Take it from me, a much older kid, now, if you go at night, you might not come back, like Ricky. Or, even be careful in the daytime, because you might end up like those twins from Boston.
I did go back one time, to observe the slide from a distance, and it was still its frightening daytime self, where if you sit on the top, it looks like the slide never ends.
But I’ll never go down it on a piece of ragged cardboard now, because I’m too old. It’s just another thing I’ll regret the rest of my life. Maybe the point is, you should follow your own Ricky down the slide and far up into the night sky so you’ll have no regrets.
1950
invoked
Jeremy Megargee
I am a slave to the centuries. Everything here is painfully familiar, from the eroded tombstones to the rusting iron gate. It is within these unseen barriers that I must exist, the extent of my world and all hope of outside exploration. She is my master, my summoner, and the flesh that I am devoted to serve. It was she that pulled me up from the pit, a dripping thing, feathers of black tar, eyes beads of oil, and nothing but a gasping caw to match her words of delight.
I’m here because of her.
But she is long gone now. It is 1950, a time I never thought I’d witness, and I am alone in this garden of the dead. I languish on the limbs of a dying oak, and I wait for her to return. She promised me she would. She promised me in a time when rattling automobiles and loud radios did not exist. She swore she’d come back for me when Salem was young and full of beautiful black energy, but Salem is older now, and I remain utterly the same. A minor immortal. A small and deathless entity in a barely recognizable era of advancement.
I dine on worms and nest in empty branches while seasons change, and humans create new marvels. They have forgotten magic. They have spurned it in favor of technological baubles. I am nothing to them but living scenery, as unimportant as the dust and bones of my master. The hangings are long since over. The endless accusations and interrogations. It is all past, and past stays buried in Salem.
She stays buried, too. I speak lost incantations to draw her up, but it is beyond me. My tiny lungs cannot produce enough sound to weave the art of necromancy, and all that is left of my beloved is a corpse mingling down there in the dark with roots and soil. I sing to her, I call to her, I caw to her…but she never hears me.
I was there when John Hathorne sent her to the noose. I thought it a mercy that she would not burn, because her flesh would remain intact, and a body intact is a body capable of being resurrected. I vowed to avenge her, and she gave me her very best smile, even as she went to the gallows. I could do nothing but circle overhead, singing lullabies of lament, my pebble of a heart beating so terribly fast with growing fear. I longed to tear at that rope and grasp her in strong arms, to rescue her and ride off into the fading twilight. We would leave accursed Salem behind, and together we’d work wonders in whatever patch of dirt we’d come to call home.
But fate isn’t so kind. The universe offered me no human form as she stood up there on that ragged wooden platform with only spiteful faces looking up at her. Every set of eyes judged her, condemned her, and wished for her to rot.
She never had a chance.
I stayed with her to the last moment. I perched on top of the gallows and waited for unfair inevitability. It came with a snap that echoed through the entire square. Her emerald eyes rolled and then shined no more. The wind caught her hair, and it carried her soul off to the eternal forest where witch-women dance until time comes to an end.
I watched her die. I watched my everything spin and twirl in her death throes. She left me behind that day, and still I waited for her. I waited until the winter stars dominated the sky. I waited until her body grew cold. I waited until the townsfolk tore her down and tossed her rudely into the dirt. I’ve been waiting since September 22, 1692, and I’ll wait here forever if I must.
Hundreds of years gone. I’ve watched the world change from the limbs of this oak. People, houses, streets, and the very bedrock of Salem itself. Soon, other dead figures joined my beloved, and the tombstones were raised, the gates were erected, and this patch of land became The Burying Point.
Her grave is forgotten. It is barren and void, save for a patch of wild roses to mark it. I’ve watched those roses die with winter and live again with spring, and a part of me thinks that it’s her speaking to me, a little piece of her still here, just to keep me company. Just to remind me that I’m not totally alone.
