Where the Dead Talk (9 page)

"But we did. We are."

She moved closer to him

"And you never thought we would."

"Did you?" he said.

"I wasn’t thinking when I first got sent to Adonijah. My heart didn’t work – I didn’t feel anything."

She stepped up to him and put a hand on his shoulder, high up and strong.

"But I felt it when we first started speaking. There was something that woke up in me again – like there was sunlight in a room long boarded up."

She kissed him.

"I want to be with you, Jude Brewster," she said.

Their tongues danced and their bodies pulled close, melting. He glanced at the door. She pulled him down to the floorboards.

Later, she closed the latch with a soft nick, still flushed and satisfied. Dawn was an hour off and she was exhausted. For even that, she was glad. She still thought her idea of moving somewhere else was right. She had no ties here, and the shackles of matrimony to Adonijah meant no more to her than if she’d been told her husband was a cow or a tree. She would get them out of here to start a new life – it would just take time to convince Jude. She hung her cloak up on the peg in the kitchen and kicked her shoes off. Quietly, she walked to the hallway. The house was silent. Often, after one of Adonijah’s spells, she’d find him on his study floor, breathing loudly through his mouth. He’d once curled up in the closet in the hallway. Stepping carefully around the noisy boards, she headed to the stairs.

"No point sneaking, woman. The hour of deceit is long past."

Elizabeth froze. The door to his study was open, black within.

"I’ve heard you, I’ve seen you, I’ve sensed your sins," Adonijah said, his voice floating out of the darkness. "The corruption is all around us now, and you bring it back with you in your heart. Between your legs. Perhaps you carry sin now in your womb, a half-breed child."

He spat the last word out, convinced as always that not just ale and cider, but the Devil’s will itself flowed from taverns.

"Adonijah, you’ve no idea what –"

"Stop, speak no further."

She went to the door to his study. In the shadows, he was seated in front of the window, slouched in his straight backed chair. His hair looked a wild halo around his face. His gaze looked beyond the panes.

"We have drawn a cursed lot," he said, "and the ruin as written is to be ours. Ours. Your vile deeds are but a drop in the ocean that rises around us, to wash the earth clean as the sinners drown and choke on blackness."

He turned to her.

"And even my own wife betrays me, betrays heaven, bringing the Devil into my own house. As for him, well – he’ll go like the other. I saw to that. The same fate no doubt awaits him."

Elizabeth frowned.

"Whatever devils are in this home have nothing to do with me," she said.

"Before the Lord you are my wife," he said, his voice soft.

"In name only."

"Before the Lord you spoke the vows of sacred marriage –"

"And I was out of my mind with grief," she said, raising her voice. "I despise you. Your mind is wrong and your heart is dead."

She finally said it. Adonijah stared at her a moment, then turned back to the window with a snort.

"The costs of our sin have come due. What we’ve planted in the very fabric of this fallen world – the sins of our neighbors, by the sins of the godless, the very sins we carry in our weak and dull hearts. The sins of rebellion, stored away in cellars and millhouses, weapons to blaze a path down into the fires. Oh, they scurry when we think they might be discovered – when we’ve heard they might be discovered."

He gave a dry sound that might have been a laugh.

"Our seeds of sin. We’ve planted them and tended them and nourished them, watching as others weed out the scriptures, the God-fearing, the words of salvation, the signposts to pious life. Members of our own community turning to a heathen warlock for advice, turning right into the Devil's arms, turning away from the path. The soil for this garden is rich."

Slowly, he got to his feet.

"You’ve joined them now," he said, "joined the doomed, the blind. How many times have I worked to protect our flock from an evil that most scoff at? When the savages attacked us, who was it that organized for them to be removed? I protected us – for I’ve seen evil, seen it directly. Heard it calling out to travelers in the deep woods. Seen the Devil move the dead as though they were puppets."

He looked to the window again.

"And now the dead rise, climbing from the grave. As written, as written. They walk among us, they tread the earth."

He turned to look at her again, his eyes obsidian points. He fingered the white scar that ran along the top third of his forehead.

