Speaks the Nightbird

by Robert R. McCammon

  “I’ll return in the afternoon,” he told her, and then he walked by Mrs. Nettles and descended the stairs.

  The day continued gloomy, befitting Matthew’s state of mind. He trudged past the spring on his way to the conjunction of streets, where he turned west onto Industry. A sharp eye had to be kept ready for the blacksmith, but Matthew put Hazelton’s property behind him without incident. He did, however, receive a generous spattering of mud from the wheels of a wagon that creaked past, freighted with the belongings of a family—father, mother, three small children—who evidently had chosen this as the day to abandon Fount Royal.

  Indeed, the town under this murky gray sky appeared all but deserted, with only a few citizens in evidence. Matthew saw on both sides of Industry Street the fallow fields and forlorn dwellings that were the results of wretched weather, ill fate, and the fear of witchcraft. It seemed to him that the further he ventured along Industry, in the direction of the orchards and farmland that should have been the pride of Fount Royal, the worse became the sense of desolation and futility. Piles of animal manure littered the street, among them more than a few nuggets of human waste as well. Matthew saw the wagon and campsite of Exodus Jerusalem but the preacher was not in view. When Matthew came upon the carcass of a pig, its bulk having been gnawed open and the innards being ravaged by a couple of desperate-looking mongrels, he thought that the days of Fount Royal were numbered—no matter what Bidwell did to save the place—simply because the lethargy of the doomed had settled here like a funeral shroud.

  He did spy an elderly man who was outside his barn lathering a saddle, and from him he inquired as to the home of Martin Adams. “House is up the way. Got blue shutters,” the aged gent answered. Then, “Seen you take the lash this mornin’. You done good not to holler. When’s that witch gonna burn?”

  “The magistrate is debating,” Matthew said, starting to move along.

  “Hope it’s in a day or two. I’ll be there, you can mark it!”

  Matthew kept going. The very next house—whitewashed but losing its paint in large, ugly splotches—looked to be long vacant and its front door was partway open but all the shutters sealed. Matthew suspected this was the Hamilton place, where Violet had experienced her encounter. Three more houses, and there stood the one with blue shutters. He walked to the door and knocked.

  When the door was opened, Violet herself stood before him. Her eyes widened and she started to retreat but Matthew said, “Hello, Violet. May I speak with you?”

  “No sir,” she said, obviously overcome by his presence and the memory it stirred. “I have to go, sir.” She made a motion to close the door in his face.

  “Please.” Matthew put his hand against the door. “Just one moment.”

  “Who is that?” came a woman’s rather shrill voice from within. “Violet, who’s there?”

  “The man who asked me questions, Mama!” Almost at once Violet was pulled aside none too gently and a woman who was as thin and rawboned as her husband stepped upon the threshold. Constance Adams wore a drab brown dress and white bonnet, a stained and frayed apron, and held a broom. She was older than her husband, possibly in her late thirties, and might have been a handsome woman but for the length of her pointed chin and the unrestrained anger in her pale blue eyes.

  “What do you want?” she snapped, as if biting off a piece of beef jerky.

  “Pardon my intrusion,” he said. “I wanted to ask your daughter another question pertaining to—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “Violet’s answered enough questions. That woman is a curse and a plague on us, and I wish her dead. Now go away!”

  Matthew kept his hand on the door. “One question,” he said firmly. He saw the little girl standing behind her mother, about to bolt like a scared deer. “Violet told me that in the Hamilton house she heard the voice of a man singing. I asked her to think about it further, and try to remember what she heard.”

  “You’re painin’ her, don’t you see that? All these questions are like to make her head split open, she’s hurtin’ so bad!”

  “Mama?” Violet said, close to tears. “Don’t yell, Mama!”

  “Hush!” The woman laid the broom’s handle against Matthew’s chest. “Violet can’t sleep at night, her head aches so! Dr. Shields can’t even help her! All this thinkin’ and rememberin’ of such evil things is drivin’ us all to madness!”