I often glide down to land on her grave and peck at the roses, a silent gardener, tasked with keeping her resting place as beautiful as it can be. It is hard work, but I enjoy it. Even the dead deserve to be cared for.
Once tasked with weaving spells and aiding in invocations, I am now just a caretaker for lost souls. Time changes us all, and I am no exception to that rule. Salem grows, Salem evolves, and Salem endures with each passing decade. Salem is all I’ve ever known, and it is here that memories reign.
I am called Winchester Mischief.
I have considered The Burying Point my home for 258 years. If you look to the trees in the time of Halloween, chances are you’ll see me. I nest in the highest limbs, and I watch Salem die a thousand deaths and live a thousand lives.
I like it here. There is no place else worth visiting.
I am just a little, patchwork spirit inhabiting the body of a raven, but the magic that animates me is ageless, and my glossy black wings do not wither with the centuries.
I’ll fly forever. I’ll caw to her until she calls back. I’ll stay and I’ll protect and I’ll love, and I’ll hope that if she ever rises again, she’ll smile to see how Salem has changed.
I am Mary Corey’s familiar.
I am the last little fragment of her legacy, and I hope to make her proud.
2008 & 2017
A Bullet Hole in an Alley Wall on gedney Street
Patrick Cooper
Oh servant Cort stumbled till
the firing commenced.
This happened again & again,
and he lies there still.
-men’s room stall graffiti, Museum Place Mall
“You heard me! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Out, ma.”
“Sneaking down here, middle of the damn night, trying to steal my beer. I know exactly what you’re doing!”
“It’s only five, ma. It’s not even dark.”
“Don’t you contradict me!”
Macon Cort eased open his mom’s mini-fridge and stealthily handed the cans of beer to his friend Jordan, who stuffed them in his backpack. The light from the fridge backlit Nancy Cort, absorbed in her talk show as much as the armchair she sat in absorbed her large frame. She continued scolding her fourteen-year-old son through the commercials.
After a while it became like stream-of-consciousness. “Just like your bastard father! He was always contradicting me, always going out. No good, double barreled son of a bitch. And when I asked him when he’d be back, his answer was always ‘later’! Like he had some kind of disease only let him say ‘going out’ and ‘later’! See where that got him. The no-good, low-life, sack of…”
It went on and on. The boys stifled their laughter and filled up the backpack in silence. Jordan scrunched his nose up against the basement’s sad, damp aroma of cabbage, old sweat, and stale beer, soaked into the carpet.
“…and see where that got him! The lousy…” Her voice trailed off for a moment, lost in emotion, a happy memory that she quickly suppressed. She picked up again with, “Left you and me to fend for ourselves! I’m sure you think this is all a joke! Some kind of big comedy, me suffering like this. Well that laughter of yours will end soon enough. Believe me! Degenerate loser…”
“Going out, ma,” Macon said. He came up behind his mom and kissed her on the top of the head.
She winced, “Degenerate loser,” still smoking on her lips.
The river of rebuke flowed on as the boys darted up the stairs tw
o at a time, leaving Nancy and her television to spend Halloween night alone in her unaired basement den. Macon paused at the top of the stairs and looked down at his mom. She was young. He’d been born when she was still a child, and she resented him for that. That resentment turned venomous when Macon’s dad was killed. Macon could feel the hate. It was palpable. It radiated from her, like convenience store perfume.
Silently, in his head every night, Macon hoped there was still a trace of motherhood somewhere in Nancy’s bloated frame. He closed the basement door behind him.
Macon had no real memory of his dad. He could catch flashes, at times. Of heavy flannel and a smell of dead leaves. Wiry hair on the back of his father’s large hands. Macon was only five when Jeff Cort had been shot in October, 2008. The slug tore through Jeff’s gut and embedded itself in the cement. He’d had been walking to his car, leaving a Halloween party at a friend’s house. He was a block from his ride when the booze really started kicking him in the head. The ground tilted. The edges of his vision blurred. Bennies and bourbon danced in his brain. Reality lost all color, but he made it to the car.
