Lords of Salem (5 page)
Mather kneeled beside him, joining Hawthorne in prayer. Near the Chair of God, Dean still fought to save his brother. He broke several of Virgil’s fingers, but Virgil would not let go of his own neck, and even the broken fingers continued to cling to his flesh.
“In the name of the creator of the world,” Hawthorne and Mather repeated together, “the king of kings, I command you to kneel before the power of God! Kneel before the power of God… Kneel before the power of God!”
Morgan laughed. “We would not kneel, even were we free to do so. We shall not submit to your false, weak God. He is worthy only of contempt.”
Hawthorne and Mather ignored her words, continuing to chant, over and over again, “Kneel before the power of God.” Hawthorne heard Dean cry out and he let his gaze fall from the heavens an instant to see Virgil gasp for his final breaths, his chest heaving but still unable to bring any air in.
Hawthorne’s prayer slowly died in his throat. For a moment Mather went on without him and then stopped as well.
As they watched, Virgil’s damaged hand fell away from his throat and dangled as if dead. His other hand, however, tightened even further, the nails of his fingers this time gouging their way into the flesh. Dean was blubbering and screaming, and Virgil’s eyes were pleading, but otherwise his body seemed not to be his own. And then the hand tightened further and in a single, violent jerk ripped his
throat out, spattering his brother with blood. Virgil swayed there a moment, blood pulsing through the ragged hole in his neck, and he then pitched forward, falling limply into his brother’s arms.
Dean cried out his brother’s name again and hugged the body to him. They had now lost one of their number. How many more would they lose before the nightmare was complete?
Mather was staring at Morgan with hatred. “By the power of the holy ghost and the blessed savior, your skull shall be drained of Satan’s black blood!” he said.
“Bring me the helmet!” Hawthorne cried.
But Mather was already ahead of him. He had the wooden box there beside him, ready for use. He opened the lid and removed a roughly forged greased iron helmet made to cover the whole face. It was scattered with holes, two under the eyes and several spread in an arc across the forehead. The surface was stained with what looked to the untrained eye like rust but that Hawthorne knew to be the lifeblood of past witches.
When Morgan spoke, it was again with the Devil’s voice. Blood now was running down the sides of chair, pooling on the ground. She laughed. “Take joy in my momentary pain,” she said. “For the blood of my death shall be the ocean by which we sail and you, my dear Reverend Hawthorne… your lineage shall be the vessel by which the Master completes his journey!”
“I shall have nothing to do with you,” hissed Hawthorne. “Nor shall my heirs.”
Morgan smiled in a disjointed, hideous way. “No, Hawthorne,” she said. “We shall be Salem’s everlasting plague.”
These last words she repeated and then repeated again,
Salem’s everlasting plague, Salem’s everlasting plague
, the words said over and over again to become first a chant and then a kind of drone. Hawthorne struggled with the helmet. A wind rushed through the room again and the witches were suddenly ungagged, their screams
joining the whistling of the wind. With a snap he managed to open the helmet. It split along a hinge in the middle, separating into two halves.
He stood and rushed to the chair, securing the back half of the helmet behind Morgan’s head. Despite Virgil’s death, despite Dean weeping and holding his brother and apparently unable to be of use, he felt at last hopeful. The end of the nightmare was in sight. He drew himself straight and fumbled to get the front half of the helmet into place. Morgan’s chant was a distraction.
“Recite as you wish,” he said. “There is no escape from the true Word of God! There is no resurrection from the pits of Hell!”
And then he had it right and had closed it over Morgan’s face. He slid the iron hasp into place to lock it closed.
Behind him, all the witches shouted, as if one: “Satan’s everlasting plague!”
“So be it that under our blessed God we are judge, jury, and executioner this night. Set the fires… Purify Salem from this curse!” shouted Hawthorne.
But Dean still stayed bent over his brother, holding his body.
“Dean!” shouted Hawthorne. “For God’s sake, the fires!”
