The Ferryman (The Guardians Series 1 Book 2)

by Wendy Saunders

  ‘She was my wife.’

  ‘Your wife,’ the hurt coiled around her chest squeezing hard and when she spoke her voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘You’re married?’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head, ‘not anymore. Look Olivia, I can explain.’

  ‘I think you’d better,’ she locked her arms across her chest like a barrier across her heart.

  ‘We were very young when we married,’ he sighed, ‘I didn’t want to be married but my father insisted. Although my brother Logan loved both me and Temperance, he always hated the farm, hated being at home, hated anything that reminded him of our mother. So he always found excuses to be absent which largely left the running of the farm to me. My father lived at the bottom of a bottle and was next to useless when he wasn’t being violent. Then he insisted it was time for me to take a wife. I was barely more than nineteen years old at the time and I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him. He said Temperance needed a female in the house to teach her how to run a home and when her time came, how to be a good wife. I had let her run wild, I had given her more freedom than was acceptable for a girl child and it was beginning to show. Whilst I was more than happy to indulge her I did feel she would benefit from having a woman in her life that she could be close to, so in the end I agreed to marriage. My father already had a prospective bride in mind and had spoken with her father. Her name was Mary Alcott. She was only seventeen years old herself and she was a sweet, pretty little thing. Quiet but always smiled shyly when she saw me at church. I didn’t think it would be so bad being married to her and at least it would give me someone else my age to talk to.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ Olivia asked quietly, not sure if she wanted to hear the answer. ‘Did you leave her when Sam brought you to Mercy?’

  ‘No,’ Theo sighed, ‘she died. Are you sure you want to know, it’s a long story.’

  ‘I have to know the truth Theo.’

  He nodded in resignation and continued.

  ‘For a while our marriage was good, we became friends and it was nice to have company. Although Temperance seemed happy to have another female in the house I noticed she always held back with Mary; she never quite warmed to her. Mary loved me, I knew she did. I’m not surprised she felt that way about me as I allowed her the same freedoms as I did Tempy. Coming from the home she did, with a Preacher father and a strict mother she suddenly felt valued. I listened to her when she spoke and let her form her own opinions, never chastising her for speaking her mind. I was very fond of her.’

  ‘You didn’t love her?’ Olivia frowned as she tried to understand.

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she wasn’t you,’ he whispered. ‘I’d seen your face every night in my dreams for as long as I could remember, looked through a window into your world. Even though I didn’t know at the time that you were real, it was your face I saw every time I looked at her. I knew I wasn’t being fair to her but I couldn’t help the way I felt, any more than she could change her love for me.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘About a year into the marriage she began to change, it was so strange. She began sleeping a lot and she would forget things. At first I just dismissed it but then she stopped bathing and taking care of herself, her hair would often become dirty and matted and Tempy would sit with her for hours trying to comb out the snarls. After a while she started to become suspicious, she said I was watching her all the time and that she knew I wanted to hurt her. I didn’t, I swear I would never have harmed her, but she seemed convinced I was going to kill her in our bed while she slept, so she stopped sleeping.’

  ‘Go on,’ Olivia urged him, frowning thoughtfully.

  ‘Quite often she would start ranting suddenly but her words didn’t make sense, her mind seemed so disorganised I couldn’t keep up with her. She would switch randomly between subjects and from that point on it just got worse and worse. She started to hear voices, she said the voices told her I wanted to harm her and I would catch her looking at things that weren’t there.’

  ‘Hallucinations?’

  ‘I don’t know what that is?’

  ‘It’s when a person sees things that aren’t real but they are convinced that they are.’

