Spirit (3 page)

Tobias turned back to the man. “I'm shivering in my boots, sir. You have set us on the path to rightness with your words. Thank you, and good night.”

Tobias helped Tess to get in the coach. “Quick-witted man,” he said. “I can't speak for you, but I'm utterly terrified.”

Tess took hold of the coach and climbed up wearily. The electric explosion of the spirit encounter had left her, and the ordinary world, with its ordinary feelings, had returned completely.

They'd had their adventure. Not just mist, but swirling mist; touching a spirit life of great power. Tired now, she hardly noticed the gravetender's ranting.

But the ghost's claim would stay in her mind for a long time after.
Not all of the accused were innocent.
Mary Sutton's spirit had wanted Tess to know this. Perhaps somehow she sensed Tess was special, unafraid of the darkness beyond the edge of life.

Of this darkness, Tess and Tobias Goodraven knew a great deal. They spent most of their time and fortune chasing nothing else but supernatural revelation. But this had been a special
encounter, more real than ever before.

Tobias took her hand, almost apologetically. He was full of energy and would inevitably want to pursue the matter further. He would want to mount an investigation into the true Salem witches, and the shadows that grew in the heart of New England.

Five Days Later,

The Goodraven Mansion, New York, 1892

T
hose who seek the truth in the blood of Salem dead will find nothing but torment in their head
…. Rather upsetting, Tess thought now, unless the gravedigger had been making it all up. She put it out of her mind.

Tess and Tobias remained in the parlor, facing each other, cellos straight, bows fallen, discussing the danger they might confront if they looked any further into the lives of the Salem witches. Despite Tess's misgivings, she knew resistance would lead nowhere.

“The Unseen Ones…were not innocent, she said…,” mumbled Tobias, pondering the parting message of the graveyard spirit. “How very, very interesting.”

Chilled, and not just by the weakening fire, Tess half wished to return to common, everyday interests—but nothing about her life with Tobias was normal. Even the music they'd been playing had been learned from an encounter with a ghost in Vienna.

She sighed. “Shall we speak of witches again, then?”

Visions of hellish engravings, page after page of tortured witches, floated into her mind, illustrations from the books they had been reading lately. “If you want to understand that cemetery spirit, Tobias, we must retrace our path in history. Now, I don't
know about ‘Unseen Ones' but witchcraft has always seemed an excuse for persecuting women…and pagans…and little more than that, as far as I'm concerned.”

“Witchcraft,” he repeated, turning the word in his head. “A way to power. Power to bewitch men.”

“Power of flight.”

“Broomsticks and black cats.”

“Black candles and black magic.”

Tobias's voice became distracted, lost in thought. “They said in Boston that the Salem witches could move things with just the exertion of the mind, project themselves to be in many places at once…”

“Nonsense. There were struggles in the church, mere infighting. Calling someone a witch was a perfect way to wrench the neck of an irritating rival. Where's the real mystery in it?” She remembered woodcut illustrations of women screaming in panic. Down through history, you could find eruptions in the boundless hatred of men toward women, or really, in the powerful toward the weak. She wished he didn't find the imagery so exciting.

“These young women of Salem were behaving as if possessed,” Tobias argued.

“Well, witches made an easy scapegoat for any strange conduct—”

“Exactly. Which means there was strange conduct going on to begin with.
Something
caused their behavior, so what was it? Something was wrong with those girls.”

“You're really not going to let us play today, are you?” Tess carefully set her cello against a bookcase.

“Go through the theories again. One at a time.”

With a deep breath, Tess began. “One: The girls in Salem were hysterical, surrounded with crazed religious dogma, day in and out. Two: Perhaps they were faking possession by the devil. Once they started, they got more status and attention, and couldn't easily stop—”

“That spirit we saw in the graveyard did not seem hysterical. Or deceptive.”

“But it passed through us quickly, and there were distractions. You can't discern facts from a ghost.”

“In the accounts of the time, there was a slave woman who saw something.”

“Please,” said Tess. “That slave woman was trying to satisfy her master, saying what he wanted to hear. She was the only one not executed, because she cooperated…and because her owner would have lost his property—her. Who knows what she saw?”

“She spoke of seeing a devil in the woods.”

“Insanity.”

“But it's in the public record that she said it. Under oath. She spoke of the witches appearing and disappearing—”

“They were hallucinating, all of them there in Salem,” she conjectured. “They were under the influence of a chemical that developed in the grain. Blood poisoning causes you to see things, you get crazed and feverish, you lapse into a coma—”

“Tess,” he said doubtfully. “You mean to say the Salem witch trials were merely a case of bad food?”

