Spirit (14 page)

T
ess tried to regain her strength, hearing the screams of children. Only the boys of the blind school remained alive. Why they had been spared she didn't know, but they had no one left to help them except for her. Their chaperones were dead.

And the others were gone as well, all of them, reclaimed by the white woods that had let them live on for a time after death; the mysterious, swirling power of the place taking them in at last, making their souls part of the snow and the mist, twisting their lives into the gnarled roots of the trees, the fingerlike branches, the poisonous brambles and old thorns in the winterscape, into the depths of the lake. Tess knew the essence of who they were had joined with the woods, to feed, and be fed upon.

Whatever had fed the longest in the woods, the strongest of its evils, had chosen now to move in. Malgore was coming back.

Tess could feel her hatred now.

With nowhere else to run, Tess clambered back into the parlor car, coming face-to-face with one of the blind boys. They were all huddling together inside.

“Who's there?” said the child, his voice a whimper.

Tess could hardly find words. “They didn't know…They'd lost their lives…She brought the car up. They…”

“Who's left? Who's left?”

Tess shook her head. “She wanted them to know…We're hers…We're all—”

Suddenly Malgore leaped into sight at the door.

The creature rushed forward, her jaws missing Tess's face as she ran, but tearing a tiny piece of flesh from her ear in a small spray of blood. Tess, screaming, crawled away fast, as Malgore reached, groping, her claw slipping from Tess's boots.

The children ran for the back of the train, squealing, almost fighting each other. Tess kicked, and the creature fell back, clinging to the door, grinning wildly. Screaming, Tess turned away, and when she looked back…

The wretch was gone. The door slammed shut.

Tess panted for air. Malgore had seemed light and weakened, her bones birdlike. Was she drained of strength now?

Then, from the window, Tess could see Malgore's eyes.

What she saw next were the eyes disappearing and a long panicked moment passed. When Malgore returned, she lifted a burning torch from the bonfire outside—and the window was covered in flames.

The witch glared, fire reflected in her eyes, chanting, as the train car became completely engulfed. Smoke filled the window.

Tess and everyone inside were screaming in terror. The heat soared. They were being left to burn alive.

More from panic than courage, Tess smashed her way out the rear doors, leaping over the flames. The fire caught hold of her, her
hair burning, and Tess rolled on the snow. She caught a blurring look at the blind children, trapped behind her. They would never get out alone.

Rolling and thrashing, she conquered the fire on her body, but the children were screaming, with their lungs and their very souls.

She snatched up a blanket from the ground and began beating at the fire.

 

An ice scarecrow.

It was a simple figure carved upon a nearly hidden frame, some artist's handiwork.

And it was all that greeted Tobias as they reached the town of Blackthorne. Not a soul joined them. The little city was empty, or nearly so. There was one man's upright body, propped up strangely on the town gates, his distorted face covered in ice. He was all that remained of the villagers, it would seem.

Tobias swallowed, unnerved, pondering a way to make light of the grim scenario facing them. He could think of nothing to say.

Their expressions taut with fear, they continued on, making their way into town. It was nothing more than one street, a huddling of ancient wooden buildings against the wilderness, some abandoned horse carriages here and there.

New structures had yet to be built around these original edifices, though the fresh paint and restored wooden stairways testified to the efforts of the development committee. In the distance, other plain, early American homes, all of them white, each as simple as a folk painting or any child's drawing of a house, lay spread out
in clearings, overseeing dead farms. Blackthorne had been a town with little to offer, it seemed, except that it was not Salem.

A furious banging drew their attention to a stable, where Tobias could make out several terrified horses, three or perhaps four, kicking deliriously as the men passed.

Everywhere there were signs of WELCOME and ICE SKATES FOR RENT. At the street's end, a collection of ice-sculpted scarecrows fronted the icy church.

“What's happening here…?” whispered Sattler.

Not a sound met them, just the wind.

They plodded toward the ice church. It was a grand creation, snow and ice sculpted into a classic building of worship, a respectable ten feet high, and steepled.

Tobias's eyes slipped over it quickly, but a new current of feeling took his attention.

Slowly, Tobias turned toward one of the old white houses nearby. “Someone's in there,” he said hesitantly.

He knew he was right. Human emotion, living feeling, had an unmistakable scent.

No one wanted to go in. Tobias at last started to move toward it, and the others followed. They closed in on the winter-beaten house.

Tobias eased the door open and went inside. Michael and Sattler came in behind him. Tobias could feel something alive before he could see it, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, scanning over rustic furniture, Indian artifacts…

…and a man hidden by the dark, staring back, sitting, his arms wrapped around a shotgun like a precious infant.

“Don't come in.”

Everyone stood still.

“Just let me be.”

