Chapter 3: Getting to Know Deszi

Being around Deszi did something strange to a person. It was like opening the blinds in a room you didn’t even realize had gone dark. Nothing sudden. Nothing dramatic. Just a slow, subtle change.

She started changing. Not all at once—God, no. It was gradual, like watching ice melt. You don’t see it happening, not really. But come back in ten minutes and the glass is half-full.

The stories she used to tell—the creepy ones, the ones that clung to you like cobwebs—started to dry up. She still had them, sure, but they came less often, like she was forgetting how they went.

At lunch, it used to be just us. Nobody sat near us if they could help it. You’d think we were contagious. But then people started joining. First one or two. Then more. Pretty soon we were just another group—laughing, bitching about finals, swapping gossip about who was hooking up in the dorms.

But the real change? That was Deszi.

The girl who used to dress like a walking funeral started wearing yellow. Yellow, for Christ’s sake. Then blue. A splash of red one day, like a cardinal in winter.

The black was still there underneath it all, though. It always was. You just had to know where to look.

These changes didn’t come in a rush. No lightning bolts. No music swelling in the background. Just slow, subtle—like walking into a mud puddle and your feet becoming wet as the water seeps into your shoes.

Every so often, one of her stories would slip out—uninvited—and when it did, something behind her eyes would shift, like a curtain twitching. Her smile would falter. Her voice would drop a few degrees. It was like watching somebody fall through a crack in the floor and land in another time, another self. Desdemona—the old one, the real one, maybe—would rise up like harbor mist, and for a while she wasn’t here at all.

When that happened, I’d do what I could to bring her back. Little things. Jokes, food, a hand on hers. Anything to keep her anchored.

I don’t know why I worked so hard at it. She wasn’t my girlfriend. Not officially. But there was a pull, like a rope tied around both our waists, knotted long before we ever met. If someone had asked me to explain it, I’d have come up dry. All I knew was that something—some force or someone, maybe older than either of us—wanted that rope to stay tied. And I wasn’t ready to cut it.

Eventually, I got tired of just listening to the stories. I wanted to know if any of it was real.

So I started digging. The college library first. The microfilm machine became my new best friend, humming and glowing in the dark like some patient animal. Then I moved on to the New Bedford City Library, chasing names through dusty registers, cracked leather spines, and biographies with pages like onion skin. The trail felt cold, but I kept going anyway.

Everything Deszi had told me about Samuel Sewall and Gideon Sewall checked out. The journals. The court records. The business deals in ink and blood. The guilt. The shame. All of it, lined up neat as teeth in a skull.

But the curse?

Nothing. Not a whisper. No mention of Sarah Good’s last words. No record of some old, black promise uttered on her walk to the gallows. If it was there, it had been scrubbed out a long time ago.

Still, I kept digging. And that’s when I found something else—something small, but it stuck with me the way a splinter does under the skin.

Samuel Sewall, later in life, had stood during a church service—publicly—and begged forgiveness for his role in the trials. A powerful man, reduced to a trembling soul asking God to look away from what he had done. After that confession, things in his life seemed to settle. The deaths stopped. The misfortunes faded.

Except for one thing.

The rumors. The whispers.

That Sarah Good had cursed him personally before the rope went taut.

I didn’t find proof of it.

But I also didn’t find anything that said she didn’t.

Gideon Sewall wasn’t just some dusty footnote in New England history—he was a character in his own right. The great-grandson of Judge Samuel Sewall, and just about his moral opposite. Where Samuel wept and repented for the lives taken under his gavel, Gideon didn’t lose sleep over anything, living or dead.

A whaler out of New Bedford, Gideon Sewall was known for three things: his ruthlessness, his discipline, and the fact that no crew ever served under him more than once. He was the kind of captain sailors told stories about around smoky barroom tables—the kind whose name made greenhorns nervous and old salts spit on the floor.

He ran his ship like a prison, fed his crew like beggars, and punished them like sinners. The cat-o’-nine-tails was his favorite tool, and he used it often enough that the ropes practically wore grooves into the deck. But here’s the part that makes it complicated—Gideon was successful. Always came back with a full hold. Always got top coin for his oil. And because of that, the men who survived one voyage were paid more than most whalers earned in three.