The Necromancer (18 page)
Authors: Kevin
“Susanna,” it croaked with stiff, beckoning arms.
She made a panicked sound which was not quite a
scream or a gasp this time, but something in between. Susanna fell back onto the bank and clawed her way to the top, in spite of her injuries. She started to run, glancing over her shoulder.
Before she had time to turn back to the direction she was 157
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running in, she slammed into something rigid, but muddy. She backed away, pushing off it, and glared into the rotted black face of Phillip’s brother, John, maggots wriggling in the fetid, spongy fl esh of his cheeks.
Susanna looked down at her hands. They were buried in the decaying muscles of his chest and pressing against his cracked and slimy ribs. She could feel his soft cool lungs fi lling the spaces between them as he breathed.
She released a shrill scream and turned to run, but tripped and fell instead.
“Susanna,” he groaned pathetically, creaking his head to one side as if begging for sympathy for his wretched state.
“Help us. You must help us.”
If she wasn’t so utterly terrifi ed of him, she might have felt pity for him at that moment, but she did not.
“Begone!” she yelled, holding her good arm up in front of her face defensively while her bad arm remained limply at her side, numb and dead. “Please...go. Leave me.”
“You must help us,” a raspy voice said to her from behind. Susanna turned around and saw a woman standing beside Phillip Hawks. She too was a cadaver, and the dark bruise around her throat and the way her head dangled from her broken neck onto her shoulder made it apparent how she died.
Susanna looked at the woman’s puffy, blackened face and knew she was looking at Bridget Bishop. (Everyone knew Goody Bishop. There wasn’t a soul in Salem Town or Salem Village that hadn’t heard of her excesses.)
Susanna was surrounded by the three of them now, but they made no efforts to come near her.
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What is this?
she thought
. Am I going mad?
The dead can
no more walk and speak than a tree or a rock. Is this a dream? Has this
all simply been some terrible nightmare from which I may awaken?
“This is no dream,” Phillip said, answering her
unspoken question. “And you are certainly not mad.”
“How...” was all Susanna could say. Then she moved her shoulder. It was all she needed to do. The pain that came was immediate, excruciating, and very real.
“What are you?” she asked Bridget, knowing she
had no choice but to speak with these dead, somehow feeling certain they needed her far too much to dare hurting her.
“What happened to you?”
“We have been murdered unjustly,” Phillip said. “And your husband is the cause.”
“How did you know we were wedded?”
“The dead know many things,” Bridget replied.
“Well,” Susanna snapped back at her, irritated at the obscurity of Bridget’s answer. “I do not know the how’s and why’s of these men’s passings, but I have little doubt that yours was far from unjust.”
“It is true, child,” Bridget said. “I did not live the cleanest of lives. I am not exempt from the Lord’s judgment, but I have been falsely branded a witch and put to death as such. If mayhap I had been allowed to live, I may have changed my ways and treaded the path of the righteous and the wise. But what am I now?—A dead soul damned to walk the earth.”
“The Reverend Blayne—”
John added.
“Your husband is in league with the Devil and his infernal legions and practices the damned art of black magic, with which he has the whole province of Salem bewitched into hurling false accusations and 159
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slander at one another. Innocent people are being tried and executed as witches, and their spirits can fi nd no peace in the earth.”
“We trod the earth undead,” Bridget continued.
“Dead, but living—tormented and aware.”
“Blayne keeps the souls of his victims captive,”
Phillip said, “and they cannot rest until he is burned to death at the stake and the souls set free. Until then, we shall suffer miserably.”
“But I do not know what I can do,” Susanna said. “I am affrighted by him. I know not how I may help. Surely, there must be those better suited to the task.”
“Only you can stop him,” John said. “There is only you. There are no others.”
“But—”
“They come,” Bridget whispered to the others.
Everyone looked at her nervously.
“Who comes?” Susanna asked.
“Do you not hear them?” she hissed. “Do you not feel them? Do you not feel their grime poisoning the air?
“Dear Lord. They come.”
“Who comes?” Susanna asked again.
“The demons,” Phillip answered. “Blayne’s demons have caught up with us.”
“We...m-must...g-go,” John stammered. “Now!”
But before they could, half a dozen cackling demons materialized in the air above them in all their ugliness, swooping at them with tarnished fangs and blood-stained talons.
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Susanna and her undead companions cried out as
the creatures passed by and picked at their heads like hungry vultures circling a slaughter.
“No!” Bridget shrieked as a pair of demons dove at her: one, hooking her rotting crotch through her dress and an eye socket with its claws; the other, clamping its fangs down on her throat while tearing at her breasts and inserting its fi ngers between her ribs, hauling her squirming body up into the ashen sky.
“Bridget!” Phillip cried out as he lurched awkwardly to her assistance only to be seized by three other demons in a similarly brutal manner. He fought against them to the best of his degenerating ability, but they still dragged him skyward; and just as suddenly as the demons appeared from nothing, the seven fl ying fi gures dissolved to nothing.
“You must help me!” John begged Susanna as the last of the creatures made its fi nal descent on him. “I do not wish to go back there!”
But Susanna didn’t know what to do, if she could do anything.
The demon attacked John Hawks from behind as he
stooped over to avoid it and plunged its paws into his back and carried him away by the column of his spine.
Susanna stood in the clearing, dumbfounded, as she watched John Hawks watching her with an expression of loss and terror covering his mildewed face that she knew she would never forget.
And in that moment, he and the demon were gone.
