Children of Salem

by Robert W. Walker

“You expect me to believe you have the ear of the Devil ’imself?”

  “If not, why’re ya be here on the seventh night?”

  Thomas slowly nodded. “I must be sure.”

  “Understood, Thomas. Come with me.”

  Putnam followed Wardwell to a full-length mirror on a wrought iron frame filigreed with leaves and wrought iron black birds. Beside the mirror, smoke rose from pitch fires in pots. “Gaze close into the looking glass, Thomas.”

  “I only see my reflection. So?”

  “Stare longer, harder. Seek in the looking glass your answer.”

  “I see nothing.”

  “Close your eyes, man, and think on your suffering, your hardship.”

  Putnam did as told.

  “Think on all the horrors you’ve shared with me here. Think, man, think.”

  Putnam’s eyes were closed, but fearful Wardwell meant him some harm, he peeked from time to time as the blacksmith increased the smoke billowing about the mirror.

  “Now open your eyes and see—see into the invisible world to behold the devils let loose to harm you and yours, Thomas, and to see who has brought misery upon ye and ye family.”

  Putnam gulped and opened his eyes on the mirror where he saw shadowy figures trying to form into whole from the broken, curling threads of smoke like fog trying to find a hold, trying to find rule and order.

  “Drink this,” Wardwell said in his ear. “This may take some time but the tea, it will help. Drink . . . drink up.”

  Thomas, thirsty from the trip, eagerly gulped down the warm tea, and then he again began studying the curling smoke and his own reflection in the mirror, and he thought if he concentrated that he saw other faces peeking about in the mirror, one set of eyes on his left shoulder, perched there, but then they dissipated, but other shapes wanted forming. Wardwell refilled his warm, herbal tea as he called the bitter drink.

  “Takes time this,” muttered Wardwell. “Be patient and you shall see for yourself.”

  Thomas drained the second cup of tea. “What am I looking for? I only see me.”

  “Exactly what they want you to see and believe! That you are the root cause of all your own problems, thereby casting off any suspicion that that root stems from another source, you see. Clever are the minions of Satan.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, you will with patience, if you will only stare hard enough and long enough in the mirror.”

  “I am.”

  “I know you are trying but it takes some working of your inner mind, man.”

  “I have no imagination for such games and parlor tricks, sir.”

  “You will! Will it, man, the faces of your deadliest enemies. Not the ones bent on spitting after your heels but those bent on harming you beyond all reason.”

  “Those who would murder my progeny, yes.”

  “Exactly. Thomas, you and you alone can bring this about. I cannot.”

  “But then why did you have me go and return on this day?”

  “You alone can see the images of evil here . . . tonight . . . on this the seventh day of our covenant.”

  The word covenant made it clear, that he was in league with Wardwell, and God knows who else by virtue of Wardwell’s unusual covenants. A covenant begot a covenant. Then Thomas began seeing movement in the smoke and mirror, a kind of life there, sometimes spherical, sometimes wormlike but all of it moving, swirling, casting ethereal shadows where there ought not be any.

  With the drugged tea and in due time, Wardwell had Thomas Putnam seeing what he—Thomas—wanted to see and believe all along, right here and now inside the smoke and inside the looking glass as Thomas’ features coalesced into those of his enemy in slow, sure succession.

  In fact, Thomas Putnam was face to face with those who’d murdered his children, and those who’d put an affliction on his womenfolk today back in Salem.

  # # # # #

  Thomas set to building a fire, not wishing to wake anyone in the house, as for the first time in recent memory, all was quiet and peaceful on his return from Andover and the wizard. But when he lifted a log from the woodbine, a frog croaked up at him and leapt out at him, its eyes wide and accusing. If the thing had had fingers, it would have been pointing at him. It seemed a demonic, ominous omen, this creature that’d gotten into his home, a possible familiar sent to spy on them, as a familiar’s eyes, read by a witch, could see all and all that the creature, be it frog, mouse, or lice had recorded in its eye.

