The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  The dirt floor of the cave sloped downward toward a narrow cleft.

  Blandine pressed herself against the wall. Her thoughts were clearing by the minute. The cleft led into another chamber. She had to bend over and crawl on her hands and knees again in order to slip through the cramped passage.

  A large space. In the weak yellow glow of a single flickering taper, Blandine saw Sabine, totally naked, crouched upon a large flat rock. A carpet of dark-green moss lay atop the stone. The child had the witika sign drawn in ash across her chest. In the muted light, Blandine caught a heartrending, hope-abandoned look on the Bean’s face.

  Blandine rose from the passageway and moved forward, touching the rough rocks, approaching the girl. “Hush, little one,” she said, unconsciously mimicking the woman’s voice she had just heard. “It’s all right.”

  She reached the Bean and gathered her into her arms.

  A movement behind her.

  The witika demon, its shadow huge on the cave wall.

  The deerskin face glared down at her, the blood scabs shining in the candlelight.

  From behind the deerskin mask came the cloying woman’s voice. “Good boy. Good little Martyn.”

  The monster loomed tall, spreading out its arms, reaching for Blandine and the Bean.

  In one hand it held a pistol.

  As though events were happening with agonizing slowness, Blandine saw the thumb pulling back the hammer, heard the click as the pin cocked, witnessed the finger tighten on the trigger.

  “Martyn!” Blandine shouted, lashing out with her feet at the candle on the crude stone altar.

  Lights out.

  Sabine tight in her arms, she rolled sideways. The gun exploded, echoing in the closed rock chamber of the cave.

  The muzzle flash strobed the darkness, illuminating the witika apparition as in a dream. Afterward, the cave chamber returned to sudden pitch-black darkness, hung with a gunpowder stink.

  Sabine clung to her. Deafened, blinded, Blandine scrabbled forward, seeking the way out, the low passageway cleaved into the rock. Nothing. A dirty stone wall.

  Behind them, the demon came on. Blandine could smell him, foul and close. He was right behind her.

  Her hand groped forward and found the cleft. She pushed Sabine into it. “Run, now,” she said. “Run and don’t stop.”

  Little Sabine wouldn’t leave.

  “Go, go,” Blandine said, and pushed the child away from her again.

  A hand seized Blandine’s ankle, pulling her backward across the rough floor, into the yawning gulf of the inner chamber.

  Drummond, Antony and Jan arrived among the rocky promontories near the Place of Stones, having blown out their horses on the frantic trip up the island. They found themselves at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.

  Kitane was with them. They had picked him up in Little Angola, the Lenape trapper leaping easily up behind Antony on the borrowed bay mare.

  “It’s up there,” Jan told Drummond, recognizing the gray rock faces where Lightning had led him before.

  The four of them hitched the mounts and climbed to a slot in the crags where they could see the flat, stone-littered clearing and the cave opening beyond it.

  “Where are they?” Antony said.

  A terrifying vision suddenly presented itself: Sabine, naked, running as fast as her small legs could pump, tearing out from inside the cave and crossing the Place of Stones in a fear-blinded dash.

  Drummond moved forward and swept the girl up in his arms. The Bean struggled against him, terror not allowing the child to realize who it was that had her. But she saw Jan and her hysteria receded.

  “Jannie,” she sobbed.

  “Where is Blandina?” Drummond asked. “Where is your Ina, Sabine?”

  The child gestured to the cave.

  Drummond let Jan have the Bean and turned to confer with Antony and Kitane.

  “We come in on three sides,” he said. “Give me five minutes to move around to the cliffside there.” He gestured to the rock face towering over the cave.

  “We should go in now, all together,” Antony said. “Every minute could matter.”

  “I need to know that there’s not another way out,” Drummond said, and he moved off before any more discussion could delay him.

  The witika demon brought Blandine to the mouth of the cave, a dagger pressed at her throat.

  “Sabine is gone,” Blandine said through gritted teeth. “You’ll never get her.”

  The beast lowered the blade to her abdomen. With a slashing movement, the knife sliced open Blandine’s already torn and muddy dress.