The bearlike man seemed to suddenly come to himself. He let his brother fall gently to the floor and lumbered toward one of the torch sconces. He grabbed a torch and trailed it along the trough. The tinder caught flame, a wall of fire quickly spreading down the trough. The witches began screaming, a veritable symphony of agony as the flesh of their legs burned and bubbled. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.
The wind began to rise again. “The nails!” Hawthorne shouted.
Mather stepped forward. In his hands he held five metal spikes and a wooden mallet. Hawthorne grabbed hold of one of the spikes and the mallet. One by one he drove the spikes through the openings in the mask.
He drove them into the eyes first, pounding them just far enough to blind Morgan and lodge them painfully in her sockets. Her body thrashed awkwardly, the veins standing out on her neck, her head immobilized. Then he drove one into the left side of her forehead. The spike, he knew, would tear away the flesh on the side of her temple and slowly gouge through the bone and then slip painfully along the exposed brain, tearing the tissue there just a little. The spike into the right side of her forehead would do the same, and the two together would reduce the little movement she had within the mask to nothing. Her body continued to thrash and her muffled screams echoed inside the helmet. It was terrible to hear, but never before had Hawthorne been so convinced that God’s will was being fulfilled.
Perhaps now, now that the pain was so great, if asked to renounce Satan and his minions she would do so, Hawthorne couldn’t help but think. But no, a sterner and more severe part of him thought. She had had her chance. Now it was too late for her. God’s mercy would not be granted her.
Ignoring both Morgan’s screams and the shrieks of the burning witches behind him, ignoring the stink of burning flesh and the smoke billowing up the chimney, Hawthorne positioned the final spike in the hole in the center of the forehead.
“You have sold your soul to the Devil,” he said. “And to the Devil you shall now go.”
He waited the briefest moment and then slammed the mallet hard onto the head of the spike, driving it deep through the bone and into the witch’s head. Blood gushed uncontrollably through the holes in the mask and Morgan’s body began to thrash violently, and then suddenly she fell still.
Dead at last
, thought Hawthorne, and he turned away, trying not to think of her final threats toward him and his children.
What had she meant that they would be Salem’s everlasting plague?
No, best
not to think about it, he told himself. These were the rantings of a deranged woman in fear of death. Just as before, as always, God had protected him. God would continue to protect them, he thought, and tried not to look at Virgil’s corpse. He told himself, not altogether convincingly, that they had nothing to fear.
SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS
PRESENT DAY
The town of Salem had changed much over the years, the dirt paths and wagon tracks replaced now by paved roads. The waterfront, once so bustling and lively with the spice trade, was now filled with shops for the tourists who came to Salem year-round, interested in the town’s past. The only three-master in the harbor was a replica and was now a museum. There were still a few fishing boats, but the majority of the trade had moved a little way away, to the more commercial town of Gloucester. The customhouse that Hawthorne had once worked in was still there, a stately redbrick building with white pillars that resembled a schoolhouse. Near where the witches had been killed was now a paved pedestrian downtown: tourist shops, witch museums, witch tours. Next to a cart selling hats and T-shirts, two women with tags reading “I’m a Wiccan” were prepared to answer any and all questions.
But just a few blocks away from the center of town, the character of Salem changed. The streets became quiet, the tourists all clinging to the waterfront and the museums downtown. Here, the neighborhoods were old and historic, the houses painted traditional slate blue or dark red. The newer ones were New England late Victorians, large, impressive structures that these days were often split into multiple apartments. But there were among them federal houses with mullioned windows and hipped roofs, with the facades covered in wide, flat board siding. Less common, but still present, were the
earlier Georgian colonials, wooden and barnlike in structure, with gambreled roofs, flat fronts, and double-sashed windows. Rarer still were the old saltboxes from the colony’s early years, high on one side and low on the other, with very few windows, and these filled with a series of small diamond-shaped panes. On these streets, you could see the whole history of Salem’s past and imagine the original colonizer standing shoulder to shoulder with their descendants, and could even convince yourself, if you were standing in the right place, before the right house, that the past was not past after all.