  ‘Yes’ he nodded, ‘that is what she was like. She was convinced the house and the farm were crawling with mangy half-starved cats, which of course it wasn’t. We had a couple of big toms to keep the mice out but that was it. For the next couple of years my father’s health deteriorated as did Mary’s condition. Tempy and I tried to hide it from most people but it was getting harder and harder and people were beginning to talk. Mary had an outburst at church and began screaming at the congregation that they were all sinners and murderers and that they were all going to burn in Hell. After that we tried to keep her hidden at home as much as we could but it made her worse because now she believed we were trying to imprison her. But it wasn’t safe to turn her loose, the witch hunts had begun. People we knew were being arrested, many of them had already hung. Fortunately, we were fairly isolated at the farm as it was on the outskirts of Salem village and a fair distance from Salem town itself.’

  ‘If they’d seen her they would have assumed she was in league with the devil, she would have been accused,’ Olivia surmised.

  ‘Exactly,’ Theo answered. ‘Logan was already in Nathaniel’s thrall at this point. He was almost at the point of taking vows and becoming a witch finder himself.’

  ‘I don’t understand’ Olivia frowned, ‘I’ve seen the court records and they state that you, your brother Logan and your father were all named witch finders by the court at the same time.’

  ‘The records are incorrect,’ he told her. ‘It is my understanding that Logan went back and had the official records adjusted.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘To change our family history’ Theo shrugged. ‘He wanted our name to be as feared as Hopkins or Searne. He wanted to promote the image of us a one fierce unified family of witch finders, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. Our family was broken and damaged beyond repair at that point. Our father was dying and my wife was touched by madness. Tempy and I were having visions which would have condemned either one of us as witches, something we were both desperately trying to hide, not just from the fanatics but from my own wife and brother.’

  ‘Surely Logan would not have allowed anything to happen to you both? he was your brother, he loved you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Theo frowned shaking his head, ‘I honestly don’t know what he would have done if he’d found out. He was changing, it had started with the death of our mother. It was like something inside him was broken. As the years passed he became more and more bitter. We stayed at the farm, with Tempy and I nursing father and trying to keep Mary as calm as we could. When Tempy died I think it just pushed him over the edge.’

  He broke off, breathing heavily as the painful memories washed over him.

  ‘What happened Theo?’ Olivia asked gently.

  ‘Tempy was sick, she had a cough and she was starting to show signs of a fever. I begged her to rest but she insisted on helping me with Mary and father. The next day I needed to leave for a while as we had to sell our produce at market two towns over. There was no way around it, we had to survive. I didn’t want to leave her alone with Mary and father but there was no other choice. I knew I could make the trip in three days, two if I didn’t stay at the inn and but kept travelling, dozing in the cart.

  I convinced Logan to accompany me, I couldn’t take the chance of him going back to the farm while I wasn’t there and discovering Mary’s condition. I was also afraid because Tempy’s fever seemed to be disrupting her gift; the sicker she got the less control she had over her visions. I couldn’t risk Logan finding out about that either so we left as planned but on the way back we got caught in a storm. By the time I managed to return home a week had passed. Tempy was gone, her fever had worse
ned in our absence and with only Mary by her side, she died. Mary was ranting about a man appearing and disappearing and cats everywhere eating the corpses. It seemed that in her sickness she’d burned Tempy’s body instead of having her buried, because she thought the cats infesting the farm would dig up the body and consume it.’

  ‘Oh God Theo’ Olivia breathed, shutting her eyes against his pain and shaking her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I tried to keep Logan from seeing Mary’s state of mind but it was too late. Driven mad with grief for our little sister and infuriated that Mary had burned her body instead of allowing her to receive the benefit of a Christian burial after an appropriate funeral sermon had been preached over her, he denounced Mary in her madness for a witch. I tried to stop them but by this point I too had succumbed to the fever which had taken Tempy. I was laid abed for days, drifting in and out of consciousness. By the time the fever broke and I had the strength to stand I crawled out of bed and headed for Salem where they’d taken Mary. Weak from my illness and lack of food it was a long and hard ride but when I finally got there I was informed Mary had already stood trial and had been found guilty. I climbed back on my horse and headed for Gallows Hill but I was too late.’

