The train clacked onward. The interplay with the Tawdrys and Mr. Boring Wine Mark was over, and Tess was left listening to the college crew chattering wildly up ahead.
“—what’s the truth of it?” asked Ned. “The festival grounds are supposed to be haunted by Blackthorne’s witches—but who were these witches?”
Sattler’s pretty friend Annette waved away this idea and spoke up for the first time. “If you lived around here,” she said, “you’d laugh about it. A silly old legend is what it is. The ‘Runaways of the Salem Witch Trials’ sounds spooky, but I don’t think it ever happened.” Tess wasn’t sure she liked Annette; she seemed excessively happy and not very bright, like a kitten rolling around a ball of yarn, excitement tumbling out of her. “The only thing I know,” the girl added, “is an old nursery rhyme we used to say about one of them…‘Old Widow Malgore, dance upon her grave—”’
Others on the train joined in. “—Old Widow Malgore, she keeps a devil slave…Old Widow Malgore, your daughter never knew, Old Widow Malgore, the curse you made for two…”
The chant began to break up, people forgetting the rest of the ditty, except Annette: “Old Widow Malgore, your devil will break free…” as others finally recovered the tune, shouting out, “And vengeance you will see!”
“Well, what does all that mean?” Ned laughed.
Annette shrugged him off. “Oh, I don’t know. Ask Michael; he knows more about it, I think.”
It seemed to Tess that Annette might be hiding feelings for the serious, bespectacled Michael, but she couldn’t be sure. Certainly Sattler, her companion, did not know of any romantic betrayal; he had introduced Annette as his finacée, with no trace of discontent. As for Michael, Tess could see his interest in the girl was obvious and mixed with painful remorse. This Michael was a young man with a conscience, perhaps.
She noticed the wine-marked historian, Gil, looking at his wife, wanting to interrupt the discussion.
But it was Michael who spoke. “After the witch hunts, Blackthorne got wiped out by an epidemic, and no one ever rebuilt ’til now. It became a ghost town. I heard they burned the witches in the old town square, but no one knows the whole story.”
“Someone knows.” At the very back of the train, a dark, impressively tall man interrupted in a low, accented voice. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that concealed his face, and his figure blended with the darkness, where the window shades had been drawn against the glare from the snow.
Tess expected him to educate them, but instead he turned his head, by way of introduction, toward an older gentleman, who had a long cascade of gray hair and piercing eyes. He looked frail and skeletal, resembling a mummy.
“This fellow here knows,” said the foreign-sounding man. “As we were waiting for the train, he told me some things that may concern you….”
His tone worried Tess. The Mummy and the Giant, that’s what the two men looked like. She shivered, not least because the older man’s gaze had fallen to her and was sending out great tides of fear and anxiety, an awareness that something awful awaited Tess and all the others as well. No, it was more than awareness. It was a surety.
CHAPTER EIGHT
While the tall foreigner eased back into the shadows, everyone’s interest turned to the elderly man, who introduced himself as Josiah Jurey. He smiled, but his grin seemed forced.
Michael smiled back at Jurey, humoring him. “So, then, are you an expert in folk legends and ghost stories?”
“Folktale, you say? A little bit of progress comes in, and the truth becomes a folktale,” Jurey replied, dismissing all things youthful and ignorant. “There were three of them. Came up here to escape the witch trials in Salem. They were followed, hunted down, and killed. But they were hanged. Not burned.”
The foreigner who sat nearby seemed to enjoy seeing the college boy set straight. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but his head tilted toward Michael as if scolding him.
“The truth is, it’s something of a Romeo and Juliet story…,” Jurey added.
“Well,” prompted Tess, “everyone loves a romance.”
“Everyone loves a tragedy,” said Tobias.
Jurey, licking his thin lips, needed little encouragement to tell the tale. “There was a young man, Wilhelm, who was seeing a girl named Abigail, back in Salem. And her mother, she hated the boy. It was a fierce hatred. She believed the boy had killed her husband when they were clearing old growth on his land. A falling tree had pinned him down, and the man was crushed to death before help could arrive. But the mother believed it was murder. You see, the father had disliked this boy to begin with. No one was good enough for his daughter.