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Roger Harrington’s Journal—
22 August—Martha is dying. Doctor Griggs has, just now, confirmed this. He does not know how much
longer she may live, but I fear it is a short time. She is sleeping peacefully now, and as I gaze upon her I find it most difficult and distressing to believe that she may have closed her eyes for the last time. O, how I have dreaded this. For the longest time I have prayed and tried to hope she would get well again, but now I sit here staring at my beloved, slumbering in what I know will be her death bed, helpless and soon to be alone. I, myself, am feeling weak of late, from illness or lack of food and sleep, I know not which. The strain of the events of this horrid year has most certainly drained me of all vitality. But, I have little concern for myself these days. If Martha passes on, I should not wish to go on without her. Salem is in an unbearable state of chaos. Several days ago, five more people were hanged as witches. Two of them were men I knew and respected. They were no more in league with Satan than I. I should not want to live alone in this house only to bear witness to more cruelty and suffering.
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Susanna stumbled down the narrow dirt road she had found after an hour’s walk from the brook and the site where the demons had snatched Ambrose’s undead
victims. It was midmorning now, or so she fi gured. It was hard to tell since the sky remained uniformly ashen.
Nevertheless, it was a hot, muggy, August morning, for which she suffered more. Her ankle was no better; in fact, it was worse, and her greatly pronounced limp attested to that.
The condition of her shoulder had also worsened, and not only couldn’t she move that arm now, but she couldn’t feel it at all.
She felt faint and listless. Her mind had shut down some miles back, and the road was all she could see or remember. It was as if she had been on this road her whole life, and she yearned for a change of scenery almost as much as she did a drink of water. All she saw were endless stretches of dusty road surrounded by walls of trees.
When will it end?
She wondered.
When will it all end?
I shall never be able to get back
, she thought
. I will die out
here of thirst and starvation, and the buzzards will get to me before my
body is found.
She resigned herself to the defeat of the grave. It made no sense to spend the last of her living hours trudging along this desolate road in hope of getting back to Salem or fi nding a town along the way. She was doomed. Her body and mind were telling her she was doomed. She could feel it in the marrow of her bones.
She sat down on the shoulder of the road and
prepared to die. She fell back, exhausted. Before long, the dreary gray morning faded to black.
*****
shew stone again, but he was tense and knew it didn’t work that well under such conditions. He had to be calm. He tried to 164
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relax using techniques he learned in the East, but he couldn’t, and the visions wouldn’t come—only vague, incoherent images: a man driving a horse and wagon; an old crone; a small, unfamiliar village. Susanna was in none of these scenes, and it distressed him. It could simply be that he was having diffi culty making the stone work, but it usually meant... It usually meant the person he was searching for was dead.
He had scoured the woods looking for her and
found nothing. What did it mean? To where could she have disappeared?
Ambrose’s eyes sprang open and the stone went dim and fell into his lap.
“DAMN!” he growled, grabbing the stone. He looked upward—heavenward. “DAMN YOU!” he screamed.
God was mocking him, he knew, and he was furious.
He almost hurled the stone through the window in his anger, but thought better of it.
He had to calm himself and try the stone later.
*****
It was well past noon now, the sky retaining its bland, uniformly gray shroud. Edward’s shirt was pasted to his back with sweat. It was hot and he was uncomfortable, almost as 165
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much emotionally as physically now that he realized the thing on the side of the road wasn’t a thing at all, but a woman.
He ran over to her and knelt down at her side.
She was in bad shape. Her face was dirty and covered with cuts and bruises, and from what he could tell, so was the rest of her body. But he remained every bit the gentleman and didn’t seek to fi nd out.
She was clad in nothing but a simple nightgown, the hem of which rode up just beneath her slightly bent knees. Her legs were as badly banged up as her face, if not more so. He looked at that face now as a light summer breeze blew several strands of her hair gently across it. He brushed the strands away with the back of his hand and examined her face more critically.
Her lips were chapped and her eyes sunken with dark circles beneath them, but otherwise she was beautiful. Her skin was smooth and devoid of lines. She could be no older than twenty-four or twenty-fi ve, but Edward fi gured she was much younger.
For a moment, all he could do was admire her beauty and wonder what events led to her lying battered on the side of this lonely stretch of road. Then he blinked and shook his head.
What am I doing?
he thought, chastising himself
. The girl
is most plainly hurt—quite possibly dead—and I am...
Her chest seemed as motionless as the rest of her body. It would be too diffi cult to fi nd out if she was breathing by holding the palm of his hand up to her mouth and nose; the breeze was too strong.
He removed his spectacles and pressed his ear against her chest and listened.
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For a moment...nothing. Then...a heartbeat. It was faint, but it was a heartbeat all the same. With his head pressed to her chest, he could feel it rising and falling ever so softly.
Edward closed his eyes and let out a sigh of relief. He lay like that for several seconds, fi nding pleasure in resting his head between her breasts.
She is beautiful
, he heard himself thinking
.
She is so beautiful.
He opened his eyes and sat up, sliding his spectacles back in place.
He knelt down on his knees and was about to lift her when he realized there was something peculiar about the way her right arm looked. It seemed askew. He reached over and felt it, then withdrew as if he had touched something slimy and repulsive.
“Well,” he said, standing up. “I don’t know how it happened, but if I were in your present condition, young lady, I would not wish to be awake when that arm is popped back in place.”
He stepped across her and sat down, kicking off his shoes.
“Please forgive me, young Miss,” he said, sticking one of his feet under her armpit and taking hold of her arm, “but it has to be done.”
He drew a deep breath and pulled. At fi rst, it didn’t seem to budge, so he pulled harder, and that was all it took.