The Witch of Wellesley Island Chapter 10 – The End . . . of the Trail

Editor's Note: Author Patrick Metcalf introduced us to the Witch of Wellesley Island for Halloween one year. . .

He wrote: "However, I do have an admission to make.  As I write this introduction, I'm not entirely sure where this story is going.  My 9-year-old son, Lee, and I talk about it.  He has contributed some pretty good ideas. During this strange COVID-19 year, I have made writing this story and enjoying Halloween a priority, as traveling along this road seems to make everything else seem a little less weird by comparison!"

Several readers asked if we could please provide an ending - and Patrick agreed. One idea came from our illustrator, Marie-Anne Erki. She kindly sent us her ending... and we (Elspeth Naismith, our real copy editor, and I, Susie Smith) agreed and BINGO... Here it is.  Enjoy!

The Witch of Wellesley Island Chapter 10 – The End . . . of the Trail

Story to Date:

On Hallowe’en evening, after closing up their family cottage on Wellesley Island and heading back towards Fishers Landing, twins Pete and Sarah hear a scream from a cliff overlooking The Narrows, between Wellesley and Murray Isle. They land, follow the sounds and lights, and see a witch by a fire. The fire goes out, the witch disappears, but the twins find an amulet, a charcoal symbol scratched on a rock, and fresh blood that had quenched the fire. They take the amulet, then are chased away by the witch. Once at Fishers Landing, they report the incident to the local police, who take the amulet as possible evidence in a missing person case.

The next day, the twins return to the cottage for their forgotten car keys and find the cottage has been broken into. There are drawings under their beds of the symbol from the night before, and a photo of them is missing. Back on the mainland, when paying for lunch, in her change Sarah is given a Confederate penny from 1865, and Pete finds a similar coin on the ground beside their car. They consult a local museum curator, who tells them the tale of a Southerner who came to the Islands after the civil war, with a treasure in gold coins. He was subsequently murdered, possibly by secret a Confederate organization with links to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The curator suggests that the caretaker at Singer Castle might know the meaning of the charcoal symbol the twins found. So Sarah and Pete travel to Dark Island. At the castle, they meet Edwin and a parrot named Ichabod. Sarah faints and has a peculiar dream.

After she recovers, Edwin tells them that the coins are reproductions, but based on a description of the amulet, he suggests that the witch is trying to raise the murdered Southerner to carry out a revenge plot. Sarah and Pete spend the night at Singer Castle, but in the morning both Edwin and Ichabod have disappeared. Sarah thinks that she knows where the murdered Southerner might be buried. The twins head for Canoe Pt on Grindstone Island; when they arrive, they hear the sound of digging . . .

Pete and Sarah followed the direction of the shovelling sounds that they’d heard from the boat, but it was quiet now. As they walked further into the dense forest, they could make out the muffled sound of human voices. The fallen leaves crunched under their feet. Still, they couldn’t see anything ahead through the trees, but visions of their recent experiences in the woods on Halloween night came back to them. Sarah shivered, not so much from the morning cold, but from the memory of the evil she and Pete had seen that night. Even the daylight could not drive away her sense of impending doom.

Sarah asked herself what she and Pete were thinking, coming to Canoe Point. What obsession was gripping them both that they were willing to place themselves in danger, maybe even in mortal danger? A dream! A premonition? Maybe she was losing her mind. Sarah woke up that morning knowing that the gravestone of the murdered Confederate was going to be here. And the gold coins that he’d stolen? Would they be here too? Now, who were they rushing to encounter in the woods? A satanic cult? Ruthless men reenacting the rites of the Knights of the Golden Circle?

Pete was thinking pretty much the same thoughts. It had been exciting to try to solve the mystery of the witch and the amulet. The symbols under their beds in the cottage had been placed there to warn them off, but how did the witch know that they would return to the cottage? If only he hadn’t forgotten the car keys, he and Sarah would be safely home by now, instead of here, barging in on some demonic ritual. Did they have a plan? In his mind, he could hear Sarah’s voice saying, “Once again, we don’t!”

