For a moment her eyes stayed dead, hearing him without really taking the words in, and then they suddenly grew fiery, furious. Yeah, there she was. She still had some fight in her, Herman thought, and he couldn’t help but think of that as a good sign.
“Fuck you!” she said angrily. “I told you I’m not doing that shit anymore.” She pulled back her sleeve and showed him her arms. “You see any fresh needle marks?” she asked. “You want to check under my toenails and fingernails? That not enough? You want to test me? You can fucking watch me piss to make sure I’m not hiding a secret urine stash.”
He took a step back. Whoa. “All right, then,” he said. “Maybe I’m an asshole. But you fucking explain it to me. You owe it to me to tell me. What the fuck is going on?”
Behind them the door swung open. They both turned, expecting Cerina since she was the only other woman working that shift at the station, but it was Whitey. He came in but stayed near the door, hanging back.
“What?” said Heidi to him. “You too? Or is this the new break room and I didn’t get the memo?”
Whitey didn’t say anything. “You owe it to him, too,” said Herman. “Come on, without us you would have lost this job a long time ago.” He reached out and took her shoulders, shook her lightly, just enough to get her paying attention again. “Come on,” he said. “Start talking.”
Heidi pushed his hands off, turned away, clutching herself. “I
don’t know what the fuck is going on,” she said slowly. “I wish I did. But I can’t explain it.”
“Try,” said Herman.
She didn’t speak for a moment. Herman just stood there with his arms crossed, waiting. Whitey, too, was silent, waiting.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t know. It started a couple of days ago. I started having these nightmares, but not regular nightmares. Not normal nightmares but, like, I don’t know, sleepwalking nightmares. They don’t even feel like nightmares exactly. They feel real. Last night I woke up in the empty apartment down the hall. I don’t even know how I got in there. The thing is… there’s bits and pieces of it, weird shit that doesn’t make sense, but it’s basically a total blackout.”
If she’s lying,
thought Herman,
she’s too good at it for me to be able to tell.
Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she hadn’t started back into the shit after all.
“Were you drinking?” he asked.
“Yeah, a little,” Heidi admitted. “But I never black out from drinking, Herman. You know that.”
“Yeah,” said Herman grudgingly. “I know that.”
From behind him Whitey spoke, his voice quiet. “Sounds like night terrors to me,” he said.
“Yeah?” said Heidi. “You think so?”
“What’s that?” asked Herman, turning toward Whitey.
Whitey cleared his throat. “Night terrors…,” he said. “It’s like a nightmare you can’t fully wake up from. I had a friend when I was a kid who had it. I remember sleeping over at his house for his birthday and he woke in the backyard drenched in sweat and screaming. I mean, he seemed to be awake and everything, but he wasn’t. His eyes were open, but he was still asleep or, like, half asleep. He was just screaming and thrashing at something that none of us could see. But in the morning, he didn’t remember anything.”
“Maybe that’s it,” said Heidi. “But I’ve never had them before. Why would they start now?”
Whitey shrugged.
“Maybe I should see a doctor,” Heidi said.
“I think you should most definitely see a doctor,” said Herman.
Heidi made a face, getting a little annoyed again. “All right,” she said. “I get the picture.”
“And nothing else?” said Herman.
“What do you mean?” she said. “Besides getting the picture?”
Herman shook his head. “No,” he said. “Besides the wine. You’re not doing anything else to help you sleep?”
“No,” she said. “I swear.” But the way her eyes flicked to one side as she said it, he wasn’t quite sure she was telling the truth.
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” he asked, just like he was a kid again.
She started to trace an X with her fingers in the center of her chest, then stopped, shook her head.
“What’s the matter?” asked Herman.
“The way the dreams I can remember are going, there’s no fucking way I’m going to say I hope to die.”
He looked at her face. Yeah, she was really scared, he realized. Really messed up over all this. Okay, he wouldn’t push it.
And then her expression changed. She was looking up, listening for something.
“Dead air,” she said.
“Huh?” said Whitey.