But the key wouldn’t work because it wasn’t his car. He tried yanking the door open again and again. The owner of the vehicle, a grandmother, cowered behind the wheel for nearly a minute as Jeff cursed and pounded on the door, certain this was his vehicle. The grandmother, scared that this frothing, rabid man would eventually get the door open, took her pistol out of the glove compartment and put the barrel to the window. The bullet went through the glass and Jeff’s belly before finding purchase in the cement wall at the alley. When the cops found his body, his gold wedding ring was missing. He’d taken it off in case an opportunity for infidelity arose at the party, the cheating prick.
This is the story Nancy concocted. The one she told young Macon. Your dad died like a dog in the gutter.
Like most youth with a void to fill, Macon created his own mythology to fill the hole. Where his father should be, Macon built a titan of a man, a totem of a battered outlaw with eyes that glowed like the moon and a serpent’s tongue, sharp and quick.
There was one thing about his dad that Macon was certain of. He knew exactly where his dad had died: the exact square of sidewalk on Gedney Street.
The boys drank in Macon’s bedroom. They held pillows over the cans of beer as they opened them, to muffle the sound. Not that it mattered. Mrs. Cort wouldn’t get out of her armchair even if a nuclear bomb went off outside the front door of their narrow High Street home. Macon joked with Jordan about his mom’s stationary lifestyle, never mentioning how twice a week he had to give her sponge baths in the chair and rub lotion on her bedsores. When his friend came over, Macon hid the waste bucket in the hall closet.
They drank and laughed and watched skateboard crash videos online, huddled over Macon’s laptop on the bed. They’d been friends since the summer before fifth grade. Before he knew his name, Jordan knew Macon as the kid with no dad. Jordan thought that was weird, because everyone had a mom and dad, didn’t they? One day Jordan saw Macon wearing an Iron Maiden tee shirt, Jordan’s favorite band. The shirt was so big on Macon, it hung over his small frame like a dress. Jordan told him he loved Maiden.
“Thanks,” Macon had said, unsure. “It’s my dad’s shirt.”
But I thought he didn’t have a dad?
A couple of cans deep, Jordan asked, “When’re we going? It’s just about dark now.”
Macon looked out the window. The glass spider webbed in a crack where his mom had pushed him up against it one furious night when she could still walk up the stairs. He said, “Just let me finish my beer.”
Jordan frowned. “No one’s going to care that there’s a couple a kids hanging around outside a liquor store?”
“It’s Halloween. No one gives a shit.”
“And it’s still there? The bullet hole?”
Macon nodded.
Jordan knew the bullet hole was still there. His friend talked about it all the time. Jordan said, “And what makes you think…How come we’re going now? What’s different about tonight?”
“It’s Halloween,” Macon replied, “I read about it in a book. Something about the land of the dead. The barrier between the living and the dead…”
“The barrier?”
“Between the living and the dead. It’s real thin on Halloween. The dead can cross over easiest tonight. I don’t know why. Some Celtic thing.”
“The Celtics?”
“Druids, or something. I read about it in a book. The dead can cross over tonight, is what the book said. Plus, we’re in Salem. Dead people have their own special places here. Places they haunt. More than in other cities. Isn’t that what the tour guides downtown say?”
Jordan shuddered. Macon sipped his beer in silence and stared at the spider web crack in his window, like there was a solution caught there, waiting to have its blood sucked out.
* * *
It was a bitter October. The evening wind was chilled by the North River. It blew into Anne’s face as she stepped off the train from Lynn. She gasped, then laughed at her own reaction. Her brother Marty stepped off behind her, hustling to stay close in the large crowd. He stopped to pull his collar up against the wind, and was shoved from behind. A conductor yelled for him to keep moving. Marty turned and looked the hard, old man in the eyes and said he was sorry. He turned back and Anne was gone. Lost in a sea of rubber masks, wigs, and face paint.
