The Salem Witch Society (51 page)

Lean’s knees started shaking as the rush of the immediate danger faded. He sat on the rocks and glanced out over the water at the lights of Portland. Grey was there. There was still hope for Helen.

T
he throbbing ache in her wrists drew Helen back, through a foggy haze, to consciousness. She felt hard boards beneath her, pressing into her hip, as the gauzelike shroud fell away from her mind. She tried to remember where she was. Maybe in her house—or Delia’s room. An image
came storming back: The woman was standing in her doorway, and then she was lunging forward. Delia! Helen tried to call out but was stifled. She worked her jaw to and fro and pressed her tongue forward. A cloth had been stuffed into her mouth. She gagged and coughed.

Tears dripped out of her eyes and ran across her face. She was on her right side. She opened her eyes, and after a few moments the blurry picture of the dark, confined world came into focus. There were a few points of light. She stared at them until the candle flames became clear. At first she thought there were a dozen, but soon she realized it was only the same two candles, reflected back many times over in the dusky panes of glass that surrounded her.

She could see that she was in a small room, circular, with a short wall of exposed planks about three feet high, above which the room was lined all around with windows. There was only darkness beyond. A droning sound was coming from somewhere behind her head: a voice, almost singing, but the words were difficult to discern, foreign, and all running into one another.

Above her, in the flickering candlelight, she could make out a painted compass on the circular ceiling. A metal hook in the center supported a long brass telescope. As she continued to glance about the room, Helen guessed that the entire space was perhaps eight or ten feet across. There was a narrow door directly opposite her, and to one side was a raised platform, the edge of which held a sort of trapdoor that swung up to allow entry from a stairway below. On the other side of the doorway was a bench, upon which was a coiled length of rope and several half-gallon glass jars. These were filled with liquid, and each appeared to hold some dark mass.

A man entered the room and moved to where a candle sat on the black bench. He loosened the belt of his long, dark robe and wriggled out of the garment. Beneath, he was wearing a dark vest over a long-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. The man had a thick, curved blade tucked into his waistband. The sight of it sent a shock through Helen’s mind: the billhook used to carve the cross on Maggie Keene’s chest.

“Your
friend is an unexpectedly troublesome man. … No bother, though.” The man grinned at Helen. “No bother at all.”

He took up the dark cloak and one of the candles. Helen watched him as he exited the room and made his way around, on the walk outside, to a spot directly opposite the door. She twisted her body and craned her neck. From the light of the man’s candle, Helen was able to make out that he had some wooden stick or pole around which he draped the cloak. Then he set about positioning the pole so that, in the candlelight, it cast a shadowy outline of a man. She could hear the man’s light footsteps moving back around until he was just outside the door to the small room. Then there was silence.

Helen’s heart was racing, and she fought to keep her own muffled breath in check as she listened for any sound. Soon there came a slight creaking noise. The trapdoor in the floor opened an inch or so. There was a pause, and it opened several more inches. Helen saw a face appear. The head turned quickly, shooting glances all around to take in as much of the scene as possible. Perceval Grey.

She tried to scream at him through her gag. Still supporting the trapdoor with his left hand, Grey raised his right, revealing a gun. He held the barrel vertically to his lips, motioning for silence, then eased his way into the room. Grey was only a few feet from her, and Helen continued to try to shout warnings as he looked around the room. She saw his eyes linger on the windows opposite the door, where the fake shadow of a man flickered through the glass.

Grey slid over to her, keeping low to the floor. He set his gun down beside her and then bent over to reach the knots that bound her wrists behind her back. Helen began to thrash her body, desperately shaking her head in the direction of the door. She realized a second too late that her own struggle to alert Grey had obscured the sounds of the killer entering the room. She saw the dark figure rise up swiftly behind Grey.

Grey’s head swiveled around as his hand shot out for his pistol. There was a quick movement, and then Helen heard a sickening thud. Grey released a surprised grunt that was cut short. His body slumped forward
onto Helen. The sudden weight of him knocked the wind from her. Grey’s head came to rest upon her collarbone, and a few seconds later she felt warm, thick drops of his blood trickling down her neck.