  Putnam stumbled back and fell on his rump, and the frog leapt forward between his stockinged feet.

  “My God! Wardwell said they’d send their familiars.” Wardwell had warned of spiders, vermin, such things as flies, centipedes, lizards, or toads. “Any one of which,” Wardwell had insisted, “could be acting as eyes and ears for the evil ones—spying on you and yours.”

  The green animal housing a demon certainly acted like a witch’s familiar; it was quite well known and documented that witches not only communicated with such vermin and low forms of life, but that they directed their movements. It was reason enough to stomp a spider, or in this case a frog whose fishy eyes blinked at him a moment before it again croaked as if trying to speak Thomas’s name.

  Thomas pulled himself together and crawled to his knees. The log he’d lifted lay beside him. “Too much to drink,” he tried to tell himself, “on top of whatever was in Wardwell’s tea.”

  Ever so slowly, gently, he lifted the splintery log, thin enough to get a single hand around, and he brought it into his body. He raised the log overhead, preparing to bring it crashing down on the bulging eyes as the spirit continued to stare as if placing a curse on him. It made him wonder if it were possible for jailed witches such as Goode and Osborne—one of whom he’d helped corner and haul to jail—could do as Goode said to him—take the form of a creature like this and give him the evil eye through a toad.

  Thomas let the log fall, and a loud gunshot-like sound replied as it smacked the wood floor. He lifted the log and to his astonishment no smashed green thing lay below it. It was as if the toad had vanished and magically so. He imagined old Goode in her cell at this moment cackling at his fear.

  A single candle lit the room, leaving most of it in shadow and sharp-cut, black corners. Where has the evil thing got off to? Where if not back to its conjurer?”

  Again it croaked, mocking his efforts. He found it somehow behind him, leaping toward deeper shadow. Putnam moved the candle with it, following the creature’s shadow reflected against one wall, the reflection looking indeed like a crawling shape, like that of a woman the size of Goode. This made Thomas start and his hand holding the log shook for fear of missing yes, but also for fear of hitting his mark.

  The frog leapt twice more as if it’d determined a destination. It seemed bent on his wife’s room.

  Putnam stalked on hands and knees closely now, and once within range, he bolstered all his courage for Anne’s sake, and he lifted the firewood piece again for the kill. How much drink have I had tonight, he again wondered—wondered if it were all a drunken man’s nightmare. He had crawled beneath the table, his hand on the table leg when the toad leapt back toward him and landed on the table leg at his fingertips so close he felt its warm breath here.

  Got you, he thought, and Thomas struck full force. The result was excruciating pain and a yelp out of Thomas as the log smashed into his other hand—fingers flattened between wooden leg and wooden log. He howled more in a scream of terror and pain, waking his wife and the children in the loft.

  More light flooded the room, Mrs. Putnam entering with her whale oil lamp. The overhead trap sent light down as well, Mercy holding a second lamp high.

  In the middle of the floor, Thomas rocked with the pain in his hand, moaning, tears freely coming.

  “What happened?”

  “The witch’s familiar came for you!”

  “Where, where?” Mother Putnam cried out.

  The children joined in, chanting, “Where, where?”
r />   “What familiar?” pressed Mrs. Putnam.

  “A toad! A toad with human eyes in the back of its bloody head.”

  She examined his hand, saying, “I see no toad, but I smell rot gut whiskey enough.”

  Mercy and Anne had come down the stairs, and they made a search for the toad, but none could be found.

  Mrs. Putnam wrapped his hand in bandages, as Thomas lamented, “I almost had it. I almost crushed the damnable thing, I tell you—drink or no drink. Anne, it was her, that witch we jailed—Goode, I tell you sent it. Give me the evil eye, it did.”

  “Almost killed it, did you?” She finished off the bandage.

  “For you, I meant to kill it for you. ’Twas heading for your bedchamber, Goodwife.”

  “Yes, dear. I’m sure.”

  “Best give your room a thorough search, too,” suggested Mercy.

