Morgan turned back to the flames and tilted the now-screaming baby toward the fire. “Help me breed this new world with your blessed spawn of glory,” she said.
A pale-faced woman with long and tangled dark hair stepped forward, swooning as if in a trance. “I am ready!” she said.
“And for what is it that you are ready?” asked Morgan of her. “Shall you commend yourself to our Dark Lord and Master, Mary?”
Mary nodded, her eyes sliding back and forth independently in the sockets, unfocused. “I am ready to abandon this mortal existence and deny Christ Jesus, the deceiver of all mankind!”
The fire climbed higher, the burning figure seemingly larger than before. Morgan nodded at Mary in approval. “What others among us are ready?” she asked. “Who among you shall abandon the deceiver of all mankind and embrace the one true Lord of Darkness?”
A plump woman, her face spread with large, seeping boils, stepped forward, swaying. “I, too, am ready,” she said.
“Speak, Abigail,” said Morgan. “He presses his ear against the wall of Hell and listens to you.”
Abigail took a deep breath. When she spoke, it was all in a single burst, the words tripping over one another. “I hold in contempt all of the symbols of the Creator. I swear on this day to be a faithful servant to the prince Lucifer.”
The fire rose again with a deep hissing sound. Impossibly, the flaming figure made of wood seemed to
move
as if it were coming to life. Again Morgan nodded. She began to reiterate the invitation to join, but one of the other women had already stepped forward. She
was a hunched woman who looked closer to a beast than a human. Her dirty mane of hair was twisted with leaves and ribbons and seemed as if it had never been washed. She threw her arms upward.
“Speak, Sarah,” said Morgan. “The Dark Lord has thrust his head through the breach we have created in the walls of Hell and waits for you to beckon him forth and birth him into this world of pain.”
Sarah let out a burst of raucous laughter. “I pledge myself mind, body, and soul to fulfill the designs of our Lord Satan and his disciples!”
The fire rose again, and the figure, wreathed in flames, now seemed to writhe. “He comes,” hissed Morgan. “He comes!”
Two others stepped forward, hand in hand. At first, in the flickering flames, they looked like a mother and her child, but when they entered fully into the light it was apparent that one was a crusty old hag and the other a tiny dwarven woman. “Speak, Martha. Speak, Elizabeth,” Morgan said.
The dwarf spoke in a high, quavering voice. “We trample on the cross!” she screeched.
The crone’s voice was deeper but broken, as if half her vocal cords had been torn out. “We spit upon the book of lies!” she said.
For a moment the fire guttered. And then it rose higher than before, the whole hovel in danger of igniting. The wooden figure was suddenly, as if instantly, consumed and the flames took on a ruddy hue. And though the wooden figure was gone, the flames now seemed to flex and turn like limbs, a strange, flitting humanlike shape flashing here and there over coals that were long expired and yet continued to burn.
Morgan slowly lowered the baby until it rode in her hands just beside the flames. The flames themselves seemed to sense it there, the fire bending toward the child, licking out at it, as if preparing to consume it.
Morgan had to shout now to be heard over the roaring of the
flames. “In our allegiance to our Master Satan we promise contempt to the faiths of all others. Stand ready to desecrate these false bodies! Show yourselves!”
Around her the coven began to cast aside their filthy clothing and rags and furs, stripping rapidly and quickly down until they stood stark naked before the roaring flames. Their bodies had been daubed with blood and painted with uncanny symbols. They had the appearance of letters, but not of any human alphabet, and they seemed almost alive, winding and wriggling on the skin as the coven swayed and moved. They were runes, but again of no recognizable system, and when one of the women came too close to the fire the flames licked out and imbued them for a moment with an unearthly glow. They were all varied except that they all had the same symbol between their breasts: a circle holding an inverted cross, mounted by an upturned semicircle with a downturned semicircle. The mark of their coven.
Morgan gave a curt nod and abruptly they began to speak in unison, the flames leaping and dancing as if in time to the words.
“Together we desecrate the virgin whore! Together we blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Together we laugh at the false redeemer’s suffering!”
