The Salem Witch Society (53 page)

“And the billhook, the cross cut into her, the pitchfork—those guarded against her witch’s powers being used against you. The same as the bottle you buried beneath your mother when you killed her. But that’s one piece I don’t quite understand. Your mother died months before the ritual began. Why kill her at all—just to gain the abrus seeds?”

“The abrus seeds were only a … a pleasant aside to killing her. You fail to understand the basic principles of magic, Mr. Grey. The Riddle of the Martyrs is a most … demanding ritual. Success requires the ultimate focus of the Mage’s powers. His energies must be … entirely pure, unfettered. Mother had placed many … spells on me over the years. Her interference—those spells—they had to be removed.”

“No qualms about murdering your own mother?” Grey asked.

“Every man must be thrust into this world in a spasm of blood and pain. I suppose she spilled her blood for me then … the same as any mother. But there was scarce little given after that moment. She hadn’t enough of a proper soul in her … to spare any for my birth. And what little soul there was in me, she did her best to drive out soon enough.”

“She didn’t come back for you. Didn’t try to save you when you were being hanged.”

“Why would she?” Whitten answered.

“But now, all these years later, you found people who would stay with you. All through this ritual.”

“Peter was never a true believer, but he’d do whatever I told him … always did. Blanchard was true, even though he was a fool. He thought all this, all the work I was doing, was to bring his mother back. That I would waste my time … to bring back such a plain and useless spirit as that.”

“You’ve chosen George Burroughs’s spirit instead. Why?”

“Why?” Whitten set the jar holding one of his gruesome trophies back down on the bench. His attention was now squarely on Grey. “He is the Master.
The greatest conjurer that’s ever lived in this country … that has ever set foot within a thousand miles of here. He was appointed, he would rule as king when the new order was raised. The Master brought the Black Book, his book … into my hands exactly two hundred years after his betrayal and hanging. The Riddle of the Martyrs … declares that the ritual is to be performed on the cycle of the Master’s death. And here it is.”

There was silence for a few moments. Helen thought she heard a voice call out in greeting, alongside the rumble of passing wheels, but the sounds held a distant, airy timbre.

“You realize, of course,” Grey said, “that you’re a lunatic. To believe in witchcraft and all this, your master, Reverend Burroughs. It’s madness.”

Whitten’s eyes darted back and forth between Grey and Helen. She felt a palpable knot of fear the moment she met his stare.
At least Delia’s not here.
No matter where she was, it had to be better than being trapped in this tiny room with Jack Whitten and his insane, murderous eyes.

“Madness? Consider this, Grey. If you speak … a few lines to her today”—Whitten nodded toward Helen—“tomorrow she tells them to a friend, who relays them to me. Next week … I repeat them back to you. Probably half the words are changed. Would you wager five dollars, let alone your … eternal soul, on how well those words were kept in just one week?

“Yet you worship a god nailed to a post nearly two thousand years ago. You follow the words of a man that were written down after his death … by men who did not know him, in a language you cannot speak. Words passed from mouth to ear how many times? Passed through how many languages? Subject to the whims of how many men’s tongues and pens? You cast yourself out onto the sea … and cling to that wreckage: the misheard and mangled words of your crucified god, corrupted over centuries to the point where they are no more credible than barroom hearsay … backyard gossip. And you believe that those words will save your soul. I call that madness.”

Whitten’s voice was getting louder, stronger as he went on, a spark growing
in him. “Tell me, have you ever heard your god’s voice? Has he ever even spoken to you? And not in some … some ridiculous sign you create for yourself: a drop of water on a statue’s face … a rainbow or a sudden piece of good fortune. I mean an actual voice … speaking directly to you? No? Well, my god speaks to me. His words are given to me every day, to heed and follow. So I ask you, which one of us is truly mad to do our god’s bidding?”

“So after you got a hold of the Riddle of the Martyrs,” Grey said with no more outward excitement than if he’d been asking for a recipe or the steps to some chemistry experiment, “why bother killing Father Coyne?”

“I thought he might be growing suspicious.”

“And you poisoned him with the abrus seeds.”

“He retreated to his family’s home, and I accompanied him. It was a perfect cover from which to conduct our affairs.”

“How long until you murdered him?”

