Gallows Hill (25 page)

"Dear God, please, help him," she whispered. "Please, don't let them kill him."

She felt her own darkness descending as the world grew dim and her knees began to buckle beneath her. She was going to faint, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it, and when she collapsed, she would be hanged—executed like the witch she must be to have drawn this dear, good person into such a nightmare and caused the terrible violence that now filled the clearing.

"Please, help him," she murmured again.

And to her astonishment somebody responded to her prayer.

"What do you think you're doing!" a man's voice bellowed. "Has every one of you gone crazy? Back off and let me see what you've done to these poor kids!"

It's Governor Phips, Sarah thought, hovering between lifetimes, and then, just before she lost consciousness, she realized that it was Ted Thompson who was removing the noose from her neck and lowering her into the upraised arms of her mother.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sarah set the vase of flowers on the windowsill of the hospital room before turning her gaze apprehensively to the boy in the bed.

He did not look as bad as she had anticipated. His head was bandaged, and an inverted plastic bag was dripping clear liquid into a tube that was attached to one arm, but the eyes that gazed back at her were bright, and the face, though smudged with yellowing bruises, was unmistakably Charlie's.

"How did you know where to find me?" Sarah asked him.

"I looked in my crystal ball," Charlie answered. He started to chuckle and then winced. "I guess it's not smart to laugh when your ribs are broken. The truth is, I couldn't stand having you mad at me, and I wanted to straighten things out. I thought if I phoned you, you'd hang up on me, so I decided to drive over to your place and try to patch things up in person. When I turned onto Windsor Street, I caught sight of Eric's car driving off, with you in it, and that seemed odd, because I'd thought you were finished with Eric."

"I was," Sarah said. "I am."

"All of a sudden I wasn't sure, and I guess—I guess maybe it was jealousy or something." He flushed with obvious embarrassment. "Anyway I decided to follow you to see where you were going, and when the car started up Garrote Hill, I began to get worried, because that's where they throw those wild parties and some bad stuff goes on there. I couldn't imagine you going to a kegger with Eric, not after everything that had happened, so I fell back so that he wouldn't notice my headlights and kept on tailing him. That's how I got there—real simple. All it took was four wheels."

"What you did when you got there was anything but simple," Sarah said. "I couldn't believe it when you started telling them about Salem."

"I was trying to buy time," Charlie told her. "Like I said, I hung back, and by the time I pulled into the parking area, all hell had broken loose. They had you up on that footstool, and Cindy Morris was slinging your cat around, and the way everybody was screaming and milling around, I thought I'd walked into a scene from a novel by Stephen King. When Eric and Kyra couldn't break things up, they took off in Eric's car, and I gave them the benefit of the doubt and figured they were going to get help. I knew that I couldn't control things for very long, I just hoped it would be long enough for them to call in reinforcements."

"The way you got everyone to listen to you—"

"It's not hard to trigger mass hypnosis in a setting like that," Charlie explained. "Those kids had already almost worked themselves into a trance state. The music and flickering firelight had a lot to do with it, and of course they'd all been drinking. And I think they were karmically ready for it. They needed to mentally relive that nightmare in Salem so that they could put that lifetime behind them and get on with the job of becoming their true selves in this lifetime. They are probably all pretty normal people, except for Debbie. That girl needs help, but hopefully not from Mr. Lamb."

"I can't believe that none of them remember it," Sarah said. "At least that's what they all say. Everything that happened on the hill that night is a blank to them."

"It's possible that's true," Charlie said. "They were pretty well sloshed, and past-life regression can be traumatic. Poison from events that are buried in the subconscious can pour out like pus from a festering wound. Psychologists use that for healing, but a lot of people aren't ready for it, so they block it out afterward. The relief from the pressure is there, but they don't realize why."

"How did you know how to do it?" Sarah asked him.

"The weight-loss hypnosis tapes taught me the basics, and I told you my mom let me practice on her so she'd stop smoking. I regressed her back to a lifetime when she was the Marlboro Man, and that was the end of her awful habit."

"You're making that up!" Sarah said accusingly. "Don't you ever stop joking, even when you're in a hospital bed?"

"Fat people joke," Charlie said. "It's part of our defense system."

"You don't ever have to defend yourself against me," Sarah told him. "And actually"—she leaned closer to study his face—"Charlie, I think you've lost weight!"

"Already?" Charlie asked in surprise.

"Already," Sarah said, as astonished as he was. For the first time since she had known him, she could see the faint outline of his cheekbones.

"How about that!" Charlie exclaimed in delight, reaching up self-consciously to finger his jawline. "I hoped it might happen once I completed my karma as Giles Corey, but I didn't think it would be this fast. Give me another week, and I may be as lean and handsome as Eric Garrett."

"Bite your tongue!" Sarah said.

