The Salem Witch Society

by K. N. Shields

  He raised the telescope and aimed it toward the harbor, only to be met with disappointment. He’d guessed that Grey might have seen the fire lit by the redheaded woman on Cushing’s Island, but that was impossible. The city’s hilly topography and several taller buildings blocked the view of Casco Bay. Panic began to flood into his mind, a fear that Helen would die tonight because of his inability to see what Grey had seen. He took several deep breaths, then slowly turned about, staring at the skyline all around him. Buildings, lights, stars clear in the moonless sky. Nothing obvious.

  He drew Grey’s three pages from his pocket. The first page must be a reference to Helen and Delia. The third page was the riddle’s clue to the location of the final murder on Cushing’s Island. But how did the second paper fit? Lean lit another match to see that page again. He read it aloud under the flickering light.

  “‘A tower standing in a pool of darkness. It’s thick like blood and filling with darkness. There’s a spark there. I can see a flame. There’s still time. Dear God, please hurry.’”

  Grey didn’t believe in the medium; there had to be another, hidden meaning. Or perhaps the plainest meaning: the words themselves, stripped of any superstitious attachments. The match burned down close to Lean’s fingers. He shook out the tiny flame, leaving himself in darkness once more.

  “‘I can see a flame.’” His voice was quiet, almost pleading with himself. A new thought rattled in his head, like hearing another voice. Words seeped into his mouth, half forming, making his tongue move behind closed lips. They were the words of the mad devil-woman on the island.

  “The stronger the spirit offered up, the brighter the flame calling him back to us.”

  A flame, not to see by but to be seen. The fire on Cushing’s was a marker, a beacon, but for whom? For the devil that they hoped to raise in the form of George Burroughs? Was it all just symbols created to appease the fevered mind of the killer? Or was it an actual sign that the sacrifice was complete? The flame on the tip of the island would certainly be visible, but from where? The killer could be on a boat, intending to land back on Cushing’s Island. No—he was the lord of the air. Up high. The fiery beacon on Cushing’s Island had to be visible from up high, where he’d be watching. A tower in a pool of darkness.

  Lean turned northeast and looked across the city: the Portland

  Observatory. It was the highest point in Portland, specifically designed to watch the harbor. Tonight, as usual, the domed top was shrouded in darkness. The maritime flags that were set there, visible throughout the harbor by day, were unlit at night.

  Lean brought the telescope to bear on the dark tower. After a moment he saw it. A spark in the observatory. A flicker of light where there should be none.

  75

  At last there was a movement from Grey. Helen turned her head toward the center of the room to watch him. She was still gagged but noted with a mix of hope and annoyance that the killer hadn’t bothered to do the same to Grey. He was lying on his back, hands bound before him. His head tilted one way, then the other, as he got his bearings. Helen looked to confirm that their captor was still outside the small room. She could see glimpses of his shadowy figure as he moved on the other side of the panes of glass. From behind her gag, Helen tried to ask Grey a one-word question: “Delia?”

  Grey turned to face her and responded by raising a finger to his lips. He began to fumble with his hands. Helen’s heart leaped at the hope that the killer had been careless with tying Grey’s wrists. After a few moments, she discovered that Grey was not wriggling his hands free from his knots. He was digging for his pocketwatch. He flipped it open and raised his head, apparently enough to catch a glimpse of the time by the faint, flickering candlelight inside the room. Helen herself had lost all concept of time; judging by the darkness of the sky, she imagined that it was sometime well after midnight.

  After watching Grey replace his watch, Helen waited for him to do something, all the while fighting back her urge to unleash a muffled scream. Her patience was rewarded when Grey simply shifted onto his right side, so that he was now facing away from her. The urge to scream ebbed, replaced by a sudden desire to kick the man and force him to whisper something about Delia—whether her daughter was alive, where she was, and how the two of them might escape.

  The wind picked up, and the short gusts rattled the panes of glass that encircled the room. Helen could still hear the killer’s voice; it was growing louder as he approached the door.