"I have seen them, faithless wife. I have seen the dead prowling the night. One came to this very window, a crack in his head. From the Chase mill, risen from the grave, driven by the end of this shameful world. He told me things, told me what’s to come. Told me what’s been happening. Told me of your fornications – sang me a lullaby of them. Grave-talk whispers of your perversions."

"What are you talking about?" Elizabeth said.

He walked towards her. She stepped back to the hallway and he brushed past her, his shoulders bent and his walk slow. He waved a hand in dismissal.

"The end has come and the faithless like you shall find no haven. Feast on the harvest of your sin. Those left with faith I shall gather, bring them together as we wait for the golden rays to loft us to Heaven. I must prepare my final sermons, the words to guide us on the last journey. I have no time to waste, not for you."

Turning his back, he went to the stairs.

"You are lost."

The Village

To the west, the sky held the last deep of night, the stars fading as the dawn approached. West Bradhill – nestled in the thick forests of the Merrimack River valley – was still. Nothing moved on the Salem Road, which divided the village north and south; nor on the Boston Road, which paralleled the smaller Shawsheen River, splitting the village east and west.

The night had been long, and the village had changed.

Old Goodwife Barker – who had secretly stopped praying twelve years earlier when her husband had drowned – had prayed for the second time since, after seeing shadows cutting through her yard during the night, dragging things behind them. This time was even worse than the night a number of years back when she thought she’d seen Constance Chase slowly walk past her windows, three weeks after she’d died. This time, there were voices, too – not just the screams and yells long rumored to be heard out in the deep woods by the lake, but voices that made a promise to her, a promise to return and give her what she missed. As the sun came up, she muttered and worried and continued her guilty prayers.

Up the Boston Road, Deliverance Draper and her daughter lay beneath their chicken coop. Noises on the walls and roof had stirred them from sleep. The daughter had screamed Deliverance awake when a face on the ceiling had started talking to her, a face that the moonlight revealed. Deliverance – as her husband had taught her – had managed to fire off a shot from their musket, aimed at the strange figure that had ended up in the kitchen doorway. The shot had connected squarely, but the figure had climbed back to its feet, muttering a string of cruel promises. By the time she had almost finished reloading, another figure had crept in the kitchen, moving along the ceiling. When they'd backed them both into the kitchen corner and asked her where the hat-o-neye were, she'd tried to protect her daughter and said she didn't even know what a hat-o-neye was. Now she and her daughter were nestled in the cool earth with nearly identical black smudges around their mouths and noses.

Henrik Graham was curled in his outhouse, shifting and moaning every now and then. He’d not joined the militia – he’d no interest in the conflict, no sympathy for either side. Since leaving Prussia for the Colonies ten years earlier, all he wanted was to work his own farm and find a good wife. Some had told him that West Bradhill was a queer place, but the land was cheap. When he’d seen the figures slinking around his property as dusk fell the evening before, he’d assumed them militia or patriot sympathizers, come to enforce the message that one was either with them or against them. He’d cursed them and fired a few warning shots with his guns, and they’d disappeared. Keeping watch into the night, his vigilance had been unexpectedly rewarded as the clock neared midnight, though not as he'd anticipated. He'd gone to the outhouse, driven there again by the flux that had weakened him for half a month. As he'd done his watery business, he'd heard the sudden whispers – coming from beneath him. Before he could puzzle out what was happening, cold hands grabbed him as he'd never been grabbed before. Another came in on him, slamming the door open as Henrik yelled, trying to free himself from the hands that were attempting to pull him down through the hole. As Henrik had struggled, they’d whispered to him – described what he’d done as a soldier in the old country, things he’d tried for years to forget. As his insides were pulled down and out, it became horribly clear to him that they weren’t patriots, nor loyalists.

In a dozen outlying houses and farms around West Bradhill, a silence held. The plows were still, the cows not let out to pasture. Chimneys were cool. In the woods around the village, there were no bird cries, no squirrels chattering. The mist in the fields was undisturbed, waiting for the morning sun to climb high enough to burn it off. In closets and cellars, beneath beds, in outhouses, in the dark of barn lofts, something was happening.

