Midnight in New England: Strange and Mysterious Tales

by Scott Thomas

  “Out!” The Captain roared. “Out with you!”

  William turned to glare at Elizabeth. “And you,” he hissed, “your vulgarity shames all women. You, miss, have made a black thing of my heart.”

  With that William wheeled and limped from the room, nearly tripping over severed arms as Elizabeth collapsed against her mother, sobbing.

  In the grey light of a November morning, when the fields were shrouded in frost, a knocking fell upon Ebenezer Howe’s door. A gentleman was admitted and taken to see William. This visitor, Thomas Sumner, was operating as “second” on behalf of Captain Fay, with whom he shared an equality of social rank. Sumner let William know that the Captain demanded satisfaction, and if no apology were forthcoming then the insulted party would require William’s presence for a duel.

  Though groggy and still slumped in his nightshirt, William summoned defiance. “If you would, please inform The Captain that nothing like an apology will pass from these lips.”

  The rigid Mr. Sumner regarded William impassively. “Then it falls upon me to offer you the choice of weapon.”

  “Pistols,” William said. “I choose pistols.”

  A Death in the Field

  The challenged had chosen the place, a field as bleak as all November, situated within a far horseshoe of low russet brush, with dim woods beyond that. The woods consisted mainly of stark and moss-worn maples and young birches like abandoned crutches.

  A low mist floated above the damp discoloured grass as if smoke after a battle. Fey crows spoke off in the wood, their voices hollow, tinged with anticipation; some sprang up off the field like great black flowers when two coaches arrived on the scene.

  Solemn figures stepped down from the carriages, the separate parties conferring at opposite ends of the expanse. At length the seconds walked to meet each other at the centre and it was confirmed that William remained fixed against apology.

  With no friends to speak of in that part of the world, William relied on his dear Uncle Ebenezer to act as his second. Ebenezer saw to it that a surgeon was on hand. Captain Fay’s party consisted of Thomas Sumner and a surgeon named Beals, who was a bespectacled cauldron with a wig the colour of frost.

  The Captain was a serious sight, tall and steady in his great coat, his eyes set in a determined squint, though the sun was barely above the trees and clouds hung in the sky like the wings of drowned angels. He was a veteran of honourable murder.

  The seconds readied the pistols while the duellists counted their paces. Uncle Ebenezer watched woefully as his nephew limped along. Beals checked his watch impatiently and took a pinch of snuff. When the pistols were charged, the seconds gave one another a stiff nod and walked off for their men.

  It was only the second time that William had worn his nice new clothing; despite these garments, and the knee-length woollen great coat he wore over them, he found himself shivering. The Captain saw this and smirked.

  Uncle Ebenezer had reached his kin and he offered the open pistol case, whispering, “Good luck be with you, my boy.”

  William could only nod. He seemed dazed as he selected one of the long heavy flintlocks. It was an unpretentious thing with an octagonal barrel, iron mounts, and a walnut stock.

  Captain Fay plucked up his weapon, which was elegantly fitted with a brass barrel and engraved silver mounts. It glinted as the sun tried to squeeze through the clouds.

  William mistook the drumming of hooves for the sound of his heart. A small black buggy appeared through the mist and rattled onto the field. When it came to a stop the horse snorted and Elizabeth climbed out.

  The Captain was flustered by her arrival; he turned and barked as she floated to where Sumner and Beals stood. “Good heavens, go home, Elizabeth!”

  “I will not.” She stood defiant. The young woman was no less stubborn than her father, as he knew too well.

  “Well,” he softened, “cover your eyes then. Shant be pretty, this.”

  Elizabeth gazed at one man then the other. Her heart was for them both. While she did not cover her eyes, her hands were cupped over her mouth as if anticipating a scream.

  And so it went. The pistols were cocked, the sound crisp in the open air, like a twig under a boot. The men stood sideways, just six yards apart, as they raised their weapons and pointed at each other.

