Night of the Living Rerun

by Arthur Byron Cover

  She saw no reason why she should not fight for his survival. After all, was she not charged with protecting the innocent as well as eradicating abominations?

  “He is the one!” cried out a young girl hysterically. “He is the one responsible for my delirium!” The material and workmanship of the girl’s dress marked her as a member of a wealthy merchant family, yet the sleeves were tattered and many stitches were torn. The girl’s eyes were wild, and fresh red scratches marred her ivory complexion.

  Samantha recognized her as Heather Putnam. She noted the tips of Heather’s fingers were bloody; the girl had injured herself, an indication of contamination by the devil himself if ever there was one.

  Back in the twentieth century, Buffy ascribed her condition to hysteria, pure and simple.

  Heather and two others approximately the same age and in the same general condition were bound at the waist by a single rope. Putnam and four other men were required to hold the rope in order to drag them in the desired direction. Having brought them this far, the men were now obliged to hold the girls in their place to prevent them from lunging at Reverend Goodman and, presumably, scratching out his eyes.

  Putnam’s mind was not on his job. He stared mournfully at his daughter and occasionally wiped a tear from his eye.

  Danforth shook his head in pity at the girls. Goodman, on the other hand, muttered a prayer for them. The men in the crowd regarded them with horror.

  “He is responsible! He is the one!” the girls said. “He is responsible!”

  “I thought you said the slave woman was responsible for your condition,” Danforth protested.

  The girls got very quiet. Heather frowned, deep in thought. The other two pointedly looked at her, if silently asking for direction. Heather nodded. Then, almost in unison, they proclaimed, “The slave is responsible too! Tituba is the one! Tituba is the one!”

  “Do you see?” Danforth calmly asked Samantha. “They are all quite mad. And very easily confused. Each and every one. Obviously the work of the devil.”

  Samantha’s sharp retort formed in Buffy’s mind, but the dreamworld of the past was suddenly obliterated in a flash of red light, and Buffy realized, with a groan, that she had fallen out of bed.

  “Buffy!” shouted her mother from down the hall. “Are you all right?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Buffy began her morning ritual of tai chi exercises at the first sign of dawn. She tried not to think about her dream. What had seemed so supremely exciting now seemed vaguely unnatural. Obviously the best thing to do would be to relax, so she could face the day with a clear head.

  That decided, Buffy checked out her appearance in the mirror on her dresser. And practically fainted: There was a bruise the size of Kansas on her forehead.

  Later, at breakfast, Mom was preoccupied with advertising the V.V. Vivaldi exhibition at the gallery (which she was sure would bring in a lot of business), but she did find time to make it clear—for the umpteenth time—that Buffy’s pretty skin wasn’t going to keep its pure, youthful quality too long if she kept banging it up all the time.

  Buffy shrugged, absently tossing her butter knife into the open dishwasher.

  The dishwasher happened to be across the kitchen. The butterknife had sailed through the air end-over-end and landed handle up.

  It was followed in quick succession by the rest of Buffy’s silverware. Each piece landed perfectly in the rack. Buffy paused, twirling her steak knife in one hand like it was a baton.

  Mom sat there silent and slack-jawed. “Buffy—?”

  Buffy remembered she had an audience. “It’s, ah, something we’ve been learning in Home Ec.” She threw the steak knife.

  And missed. Completely.

  It landed in the sink. Buffy picked up her glass and moved toward the dishwasher.

  “Ah, wait a minute there!” interrupted Mom. “Why not do the rest the old-fashioned way.”

  “Oh, we never throw the dinnerware.”

  Her mother looked relieved.

  “Not until next semester.”

  * * *

  Buffy walked to school under a cloud. She’d been so distracted by the dream that she’d gotten sloppy and let her mother see something that reminded her of when Buffy had burned down the school gym—a big no-no in the mother’s manual. Mom had said a thousand times that if she caught Buffy doing anything that smacked of that kind of trouble again, she would ground her indefinitely.

  Buffy believed her. She didn’t want to have to explain to Giles that she couldn’t save the world from a wave of enraged soul-eaters because she was chained to her bedpost.

  The only silver lining in her cloud was the knowledge that soon she could confide to Willow about the dream. She wanted to tell Willow first because Giles would just try to explain it all away with facts and theories, and something about the experience was simply too fantastic for that. Buffy didn’t want to spoil it, yet.

  The only problem, as it turned out, was Xander, who knew their schedules better than they did and hence did not miss an opportunity when it came to finding one of them. Today he simply would not go away when Buffy and Willow made it clear his presence wasn’t welcome at the moment.

  Consequently, Buffy was probably harsher than necessary when she finally told him to get lost.

  “Why?” Xander asked. “We always study in the library together.”

  Giles cleared his throat but refrained from looking up from the massive, dusty tome he’d been studying since they’d come in.

  “You too—out!” Buffy pleaded. “Willow and I need to be alone.”

  “We do?” said Willow.

  “Yeah. You know, girl stuff: hair, nails . . .”

  “Clothes, boys.” Willow quickly added.

