Lords of Salem (3 page)
Dean regarded him with irritation. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “I’ll take down that woman just as I did this young doe. Once I set my sights, brother, my aim is true.”
Virgil smiled. He shook his knife at Dean, the piece of meat impaled on the end of it shivering. “I doubt Widow Parsons would be as delicious to the taste as this blackened flesh,” he claimed.
Dean relaxed a little, even smiled. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Nothing more delicious than a healthy woman craving meat.”
“True,” said Virgil. “Too true.”
There came a loud pounding at the front door. Both brothers
froze. Dean finished his piece of meat and then wiped the blade of his knife clean on his trousers.
“Not ghosts after all,” said Virgil.
“No,” said Dean. “Told you there was something out there.”
“Maybe it’s the widow come a-calling, ready to be courted. Either that or someone just realized they’re missing a goat.”
“Mark my word, the widow awaits behind that door. The stench of finely roasted meat has done its job and brought her hither.”
But Dean did not pocket his knife as he approached the door, instead holding it casually but at the ready in his hand.
Behind the door were Hawthorne and Mather, both dressed in black traveling garb now. Mather had lifted his cane again, was preparing once more to rap on the door with it. He stopped when Dean opened. The latter smiled, wiped his beard with the back of his hand, the other hand quickly sheathing the knife.
“Greetings,” he said. “And to what honor do I owe this nocturnal intrusion?”
“It is time,” said Hawthorne.
For a moment Dean stood there motionless, a questioning expression on his face. And then suddenly his expression changed, his eyes narrowing.
“You are certain? When we wanted to proceed before, you preached caution. What has changed?” he asked. “You have proof?”
“As much proof as we need,” said Mather. “I have seen the red smoke.”
Dean turned again to Hawthorne, who simply nodded. “Now is the time to act,” he said.
Dean nodded, turned, and called back into the room, “Virgil!”
“Aye, brother,” said Virgil, still slowly eating the haunch of meat.
“Our brothers in God are here. Reverend Hawthorne claims it is time.”
“Time for what?” asked Virgil. But when Dean didn’t answer he pushed back from the table and stood. “I see,” he said.
“Sharpen the tools,” said Dean. “We’re going hunting.”
“Already have, brother, already have,” said Virgil. “A dull blade is of no use to anyone.”
Dean turned back to the door. “Well, Reverend, we shall be the Lord’s instruments of just destruction, his means of righteous anger. Direct us toward the demons and we’ll gut their bellies as we would any fatted hog awaiting slaughter.”
They moved quietly through the night, the four of them traveling along the forest path single file. They all wore dark cloaks. Two of them had their faces hidden within their hoods. And they all had faces that were covered by dark masks emblazoned with rough-sewn death’s heads.
Memento mori
, remember that you will die. Moonlight caught the death’s heads and made them stand out faintly against the darkness, and with their otherwise dark clothing it was as if disembodied skulls were floating slowing down the path. It caught, too, on the blades of the weapons that a pair of the masked figures held: two huge splitting axes slung over their shoulders.
Even from a distance, they could make out the red smoke rising from the hovel’s crude chimney. It had an unearthly glow to it. Yes, this was the Devil’s fire.
They entered the clearing that contained the hovel and slowly spread out. Hawthorne approached the door silently. He depressed the latch lightly with his finger and then placed his hand against the door and pushed. The door, apparently barred from within, did not budge.
He slowly circled the house, the others following him as he examined the walls. After a moment he stopped, examined a section of wall up and down, and then nodded. He gestured and the masked Magnus brothers came forward. Together they heaved up their axes and began to chop.
The first few blows did but little, but after a moment the wooden wall began to splinter and crack, slowly coming asunder. Would they simply make an opening, wondered Hawthorne, or would the zeal of the brothers collapse the hut? Perhaps the easiest way to resolve this, he thought, would be for the hovel to collapse and for the witches to die beneath its weight.
But soon the hole was large enough for the Magnus brothers to shoulder their way in, Hawthorne and Mather following close behind.