There was little about the house on the outside to suggest what Heidi Hawthorne’s apartment looked like on the inside, or to give any clue to the kind of person she was. Outside it seemed a typical mid-Victorian house on a quaint street in this perfectly maintained and varied historic neighborhood, though this particular house was slightly less perfectly maintained than the others around it. The white paint had faded and the drab green shutters gave the house a less vibrant feel than the others. It wouldn’t be long before the paint started to peel and the landlord would be paid a visit from the Salem Historical Society, reminding her that a responsibility to the community came with owning a historical home and encouraging her to properly maintain it unless she wanted a fine.
Inside, Heidi’s apartment was anything but historic. The wall behind her bed was covered with a mural of a wasted-looking Keith Richards, with Richards leaning against a sign proclaiming “Patience Please. A Drug Free America Comes First!” The bed was overwhelmed with pillows, with the blankets disarranged and curled up around her.
She was lying facedown in it. Her hair was bleached white and dreadlocked and hid her face. Her slender bare body was covered with vibrant tattoos, a swirling water scene complete with fish and octopi crawling in a sleeve up one arm. The other arm was all skulls, outlined in black and rendered gold, chewing on one another and deliberately smearing into one another. An image of leathery,
tattered bat wings ran along her shoulders and hung folded down her back.
Her dad would probably roll over in his grave if he had a chance to see her tattoos. Her mother told her this sometimes—not to be mean, really; she just couldn’t help herself. And perhaps because she thought that it might keep Heidi from getting more tattoos. The first one she’d gotten she’d kept hidden from her mother for weeks, only wearing long-sleeved shirts when around her, but then her mother and she had accidentally crossed paths downtown and that was it. And her mother had been more upset that Heidi had hidden it than about the tattoo itself, so Heidi stopped hiding it. Though there were things she still hid from her mother.
But I wasn’t a bad kid
, Heidi thought. No, she’d been pretty much normal, maybe slightly geeky at first, but that all had changed as she got older and grew into her looks. Over the course of her freshman year, she went from being the kind of girl who didn’t get noticed to the kind of girl who got almost too much attention. Yet the way it happened made her mistrust it, made her always think that it was just a fluke and that from one day to the next people could stop paying attention to her again.
When the clock radio clicked on, blasting metal, Heidi roused herself and rolled over long enough to turn down the volume. Her body was svelte yet shapely. She hadn’t bothered to wash off her dark eye makeup from the night before and it had run a little.
She reached over and turned the alarm off and then pulled herself up to a sitting position. On the bedside table was a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, which for a second her hand groped for and then found and put on.
She sighed. Another long night. She’d planned to have just one drink and then come home, go to bed early so she’d be up and rested by the time she had to go to her shift at the radio station late in the day. And now it was already midafternoon. She remembered the one drink, but then there had been another, and another after that.
Then things got a little hazy. Luckily, she’d managed to set her alarm before going out; otherwise she probably wouldn’t have woken up in time for her shift.
Near the foot of the bed, wagging his tail, was Steve, Heidi’s large Lab mix. When he saw her looking at him, he started wagging his whole body and came around near the side of the bed where he could get closer. Heidi yawned.
“Steve…,” she said, and made a halfhearted attempt to pat his head. At the sound of his name, Steve’s ears pricked up. “How’s about you making me breakfast for a change?” she asked.
Steve wagged on.
“Nothing fancy,” said Heidi, beginning to wake up a little more. She yawned. “Eggs Benedict, a little freshly squeezed OJ, and above all some coffee.”
For a moment Steve stared at her attentively, waiting, but when nothing more happened he turned once in a circle and lay down beside the bed. Heidi just watched him.
“I’ll take that as a polite fuck you,” she finally said.
She untangled herself the rest of the way from the blankets, stepped out of bed, and stumbled toward the bathroom. Halfway there, she stopped and steadied herself against the wall.
God, she was hungover. She really shouldn’t be drinking like that—not a smart idea in any case, considering that this time last year she’d been far from clean. And if it hadn’t been for Whitey she probably would have lost her job, and then where would she be? She’d hated him when he’d placed the call and forced her to check in to the clinic. She had said some pretty unforgivable things, but she was grateful now. No, she had to be careful—one drink too many and then who knew what she’d do?