Smith cursed under his breath, regarded with a strange, untethered malice that small drinks cupboard, and stomped across the room to pour himself a slug of brown liquor from a crystal decanter. He knew not what it was, but it burned and that was good enough. He was a man who should burn for all the trouble he had caused.
Oh, that he had never come upon that Chinaman and his diabolic timepiece!
Another slug of firewater made his head spin anew, and he set the bottle aside before he could lose himself in it. His good lady wife, God rest her soul, had done cured him of his wicked ways with the drink, and now was not the time to go back on her lessons.
Smith girded his will and returned to the writing desk, where the other note lay, unread.
His shock at the communication from Cady did not inure him against curiosity as regards this second missive. He picked it up by a corner. This letter was typewritten in English.
* * *
My dear Mr. Smith,
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Professor Ludwig Koffler, and I represent the interests of Miss Cadence McCall.
I am sure you will understand, given the unconventional nature of those interests, if I merely allude to them in this letter.
I am instructed by Miss McCall, at some remove as you will appreciate, to make contact with you at your earliest convenience, so that I might apprise you of her situation and what might be done to repair it.
I can assure you that repair is possible and you are possessed of the means to effect such.
We must meet as soon as you have read this. There is no time, which, I am sure you will agree, is a grim irony indeed.
I can be reached via my offices at the Colonial Historical Society here in Berlin.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Ludwig Koffler
* * *
Smith’s thoughts were ablaze with the heat of so much agitation and distress, that for a few minutes he could do nothing but stalk back and forth across his room. Was that first letter really Cady? It surely sounded like her on the page. He could hear the sweet sound of her voice inside his head when he read the unexpected letter. But could it be a trap?
Of course.
He had set and sprung enough of them himself over the years to recognize the possibility.
But who, other than the mysterious powers seeking return of the watch, would do such a thing? And why? The Watchmaker’s Apprentices—for the creator of the timepieces must surely employ those men and women who sought the devices with such merciless industry—they had previously come at him directly. Why a preference for subterfuge now?
It was a powerfully vexing mystery, and Smith did not feel himself in the least ways equipped to solve it by sitting quietly in this gilded cage. He folded both letters back into the envelope and stowed it safely in his pocket. He felt keenly the lack of any firearm with which he might defend himself, but even more keenly the folly of returning to the public thoroughfares with a bloodstained Bowie knife at his side. His jacket had previously hidden the knife, but now it stood out in plain view.
Reluctantly he removed the weapon and its scabbard. He took a long minute to clean the blade properly but he did not strap the knife back on.
There might be something in among all the amazing rig and tackle that Cady had stuffed into his possibles bag, but he did not have time to sit around pondering the uses of so many unknowable doodads. He did have time to change his shirt for one less stained by the insides of some Indian savage, and so he did just that. And having thus made himself presentable, he was ready to saddle up and ride out.
10
Gruel was served in wooden bowls at sunrise. One of the sheriff’s deputies arrived with a bucket from which he spooned out a thin measure of grey, watery porridge. The female prisoners crowded the bars of their cages, scrabbling and begging for just a little extra. Dressed again, but in clothes that were now spectacularly filthy, Cady took one look at the slop in her bowl, shook her head, and gave her portion to Mary.
“You need it more than I do.”
The old woman hesitated, but not for long. She fell on the extra ration like a pitbull on a sirloin. For a few minutes the only sound was the clocking of wooden spoons on wooden bowls as the prisoners attempted to scoop out every morsel of gruel. Cady’s stomach was rumbling. The gruel looked truly horrible, however, and she preferred to take her chances with hunger. She couldn’t afford to go down with food poisoning. Thinking of the freeze-dried rations in her backpack—chicken biryani, beef stroganoff, mushroom risotto—caused saliva to shoot into her mouth.
Cady swallowed her own spit and grimaced. The grumbling complaint of her empty stomach turned into a full-throated grizzly bear growl the longer she watched Mary eating. She pushed herself up off the ground and walked up and down the length of their small cell to work out the knots and kinks in her muscles. She tried to ignore the unsettling noise of her cellmate licking at the last of the slops, and the grunting, almost animal sounds of pleasure from the women in the other cell as they snuffled at their own bowls like half-starved dogs.
How long before she was reduced to the same state?
She tried to distract herself with a bigger problem. Where the hell was Smith and what was he doing?
Hopefully busting his ass to get back to me!
They’d jumped from Seattle to Salem using ‘his’ watch, the one he’d taken from a dying Chinese man back in eighteen-seventy-something-or-other. Cady was having trouble keeping it all straight in her head, which is why she’d gone to the effort, the frankly fucking torturous effort, of sitting with Smith for nearly two days in that hotel room, recreating his timeline and writing it down.
She stopped pacing and sighed heavily, annoyed with herself.
She should have memorized the timeline, instead of just writing it down.
And anyway, that list of destinations was a result of jumping with Smith’s original watch.
He’d disappeared yesterday while holding the timepiece they’d taken from Chumley, the dead Apprentice.
