Chain of Souls (Salem VI)
Read Chain of Souls (Salem VI) Online
Authors: Jack Heath,John Thompson
ALSO BY BY JACK HEATH AND JOHN THOMPSON
SALEM VI: REBECCA'S RISING
Published by Pressque Publishing, Charleston, SC
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or have been used to create this work of art. Any similarities to actual persons, living or dead, events, etc. is completely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2013 Jack Heath and John Thompson Cover image copyright © Pressque Publishing
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, permitted by law. For information contact: Pressque Publishing, Charleston, SC.
Hardcover: | ISBN-13: 978-0-9889483-3-4 |
Typography by Torborg Davern
THE GIRL'S FEET KICKED UP SMALL PUFFS OF
dust as she walked down the dirt lane. The greens, blues, and reds of her plaid skirt seemed to pulse with every step, and the wind tossed the blazer covering her white blouse, each gust making it rise and writhe as if trying to escape the strain of her backpack straps. Her hair was dark, tied in a neat ponytail, and her face had a youthful glow that betrayed her age. She was at best thirteen, maybe fourteen.
The sky overhead was a swirl of heavy gray clouds that seemed to threaten rain, yet the path was hard and bone dry. An ancient stone wall ran along beside the lane; and beyond, the ground rose to what should have been a verdant meadow. Instead, sheep grazed on scabby brown grass that clung to the hillside.
The man looked down on the scene with growing dread. Something was terribly wrong. He called to the girl, imploring her to turn around, to go back to wherever she had come, but his voice, barely escaping his mouth, faded into the heavy gauze of the approaching storm. He tried to run after her, but his movements were slow and restrained, like a fly trapped in ether.
This was a dream, he
knew
it was a dream, but through the horror of his past he understood that something about this dream was more, was real. The man cried out, screaming at the top of his lungs, but the girl kept walking.
Up ahead of her an enormous oak webbed the ground with twisted shadows, its barren limbs catching what little light there was, and deeper, beyond the edge of the shadows, was pitch black, as if some terrible secret was hiding in the darkness, waiting for the girl there—something he could feel, something he knew with all his senses was horrible beyond words, that related to another place, another girl.
Suddenly, his dream changed, and he saw the place where he had found the other girl. It was a room of white tiles with shackles set into the walls, the girl's nude body sagging in the chains, her belly slit open and her intestines spilling obscenely, the floor pooled with blood. The young girl, the one with the backpack, was walking into the exact same fate.
John Andrews bolted awake, his body tense with panic, his heart pounding, his pillow and sheets soaked with his sweat. Beside him Amy gripped his shoulder and switched on the bedside lamp.
"John," she said, her voice soft yet urgent. "It's okay. You were having a dream."
Andrews pulled up his knees and brought his head forward, balling himself up like a child hiding from the world. "The Coven," he groaned.
"It's over," Amy assured him as she worked her fingers into his shoulders, trying to unknot the muscles. "They're all dead, all of them. They can't hurt anyone anymore."
John tried to focus on the warm light from the lamp, the reassuring touch of Amy's hands on his shoulders, on the words she was speaking. More than anything, he wanted to believe her and be assured the Coven had finally been destroyed.
He was safe in his bed on Pickering Wharf in Salem, Massachusetts, he told himself. He wasn't on some dusty lane in god-knows-where. There wasn't a girl in danger. Amy was right. The Coven was gone. After all, hadn't he seen the bodies of the leaders? There was no mistaking the fact that they were dead because he was the one who had killed them, all of them except his friend Rich Harvey, who had killed himself, and he had seen that with his own eyes, too.
It was hard to imagine that all of those things had taken place just a week earlier. Already it seemed like another lifetime or another world because the discoveries had been so horrifying, the violence so unbelievable.
John knew that over the past week his mind had shut down, almost like it had been shocked into a state of suspended animation. He hadn't thought about the Coven; he hadn't relived the bloody scenes. He had just gone through his days with his mind almost blank, getting up, taking long walks, eating, sleeping, never allowing himself to process the atrocities of the previous weeks.
Now he realized he was starting to come out of it and re-enter the real world, and he was enough a student of psychology to know that nightmares were a natural part of reawakening. This bad dream wouldn't be the last one, and it was probably perfectly normal.
Only something nagged at him. He remembered something Captain Card said when they were alone together in the underground warrens of the Coven. John hadn't thought about it until now, but he was sure that Card said there had been a seventh member of the Coven. Card, a Massachusetts State Police detective, had been very cryptic and tight-lipped, and the few things he had let slip seemed to have only leaked out by accident. John wracked his brain to recall what else Card had said. He recalled something about the fact that the ultimate leader of a Coven was apparently called the Inquisitor, and hadn't Card also said that all the Covens were organized the same way?
All the Covens, plural? The word had sat in his brain for the past week like a cancer, silent and waiting to be discovered. John felt a sickness deep inside. His mind reeled and images and memories of visions past—visions of Rebecca Nurse—came flooding back. As hard as he had tried at first to deny those visions of his long-dead relative, he had finally accepted that they were real. Now the same part of him that knew Rebecca Nurse had been real knew what he had just seen was no dream. The girl was real and she was still walking, just entering the deep shade beneath the ancient tree. What waited for her there was the same evil he had defeated before; he could feel it. That meant the Coven might be gone from Salem, but it wasn't destroyed.
John sat up and turned to face Amy. "What?" she asked, seeing the alarm etched on his face.
"It's not over. It's not even close to being over."