L
ean urged the horses on, though he was hard-pressed to ignore their protests any longer. The beasts’ sides heaved and glistened with sweat after the mad dash of several miles from the shore in Cape Elizabeth. Doran’s two men had been left behind there. The lightened load let them make good time, with Lean cracking the whip more often than he should, across the bridge and along the winding path up Commercial Street.

Doran cradled Delia the entire ride. The girl had obviously been drugged, and she fluttered in and out of consciousness during the frenzied boat crossing back to the mainland. When first asked about who had taken her, the girl had mumbled something that included the words “black coat,” before her quivering lip crumpled into a series of sobs. Lean and Doran had gently but relentlessly pressed her for information on her mother’s whereabouts, even though each attempt eventually led to tears, the child whimpering for her mommy.

Finally, when Lean asked, “Did he say anything? What did the dark man say?” he was rewarded with one more cryptic muttering: “The lord of the air.” The girl’s eyes, already closed, had squinted tighter, her brow furrowing slightly. Lean realized that the phrase had confounded her, a reference queer enough to lodge itself deep in the child’s mind, where she could secretly puzzle over the literalness of the statement.

Once ashore, Lean had turned his attention to driving the carriage and Doran had settled into silence with Delia slumped in his arms. Makeshift bandages of knotted handkerchiefs were tied around the big man’s
left thigh. The leg had bled freely, but Doran was lucky in that the crazed woman’s bullet had only cut a line along the meaty portion of his leg. Although Doran denied any need for medical attention, Lean could see that the man’s face had gone a shade paler from his normal ruddy complexion. On the few occasions when Lean glanced at the pair huddled behind him, he could see Doran grimacing as they rumbled over the uneven road.

They went directly to Helen’s house in the hope that she might miraculously turn up there at some point. More realistically, the girl was sure to come around sooner or later and be hysterical at the absence of her mother. Lean hoped that familiar surroundings might lessen the fear, even a tiny bit.

After depositing Doran and Delia, Lean came outside and climbed on top of the cab. He was still wrestling with that phrase: “the lord of the air.” Was it just a passing remark, meaningful only within the impenetrable darkness of the killer’s mind? Or was it possibly an actual clue? For lack of anything else that offered any glimmer of hope of finding Helen, Lean immediately attached a great importance to the phrase. He turned the words over, letting the phrase chase its tail round and round in his head. He recognized the title from his readings on the Salem witches; it was a moniker that the Puritans had attached to Satan. But there had to be something more to it. Otherwise he was lost—and so was Helen.

Maybe Grey could pull a linguistic rabbit from his hat and ascribe some concrete meaning to “the lord of the air.” On his way toward Grey’s High Street rooms, Lean passed a police call box. He thought of stopping to telephone ahead to Grey, but the idea of standing still for so long, waiting for the operator to connect the call, was unbearable. Minutes later he was rapping at the door, in nearly as much of a lather as the horses, waiting for the landlady to undo the latch. He heard Mrs. Philbrick puttering about just inside the doorway, and then the door inched open and a wary eye appeared.

“Oh, it’s you, Deputy Lean. What a relief.”

“Mr. Grey in?” Lean said as he barged past into the hallway.

“No.” Then she muttered, “Thank heavens.”

“How
long ago did he leave?”

The landlady shrugged. “Under an hour, I suppose.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No. He was in a right frenzy, but not a word about where he was headed.”

“Did he say anything at all?”

Mrs. Philbrick was shrinking back, her eyes edging wider at Lean’s barrage of questions. “Nothing that I can recall.”

“Well, what was he doing in his rooms just before he left?” Lean started up the stairs and heard Mrs. Philbrick plodding after him.

“That’s the odd part. He wasn’t in his rooms.”

Lean stopped short on the stairs, and the landlady bumped into him.

“I went to his door, and I heard him thumping around above,” she said. “So I went down the hall to the ladder that leads up to the roof door. He comes clambering down, nearly landed on me.”

“What was he doing up there?”

“I’m certain I’d have no idea.”

Lean saw a flicker in her eyes, a look perhaps of embarrassment at having to answer these questions about her peculiar tenant.

“Come now, Mrs. Philbrick. This is a matter of the gravest importance. Tell me what he was doing.”

“Seemed to be reading. Had some papers with him.”

“Anything else?”

Her head started to shake, denying any complicity in what she was about to reveal. “And he was spying on people.”

