Speaks the Nightbird

by Robert R. McCammon

  Matthew stayed exactly where he was for a minute or more, still gripping the bars. He stared toward the gaol’s doorway, hoping beyond hope that Linch, or someone, would return with a lantern, because this darkness was a brutally terrible thing. He could smell the blood of rats. He felt his nerves starting to unravel like axe-hacked ropes.

  “I told you,” Rachel said in a quiet but very calm voice. “The darkness is bad. They never leave a lantern in here at night. You might have known that.”

  “Yes.” His voice sounded thick. “I might have.”

  He heard her stand up from her bench. He heard her footsteps through the straw. Then there came the rustling of her sackcloth gown and the scrape of a bucket. What followed next was the noise of a stream of water.

  One problem, he realized grimly, had been solved.

  He would have to bear the dark, though it was almost beyond endurance. He would have to bear it anyway, because if he did not fight its pressure upon his mind, then he might scream or weep, and what good would come of those actions? Surely he could bear it for three nights, if Rachel Howarth had borne it for three months. Surely he could.

  From the logwall behind him he heard a squeaking and scurrying. He knew full well that now had come the night that would test his mettle, and if his mettle be found cracked he was lost.

  Rachel’s voice suddenly came from just beyond the bars that parted them. “Try to sleep, if you can. There’s no use in standing up all night.”

  At last Matthew reluctantly loosened his grip on the iron and made his way past the desk to the place in the straw where he’d decided to sleep. That had been before the light had been taken, of course. He knelt down, feeling around to make sure no rats were waiting to attack him. There were none, though they sounded alarmingly near. He lay on his side and curled himself up into a tight ball, his arms around his knees. It seemed eons until the dawn.

  He heard the woman lie down in the straw. Then silence reigned, except for the rodents. He clenched his teeth together and squeezed his eyes shut. Perhaps he made a noise of despair—a gasp, a moan, something—but he wasn’t sure.

  “May I call you Matthew?” Rachel asked.

  It wasn’t proper. Wasn’t proper at all. He was the magistrate’s clerk, and she the accused. No, such familiarity was not proper.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice strained and near cracking.

  “Good night, Matthew.”

  “Good night,” he answered, and he almost said Rachel but he closed his mouth before the name could emerge. He did speak it, though, in his innermost voice.

  He waited, listening. For what, he did not know. Perhaps the buzz of a luminous, witch-directed fly. Perhaps the cold laughter of a demon who had come to visit for obscene purposes; perhaps the sound of raven’s wings flitting in the dark. None of those sounds occurred. There were just the furtive noises of the surviving rodents and then, a while later, the soft breathing of Rachel Howarth in sleep.

  What she needs is a champion of truth, he thought.

  And who in this town could be that champion but himself? But the evidence…the apparent evidence…was so damning.

  Damning or not, there were so many questions. So many whys, he could scarce list them all in his mind.

  One thing was certain: if the woman was not a witch, someone in Fount Royal—perhaps more than a single person—had gone to great and evil effort to paint her as one. Again the question: why?

  In spite of his trepidations, his body was relaxing. He felt sleep coming nearer. He fought it by going over in his head the testimony of Jeremiah Buckner. At last, though, sleep was the victor, and he joined Rachel in the land of forgetting.

  fifteen

  THE POWER OF GOD was the subject of Robert Bidwell’s lecture at the Anglican church on Sabbath morn, and during its second hour—as Bidwell paused to drink a cup of water and renew his vigor—the magistrate felt his eyes drooping as if drawn down by leaden weights. It was a sensitive situation, as he was seated in the front pew of the church, and thus being in the seat of honor Woodward was subject to the stares and whispers of the congregation. Such would not be worrisome to him if he were in firmer health, but as he’d slept very poorly and his throat was once more ravaged and swollen, he might have chosen a rack-and-wheel over the torture of this predicament.

