The Devil Dances (13 page)

The men all gave me concerned looks, but to their credit, none spoke against me just yet, which was encouraging—no flaming torches or raised pitchforks was always a good sign, as far as I was concerned. I thought how they must be pretty desperate to be entertaining a witch among their numbers. One man I didn’t know, standing at the center of the room with his arms crossed, said, “Did you speak with the Bishop about this, Elsie?” He was tall, middle-aged, but looked fit and very strong, with reddish-brown hair, a hooked nose, and a thick and luxurious beard. He looked homely until he spoke. Then he just looked wise. The others looked to him.

“I was hoping you might, Abraham,” Mrs. Knapp said. “For the sake of our children. I know the Bishop will listen to you.”

The man nodded, acceding to that, then stepped up and introduced himself as Abraham Sutter, the Church Elder, which was a polite way of stating he was the head of this branch of the Swartzcopf colony, the one who delivered sermons on Sunday and made most of the big decisions for the community. He was one step below the Bishop, who presided over the whole Ordnung from his own colony in Ohio. As far as authority figures went, Abraham was the big kahuna.

I knew, from what Mrs. Knapp had told me earlier, that the colony here was made up of roughly four families—the Knapps, the Yoders, the Schroders, and the Sutters. They were huge families, composed of many adults and children, but all were connected to each other either through blood or marriage, and everyone was expected to listen to Abraham. She’d warned that it would be to my advantage to work myself into his good graces.

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Sutter,” I said, not offering my hand. “Or is it Reverend?”

But he offered his, so I took it. He looked me up and down with all the intensity of an anthropologist discovering a new species of indigenous people. “Abraham is fine. You have a good grip,” he said. “Honest men have good grips.”

“Thanks,” I said only. I didn’t want to push my luck.

“Tell us what your plans are, Nicholas.”

The other men were watching me with intense, hooded eyes, but since they didn’t look like they were planning to erupt into a lynching mob anytime soon, I turned to face them and explained about the spell of protection I planned on putting around their colony. It was the only decent solution I could come up with at such short notice.

I would walk the edge of the colony where it abutted the grove, the place where all the trouble seemed to be originating, and cast salt and spells against any invading evil forces. I couldn’t guarantee that it would work, but I was pretty sure it was going to give whatever was attacking their children a hell of a headache. If it was demonic, it would not be able to cross the line; if it was something else, something I was unfamiliar with, it was going to have to dig deep into its magick reserves to break my spell.

I would weaken it, then finish it off. If they let me. It was up to them.

The men made a small circle, heads bowed as they spoke amongst themselves in Pennsylvania Dutch. I stood by the mantel with the elder Mrs. Knapp and waited for their final verdict. Elsie Knapp gave me a grim but encouraging smile and a pat on the arm. A part of me couldn’t believe the Swartzcopf men were even tolerating my presence. And when Abraham stepped up to me to shake my hand and give me the go-ahead to do the spell, you could have sewn my jaw back into place.

I suppose there are desperate men everywhere.

Vivian helped me with the spell.

The Swartzcopf colony was bordered on one side by Route 30 East, a major thoroughfare through eastern Lancaster County, and on the opposite side by Mulberry Grove, a densely treed area that had never been cleared or settled and was so thick with maples, white birch, and bushes full of stickers, that even at high noon—at least according to the locals who had dared venture there—it was as black as pitch beneath the foliage. Tonight, even by the light of the full moon, it looked like a solid black wall, impenetrable and uninviting.

Mulberry Gove had a bad reputation, as I understood it. Even back in Blackwater, it had some serious mojo attached to it. Sheriff Ben, who was half-Shawnee, had once called it
me ki ta wi
, which meant dark or black, but had a more subtle meaning—bad or dangerous. Unsettled. The Shawnee said nothing lived there, not even animals.

Vivian and I walked the three-mile-long property line of the colony, where the gravel ended and Mulberry Grove began. We went slowly and it took most of the night. I took the lead, and Vivian walked a few steps behind me, bearing a sack of salt with a small hole cut in the bottom.

In the beginning, I had summoned down a pretty basic spell of protection; now I was just salting the edge of my new “domain”. It was fairly simple demonic science, really. By bespelling the colony line, I was making it my territory, my stomping ground—basically casting it as holy ground that belonged to me, so other-creatures could not walk upon it safely. But it wasn’t a perfect science. Magick never was. If I wanted the spell to be truly powerful, I would need the denizens of this new territory of mine to worship me. If they worshipped me, they would feed their wills into my power, which would then strengthen the barrier I had created. That’s how worship worked—or, at least, that’s how my dad had explained things to me.