“Spying on people? What are you saying? Come on now, out with it.”

“It’s true. He came rushing down from the roof, hands me some papers and a telescope.” She nodded at the last bit for emphasis. “Then he dashes into his rooms, comes bolting out again, in a fierce rush for the street.”

“Telescope? Where’d you put it? And the papers.”

“I left them just inside his door. I don’t like to go in there when he’s out. Course, going in when he’s home isn’t much to grin at either.”

“How
do I get to the roof?”

“Up there, past Mr. Grey’s. There’s a closet door in the hallway.”

Lean bolted up the rest of the stairs. Grey’s door was unlocked. Just inside was the telescope and a few pages. Lean seized up the papers, a grand total of three. They were crumpled; Grey had clutched them, perhaps in excitement at having discovered something. Lean pored over them by the light of a gas jet inside Grey’s parlor. Each page held a single entry.

The first page was Amelia Porter’s warning to Lean: “The darkness rising beware the Good woman and her child.” Grey had dismissed the woman as a charlatan, but there was no denying that this very writing is what had tipped them to Helen and Delia’s abduction. The second page was more from Amelia Porter, one of the quotes they had recorded from her séance: “A tower standing in a pool of darkness. It’s thick like blood and filling with darkness. There’s a spark there. I can see a flame. There’s still time. Dear God, please hurry.’”

The third paragraph was the last entry from the Riddle of the Martyrs. Lean didn’t have to read it—he’d long ago memorized every word—but his eyes raced over the page once more, hoping some new idea would make itself known. The words from the pages flowed through his mind. Blood, fire, tower, darkness, rising, empty, filling, time, hurry. No answer came to him, but the same must have been true for Grey until he’d seen something from the roof. Lean shoved the pages into his pocket and snatched up the telescope. In the hallway a narrow door he’d never noticed before blended in with the drab wallpaper. Inside the small closet, wooden rungs nailed into the wall formed a ladder. Lean made his way up and emerged onto a flat rooftop. At first it appeared empty except for chimneys and vent pipes. Then Lean noticed papers lying scattered around. He seized up a few and by match light recognized them as more notes from the investigation. Grey had tossed these aside, so Lean did the same.

He raised the telescope and aimed it toward the harbor, only to be met with disappointment. He’d guessed that Grey might have seen the fire lit by the redheaded woman on Cushing’s Island, but that was impossible. The city’s hilly topography and several taller buildings blocked
the view of Casco Bay. Panic began to flood into his mind, a fear that Helen would die tonight because of his inability to see what Grey had seen. He took several deep breaths, then slowly turned about, staring at the skyline all around him. Buildings, lights, stars clear in the moonless sky. Nothing obvious.

He drew Grey’s three pages from his pocket. The first page must be a reference to Helen and Delia. The third page was the riddle’s clue to the location of the final murder on Cushing’s Island. But how did the second paper fit? Lean lit another match to see that page again. He read it aloud under the flickering light.

“‘A tower standing in a pool of darkness. It’s thick like blood and filling with darkness. There’s a spark there. I can see a flame. There’s still time. Dear God, please hurry.’”

Grey didn’t believe in the medium; there had to be another, hidden meaning. Or perhaps the plainest meaning: the words themselves, stripped of any superstitious attachments. The match burned down close to Lean’s fingers. He shook out the tiny flame, leaving himself in darkness once more.

“‘I can see a flame.’” His voice was quiet, almost pleading with himself. A new thought rattled in his head, like hearing another voice. Words seeped into his mouth, half forming, making his tongue move behind closed lips. They were the words of the mad devil-woman on the island.

“The stronger the spirit offered up, the brighter the flame calling him back to us.”

A flame, not to see by but to be seen. The fire on Cushing’s was a marker, a beacon, but for whom? For the devil that they hoped to raise in the form of George Burroughs? Was it all just symbols created to appease the fevered mind of the killer? Or was it an actual sign that the sacrifice was complete? The flame on the tip of the island would certainly be visible, but from where? The killer could be on a boat, intending to land back on Cushing’s Island. No—he was the lord of the air. Up high. The fiery beacon on Cushing’s Island had to be visible from up high, where he’d be watching. A tower in a pool of darkness.