“Not long after the father died, others died mysteriously, and the witch-hunting began; and Wilhelm and Abigail joined with the whole town to watch the hangings, never knowing they’d be enmeshed in it.” His grim voice with its New England lilt was entrancing. “One way or another, mother, daughter, and suitor all ended up in Blackthorne. They were tracked down and killed, all three, accused of witchcraft: the young man, Wilhelm, for consorting with witches and the girl, for the darkest of magics. The crowd, they forced her to kiss the lips of the dead Wilhelm, before she died herself. It is a known fact. And what they say is…well…in dying these witches somehow left a curse on every person who ever sets foot on this ground to die and be tortured after death, with such brutality that the very soul itself bleeds away.”
No one took a breath.
“Or some such,” said Jurey, with a touch of pleasure.
The mention of a doomed couple in 1600s Salem gave Tess a slightly unwanted thrill—a delicate disturbance not easily explained by the fact these two had also been reckless and young.
The tawdry man reacted unkindly. “Sir, you seem to have an unhealthy interest in—”
“Then came the deaths,” added Jurey. “Murders. Infants dying in their beds. Suicides. An epidemic came through Blackthorne and wiped everyone out.”
“Well, that’s quite a lot of death,” said Tess. “A curse is almost convincing, I’d say.”
“Why? Because there was some sickness? An epidemic, unh?” Gil, the historian, looked at her with contempt. “It’s now believed it was cholera, which even today kills people the world over—the devil’s work, maybe, but we don’t say it’s witchcraft. We’re smarter than that. The people in Blackthorne let superstition get the best of them, and it drove them to insanity, unh?”
“But people around here believed in the curse, didn’t they?” said Jurey. “The town died out. No one ever went back in to live there.”
“So many terrible things happened there. Why go back now?” Tess wondered.
“The railroad’s built new lines between Salem and Vermont, and they want a shortcut to them,” Gil’s wife, Elaine, answered her. “That takes ’em right through here. Someone decided to have the winter carnival in Blackthorne to try to bring people back in. The old men of Boston and New Haven who own the town need new blood—young people like yourself—coming here to settle. They can’t have this great ugly hole between townships….”
Gil scowled. “You ask me, they ought to cover up the history, the traditions, any trace of the whole thing. You can put a pretty bow around it, but people don’t like this ‘witching’ talk. They’re superstitious. Part of old Salem even changed its name to Danvers.” He looked around the car. “Fact is, there are people on this train who are related to those that killed the witches. They don’t want that blood on their hands.”
Some passengers did indeed look disturbed.
“We’re going into the last piece of America where the Salem witch trials are still a fresh scent in the air,” Gil went on. “Folks here remember it well. But history is finally blowing it all away. They’re even going to put in electricity up there. Scare away the spooks.” His joke failed, and Gil retreated. “Oh, calm yourselves. Now, just because the town slaughtered a few witches and then was wiped out by a plague doesn’t mean there’s a curse on it.”
&nbs
p; Everyone stared at him in dead silence. Tess wanted to laugh.
“Well, it’s an adorable story,” said Tobias. “I think you should use that to attract people. I mean, there are all kinds of nutty fudges who would love to see where they killed the witches. You should make it the theme of the carnival. Nothing says Christmas to me better than the skeletons of real-life witches, I can tell you that.”
As usual with Tobias’s remarks, no one was quite sure what he meant at first.
“You should roll out all their old, wormy remains and let us have a look,” he continued. “I’ve yet to see the person who doesn’t enjoy seeing a shrunken head or a good hanging, and there’s always a big turnout at any funeral wake with an open casket. If you really want people to come to your festival, you’ve got to get those bodies out and let people get their pictures taken with the witchy cadavers. Dig them up. Someone must know where they are, don’t you think?”