  Giles closed the book and said with mock resignation, “Come along, Xander, I guess even a Vampire Slayer needs a private moment once in a while. Besides, this will give us a chance to discuss certain astrological portents we need researched.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why dally where we’re not wanted?”

  “I’ll want a complete report later!” said Xander over his shoulder, as Giles led him away.

  “He must think you want to confide in me about your personal life,” Willow whispered, barely containing her excitement. “Is it about boys? You do want to talk about boys, don’t you?” She was visibly crestfallen when Buffy, who suddenly had second thoughts, countered with:

  “Well, no. I need to talk about history.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I’ve got some questions about colonial times. I’m afraid I haven’t always been paying attention in class.”

  “So what else is new? You’ve been daydreaming about boys, right?”

  “No, I’ve been taking catnaps because I’ve been up all hours of the night keeping the world safe from the scum of the nether-regions.”

  “Oh, now I understand why you’re so interested in history all of a sudden,” said Willow, her sigh indicating her reluctant acceptance. “We are, after all, having a big test this afternoon.”

  All the blood drained from Buffy’s face. “This afternoon? Today? Or this afternoon, tomorrow?”

  Willow checked her watch. “Today. In about twenty minutes, to be precise.”

  “What kind of test is it?”

  “Probably multiple choice, or in your case, multiple guess. That way it’ll be easy for Mrs. Honneger to grade. She likes doing homework about as much as we do.”

  “So, why don’t you ask me a few questions?” said Buffy, trying to relax. Tension always worked against her when she was trying to recall facts for a test, though strangely, it always seemed to help when the situation called for arcane vampire lore or sophisticated combat improvisation.

  “Okay, what year was Plymouth Colony founded?”

  “1620!”

  “Who founded it?”

  “The Puritans, who were fleeing religious persecution in England.”

  “And what did they
want ?” Willow asked, her eyes narrowing.

  “A place where they could enjoy religious freedom. But that’s where they sorta screwed up. ’Cause the only religion they allowed was their own. Dissenters were punished—banished! Did you know that?”

  “I knew that. What was name of their colony?”

  “The Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

  “What kind of government did they practice?”

  “A theocracy, meaning government by interpretation of the religious scriptures. Preachers had quite a bit of influence, since officeholders always had to look to them for approval.”

  Willow pursed her lips. “Buffy, you have been studying, haven’t you? On the sly, right?”

  “Uh, right.”

  “What can you tell me about the witch trials of 1692?”

  “Not too much,” said Buffy. “A group of girls about our age became afflicted with convulsive fits, short-term hearing, seeing, and memory loss, and strange bruises and marks on the skin! The local doctors didn’t know what to call it, so their diagnosis was witchcraft! By the time the preachers, judges and sheriffs got involved, there was a fullscale panic. At that time, anything that couldn’t be explained was blamed on the supernatural!”

  “Mrs. Honneger never told us that!”

  “Did you know that one of the first people to be accused was a slave named Tituba, who on dark and stormy nights fed the girls tales of possession and the walking dead? Tituba survived, actually, because she repented. Mrs. Honneger thinks the girls were faking their symptoms, but the problem could have been entirely medical or psychological in origin! Or maybe they just wanted the attention!”

  Buffy became pensive. “You know, if you put together the changing social and political structure of the colony with the people’s view of a world where the devil and his demons were actively conspiring against them—then the Salem Witch Trials were almost inevitable. Besides, hysteria over witches had been going on in Europe for a couple of centuries, and there they were burned at the stake, rather than merely hanged.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about this test if I were you,” Willow said.

  Just then Giles stalked back in, followed by Xander, who was barely keeping his mirth to himself. Giles wore a stern expression on his face.

  “I hope you ladies are through with your little talk,” Giles said, “because I suspect a situation is brewing right under our very noses.”

  Buffy sighed. “Another emergency? No prob. I can probably fit it in between history and math.”

  Xander giggled.

  Giles looked at him sternly. “This isn’t funny. The human race could be doomed to extinction.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Xander, in tones that indicated he really wasn’t, “but you’re getting all worked up about a prophecy made two hundred years ago by some guy even you admit was insane.”

  “He doesn’t sound too reliable,” said Willow, as Buffy gestured at Xander to stop snickering. Which Xander did, but with difficulty.

  Giles cleared his throat, then plunged right ahead. “I have been studying The Eibon. It is the most notorious book of prophecies ever written, with the possible exception of two lost books referred to in that great cycle of East Indian mythology, The Mahabharata. Unlike those two lost books, however, The Eibon is still with us. An early copy is almost always in the possession of the Watcher, passed down from the previous occupant of that post.

  “You’ve heard, of course, of Nostradamus, Cayce, Criswell—the great seers of modern Western thought who saw far into the future and then wrote it down, in the hope their wisdom would be handed down to subsequent generations. Their major predictions tend to be deliberately vague, so it’s possible to draw many different meanings from them. Some people, for instance, believe Nostradamus predicted the advent of the airplane and tank as weapons during World War I, while others believe the same verse refers to the approach of the tropical weather phenomenon known as el niño. Personally, I think they’re both wrong, but nobody’s been asking me my opinion lately.”

  “Is that such a surprise?” asked Xander, unable to resist the line. He was mildly frustrated when everyone pointedly ignored him.