“Sisters!” yelled Morgan. “Gather your tools and release the master!”
The naked women turned briefly away, groping along the dirt floor behind them to come up with half-broken and makeshift musical instruments. One had a sort of violin missing half its strings, which she played with a knobbed stick that made it utter an unearthly screeching, like a cat being tortured. Another had a flute carved from a bone that let out a high piercing sound. Another still had a basin whose top had been covered with an animal skin, which she beat in time to the baby’s screams. Each of them played to a different tune, the resulting cacophony swirling about the fire and melding with the newborn’s cries like the utterance of chaos itself.
Morgan moved the infant yet closer to the fire and now the flames leaped out and licked at its body, touching it for only the merest moment but leaving always in its wake a glowing, faded symbol not unlike those on the witches’ bodies.
Soon, the infant’s whole body was blistered and colored by these symbols and the screams and music had risen to a fever pitch. The fire contracted and seemed to gather itself, and suddenly an acrid red smoke began to billow from the coals. The shape that had been flitting through the flames suddenly resolved into a hideous creature, a demonic presence. Its body of flame shifted, becoming something made out of coils of the reddish smoke, and then that suddenly stiffened, hardened into leathery red flesh. Its face was uneven, its jaw drooping and slavering. It had horns, one of which had turned back on itself to penetrate its temple, and its eyes, one of them much larger than the other, were glowing red like a pair of coals.
It snarled, blood dripping from its mouth, and quickly reached out, taking hold of the infant. Morgan released it, and the creature dragged it back into the fire.
The child immediately caught flame but continued shrieking. The creature toyed with it, dangling it by one foot and regarding it with its smaller eye with curiosity and hunger. And then with a single sharp movement it snapped the child like a whip. The newborn suddenly fell silent, its neck broken. The creature dashed its head against the floor once, hard, and when it came up again, the flaming head was loose and pulpy and dripping blood. The creature held the baby up again, looking at it now with its larger eye, and gave a hideous smile. With the dirty red nails of its other hand, it began to scrape away the child’s skin.
All around the fire the coven swayed, now lost in a trance. Some mumbled and babbled; others raised their hands high above their heads with their hands flopping on the ends of their wrists like birds with broken wings; others frothed at the mouth, their eyes rolled far
back into their heads. First one and then slowly all the others began to drool, long strings of spittle slipping from their mouths, as if they were having a fit. And then the spittle grew dark, became a sticky black substance that descended in thick cords down their chins to drip along their naked flesh.
Justice Samuel Mather strode quickly down the rutted wagon path and toward the town, his stick-thin body moving jerkily. He was waving his walking stick about, gesticulating with it rather than using it for walking. It had finally happened. Before, there had been rumors, a sense that evil was afoot, but he had never managed to catch the women in the act of pledging themselves to Satan. But all the nights of waiting and watching, sitting hidden in the woods outside of Margaret Morgan’s hovel until the midnight hour and even long past, hidden and shivering in his dark cloak, his thin hands clenched tight against the cold, had finally paid off. Or would, if he managed to gather the others in time.
He had watched the other women enter, one by one, each of them cloaked or dressed strangely, often in furs or rags. And then he had waited until the smoke began to rise from a chimney placed, oddly enough, in the center of the hovel, not near a wall like a chimney should be. Even still he had waited, not wanting to believe that what he and Hawthorne had feared to be the case was finally to be proven real. But when the smoke rising from the chimney had taken on a reddish tinge, he knew there was no denying what was happening.
He had reached the bridge, Salem lying just on the other side of it. The fog was rising off the river and obscuring the bridge itself, making it seem as if it dissolved halfway across the water. He hesitated for a moment before crossing over it, his footsteps echoing
against the planks. The bridge slowly appeared out of the mist in front of him, becoming firmer, becoming real. But when he turned and looked back behind him it had begun to vanish. He hurried his steps, breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally on solid ground again.
He hurried through the muddy streets of town, past some of the newer and smaller dwellings, many of them still unfinished, until he came to a saltbox house with a long sloping roof. Well-made and painted a dark red, it was the largest house on the street and perhaps in the town. He pounded on its door with the knob of his walking stick. He waited impatiently, and when there was no answer, he knocked again.