Marty panicked. He pictured Anne in the clutches of a drunken frat boy, clubbed over the head and tossed over his shoulders, caveman style. He moved forward with the crowd exiting the train. Cops were peppered throughout the mass of hundreds and hundreds, scanning the crowd for gang members come to town to raise hell. He was about to approach one and ask for help when he heard, “Marty!”
Anne was standing on top of a bench, her silver scarf flapped in the breeze. The scarf was the essential accessory for her costume. Aside from the scarf, she wore silver booty shorts and a tight NASA shirt. Her costume, she had explained sincerely to Marty, was an astronaut.
Marty made his way to the bench. Anne stepped down and hooked her arm around his. Together, they joined the pilgrimage to downtown Salem.
It was Marty’s first night out since the incident two months ago, the end of summer bonfire and his blackout. The last thing Marty could remember of that night, he reached for a branch to throw on the fire. Then his vision filled with horrible images of a homeless man beaten to death with that very branch. It was so graphic, the curtain of violence so intense, Marty felt every strike with the heavy wood.
A group of Cub Scouts found him the next morning on Nahant Bay. There was blood on his clothes, but no visible wounds. Witnesses at the bonfire claimed Marty tried to bite someone, like an animal, before running toward the ocean. His face was contorted into a “terrible frown,” one bystander said.
He’d undergone full physical and psychological exams and was deemed perfectly stable, perfectly healthy. One doctor chalked the episode up to bad shellfish. Marty’s dad said he was too sensitive—like your mother. He’d been called that his whole life. Too sensitive. They were right, Marty knew. More right than they could possibly know. He wasn’t sensitive like his mother, though. He was sensitive to people and places that weren’t there anymore, and the violence that marked the land.
That’s why Marty had protested coming to Salem on Halloween night. Every crack of the sidewalk had a story to tell, more so than other places.
He’d been there once before, for the holiday, and described it to his sister as a “cobblestone shit show in a distillery.” But Anne was still eager to come. One of her high school friends, one that she wouldn’t mind being more than friends with, was throwing a party. Across town, on Jefferson Street, by the hospital, a 25-minute walk from the depot according to Google Maps. Anne and Marty’s parents wouldn’t let her go unless Marty played chaperone. They paid him $50.
Giddy, Anne dragged her older brother through the crowd. Walking up t
he depot stairs to Washington Street, Marty locked eyes with a burly man dressed as the Joker. He was smacking his lips, hunched over, doing his best Heath Ledger. People are still dressing like him? Marty thought to himself. The Joker glared at him.
* * *
The bullet hole was at the end of the alley between Quality Liquors and North Shore Driving School, on Gedney Street, a large caliber reminder of death in a city that banked its tourist-draw on reminders of death. Two wooden pallets leaned against one wall and dead leaves scourged the ground at the end of the alley. One dim bulb above the side door of the driving school provided the only light.
Over the years, Macon had developed his own story surrounding his father’s death. He added to it a bit more every day when he came to worship at the bullet hole. This alley was his church.
“This is where they cornered him,” Macon said, pointing at the bullet hole. “The cops, a whole squadron of them, right here!”
Jordan mouthed ‘Whoa’. Macon had talked about the bullet hole so much over the years, that seeing it in person was thrilling, like seeing your favorite athlete up close. Jordan’s heart pounded with genuine excitement. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder to steady himself and said, “A part of me thought you were full ‘a shit all these years.”
Macon smiled, proud. “Jordan, meet my dad. Never had there been, nor would there ever be a more notorious outlaw on the North Shore.” He went into his well-rehearsed routine, which Jordan could almost recite along with him. He talked with his hands, a lot. “He’d roll into different towns, like a fog, taking whatever he wanted: money out of banks, food out of refrigerators, beer out of the tap. Sleeping with married women. That’s how come ma hates him so much. Oh, he was a dog, all right. A hound from hell! No one dared try to stop him. Not the law. Not anybody. Seven feet tall with blue eyes that could shoot hellfire one minute and make you fall in love the next.”
One Night in Salem Page 24