“Well, don't you think it remarkable that wherever in history you find spooky, devilish tales and hysterical witch-hunting, you
also seem to find this very problem with the grain?”

“Nobody else shares this view, among the experts,” Tobias chided. “Is this all science has come up with?”

Science. Science was his new religion, as with everyone these days. Tess was at the end of her patience. “There are other, obvious possibilities, Tobias. Salem and all of New England had been through the Indian Wars. They'd seen bloodshed and scalping and terrible things, and these shocks and tragedies had wormed their way into their imaginations. They thought up witches to explain nightmarish visions that were really just violent memories.”

“No,” he said. “Something's missing.”

“Turns out she was right,” said a voice, and the couple turned to see their butler entering the room. Horrick was a portly man of fifty with reddish hair and beard, who looked rather like a worried orangutan.

“Who was right?” asked Tobias.

Horrick slammed down several books and old newspapers at a long table. “The spirit you met with at the graves. It spoke the truth. There
were
some who escaped the Salem witch trials. And I think I understand why your spirit called them ‘the Unseen Ones.'”

L
ore. How Tess and Tobias loved it.

Horrick knew they were captivated. “These escaped witches. When they left Salem, they went to a little town called Blackthorne.”

Tess arched her back, trying to see what he'd brought, knowing she'd be the one who'd have to read through it in detail. “What have you got there?”

“Did your research for you, as usual,” answered the butler. “These are old papers from the
Times
archive, original documents, letters, but this is the last of it.”

Tobias stared. “The last of what, Horrick?”

“The last time I do this sort of thing.” Horrick's voice descended, and he sent out a pervasive dread that Tess could pluck from the air. “It's bad for the soul, these things you have me look into—you and her gone off all the time, leaving me alone in this house, reading on all manner of horrifying calamities—”

Tobias was untroubled. “We count on you to dig this stuff up, Horrick. Double your salary.”

“I can't do that, sir.”

“Why not, Horrick?”

“I don't handle the money, the accountant does, excepting petty expenses.”

“Then I'll have him deduct two dollars a week for your complaining all the time.”

Tess looked at Tobias, bemused, and said, “Don't mind him, Horrick. If there's any good hauntings we haven't been to, he likes to be the one to find them.”

“I always do find them,” bragged Tobias. “He just fleshes out the details. In fact, Horrick, why exactly do we bother with you?”

Horrick sighed unhappily, familiar with the routine. “I'm not coming back, sir,” the butler said solemnly. “If you go off looking for these spirits, I'll be done in this house. You engage in these hunts, and for no reason but for sport.”

“All hunts are for sport, Horrick. Deduct two more dollars for your impertinence,” ordered Tobias, and after Tess gave a disapproving look he said, “and add two dollars for your dramatic performance here.”

“That still leaves me two dollars down, sir.”

“And well it should.” Tobias sighed. “What else did you find out?”

Horrick lifted a very old page among the stacks. “It's really quite an oddity,” he said. “You see here some older papers on the Salem trials of 1692, journals and the like. Here the prosecutor listed the accused, but if you look…” He pointed to an ornamented space at the top of the page. “There was a first name. Behind all the others. A First Accused…who has been wiped out from history. Painted over. Unseen.”

He then pulled over an old, tattered book. “It's not the only reference. Another journal states there were rituals observed around this person: terrible deaths, intestines ripped out of living bodies and come to life like snakes, strangling other men…fires that grew out of people's eyes…Quite shocking. She or he is listed only as Accused Number One. All this was recorded before the trials we know….”

Tess withheld a shiver. “Caused by this unknown person?”

Horrick nodded. “The origin of all the hysteria. A First Witch.”

Tobias tapped his bow on his chin. “We have no name?”

“No,” said Tess, drawing closer. “Listen for a change.”

“I'm an excellent listener,” he said, distracted by the fluttering of a moth.

“Someday they're going to diagnose your condition. You can't pay attention for half a second,” said Tess.

“Wish they'd diagnose my other condition,” Tobias answered, snapping up the moth in his hand.

“And which sickness would that be? You've got thousands…”

“My sad and depressive states. Which you never help,” said Tobias, pondering what to do with the insect.

Tess grinned at him. “You wouldn't survive a minute without me.”

