Spirit

by J. P. Hightman

  “Tess, wake up. We need you. We need to know who’s left. What are we going to do for the wounded?”

  There were still badly injured survivors in damaged train cars, far from the main body of the train. They were the ones who couldn’t be moved at all, and there was no one to help tend to them.

  Just over half the original survivors remained alive now, Tess realized in shock. Perhaps a hundred people left in all? From where she stood, she counted perhaps two score, outside with her, unprotected. It had been a massacre.

  She pulled in a bracing breath of cold air, thinking she’d rather run away than face all that needed to be done. She had a confused longing to turn into the forest and leave it all behind no matter what the risk, to leave the people here as bait for the witch, and escape in the chaos.

  It seemed now that a riot was erupting. Ned pulled her and Lucinda away from the growing mob trying to break into the train. Rocks were being thrown. There was nothing Tess could do; it was like a dream. She could only stand there with her newfound allies and watch everything fall apart.

  The wind picked up and ice scraped over the snow. No one was sure if this somehow meant Malgore was near, but Tess felt nothing stirring her deep senses.

  “It’s getting colder. I’ll bet we don’t have much more than an hour left of light,” Ned said.

  They huddled together. Tess felt the softness of his wide stomach against her elbows, as she held her arms clutched against her chest. He looked down at her worriedly. “What do we do? How long can we withstand this?”

  “I don’t know.” Tess sighed.

  Lucinda watched the crowd silently, ashen, unable to say anything.

  “I feel like the cold is coming from my insides out,” Ned uttered thoughtfully.

  Tess was now distracted, for the angered crowd was breaking up; strangely enough, she was seeing people moving away, toward the icy lake. Her eyes began watering, tears coming to them in some premonition of some great sadness she couldn’t make clear in her head. Suddenly, there was a shattering sound of ice. People yelled, pointing.

  Then the cause of her strange pain became more clear. Out of the frozen lake the buried train car was emerging, bursting out of the ice with a kind of electrical crackle. There was a sudden billowing of energy from the panicked survivors all around Tess. And they started moving in the direction of the lake, leaving the train to help. Tess trailed them, feeling sure that it was wrong to go.

  And then she stopped. Knowing. The others rushed forward, while Tess stood watching, afraid, as they closed in, and the watery door fell open.

  The rescuers suddenly slowed, confusion played out on their faces, struck by disbelief and horror. The storm was building, snow whipping around them—as Tess hung back, fearing what it was in the car.

  “What is it? What do you see?” She had to scream to be heard over the wind.

  Behind her, Lucinda was yelling; the weather, the elements, raging around her even more fiercely now…as the men up ahead saw into the train car. And they were looking at their own bodies. Leo and Alan and all of them, dead, looking at their own remains, and Tess saw it happening, saw it all so slowly unfolding and now the snow came charging across the angry landscape, and they began to vanish with it, swept away by the wind.

  Tess turned back, looking to the train.

  Lucinda was calling out, “Oh God…”

  She and others stood staring back at Tess—and then slowly faded away. Tess saw them vanish from afar, leaving the train a solitary darkness, a collection of black objects in a long broken line. Snow swept across the landscape, wiping it clean of life….

  They were gone.

  Tess felt her heart trembling. Her breath held half-started prayers; she could not bring herself to move, and everything in her rejected what she was seeing. These people were not dead. It was impossible. She had seen them, held their hands, spoken to them, for hours. She needed them, she could not get through this alone. She looked around in terror, abandoned.

  Ned was stumbling toward her, his face pained and disoriented.

  The body he was carrying was his own.

  The snow lashed around him and behind it his dark shape vanished, the body collapsing to the ground. Then he was gone.

  Tess was in absolute shock. God help me. This is real. This is real….

  Somewhere behind her, a boy stood terrified in the snow in front of the train, unable to move. “THEY’RE GONE—HELP ME—SOMEONE!” His screams were being eaten by the winds.

  And Tess truly comprehended. They were no longer alive, but they could not accept it; they had lived on, believing themselves to be survivors. They had warped nature around them, the signs had been there. Everyone around her was fading away in the dim light of winter. They had been killed by the wreck, the storm, or the Thing itself; but they had been killed one by one. They were gone, all of them.

  The snow charged across the land, and the trees, and the lake, and took every last ghostly breath from the place, erased the other travelers from existence, for they now knew what they were.

  Phantoms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tess tried to regain her strength, hearing the screams of children. Only the boys of the blind school remained alive. Why they had been spared she didn’t know, but they had no one left to help them except for her. Their chaperones were dead.

  And the others were gone as well, all of them, reclaimed by the white woods that had let them live on for a time after death; the mysterious, swirling power of the place taking them in at last, making their souls part of the snow and the mist, twisting their lives into the gnarled roots of the trees, the fingerlike branches, the poisonous brambles and old thorns in the winterscape, into the depths of the lake. Tess knew the essence of who they were had joined with the woods, to feed, and be fed upon.

  Whatever had fed the longest in the woods, the strongest of its evils, had chosen now to move in. Malgore was coming back.

  Tess could feel her hatred now.