  Anne Junior stood nodding beside Mercy. “Yes, Mother, it wouldn’t do to not be thur-thur—what Mercy said.”

  “God blind me, then! Go ahead, children. Give it a look.”

  Thomas whispered to his wife where they remained at the table, “I have something to tell you and you alone.”

  Anne sensed the urgency in his tone to mean now. For any modicum of privacy, she’d have to send the children back to bed first. When Mercy and Anne Junior could find no sign of the frog, she pointed to a knot hole in the floor and lied. “I saw the fool thing skitter out here. Now the two of you, back up and to bed!”

  The children obeyed and Anne remarked to Thomas how dutiful Mercy had become since her and Anne’s recent afflictions. “Somehow these attacks they’ve suffered, I suppose, has taught them that all our teachings and those of the minister are not simple clap-trap and talk from old people. Now . . . what is it on your mind, now that you’ve wakened the house?”

  He looked up to see that the trap door was closed tight and that Mercy was not listening in. Although it was closed well, he still ushered his wife into their bedroom and closed the door.

  “Why’re you acting so strange?” she asked. “What is it you wish to tell me, Thomas?”

  “I have done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “As I swore I would.”

  “You’ve gone to Andover?” Her eyes widened, a half smile forming.

  “Yes.”

  “To see the wizard?”

  “What other reason to go there?”

  “What’ve you learned?”

  “Only what we already suspected, but it’s now confirmed in my mind, and not just what others have told me is so.”

  “Confirmed how?”

  Thomas described in detail his two visits to Wardwell and the final results. When he’d finished, she grabbed his hands in hers. “I knew it. How often’ve I told you so? How often?”

  “It corroborates your brother Henry’s indictments.”

  “If only the dead could indict the living.”

  “God forbid!” he said with a gasp. “If so, we’d all be in stocks and chains.”

  “Not the righteous among us! No need for them to fear,” she countered.

  ”But he—Wardwell, he has, and we will act on Henry’s behalf, Henry and the children.”

  “Poor Hopestill.” Mrs. Putnam teared up. “I’d so thought she was going to survive long-long-er.”

  Hopestill had been their last child before the birth of Anne Junior. There’d been an earlier Anne Junior, but they’d lost her as well and saw no harm in naming their tenth attempt at a child Anne Junior as well. Their combined hope had in fact completely abandoned them after Hopestill’s death, and now what a cruel irony her name had become—Hopestill. Not a stillborn but dead nonetheless before she could learn to properly suckle a teet. And then cruel fate had given them a new hope, a new glimmer of faith as time brought about Anne.

  They huddled now together, husband and wife, secure and sure in the knowledge that’d been brought to them by the spirits and corroborated by the wizard and his magic mirror.

  Chapter Five

  Boston, the following day

  Jeremy woke up in the arms of the only woman he ever loved, and rousing, he tried to not wake her, but failed miserably. She didn’t say a word but beckoned him to stay, her arms outstretched where she lay in repose. For the sake of propriety, they had rented two rooms, and Jeremy had made a great show of going to his room, dropping his traveling bags, and loudly stating how tiring the trip had been from Salem. A mistake, as the landlord, a lady who had introduced herself as Mrs. Fannie Fahey, wanted all the juicy gossip coming out of Salem some sixteen miles away. It took some time then for Jeremy to extricate himself from the lady’s interest while Serena laughed at his predicament from behind her closed door at the Fahey House. Once he did so, he had slipped from his room to Serena’s, and they had slept together.

  They had also made long, languid love, but they had to do so without benefit of making a sound—not a whoop, not a holler, not a gasp or a sigh to heavy. They feared being found out by other boarders or Mrs. Fahey and possibly thrown out for their distasteful behavior and contempt for the mores of the day. So they had made passionate love in absolute silence, relying on touch and sight and smell and taste alone—no auditory asides, no pounding of the heart even, and surprisingly, they had found the suppression of sound in their lovemaking more than just a challenge as it had somehow become an added spice.

