Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (11 page)

He looked at the folds in the paper then laid out the other letters that had been in the bundle. Wondering if the map had been folded along with one of the other letters, he took the pages one by one and laid them atop the map. The creases on only one of the letters exactly matched the map's folds, as if the same careful hand had folded them at the same time. It was the letter written to someone known only as Elizabeth.

John felt a surge of fresh energy as he looked at the letter and the map. The references to greatness and obedience to a master, to a ship named
Astarte,
and now the lines that radiated off the gables of the house, one of which intersected the New World at what looked like the location of modern day Salem. All of it was vague, but he knew he was onto something here, something strange. He didn't have any idea what it meant yet or where it might lead, but he knew in his gut he had to start pulling this thread to see where it led, and he had to do it as fast as he could. He couldn't articulate why, but he believed at some level beyond intellectual understanding that wherever this went, it was going to take him to Sarah.

He knew it was against library policy, but he snuck his cell phone out of his pocket and used it to take pictures of both documents. Then he returned the documents to the box and rang the buzzer that would summon Joe D'Angelo to come let him out and to return the boxes to their proper places in the stacks.

JOHN WAS BACK IN HIS CAR BY HALF PAST NINE,
but sat in the parking lot, the engine turned off, and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He didn't know where to go or what to do. He'd learned a little bit more about the Coven, at least
maybe
he had, but how was it possibly going to help him find Sarah?

He needed to do something, but there was nothing he
could
do. He had no information, no course of action. In addition, he knew he needed to at least show his face at the
Salem News
and pretend to work. However, instead of heading straight to the paper, he drove back to his house. Needing to take a run to try to banish his exhaustion and wear down some of the anxiety that was going to render him totally useless if he couldn't get it under control pretty quickly, he changed into his running clothes, did a cursory stretch, and then headed out. As he began to jog, he tried to empty his mind of conscious thoughts about Sarah or Elizabeth Turner or
Astarte,
and instead let his inquiries and associations run free and seek some order on their own.

The drawing of the house and the lines coming off the gables and extending around the world had disturbed him for reasons he couldn't articulate. It seemed to have lodged itself in his mind, because when he closed his eyes, he could still see it as if it had been burned into his retina. Who exactly was Elizabeth Turner? What part of England had she come from? Who had her master been? What was the significance of the name of the ship on which she had sailed to the New World? Was it just coincidence that she ship's name,
Astarte,
was also the name of one of the angels who had helped Lucifer in his rebellion against God in
Paradise Lost?
And even so, what could any of this have to do with Sarah?

Why did he have such a strong compulsion to dig into history when his daughter was missing in the present? Was it because he just needed to do something to feel like he was making progress, or were his instincts guiding him in the right direction? And what about the dream or the vision he'd had on two different nights of the girl walking on a dirt lane and a house that looked almost exactly as though it could be the one in the drawing? And what about seeing Sarah in the window of that house? What did it mean?

He remembered the idea he'd discussed with Amy before Sarah was abducted, going to England to try and find Jessica Lodge, and then he began to wonder whether his dream was somehow related to Sarah's current location? Was it possible she had been spirited out of the country? Certainly if his suspicions regarding Jessica Lodge were accurate and if Jessica was the rumored Inquisitor of the Salem Coven, then she might have had Sarah abducted and flown to England, to some place where the Coven still operated in protected secrecy. Jessica certainly had the financial means to have pulled it off; after all she had her own jet.

He made a mental note to check with the FAA to see if Jessica Lodge's jet had flown back into the US at any time in the past few days and if it had departed again, and if it had, where its flight plan said it was heading.

He let his eyes wander along with his thoughts as he ran through the streets of Salem, past the familiar, ancient houses, so many of which dated back to the 1700s. The town, which so often seemed overly full of tourists, especially during the two months preceding Halloween, now appeared blessedly empty, since Halloween had just been a week earlier. He passed Wicca Wonders, the occult shop that had been run by Abigail Putnam, the woman who had been the head of Salem Coven and who had supposedly reported to the rumored Inquisitor.

At this point it seemed so impossible that it was almost like recalling a strange dream to think back to the night he killed Abigail along with the other leaders of the Coven. He still couldn't begin to explain exactly what triggered it when some extreme combination of anger and fear and God only knew what else had allowed him to absorb the spirit of Rebecca Nurse and the spirit of a young woman named Melissa Blake. Also, attached to Melissa Black had been a chain of other spirits, all of whom had been sacrificed by the Coven, and somehow the combined force of all those spirits had joined with his own and coalesced into some kind of occult power. And he had used that power to destroy those Coven leaders.

Once the killing was over, the power had rushed out of his body as quickly as it had come. It left him dazed and utterly exhausted and, just like right now, wondering whether any of what he thought had just happened had really happened. Only the ravaged and torn bodies of the dead Coven leaders convinced him that it had been absolutely real.

John closed his eyes and picked up his speed as recalled how he had taken Captain Card down into the Coven's catacombs to show him the bodies, at the time never suspecting that Card was also an imposter, who himself must have been part of the Coven. Only if Card was a member of the Coven, why had he told John there was one more member of the Coven who had not been in the catacombs that night? Card had called that person the Inquisitor, the most powerful member, one who made sure the other members of the Coven remained true to their sworn purpose.