All eyes were fixed nervously on the shotgun in the man's hand.

Tobias surprised everyone by stepping closer, gingerly. “What happened?”

The waiting man stared back, his face invisible in the dim light. “Something was killing us,” he grunted. Tobias eased closer, trying to see the man's eyes. The man continued, in halting speech. “I blacked out. Then I…wandered around…It got so very cold…cold like I've never known. I came back in, and…there wasn't anyone here anymore.” Tobias eased the shotgun away from the man, handed it to Sattler. Seeing the man's riding whip, he handed that away, too.

“You have a horse?” asked Tobias, friendly, calm.

“Out there somewhere.”

Tobias nodded. The man wanted to talk, saying more without prompting. “I had started working with my brother; we brought up horses to sell. They never wanted to come. The horses. They knew. They knew this wasn't a right place. God in heaven…Everything went into wild disarray here. People were thrown around like puppets,” he said, his teeth clenching.

Puppets, thought Tobias. Like that cheap and tawdry couple that had run from the train, like that lonely doctor in his house, all of them toys of Malgore. How does she do it? What means gives her such control?

The man in the chair went on. “Most of 'em died after a few
minutes. I don't know what it was…what it wanted from us. I never saw it directly. All I saw was rage. Absolute rage, God help us.” He coughed.

Tobias looked at him carefully. “Are you sick, sir?”

The man looked back at him with vague distrust. “I've been fighting off black lung for some years.”

Sattler asked, “You don't know where the people went?”

“Yeah, I think I do,” said the man, rocking in his chair. “Can't go in there myself.”

Tobias and the young men exchanged glances.

“I pray you'd tell us where they went, sir.”

A
moment later Tobias and Sattler were outside. Tobias motioned for Michael to stay with the man, and he did so without complaint, turning back at the door.

Without a word, Tobias and Sattler headed toward the ice church.

Tobias felt numb. He'd been through too much, had been burned, inside and out, and wanted only to be done with this nightmare and be back with Tess, away from here, in New York, tuning his cello.

They trudged on, every step filling them with more fear.

“Maybe we could shove that man in there first and see what happens,” Sattler said.

Tobias looked at him with a sidelong glance. “I can't say that I care for morbid humor.”

Neither had the heart for talking any more, and soon they were standing in front of the ice church, speechless in the chill wind. There were no sounds from the building.

“We don't have to do this,” Sattler pointed out finally.

“We've checked everything here. This is the only place left to look for help.”

Sattler thought for a moment. “Tobias. This is madness. We both know this is madness. Is there some piece I'm missing?”

Tobias was fixated on the church. “There's something I have to see in there.”

“I'm quite certain there's nothing we want to see inside that.”

“I have to finish what was started. I have to see their belongings returned to them. I think this is where they were hanged.”

“It's not yours to do.” Sattler stared at him. “This is insane.”

“We need to see this through. I need to do this for them. It may be the way to kill that thing.” For just a second Tobias had begun to feel unsure.

Sattler studied the building nervously. “The door of the church looks like the den of an animal. It feels very much like a trap to me. We've survived this long; we can find another way. Why do you force us ahead like this?”

Tobias tried to see into the opening at the ice church. The mystery called to him. But it was more than temptation—there'd be no chance for any of them if he couldn't find a method to kill Malgore.

“It's trickery of some kind,” said Sattler. “You know it. It's too weak now to attack us, so it lures us inside and seals us in. Then it waits to regain its power.”

“There's a logic to what you say.”

“Look here, forget all of this. Let's turn around, let's just get some horses and keep going,” said Sattler, intense now. “You've seen enough death.”

To his surprise, Tobias nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“Right. All right, then. You want to live, don't you?”

Tobias looked at him, deeply thoughtful. “Yes. Turns out I do.” He was in a state of slight disbelief at his own words.

Sattler handed him the horsewhip. “Let's get a horse and get out of here.”

He made it sound so simple.

To the surprise of both of them, Tobias took the offering. He looked ahead, to the most prominent scarecrow made of ice, stalactites hanging over its empty sockets. He found some final answer somewhere in those eyes, and he turned away from the winter-made church.

But it was too late.

Without warning, from the scarecrow's downturned mouth came a shock of sound and wind, and the two men were dropped by the force of it.

Falling into a sleep, Tobias felt his body scraped along as if by the wind.

He was being swallowed by the ice church.

 

Tess had helped the children out of the burning railway car, but they had run from the fire in terror, without thinking and had been separated, gotten lost in the storm.

Tess could see the train car still burning in the snow.

Her refuge was gone. She was in the open.

She looked around. Amid the rows of trees, she saw the blind boys, each alone, wandering, stumbling; the lone survivors. Tess felt her heart drop at the sight of them all, a responsibility she had never wanted.