  She felt the blade, cold against her flesh. The Devil was after her unborn. She pushed away hard, putting all the leverage she had into her elbow.

  Martyn Hendrickson tottered and swayed backward on the strange wooden buskins he wore to elevate himself to nine feet.

  At that moment Edward Drummond dropped from the gray stone crags above the cave, tackling Martyn.

  In her exhausted and half-drugged state, Blandine at first thought the whole cliffside had fallen, a rock slide, an avalanche. But it was Drummond.

  The two men collapsed in a heap. As he fell, the blade of Martyn’s dagger twisted upward and ended up embedded deeply in his own shoulder. He had inadvertently stabbed himself when Drummond struck him from above.

  Blandine had never seen Drummond this way. Fury rode him. He tore off the man’s witika mask and flung it away.

  Martyn fell back, his face twisted into a sick, red-faced snarl. He panted like a cornered animal. But his eyes looked strangely blank, mesmerized with opium.

  Drummond began pummeling him. As his fists smashed into the handsome face, over and over, Martyn reached up with one arm as though to ward off the blows.

  Blandine saw the dagger. Martyn groped for the handle of the knife.

  “He’s got a blade!” Blandine shouted.

  Bellowing with pain, the wounded man drew the dagger out from his own shoulder and jabbed it at Drummond.

  But Martyn was too weak. It was as though the deerskin mask had given him his power. Drummond merely snatched his wrist, bent the weapon downward and disarmed him.

  It was over.

  Confiscating the bloody dagger, Drummond got to his feet, stepping back toward Blandine.

  “Sabine?” she asked, breathing hard.

  From the other side of the clearing came Jan, carrying the Bean in his arms. Behind him walked Antony and Kitane.

  At that moment of distraction, Martyn gathered his cloak around him, rolled away from the cave mouth and dropped off a rock ledge. They heard a shriek as he disappeared.

  They all rushed to the edge of the cliff. Flinging ropy gouts of blood onto the leaves scattered across the forest floor, the wounded Martyn bounded recklessly down the cliff side toward the stream below.

  Blandine turned to Antony and extracted her oversized musket from his grip.

  “Cover Sabine’s ears,” she directed Drummond. She stepped forward, shouldered Pretty Polly and let loose.

  The boom sounded huge, cannonlike, but the shot went wide, splintering a birch sapling just as Martyn careened by it.

  “Judas Priest,” Blandine said.

  “I didn’t think Pretty Polly could miss,” Drummond said.

  “She’s not herself,” Blandine said.

  At the bottom of the hill, they could see the once-mighty witika monster flailing away, red heels flashing, stumbling, trying to keep his balance.

  “I’ll get him,” Kitane said, loping off in the same direction Martyn had fled.

  “Take a horse!” Drummond called.

  “I’m going to run him,” Kitane called back.

  Kitane had a specific tactic in mind. It was a wartime Algonquin practice, modeled on the way wolf packs ran deer, chasing them tirelessly, switching out members of the pack to give others a rest, finally killing their exhausted prey as it collapsed, tongue lolling out and mouth foaming.

  Drummond watched Kitan
e take off after the fleeing Martyn, down the hillside to the little stream that fed into the North River. Martyn ran panicked and wounded, while Kitane managed to affect a casual, insouciant pursuit. They splashed across the stream at the Wading Place, climbed up the opposite slope above Spuyten Duyvil and disappeared toward the Post Road.

  “Will he catch him?” Jan asked.

  “I am not sure Kitane wants to catch him,” Blandine said. “Not right away. First he must toy with him awhile.”

  “Like a cat with a mousey,” Jan said.

  “Mousey,” the Bean echoed.

  Running, desperate and weak, Martyn groped for a way out. He would scream of an indian attack to the first settler he met, gesturing back to the Lenape madman behind him.

  But he saw no settlers. The witika terror Martyn himself engineered had depeopled the landscape.

  He ran on. Martyn told himself he did not really mind dying. His life, snuffed. It was a pity, he had so much to offer the world, but there it was.