  “Greatest of all was the mad Austrian heretic Prince Ashton Eisenberg V, who lived from 1692 till 1776. Toward the end of his life, when he was imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris—thanks to being caught in the midst of some indiscretion—he wrote a book of prophecies unparalleled in their precision. When he writes that the snake-brother’s army shall devour the parasitic brother’s army in the New World, for instance, he’s obviously referring to the American Civil War, nearly a century later.”

  “Obviously,” agreed Willow.

  Caught up in his lecture, Giles continued, “Prince Ashton’s most famous prediction is known simply as Eisenberg’s Prophecy of the Dual Duel. It’s the vaguest of all his predictions. Roughly translated from its pidgin German, it says:

  There came a time when the planets and stars were in harmony

  A time when that which was before, shall be again,

  And that which was done, will be done again.

  A time when a great beast shall crawl onto the land,

  A beast beyond defeat but not beyond loss

  A beast who shall be vanquished by the pure in heart.

  Such a time shall come again.

  As surely as the stars will once again be in similiar harmony

  And at this time another beast shall rise,

  A beast different in body but same in spirit

  And like his brother of old he shall strive

  To steal the moon, to consume the sun, and to walk the earth.

  To see if he might strike a dagger into the heart of destiny.

  “Interesting, wouldn’t you say?” Giles eagerly awaited their response.

  “Actually, the word I was thinking of was farfetched,” said Xander.

  “I think I’m leaning toward Xander’s point of view on this one,” said Buffy. “Tell me again how accurate this guy was—”

  “—on matters other than this great beast thing,” Willow suggested.

  Giles smiled, weakly. “There are some who believe Prince Ashton Eisenberg predicted night baseball.”

  “Before or after the invention of satellite television?” Xander asked, smartly.

  “Before.”

  “Wow,” said Xander breathlessly. “He was good.”

  “So when did the first great beast try to walk the earth?” asked Willow.

  “The beast in question was an abomination called the Despised One. The Despised One tried to rise from the nether-regions sometime around the year of Prince Ashton’s birth—”

  “1692!” exclaimed Buffy.

  “And it happened somewhere in the New World. Now, I grant you old Ashton was certifible, but he is a towering figure in occult studies because so many of his prophecies have come true. He claimed the ghost of the Despised One communicated with him occasionally and discussed strategies to shift the traditional balance between good and evil. Ashton approached the occult rather scientifically, so when a routine examination verified the beast’s information, he realized the strategy could be repeated, but only at particular times, when rather specific conditions are met.

  “I don’t know about most of the conditions, but the stars are getting right. And that means we could be in the midst of it and not even know it yet.”

  “1692,” said Xander soberly. “That’s the year of the Salem witch trials. Which happens to be one of the subjects we’re being tested on in history class today.”

  The bell rang, indicating study period was over.

  “A test which is right about now,” said Willow.

  * * *

  The moment Buffy laid down her pen in history class, she knew she’d aced the test. Answers had come to her so easily she’d had to force herself to slow down, just in case Mrs. Honneger had thrown a few trick questions into the mix.

  After midnight that evening, she snuck out of the house t
o foil an insane circus clown’s plot to infest the Sunnydale rat population with piranha DNA. The clown, it seemed, held a grudge against the town after some environmental mishap he had suffered during his youth.

  Buffy was successful—but not until the clown had been devoured by his own creations. Unfortunately, while eluding the horde of mutant rodents by crawling through a flooded basement, Buffy came down with a serious cold.

  By the time the rats lay dead in a giant heap before a statue of the blindfolded lady justice, Buffy could barely breathe, and she was sweating like she’d done an intense workout on a hundred-degree day.

  Immediately after sneaking back into the house, she took a cold shower to try to get her temperature to drop. Once again she was out the moment her head struck the pillow. Her hair was still wrapped in a towel and her body didn’t seem cooler by even one degree.

  Her mind fell through a sea of holes. It landed on an infinity of nothingness.

  And she was back. Back as Samantha Kane, intrepid witch-hunter in 1692 Massachusetts; but the Salem gallows, the angry men and Heather Putnam and her co-conspirators were nowhere around.

  Samantha was alone, on horseback, in the crossroads of two trails in a daylit wood. She had followed the escaped Sarah Dinsdale’s footsteps to this point, but now they had suddenly disappeared.

  No matter, Buffy heard Samantha thinking, she’ll reveal herself another way. They always do.

  Samantha’s mount was jittery. Her own horse was spent, so she’d borrowed this mount from Judge Danforth, but it wasn’t used to being ridden as hard as Samantha needed it to.

  The rays of the setting sun reflected off something down the eastern fork. Samantha jerked the reins to get the horse’s attention, then rode it roughly to the place where she’d seen the glint.

  Buffy mumbled in her sleep, “The way you’re treating that mare, it’s a wonder she doesn’t throw you in a briar patch.”

  Samantha dismounted and lifted a bright orange piece of cloth shaped like the letter “W” from where it was caught on top of a bramble bush. It was the mark of a witch—customarily sewn onto the clothing of a devil’s consort once sentence was passed.