The snow relented, revealing, as she turned around, the doctor's
estate—the long, tall old house and its smaller partner. The biggest building was a burned-out, ancient hulk, the old refuge of the Salem runaways. She hated the idea of returning to the room with the corpse. But it was shelter.

Tess stared at it, distrustful. She looked back, up in the trees, to the darkening evening sky. Everywhere it seemed there was a threat from the forest.

She realized she always counted on Tobias to help her with such decisions, and at the same moment, the fact hit her that he always allowed the final judgment to be hers. She allowed him to tug at her, because she wanted it—there was truly no manipulation at all.

She had no notion of how long she stood there, thinking about it.

“Boys…,” she whispered, and then even quieter, “come with me.”

A
twisting snake of smoky blue mist had hold of Tobias and Sattler, pulling them into the ice church. It took time, for the misty form of Wilhelm was weak, but the young men did not resist. Their bodies made sloppy grooves in the snow.

Tobias opened his eyes groggily, feeling the sliding motion, but he had no power over his muscles. He could not run. And he was desperate. Something was now approaching. He saw a blurred, creeping figure in the windswept snow, slowly and confidently moving toward the church doorway.

Malgore.

Tobias felt his body dragged away from her and rolled into the church entry, and Sattler was pulled in beside him. As he saw the witch approaching in an unhurried, arrogant stride, Tobias realized the protective mist was building up around the doorway, and Wilhem's barely visible fingers were now collapsing the icy entryway. Malgore could not enter.

The spirit had saved him again.

 

Malgore leaped and scaled the top of the ice church in an angry rush.

The creature pondered its next move from the rooftop.

Beyond the guarding ice scarecrows—their arms stretched out in icy crucifixion—the witch considered how to enter…or whether it was even necessary….

 

Inside the ice church, Tobias and Sattler awoke in a hallway.

Very little light entered from either direction. There was no way to know which way was out. Heading down the hall, they passed a few flickering lanterns, frozen into the ground. It was too much effort to break one loose.

Silently they walked on, deeper into a blackness so richly devoid of light Tobias felt himself near despair as it stretched on.

“Are you there?” Sattler called.

“Stay with me,” Tobias answered. “I'm right up ahead of you.”

“Tobias…?”

“Keep coming.”

They made slow progress. Then Tobias stopped in fear. He felt as if a man were breathing upon him mere inches ahead, a sour exhale coming out of the darkness. Tobias could feel it on his eyelashes, his skin…sickly breath, and anger in it, somehow. Tobias didn't move, waiting. But the man did not lash out, did not speak, and Tobias's muscles relaxed. He wondered if it was his imagination. Or the spirit of Wilhelm, now angering?

The feeling quickly faded, and Tobias kept going, groping forward, hands out, a sadly feeble defense.

Then they could see just the tiniest strands of light, and emerged into a narrow ice hallway dimly lit with lamps. They continued on into a chamber, where several beautiful six-foot ice angels surrounded a large ice fountain, with frozen water forming arches
from the spouts. Champagne glasses waited at the base of the fountain.

Carved into the ice at the entryway a sign said:
WHERE OLD MAN WINTER PREYS.

It must have seemed amusing at one time.

Tobias and Sattler crossed past it, into the dark hallway beyond.

 

It was twilight now.

Tess led the trail of children, all clasping hands, through the snow.

“Hurry, hurry, come now,” Tess urged the boys.

They entered the smaller house, but Tess could not stomach the sight of the dead doctor inside, with his ice-burned, sickly colored face. She immediately turned to leave again, when the rustling of pages stopped her.

A small book lying in the center of the room was being paged through, rustling from an invisible force. And then the doctor's dead hands were tugged by an azurelike mist as if he were reaching, as if to indicate the tattered volume.

Tess went to it quickly. She was surprised to realize it was the witch-hunter's journal, left behind by Wilder in his scuffle with the doctor, and her eyes fell to the handwritten words over an illustration of Old Widow Malgore, apparently torn from another volume and pasted here.

Tess read the writing carefully, “Many ways of…killing…Assured of death…”

“What is it?” asked one of the boys, standing fearfully at the door with the others.

Tess kept her eyes on the book, whispering more to herself than him. “It changed over the years…”

“What did?”

“The rhyme,” said Tess, reading Josiah Jurey's notes. “Not ‘dance upon the grave…' It was once ‘Old Widow Malgore, never had a grave.' ‘…Old Widow Malgore, her heart is made of wicker, Old Widow Malgore, it must be burned to flicker…'”

The nursery rhyme held a message, distorted over the years.

It was a method for killing the witch.

 

Unnerved by the quiet, Tobias continued with Sattler. Finally they emerged in the circular main chamber of the ice church, where dozens of men stared back at them in welcome.

