Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (15 page)

Earlier in the afternoon, not knowing what else to do, John had brought Faust back to his house and then left him there for a time when he went into the
Salem News.
When he'd gotten there he'd spoken with Jack Daniels, Lucinda Jenkins, Jackie McKinney, and Tim Monahan, apologizing for his absence from the paper at such a critical time. As soon as he said that, they told him that earlier that morning, two Boston policemen had shown up at the paper to ask him questions relating to the missing persons report filed by Sarah's television station. Evidently the police visit had served as enough of a reminder of John's personal problems that his absence hadn't upset anyone.

After speaking to the staff, John had taken Amy into his office, closed the door, warned her to keep her expression deadpan and not exclaim, and then he'd told her everything that had happened that morning. They had agreed to meet with Faust together over dinner and make him explain who he was, who he worked for, as well as everything he knew about John and Sarah.

Now, John reached across and refilled the priest's glass with more red wine, eager to loosen the priest's tongue and hear everything Faust had to say. Up to this point, the conversation had been polite and inconsequential, and each time John had tried to ask more penetrating questions, the priest had deflected. John was struggling to smother his growing anger and frustration, but he also had the impression the priest had been taking his and Amy's measure, just as John and Amy had been trying to figure out Faust.

Perhaps the priest was trying to figure out what to tell them, whether they could be trusted with the information he had to impart, whether he needed to be blunt or diplomatic. For his part, John needed information, and he was about to get rude, although the thought also occurred to him that getting rude with an armed killer might not be the best approach.

The priest was in his fifties, John guessed, but he had a wiry body that seemed to carry no fat, and he moved with the grace and quickness of a man who was in excellent physical shape. With his short-cropped bristle of gray hair, intense blue eyes, and narrow face, he didn't exactly support the image of a friendly priest. All in all, John thought Faust looked much more like a soldier than a man of religion. In fact, Faust's accent, combined with his nose, which was hooked and aggressive and uneven enough to suggest it had been broken more than once, made John think of a Gestapo officer from an old WWII movie. Several times when John had glanced at Amy during the early part of dinner, he could sense her wariness of the priest.

To the degree that Faust seemed to sense John and Amy's uneasiness and the questions that were churning in their brains, it didn't seem to create any sense of urgency to explain himself. It was only after Faust had eaten every morsel on his plate and started to sip his freshened glass of wine that he nodded to Amy. "My thanks again for a very lovely dinner."

He turned to John. "Now we need to talk of more serious matters. I know you're eager for answers."

John, barely able to contain his impatience, managed a tight smile. "I was wondering when we were going to get to that," he said, burning to hear everything the man knew about Sarah.

"Are you a religious man?" Faust asked.

"Hardly," John said, swallowing his frustration, but realizing Faust wasn't going to be rushed. "I was raised Catholic, but I've been pretty much an agnostic most of my adult life."

Faust nodded. "And you?" he asked Amy.

"Basically the same. I was raised in the Lutheran church, but I don't practice."

"Has anything changed for you in the past month?"

John scowled. "I hope this isn't some sort of attempted reintroduction to Catholicism. I want to talk about my daughter."

Faust gave him a hard look. "It's not a reintroduction to religion at all. Please answer my question."

"Well, of course things have changed, but you knew the answer to that question before you asked it."

"How would you explain what happened to you?"

"I don't have a goddamn clue."

"Sure you do."

"Okay, I was invaded by a spirit."

Faust nodded. "We call it 'invested.' It was the spirit of Rebecca Nurse, correct?"

John tightened his lips, but he nodded. "How do you know all this? And who is
we?"

"I'll answer your questions shortly, but let me ask a few more."

John shook his head and drummed his fingers on the table.

"So did you ever encounter this spirit before it invested you?"

John pursed his lips, but answered, "Yes."

"And did she reveal anything to you?"

"Yes."

"May I ask what?"

John looked at Amy, his eyes full of anger and frustration, but she gave him an encouraging nod.

"It was very confusing because I had a concussion, but I think she showed me how to open a secret door that led to the Coven's underground lair. And then she took me on some kind of," he raised his hands to show that he was groping for the right words, "some kind of tour through time."

Faust nodded, encouraging him to go on.

"We went back to the day she was arrested by Edward Putnam and George Corwin, and then we went to a secret meeting between those two and some other people from early Salem when they swore a covenant to worship Satan."

"And then could you please tell me what happened the night you went down into the catacombs to rescue," he tipped his head toward Amy, "you I believe."

Amy nodded, and John went on. "A man who I had believed to be one of my best friends, Rich Harvey, went down with me. I thought he was coming to help me. I had no idea that he was trying to deliver me to the Coven."

"And what happened when you got to wherever you were going?"

"There was a room, like a paneled dining room with mahogany walls and oriental rugs, and the leaders of the Coven were sitting around a table like they were just having a nice dinner, but there was a big door that opened onto this other room." John closed his eyes and shook his head, and he saw Amy's face go pale as she was reminded of the same thing.

"I know this is very difficult," Faust prodded. "But it's also very important. Please go on."

"The walls and floor of this room were white tile, like a shower room. Shackles were set in the walls, and I could see two people—they looked like teenagers. They were naked and dead, and their bodies had been terribly disfigured." John took a deep breath. "The walls and the floor were smeared with so much blood . . . and then I also saw Amy. She too was shackled. Cabby Corwin, a Salem policeman, was starting to torture her."