Everyone gaped at him. Tess smiled at them broadly.
They were off to a wonderful start with these people.
The train headed into a curve, affording a view of a big ice-coated wooden archway up ahead, with a playfully carved witch’s face upon it. WELCOME had been written on an ice slab nearby. Everyone seemed disturbed at the sight of the witch’s image at that particular moment.
“Fact of the matter is,” added Tobias, “that’s why we’re here.”
“What’s why?” asked Gil.
“Well, the ghosts, of course. There’s talk that those witches didn’t pass on quietly. They’re still up there.”
Tess added, “We’ve been all over the world searching for spirit habitations. Who would’ve thought there was an authentic one right here in New England? I’m positively embarrassed we didn’t know about it before.”
Tobias looked at her sympathetically. “You can’t know about all of them, dearest.”
Everyone in the car was now staring at them.
“This habitation could be as good as the one in Switzerland,” she said.
“Don’t get your hopes up, sweetie,” Tobias replied. “It could be a hoax. “You come all the way out, you pay your money, and what is it? Nothing but flashing lights and hokum.” He paused. “Of course, flashing lights have their appeal….”
A dour-faced, prudish woman looked at Tess with some disgust. “You really seek out ghosts?”
“Dear lady,” said Tess, “nothing gives a rush of blood to the body like a good spirit possession. “You feel it right down to your intimates. It’s a thrill you will not soon forget.”
The prudish woman looked shocked. “You’ve done this sort of thing in the past? Why?”
“Well, I don’t want to disturb you by calling it an addiction,” Tobias interjected, “but let’s just say, you’ve never really lived until you’ve been tickled from the inside.”
Tess and Tobias smiled sweetly.
It was so easy to shock people these days, it almost wasn’t fun. Still, there were some passengers who were not bothered at all by talk of death and phantoms. Tess felt the steady gaze of the dark foreigner fall upon her.
“I fear no ghosts,” he said, “nor anything else.” The man—was he Italian? Spanish?—was leaning forward just a bit, into the window light, opening his coat so Tess and everyone else could see he was armed, pistols glinting silver against his dark clothes. “I’ve been hired by some of these rich old men who own the town. I’m here to make certain there is nothing to fear, neither among rowdy men drunk on spirits nor among spirits who wish to drink the blood of men.” He gave a stern smile, and Tess could see the edge of a handsome but unshaven jaw beneath his square Western hat.
“I shall do my best not to fear any dead witches,” she said to him.
Tobias looked at the foreigner. “Is there a reason you above any other would be hired for this protection?”
“I have been here and there. Seen the West. Seen blood. Seen death. Seen guns.”
“All in one place, or one at a time?”
The foreigner was unamused. “You speak like one who has never seen a fight.”
“True enough, I suppose,” said Tobias. “But I have other strengths. I have seen the unseeable. How about you, sir? Were you lucky enough to have encountered the supernatural in your journeys?”
“I will say this: I’ve made up my mind that I won’t judge other’s beliefs. There’s nothing certain, except that God favors the strong. I go where there’s money. Witches or not, I come prepared to kill what needs to be killed—”
“There are witches in these woods,” Josiah Jurey interrupted. “And they are to be respected.”
Tobias looked at him with a touch of surprise.
In the moving light, Jurey looked tremendously old, with rivers of wrinkles on his face. “I’ve hunted their kind in a thousand corners. What you have here has dug itself in and drawn power from a sacrosanct place, forbidden and frightening even to the Indians, long before we came. Those who draw from the wellspring in this darkness will not leave easily. They will be strong. The two hundred-year mark of their death will grant them new vitality. They will travel on demons, with blood in their wake….”
CHAPTER NINE
Mr. Josiah Jurey’s tale of living, breathing witches feeding off some eternal power in the wilderness strained even Tess’s and Tobias’s credulity. The man claimed the Widow Malgore—whom he called “The Wretch”—was likely to be surviving on demon’s blood, walking about, free as you please. He went on to say the other accused, Abigail and Wilhelm, might have shared a similar fate.