“Not long—months ago. I let Peter kill him. He’d earned it.”

“You kept his body, and that was what they pulled from the ashes of his house. And what about Geoffrey Blanchard on Gallows Hill? You let Peter carry out that murder as well, even though it was you the Blanchards hanged all those years ago.”

“Not murder, Mr. Grey, sacrifice. And that pained me. I’d have liked to slit the little toad’s throat myself. But”—he motioned toward his leg—“I was unable to go so soon after I was shot. It was disappointing, but now I see the Master’s hand in it all. I am still alive to complete the ritual and accept his return.”

“You seem to have little remorse over your brother’s death.”

“Sacrifices are required of us all,” Whitten said.

“So Geoffrey Blanchard had arrangements at the hospital to come and go—bribed a guard, I suppose. His excursion out a week ago was to communicate with you, make final plans for the last phase of the ritual. You made assurances, lured him to Gallows Hill with the promise of a ritual he believed would bring his mother back to him.”

“He never understood the true purpose of the riddle. He actually thought, when all was done, he’d see her risen in the flesh once more.” A twisted grin spread across Whitten’s face.

“So
you admit that the Riddle of the Martyrs doesn’t produce the dead?”

“In the flesh? Of course not,” Whitten said. “The called spirit of the Master exists again within the flesh of the Servant.”

“Within you? Ah, so that’s the purpose of the disappearing moon. And the riddle’s references to the vessels being poured out. Emptied and prepared. Some sort of symbolic wearing away of your soul, making room for the spirit of the Master.”

“Not symbolic, Grey. My soul will give way before the Master. He shall live in me.”

“And what becomes of your soul?”

“Sacrifices are required of us all.”

“I do have one final question,” Grey said. “What exactly do you plan to do when your invocation fails? When you realize you’re still the same weak, ineffectual, stuttering child you’ve always been. The memories of beatings, the constant hunger, strange men grunting and rutting in the room beside yours, separated by that tattered curtain. The feel of that rope burning into your neck. No one coming to save you. There’s no one coming to save you now, either.”

The hint of a smile that had flickered across Whitten’s face for much of their conversation now vanished. “Soon you will see, Grey. Then you will believe … in those last few moments before you die. You will know the truth of all things. Your god’s empty promise. There will be no judgment … no redemption. And my god will rule over you. My spirit will pass into … nothingness, and I will be joined with the Master. He will complete his work. The world wasn’t … ready two hundred years ago; it is now.” Whitten stepped back and spread out his arms.

“And there shall be the trumpet sounded, and it will be heard many miles off … and then they all come one after another to be made witches. And the Master will pull down the Kingdom of Christ and raise up the Kingdom of the Devil … who was always the true teacher and rightful God of Man. And the Master will abolish all these false churches in the land, and so go through the country. And the
Master has … has promised that all his people should live bravely, that all persons should be equal, that there should be no day of resurrection … or of judgment, and neither punishment nor shame for sin.” Whitten fell silent, still staring at Grey.

“You know,” Grey said, “you just reminded me: Since Geoffrey Blanchard is dead, there’ll be a vacant room at the Danvers Lunatic Hospital. It’s rather luxurious inside. And the grounds are lovely. Depending on your behavior, you’d have upwards of an hour a day of outside time. Supervised, of course.”

Whitten took a small step forward and launched a boot into Grey’s midsection. “I thought perhaps to spare you … for a while, anyway. You seemed to fit. With your Indian blood, … so like the Master’s shadow helper. But I can see now that you deserve to die as much as the others …” Jack Whitten struggled to produce the next word, and as he did, there was a noticeable thud from below. His eyes went wide. Whitten tilted his head and listened for several seconds before leaning in toward Grey again.

“Oh, you’re a clever one. Distracting me so. You will suffer for this.” He stepped over to Helen, bent down to grab her by the arm, and thrust his billhook close to her face. “Up!” he hissed. “Any trouble and I’ll slice your throat.”

Her legs were not bound, but she was still a bit unsteady from the aftereffects of the chloroform. Whitten held her in front of him and stepped toward the trapdoor, so he could look down the short, curved staircase. He waited there half a minute, blade poised at Helen’s neck.

“I know you’re there,” he finally called out. “My god reveals your secrets to me. Step forward or I’ll kill her.”