  Dizziness flooded William and he turned his head ever so slightly to look once more upon Elizabeth’s beauty. He felt a tear on his face, but could not see her tears for the distance between them. She stood off to the side with Thomas Sumner and the round surgeon.

  It fell upon Ebenezer to give the order. “Fire!” he called.

  In that instant William found his target. His pistol thundered and the cloud from the weapon obscured that of his opponent’s. The Captain’s shot struck him square in the knee, inches below the old wound.

  William’s aim proved more exact—the ball tore straight through Elizabeth’s chest and flew off with the crows that spat startled from the brush.

  “I’m killed!” the woman gasped, crumpling to the ground.

  William himself lay in the cool wet grass, clutching his bloody leg. The pain was a molten ocean. His surgeon and Uncle Ebenezer lifted him and stumbled over to their carriage. They struggled to get him into the thing and then sped off for the parsonage down the road. Once there, the surgeon, left with no other alternative, amputated William’s left leg. Thank heavens the young duellist had kept his medicine on hand.

  Elizabeth died in the field.

  November Rain

  Once, in the cheerless grey of November, when the year was limping toward snow, it rained. It rained on the town (far from the Bay Colony) where William had fled to evade the law. It was a green rain and it drummed on his roof and wept at his windows, and in the morning, following the storm, the puddles were like mud and peridot and each bore a face. A woman’s face.

  The Recurrent Silence

  Dear Michael,

  Please give this a read, and when you have some time, let me know what you think. It’s a piece my dear Aunt Lydia was working on when she died last spring. Knowing that I shared her interest in genealogy and a love of New England history, she left me a number of books and papers on the subjects, this among them. On the surface, it appears to be the history of a small town here in the north-central part of the state, but there is something curious about it. I won’t say just what this strange thing is, however, until the end...

  A HISTORY OF NORTHMINSTER

  By Lydia Purcell

  An hour’s ride up from Worcester, travelling westward along the Old Athol Road, you will encounter the quaint Massachusetts town of Northminster. It is an easy target to miss, however, even for those seeking it, for it is secreted in a dense pine wood that straddles the New Hampshire border. Still largely a farming community, it retains much of its past charm and offers some fine examples of Colonial architecture.

  Laid out as a township in 1734, Northminster had few inhabitants originally. Some notable characters from those early days would include Cyrus Goodwin (the carpenter who went on to erect the First Parish Church), the Rev. Elias Brooks, and the farmer Tobias Martin, whose frame house still stands on a knoll by Otter Pond.

  Rev. Brooks’s father James came over from Bury Saint Edmonds, County Suffolk, England in 1643 (he was still in his infancy at the time). This elder Brooks served a tour of duty as a captain in King Phillip’s War (1675-76). He married Dorotha Rugg of Sudbury and together they had ten children. Church records show that he died of bilious fever at Fitchburg in 1710.

  In 1735, one hundred veterans of King Phillip’s War (or their heirs) were awarded 40-acre house lots in Northminster, in honour of their loyal service to the crown. Rev. Elias Brooks was granted his father’s share and built there the first parsonage. This building was lost to fire in 1773; the second was built in 1775 and stands to this day. It is a handsome work of Georgian symmetry, with massive twin chimneys and heavy pediments above the front and side entrances.

 
Elias married Asa Trowbridge, a tanner’s daughter, the year that the first parsonage went up. Silence, the first of their seven children, was born in November 1736. The other children were as follows:

  Thankful, born 1737

  Jonah, born 1739

  Solomon, born 1741

  Gideon, born 1742

  Jedediah, born 1744

  Prudence, born 1746

  A series of terrible misfortunes diminished the ranks of Rev. Brooks’ family, starting with young Silence (of whom a portrait, in remarkable condition, remains in the keeping of the Northminster Historical Society). At the age of five, she fell into a tanning pit and drowned. Her headstone can be found at the Old Burying Ground on the Northminster Common.