What Hawthorne saw filled him with dread. The only one of the women on her feet was Margaret Morgan, who stood stock-still, her legs quivering, playing a simple haunting melody on a violin. The fire was high and strange, the color wrong, and around it, writhing at Morgan’s feet, were the rest of the coven. They were naked, their bodies painted with strange symbols, and they moved over and across one another, moaning with ecstasy. They embraced one another but tried, too, to couple with the ground, and one even had blackened and burning fingers where she had thrust them into the fire. With one or two it was as if their skin was covered with unnatural shadows that moved and twisted back and forth in a way not canny with the light cast in the room itself. On the sole bed in the corner was the body of a slaughtered woman, trussed to the bed, gutted, most of her abdomen missing, the bed and dirt floor beneath it slick with her blood. He recognized her: Krista Seward. She had been pregnant. He cast his eyes around for the child, but could not find it.
He felt his skin crawl. Any doubt that he’d had that these were witches, that this was a coven, immediately vanished.
The Magnus brothers went straight for the fire, kicking aside the convulsing witches in their path. With their axes they scattered the coals, stamping their way through the flames and kicking sparks and embers onto the witches around it. Some of them seemed to come back to themselves, brushing off the embers, ceasing their writhing and crying out, and becoming conscious of their surroundings.
Others, however, seemed not to notice even as the embers burned their hair and flesh and the room filled with the stench of it. There was a roaring sound coming from the fire and it suddenly and impossibly rose up again from the scattered ashes, and Dean Magnus’s death’s head mask smoked and caught fire. He tore it off, laughing, sparks sizzling in his beard, and beat the flames out against his leg. He and Virgil continued to kick and hack apart the fire until with a whoosh the fire diminished, its color returning to normal.
“Battling devils is sweaty work,” claimed Dean, beating out his smoking beard. Through his mask, his brother gave a muffled laugh. The writhing of the women had slowed now. They were beginning to look stunned and confused, many not entirely sure of where they were. Some had begun to cover their nakedness, seeing the Magnus brothers leering down at them now that the fire was taken care of.
“Don’t lose your heads, brothers,” Hawthorne cautioned the Magnuses.
Dean brandished his mask, the death’s head damaged and partly burned through. “But I already have,” he claimed, shaking it. “I already have!”
Hawthorne frowned. The line between the good that they were trying to preserve and the evil they were hoping to stomp out was murky at times, and he could not help but feel that the Magnus brothers remained straddled there, one foot on either side of the line. They were willing to be God’s instruments, but had things been just a little different, the brothers might have tipped in the other direction and served the Devil. Better not to think of it, Hawthorne told himself. Better to simply accept the pair for what they had to offer.
Margaret Morgan still stood there, playing her violin, seemingly oblivious to the brothers or Hawthorne or Mather. What was that melody? Where had he heard it before? Why did he feel so sleepy, as if he had no desire to move? It was haunting, seemed to draw him deep within himself, and as she played it he felt dark shadows begin to flit around him, gathering closer. Mather, he saw, standing beside
Morgan, was similarly affected, but Hawthorne watched him reach out with a great deal of struggle within him and drag the violin away from her.
As soon as the melody stopped, Hawthorne felt himself again, and control over his limbs returned. He strode forward as Mather broke the violin on his knee and tossed it to the ground.
“Margaret Morgan,” he said in a loud voice. “I, together with my brothers in Christ Jesus, Dean Magnus, Virgil Magnus, and Samuel Mather, bear witness against you for consorting with the Devil.”
Margaret Morgan stood motionless, unblinking, her face as slack and expressionless as if she were sleeping or dead. Hawthorne reached out and shook her shoulder, found her body as rigid as if it were made of wood.
“Margaret Morgan,” he said again. “In the name of God and his angels, I call upon you to confess your crimes and turn away from the Devil and his minions.”
This time she turned her head and blinked once and then smiled. “Satan will not desert me,” she said. “You shall see.”
“Satan!” shouted Mather, his eyes darting all around him. “We command thee to leave this place!”
“It is too late!” said Morgan. “We have unleashed him and you cannot confine him again. It is too late!”