  “Hemen-Etan! Hemen-Etan! Hemen-Etan! El Aozia Teu Achadon! El A Hy! Aie Saraye! By Eloym, Archima, Rabur Bathas over Abrac … flowing down, coming from above Aheor upon Aberer Chavajoth! I command thee … by the Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras.”

  The man entered the room and set his long wooden staff down on the bench. He was again wearing his dark robe, which stretched to the floor. The hood over his head kept his face mostly in shadow. “By Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth … Metraton On Agla Adonai Mathon, the Pythonic word, the Mystery of the Salamander … the Assembly of Sylphs, the Grotto of Gnomes, the demons of the heaven of Gad … Almousin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatbatmik: Come, Come, Come!”

  “Most tiresome,” Grey declared. “Are these incantations supposed to be so repetitive, or is that just part of your stammer? Did you have that trouble speaking fluently since birth, or was it a result of the trauma to your neck? Probably all in your head. Product of a fragile mind, I’d suspect.”

  “Mr. Grey, you’ve chosen to”—their captor paused, appearing to struggle with the selection of his next word—“rejoin us. How nice … that you’ll bear witness to the Master’s rising. It will be the last thing you … see on this earth. But what a wondrous sight to behold.” The man pushed back the hood of his robe, revealing a somewhat handsome face topped with black hair. Helen had never seen him before in her life.

  “I’m all aflutter with anticipation, Father Coyne. Oh, I suppose you’ve abandoned that identity now. You’ve emerged from the ashes of that man’s home like the phoenix reborn.”

  “Something like that.”

  Helen listened in disbelief. She wanted to scream at Grey, tell him to shut up and stop antagonizing the killer.

  “What’s that, Mrs. Prescott?” Grey said. “Oh, how rude of me—you haven’t been properly introduced. Allow me to present Jack Whitten.”

  For a second, Helen wondered if she had made some noise earlier to indicate her annoyance. But then she realized that although Grey had said her name, he was really addressing the killer the entire time he spoke.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner,” Grey said. “That ridiculous headdress of bandages you wore when we came to see you at Father Coyne’s hid your black hair. You reclined the whole time to hide your height. And your faked consumptive cough provided excellent cover for your inconsistent, stammering speech.” Grey shot the quickest of glances at Helen. “Yes, he’s the real Jack Whitten. Oh, don’t be embarrassed, Mrs. Prescott; he’s been rather clever in hiding his identity all this time. It’s certainly no poor reflection upon you to be a bit confused at the moment.”

  Helen shifted her own body, trying to get a better look at the men without having to crane her neck so awkwardly. The effort of moving while tied up caused the release of several quick grunts.

  “Hmm? Oh, you thought Jack Whitten died in front of a train in Salem the other night. Well, to tell the truth, so did I. For a while, anyway. The man who was posing as Peter Chapman, Father Coyne’s not-so-gracious assistant, was not actually Jack Whitten, as I had originally surmised. But that was your younger brother, wasn’t it?” Grey said to the robed man. “What was his name? I never did see it recorded anywhere.”

  “Peter. His … given name really was Peter.”

  “Clever. You recall, Mrs. Prescott, that Old Stitch, or Black Lucy Whitten, had two sons. But, as an Indian fortune-teller who knew her explained, they had separate fathers—and the two boys couldn’t have looked more different. The eldest was suppo
sedly hanged by Colonel Blanchard’s mob when they burned the family out. That was after the colonel’s wife died from Old Stitch’s poisons. Was it the abrus seeds that killed Mrs. Blanchard?”

  “My mother didn’t kill Mrs. Blanchard. She took her own life once she learned the truth about her husband, and me.”

  “Is that it?” Grey asked. “Your mother worked as a servant for the Blanchards. She was let go when she became pregnant with you. But Mrs. Blanchard didn’t know the truth, did she?”

  “He paid her to keep quiet about it all … to say the father was some foreign sailor. It wasn’t till the end that she figured it out. … Came to see my mother one last time, to hear the truth for herself.”