Tobias thought about it, and then nodded begrudgingly. “True. I suppose I wouldn't.” Then he shut the moth in a book, smashing it and immediately wishing he hadn't. Tobias loved books. For living things, he had less concern.

Horrick, annoyed, began tapping the old court journal. “These
records were doctored. Most likely by railroaders wanting to draw people back into town….”

“The town of Blackthorne? The railroad has business that way?” Tobias asked.

“New business,” answered Horrick, setting aside the ancient documents and pulling out a crisp newspaper. “This article clarifies a few things: Back in 1692 some of the accused in Salem ran away to Blackthorne and were killed there. Since then, the town has gone through every variety of misfortune. The place died out several times, in fact. In the early 1700s a plague drove everyone away; bad water was blamed. Then about twenty years ago they laid tracks there, but some kind of accident scared the investors off. But now there's interest in resettling it again.”

“Let me see that for myself,” said Tobias, impatient, but Tess snapped the paper away playfully before he could take it.

“I will read it to you,” she said, enjoying her power.

“Let me see there—”

“What do you want to know?” asked Tess, looking over the paper. “Around Yuletide, the town is going to have a carnival on the spot where they hanged the witches, and they're going to use the occasion to…draw people in.”

Horrick nodded. “It's a sad little place, abandoned; people think it's haunted. The New Haven and Boston families who own the town want to rebuild, put all that to rest—”

“Well, that's going to be something of a trick.” Tobias snorted.

“Give them a chance; it's just the beginning. It's a nice thing, really. They're rededicating the old town square.” Tess read further.
“It's a winter carnival, sort of a celebration—”

“Of having killed witches?”

“Of course not, that was two hundred years ago. Let them bury the past,” Tess chastised him. “It's supposed to be a much-needed break in the winter gloom. I would think you above all would appreciate that.”

Tobias was thinking, letting her words soak in. “I suppose I do. We could all use a break from the annoyances of the season.”

She looked at him, immediately regretful. “Tobias.”

“Well, what were you planning to do for Christmas?”

“Something
normal
and traditional. I don't plan to spend the holiday at the reopening of a ghost town. Sooner or later you have to work this ghosthunting business out of your system.”

Tobias smiled naughtily, and rested his cello bow on his shoulder. “Sooner or later I will. A few more years of it, and I'm done.” She glowered at him, and he said, coaxingly, “Tell me it doesn't sound like fun. The two hundredth year. If I were a ghost witch monstrosity, I'd want to be there.”

“That's what bothers me,” she said, her humor fading away.

Their mutual sensitivity to the world around them, seen and unseen, was becoming more and more highly attuned. Little things had been bothering her lately, which she hardly admitted even to herself. Now he was confronting it directly. “You don't want to say it, Tess, but you've felt it, too. We're being summoned there. Like a voice in the next room…The whole spirit plane is rippling with it. Something is calling us.”

“There is always a calling somewhere, if you listen for it. Often it's so faint, it could easily be our imagination.”

“Not this time. It's stronger. Piercing. Don't you want to know why?”

Tess grew frightened, and no longer cared to disguise it. “We test fate every time we reach out to a spirit. We're lucky nothing truly regrettable has ever happened to us.”

“I want you to consider the outlandish idea that you might someday die a dreadful death, and be left somewhere improper. There you are, and your spirit calls out for help. You are heard by certain sensitives. And ignored. Left to fester unjustly.”

His words wounded Tess, who feared loneliness in life, and had never considered such a state in death.

“If you don't wish to join me,” Tobias added, “I'll make my own way, and Horrick can look after you.”

“Not me, sir,” the butler answered. “Your endeavors are too improper for me to continue here. I meant what I said.”

Tobias looked back at Tess. She knew Horrick was quite serious; a tremor of disharmony flew out from him, uncertainty about where he would go and what he would do now.

Tobias felt it as well. “Well, Tess, I'm sure you can manage a week or so with just the maids and the cook.”

A quiet panic stirred within her at the prospect of losing her first married Christmas with Tobias. He was keenly aware of everything in her heart, as always. She envied his perfect clarity about what he wanted.

Tobias could tell she was leaning toward accepting his offer. “It's simple. A plea is being made. We have to answer this,” he said, smiling, his eyes victorious already. “Your curiosity is as awful as mine, you just won't let yourself feel it.”

She sighed, making no reply. Tobias took this as agreement.

He looked at Horrick. “When does the train leave for this fine little hamlet?”

And so Christmas plans were made.