  Bidwell, to be so eloquent and forceful face-to-face, was a wandering wastrel at the pulpit. Between half-cooked pronouncements simmered long pauses, while the congregation steamed in the close, hot room. To add even more injury, Bidwell didn’t know his Good Book very well and continually misquoted what to Woodward were passages every child had memorized by the age of baptism. Bidwell asked the congregation to join him in prayer after prayer concerning the well-being and future of Fount Royal, a task which became truly laborious by the fifth or sixth amen. Heads nodded and snores grumbled, but those who dared to sleep were slapped awake by the glove that Mr. Green—who was acting just as much gaol-keeper here as at the gaol—had fixed to a long wooden pole capable of reaching the cheek of any sinner.

  At last Bidwell came to his dutiful conclusion and went to his seat. Next arose the schoolmaster, who limped up to the pulpit with his Bible beneath his arm, and asked that there be another prayer to secure the presence of God among them. It went on for perhaps ten minutes, but at least Johnstone’s voice had inflection and character and so Woodward was able—with an effort of will—to avoid the glove.

  Woodward had risen from his bed at first light. From his shaving mirror stared the face of a sick man, hollow-eyed and gray-fleshed. He opened his mouth wide and caught sight in the glass of the volcanic wasteland his throat had become. Again his air passages were thickened and blocked, which proved that Dr. Shields’s remedy was less a cure than a curio. Woodward had asked Bidwell if he might see to Matthew before the beginning of Sabbath service, and a trip to Mr. Green’s house had secured the key, which had been returned to him after its use by the ratcatcher.

  Fearing the worst, Woodward discovered that his clerk had actually enjoyed a better rest in the harsh straw than he himself had endured at the mansion house. Matthew had had his tribulations, to be sure, but except for finding a drowned rodent in his waterbucket this morning he’d suffered no lasting harms. In the next cage, Rachel Howarth remained cloaked and impassive, perhaps a pointed response to Bidwell’s presence. But Matthew had come through the first night without being transformed into a black cat or a basilisk, and seemed to have undergone no other entrancements, as Woodward had feared might happen. Woodward had vowed he would return again in the afternoon, and so had reluctantly left his clerk in the company of the cloaked harridan.

  The magistrate had expected to smell the dust of a hundred dry sermons when the schoolmaster took the pulpit to speak, but Johnstone was at ease before the congregation and therefore earned more ears than had Bidwell before him. In fact, Johnstone was quite a good speaker. His message was faith in the mysterious ways of God, and over the course of an hour he skillfully wove that topic into a parallel with the situation faced by the citizens of Fount Royal. It was clear to Woodward that Johnstone relished public speaking, and used his hands in grand gestures to illustrate the verses of scripture that were his emphasis. Nary a head nodded nor a snore sounded while the schoolmaster held forth, and at the end of Johnstone’s lesson the prayer that followed was short, concise, and the final “Amen” delivered like an exclamation point. Bidwell rose to say a few more words—perhaps feeling a bit upstaged by the schoolmaster. Then Bidwell called upon Peter Van Gundy, proprietor of the tavern, to dismiss the service, and at long last Mr. Green rested his glove-on-a-pole in a corner as the congregation took their leave of the sweatbox.

  Outside, beneath the milky sky, the air was still and damp. Beyond Fount Royal’s walls mist hung low over the forest and draped the taller treetops with white shrouds. No birds sang. As Woodward followed Bidwell to the carriage where Goode waited to drive them home, the magistrate’s progress was interrupted by a tug on his sleeve
. He turned to find Lucretia Vaughan standing there, wearing her somber black Sabbath gown as did the other women, yet hers had a touch of lace decorating the high bodice that seemed to Woodward a bit ostentatious. Behind her stood her blonde daughter Cherise, also in black, and a slim man of short stature who wore a vacant smile and had equally vacant eyes.

  “Magistrate?” the woman said. “How goes the case?”

  “It goes,” he answered, his voice little more than a raspy croak.

  “Dear me! You sound in need of a salt gargle.”

  “The weather,” he said. “It disagrees with me.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. Now: I would like—that is, my husband and I would like—to offer an invitation to our table on Thursday night.”

  “Thursday? I’ll have to wait and see how I’m feeling by then.”

  “Oh, you misunderstand!” She flashed him a bright smile. “I mean an invitation to your clerk. His sentence will be done by Tuesday morning, as I hear. He’ll receive his lashes at that time, am I correct?”

