It was a skeletal figure, a woman, hunching down beside a tree. The woman, or whatever it truly was, reached into its own chest, and pulled loose a white pulse of light from its innards.
It opened its hand, and the light flashed, and vanished; the train car shook and rattled from its energy, as Tess realized what the woman was.
The witch—the Beast—had come for them.
A mist outside the car had spread quickly to swallow everything in sight, and Tess saw the witch dart away into the forest.
All of this happened with great speed, and Tess became aware that the other train cars were being rocked and pummeled, as the witch’s power spread malevolently through the clearing.
Inside the parlor car, Tess tried to get free to help the blind boy, but the door was unmovable. She yelled, but her voice was drowned out.
Tess fell against the door and could see from the window that the blind boy was crawling about in terror on the snowbank. He suddenly reversed, and dived under the train, but—astonished—Tess could see him yanked out again in a thrashing of snow. Something was dragging him.
He screamed, and his face was lit up for a fraction of a second by vivid lightning. Annette rushed toward him, but was thrown back onto the ground.
The boy clutched his head, and suddenly he seized up, shaking horribly. It was as if ghostly, skinless hands had burst from his head and were clutched over his mouth.
Tess could see dimly the hands of the witch in the forest, mimicking this action, controlling it. The boy grabbed for his face—a sight so dreamlike and shocking Tess had to look away.
She could see Annette on the ground, trying to get to the child. But something was pulling her deeper into the snow, half burying her, as she screamed in terror.
White light was crackling around Annette. Coils of electricity flashed and vanished as the witch’s magic gripped her, tugging her downward.
The power of the wretch was everywhere at once.
There were forty or fifty people on the snow, and many of them started forward to help the boy, who was being dragged away as if by invisible chains. Tess instinctively knew it was a trap, but was powerless to stop them from rushing to him.
Malgore moved in.
Charging in a white blur, the witch-creature slashed down survivors, wielding a long crescent-shaped knife.
The beastlike wretch was only glimpsed by Tess as the travelers shrieked, trying to make their way back into the train cars. They could not get the doors open. Tess screamed. They were being raked down, stabbed, pulled back into the snow. Someone would go down, then someone else—and a white skeletal hand would flash out of the mist and snow, reaching from behind the crowd to kill, to pull down, to slash at will.
Tess couldn’t breathe. She still struggled with the door but it was locked hopelessly.
Outside, Annette was pulled back farther, into the woods.
The man trapped under the train could not see behind him but Tess heard his screams of horror. The train was still shaking brutally. More screams tore the air from survivors inside.
Tess was yelling with them, to Annette, to anyone, just wanting to scream the Thing away, to fight, and it was all she had, her voice, as the sizzling flashes of light that surrounded Annette tossed her aside. Tess’s stomach dropped. The wretch was moving on. She had attracted it.
It was coming for her, now.
Inside the parlor car, a bluish mist began oozing from the ceiling.
Everyone screamed. The blind boys cried out and buried their heads. The mist was slipping in through cracks in the windows and under the doors, relentlessly.
Strangely, as it moved over them, Tess had a clear feeling that the mist was a solace. The haze was a spirit, and it was running from the witch, terrorized. Distinct from the crackling white power emanating from the wretch, the mist was of a blue twilight hue. It filled Tess with a state of wonder.
But Malgore had located this new spirit. The wretch sent its hand forward, shocking the car with pulses of pale light.
Tess turned. All around her people’s faces were lit up briefly—she saw skulls partially revealed and filled with light, faces halved into skeleton and flesh, bones visible as if burned from inside.
Tess saw one blind boy screaming, hysterical, saying, “I want to see—I want to see—”
And another screeching, “No—no—no—”
The power of the witch was searching inside the car; Tess knew it was searching for the spirit. There was nowhere to run. She turned and saw the indigo mist forming into a human shape beside her.
It was a Puritan girl—sixteen years old, maybe less—kneeling beside her, staring ahead at the bright pulses of light, as terrified of the witch’s power as anyone. The spectre looked into Tess with eyes of sorrow and desperate need, but she could not speak: She shouted, but no voice came forth.
Tess watched as the girl broke into a sea-colored mist that flooded toward Tess, who screamed, joining her shrieking with the others’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The blue mist reached into Tess. She stared horror-struck as it passed through her, leaving part of her body aglow.
The mist was moving like a snake inside her, splintering into many, slithering in her intestines, her stomach shuddering, her muscles weakened.
Mist-tendrils whipped upward, stabbing into her head.
Her eyes shut, for an instant Tess experienced a flood of emotions and then felt nothing but cold. Her brain felt punctured as if by a sword of ice.
She saw a rapid scattering of pictures in her mind’s eye: scarecrows, hands, a church, the train, as she detached from the reality before her.
In warm yellow light she awoke. She was in a different train car, snow covering the windows. Everything was moving strangely, fast and then slow. She was staring at many well-dressed men and women, in clothes such as her parents might have worn. They were being thrown against the walls.
A woman was screeching, “GET THE CHILDREN OUT!!”