There was no way of knowing where it had dropped him. He might even have landed on the Death Star at the center of all of these branching timelines and alternate realities. The more she thought about it, the less certain she could be of anything. Cady’s heart started to race and she recognized the other warning signs of an anxiety attack creeping up on her: dizziness, nausea, a shortness of breath. With an effort of will, she gave up the strangely satisfying anguish of worrying about shit she couldn’t change and focused on the shit she could.
“Mary,” she said, returning to sit by the old woman, who had finished grubbing out the second wooden bowl and was leaning back against a wall with an almost serene expression on her face. She opened her eyes and looked at Cady, as though surprised to find her still there.
“Thank you,” she croaked. “I have been hungry for the longest time.”
“That’s cool,” Cady said. Rather than trying to sound like an extra in some shitty high school Shakespeare production, she decided to simply slow down and say each word as clearly as possible. They all spoke English, of a sort. They could figure it out.
“Listen, Mary, I’m not from around here. Smith, my… husband and I, we are travelers. Merchants.”
The old woman nodded sagely. “My husband and I also carried on trade. And it is a truth to be roundly observed that you do not hail from Massachusetts, Goody Smith. Your attire clearly marks you at a glance as an outlander. Oh, but when you give yourself to speak aloud, then you are confirmed a strange one indeed.”
“Thanks. I think.”
Mary shrugged. “I proffer the observation, not a compliment.”
“At the moment, I’ll take my compliments where I can find them,” Cady said.
That seemed to amuse her companion, who replied, “The world is niggardly enough with fair consideration for a woman’s virtues that we must all on occasion look for them in the reflecting pool.”
Cady nodded, “Testify, sister.”
She cocked an ear, listening for any sound that might give away the early presence of the sheriff or a deputy, but she heard nothing. Butt shuffling an inch or two closer to Mary, lowering her voice, Cady took her chances.
“Mary, they’re going to kill you.”
“I know that. My husband works to secure my release, but here I sit, many months after I was falsely accused.”
“Yes! Exactly! You’re innocent. You’re not a witch. My guess is, you just got on somebody’s bad side. Those other women too.”
She lifted her chin to indicate the occupants of the other holding cell. They were sitting quietly, their eyes closed. One of them appeared to be praying. Mary Bradbury said nothing.
“We need to get out of here,” Cady said. “Not just out of this prison, but out of Salem, too. These witch trials. They’re wrong. They are a sort of madness.”
Mary regarded her warily.
“You know of our tribulations then, traveler?”
“Word gets around. How many have they killed so far?”
“Eleven hanged,” Mary replied without pausing to think.
“I saw a man being crushed by rocks when we arrived here,” Cady said. “They weren’t hanging him.”
“Ah, Giles Corey,” the old woman said, mostly to herself. “I did hear they might press the old goat for his silence and give him thus to bleat.”
“So, a dozen killed so far, and more of you waiting your turn.”
Mary said nothing.
Improvising, Cady went on in a low, urgent voice, “It would not be God’s will that you died at the end of a rope for a sin you did not commit. That would be a terrible mistake, one made by men. And you have committed no sin, have you, Mary?”
She gave Cady the smallest shake of her head. Long wisps of grey hair floated about her deeply lined face.
“Then it is for God to judge you, not men.”
“It is men who hold us captive,” Mary said quietly.
“I can take care of that,” Cady assured her, casting a quick glance over to the other cell. “But I need my backpack… my luggage,” she went on when she saw the slight confusion on Mary’s face. “And I need you to tell me as much as you can about the village, the port, and the road to Boston.”
She learned that they were not being held in the town’s jailhouse. So many had been accused and arrested that the small prison block was already full to overflowing. Instead, like many others, they were being held in the local tavern. Some of the other prisoners were lucky enough to be locked into rooms upstairs, some of them right next door to magistrates sitting on their trials. Others had been sent on to Boston; so many in fact that Mary said the lieutenant governor had approved ‘significant monies’ to increase the number who could be held there.
That didn’t sound good.
And it was double plus ungood that Mary Bradbury seemed to have been a bit of a power player among the real housewives of Massachusetts before ending up here in the dungeon. She wasn’t the only one, either. Cady knew nothing of the Salem witch trials beyond the vague understanding, taken in by cultural osmosis, that they were fucked. Mary explained that over a hundred people had been accused and imprisoned, and the madness was spreading to the rest of the colony. The wives of important serving officers, and even of the acting governor himself, had been accused.
They had to get out of Salem.
Cady was hoping that if they could escape this shitpot version of Silent Hill, they, or at least she, might be able to hide out in the much bigger colonial capital until Smith returned.
If Smith returns…
She quickly shut that shit down. He would be back and she would be ready.
They weren’t even in Salem, Mary told her, but rather Salem Farms, or Salem Village. The old woman seemed to use the terms interchangeably. Cady’s mental map of the east coast vagued out once you got more than a couple of streets away from the start-up ghetto around Union Square and the Flatiron in New York. She’d easily lose a bar bet trying to drop a pin on uptime Salem without the help of Google or Apple Maps, but she knew where Boston was in relation to Manhattan, and Mary confirmed that the Tea Party city was half a day’s ride south from Salem, or a slightly longer haul in a coastal trader, if they could get to the waterfront in Salem proper. Any number of rogues and pirates would give them passage for coin and to damn the eyes of the colonial authorities.