What motive could a member of the Coven have for leading him deeper to the truth? He had wondered more than once if it was even true, but in his guts he had the strong sense it was. Did the Coven actually
want
him to go to England to look for Jessica Lodge? Was there something about Salem itself, perhaps the fact John's ancestors were buried here and their physical proximity was what had allowed him to tap into that extraordinary spiritual power? Perhaps the Coven realized that in England, so far from those ancestral graves, he would be powerless and easy to kill.

He shook his head in confusion and picked up his pace even more. He could feel his heart beating hard, his lungs bellowing the cold air in and blowing it out, his legs pumping, burning out at least for the moment, the effects of his exhaustion. There simply
had
to have been a purpose behind Card's revelation, he told himself, and he needed to figure out what it was. Also, after Card had taken such pains to mislead him into thinking he was a policeman, why had Card suddenly stopped returning John's phone calls and thereby abandoned his carefully crafted charade? It would have been so easy to have kept John in the dark. What was the point to letting him learn he'd been duped?

Was there something about restarting the paper that could have triggered Card's disappearance? Was restarting the paper the thing that had triggered Sarah's abduction? He turned a corner and ran hard down another long familiar street. He saw the houses and businesses and restaurants without really seeing anything. He could feel his brain corkscrewing into questions, getting further and further into a web of confusion where there were absolutely no answers. He wanted to stop, pull out his hair, and scream.

But then he did stop. Dead. Right in the middle of the street, and a car behind him honked its horn and swerved. John ignored the horn and stared straight ahead at the thing that had caused him to make such an abrupt halt.

It was a sign for the entrance into the compound where the House of the Seven Gables was located. He couldn't see the house from here, but its shape was in his mind. How many times had he seen it looming dark and austere and spooky because of its sharp angles and the steep gables for which it was named? As he stared at the sign, his mind started to race in a new direction and he began making connections.

The House of the Seven Gables wasn't the house from his dreams, and it wasn't the house in the drawing he'd found that morning in the library,
but it was so similar.
Just like the many other historic houses and building in Salem, he'd seen the House of the Seven Gables so many times over so many years that he had taken it for granted, but now in his mind he was seeing it,
really
seeing it for the first time in a long time.

He remembered the journal he had found on a previous visit to the Phillips Library when he had gone with Rich Harvey. Written by his ancestor, Captain John Bancroft Andrews, the journal had talked about Captain Andrews's friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. This in turn reminded John of another connection that hadn't seemed vitally important. Hawthorne's cousin had built the House of the Seven Gables, and that cousin's name had been Captain John Turner, the same man who, John surmised, had married a woman named Elizabeth Turner, as in
Asthoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner.
Was it the same Elizabeth Turner as the woman in the letters? What were the odds in a small community like Salem there could have been two Elizabeth Turners?

Earlier that day he'd skipped past his great-great-grandfather's journal because he'd read it on the other occasion he'd visited the library, but now he was thinking those boxes of recently discovered papers he had gone through just that morning at the Phillips had included some of Hawthorne's secret writing done at the end of his life. Hawthorne had wanted those truths to be shared, but he had also intended those writings be found only after his death when his family could no longer be harmed as an act of vengeance.

And hadn't those recently found boxes of old letters and journals been taken from the House of the Seven Gables? The house was a tourist magnet, John thought. Where in that structure, which had been crawled through by so many hundreds of thousands of visitors, could those documents have been hidden for all those years? And if those letters and journals had just been discovered recently, what else remained to be discovered? And hadn't Hawthorne, just like Andrews himself, been descended from some of the people who had been part of the original Salem Coven.

After all, Hawthorne's family name had originally been Hathorne. John Hathorne had been one of the original judges in the witchcraft trials and one of the original Salem Coven members. Deeply shamed by his ancestor's involvement in those despicable trials, Nathaniel Hawthorne had changed his name to disguise his relationship. John Andrews's own family bore the same stain because on his mother's side he was descended from the Putnams. Edward Putnam had been deeply implicated in the witchcraft trials and a member of the original Salem Coven, and yet another of his ancestors, Ann Putnam, had been one of Rebecca Nurse's original accusers.

John suspected that one of the reasons Rebecca Nurse had picked him and chosen to appear to him was that he bore the blood of the Putnams in his veins, in addition to the blood of Captain John Bancroft Andrews. John found the whole line of inquiry uncomfortable, but he could not help but wonder whether his Putnam blood was what had made it possible for him to open the secret doors that led to the Coven's lair beneath the streets and cemeteries of Salem. Did his Putnam blood also carry some deeper stain, one that in the wrong circumstances might make him susceptible to being seduced by the Coven's dark call? Did he share that trait in some dark hidden recess of his being? He had wondered about that more than a few times in the past two weeks, but each time the question arose he'd tried to shove it down into the back of his mind, as if keeping it unasked would mean it couldn't be true.

As John continued to stare at the entrance to the House of the Seven Gables compound, he could feel some force pulling at him that seemed as powerful and impossible to resist as gravity. He
needed
to go into the compound. He
needed
to see the house up close, maybe even go inside, but he had no idea what he hoped to accomplish if he did. The House of the Seven Gables was a tourist mecca. There was public access to most parts of the house, and only a few other parts of the house were closed off. Even the parts that were closed to the public would have been searched tirelessly over and over through the years. So the question surfaced again, where would those recently discovered documents have come from?