  “I can understand your difficulty, but I have to—”

  “You don’t have to do nothin’ but turn around and go!” she said, all but shouting. “If the witch had been put to death three month past, this town would be all right, but look at it now! She’s near killed it, just like she killed the reverend and her own husband! Just like she’s killed Sarah Davis and James Lathrop, Giles Geddy and Dorcas Chester and all the rest of ’em laid down in them graves! And now she’s tryin’ to kill my Violet by a knife to the brains!” Spittle had spewed from the woman’s mouth and glistened on her chin. The expression in her eyes, wild to begin with, now had taken on a frightening fever. “I told ’em she was no good! I told ’em all along, but they didn’t care to hear me! No, they let her walk in that church, just walk in and her a black nigger from Hell!”

  “Mama! Mama!” Violet was crying, and had clasped her hands to her ears.

  “She will damn us all before she’s done!” Constance Adams continued to rave, her voice now risen to a dreadful, piercing pitch. “I’ve begged him to leave! By Christ I’ve begged him, but he says we ain’t runnin’! She’s tainted his mind, too, and she’ll have him dead a’fore long!”

  Matthew presumed she meant her husband. It was obvious that the woman was in danger of losing her last tattered rag of sanity. And obvious as well that no good was being done here. He backed away from the door as the distraught wretch went on jabbering, “She killed Phillip Beale! Choked him on blood in his sleep! I told ’em to run her out of this town! I told ’em she was evil, and Abby Hamilton knew it too! Lord God protect and save us! Burn her, for the love of Almighty God, burn her!” The door slammed shut, and from beyond it Matthew heard Constance Adams wailing like an injured, terrified animal caught in a cage.

  He turned around and walked away from the house, going eastward along Industry Street. His heart was pounding, his stomach seemingly twisted into a knot by his encounter with the madwoman. He understood, though, the power of fear to distort and destroy. Perhaps Constance Adams had been long balanced on a precarious edge, and this situation had pushed her over. In any case, he could expect no further help from woman or child. This he found extremely unfortunate, because the matter of a man’s singing voice in the demon-inhabited Hamilton house was so strange that he felt it might have great bearing on the truth.

  In a few moments he came once again to the house itself. There was nothing particularly forbidding about it, other than the fact that it had the air of abandonment, but Matthew thought that on this grim day it was like an ugly fist clenched around a secret. It was made of the same pine timbers as the other houses and was the same small size—two or three rooms, at the most—yet this house was indeed different for it had been chosen, if one believed the child, as the site of Satan’s warning against the citizens of Fount Royal.

  He decided to see the interior for himself, and particularly find the back room from whence the man’s voice had come. The door was already open wide enough to admit him, and Matthew recalled Violet saying that the door was open when she entered as well. He doubted that anyone had set foot here since the child’s experience, and so he thought there might be some evidence of interest. Possibly the imp’s candle, or the chair upon which Satan had been sitting?

  Matthew approached the door, not without some trepidation. Because all the shutters were closed, the interior was as dark as the gaol at midnight. He was greeted at the threshold by a damp, putrid, altogether unsavory odor. He called on the sternest stuff he had and entered the house.

  His first task was to make his way to the nearest window and open the shut
ters wide, which he did. Now, with the aid of feeble though welcome light, his courage grew. He went to the other window and opened those shutters also, allowing God’s illumination into the refuge of Satan.

  When he turned to survey the room in which he stood, there were three things he noted in rapid succession: the Hamiltons had evidently carried everything away in a wagon, for there was not a stick of furniture remaining; the floor was littered with what appeared to be dog droppings, some of them relatively fresh; and a skeleton lay in the corner.

  The skeleton, of course, secured his attention. Matthew approached it for a closer inspection.