  He could not resist her silent plea now for him to return to her and to again make love to her. They were both nude and he eased into her, and now with half the house awake and moving around outside, the game of silent lovemaking was even more of a dare and a spice. It proved near unbearable not to shriek out at moments of greatest passion. Even to keep their kisses quiet proved difficult work. Still as their hands roamed one another’s bodies, as their lips played over one another, they smiled at the game they’d discovered here at the Fahey House. Part of the play that made the touching and lovemaking so powerful was the idea that disapproving citizens just the other side of the walls and doors would be scandalized should they be discovered here like this, unwed yet very much in the throes of love.

  “We can’t go on like this, Jeremy,” she whispered—or rather gasped—into his ear before plunging her tongue into his mouth.

  “I know . . . must make an honest woman of you.”

  “And soon.”

  “Absolutely . . . ah! Yes.”

  They fell away into one another’s arms, trying desperately to not let their giddiness and joy so overtake them as to send up a howling, which is what each very much wanted to do by this point.

  After a long respite and with no more sounds coming in under the door from the hallway, Jeremy again stood and quickly dressed and slipped from the room, blowing her a kiss as he disappeared, and down the hall he went to muss up his own bed to keep the charade alive for Mrs. Fahey, while outside the windows of the boarding house, he heard the rhythmic noise of street hawkers and produce salesmen shouting out their wares and bartering over weights and measures.

  # # # # #

  Boston bristled with activity. The busiest area in the city proved the North End with the towering clock and bell tower of the North Church looking down over the ships in harbor at the seaport. In essence, Boston appeared a larger scaled Salem Town. While Salem was the port-of-call in the New World for Great Britain and many foreign countries, Boston had begun to rival Salem for the title and to outstrip Salem in permanent growth and population. In fact, there seemed a giddy explosion of activity and expansion and building here. Merchants, bakers, candlestick makers—all in all any business imaginable and some areas of ill repute as grimy and as reprehensible as to rival London some said—but not quite, Jeremy suspected.

  As with most second generation New Englanders, Jeremiah Wakely hadn’t ever had the opportunity to see England or London—or any other place off the continent, and would not unless he became a seaman. A highly unlikely prospect, and while like many, he would like to one day see the “old sod” as England, W
ales, Ireland, and Scotland had come to be known among the colonists, he doubted mightily if he ever would. As a result of such certainty, many a colonist had long ago decided that being a born New Englander was plenty enough to worry a man in the here and now, and that England and London had naught that a man needed that he could not find and attend to on these shores.

  Of course, it was a lie men told themselves to help in accepting the rough and primitive world into which their parents and grandparents had deposited them.

  Jeremy and Serena married in a quiet ceremony at the North Church, a Reverend Stiles having been pressed into service to do the honors on a weekday. The best man was a deacon of the church, called last minute, along with a lady of the church to act as witness, and Serena still talked about the kindness of these strangers and how they had all cheered and clapped for the young couple.

  Jeremy had purchased a pair of gold bands with what amounted to nearly the end of his meager funds, so while in Boston, he’d done some work at the local newspaper office, where he wrote a column under an assumed name, denouncing the witch hunt at Salem as “a fabrication with underlying motives too despicable for polite society to imagine.” Quite soon after the publication of his first “dispatches” from Salem as he called the pieces written under the pseudonym Alastair Cantwell, he was fired and the column running in the pamphlet-sized paper shut down as seditious and libelous.

  Jeremy had been enraged by this, and he had fought with his editor, Horatio Sperlunkle, but the pressure from somewhere in a powerful seat proved too great, and so he’d been without sufficient funds now for a few days. But worse than the loss of money was the suppression of truth. Still, funds were a worry as soon, he and Serena would have nothing for the rent.

  They continued to board at a Mrs. Fahey’s who charged a reasonable and fair rate. In fact, she stopped them in the hallway and insisted Jeremy take back half the rent she’d charged him before they’d become man and wife. Jeremy put up resistance, thinking it odd until Mrs. Fahey conspiratorially said, “I can’t charge a man for an unused bed. Now you two just take back the half.”