  With nowhere else to run, Tess clambered back into the parlor car, coming face-to-face with one of the blind boys. They were all huddling together inside.

  “Who’s there?” said the child, his voice a whimper.

  Tess could hardly find words. “They didn’t know…They’d lost their lives…She brought the car up. They…”

  “Who’s left? Who’s left?”

  Tess shook her head. “She wanted them to know…We’re hers…We’re all—”

  Suddenly Malgore leaped into sight at the door.

  The creature rushed forward, her jaws missing Tess’s face as she ran, but tearing a tiny piece of flesh from her ear in a small spray of blood. Tess, screaming, crawled away fast, as Malgore reached, groping, her claw slipping from Tess’s boots.

  The children ran for the back of the train, squealing, almost fighting each other. Tess kicked, and the creature fell back, clinging to the door, grinning wildly. Screaming, Tess turned away, and when she looked back…

  The wretch was gone. The door slammed shut.

  Tess panted for air. Malgore had seemed light and weakened, her bones birdlike. Was she drained of strength now?

  Then, from the window, Tess could see Malgore’s eyes.

  What she saw next were the eyes disappearing and a long panicked moment passed. When Malgore returned, she lifted a burning torch from the bonfire outside—and the window was covered in flames.

  The witch glared, fire reflected in her eyes, chanting, as the train car became completely engulfed. Smoke filled the window.

  Tess and everyone inside were screaming in terror. The heat soared. They were being left to burn alive.

  More from panic than courage, Tess smashed her way out the rear doors, leaping over the flames. The fire caught hold of her, her hair burning, and Tess rolled on the snow. She caught a blurring look at the blind children, trapped behind her. They would never get out alone.

  Rolling and thrashing, she conquered the fire on her body, but the children we
re screaming, with their lungs and their very souls.

  She snatched up a blanket from the ground and began beating at the fire.

  An ice scarecrow.

  It was a simple figure carved upon a nearly hidden frame, some artist’s handiwork.

  And it was all that greeted Tobias as they reached the town of Blackthorne. Not a soul joined them. The little city was empty, or nearly so. There was one man’s upright body, propped up strangely on the town gates, his distorted face covered in ice. He was all that remained of the villagers, it would seem.

  Tobias swallowed, unnerved, pondering a way to make light of the grim scenario facing them. He could think of nothing to say.

  Their expressions taut with fear, they continued on, making their way into town. It was nothing more than one street, a huddling of ancient wooden buildings against the wilderness, some abandoned horse carriages here and there.

  New structures had yet to be built around these original edifices, though the fresh paint and restored wooden stairways testified to the efforts of the development committee. In the distance, other plain, early American homes, all of them white, each as simple as a folk painting or any child’s drawing of a house, lay spread out in clearings, overseeing dead farms. Blackthorne had been a town with little to offer, it seemed, except that it was not Salem.

  A furious banging drew their attention to a stable, where Tobias could make out several terrified horses, three or perhaps four, kicking deliriously as the men passed.

  Everywhere there were signs of WELCOME and ICE SKATES FOR RENT. At the street’s end, a collection of ice-sculpted scarecrows fronted the icy church.

  “What’s happening here…?” whispered Sattler.

  Not a sound met them, just the wind.

  They plodded toward the ice church. It was a grand creation, snow and ice sculpted into a classic building of worship, a respectable ten feet high, and steepled.

  Tobias’s eyes slipped over it quickly, but a new current of feeling took his attention.

  Slowly, Tobias turned toward one of the old white houses nearby. “Someone’s in there,” he said hesitantly.

  He knew he was right. Human emotion, living feeling, had an unmistakable scent.

  No one wanted to go in. Tobias at last started to move toward it, and the others followed. They closed in on the winter-beaten house.

  Tobias eased the door open and went inside. Michael and Sattler came in behind him. Tobias could feel something alive before he could see it, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, scanning over rustic furniture, Indian artifacts…

  …and a man hidden by the dark, staring back, sitting, his arms wrapped around a shotgun like a precious infant.

  “Don’t come in.”

  Everyone stood still.

  “Just let me be.”

  All eyes were fixed nervously on the shotgun in the man’s hand.

  Tobias surprised everyone by stepping closer, gingerly. “What happened?”

  The waiting man stared back, his face invisible in the dim light. “Something was killing us,” he grunted. Tobias eased closer, trying to see the man’s eyes. The man continued, in halting speech. “I blacked out. Then I…wandered around…It got so very cold…cold like I’ve never known. I came back in, and…there wasn’t anyone here anymore.” Tobias eased the shotgun away from the man, handed it to Sattler. Seeing the man’s riding whip, he handed that away, too.

  “You have a horse?” asked Tobias, friendly, calm.

  “Out there somewhere.”

  Tobias nodded. The man wanted to talk, saying more without prompting. “I had started working with my brother; we brought up horses to sell. They never wanted to come. The horses. They knew. They knew this wasn’t a right place. God in heaven…Everything went into wild disarray here. People were thrown around like puppets,” he said, his teeth clenching.

