A Spell for the Revolution (30 page)

Paine’s pen scratched another sheet of paper or two, and then the Scotsman rose and quietly stirred the coals, adding a new log to the fire. In the renewed heat, with the soothing spit and crackle of the fire nearby, Proctor finally fell asleep.

The room was cold and dim when he awoke abruptly. A hand shook him roughly, and he was staring up into Tilghman’s face. The officer’s expression, usually calm and thoughtful no matter the circumstances, was filled with rage.

“Come on, Quaker boy,” he said. “Howe’s army is across the river—it’s another retreat.”

“What?” Proctor said, grabbing his hat as he jumped up. He was still drowsy, only partially grasping that the anger was not directed against him. “How did they—?”

“No one knows,” Tilghman said, gathering up the blankets and rolling them into a ball. “There are nothing but our soldiers along the whole length of the Palisades. It’s like their progress was concealed by a fog, only there’s no fog. If some slave girl named Polly hadn’t seen them first and raised a warning, we’d still have been sleeping when they fell on top of us.” He grabbed Proctor by the shoulder of his jacket and flung him toward the door. “Now go!”

“But my shoes,” Proctor said, looking back to where he’d kicked them off. He bent to put them on, and when he looked up Tilghman was gone already.

Proctor hopped on one foot, buckling the shoe on the other, and stopped, propped against the doorjamb. A cold drizzle fell. “Of course,” he murmured.

Rain blew in under the brim of Proctor’s hat and ran down his face. Outside, in the mud and the rain, discipline collapsed like a straw house. Men ran, some shouting orders,
others curses; here and there solitary men stood still, heads hung, dejected. Two couriers were shoving and swinging at each other over who would take the last saddled horse.

Then the men blurred to Proctor’s vision, and for a second all their ghosts emerged in sharp relief. They all were agitated, attacking their unwilling and unwitting hosts, dragging them one way or another, twisting their heads to see every slight, tripping them so they fell in the way of every random strike or blow.

Proctor wiped the rain out of his eyes, but he could still see the ghosts. Whether a puppet master somewhere, his hand inside their spectral forms, stirred them to violence, or whether they savaged on their own initiative, spurred on by the prospect of release at the American army’s ruin, Proctor couldn’t guess. Nor did he think it mattered. Even though he was not cursed like the soldiers, he felt cold fear rushing through him just from being so near it. He was close to the bridge—if he crossed it, he could escape the British forces and eventually make his way back home again.

Of course that would mean abandoning Deborah at the fort.

The two men were still fighting each other over the horse. Proctor grabbed the reins from their hands and knocked them both sprawling into the half-frozen mud.

The horse was equally eager to escape. As Proctor swung into the saddle, it bolted from the camp. He turned it toward Fort Lee, bent to its neck, and let it gallop.

The first refugees Proctor passed coming out of Fort Lee restored his hope. Several hundred men marched in orderly file, making good time toward Washington’s headquarters and the nearby bridge. Proctor reined in his horse, easing over to the verge of the road to let the men pass. Several called out the news to him, urging him to turn around. Only when they came close to him could he see that they carried very little more than the clothes they wore and personal weapons—all their gear, the tents, the stores, the winter supplies, must have been left behind.

He ignored them the same way they ignored the frantic and ineffective struggles of their own cursed companions. When the end of the line passed him, he kicked the horse on again, throwing up clods of mud as they rushed on. Within half a mile, he had to rein in a second time. Stragglers filled the road in all manner of dress and organization. Some ran away in their bare feet and underclothes, as if British bayonets were nicking their heels and elbows.

No, not British bayonets, but cursed spirits. The dead souls trapped with the men stabbed numinous daggers into their tender spots and tore futilely at the mortal flesh with translucent, bony fingers. The men, unaware of the ghosts that Proctor saw so clearly, were driven to panic and lost all sense of purpose. Trunks lay abandoned in the road, along with scattered clothes, military supplies, and even weapons. Someone in a panic was trying to unhitch a team of horses from its carriage in order to escape more quickly.
The crowd fighting over the wide-eyed, stamping animal saw Proctor and surged toward him.

Though no horseman, he closed his eyes and ran the horse straight at the low wall bordering the road. He took a breath in relief as it leapt over the barricade. Now free of the mob, Proctor took off across the fields toward the fort. It sat in the distance, a low, brown wall flattened by the hard iron of the sky. Like a dropped wallet at the side of the road, waiting to be picked up.

The gates stood wide open. Proctor walked the horse inside. Under one porch roof, protected from the drizzle, a solitary officer sat eating breakfast off a table covered with a linen cloth; his slave, in better clothes than those worn by many of the ordinary soldiers, cleared the dirty plates away while his master carefully wiped the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief. Not twenty feet away, a mob had broken into the rum stores and were already drunk. With their arms around one another, they swayed back and forth, singing “Yankee Doodle.”

The ghosts swirled around, weaving in and out of the mist. It gave Proctor a headache just to watch them. One man they grabbed by the ear, whispering things only he might hear. Another man they led by the nose toward some plate of bacon abandoned in the rush to escape. The next one they dragged by the collar, flinging him against a man who immediately spun around with his fists.

It was as though they gained strength from the nearness of the necromancer who ruled them. Or perhaps, knowing that their last hours on earth were numbered by the impending defeat of the American forces, the cursed spirits wanted to experience life one last time, and so they seized it by proxy, dragging their cursed hosts any direction they could. The more intense the experience, the better.

Proctor used the horse to push his way through the looters, drunks, and lost souls. The last were men standing vacant-eyed, the cursed spirit overlapping their own souls
so far they no longer knew who or where they were. He came to the tent where Deborah had been treating the sick, and he dismounted.