  It had been at one time a medium-sized dog, obviously aged because its teeth were so worn down. The skeleton lay on its right side on a mat of its own grayish-brown hair, its bones picked clean by the flies that even now buzzed around the fresher mounds of excrement. The smell in this corner of the room was not pleasant, as the boards beneath the dead animal had been stained by the liquids of decay. Matthew wondered how long this carcass had been lying here, being whittled down to its foundations by scavenging insects.

  He remembered what Martin Adams had said before Violet had related her story: This thing she is ’bout to tell you happent near three week ago.

  Surely, to have been so completely consumed, the dead dog had been lying in this room for at least that long, he thought. The smell must have been sickening. It must have struck a person in the face as soon as that threshold was crossed, and indeed must have been quite apparent even before the entry was reached. Yet it had not stopped Violet Adams from entering the house, and indeed she’d not noticed it even when she was well within.

  One might say the Devil had masked the odor, or that Violet had been too entranced to let it wrinkle her nose, but still…Of course, the dog could have died here two weeks ago rather than three. But still…

  Matthew turned his mind to the fact that there were no furnishings in the room. No chair, no bench, nothing upon which the Devil might have been sitting with the imp upon his knee. Of course Satan might have conjured a chair from thin air, but still…

  He heard a noise from the rear of the house.

  It was a slight sound, just a whisper of a noise, but it was enough to make the small hairs stir on the back of his neck. He stood very still, his mouth gone dry. He stared into the darkness that held reign back there, beyond the spill of meager light.

  The sound—whatever it was—was not repeated. Matthew thought it had been the creaking of a board, or the slow shifting of something that would not be seen. He waited, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, his eyes trying to pierce the gloom. A fly landed on his forehead, and he quickly brushed it away.

  The room back there. From where the child had said she’d heard a man’s voice, singing.

  Matthew was terrified by the thought of what might be lurking just beyond his range of vision. Or, indeed, lying in wait for him. But, God help him, he had come to this house to ascertain the truth and therefore he must go back into that dark room, for who would go if he would not?

  Still, his feet had grown roots. He looked around for a weapon of some kind—of any kind—but found nothing. No, that was not quite correct: amid the ashes of the hearth he saw two items that had been left by the Hamiltons—a broken clay tankard and a small iron cooking pot. He picked up the pot, which had been so used its bottom was burned black, and again faced the gathered dark.

  Matthew would have traded two teeth for a sword and a lantern, but a cooking pot was at least substantial enough to strike a blow with, if need be. He sincerely hoped there would be no need. And now came the test of his own mettle. To go or not to go, that was the question. If he slinked out, would it not be an admittance that the Devil really might be back in that room awaiting him? And had he heard a noise, or had it been only his fevered imagination?

  It could have been a rat, of course. Yes, a rat. That was all.

  He took one step toward the dark and stopped, listening. There was no sound other than the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears. One more step, and then another. He could now make out an open doorway, beyond which might have been a bottomless pit.

  Slowly, slowly, Matthew approached the room and winced as his weight made a board groan. He peered inside, all his senses alert for any hint of motion or threat of attack from a spectral fiend. He saw the barest crack of daylight back there: the seam of closed shutters.

  Again his courage faltered. To have a view of the room meant he must cross it and unlatch the shutters. A cold hand might grip the back of his neck before he could get there.

  No, it was ridiculous! he thought. His very reticence here was giving weight to the notion—absurd, in his belief—that indeed Satan had visited this house and might still be a presence in its darkness. The longer he tarried on the threshold, the more claws and teeth Satan bared. There was nothing to do but enter the room, go straight to the shutters, and throw them open.

  And, of course, while doing so keep a tight grip on the iron pot.

  Matthew took as much of a deep breath as he could stand, as the smell was less than fragrant. Then he gritted his teeth and walked into the room.

  He felt the darkness take him. His spine crawling, he went the ten feet or so to the opposite wall, found the shutter latch, and lifted it with a quick—one might say frantic—motion. As he opened the shutters the blessed gray light rushed in, and never had he been so glad to see a skyful of ugly clouds.