Get a colony of devout Amish to worship the devil. Yeah, right.

Well, it was the best I could do.

“It looks pretty, like fairy dust when you cast it,” Vivian said with admiration. Like me, she could “see” the salt as an other-creature—a glistening barrier against outside forces. “So this will keep the weird stuff away?”

“It should act like a Keep Out sign, yeah. But I won’t know exactly what steps need to be taken for a more permanent solution until I figure out what I’m dealing with. This is more of a Band-Aid fix.”

Deep within Mulberry Grove, something moaned. I don’t mean like a man, because there was nothing manlike about it. It was like the wind soughing and the mountains moving at the same time, and the sound scraped along my skin like the teeth of a comb. The short hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

Both of us stopped dead in our tracks.

“What the fuck was that?” Vivian said with big eyes. She held absolutely still and just trembled on the spot.

I went to her and put my arms around her shoulders. I kissed her ear and said, “Don’t be afraid. If it senses your fear, it’ll work off it.”

“Jesus Christ, Nick, how can you
not
be afraid of whatever the hell that was?”

I didn’t want to admit it, but I
was
kind of, sort of, afraid, too. I mean, when it was all said and done, I was only human, after all. Well, almost. I faced the grove, held my girlfriend against the shelter of my body, and said, “It
would
come from Mulberry Grove.”

“What’s so special about Mulberry Grove?”

I was a little surprised she hadn’t heard the stories. “Do you know how Blackwater got its name?”

“The Blackwater River runs through it.”

“Yeah, that river runs all through the Lehigh Valley region. It’s one of the longest rivers in Pennsylvania, and it empties out here into Black Lake, just beyond Mulberry Grove.”

“I remember Josh saying something about Black Lake, some legend.”

“In the 1700s, they accused a man of being a witch, Hieronymous Quinn. He helped a number of young, unmarried women with abortions when they got themselves in the family way. So when the people of this region started having a bad crop, naturally they blamed Quinn. They thought he had bewitched them. The story goes that they castrated him, but he didn’t die, so they drowned him in Black Lake, then called Susquehannock Lake, after the Native American tribe. They said he died cursing them and it turned the lake pitch black, as well as the river that fed out of it. And that same river runs straight through Blackwater.”

“Jesus,” Vivian said, drawing back and glancing cautiously at the grove. “That’s not the story of the Faceless Man, is it?”

“They call him that, yeah. Locals are always seeing him.”

Vivian was shaking again, so I didn’t go on about the story. I didn’t have to. I knew of at least a half-dozen people who had seen the Faceless Man in and around Blackwater. I’d even spotted him once myself while in a convenience store, of all places—a tall, black-coated specter that reminded me vaguely of Slash from Guns ‘N Roses, with wet, black, river hair over his face. He was known to drip water wherever he went. Back in the day, the most superstitious women in Blackwater used to cover their faces with a black veil at the moment they gave birth to their children, some legend about hiding your face so the Faceless Man didn’t recognize you as a descendent of one of the men who had taken his life and curse your child. When it was less understood, SIDS had been blamed on the Faceless Man.

Honestly, though? I didn’t think it was the Faceless Man who was haunting the Swartzcopf. This seemed a little too ambitious for a specter whose greatest ambition in life was dripping river water all over your carpet.

We heard the moan again as I was closing the circle. This time, neither of us said anything about it.

Abraham was waiting back at Mrs. Knapp’s farmhouse when we returned. “Elsie has generously offered to let you stay with her,” he explained. “It has all been approved by the Bishop.”

I was happy that Abraham had gotten the Bishop’s permission. At least we wouldn’t need to worry about being asked to leave in the middle of the night. I shook Abraham’s hand. “Thanks,” I said.

Abraham’s thin, homely face remained grim, and his eyes dark and hooded. “We appreciate you doing this, Nicholas.”

His grip was strong, but his hands shook ever so slightly.

was having some odd, disjointed dream about Vivian and me writhing on a bed full of bones when a noise woke me suddenly in the middle of the night.
It took me a moment to orient myself, to remember that I was sleeping in the guest bedroom of Mrs. Knapp’s farmhouse. I glanced around at the plain walls, the delicate, hand-crafted furnishings, the pitcher and washbasin on the antique highboy. I reached beside me for Vivian, but the bed was empty and the sheets wrinkled on that side.

“Vivian?”