After a moment the door swung open. Behind it was a man in his early fifties, nearly large enough to fill the doorway. John Hawthorne. He held a candle. He had shoulder-length hair and his feet were bare. He was dressed in a nightshirt made of rough linen, held gathered by strings at the neck and the wrists, and though he appeared to have been awoken from sleep, his appearance was not befuddled but focused and sharp.
“Brother Mather,” he said. “What cheer?”
Justice Mather shook his head. “None,” he said. “I have seen the smoke. I was right to suspect Margaret Morgan. It is happening. It is happening even now.”
Hawthorne’s lips thinned, his brow furrowed. “The red smoke of death,” he said, his voice heavy. “Then it is as we feared.”
“Aye, brother. I can only pray the angels protect us in our quest to drive this vile serpent from this township.”
Hawthorne took a deep breath, nodded. “I fear the Devil himself walks among us. I fear the Lord has turned a deaf ear to our most desperate prayers.” He reached out and placed his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Brother Mather, the plague has returned to Salem.”
Justice Mather nodded curtly. “I fear the same,” he said. “But we must proceed as best we can. Dress yourself. We must do our best to
nip this evil in its hellish bud. If we act with the conviction that God be with us, then so shall He be.”
“We will do what we can,” said Hawthorne.
“We must fetch the brothers,” said Mather. “There is no better pair for tonight’s work.”
“As you say,” said Hawthorne, turning back into the house and beckoning Mather to follow him. “But even the brothers have their limits.”
The house was off the beaten path. It was a rough-hewn but well-built hodgepodge, a canny construction of wood, cut stone, and thick pond reeds. The chimney was a seemingly precarious pile of rough brick from which smoke belched out to thicken the darkness.
The man standing in the light of the doorway peering out was huge and lumbering, more like a bear than a man. His left eye was covered with a thick leathern patch that had once been dyed black but now had faded. His gray hair and lined face suggested he was in his sixties, but his thick and well-muscled body would have seemed to have been borrowed from a younger man were it not for the scars that crisscrossed his hands and arms. He squinted out into the darkness a moment more before grunting and returning inside, clapping the door shut behind him.
Dean Magnus walked to the fire, over which the carcass of an animal hung on a spit—a deer perhaps. The meat was blackened and charred on the outside but when he cut into it with his knife and sliced off a chunk of flesh, the inside was still bloody, nearly raw. He began to eat, tearing off mouthfuls of it, the juices and blood of the meat flowing down to stain his already-filthy beard and drip onto his shirt.
Behind him, sitting at a small wooden table whose surface was nicked and charred, was his brother Virgil. The family resemblance was clearly visible, despite Dean’s eye patch and the fact that a good
half of Virgil’s face was torn by deep scars, the result of the swipe of a bear’s claws. The bear’s skin was lying on the packed dirt floor beside the table, and Virgil rested his feet on its head. Beside it, next to the table, was a goat chained to the wall, eating from a large bale of straw. On the table before him was a battered pewter plate in which sat part of a haunch of meat, charred on the edge and raw in the middle.
“Anything?” asked Virgil. He reached out and caressed the goat, which
baa
ed once, then continued to eat its straw.
Dean shook his head. “Something’s happening,” he said, “but not too close. Maybe nothing much.”
Virgil nodded. “You’re starting to see ghosts,” he said.
“Aye, brother,” Dean said, and continued to chew on his chunk of meat, stopping only to spit out a bit of buckshot still lodged in it.
Virgil turned back to his plate, slicing off a bit of the haunch and swallowing it all in one gulp—gristle, tendon, and all.
“I noticed,” said Dean, and then swallowed deeply before continuing. “During morning services, I noticed the Widow Parsons was looking my way again. I think her mourning period might well be coming to an end.”
Virgil shook his head. “Hallucination of a lustful mind, my brother,” he said. Then he laughed. “That widow will be mourning ’til you are sleeping in a dirt hole feeding worms.”