Pete turned around and whispered to Sarah, “I don’t think this is such a good idea. Let’s go back and call the police.”

“The police?” Sarah shook her head. “Are you crazy?! What are we going to tell them? There are people at Canoe Point? We need proof that something bad is going on. Maybe these are the kidnappers of that missing person the detective told us about. We have to know what’s going on.”

“All right, all right,” Pete whispered. “Just stay behind me and go slowly.”

As they came closer to the sound of the voices, they could see some people through the trees. Pete and Sarah crouched in the undergrowth as they got nearer to the group. Edwin was there! There were five other people with him, all women. The six were standing around and, curiously, seemed to be in good spirits. The gathering didn’t look at all menacing. Then, Edwin turned around and spotted the new arrivals.

“Hi there!” Edwin called. “So, you found us after all!”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the women. “Who are these people?”

“It’s Pete and Sarah, who followed Marie and me to Dark Island,” said Edwin.

“Followed you?” Sarah exclaimed indignantly. “No way! The curator at the Thousand Islands Museum told us to go out there. She said that the caretaker at Singer Castle would know about the charcoal symbol that we showed you. We weren’t following you!”

“Hold on,” said another of the women. “There were only two teams left to find this cache. When and how did these people butt in?” she asked, pointing at Pete and Sarah.

“We’re not butting in!” Pete said. “And what cache? What the heck are you talking about?!”

“You mean, you're not looking for the last geocache?” asked Edwin.

Pete shook his head. “A geocache? No! We told you what we were doing! We were trying to figure out what was going on with that witch who we saw on Wellesley Island, and why she left that symbol with blood on it at the campfire, and why someone broke into our cottage and marked that symbol under our beds. We told you all of that!”

“And you told us that the symbol was meant to conjure a malicious spirit! Something from ancient Mesopotamia! And we showed you the Confederate pennies we found,” added Sarah.

“Oh, no!” Edwin was laughing. “I thought you were the team that we had to beat to the last geocache. I was playing along and thought that I could get you to go to the Clayton graveyard instead of here.”

“Susie and I are the other team,” another woman said, laughing. “And we thought that Pete and Sarah were you and Marie.”

“Hang on, now,” said Sarah. “Wait just a minute! What IS going on?”

“I think that we have to clear things up a bit,” said one of the women, who was obviously in charge. “You two are Pete and Sarah. Right?”

The twins nodded in agreement.

“OK,” said the woman. “My name is Jennifer and this is Beth.” Jennifer pointed to the third woman, who had first spoken to Pete and Sarah. “We are the representatives of the Great Upstate New York Geocache Summer Contest, and we’re here because today the last cache was found by these two teams. We started with 100 teams two months ago, but Edwin and Marie, and Susie and Elspeth are the last two teams left. They joined forces today and found the last geocache together.”

“What happened to all the other teams?” Pete asked.

“Some had to drop out because they ran out of time off from work or school,” Jennifer explained. “But the contest also had time limits, so if a team didn’t get to a specific geocache by a certain time, they were disqualified.”

“Geocache?” Pete sputtered. “You mean, this was all a treasure hunt?!”

“Sort of,” said Beth. “You’ve heard of geocaching, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, but . . . ” Pete started to scratch his ear. “But what about the witch we saw on Halloween night?”

“For goodness sakes! What witch?” Beth asked.

Susie and Elspeth started laughing. “Oh, that was us!” said Elspeth. “We wanted to scare you off. We thought you were the other team.”

“Why were you on Wellesley?” Sarah asked.

“We knew that we were closing in on the last cache, but our phones ran out of juice so we couldn’t keep going, and decided to stop for the night close by,” said Susie.

“On Wellesley Island?” Sarah said.