For a moment, Tobias was taken aback. But then he realized they did not blink. They were gathered, pressed together on one side of the icy room, just standing, staring.

Dead.

Tobias could feel the sadness of their lost lives, like half-remembered music, and he knew that he would no longer see human emotion as a plaything. He let his eyes track over to the large center of the round room, where three old men dressed in suits, perhaps the town fathers, were standing there, spaced apart, near an altar covered in frost. At the altar knelt a bearded man made of ice, near an icy placard that read
OLD MAN WINTER.

Tobias saw something more alarming and strange, like no experience he'd ever had with the spirit world.

The image of Father Winter shaped into the ice was unnervingly familiar.

His father's face lay before him in ice, sculpted to look exactly as it had in the séance in New York—but, then, slowly Tobias's eyes began to make out the sculpture's true appearance. He gazed upon a fanciful incarnation of Winter itself, and nothing more. His heart beat furiously. Some cruel magic it was, or some sad twist in his psychology.

Deeper into the room he could now dimly see women lying dead, like broken toys. Tobias pondered all of this in horror.

Sattler whispered, stunned. “She killed them all.”

Tobias turned to him. “Why…? Why this hate?” And how could she have created this figure to taunt him, weaken him? Just as she had summoned the elk here from the north for sustenance, could her potency reach beyond any boundaries?

The room grew misty with a fullness like smoke. He heard his father moaning from the emptiness. “Good-for-nothing,” said the voice. “Left me for dead. Dead like you always wanted. Bloodsucking little vermin.”

The face of Winter remained eerily placid.

Tobias took a few steps back and felt tears sting his eyes. The passing illusion was overwhelmingly strong, a cherished voice from childhood, warped here into something vicious.

He had no time to make sense of it. A glance at Sattler proved it was all in Tobias's mind, for his companion seemed to have seen and heard nothing. He wondered what trickery Sattler
was enduring within his own head.

Sattler remained staring at the sight of the killings, shaking, and Tobias had to take his satchel from him.

“The spirit wants what is his…,” said Tobias, and he placed the box of Puritan possessions—the rings, the dress pieces, all that Wilhelm and Abigail left behind—into the ice near the altar, burying it hurriedly.

“It has protected us…,” Tobias said, in bitter prayer. “It shall again…”

But ice chips were raining down from the ceiling. It was breaking up. A loud, brutish drumming resounded from above.

“That Thing is coming for us,” Sattler said. “We came here for nothing. We left the women…behind…”

Tobias whispered in a broken voice, “It has meant nothing.” Sattler looked vacantly at him. Nothing emerged from the buried box. No magic came from it, and Tobias stood in disbelief. The spirit was not going to help them. The icy structure was quaking, splintering….

And suddenly part of the ceiling
shattered,
and breaking through from the hole, Malgore fell upon Tobias, knocking him to the ground, his face pushed into the ice.

Sattler slammed his torch onto her head, and Malgore spun, charging him to the wall.

Tobias weakly rose, grabbing the long crescent dagger from his pocket, and began jabbing at the Thing's back, hard, quickly, again and again.

Malgore screamed and pulled away, falling back into the arms
of the Old Man Winter sculpture.

In that moment, the spirit of Wilhelm took shape vaguely, and began to drive the entire sculpture back, bashing the witch's head against the wall. The spirit
was
here. Tobias stabbed the dagger a last time into Malgore's heart, and those animal eyes locked onto his, stunned, fixated….

 

In the doctor's house, Tess read from Josiah's book feverishly, voraciously. “Burn the body, burn the body…”

She looked up, absorbing the words.

Old Widow Malgore, her heart must burn…to flicker.

It was fire. Fire would kill the witch.

 

But the creature called Malgore was already dead.

Tobias and Sattler looked exhaustedly at their work. The witch—a spindly albino form, a skeletal figure—lay splayed against the statue of ice.

The spirit's misty coils knocked over a lamp, starting a meager fire.

But Tobias turned and kicked snow over it. “Get the other lantern. Let's get out of here.”

They moved to leave—but the witch was disentangling itself behind them, rising to come after them, though they did not yet know it. It had disguised its emotion, and Tobias felt nothing, walking on, as the wretch closed in on them.

“Tess will think the worst…,” Tobias started to say—but suddenly Sattler was yanked backward, his neck breaking as the witch-creature threw him against the ice sculpture.

Horror filled Tobias. Furious, Malgore lifted the entire sculpture of Old Man Winter, and crushed it down on Tobias with great force. He fell like a doll, as Malgore screeched, pushing down upon the statue.

The pressure created a crater in the ground, where Tobias lay motionless beneath the ice carving. His eyes fluttered shut.

Malgore regarded her work, and screeched again.