by Heath, Jack
He remembered the idea he'd discussed with Amy before Sarah was abducted, going to England to try and find Jessica Lodge, and then he began to wonder whether his dream was somehow related to Sarah's current location? Was it possible she had been spirited out of the country? Certainly if his suspicions regarding Jessica Lodge were accurate and if Jessica was the rumored Inquisitor of the Salem Coven, then she might have had Sarah abducted and flown to England, to some place where the Coven still operated in protected secrecy. Jessica certainly had the financial means to have pulled it off; after all she had her own jet.
He made a mental note to check with the FAA to see if Jessica Lodge's jet had flown back into the US at any time in the past few days and if it had departed again, and if it had, where its flight plan said it was heading.
He let his eyes wander along with his thoughts as he ran through the streets of Salem, past the familiar, ancient houses, so many of which dated back to the 1700s. The town, which so often seemed overly full of tourists, especially during the two months preceding Halloween, now appeared blessedly empty, since Halloween had just been a week earlier. He passed Wicca Wonders, the occult shop that had been run by Abigail Putnam, the woman who had been the head of Salem Coven and who had supposedly reported to the rumored Inquisitor.
At this point it seemed so impossible that it was almost like recalling a strange dream to think back to the night he killed Abigail along with the other leaders of the Coven. He still couldn't begin to explain exactly what triggered it when some extreme combination of anger and fear and God only knew what else had allowed him to absorb the spirit of Rebecca Nurse and the spirit of a young woman named Melissa Blake. Also, attached to Melissa Black had been a chain of other spirits, all of whom had been sacrificed by the Coven, and somehow the combined force of all those spirits had joined with his own and coalesced into some kind of occult power. And he had used that power to destroy those Coven leaders.
Once the killing was over, the power had rushed out of his body as quickly as it had come. It left him dazed and utterly exhausted and, just like right now, wondering whether any of what he thought had just happened had really happened. Only the ravaged and torn bodies of the dead Coven leaders convinced him that it had been absolutely real.
John closed his eyes and picked up his speed as recalled how he had taken Captain Card down into the Coven's catacombs to show him the bodies, at the time never suspecting that Card was also an imposter, who himself must have been part of the Coven. Only if Card was a member of the Coven, why had he told John there was one more member of the Coven who had not been in the catacombs that night? Card had called that person the Inquisitor, the most powerful member, one who made sure the other members of the Coven remained true to their sworn purpose.
What motive could a member of the Coven have for leading him deeper to the truth? He had wondered more than once if it was even true, but in his guts he had the strong sense it was. Did the Coven actually want him to go to England to look for Jessica Lodge? Was there something about Salem itself, perhaps the fact John's ancestors were buried here and their physical proximity was what had allowed him to tap into that extraordinary spiritual power? Perhaps the Coven realized that in England, so far from those ancestral graves, he would be powerless and easy to kill.
He shook his head in confusion and picked up his pace even more. He could feel his heart beating hard, his lungs bellowing the cold air in and blowing it out, his legs pumping, burning out at least for the moment, the effects of his exhaustion. There simply had to have been a purpose behind Card's revelation, he told himself, and he needed to figure out what it was. Also, after Card had taken such pains to mislead him into thinking he was a policeman, why had Card suddenly stopped returning John's phone calls and thereby abandoned his carefully crafted charade? It would have been so easy to have kept John in the dark. What was the point to letting him learn he'd been duped?
Was there something about restarting the paper that could have triggered Card's disappearance? Was restarting the paper the thing that had triggered Sarah's abduction? He turned a corner and ran hard down another long familiar street. He saw the houses and businesses and restaurants without really seeing anything. He could feel his brain corkscrewing into questions, getting further and further into a web of confusion where there were absolutely no answers. He wanted to stop, pull out his hair, and scream.
But then he did stop. Dead. Right in the middle of the street, and a car behind him honked its horn and swerved. John ignored the horn and stared straight ahead at the thing that had caused him to make such an abrupt halt.
It was a sign for the entrance into the compound where the House of the Seven Gables was located. He couldn't see the house from here, but its shape was in his mind. How many times had he seen it looming dark and austere and spooky because of its sharp angles and the steep gables for which it was named? As he stared at the sign, his mind started to race in a new direction and he began making connections.
The House of the Seven Gables wasn't the house from his dreams, and it wasn't the house in the drawing he'd found that morning in the library, but it was so similar. Just like the many other historic houses and building in Salem, he'd seen the House of the Seven Gables so many times over so many years that he had taken it for granted, but now in his mind he was seeing it, really seeing it for the first time in a long time.