“Yeah, as Susie said, that’s where we were when our phones died, and it’s close to here,” Elspeth said as she pointed towards the east. “We should have gone to get a room in Clayton and charge our phones overnight. But it got dark, we don’t know the River well, and I’m really nervous about crossing that shipping channel in the dark. Anyhow, we thought we could camp out and we had a fire going. When we saw you, we thought you were the other team. We decided to skedaddle, but I drew the symbol on the rock to confuse you. Then I dropped my lucky charm, and after you left, I realised that you must have picked it up.” Elspeth pointed an accusing finger at the twins. “I was calling you to come back, because I really wanted to have it back.”

“That was you, then, shouting from the island when we were in the boat?” Pete said.

“Of course,” Elspeth said. “I was really mad that you took my lucky charm.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pete. “I didn’t mean to steal it. I thought you were a witch – I didn’t see that there were two of you.”

Elspeth and Susie started to whoop with laughter. “Yes, well, maybe in the dark we do look like witches,” they gasped as they looked at each other, and laughed even harder.

“The police in Clayton have your lucky charm because I thought there was blood on it, and it might be a clue in a missing person case,” Pete said.

“Anyhow, what was all that blood that you threw on the fire?” Sarah asked Elspeth and Susie, now pointing her finger at them.

“Oh, that wasn’t blood. We were heating up some beet soup for our dinner, but when we saw you, I panicked and upset the pot. It put out the fire, but we also lost our soup.” Susie said ruefully. “We stayed around, out of sight, and tried to get a good look at you. We didn’t know who the other team was, and we wanted to keep a lookout for you later.”

Elspeth chimed in and said, “Then we decided that camping out wasn’t such a great idea. There’s no place around here to stay, so we took our boat over to Grandview – it seemed to be the nearest place with cottages. We thought we’d see if anyone would let us use one of their rooms, but all the cottages were closed up for the winter. The door was sort of unlocked at one place, so we camped out in their living room.”

“That was our place,” said Pete indignantly. Then he said, “And I left the door unlocked?” He slapped his forehead. “I must be losing my marbles.”

“Yes indeed,” said Sarah. “I sometimes think, dear brother, that you really are losing your marbles!”

“Well, um, no. Not exactly,” Susie said. “We found the doors were locked, but the kitchen door was sort of easy to open.”

“Wait a sec. You pried open our kitchen door?” Pete accused the two women. “You did real damage.”

Elspeth and Susie nodded, looking down at their feet. “Yeah, that was our bad. We wrote a note for the owners. I guess that’s you?”

“Our parents,” Sarah replied tersely.

“Sorry. We were getting a bit desperate by then and weren’t thinking straight. We left a couple of hundred dollars with the note, on top of the piano,” Elspeth said. “Didn’t you find it? We can pay more, if you need more.”

“We’ll see how much it costs. Maybe it looked worse than it is,” Sarah said.

“Well, when we saw your boat coming into the dock the next morning, we thought we recognised you from the night before, and we could play a trick on you again. We managed to draw that symbol under the beds before you even landed.” Susie chuckled. “Then we got away as fast as we could.”

“Why did you take the photograph from my dresser?” Sarah asked.

Elspeth and Susie looked at each other. “We were shocked that we were staying in the cottage of the people who were the other team, and we wanted to have the picture, in case we ran into you later. Yeah, maybe it wasn’t our best idea.”

Turning to Pete and Sarah, Edwin said “When I met you at Singer Castle, I thought that you were the other team. Then you showed me the photo of the amulet and the symbol, and I was confused. I didn’t think that there were any other clues to find the cache, other than the GPS coordinates and the written hints about an old grave, but then I wondered if maybe Marie and I had missed something. I had heard about the legend of the Maple Island murder and the Knights of the Golden Circle. I thought that I could throw you off the track, until I could figure out what was going on.”

“Why were you two on Dark Island?” Beth asked Edwin and Marie.