  “Then she took her own life, and the colonel had to hide the reason. He came to kill you and your mother, so there would be no one left who knew the truth of his sins.” Grey considered this new information for a moment. “I see, and so the elder boy was hanged and the younger was turned over to the orphanage, to be held until the age of sixteen. But the younger boy, Peter, didn’t miss a trick, did he? Claimed to be the elder son, Jack, to shave a few years off his time in captivity. And the elder boy … well, they never did find a body. Because there was none. There was a hanging, though. So what happened? They left you for dead and you managed to wriggle out?”

  “It’s easy enough to kill someone … when you know what you’re about.” Jack Whitten reached down beneath the bench and picked up the coiled rope that Helen had noticed earlier. “But that lot was useless. Couldn’t tie a shoe, let alone a … noose. Besides, I did have some magical protections. By the time they set the fire and got me strung up, Mother and … Peter had both gone off. Nothing for that mob but to stand and stare at me dying. Lost their stomach for it. The rope was … cutting into me, but I just played dead and waited.” Whitten measured out about half the length of rope, maybe twenty-five feet. “When they were gone, it was … no trouble to get my boot knife and cut myself down.”

  “And then the real Jack Whitten slipped away,” Grey said. “Never noticed. Never missed. To scratch out a life and cause what trouble he may. You might even have rejoined your mother during her time spent in the traveling Indian shows. Is that where you picked up the Abenaki language? And your contempt for them?”

  “Your people are a pitiless and savage race, Mr. Grey.” Jack Whitten smiled down at him. “I learned many useful things there.”

  Grey continued, “Meanwhile, Peter, using Jack’s name, began to find a bit of religion under the tutelage of Father Coyne. Until one day when he got into a bit of trouble with another boy. Geoffrey Blanchard, wasn’t it?”

  Whitten nodded. Helen thought the man was enjoying Grey’s recitation of the facts, which went on in a dry, professorial tone.

  “They broke in to the cathedral library and found the Black Book. Passed it off as a bit of mischief, no doubt, but it was more than that. The men from Harvard had come to the cathedral back then to make a copy. It would have been quite a business, all hushed up and secret. Seems Peter hadn’t gotten so much religion that he could just ignore it when he knew there was something in there worth taking a look at. But the boys got caught, and Peter was blamed. He was banished from the cathedral to the boys’ home in Cape Elizabeth to serve out the remainder of his time until, in the guise of Jack, he reached sixteen and was released into the world.”

  “Blanchard recognized the Whitten name. Made him nervous, and he demanded Peter be sent away,” said Jack.

  Grey paused, his mouth starting to go dry. He kept his eyes focused, refusing to divert his attention from Whitten to Helen. “Years go by, and our little saga lies dormant. Jack and Peter are reunited and get on with their lives, such as they are. Father Coyne goes on preaching. Old Stitch goes on with her hocus-pocus performances. Colonel Blanchard continues his war on alcohol and sin. All of those involved in the death of Agnes Blanchard, and the attempted lynching of young Jack Whitten, go on with their lives. Until these many years later, something happens. Something that sets the wheel in motion again.”

  Whitten looped the middle section of rope around the hook in the ceiling that held the observatory’s telescope. He tied a knot there so that two long sections of rope dangled from the hook and landed in piles on the floor.

  Grey cleared his throat. “What’s that, Mrs. Prescott? You’re quite right; I’ve neglected your excellent bit of detective work with Rachel Blanchard at her mother’s grave. Not everyone in our story did get on with life. The son, Geoffrey Blanchard, was never able to overcome the loss of his beloved mother. It consumed him, drove him mad. It’s when he turns to the occult to reach his departed mother that the colonel’s had enough. He keeps Geoffrey locked away in asylums, well out of view. But from what I saw, he didn’t put his son away soon enough. At some point Geoffrey Blanchard learned a fair amount about witchcraft.

  “And that, I think, brings us to the point where our current little mystery begins to play itself out. Witchcraft and the Black Book. That’s where all our strands connect. Of course, you knew all about witchcraft, Jack. You grew up with it. And you learned that Geoffrey had became a student.”