  The torture, the time it would take him to die, he also thought he could face. He had been on the other end of the fist and the blade so many times, he thought it might be almost enjoyable to experience how it felt with the positions reversed.

  But the eating, that’s what horrified him. He recognized the Lenape trapper who was on his trail. The famous Kitane. He knew Kitane to be afflicted with witika madness the same as he, and Martyn could not suffer the thought of his body being consumed by another human.

  Yes, yes, Martyn realized he was being inconsistent, even hypocritical. He had certainly eaten his share. He couldn’t explain it logically. It was just that the very idea of his flesh residing in another person’s mouth sent him into paroxysms of retching disgust. It made his skin crawl.

  Martyn lasted a good while on the run. Several miles. Kitane had seen longer. He had pursued Mahican enemies of his people farther, a dozen leagues at least, twenty-five miles. But Martyn did respectably well for a swannekin, especially with a knife wound in one shoulder. The poppy tears helped dull the pain.

  Kitane finally closed on him beside rapids that coursed down to the North River. The Lenape clan that lived nearby called the stream the Nepperhan, the “net-fishing place.”

  Martyn plunged his head into the water, drank deeply, vomited and passed out.

  Kitane woke him with a kick to the side of his head. He toyed with him while the fire got going, a little with the blade, a little with a rock employed as a hammer. As Martyn roasted, bellowing at the top of his exhausted lungs, Kitane idly carved the witika sign on the surface of a stone, where it remains, faintly visible, to this day.

  Then Kitane ate Martyn Hendrickson, consuming him, over the course of a few days, down to the tiniest bone.

  Epilogue

  Ten years after he left it, on his way to London to see to family affairs when his mother died, Drummond journeyed alone to Manhattan. He found the place changed beyond recognition.

  With insane industry, his English countrymen built, tore down and recast, transforming New Amsterdam into New York. When they had it, the Dutch sought to make Manhattan over as a facsimile of Patria, with canals, waterways and drainage projects. The English were busy transforming the place into London, with sooty facades and cobblestone streets.

  Only the Lion remained from the old days. Drummond entered and was immediately assailed with memories so strong they nearly cut him off at the knees. The blades still waited in the rafters for the next riot. The same drunks at the same tables. The smell of beer and tobacco smoke.

  And Ross Raeger. “Drummond!” his voice called out, and the two men embraced as though they were drowning men clinging to flotsam of the past. No need for secrecy or Sealed Knot passwords. Raeger seemed fatter and grayer, an old pirate retired to his tavern.

  “Did ye bring the lass?” Raeger asked, and looked disappointed when Drummond told him no, Blandine remained at their trading outpost in the western wilderness.

  They walked the town together as they had in the old days, not gathering intelligence about military defenses this time, but merely trying to grab on to the surviving shreds of New Amsterdam before they vanished for good. The town authorities were in the midst of filling in the canal, transforming it from a Dutch waterway into a proper English thoroughfare.

  “Let me show you something,” Raeger said. He guided Drummond along the old canal to where it branched off to the west. A thin finger of a ditch led toward the parade ground, now a bowling green.

  “This was the Hendricksons’ private canal,” Raeger said. “It led over to the big one, the Heere Gracht.”

  “I remember,” Drummond said.

  “Look down there,” Raeger said.

  Where the little canal dead-ended behind the former Hendrickson grounds, a wooden door was set into the bulwark.

  “Come along,” Raeger said, leading Drummond to climb ten feet down into the ditch and approach the door.

  He forced it open. The gaping mouth of a passageway, musty-smelling and dank. “Ye afraid of the dark?” Raeger asked.

  “Not since I last slept at the Lion,” Drummond said.

  The passageway—a tunnel, really, faced with stone and big enough to roll a small cart through—ran to the south. The light spilling from the entrance faded, and they moved forward in pitch darkness.

  Drummond knew where the tunnel led before they reached it. After thirty yards, the passage ended at another door. Raeger opened it, bringing in daylight along with an overpowering smell of burnt wood.