F
rom where he stood, beside the final set of steps, Lean could see the shadow of a human form within the rectangle of faint light coming
down from the trapdoor. He took a deep breath and whirled around into view, his pistol aimed up to where a dark-haired man wielding a billhook held Helen before him.

“Toss that up here!” Whitten shouted down to Lean.

Lean didn’t flinch. Helen shook her head at him, pleading with her eyes for him not to listen to the madman. The blade pressed into her neck, and she let out a stifled yelp. Lean lowered the gun slowly, then tossed it up the staircase. It landed beside the killer’s feet.

“Delia’s alive!” Lean called out.

Helen’s eyes went wide with unmistakable joy. She didn’t seem to notice the killer’s recoil that caused him to poke her neck again, hard enough to draw a bead of blood.

“You lie!” Whitten shouted.

“We pulled her from the pyre on Cushing’s.”

“I saw the blaze,” Whitten said.

“You saw that red-haired witch of yours. She went up fast, whoever she was.”

The killer pushed Helen aside and bent to grab Lean’s pistol. Lean ducked back into the shadows, grabbing a loose piece of wood from one of the shelves that held the observatory’s signal flags. He expected to see the killer descend, but instead the room went dark as the trapdoor slammed shut.

Inside the observation platform, Grey watched as Jack Whitten set Lean’s pistol aside and grabbed his long wooden staff. The man struggled to get the wooden bar into place above the trapdoor. He wedged the top beneath a windowsill and started forcing the base under the lip of the door leading outside. With one fluid motion, Grey rolled himself up to a sitting position, got his weight over his crossed ankles, and forced himself upright. His hands were bound before him, but he had enough mobility to grab the rope Whitten had tied to the hook in the ceiling. Grey took hold of it and looped the rope twice. As Whitten finished jamming the trapdoor closed, Grey dropped the rope circle over the man’s head and yanked the ends, drawing the cord tight about Whitten’s neck.

Whitten spun around and was met with a backhanded blow from Grey’s
bound fists. He fell back against the doorframe, then drew the billhook from his belt. Grey was on him in an instant, seizing Whitten’s wrist and slamming it through a windowpane. The billhook clattered to the floor. The trapdoor banged, and Grey realized that Lean was throwing his weight against it, not realizing it was blocked.

Whitten tried to reach Lean’s pistol on the floor. Grey slipped his foot forward and kicked the gun, which slid over the doorjamb out onto the deck. The attempt to grab the weapon had put Whitten off balance, and Grey threw his weight forward. Whitten clutched at Grey, but the momentum carried both men through the open door.

The two men spilled out onto the narrow walkway surrounding the observation platform. Grey was on his side as he grappled with the killer. He saw his pistol nearby, where it had slipped out the door during the struggle. He let go of Whitten and stretched for the gun. He just reached the butt with his fingertips when Whitten clasped his wrist. There was a stinging on the back side of his hand as Whitten dug his nails into Grey’s flesh.

Grey jerked his body, flailing forward toward the gun. Whitten released his wrist and also grasped for the gun. The two of them struggled for control of it for a second before it slipped away, toward the edge of the deck. It passed under the bottom edge of the railing that circled the deck. The gun wobbled there for a split second, then disappeared over the side.

Whitten pushed away and scrambled to his feet. Grey bolted up as well but, hampered by his bound wrists, he was a half second too late. The man was on him again, pushing him back to the waist-high railing. Grey’s foot slipped out from under him. The deck was not level; it sloped away slightly from the building. The unexpected slant caught him off guard and gave Whitten the advantage needed to overpower him. Grey’s lower back pressed into the rail. The killer’s hands were at his throat, pushing, forcing his head back so that Grey arched out over the railing. He grabbed at Whitten’s hands, trying to break the man’s grip.

Jack Whitten was small but surprisingly strong. Grey didn’t have enough leverage; he was losing the battle, unable to pry the killer’s hands from around his neck. Grey stuck his right foot between two of the
railing’s balusters, twisting his lower leg around for support. Then he let go of Whitten’s grip and went for the throat instead, his fingers clutching, searching for the man’s windpipe, desperate to crush it. Grey strained to work his thumbs between the double strands of the rope that he had tightened around the killer’s neck.