On his way in, Proctor ran into another man staggering to the entrance on his way out. The man was barefoot, wearing only trousers held up by suspenders and a shirt with more holes in it than fabric. His chin rested on his chest. For a second Proctor took him for a lost soul; the spirit shackled to him had merged so far into his body, it was hard to see. Then Proctor caught the stink of rum, so strong it made his stomach turn.

“The woman here, the nurse,” he said, unable to squeeze past the man. “Have you seen her?”

The man lifted his head.

He was not a lost soul, but a soul possessed. The spectral eyes behind his eyes burned like white-hot flames; the grin behind his own mouth twisted into a leer.

“Get in line,” the man said, his words sounding like a voice layered upon another voice. “A fine peach like that, I intend to finish pitting it myself before it’s wasted on a British prick.”

Proctor swung his fist at the man’s face, as a reflex. Despite the stink of rum, the man laughed, easily dodging the blow. Proctor pulled back his fist to punch again, but stopped when the man lifted his hand to show the fascine knife he held there. The wicked curve on one end matched the uneven smirk on the drunk’s doubled face. A stain on the sharp edge might have been blood.

“Oh, lookee, the Quaker’s angry,” the man taunted in the same echoey voice. “I’m shaking in my boots.” He looked down. “Oh, wait, I’m not wearing any boots.”

While the man admired his own rough humor, Proctor drew on his talent, swallowing the power like a man about to drown.

“He only is my rock, and my salvation,” he quoted from the Psalms. “He is my defense.”

The drunk sneered, laughing at Proctor. “What good do you think a Bible verse can do you?”

The last syllable was not even out of his mouth when a fist-sized rock that Proctor had summoned from a pile across the yard slammed into the side of the man’s head.

The ghost must’ve felt it coming, turning the man’s head at the very last second, because the rock only glanced off his cheek instead of laying him flat. It threw him off-balance, though. Proctor hurled his body into the man, knocking him to the ground, where he gripped his wrist and slammed it down until the knife came loose. He jammed his knee into the drunk’s gut and pinned his throat to the ground, squeezing as hard as he could while he lifted his head and scanned the tent.

“Deborah?” he called out. “Deborah!”

Something like icicles pierced his arm, and he gasped. The man, too drunk and stunned to resist hard, did little to free himself, but the cursed spirit possessing him thrashed like a cat in a sack. Its arms flailed, struggling to get a grip on Proctor, stabbing chills through him every time it grabbed at him.

The spirit’s bright eyes flared brighter, and the sneering grin on its face twisted into laughter of triumph. Proctor’s right arm, pinning the man’s neck, went tingly and numb. All the air rushed out of his lungs.

The dead soul had grabbed hold of his own living spirit and was tearing it out of the flesh of his arm. The numbness shot up his arm and through his shoulder, almost touching his heart.

With a choked cry of fear, Proctor rolled off the possessed man and away from him, tearing his soul free from the spectral grasp. Blood thundered back through his arm, followed by burning pain.

The other man rolled over to his knees, holding his throat, gasping for breath. The spirit trapped in his body
corkscrewed around, trying to drag him back into the attack on Proctor.

When he and Deborah had first seen the curse, and tried to cure the volunteer in Gravesend, they had stopped short because they feared destroying the man’s own soul.

Proctor didn’t stop to worry about this man’s original soul. The original spell, which Deborah had taken from the gospels, came back to his tongue.

“By the finger of God, I cast out devils!”

He felt the power flow through him, filling his numb arm with life, and he pointed it at the man on the ground. He saw the spirit start to rise out of the body, and his joy rose with it.

But it was not to be so easy. In the same instant, the man stirred, and Proctor hesitated, afraid for his soul. The spirit snapped back into the body of the drunk, who lurched to his feet. The spirit trapped inside him gave him an oddly doubled image, as if Proctor’s eyes were crossed. The outer body was sluggish and heavy-limbed, but the inner body twitched like flame, white-hot and quick with rage. When he spoke, the doubled voice became one, echoing from far away, as if through the canyon of the man’s throat.

“What do I care for your Bible verses when I am trapped in this hell?” it growled

He lunged at Proctor, raising his fist.

“By the finger of God, I cast out devils!” Proctor cried again. The spirit was willful, but the flesh was weak, and Proctor stepped inside the drunk’s slow lurch to punch him in the jaw.

The man flew backward, falling over a cot and breaking its leg, to lie motionless on the ground. There was a burst of dust, or maybe a flash of pale light, and then nothing.

Proctor shook his hand, which hurt knuckles-to-wrist. “All right, so that was more my fist than my finger.”

He stepped cautiously over the body. After a second he poked it with his toe, ready to leap back. But nothing happened.
The cursed spirit was gone, and Proctor did not think it had gone to a better place.

“God forgive my soul,” he whispered. Now that the fear had left him, the possible evilness of his act appalled him. He knelt quickly beside the body, checking for a pulse, for a breath, and found none. The shock of breaking the curse might have killed the man as well as casting out the other soul. Both were victims of the German necromancer who had placed the curse on them.

The sound of gunshots outside snapped him to attention. “Deborah!” he cried, spinning around, checking every corner of the tent, under the scattered piles of blankets. He was both relieved and alarmed when he didn’t find her.

He ran out the entrance and saw the officer who had been eating breakfast calmly riding out the gate on Proctor’s horse. He sprinted after him for a few steps then stopped when he realized how futile it was.

During his fight, the rest of the fort had emptied, even of the drunks, who staggered, arms linked, out of sight, down the road, or ran singly, like thieves caught in the act, across the sodden fields and away.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you a Friend?”

Proctor turned at the voice; it was the officer’s slave, who had been left behind. Proctor considered answering that he was no Quaker, but thought better of it.