  In February of 1740, three-year-old Thankful fell ill with winter fever. Suffering delirium, she reported seeing her sister Silence sitting on the edge of her bed. Neighbours tried healing Thankful with medicinal herbs to no effect, so the physician was summoned, he being William Upham (who was also Justice of the Peace). Dr. Upham immediately drew his lancet from a small black pocket case and bled the patient. When his best efforts failed to bring about any positive change, the most religious men in town were gathered to pray for the child. None of these measures managed to save her, though, for she perished that night.

  More adversity came in the spring of 1745, when young Jonah was badly injured under the wheels of a cart. He lived for several days after the accident, and in his fever reported seeing Silence sitting at the end of his bed. He was just five years of age.

  Solomon and Gideon both were lost that December, struck with consumption. Neither lived to see his fourth year.

  Two years later, Jedediah drowned in the sawmill’s pond at the age of three.

  Only Prudence survived to adulthood. While she never married, she had some small degree of fame afforded her by the locals for being the first in town to be in possession of a spinet. She exhibited remarkable musical ability, and in her later years played organ at the First Parish Church.

  Prudence delighted many with her playing and good-natured personality. This is noted in her diary, where she notes that relations and neighbours from surrounding towns came to hear her as she sat at her instrument in the parlour. One can read about her musical enthusiasm in her diary, which is preserved at the Historical Society (which contains a great number of old journals, reports, and various documents made available to the public for viewing).

  Townsfolk from as far away as Lancaster mourned when Prudence died. Some wept when they saw the silent spinet sitting in the Brooks parlour. She had just turned thirty years old when the dreadful illness came upon her. Her flesh wilted; the disease wore down her body, and yet her spirit remained bright to the end. When her suffering was over, Prudence was laid to rest a mile east of the parsonage, at the Old Burying Ground. There she would rest among kin. Rev. Ebenezer Young of Phillipston attended the burial.

  “Silence fell over the whole town that bitter April morn,” Rev. Young noted in his papers. “So quiet was the day that the birds were without song as they sat in the trees like sad dark fruit. They knew, perhaps, that one terribly fond of their music was gone.”

  The Brooks house was opened to friends and relatives after the burial. Prudence, with her playing and joviality, and in her kind-hearted ways had touched all of their lives. Even as the mourners walked away from the grave (there alongside those of her siblings, all gone before her), they traded fond memories.

  The Poor Rev. Brooks, returning to his home, wept quietly to himself. His sad arthritic body was too weak even to stand, so he sat wordlessly at the spinet. His tears fell on the pale keys.

  Was it perhaps the loss of Rev. Brooks’ daughter Prudence, his last child who had only been gone a matter of months, that hastened the fellow’s own demise? He took ill not long after she died. But for his beloved Asa, the man had felt terribly alone, though his faith in God remained strong. There in the parsonage he retired to his bedchamber, suffering from a burning fever. His thoughts were plagued by the memories of earlier losses.

  The man was bedridden for a week. Delirious, he laughed and wept and even drew several skulls on his bedcovers. One night he told Asa that Silence had come to sit on the edge of the bed. Of course that was only the madness of disease; the illness had taken his mind. He lived another five days before succumbing on the first day of August in 1776.

  Small grey headstones, carved from flaky New England slate, mark the graves where the children of Rev. Elias Brooks and his wife Asa are buried at Northminster’s Old Burying Ground. In the earth along with them lay their parents, the family reunited. Asa died in the winter of 1779. Her final days were spent alone at her beloved parsonage. She was eulogized by the Rev. John Coffin as a fine mother and a faithful wife.

  That is as far as my Aunt Lydia got in compiling her history of Northminster. It’s an accurate piece, so far as I can tell, but I mentioned to you that there was something peculiar about it. This strange aspect was pointed out by a friend of mine (don’t ask me how he ever noticed!). Go back to the above history and count seven paragraphs up from the bottom. You’ll come to the sentence that reads Prudence delighted many with her playing and with her good-natured personality. Starting with the word Frudence read down the rest of the history, sticking only to the left most word of each line.