  ‘Theo you don’t have to finish.’

  ‘No,’ he breathed past the hard lump in his throat, ‘you need to know. I did everything I could to save her but I was betrayed by my own weak body. As I approached I could see Logan reading the list of charges against her as she stood on a stool with a noose around her neck. I dismounted but my legs collapsed beneath me. Pushing myself up with everything I had, I forced my way through the jeering crowd but before I could reach her Nathaniel kicked the stool out from under her. Two of the men from the crowd held me back as I tried to reach her, but I had no strength left to fight them. They forced me to watch her die, kicking and struggling for breath.’

  ‘Theo,’ Olivia whispered sadly.

  ‘I fell to the ground in the dirt and mud as the rain came down in torrents. The witnesses drifted away one by one, leaving me alone in my grief, watching as her lifeless body swayed in the wind and dangled helplessly at the end of a rope.’

  He looked up at Olivia his eyes dark and filled with centuries old grief and pain.

  ‘Logan came to me, the way he looked at me,’ Theo shook his head. ‘Just for a moment there was a brief glimpse of the man he had been, the man I had loved and as he put his arms around me for a brief time he was my brother again. I should have saved Mary and I should never have left Tempy alone with her.’

  ‘Theo,’ Olivia took a step towards him, ‘it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t drive Mary to madness. From what you’ve described to me I think there was something very wrong with her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s no way to prove it now but I suspect from the symptoms you described that Mary was suffering from Schizophrenia.’

  ‘I don’t understand this word?’

  ‘Schizophrenia is a mental disorder and quite often doesn’t present with symptoms until late adolescence or early adulthood. I had a friend at college who was diagnosed with it in our second year. The people who suffer from it display a range of different symptoms, depression, lack of personal hygiene, disorganised speech, paranoia and hallucinations. There was no way you could have helped her, not without modern medicine and in the grip of witch fever you could only have hidden her condition for so long. It was always going to end badly.’

  ‘Still I should have been able to do something.’

  ‘Theo you have to stop blaming yourself. You can’t change what happened and this?’ she encompassed the room with a sweep of her arms, ‘it’s not healthy, you need to stop carrying your grief with you and let her go.’

  ‘I didn’t paint all these.’

  ‘What?’ she asked slowly.

  ‘I painted the original one, I don’t really know why, but all these other paintings and sketches were of different things. I tried destroying the original painting; I painted over it, I burned it, I cut it up but it just keeps reappearing back in its frame. Now all the other pictures have changed and they are exact copies of the original, except for one thing. The painting’s expression keeps changing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

  ‘I painted her as I remembered her, a young carefree, happy girl but when she started looking back at me her expression gradually got colder and angrier.’

  ‘Theo,’ she breathed heavily, ‘are you trying to tell me Mary’s spirit came through the doorway and she is haunting the painting?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s in the painting anymore’ he replied quietly.

  Suddenly the silence was interrupted by a door slamming somewhere in the house, followed by another. Beau shot into the room and hid under Theo’s chair, whimpering loudly. The windows started rattling, just like they had at the pub, the lights flickering on and off erratically. The pencil and brush pots Theo kept neatly lined up shook and skidded across the table scattering brushes everywhere.

  ‘We need to get these out of here now,’ Olivia started tearing down the pictures from the walls but as she turned to yank the original canvas off the easel, the tray in which Theo kept all of his sharper tools began to shake violently. An enraged ghostly scream ripped through the house as the box upturned and the instruments were hurled in Olivia’s direction.

  Theo grabbed her and turned, throwing her to the floor but as he did one of the sharp pallet knives caught her, slicing along the bare flesh of her thigh. She cried out in pain as they both hit the floor, slamming her elbow and knocking the breath from her. She looked up as the paintings began to rattle and sway and one by one they burst into flames.