She began to wave her hands and speak in a guttural, unknown language, and suddenly Hawthorne again felt a great, overwhelming tiredness. He could not move. He tried to reach his hand toward Morgan but it seemed to move so slowly that he could not believe that it would ever arrive. For a moment, Mather beside him was shouting but then he suddenly trailed off, his voice dying in his mouth. Morgan opened her eyes wide, and Hawthorne saw they were sparking with a reflected fire even though the fire in the pit was now out.
Or an inner fire,
he thought.
From Hell.
She opened her mouth and smiled, a wicked, hideous smile.
Then Dean Magnus struck her in the back of the head with the
haft of his ax and she collapsed in a heap. And Hawthorne found he could move again. He took a deep breath.
“Did you kill her?” he asked.
Dean shook his head. “Just unconscious,” he said. “Do you want me to?”
Hawthorne shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ll bring them back for a proper trial. We will follow God’s laws and give them that.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to kill them now?” asked Mather. “We know they are witches. We know what we have seen.”
Hawthorne shook his head. “They will die as witches,” he said. “That is beyond question. But even witches must be given a chance to confess and repent before they die.” He turned to the Magnus brothers. “Bind their hands and gag them,” he said. “And be certain that the gags are secure.” He gestured to the floor, at Margaret Morgan’s crumpled body. “Especially for that one,” he said.
The building had only one entrance, a heavy door in bound iron, which was now barred. Inside, it was lit by torches and there were no windows, no other way out besides the door that you entered by. That door was colloquially called the Portal of Judgment. Those who passed through it with their hands bound were rarely allowed to leave alive.
There was only a single room, a long beaten metal trough running down the center of it. The trough was heaped with dry sticks and tinder. Affixed at intervals within it were wooden posts. To these were bound the members of the coven, sometimes alone, sometimes two to a post, all of them tightly gagged. They were positioned to face a forged metal throne. It had jagged spikes in place of the seat and arms and straps to hold the condemned in place. The spikes and the metal itself were stained reddish brown with dried blood. The accused were made to sit on the chair, gently at first, the spikes pricking the skin and making it bleed, and then the straps were drawn tight and as the accused screamed and cried and begged for mercy the spikes were forced deeper and deeper. It was the Chair of God, though what went on in it could hardly be considered godly. Yet sometimes, Hawthorne told himself, you had to inflict suffering if you were to cleanse this mortal coil of sin and perdition.
Beside him stood Judge Mather, a sheaf of papers in his hand, his death’s head mask still on but rolled back now to reveal his face.
Hawthorne wore his the same way—it was tradition, a way of acknowledging that the witchfinder and the judge were one and the same. These were, Hawthorne knew, the charges. Always the same, only the names having changed. He knew what was coming, remembering from the last time the plague had struck:
Found guilty of commerce with the Devil. Condemned to death by the very fire that shall be your eternal dwelling in the Hell that you have embraced and that awaits you to consume you.
It was very late, hours past midnight but still well shy of the beginnings of morning light. But Mather had insisted that the trial be held that same night, immediately, before the witches had a chance to gather themselves and call evil down upon the town. Hawthorne, having felt Margaret Morgan’s power, had to agree. This was a coven to be reckoned with. Better if they were done away with directly, before they could do any further damage.
Still, wouldn’t it be better to wait until morning, to consider all afresh and with clear eyes in the daytime? Wasn’t the night the Devil’s favorite haunt, and did not God rule with the iron hand of justice in the cold light of day?
But what was done was done, Hawthorne told himself. The trial had begun. There was no stopping it now.
Beside him, Mather cleared his throat and began to read, his voice stentorian and charged with holy indignation.
“To the honor of Salem, Massachusetts, be it this day of sixteen September sixteen ninety-two. Clovis Hales, Mary Goodwin, Abigail Hennessy, Sarah Easter, Martha Bishop, and Elizabeth Jacobs, you stand guilty of granting permission to Satan…”
His voice dipped for a moment when he said the unholy one’s name. When he continued, his voice was more solemn, less thunderous.
“… and other unholy spectral beings to be engaged in unholy alliances with such apparitions upon your specific persons.”