  Oddly enough, you will find what (coincidentally?) seems to be an addendum of sorts.

  Best regards,

  Benjamin Read

  The Collector in the Mill

  There was nothing of particular interest about the room itself; while it was not spacious, it was clean and the rent reasonable. The house rules prohibiting guests were not unacceptable, for I, a bachelor in the midst of pursuing a degree in archaeology, was not inclined to entertain visitors.

  The room offered a place to sleep and study, thus my needs were sated. The only interesting aspect to the room was the view.

  The towering old tenement in which I was a boarder stood on the edge of a once vigorous industrial block on the city’s east side. Abandoned mills crowded the narrow streets where puddles hid in potholes and reticent natives passed hurriedly without interchange. One of these brick monstrosities stood directly parallel to my room. Architecturally speaking, it was not unlike so many other oversized, angular structures of the time when mills lined up along the oily river that cut through the eastern quarter of the city. It had long, dark windows and precarious fire escapes fastened to its side, these being so encrusted with rust that they were, in colour, virtually the same as the bricks. Some of the windows had been boarded up following an explosion and fire some years back.

  I had been staying in the rooming house on Danvers Street for several days before I took note of anything abnormal about the abandoned mill. After hours of pressing my spectacles into a ponderous tome on prehistory, I rose and paced my chamber, stretching my limbs and rubbing at my eyes. I happened, upon chance, to glance out through the window at the mill across the way.

  It had been raining steadily for several hours and the building appeared darker than usual as it stood in the evening gloom. I was about to return to my studies when a lightning flash illuminated the mill and I saw, through one of the long smeary windows, something large and circular, perhaps the span of a wagon wheel, blink past the glass.

  While intrigued, I decided that there were a number of factors with which to explain away the occurrence as a natural phenomenon. Perhaps the glare of light had illuminated a silvery trashcan lid, propped in the empty building, or possibly some forsaken piece of machinery that had suffered damage in the explosion and ensuing flames that had led to the building’s uninhabited state.

  At any rate, I was not alarmed, and gave the matter little thought in the immediate days that followed.

  The city’s eastern side was a place of squalor, overall; the unfortunate seemed to gravitate there as if magnetized to the chill shadows and damp streets and crumbling doorways of ancient houses. On my way home from the uni
versity, I encountered many sad, bedraggled types. They were furtive creatures by and large, pitiful and unkempt. Most seemed ill, and, curiously enough, a notable number of them appeared short one or another limb. I made a habit of carrying coins to clink into their hungry cups.

  It was just after dusk, one cool Monday in autumn, when I made my way down Danvers, having taken several shortcuts through the maze of alleys in the mill district. An unsettling howling sound came from a clump of shrubbery set back on the lawn of a mouldering Colonial several doors down from my residence.

  I paused to see what the source of the painful emission might be, then walked closer, crouching to peer into the shadowy vegetation. It gave me quite a scare when a scraggly cat came bounding out, wild-eyed and hissing, dashing past me, heading down the street. The poor beast moved with a great deal of speed considering it was missing a leg.

  It rained quite frequently that autumn I spent on Danvers Street, but the weather was not a cause of great distress, so far as I was concerned. While I tried to occupy myself with my scholastic goals, I became increasingly unsettled, despite the fact that there seemed to be no actual source of disturbance. It is true that I was gazing more frequently at the brooding mill across the street, but I could perceive no connection between the place and my disquieted state.

  There was, I suppose, a curious foreboding quality about the mill, and I had noted the way pigeons (more than common atop other old buildings in the area) avoided lighting on the place. But I could identify no logical reason to be spending so much time peering out at it.

  My schoolwork suffered further interruption when one of my classmates from the university inexplicably vanished. Morris Webster was, for the most part, a satisfactory student, though his overt interest in women seemed a near constant source of folly both inside and outside the campus grounds.