  They stepped forward, and Drummond found himself in the understory of the old Hendrickson mansion. The dwelling-house had hidden its tunnel as one of its many secrets. A decade after the place burned, collapsed and fire-blackened timbers still lay in disarray, and a half foot of dirty rainwater pooled in the gutted subterranean chambers.

  This was how the Devil was supposed to smell, Drummond thought, charred and rotten.

  Raeger said, “Ye ever wonder how Martyn got out and about in his infernal witika gear, terrifying and murthering wee ones?”

  “I did wonder,” Drummond said.

  “They made the tunnel in the old days,” Raeger said. “For the Hendricksons to bring their trade goods in from the little canal.”

  Drummond looked around the site. He felt a cold distaste. “Nobody will build here,” he said. “The place is cursed.”

  “Aye,” said Raeger, “that it is.”

  Blandine and Edward never made it to Cain-tuck-kee. That mythic land floated in their imaginations, far off, fertile, where the grass, legend said, grew an uncanny shade of blue.

  Instead, they founded a small trading post at the southern end of one of the odd, beautiful fingers of water in western New York, Honeoye Lake, close to the Genesee River and home country of the Seneca nation. Wilderness enough for Edward, trade enough for Blandine.

  They had Jan with them there, and Anna and her children. The Bean grew up fat and happy, as did Blandine and Edward’s own baby, Sarah. All they were was love.

  Blandine swiftly fell in with the Seneca, continuing to import cloth from the old world, trading adroitly in New York’s fur-rich interior, shipping the pelts back to her New Amsterdam customers and pocketing the profit. Far back in her kas, alongside the enameled rose her parents gave her, she kept an Emily Stavings miniature of Aet Visser, a brave bad man or a cowardly good one, she could never decide which.

  For a home, Blandine and Edward built their own, not a squat clapboard-and-brick dwelling-house such as those on Manhattan, but a soaring, porch-enclosed, light-filled apparition that sat like a ship on the smoothly rolling horizon. The glass for its windows Edward poured himself.

  They never saw Kitane. Rumor had him in Paris, the pet of a buxom French lady. Antony stayed in Manhattan and gained his own pulpit. He made the long trek to visit Honeoye Lake only once in a while, preaching his way to them through the growing string of hamlets and villages the Europeans established along the rivers of the southern tier.


  Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell, the New Haven regicides, lived and prospered. Clarendon’s assassins never came, primarily because Clarendon had other difficulties, most of them the creation of the Duke of Norfolk. Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon, the lord chancellor who stood in for the deceased father of the second Charles, guiding, teaching, protecting the young prince, exterminating the regicides, fell victim to court intrigue.

  Drummond briefly thought of going to New Haven to do the job on Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell himself, just to get back his facility for killing, but had not the heart. With his daughter, Sarah, on his lap and Blandine talking peltry to a Seneca sachem on their front porch, that world seemed impossibly far away.

  He enjoyed hearing from Antony of the decidedly cool reception given to Petrus Stuyvesant when the disgraced director general returned to Patria after the English takeover. In fact, the Dutch stateholders argued for putting the man before a punishment tribunal. For treason. Drummond thought he might have recommended a good man to act as counsel.

  The witika continued to stalk the north woods, ranging up to Canada, out toward the Great Lakes, down into the American river valleys west of the mountains. Wherever the demon went, the witika sign appeared, like punctuation, like a challenge, like a warning.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have grounded this fictional narrative in verifiable facts and real situations. The orphanmaster as an official government function did exist in New Amsterdam, agents of the English king did search out the signatories of his father’s death warrant, the North River did freeze over enough to admit sleigh traffic. The director general of the Dutch colony was indeed Latin-proud and possessed a peg leg set with silver. Details of geography and body politic, of colonial foodstuffs, the magic lantern and early optics are accurate as far as I could make them.

  The novel centers around an apparition known as the witika, a flesh-eating demon that formed a crucial part of the psychic life of the Algonquin Indians. The name has many transliterated variants, including, most popularly, wendigo, but also witigo, witikow and windiga. Living amid native Americans, seventeenth-century Dutch and English colonists became intimately familiar with witika lore.