  Puppets, thought Tobias. Like that cheap and tawdry couple that had run from the train, like that lonely doctor in his house, all of them toys of Malgore. How does she do it? What means gives her such control?

  The man in the chair went on. “Most of ’em died after a few minutes. I don’t know what it was…what it wanted from us. I never saw it directly. All I saw was rage. Absolute rage, God help us.” He coughed.

  Tobias looked at him carefully. “Are you sick, sir?”

  The man looked back at him with vague distrust. “I’ve been fighting off black lung for some years.”

  Sattler asked, “You don’t know where the people went?”

  “Yeah, I think I do,” said the man, rocking in his chair. “Can’t go in there myself.”

  Tobias and the young men exchanged glances.

  “I pray you’d tell us where they went, sir.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A moment later Tobias and Sattler were outside. Tobias motioned for Michael to stay with the man, and he did so without complaint, turning back at the door.

  Without a word, Tobias and Sattler headed toward the ice church.

  Tobias felt numb. He’d been through too much, had been burned, inside and out, and wanted only to be done with this nightmare and be back with Tess, away from here, in New York, tuning his cello.

  They trudged on, every step filling them with more fear.

  “Maybe we could shove that man in there first and see what happens,” Sattler said.

  Tobias looked at him with a sidelong glance. “I can’t say that I care for morbid humor.”

  Neither had the heart for talking any more, and soon they were standing in front of the ice church, speechless in the chill wind. There were no sounds from the building.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Sattler pointed out finally.

  “We’ve checked everything here. This is the only place left to look for help.”

  Sattler thought for a moment. “Tobias. This is madness. We both know this is madness. Is there some piece I’m missing?”

  Tobias was fixated on the church. “There’s something I have to see in there.”

  “I’m quite certain there’s nothing we want to see inside that.”

  “I have to finish what was started. I have to see their belongings returned to them. I think this is where they were hanged.”

  “It’s not yours to do.” Sattler stared at him. “This is insane.”

  “We need to see this through. I need to do this for them. It may be the way to kill that thing.” For just a second Tobias had begun to feel unsure.

  Sattler studied the building nervously. “The door of the church looks like the den of an animal. It feels very much like a trap to me. We’ve survived this long; we can find another way. Why do you force us ahead like this?”

  Tobias tried to see into the opening at the ice church. The mystery called to him. But it was more than temptation—there’d be no chance for any of them if he couldn’t find a method to kill Malgore.

  “It’s trickery of some kind,” said Sattler. “You know it. It’s too weak now to attack us, so it lures us inside and seals us in. Then it waits to regain its power.”

  “There’s a logic to what you say.”

  “Look here, forget all of this. Let’s turn around, let’s just get some horses and keep going,” said Sattler, intense now. “You’ve seen enough death.”

  To his surprise, Tobias nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  “Right. All right, then. You want to live, don’t you?”

  Tobias looked at him, deeply thoughtful. “Yes. Turns out I do.” He was in a state of slight disbelief at his own words.

  Sattler handed him the horsewhip. “Let’s get a horse and get out of here.”

  He made it sound so simple.

  To the surprise of both of them, Tobias took the offering. He looked ahead, to the most prominent scarecrow made of ice, stalactites hanging over its empty sockets. He found some final answer somewhere in those eyes, and he turned away from the winter-made church.

  But it was too late.

  Without warning, from the scarecrow’s dow
nturned mouth came a shock of sound and wind, and the two men were dropped by the force of it.

  Falling into a sleep, Tobias felt his body scraped along as if by the wind.

  He was being swallowed by the ice church.

  Tess had helped the children out of the burning railway car, but they had run from the fire in terror, without thinking and had been separated, gotten lost in the storm.

  Tess could see the train car still burning in the snow.

  Her refuge was gone. She was in the open.

  She looked around. Amid the rows of trees, she saw the blind boys, each alone, wandering, stumbling; the lone survivors. Tess felt her heart drop at the sight of them all, a responsibility she had never wanted.

  The snow relented, revealing, as she turned around, the doctor’s estate—the long, tall old house and its smaller partner. The biggest building was a burned-out, ancient hulk, the old refuge of the Salem runaways. She hated the idea of returning to the room with the corpse. But it was shelter.

  Tess stared at it, distrustful. She looked back, up in the trees, to the darkening evening sky. Everywhere it seemed there was a threat from the forest.

  She realized she always counted on Tobias to help her with such decisions, and at the same moment, the fact hit her that he always allowed the final judgment to be hers. She allowed him to tug at her, because she wanted it—there was truly no manipulation at all.

  She had no notion of how long she stood there, thinking about it.

  “Boys…,” she whispered, and then even quieter, “come with me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A twisting snake of smoky blue mist had hold of Tobias and Sattler, pulling them into the ice church. It took time, for the misty form of Wilhelm was weak, but the young men did not resist. Their bodies made sloppy grooves in the snow.

  Tobias opened his eyes groggily, feeling the sliding motion, but he had no power over his muscles. He could not run. And he was desperate. Something was now approaching. He saw a blurred, creeping figure in the windswept snow, slowly and confidently moving toward the church doorway.