He remembered the journal he had found on a previous visit to the Phillips Library when he had gone with Rich Harvey. Written by his ancestor, Captain John Bancroft Andrews, the journal had talked about Captain Andrews's friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. This in turn reminded John of another connection that hadn't seemed vitally important. Hawthorne's cousin had built the House of the Seven Gables, and that cousin's name had been Captain John Turner, the same man who, John surmised, had married a woman named Elizabeth Turner, as in Asthoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner. Was it the same Elizabeth Turner as the woman in the letters? What were the odds in a small community like Salem there could have been two Elizabeth Turners?
Earlier that day he'd skipped past his great-great-grandfather's journal because he'd read it on the other occasion he'd visited the library, but now he was thinking those boxes of recently discovered papers he had gone through just that morning at the Phillips had included some of Hawthorne's secret writing done at the end of his life. Hawthorne had wanted those truths to be shared, but he had also intended those writings be found only after his death when his family could no longer be harmed as an act of vengeance.
And hadn't those recently found boxes of old letters and journals been taken from the House of the Seven Gables? The house was a tourist magnet, John thought. Where in that structure, which had been crawled through by so many hundreds of thousands of visitors, could those documents have been hidden for all those years? And if those letters and journals had just been discovered recently, what else remained to be discovered? And hadn't Hawthorne, just like Andrews himself, been descended from some of the people who had been part of the original Salem Coven.
After all, Hawthorne's family name had originally been Hathorne. John Hathorne had been one of the original judges in the witchcraft trials and one of the original Salem Coven members. Deeply shamed by his ancestor's involvement in those despicable trials, Nathaniel Hawthorne had changed his name to disguise his relationship. John Andrews's own family bore the same stain because on his mother's side he was descended from the Putnams. Edward Putnam had been deeply implicated in the witchcraft trials and a member of the original Salem Coven, and yet another of his ancestors, Ann Putnam, had been one of Rebecca Nurse's original accusers.
John suspected that one of the reasons Rebecca Nurse had picked him and chosen to appear to him was that he bore the blood of the Putnams in his veins, in addition to the blood of Captain John Bancroft Andrews. John found the whole line of inquiry uncomfortable, but he could not help but wonder whether his Putnam blood was what had made it possible for him to open the secret doors that led
to the Coven's lair beneath the streets and cemeteries of Salem. Did his Putnam blood also carry some deeper stain, one that in the wrong circumstances might make him susceptible to being seduced by the Coven's dark call? Did he share that trait in some dark hidden recess of his being? He had wondered about that more than a few times in the past two weeks, but each time the question arose he'd tried to shove it down into the back of his mind, as if keeping it unasked would mean it couldn't be true.
As John continued to stare at the entrance to the House of the Seven Gables compound, he could feel some force pulling at him that seemed as powerful and impossible to resist as gravity. He needed to go into the compound. He needed to see the house up close, maybe even go inside, but he had no idea what he hoped to accomplish if he did. The House of the Seven Gables was a tourist mecca. There was public access to most parts of the house, and only a few other parts of the house were closed off. Even the parts that were closed to the public would have been searched tirelessly over and over through the years. So the question surfaced again, where would those recently discovered documents have come from?
Giving into his growing compulsion, he walked across the street and headed into the compound. The sign said that the House of the Seven Gables opened at ten a.m. for tours, and when he checked his watch, he saw that it was just a few minutes past and that two busses had already pulled in, one full of school children and the other full of retirees. Both busses were in the parking lot disgorging their passengers. The children whooped and tried to run around while teachers tried to corral them. The old people moved much more slowly.
John went into the front building, bought a ticket for a guided tour, and watched as the teachers bought tickets for the kids and the bus driver bought tickets for the retirees. He waited around for several minutes, trying to mask his impatience, until a tour guide finally came out and addressed the group. The first thing the tour guide did was to apologize for the overly large size of the day's first tour, saying that two of the other guides who were usually there at that time had both called in sick.
After a quick history lesson, the guide cautioned the group not to touch anything in the house or go beyond the ropes the tour set out. The school children jostled and shoved their way into the lead, while the retirees strung out behind. John went last, trailing the stragglers of the older group and found himself far behind the tour guide from the very beginning.
Ahead of him the slowest of the oldsters hobbled on walkers and moved like snails through the door of the House of the Seven Gables, and as they did John let himself drop even farther behind. His eyes carefully roamed each room as he walked inside the house, seeing the period furnishings, the low ceilings, the large fireplaces, the floors grooved from hundreds of years of foot traffic. He took in all of it, but looked hard for other, less obvious things.
As he lagged behind the rest of the tour through the first floor, he saw nothing that made his pulse kick. There were several sitting rooms, a dining room, and a good-sized kitchen with a large hearth with iron kettles on iron hangers and a bread oven built into the side.
On the far side of the kitchen, a decorative rope barrier stood in front of a small door set into the wall. John waited for a time, but a group of five or six of the retirees remained in the kitchen, fascinated by the cooking utensils and the baking oven.
He finally moved out of the kitchen and caught another group of retirees as they were heading up the stairs to the second floor. They went up slowly and milled around, going through the rooms. John had the same sense of disappointment when he got up there as he'd had on the first floor, and he went through the bedrooms quickly, seeing nothing of interest.