Oh shit
, thought Herman. The song had ended and none of them were in the studio.
“Dead air,” she said again, and this time it clicked for Whitey. “Fuck!” he said, and rushed out of the bathroom.
In Heidi’s building, upstairs, the hall lights began to flicker, going out one by one. Light still came up from the stairwell, but very dimly. Had anyone been there, it would have taken a while for their eyes to adjust enough to see that anything in the hall had changed. For as soon as the lights had gone out, the doorknob of apartment number five began to turn. Very slowly the door opened, just an inch at first, then another inch, and another, moving with a slow creaking sound.
At first that was all, just an open door. But then there was a brief flicker of movement and something small and gray, just barely lighter than the darkness, rushed out. A rat. It zigzagged down the hall before coming to rest, panting, near the top of the stairs. Another rat soon followed, then another, and suddenly they were coming all at once and far too quickly to count, first dozens then hundreds of them, the door swinging wide. They spilled down the hall, pouring over one another like water, rolling and tumbling and flooding down the stairs.
And then, as suddenly as they had been there, they were gone.
But the door was still open, the hall lights still extinguished. The doorway itself had a more palpable darkness to it. Something was not right.
And then the darkness moved and seemed to thicken. Until it became a black figure, a silhouette, like a man but larger. It was
wearing a broad-brimmed hat that nearly brushed the top of the door frame. It seemed to have no thickness, seemed to be just a shadow, but was cast and reflected in a way that it should not be, on a dark, open space. Either it was just a shadow or it was so enwreathed in darkness as to appear so.
For a long time, it just stood there, unmoving. A strange odor filled the hall, the smell of something rotting. The only sound was the sound of breathing, a slow, huffing sound, coming from the open doorway, either from the figure standing within the frame or from something beyond it, deep in the room itself.
And then the figure took a step out into the hall.
Francis had a stack of books out already, several dozen of them, and a bunch of crumpled photocopied articles as well, but he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. There had been so much that he’d read when he’d been writing his own book, pages and pages, and so much that he hadn’t been able to fit in—even with his computer files and index cards and scrawled notes it was anyone’s guess where he’d find what he’d been looking for.
But he’d find it eventually; he was sure. It was here. It was just a question of time. He pulled another book off the shelf, a cheap paperback with a broken spine called
Mass Hysteria in Salem, Mass.
, and paged through it. He read some of his marginalia within it, and then thought, no, probably not that one, and shoved it back in. Another book,
Witches in Salem: A Cultural Anthropology
, he kept out longer, thinking it more likely, but no, nothing relevant in the index, and nothing revealed by a quick scan-through. Sighing, he dropped it onto the desk, as something to comb through more closely later.
He scanned farther down the shelves, pulled out a dark hardcover called
The End of the American Witch
. Maybe yes, it was this one.
And when he began to page through, he came right to it. He read for a moment, nodding his head, and then carried the book out of the room.
“Alice!” he called. “Alice?”
Where was she? Why could he never find her when he wanted to show her something. No, not wanted—needed. This was important.
He wandered out into the living room looking for her, but she wasn’t there. Not in the kitchen either. Had she gone out when he wasn’t looking? Maybe she’d told him and it just hadn’t registered because he’d been looking through the books. Yes, that was possible. He had a hard time focusing on other things when he was caught up in his research.
“Alice?” he called again, a little louder this time, and this time heard her voice from inside the bedroom. “What?” she said. Only when he went into the bedroom she wasn’t there. Had he misheard? What kind of game was she playing?
“Alice!” he shouted. “Can you come help me with something?”
“What?” she shouted back. She was in the bathroom. He should have realized. He went to the door and pressed his face close to it.
“I need you to play something,” he said. “On the piano.”
“I’m in the tub!” she shouted back.
What did that have to do with it? he wondered. He checked the doorknob and, finding it unlocked, went in.
The room was still steamy from the heat of the water. Alice liked her baths hot enough to cook off a layer or two of epidermis. His glasses immediately fogged up. He closed the door behind himself, shuffled over the honeycomb tile to the edge of the claw-foot tub.