“Sounds like a wretched hive of scum and villainy,” Cady said. “I like it. Let’s go with that.”
“But how, Cadence? How can we effect our liberty? If we could escape these cages, my husband would surely see us safely away.”
“I have money. Weapons too, and some tools that’d come in handy right about now. But they’re all in my bag, which I lost when they grabbed me and threw me in here. This is important, Mary. Do you have any idea where they might take something like that?”
“Upon the sheriff lies the duty of securing the property of the accused,” Mary said. “If anyone were to have your baggage, it would be Corwin.”
“And where would he keep it?”
“At the jail, of course.”
“So we need to break out of this jail and into the real one. Okay. Fine. I’m up for that.”
Another worry was gnawing away at her, though, one that she could not talk about with Mary. If the Apprentices had traced her here, they would not let her bag of goodies remain in circulation for long. If that magistrate was one of them, no way would he let these slack-jawed yokels keep hold of such a sweet haul of uptime swag. It’d be worse than teaching Confederates how to build an AK-47. Their whole fucking Time Nazi mission statement probably boiled down to ‘stop that shit happening, yesterday’.
Cady was trying to synthesize everything Mary had told her, the recent history of the village and the madness of the witch trials, a frontier war which had been raging for seven or eight years, the layout of the sandbox they were playing in, when she heard the heavy cellar door squealing open again. She laid one hand on Mary’s arm to quiet her, but the old woman needed no encouragement to caution in the presence of their captors. Boots crunched on flagstones, and the women in the other cell flinched back into the shadows. The sun had risen outside, and the noise of village life reached them, even if it was muted by thick stone walls. Sheriff Corwin led three deputies, all of them carrying wooden staves and heavy chains. Not for the first time was Cady struck by the bullshit incongruity of it all.
If they actually were a coven of bad ass witches down here, these assholes would’ve been zapped into smoking chunks of lunchmeat. But she already knew better than to point that out. They were unlikely to take it in the spirit intended.
“Stand back,” Corwin ordered. He whacked at the bars of their cell with his heavy club. One of his deputies, who looked the sort of moron to have invented the sport of cow tipping, keyed open the heavy iron padlock. Mary, who’d obviously been through this before, was already standing with her hands presented for the manacles.
Cady forcefully resisted the urge to start macing the motherfuckers.
This wasn’t the time.
Instead she meekly presented herself to be chained in the same fashion as Mary Bradbury. The shackles came on heavy and they pinched at the skin of her wrists. She couldn’t help yelping in pain.
“Shut up, witch,” Corwin said.
“Careful, Sheriff,” she said. “I might decide to turn you into a newt.”
The color drained out of Corwin’s ruddy, apple-cheeked face.
“I will see you hang first,” he promised, but his voice was unsteady and the threat sounded hollow.
Cady felt pleased with herself for the first time since arriving.
She would soon understand just how grave a mistake that was.
11
The office of the US Marshal was a venerable institution, tracing its origin to the very first Congress, and the Judiciary Act signed by George Washington himself. The first marshals were often veterans who had proven their bravery, wiles, and to be
honest, their good luck, in the War of Independence. They were officers of the court and a good deal of their time was given over to executing warrants. Oftentimes the subjects of those warrants were not much interested in being served and the marshals soon accumulated vast experience of tracking down men and women who were violently disinclined to be tracked. There weren’t much magic to it in Smith’s experience. Often as not it meant asking somebody who might know where to find these worthless varmints.
“Y’all know where’n I might find the Colonial Historical Society of Berlin,” he asked his old chum on the front desk. “I need to parley with their Professor Ludwig Koffler.”
After a moment consulting a very large book closely printed with dense columns of names and numbers, the clerk wrote out an address and a ‘phone number’.
“I heard of these phones,” Smith said. “But I ain’t seen none hereabouts.”
He was thinking of the small oblong of magically glowing glass wherein Ms Cady’s nose could be found buried most hours of the day and night. No such artifacts existed in Berlin in the summer of 1934.
Well, none save for those in his bag upstairs, of course.
The clerk smiled indulgently and pointed to a small table near a potted fern.
“I can make the connection to the professor’s rooms and you can take it on that phone over there,” he said.
Smith somewhat dubiously followed the man’s pointed finger, fetching up at the small table which was mostly occupied by a single artifact; a dark object of some smooth molded material. It began to ring. He looked back uncertainly at the desk clerk, who gestured with his hand for Smith to pick something up and slowly punch himself in the noggin. At least that’s what he seemed to mean.
The ‘phone’, so very different from Ms Cady’s beloved little fancy, appeared constructed in parts, and examining the thing there was an obvious piece of the whole which he might lift away and hold to the side of his face in the way he had observed both Cady and her friend Ms Georgia do.
The Golden Minute Page 10