By the time he came back downstairs, the school kids were all back in the dining room where the tour guide was showing them the famous hidden staircase, made immortal in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The House of the Seven Gables. The kids were taking turns going up and coming back down in groups of five, and many of the retirees were showing the same interest in the secret staircase as the children.
Slowly, the rest of the stragglers made their way into the dining room as people went up the secret staircase that wound around the chimney to a small room in the attic and then came back down. Realizing this was probably his only chance, John moved out of the dining room and back into the kitchen, glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one else had come after him, and then he went over to the guard rope and tried the latch on the door that stood behind it.
To his delight, the latch clicked softly, and the door opened. John ducked under the rope, went quickly through the door, and quietly shut it behind. Finding himself in complete darkness, he reached into his pocket for his cell phone, went to the flashlight app, and flicked it on. He played the light around and saw that he was standing on a narrow landing and a steep set of stairs led down to what looked like a large cellar.
The air here was musty and damp, smelling of great age and mildew, as if the cellar door was seldom opened. The steps were nearly as steep as the rungs of a ladder, and John descended carefully, keeping one hand against the side of the wall for balance. At the bottom he shined his small light into the darkness, seeing that the space was low and cavernous and largely empty, broken only by brick columns that no doubt helped bear the weight of the beams above and several huge brick supports that helped bear the weight of the fireplaces and chimneys overhead.
Above his head John could hear the footsteps clomping around on the wooden floorboards, and he realized the tour was starting to go outside the house. Wishing he had a candle or larger flashlight, he started moving around the cellar, trying to see whether there could be anything here that might shed more light on all his questions. For some reason the sensation he'd first experienced outside, the feeling as if something was pulling him into the house, had become even stronger since he'd come into the cellar.
Shining the light on the dirt floor, John could see where the dirt seemed to have been well trodden in a sort of line, as if over the years many people had come in the same direction across the cellar floor and made a sort of flat area in the otherwise lumpy dirt. The dirt path went from the bottom of the steps toward the far end of the cellar, and not having any better idea, John started to follow it to where it ended in a massive brick support for the line of fireplaces and chimneys that ran up the far side of the house.
He stopped at the brick support and shined his light around. The cell phone was becoming hot to the touch, and he knew he couldn't keep the light on too much longer. He looked up and down the support, but he could see no reason for the path to end right here. The phone got hotter and hotter in his hand, and he was about to give up and head back when something occurred to him.
He patted his pockets, but because he was dressed in his running clothes and not street clothes, he did not have his pocketknife in his pocket as he usually would. Casting his eyes around the brick support one more time, he looked for some other instrument he could use, and after a second his gaze fastened on something that glinted, reflecting the light from his beam. He reached for the thing, and his fingers closed around a thin nail that was resting on a line of bricks. He took the nail, and without giving any more than a momentary thought to the risk of tetanus, he jabbed the tip of the nail into the first finger of his left hand.
Immediately a thick dot of blood welled to the surface, and then he looked around for the right place to put it. Spotting a place where the bricks appeared cleaner, as if people had inadvertently wiped up against them and cleaned off the dust of centuries that clung to the other bricks, he ran his other hand up along the higher rows of bricks until he felt it, something smooth and cool like a very shallow and very small bowl.
Placing the first finger of his left hand into the indentation, he felt the surface soften instantly, as if the metal or whatever he was touching had become porous and his blood was being absorbed into whatever was there. A second later he heard a thunk as if some heavy object had shifted, and then part of the brick support swung out
ward as if on perfectly smooth hinges to reveal another staircase.
The cell phone was nearly burning the fingers of his right hand now, but he ignored the pain and started climbing, taking care to be as silent as possible. Just like the other secret staircase, this one was very narrow and very steep, running around what must have been the fireplace chimney on the far end of the house. John went up and up, high enough that he knew he had to be coming up to the third floor of the house, and he finally spotted a narrow landing with a doorway ahead of him.
As he came to the doorway he noticed something else, a heavy and terrible smell, as if some creature much larger than a mouse, maybe a cat or possum or even a raccoon, had somehow gotten inside the walls and died. He listened for a few seconds, his mind fighting against the image that was trying to form, trying to reject the possibility that the smell could be coming from something that had once been human. Finally, with a trembling hand he lifted the latch and pulled the door open. Light flooded into the area where he was standing.
The smell really hit him. It was horrible, so disgusting and powerful it nearly drove him to his knees. He breathed through his mouth and swallowed hard several times until he was somewhat confident he wouldn't vomit. The stench was so overwhelming his mind tried to grasp how it was possible that he hadn't smelled it before now? How could the rest of the house not reek? The question left his mind as quickly as it had come because in the next second his eyes focused on the interior of the room, and he saw the chair and the body tied to it.