And a ghostly female voice hissed an icy sound, “We do not want to hurt—”
And Tess knew she was seeing the story Lucinda had told her of the buried train, only it was not a story but the truth seen through someone’s eyes.
Someone who had been there.
The Puritan girl was trying to speak in the only way she knew how, through dreams and images. This was a warning, a message about her mother, the true witch, and Tess knew this as if it were her own knowledge. Then everything before Tess vanished.
She found herself now in yet another dark passenger car, with a group of children. They had barricaded the door, and their hearts were filled with terror. As if in a dream, an older girl of nine or ten years looked at Tess, saying “She wants us dead, she wants us all dead…
“She would feed on us,” intoned the girl, in a slow, empty voice. “Malgore, they say she chews you open and feeds on your bones while you live…keeps you alive to feel the pain…and takes your bones to use in her magic…
“Your spine,” she whispered, “she rips your spine out and curls it round her bed—”
“No…,” murmured Tess.
The girl nodded. “In Blackthorne, men killed themselves before she could get to them. They did not want to die at her hands. We shall all be murdered here, Lord deliver us….”
Tess knew. The little girl had never said such words. It was the ghost speaking as directly as it could. Dream was blending with memory.
Then the vision was gone.
She awoke feeling dazed, the influence of the ghost still clinging.
Outside in the field beyond, Tess saw the lost blind boy, his face normal and restored, alive but wracked with fear. She shot a glance to Annette, who was pulling herself up, safe, free of the snowy ground that had held her like a living thing.
The witch’s power was weakening.
Her abilities are not endless, thought Tess with relief.
She tried the door. It gave.
She smashed her way into the snow,
Abigail’s spirit still inside her. Shouts came from the train behind her and she glanced back wildly, seeing figures in the whitened windows. She battered at her chest, to drive out the thing within, and fell to the icy earth.
A force poured out of Tess, rippling the air, and shaping itself into the figure of a young Puritan woman. The bottom of her face was gone, mere vapor, and then all of her fell away into glimmering ether.
Still searching for her, the witch pursued, leaping from the train roof, limping grotesquely. Tess saw her suddenly stop as she came upon the body of Josiah Jurey in the snow.
Malgore saw the cross and other amulets upon it. She hissed, crunching his ankle in her claws, and dragged the witch-hunter off into the woods.
Tess watched the ghostly feminine form of Abigail, a flowing curtain of blurring waves in the air, and below that, the witch striding off, a swift shape in the snow, limping, moving unnaturally, dragging its dead prize.
Long after Tess was free of the encounter, Malgore continued to pursue the misty cerulean form of Abigail. With its animal mind, the witch knew the spirit desperately wanted to be followed. The bait would not be taken. Abigail desired nothing more than to draw Malgore away—but the witch would not be deceived into leaving her human prey out there in the forest ahead.
The widow dropped Josiah Jurey, leaving him like a hunter’s kill. She hissed and after a moment, something huge crackled in the brush in response. Malgore gave a satisfied sigh, motioning her servant closer.
Now she would hunt the men properly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Michael and Sattler tried to keep pace with Tobias as the pale daylight crawled on toward three, then four o’clock. The woods were as still and quiet as the day of creation. Tobias shook himself out of a daze.
Wilder was saying, “These woods were feared by the Indians long before any Salem witches came into it. That’s what the old man on the train said. He said the creature came to gain strength from the power emanating here.”
For just an instant, Tobias saw shapes in the dim, snow-shrouded forest, hundreds of them, people in ragged old-fashioned dress.
“Do you…sense something?” Sattler asked.
“I sense nothing but happiness and dandelions out there, waiting to be reborn.” Tobias kept going, visibly nervous. Were the dead railworkers? The deceased from Blackthorne, the burned bodies from the plague?
“Come now. What did you see?” Sattler was used to his bleak humor by now.
Shrugging him off, Tobias treaded onward. Many died here. He was thinking. They’re tied to the place, but put it out of your mind—they’re not the ones to fear. There’s something else out there.
The other men were calling for him to slow down, but Tobias was slogging on. “We have people counting on us. I’m sure that’s as new a feeling for you as it is for me, but that’s that.”
And then there was silence, a hole of sound where the young men should have been.
Tobias turned. The others were gone. The forest had been swallowed by the smoky blue and white mist. His heart was pumping hard.
“Sattler?”
He heard their voices calling, distant.
Michael: “Where are you—?”
Sattler: “What in God’s name happened?”
Staring at the wall of fog, Tobias turned, listening, the voices moving around him….
“Can anybody hear me?” called Sattler.
His voice trailed off, as did Michael’s. There was no sign of Wilder at all. Tobias saw the haze in the forest growing, reaching toward him.
He gave a quick prayer. In an instant the mist surrounded him.
Tobias stumbled around in the gloom, fearful, listening, lost in the snow-painted trees, trying to be calm. “Are you here…?”
But there was no answer.
Suddenly Tobias heard a low growl at his side. He could see nothing in the drifting, cloudlike masses. Then a more disturbing sound came from directly in front of him.