The night had been long.

A Bit Of Backbone

There was a clearing in the trees leading to the lake. Thomas searched the ground, at times crawling on hands and knees – here footprints, there a turned rock - moss-side down, dark-earth-side up. He followed the signs to the water’s edge. The footprints continued in the mud, under the water. The rock outcropping that he’d been at with his father and uncle rose twenty-five yards to his right – he could just make out the spot his cousin Nathan had been lodged on. Could it all have started right there?

Ripples on the surface started moving out in rings from a spot behind him. He turned. The Major stood at the edge of the water, squinting in the sunshine and pissing into the lake. He turned to Thomas.

"And you didn’t think to mention that bloody revolution had broken out? Those farmers with guns looked at me like I was a fox and the hunt was on," he said.

They were at the mossy remains of the old cabin, the one that Jonathon and Thomas had found years earlier. It had been the chill hour before dawn by the time he’d found it, and the Major had stumbled exhausted into the corner, grabbing the one blanket that Thomas had thought to bring with them. Thomas hadn’t been able to sleep, eyeing the dark forest, watching until the faintest blue seeped into the sky.

"See those footprints?" Thomas said. He pointed at the spot just to the left of the Major. The Major leaned forward and pulled up his breeches.

"Someone went for a swim," he said, turning so that Thomas could read his lips.

"The prints come out of the water. From the lake," Thomas said.

The Major stared at Thomas for a moment with one eyebrow raised, then looked back at the water edge. He took a step back and looked at the nearby ground as well.

"So they went for a swim over there –" he pointed down past the rock outcropping "— and came out here. What on earth has that got to do with anything?"

"The bodies. This is where they came from."

The Major gave the lake another look, scanning the black surface.

"Perfect place for a piss, then," he said, and headed back though the hemlock and old pine that bordered the shore. The air was cool where the sunlight didn’t penetrate. They cut back to the tumble of rocks that marked the husk of the old cabin. The two muskets and the Major’s pistols were leaned against a stone in the middle.

"I’m a man of very stupid ideas," the Major said, collecting his gear, "and now look at me. This worthless little hamlet. It took me four days to find, two days to lose all my men in, and just a little more than that to end up next to a lake that makes walking – or I should say jumping – corpses. Bugger it all."

Thomas looked around the old cabin, kicking over small stones, taking a look at it in the light of day. He’d once mentioned it to their father, who had scolded them – Jonathon getting the brunt of it – and forbidden them from ever going near the spot; even when pressed, he’d never given the boys a reason. Thomas leaned over the wall and reached down. A leather pack. Lifting it up, he looked inside. A few wrinkled pamphlets, two dried apples, a scarf, some quills, and a short knife.

Jonathon.

He’d been here, and recently by the looks of it. Thomas turned back and looked over the cabin again, excited. In the corner opposite the Major, half a dozen pine branches were tumbled, showing white where they’d been broken off. He held the pack out.

"This is my brother’s," he said.

"Lucky you. My brothers never gave me anything other than the odd beating," the Major said.

"No. He was here. He left it here," he said.

The Major looked around the cabin and then back up at Thomas.

"It means he’s back," said Thomas. "He’ll know what to do."

"Then that will make one of us," the Major said.

Thomas paced back and forth. Jonathon would certainly have gone to their house and found it burned. Had he then gone to Uncle Joseph’s, or had he come here first to work out a plan? He looked out at the trees in the direction of the village. Maybe he was going to come back, since he’d left his pack here – then he could help Thomas find Pannalancet, tell him what had happened.

The Major looked around the woods and then stepped over the rocks and down to the stream that gurgled a few paces off. It ran fast over dark rocks. Squatting at the bank, he lifted handfuls of icy water to his mouth and then splashed his face. He lifted his head, water dripping from his nose, then straightened. He tucked his pistols into his belt and hefted his saddlebag and turned to face the boy.