“Our cell coverage isn’t very good around here, so we ended up getting totally turned around. We were going to go ashore to get a different service provider. When I saw Dark Island, I remembered that I had visited it as a kid with my parents, and I wanted to show Marie around a bit. Nobody was there, but, boy, were we ever surprised when we found a back entrance open. So we went in.”

“What about the parrot?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, he’s my darling,” Marie said.

“What? I thought I was your darling,” Edwin pouted.

“You are both my darlings, in different ways,” Marie cooed at Edwin.

Pete shook his head in exasperation. “All right, you two love-birds. Back to the explanations, please.”

Pointing at Pete and Sarah, Edwin said, “When we saw you two, we decided that Marie should stay hidden and that I should act as if I was meant to be there. I tried to get you to go to the graveyard in Clayton, so that Marie and I could get here ahead of you.”

“Well, thank you for the breakfast you left us,” said Sarah.

“Yeah, that was nice of you to do,” said Pete.

“So we’re good?” asked Jennifer.

“Y-e-s . . . ” Pete and Sarah said tentatively.

It seemed as if they had just walked into an alternate reality. A parallel universe. How had they gotten so wound up with the supernatural and an old legend of a murdered Confederate who had come north with a hoard of gold coins?

“We’re going to the Thousand Islands Club to celebrate the end of the contest. Our sponsors are hosting a big luncheon and you’d be most welcome to join us,” Beth said to the twins.

Pete and Sarah looked at each other. They were feeling a bit deflated and a meal at the TI Club sounded good. But getting on the road and heading back home felt equally good.

“Thank you for the invitation,” Sarah said. “But I think that we’ve intruded on your event more than enough. Maybe we should just get going.”

“Yeah,” said Pete. “It was really nice meeting you all. It sounds like you had fun with the contest.”

“It was huge fun,” Edwin said. “The prizes are pretty good, too.”

“It was all meant to promote tourism in Upstate New York,” Jennifer chimed in, “And it did attract a lot of newcomers here, to visit this beautiful part of the state.”

“Great,” said Sarah.

“OK. Well, our boats are over there.” Beth pointed north up the shore from where the twins had beached their boat.

“Bye now!” rang out as the two groups exchanged waves and farewells.

“Right, Sis,” Pete said. “I guess that’s the end of that.”

“I guess so,” replied Sarah, sounding a little unconvinced.

They walked back towards the boat, feeling decidedly underwhelmed and let down. Did it all make sense? Had it been all their imagination?

“Hang on,” Pete said. “I have a pebble in my shoe.”

Pete sat down on a boulder, wrenched off his left shoe, and shook out the pebble.

“I guess the lesson for us is not to wait for Hallowe’en night to close up the cottage again,” said Sarah.

“Right. Let’s plan to not do that again,” agreed Pete.

As he got up from the boulder, the sun came out from behind the clouds and, unseen by the twins, glinted off a small yellow metal disc, half-buried near the boulder.

“Let’s go!” Sarah said, and the twins raced to the shore, feeling the exhilaration of release from all their fears of the last couple of days. Through the woods came the strangled call of an animal . . .  or was it the cackle of a dark-cloaked stranger, who had been watching them all with a malignant eye.

Happy Halloween!👻🦇🧙

By Marie-Anne Erki

Marie Anne Erki, Kingston artist and emeritus professor civil engineering at the Royal Military College.  Marie Anne initially considered a career in architecture, but her love of mathematics led to becoming a structural engineer.   She says, "At a time before computer assisted drawing (CAD), both disciplines required a huge amount of freehand and mechanical drawing. After a quarter of a century of great fun as a structural engineer, I decided to pursue painting full time." We at TI Life are fortunate as Marie-Anne has accepted to be our Official Illustrator and you will find her work on many of our articles. You can also see her works at marieanneerkipaintings.blogspot.com/

Editor's final note written after both Elspeth and I stopped giggling. "Bravo Partick and Marie-Anne - Well done."