It was a savage howl, a murderous cat-kill screech carved out of the quiet, and out of the mist before him, Tobias saw Michael thrown to the ground, a rageful white creature pouncing upon him with incredible fury. Tobias stared in shock.
He stumbled back, away from the white beast—what was surely a witch—but Tobias was so stunned he could not find the word in his head. The thing ripped into Michael’s flesh, his arm, his chest, the college boy’s fingers were snapped by the creature’s jaws. Michael’s head slammed backward, and he fell unconscious.
The creature looked up, saw Tobias, and dropped its attack on Michael. Instead, it began slowly, inexorably, striding toward him.
For a moment Tobias could only stare.
He thought he saw the shadow of a wolf behind the witch, moving toward Michael. But the mist seemed to shuttle the four-legged creature away, and Tobias had no more courage to watch.
He turned to run, but Malgore leaped for him, as he felt a rush of air from behind. His head met the ground hard, the witch’s brutal strength pushing down upon him.
He looked up, gasping. The Thing was astonishing. To call it a “witch” was to stretch the definition. It was a beast, a horror, its skull stretched and deformed, its feminine face tightly narrow and extremely thin, barely covered in white skin and crowned with a long mane. A skeletal woman with small, bright eyes loomed over him.
It opened its huge jaws, rising back for a final, joyous strike of death—
But Wilder rushed out behind it, firing his pistol. The witch was struck, but turning, it flew at Wilder and pinned him to a tree.
Tobias was staring in a near stupor when he felt a grasping at his arms. Out of nowhere a misty form tugged him back, lifting him high off the ground, pulling him up into a tree to safety.
He could scarcely see what had saved him. Tobias glanced at the shape, which had the vague look of a man in Puritan clothes, but it was blurred, subtle, becoming mist almost as soon as Tobias cast his eyes upon it.
Below him, Malgore slammed Wilder against the tree again and again, his enormous frame struggling. Behind the creature, a second billowing presence, this one female, was soaring away, and the witch turned to it, hissing.
The witch gave chase, releasing Wilder to choke upon the ground.
High in the tree, Tobias searched for the apparition that had saved him, and then had faded as if worn out. Suddenly it made itself known as a coil of indigo vapor that whipped around the tree, becoming the slightest outline of a human form, the ghost soaring into Tobias, its hand touching his forehead. Tobias felt electrified, as the spirit broke through his skin, firing each nerve in his brain. He felt as if a gauzy substance, a curtain, were brushing upon the interior of his head. He took in a rapid flash of images: scarecrows, Salem, the train, axes, torches…
Tobias Goodraven felt his identity merge with another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
And then he was somewhere else. Tobias stood before a set of open church doors. Within the church, staring out, were the faces of angry men. Their gaze was so unkind, their appearance so disturbing, their bones so severe and sharp that Tobias felt it hard to withstand the sight of them. He had a sense somehow that he would be forced to enter this place and confront them.
But gradually light engulfed them, and he found himself standing in a crowd in front of a gallows. He was seeing the Puritan witches being hanged: A young man, a young woman, and her mother. The crowd was shouting. The bodies fell, one after the other, jerking, writhing on the ropes.
A flash engaged Tobias’s vision, the moment passed, and the bodies were dragged away by the mob. The old woman was thrown down a hill, and left to lie in a ravine. As the crowd left, Tobias stared down at her from the top of the hill. She was twitching, her emerald-white eyes upon his, otherworldly. She was alive.
Tobias knew what she was. In an instant, he became aware that the woman was once a living person, vicious, brutish, that she was now cheating death. She had only seemed to die, had worked a dark and terrible bl
ood magic, feeding on a force in the forest older than anything known.
Her wounds dripped from where the crowd had stoned her, and the stringy tatters she wore were clotted with crimson. She arose, thin muscles pulling her body out of the dead creek, and moved, sluglike, her mouth close to the dirt, her eyes smoldering in fury. Dragging herself up the hill, she was pure determination. Her white hair had fallen back from her high, withered forehead, and with the taut flesh of her face exposed, she was the equal of any creature in hell, ready for new life, power, and vengeance.
Tobias was seeing the Malgore witch being born, a living thing, but no longer human.
He was being given a history of horrors, as the ghost of the Puritan boy was showing him events of two hundred years ago in a bright, clear, unflinching vision. And the mystery that turned inside Tobias was, Why? What did the spirit want from him?
Tess lay on the snowy ground where she had fled, her eyes clenched shut as she heard the train metal stop rattling somewhere behind her. She opened her eyes. Her body was hers again.
The spirit had gone.
It went to find strength, Tess thought, to gather energy for another strike. There was time yet to prepare.
Tess stood up and moved across the snow to the train. Underneath her fear, she felt, at the back of her mind, a strange, buried envy. The spirits could move together, pass into each other; know one another with unimaginable intimacy. Their secrets, their history, their shared tragedy would be fully experienced by both together. Their feelings could never be hidden or ambiguous.
She saw Annette just ahead, and moved toward her. “They’re being kept apart,” Tess whispered to her.
“What?”
“I felt their isolation…” She knew Tobias would’ve seen it had he been here.
“I don’t understand.”
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