John bowed his head and closed his eyes, wishing he could permanently erase every vestige of memory from that horrible night.

"What impressions did you have?" Faust asked.

John looked up. "What are you talking about!" he snapped. "What impressions? Are you joking? I wanted to kill those people!"

Faust held up a calming hand, and Amy reached across and took John's wrist and squeezed.

"Did the members of the Coven appear to fear you when you first walked in?"

John tried to remember, and after a second he shook his head. "They seemed pleased, like they were feeling very cocky and thought they had somehow beaten me."

Faust nodded and smiled. "I'm sure they did. But can you tell me what happened next?"

"My friend Rich hit me over the head, and when I came to I was shackled in the tile room."

"And?"

"What I said before. When Corwin started to torture Amy I felt my anger spike like it had never spiked before. I felt, I don't know,
different,
like I was split into two parts. One part was fear; the other part was pure rage. And then I looked over and saw Rebecca Nurse holding my hand. She told me something she had told me before but I'd never understood."

"And what was that?" Faust asked.

"That
I was the weapon"

Faust nodded, and John could feel the man's intensity rising, almost like heat from a fireplace. "Okay," Faust prodded. "What happened next?"

"I felt Rebecca flow into me, but then I felt something else, and I looked to my left and saw this other spirit, and I knew who she was."

Faust's eyes went a little wider. "Yes, go on."

"It was a local girl named Melissa Blake who'd disappeared, and I felt her flow into me."

Faust was looking at him much more intently all of a sudden. "Say that again. Think back, and try to be very clear. You felt invested by a second presence?"

John nodded. "Yes."

Faust nodded, squinting slightly as if he was suddenly skeptical. "And then what happened."

"I had been shackled to the wall, like I said, but when both spirits came into me, the shackles exploded."

"You're quite sure of that."

"I know what an explosion looks like."

"Sorry, it's just that details are important."

"I'm not sure why that detail is any more important that the rest. If I told these things to anybody else they'd put me on Thorazine."

Faust folded his hands on the table and gave John a look that made him fall silent. "I fully expected you to tell me you were invested by the spirit of Rebecca Nurse, but I did not expect you to tell me about the second spirit. You should not have been able to break out of those shackles, even with one spirit investing you, and maybe not even with two."

"There's more. There's one thing I forgot."

Faust's eyebrows went up again. "Yes?"

"When Melissa Blake held my left hand, it wasn't just her. I could see a whole chain of other spirits linking their hands to hers. The line went on and on. I couldn't count them all, but I knew who they were. They were other people who had been killed by the Coven over the years."

"You actually
saw
this?"

John nodded. "How did you feel?"

"Incredibly powerful, like I had power inside me that, if I'd just let it go at once, would have blown up the whole city block above us."

"Dear God," Faust said, almost to himself.

"What?" Amy asked.

"Astounding. This explains so much."

THE TABLE WAS LARGE AND THE MOST UNUSUAL
shape she had ever seen. It seemed to be a hexagon, but instead of having points, each spoke of the hexagon ended in an inward curve so that someone could pull up a chair and nestle into the curve. The table was covered with a tablecloth. Six candelabras burned, one at the base of each spoke, each one holding six candles.

Seven other people sat at the table along with Sarah, each of them at the end of one of the spokes, except for the one spoke where Jessica Lodge sat beside another person, a man. Sarah sat along the side of the spoke nearest Jessica Lodge. She was dressed in a white dress with long sleeves and a high collar. Her hair had been put up in a fancy coil that she would never have chosen herself.

The others at the table were dressed in similar formal clothing, only theirs was all black. They were all quite a bit older than Sarah, probably in their sixties or seventies, and several in their eighties, she guessed. Jessica Lodge wore a long black dress with a swirl of black sequins that went from her shoulder to her hip. At her throat she wore a necklace with a ruby pendant the size of a thumbnail. She looked as regal as a visiting queen. Beside her sat a man with wavy white hair, a prominent nose as straight as a ruler, a chin that jutted like the prow of a ship, and steely eyes that made him look like someone who had been in command of others all his life.

The other women, of whom there were two, had neatly coiffed gray hair, equally expensive jewelry, and long gowns. The rest of the men were also distinguished with the kind of features typified by tight skin over good bones, pampered faces that suggested they were accustomed to a certain amount of wealth, power, and control, and they wore tuxedos and starched shirts.

The aura around the table was so stilted and formal that Sarah felt like a little girl going through some sort of church confirmation ceremony. The part of her brain that was capable of having that thought also told her that this whole thing was ridiculous and that she ought to get up and excuse herself, but the other part of her found it so easy just to go along.

They were sitting in a dining room of some sort, but it wasn't the formal dining room on the first floor of the large country house where Jessica and Sarah were staying. This dining room was in the basement, down a narrow staircase and then at the end of long passageway. It seemed like a room that few visitors to the house would ever get to see, and Sarah wondered why anyone would have such a lovely dining room so far underground and so far from a kitchen. Sarah didn't even know if Jessica owned the house, but for some reason she thought she did, which was odd because she had always been under the impression that Jessica lived in Salem.

The well-honed TV-news-journalist part of Sarah's mind came up with those kinds of thoughts and asked those kinds of questions, but it had to work
so
hard because the larger part of her mind felt like a dry sponge and it just accepted all of this as normal. Sarah felt the same sluggishness she'd felt for days, as if pushing thoughts through her brain was like sucking molasses through a straw.