“After two hundred years, they’re alive,” Tobias said, feigning seriousness. “How interesting. Are you here on a hunting expedition?”
“I have been drawn here. And my work is of a personal nature,” said the old man.
“Ah, a mission of vengeance? One of these things killed your child, perhaps? Killed your wife?”
“One such creature was my wife,” said Jurey. “She killed my child.”
At his words, a chill ran through the car.
“There will be danger ahead,” said Jurey. “And you will all have a part to play.”
“Madness,” murmured Gil.
“It is always madness that brings true insight,” said the foreigner.
Tobias suppressed a laugh. “Do we pay extra for these wisdom…nuggets?”
The foreigner leaned forward and gave him an icy stare. “I will protect even you,” he said.
Annette smiled nervously. “Gunmen, witchhunters,” she said. “Didn’t anyone come for ice-skating and sleigh rides? This is to be a carnival, after all.”
Mr. Tawdry broke in: “We heard of this at a séance in Connecticut. Sounded like a thrill.”
His wife smiled. “Our macabre curiosity rears its head.”
It had begun to seem that quite a few of the travelers would be more than happy to see the dead witches come to life. Tess felt herself in wilder company than she at first thought. She began to see how these ordinary people were in many ways hoping for something dreadful to happen—to someone else.
“A-sleighing we will go…,” sang the foreigner strangely, his eyes on Tobias in an odd challenge. Have you the strength to face this? he seemed to say.
Still, Annette and many of the others looked perturbed, as if unhappy to see the kind of people they were traveling with. It would seem a few had indeed come for mere sleigh rides and fireworks.
Outside, the snow-shrouded woods were silent, ominous. Lifeless. Not even a rabbit disturbed the ground. All the usual wildlife had fled. The train thundered past, a long black scar blowing ivory steam through the relentless snowfall.
The old town pulled the train closer.
Some people still sent Tess and Tobias curious and rude glances, but the train had all but returned to normal. Sattler and Annette were laughing quietly. Tess and Tobias watched them, seeing their own behavior mirrored somehow more gracefully in the way the two lightly enjoyed each other’s company. Perhaps Tess had been wrong in thinking
Annette could be unfaithful.
Feeling their stares, Sattler looked over, seeming perturbed by what he imagined was Tobias’s interest in Annette. Then Sattler noticed the Goodravens’ cello cases. “What’s in there?”
“Cello,” said Tobias.
“Both of you play?”
Tobias nodded.
Sattler paused. “You aren’t going to play at the carnival, are you?”
“I never leave my instrument. It soothes my nerves. We aren’t playing for money, if that’s what you mean,” said Tobias.
“Good. I thought you were competition. Michael does sketches. We were going to try to earn a bit.”
Tobias regarded him. “He draws portraits? Is he any good?”
“He’s awful. But we have the whole thing worked out quite well. See, we show this sketch of me…” Sattler pulled out a drawing pad.
Tobias looked. “That’s fairly nice.”
“Yes, we had this fellow back home do it. What we do is, I pretend as if I bought this drawing from Michael, and then hopefully he gets another customer to step up and get a portrait done.”
“I don’t understand. If he can’t draw, what happens when they see his work?”
Sattler smiled at Tobias, letting him in on the secret. “He never finishes. He pretends to take a long time finding inspiration, then he starts sketching, and it just goes on and on and on. He makes it take forever, and the customer always decides to get his money back. But then Michael acts offended, and he usually ends up getting half the asking price.”
“You annoy these people to death. For profit.”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“This has worked for you before?”
“It’s getting us through college.”
Tobias couldn’t help but grin. Sattler smiled back.
“Beware the art student with no money,” Michael added gloomily.
Well, Tobias had found some complex personalities to amuse him. Tess, fishing about for a passenger of similar value, looked toward Annette. “How about you? Are you interested in the arts as well?”
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