  Whitten smiled. “I’d been keeping my eyes on the Blanchards … father and son. They were there that day. They were the ones who … did this to me.” He tugged his collar down to reveal a line of scar tissue around his neck. “The colonel’s always surrounded by his … old army men. And too visible. But the son could be gotten to … made to pay for what they did.”

  “So you followed Geoffrey Blanchard when he made his way to Jotham Marsh’s magical society. And the subject of the Black Book came to light again.”

  “With all I knew, it was easy enough to fit in with Marsh’s foolish order. I was a star pupil. And Blanchard … well, he was still obsessed with his dead mother. Talked of nothing else. He wanted to know everything about contacting spirits. Marsh knew all about it. He mentioned the Black Book. Blanchard got to talking, mentioned the book at the cathedral, and soon enough we all put two and two together.”

  “You needed access to the cathedral to get at the book. It was you who went there as Peter Chapman,” Grey said, “since Father Coyne would have recognized your brother.”

  “But I couldn’t pick the lock. So I needed to find the copy. … Eventually I won Father Coyne’s confidence. He revealed that the copy was kept at Harvard.”

  “You got to it first, figured out which section was the Riddle of the

  Martyrs, and destroyed the rest, so no one could follow what you were doing and stop you.”

  “Or try to repeat my efforts.”

  Helen’s mind had been floating back and forth between the conversation and images of Delia. She was desperately hoping there was a reason Grey wasn’t talking about her daughter: because he already knew whether she was still alive. Or perhaps that’s why he hadn’t bothered even looking her in the eye for more than a second. He knew that Delia was already gone. Helen pushed the idea out of her thoughts. He was distracting Whitten from the rescue that must be coming.

  “Marsh demanded … I turn the riddle over to him, but he was a fraud.” Whitten was answering some question from Grey that Helen had missed. “He wouldn’t have ever dared to perform the ritual. I think he was glad I refused. But he talked about mutiny … turned the others against me.”

  “Including Lizzie Madson?”

  “Even Lizzie,” Whitten said.

  “And that’s why she deserved to die?”

  “It seems she was always one of Marsh’s.” Jack Whitten shrugged. “Student … or lover. Just another soul for him to … toy with.” “What about Maggie Keene and Hannah Easler?”

  “Who’s that?” Whitten asked

  “The pregnant woman in Scituate.”

  “They … served the purpose. Sinners. Fallen souls … needed for the ritual.”

  “The red ink on Maggie Keene’s hand. You had her sign in a book of some sort.”

  “I needed her soul, a witch’s soul.” Whitten pic
ked up one of the glass jars that Helen had seen on the bench inside the room. He lifted it to eye level and considered the contents. The candlelight was too dim for her to make out anything with certainty, but Helen thought she saw shapes like protruding fingers.

  “And prying up the floorboards at the Portland Company?” Grey asked.

  “The riddle required it. That was the one sacrifice that was required to be on the very ground where the Master first took a life.” “And you believe Burroughs’s old meetinghouse was that site.” “Precisely.”

  “And the billhook, the cross cut into her, the pitchfork—those guarded against her witch’s powers being used against you. The same as the bottle you buried beneath your mother when you killed her. But that’s one piece I don’t quite understand. Your mother died months before the ritual began. Why kill her at all—just to gain the abrus seeds?”

  “The abrus seeds were only a … a pleasant aside to killing her. You fail to understand the basic principles of magic, Mr. Grey. The Riddle of the Martyrs is a most … demanding ritual. Success requires the ultimate focus of the Mage’s powers. His energies must be … entirely pure, unfettered. Mother had placed many … spells on me over the years. Her interference—those spells—they had to be removed.”

  “No qualms about murdering your own mother?” Grey asked.

  “Every man must be thrust into this world in a spasm of blood and pain. I suppose she spilled her blood for me then … the same as any mother. But there was scarce little given after that moment. She hadn’t enough of a proper soul in her … to spare any for my birth. And what little soul there was in me, she did her best to drive out soon enough.”