"That's my line."

"Well, now it's mine. If you start resembling Eric, you're out of my life."

"He's not all that bad," Charlie said. "And neither is Kyra. They're not evil kids, either one of them. They're just messed up, because of their messed-up parents. As it turned out, by bringing Mr. Thompson to the rescue, they may have saved both our lives."

"Eric has Ted convinced that it was only a hazing," Sarah said. "He explained it was sort of an initiation ceremony to make me part of the 'in' group, and it got out of hand. Of course Ted wants to believe that, and so do the other parents, and I couldn't see anything to be gained by trying to refute it. Everybody blames what happened on the liquor. The football team is in trouble at school for breaking training, and a lot of the kids got grounded, and from what I hear, the Reverend Morris is planning to preach a sermon on the evils of alcohol. Other than for that, it's like the whole thing is already history."

"Which it is," Charlie said. "Twice over—first the premiere and now the rerun. Except that a couple of centuries went by between the showings."

"I've been trying to put the pieces together," Sarah said. "I'm willing to accept that you may have been Giles Corey, because it was his courage that ended the witch-hunt in Salem, and it was yours that ended it here in Pine Crest. And if Cindy was Sarah Good, that would explain her weird obsession with the doll she named Dorcas. And, I have to admit, the other cheerleaders did respond to hypnosis as if they were victims of the witch-hunt, although I suppose it's possible they were mimicking each other the way the 'afflicted children' did in Salem."

"What I can't figure out is how you fit in," Charlie said. "You must have played an important role in that past time, or they wouldn't all have ganged up on you in this lifetime."

"I know who I was," Sarah said. "In that other lifetime I was one of the 'afflicted children.'"

"What makes you think that?" Charlie asked her.

"I know it from my dreams. The visions I saw in the crystal ball were of the future, but my dreams were memories of the past, and all of those dreams were experienced from the viewpoint of a child. The victims had reason to hate me. I triggered the witch-hunt!"

"You couldn't have been Ann Putnam," Charlie said, frowning. "Ann received her punishment in her own lifetime. She was excommunicated, which was a fate worse than death in Salem Village, and then she became a semi-invalid. Before she died, she was finally granted Communion, but only after she delivered a public confession and begged God's forgiveness."

"I know," Sarah said. "And it was that way with most of the others. In general the 'afflicted children' led miserable lives. All except for Betty Parris. Betty didn't even get a slap on the wrist. Her father sent her to Boston to live with relatives, and she had a happy childhood and a wonderful life. Don't the rules of karma say that what goes around comes around? If we don't pay our debts in one lifetime, we pay them in another?"

"Betty was only nine years old," Charlie protested.

"That's not too young to take responsibility for your actions. It was Betty who started the witch-hunt, and Betty who could have stopped it. All she had to do was confess to her father."

"Who may or may not have believed her," Charlie said. "We can't second-guess the past, we can only learn from it. How did your mother react to Eric's story about the hazing?"

"She didn't buy it," Sarah told him. "She took one look at that gallows and announced, "We're out of here!' Rosemary and I are moving back to Ventura. She's already made arrangements to have our furniture shipped as soon as we find a new apartment. And the great thing is that she's been able to get her old job back! She'll be teaching at a different grade level, but at least it will be at the same school."

"What about Mr. Thompson?"

"She seems to have lost all interest in him," Sarah said. "She says he can follow us if he wants to, but she doesn't seem concerned about it. Just like flicking a switch, she's become the old Rosemary. It's like she just can't wait to take control of her life again."

"It's the same with my folks," Charlie said. "Now that our karma has been satisfied, they're making plans to leave Pine Crest as soon as I graduate. Dad says he wants to open another bookstore, but he isn't sure where yet."

"I'm going to miss you," Sarah said.

"When you see me again, I'll be skinny."

"I don't know that I want you to be skinny. I've gotten kind of used to you."

She leaned over the bed to plant a goodbye kiss on his cheek. Instead he reached up and cupped her head in his left hand, so that he was in charge of her kiss and it landed on his lips. It was not, as she would have expected, the fumbling kiss of a boy who was unused to dating but the practiced kiss of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

Charlie released her head and smiled at her astonishment.

"In one of my former lifetimes I was Casanova," he said. "I'll tell you about it when I visit you. Or maybe it would be better to save it for the cruise ship?"

"The choice is yours," Sarah said, trying to keep her voice steady and having a hard time doing it. She drew a long breath to stabilize herself and reached into her purse. "I brought you a little memento to make sure you don't forget me."

"Fat chance of that," Charlie said.

"Stop trying to be funny."

She took out the crystal paperweight and placed it on the windowsill next to the flowers. Sunlight streamed through it, throwing rainbows on the sheets of Charlie's bed.

It was clear and transparent as window glass.

The End