  That was the last straw and Olivia saw red. Having a spirit trapped in her house was one thing but it would not use fire against her, that was her gift. Olivia climbed to her feet ignoring Theo as her eyes flashed pure gold. She felt her power flash through her body, fuelled by her rage. She reached for the fire, felt the flames and gloried in the heat and power. This was hers and no crazed ghost was going to use it against her. She pulled the fire from the paintings, smothering the flames before they could catch and spread through the house.

  A howl of inhuman rage swept through the room churning up the papers which ended up strewn across the floor. Theo was thrown violently across the room, cracking his head against the corner of the window and splitting the skin open. Olivia felt her head being flung backwards as if some unseen hand had cracked her across the mouth. She licked her lip and tasted the metallic tang of blood but held her ground. Debris was flying around the room now and Olivia watched in smouldering anger as a woman appeared in front of her. Her clothes were torn and dirty and her matted blonde hair hung down in a tangled mess. Her eyes were red and filled with madness and fury as she bared her dirty teeth. Olivia’s eyes drifted to her neck and she saw the deep agonising welts of rope burn. Mary faced her, her dirty fingers curved into claws as she let out another wail.

  Olivia tried to find some sympathy but she couldn’t, she was so damn angry. Everything collapsed in on her, the pain of knowing Theo had been married and that he had kept it from her, the demon, the spirits, the fact that everyone seemed to be looking towards her to deal with it all when all she wanted was a normal quiet safe life. God dammit she’d earned it, it was so unfair, no one had asked her what she wanted and she was sick to death of people hurting her. The rage and unfairness all coalesced into a hot hard ball in her chest and she thrust her hands up into the air reaching for her spirit fire.

  This time, unlike when she’d called it before, it was huge, vast, almost the same as when she’d called the Hell fire against the Hell Hounds. The power was immense and she held it in her bare hands with all the raw energy of a freight train. It was like riding a lightning bolt. Her heart hammered in her chest and her breath came in heaving gasps. Her skin felt like it was alive, prickling with thousands of pinpricks of electricity, even her
hair felt like it was standing on end. This time when she looked at Mary, growling at her like a rabid dog, she embraced the power. Her fists gripped until her knuckles turned white and she pulled the power down.

  ‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!’ Olivia screamed furiously and punched out.

  The power exploded out of Olivia’s chest like a blast of silver white light flung violently outwards like a shock wave. When the light hit Mary it flung her through the wall of the house until she appeared on the other side. Olivia rushed into the hallway and yanked open the front door, rushing onto the frozen porch in bare feet, not even aware of the freezing cold. She watched the ring of silver light continue to expand, carrying a struggling Mary as if she were snared in a fisherman’s net. Once it reached the glowing and pulsing blue protective ring of Olivia’s wards, Mary was shoved to the other side.

  Olivia strode down the steps angrily and out onto the snowy path. She speared her hands up to the churning sky and pulled more silver fire down. Great bolts of silver lightening rained down, lighting up the protective circle which suddenly flared up, roaring to life in great silver flames. Olivia rode the whip of power, embracing the fire as it burned higher and higher and suddenly exploded outwards with such force it made the ancient thick trunked trees tremble, knocking the snow from their branches so it fell to the ground it giant heaps.

  When the light and fire died down she stood trembling, her breath heavy and uneven. She watched as the sky which had been alive with purple and pink began to lighten and the sun slowly began its ascent. As the sky began to fill with early morning light she gazed out across the water and realised that the lake was almost frozen solid and covered in places with a thick dusting of snow.

  Her body began to come down from its high and as the adrenalin drained away leaving her exhausted, she felt as if she’d been hit by a truck. Her feet were frozen and she began to shake violently. She was aware of a blanket being wrapped around her and she felt Theo lift her gently into his arms. Burying her face into his neck, unable to find any words, she breathed in the beloved familiar scent of him and for the first time it brought her no comfort but only a sharp pain in her heart.