shirt. Looking for lesions, bruises, calluses, scars, strange welts in the shape of an animal footprint. Witches’ marks.

If he is her familiar, then surely there must be marks.

“You just lookin’ or you gonna do something about it?” The bartender’s voice is all warm humour, but there’s a dangerous glint in his eyes as he slides a glass of whiskey across the counter.

Fulton shifts his weight. Catches the drink, doesn’t pick it up, instead seizes the bartender’s forearm and tries to haul him closer to see beneath his sleeve. The other man writhes — uncommonly flexible, athletic, whirling right over the top of the bar. And then the bartender’s fist winds into Fulton’s shirt, a few buttons snapping, the fingers of his other hand digging into the back of his neck.

The tailor whirls, feeling the seams at his shoulders straining. He finds himself pressed over the counter, the other man’s breath panting in his ear — there’s a thrill of something illicit, a sudden sharp kick of pleasure which he both fears and craves — before he kicks off, shoves backward, eventually slams the bartender against the wall of his bar.

The glasses rattle on their shelves; a couple of the playing cards fall off the board.

And they’re entwined with each other, fingers digging into skin, their mouths crashing together into a hungry kiss, biting until they taste blood.

That doesn’t always happen.

Sometimes the two of them come away with Fulton’s lip bleeding from the bartender’s knuckles, now fastidiously straightening his sleeves and hurrying away from the speakeasy. The bartender pours himself another drink, pressing the cold-sweating glass of whiskey against his black eye.

Other times, the night ends differently. Like this. Limbs tangled in a narrow bed at the bachelors’ boarding-house, fingers running across naked skin, perhaps still searching for marks and finding nothing — then his teeth grazing Fulton’s neck with hot, open-mouthed contact until it raises bruises, a small irony.

They spend the night together. Time blurs.

But the bartender can’t fall asleep: the closer it gets to midnight, the more restless he gets, and he eventually slips out of bed. There’s a jar of honeyed sugar water on the shelf: he unscrews the jar, dips a fingertip in it, licks his finger clean. Sweetening, hoping for good outcomes.

There’s a small family altar. He’s not sure if it still works anymore. Sometimes he burns coloured wax candles in a glass jar, working his herbs and charms, chewing roots. It’s not the same as grandmaman’s work down outside New Orleans, and he can only imagine how she would’ve looked askance at him today: under the thrall of that dangerous goddess down the street, doing her bidding. Blood and tears, roots and bones. Hecate’s magic always tastes foul on his tongue, like turned earth.

But he’s got a job. He’s got near-eternal life. He roams Gallow Green like some puckish spirit with the town at his feet, comfortable and at home in all of its nooks and crannies; and in his free moments, he still tries to keep the traditions alive as much as he can. He sets out three shots in rings of salt.

Yet his charms, too, are unstitched and unspooling.

Fulton, the cunning man, has picked up bits and pieces of folklore like some scavenger, but largely his traditions are more prim and proper. Bible verses. Ash and water smeared on the forehead, like Ash Wednesday. Tidy red thread. Everything upright and northerly.

(It had been beyond delicious, getting him to unravel this night.)

“Is that how you cast your spells?” Fulton asks from the bed, watching him with the jar, and the bartender feels that hook twitch beneath his ribcage again.

“It ain’t spells,” he explains, or tries to explain. “It’s called work. Rootwork. Chores. It’s hoodoo and it ain’t for you, James. My grandmaman’s a conjure woman. I learned everything I know from her.”

With the candle lit, the bartender lets himself sink down and sit on the edge of the bed like a puppet with its strings cut; his limbs are pleasantly exhausted, but his mind and soul are unpleasantly tired. He feels heartsick, soulsick. He can’t remember how long he’s been working for her. He doesn’t know how much longer he can keep this up.

Midnight’s getting closer. There’s a noise rattling the windows, night-shrieking through the eaves and down the street, and he tilts his head like a dog hearing a distant whistle.

“It’s time. You gotta go,” the bartender says, and doesn’t look at the man behind him.

A cold wind blows through Gallow Green, and all of the clocks are being set to rights.