  At the instant of Matthew’s relief, a groan came from behind him that rose in volume and power and quite near sent him hurtling through the window. This sound of a vengeful demon all but lifted Matthew out of his shoes. He twisted around with his face frozen into a terrified rictus and the iron pot lifted to strike a blow against a horned skull.

  It was difficult to say who was more frightened, the wild-eyed young man or the wild-eyed brown mongrel that cowered in a corner. But it was definitely Matthew’s fear that passed first, as directly he saw on the floor the six pups that had been suckling at their mother’s swollen teats. He gave a reflexive, strangled laugh, though his testicles were yet to descend from the height they had risen.

  The bitch was trembling, but now she began to show her teeth and mutter a growl, therefore Matthew felt it prudent to take his leave. He had a look around the room, which was quite bare except for the animals, their excrement, and a couple of tattered chicken carcasses. He lowered the cooking pot and backed out, and was on his way to the door when the master of the house suddenly arrived.

  It was one of the dogs that had been pulling the entrails from the dead pig in the street. It came in bloody-mouthed, carrying between its jaws a hunk of something dark red and dripping. As soon as its glinting eyes took sight of Matthew, the animal dropped its gory prize and crouched down in an attitude of attack, its husky growl indicating that Matthew had intruded upon a territory off-limits to the humans of Fount Royal. The beast was about to jump for Matthew’s throat, that much was dangerously clear. Matthew wasted no time in making his decision; he flung the pot to the floor in front of the dog, causing it to leap backward and issue a fusillade of indignant barks, and then he immediately turned to the nearest window, climbed up over the sill, and jumped out.

  Up on his feet again, he made haste in an easterly direction. He glanced back, but the dog did not follow. Matthew kept his pace brisk until he’d left the Hamilton house well in his wake, and then he stopped to take account of a scraped right shin and a number of splinters in the palm of his right hand. Otherwise, he was none the worse for his venture.

  As he continued to walk toward the conjunction of streets, he reflected on the meaning of this experience. Possibly the dogs had belonged to the Hamiltons and had been left behind months ago, or possibly they were curs abandoned by some other fleeing family. The question was: how long had the dogs been living there? More or less than three weeks? Was it reasonable to assume they had been there when Violet Adams had entered the house?

  If she had entered the
house. There had been no chair. No candle or candlestick. Bidwell and Exodus Jerusalem would say that those items had been spectral and of course had vanished with the demons, but Matthew needed to see them to believe they had been there at all. And what of the dog’s skeleton? The decaying carcass would have filled that room with a repulsive odor, yet Violet had not noticed it nor been hesitant in entering the house. Matthew doubted very much if he would have gone into a deserted house that had the smell of death wafting from its front door, no matter who’d been calling to him. Therefore, what to make of the child’s testimony?

  Had she really been in there, or not? The strangest thing about this was that, as far as he could tell, Violet—like Buckner and Garrick—was not lying. She fervently—and fearfully—believed in the truth of what she’d witnessed. It was her truth, perhaps, just as what had happened to Buckner and Garrick were truths to them…but was it the whole and actual truth?

  But what kind of truth was it, that might be both true and false at the same time?

  He felt he was venturing onto philosophical ground, worthy of intense thought and debate yet not very helpful to Rachel’s cause. He’d been planning on asking directions to Dr. Shields’s infirmary, in order to more thoroughly understand the magistrate’s illness, but somehow he did not approach the next person he saw, which was a man mending a wagon’s wheel, nor did he approach the next two men who were standing together smoking pipes and conversing. Perhaps he didn’t wish to answer questions concerning the magistrate’s health or the fate of the witch, but in any case he kept walking from Industry Street onto Truth Street and therefore in the direction of where he knew he’d been heading all along: the gaol.

  The door was still left unsecured. The sight of the pillory standing beside the gaol did nothing for his fond memories of this morning, yet he realized—and would be loath to admit it to anyone, especially Bidwell or the magistrate—that he missed Rachel’s presence. And why was that? He asked himself that question, as he stood just outside the door.