  “Yes, madam, you are.”

  “Then he should be up to joining us on Thursday evening. Say at six o’clock?”

  “I can’t speak for Matthew, but I will pass your invitation along.”

  “I would be oh so grateful,” she said, with a semblance of a curtsey. “Good day, then.”

  “Good day.”

  The woman took her husband’s arm and guided him along—a shocking sight, especially on the Sabbath—and the daughter followed a few paces behind. Woodward pulled himself up into the waiting carriage, lay back against the cushioned seat across from Bidwell, and Goode flicked the reins.

  “You found the service of interest, Magistrate?” Bidwell asked.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it. I feared my sermon was rather on the intellectual side, and most of the citizens here are—as you know by now—charmingly rustic. It wasn’t too deep for them, was it?”

  “No, I think not.”

  “Ah.” Bidwell nodded. His hands folded in his lap. “The schoolmaster has an agile mind, but he does tend to speak in circles rather than to a point. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” Woodward said, realizing what Bidwell desired to hear. “He does have an agile mind.”

  “I’ve told him—suggested to him—that he keep his message more grounded in reality than abstract concepts, but he has his own way of presentation. I myself find him somewhat tiresome, though I do try to follow his threads.”

  “Um,” Woodward said.

  “You would think that, being a teacher, he might be also a better communicator. But I suspect his talents lie in other areas. Not thievery, however.” He gave a brief laugh and then attended to the straightening of his ruffled cuffs.

  Woodward was listening to the creak of the wheels when another sound intruded. The signal bell at the front gate’s watch-tower began to ring. “Hold, Goode!” Bidwell commanded, and he looked toward the tower as Goode reined in the horses. “Someone’s approaching, it seems.” He frowned. “I can’t think of anyone we’re expecting, though. Goode, take us to the gate!”

  “Yes sir,” the servant answered, and he maneuvered the team around to change direction.

  On this afternoon, Malcolm Jennings was again atop the watchtower. A group of citizens had already assembled to see who the visitor might be. As Jennings saw Bidwell’s carriage stop on the street below, he leaned over the railing and shouted, “A covered wagon, Mr. Bidwell! Young man at the reins!”

  Bidwell scratched his chin. “Well, who could it be? Not the maskers; it’s way too early yet for them.” He motioned toward a rawboned pipesmoker who wore a straw hat. “Swaine, open the gate! You there, Hollis: help him with the timber!”

  The two men Bidwell had spoken to drew the latching log from its position of security and pulled the gate open. When the gate was drawn wide, the covered wagon Jennings had announced rumbled across the threshold, hauled by two horses—a piebald and a roan—that appeared but several ragged breaths away from the pastepot. The wagon’s driver reined in the team as soon as the vehicle had cleared the entrance, and he surveyed the onlookers from beneath a battered brown monmouth cap. His gaze settled on the nearest citizen, which was John Swaine. “Fount Royal?” he inquired.

  “That it is,” Swaine answered. Bidwell was about to direct a question of his own about who the young man might be, when suddenly the wagon’s canvas was whipped open with the speed of revelation and another man emerged from the interior. This man, who wore a black suit and a black tricorn hat, stood on the seat plank next to the driver, his hands on his hips, and scanned the vista from left to right with the narrowed eyes of an arrogant emperor.

  “At last!” The thunder of his voice made the horses jump. “The Devil’s own town!”

  This statement, delivered so loudly and imperially, sent a terror through Bidwell. Instantly he stood up in the carriage, his face flushed. “Sir! Who might you be?”

  The dark eyes of this new arrival, which were hooded with flesh in a long-jawed, gaunt face that seemed a virtual patchwork quilt of deep lines and wrinkles, fixed upon Bidwell. “Who might thee be?”

  “My name is Robert Bidwell. I am the founder of Fount Royal, as well as its mayor.”

  “Mine condolences, then, in thy time of tribulation.” He removed his hat, displaying a shockpate of white hair that was much too unruly to be a wig. “I am known by the name God hast given me: Exodus Jerusalem. I have come many a league to this place, sir.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Need thou ask? I am brought here by the might of God, to do God’s bidding.” He returned the tricorn to his head, his show of manners finished. “God hast compelled me to this town, to smite thy witch dead and do battle with demons infernal!” Bidwell felt weak in the knees. He had realized, as had Woodward, that the gates had been opened to allow the entrance of a travelling preacher, and this one sounded steeped in the blood of vengeance.