“Francis!” she said, and covered her breasts with her arms. Why should she bother doing that? He’d seen her naked countless times before, and she looked great like that. There was no cause for her to be embarrassed.
“Look at these pages from John Hawthorne’s diary,” he said, and held the book toward her.
“Can’t this wait five minutes?” she asked.
“Why?” he asked, surprised. He realized he had it turned to the wrong page, flipped through it until he found the right one. “Most of the books just give a transcript,” he said. “But this one gives a facsimile.”
He settled on the toilet seat, holding the book where she could see it. He pointed.
“Now look here,” he said. “This book reprints a few of the surviving pages from Revered John Hawthorne’s diary. A very fine reproduction, too.”
“I thought that diary was considered to be the writing of a lunatic,” Alice said. “You yourself told me that, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said patiently, drawing himself up a little. “It is true that many believe it to be the writings of a man in an advanced stage of dementia, but that’s not important right now. My point is that he refers to this coven of witches as the Lords of Salem… then that DJ Heidi tells me that this music from ‘the Lords,’ the one they played after I spoke, was sent directly to her.”
Exasperated, Alice chuckled. “So?”
“Let me finish,” said Francis. “Heidi’s full name, you may be surprised to know, is Adelheid Hawthorne. She is directly descended from Jonathan Hawthorne.” He had her attention now, he could see. “On top of that, we have this incident of slaughter in which Maisie Mather butchered her boyfriend. Maisie Mather is a direct descendant of Judge Mather, who, according to Hawthorne’s diary was directly involved with Hawthorne in the execution of this Lords coven.”
For a moment they just stared at one another.
“Strange, no?” said Francis.
Alice nodded. “And your point is?”
Francis took a deep breath. “Well,” he admitted, “I’m not exactly sure what my point is. That’s why I need you to play something for me.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Alice, “but if you insist, let me get out of the tub and I’ll meet you at the piano.”
“I’d like that,” said Francis. Satisfied, he stood back up, still scanning the book, and wandered out of the room. A moment later he was back. “How long do you think you’ll be in the bath?” he asked.
“I just got in,” said Alice.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” said Francis.
Alice sighed. “I’ll be out soon, I guess,” she said.
“Soon,” said Francis. “Yes, that sounds good. Soon. Okay, I’ll be waiting.”
Heidi felt like she was sleepwalking, dead on her feet.
Maybe this is a dream,
she thought. Maybe she was still asleep, lying in her bed, waiting for the nightmare to begin.
But it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real. She was here, and the sun was out; the air was crisp but there was no wind. She was walking through the streets of Salem with Steve, and walking past people who seemed normal and real enough, and some of them were even people she knew. Some of them knew her and nodded as she passed or even spoke, and she did her best to nod or speak back, though from the way they looked at her, the concerned looks they gave her, she could tell that they knew she wasn’t all there.
Why was she so tired? Last night, for once, she hadn’t had any dreams. At least not any she could remember. Come to think of it, she hardly remembered anything after the radio show itself, and even that came only in bits and pieces. She remembered vomiting in the bathroom, remembered the embarrassment of Herman coming after her and dressing her down and accusing her. How dare he? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, okay, she admitted to herself, maybe she hadn’t told him everything, hadn’t told him about smoking the joint, but she’d only done that because of the dreams, to calm herself down. It wasn’t like it mattered—she’d told him the important things. After that, she remembered the show itself, remembered muddling her way through it, and then Whitey had put on the Lords again and something had happened. It was like she’d just phased out. And then she’d woken up in her own bed, hours later, sun streaming in on her. No dreams, no memories, nothing. But still, somehow, even more exhausted than she’d been the night before.
But Steve had to go out and so she’d groaned and heaved herself up and fed him and then they’d gone, and now here they were and she’d forgotten her sunglasses to boot, so she had to wince and squint. Hell of a start for what was sure to be a miserable day.