  “We have the situation in hand, Mr…uh…Jerusalem. Well in hand,” Bidwell said. “This is Magistrate Woodward, from Charles Town.” He pointed a finger at his companion. “The witch’s trial is already under way.”

  “Trial?” Jerusalem had snarled it. He looked across the faces of the assembled citizens. “Dost thou not know the woman is a witch?”

  “We know it!” shouted Arthur Dawson. “We know she’s cursed our town, too!” This brought up a chorus of angry and frustrated voices, which Woodward noted made the preacher smile as if he were hearing the sweet refrains of chamber music.

  “Then of what need is a trial?” Jerusalem asked, his voice becoming something akin to a bludgeoning instrument. “She is in thy gaol, is she not? But whilst she lives, who may say what evil she performs?”

  “One moment!” Bidwell hollered, motioning with both arms for the onlookers to settle themselves. “The witch will be dealt with, by the power of the law!”

  “Foolish man!” Jerusalem, a human cannon, blasted at the top of his leathered lungs. “There is no power greater than the law of God! Dost thou deny that God’s law is greater than the law of fallen Adam?”

  “No, I do not deny it! But—”

  “Then shall thou depend upon the law of fallen Adam, knowing it to be tainted by the Devil himself?”

  “No! I mean…we have to do this thing the correct way!”

  “And allowing evil to live in thy town for one more minute is, in thy opinion, the correct way?” Jerusalem grinned tightly and shook his head. “Thyself hath been blighted, sir, along with thy town!” Again his attention went to the assembly, which was growing larger and more restless. “I say God is the truest and purest of lawgivers, and what doth God say in regards to witchcraft? Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

  “That’s right!” George Bartow shouted. “God says to kill a witch!”

  “God doth not say tarry, nor wait upon the tainted law of humankind!” Jerusalem plowed on. “And any man who serveth su
ch folly is doomed himself to the brimstone pit!”

  “He’s rousting them!” Bidwell said to the magistrate, and then he called out, “Wait, citizens! Listen to—” but he was hollered silent.

  “The time of God’s judgment,” Jerusalem announced, “is not tomorrow, nor is it the day after! The time is now!” He reached back into the wagon, and his hand emerged clamped to the grip of an axe. “I shall rid thee of thy witch, and afterward we shall pray for God’s blessing upon thy homes and families! Who amongst thee will lead me to mine enemy?”

  At the sight of the axe, Woodward’s heart had started pounding and he was now on his feet. He gave a shout of “No! I won’t have such a—” blasphemy against the court, he was going to say, but his tormented voice collapsed and he was left speechless. A half dozen men yelled that they would lead the preacher to the gaolhouse, and suddenly the crowd—which had grown to twenty-five or more—seemed to Woodward to have been seized by a raging fit of bloodlust. Jerusalem climbed down from the wagon, axe in hand, and surrounded by a veritable phalanx of human hounds he stalked down Harmony Street in the direction of the gaol, his long thin legs carrying him with the speed of a predatory spider.

  “They won’t get in, the fools!” Bidwell snorted. “I have the keys!”

  Woodward managed to croak, “An axe may serve as a key!” He saw it, then, in Bidwell’s face: a smug complacency, perhaps, or the realization that Jerusalem’s blade might end the witch’s life much quicker than the flames of the law. Whatever it was, Bidwell had made his decision on the side of the mob. “Stop them!” Woodward demanded, sweat glistening on his cheeks.

  “I tried, sir,” came the reply. “You witnessed that I tried.”

  Woodward thrust his face toward Bidwell’s. “If the woman’s killed I’ll charge every man in that crowd with murder!”

  “A difficult charge to prosecute, I would think.” Bidwell sat down. He glanced toward the preacher’s wagon, where a dark-haired woman of slim build and middle years had emerged from the interior to speak with the young driver. “I fear it’s out of my hands now.”