“I didn’t see any ghosts,” Dad said. He had pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Garrison Street. As they rattled over the bridge, Sean saw the tops of the ailanthus trees that choked Witch Island. “No ghosts, just plaster dust and ripped-out wiring. As for Helen Arkwright, she looks like she’s about twenty years old and too nervous to say ‘boo.’”
“Maybe she’s nervous because of the ghosts,” Sean said.
“More likely because she’s trying to renovate that whole monster at once. She said the uncle who left her the house lived in the library and let the rest go.” Dad shook his head. He didn’t believe in letting stuff go. “That’s where the stained-glass windows are, in the library. They’re in rough shape, but they’re spectacular. You’d like them, Sean. One of the panels has the Devil in it.”
“What, like Satan?”
“Ms. Arkwright called him the Black Man. I guess that’s what the Puritans called him. He didn’t look like a devil to me, though. He was in this Egyptian getup, no horns, no hooves, no tail.”
Sean leaned between the front seats. “So, are you going to restore the windows?”
“I think so. Big job. I’ll have to take them out and do a full refabrication, new support system, the works.”
“So you’ll have to come back to Arkham?”
Dad grinned; Sean saw it in the rearview mirror. “Which would mean you can come back to Arkham. You have that good a time?”
“It was awesome. This place owns Salem for witches. We went to the Witch Museum, and the Witch House, and the courthouse where they had the witch trials, and Witch Island—”
“We only saw the Island off the bridge,” Eddy cut in. “Sean wanted to swim out to it, but I wouldn’t let him.”
“No, I didn’t. I wanted to rent a kayak and row out to it.”
“Only there’s like three waterfalls between the Island and the kayak rentals. Then we hung out on the University Green for a while. I so want to apply to Miskatonic now.”
“I’m applying for sure,” Sean said. “Then we went to the bookstore.”
“I see you bought something.”
“This book about mythology, that’s all.” And it was all that he’d bought. No need to mention the Witch Panic book and the newspaper clipping. It was too complicated, and Dad had just inched into the jam of cars on Main Street. Dad hated traffic. The only way he could deal with it was by turning on the classic rock station from Boston, which he did now. “Jumping Jack Flash” blared. Dad joined in without missing a snarl.
End of the interrogation, excellent. Eddy had already snagged Infinity Unimaginable and was slumped comfortably, reading. Sean pulled out The Witch Panic and let it fall open to the clipping. “Wanted, an apprentice in magic and in the service of its Masters.” If it only said “an apprentice in magic,” that could mean it was hocus-pocus, saw-the-lady-in-half magic. Stage stuff. But it also said “and in the service of its Masters.” With a capital M. That made the whole business sound more serious. Who were the Masters of magic, anyhow? And why did the guy who’d faked the ad call himself Reverend Orne? Sean checked the index. He found a listing for “ORNE, Redemption, husband of Patience, minister at the Third Congregational Church.” The Reverend was a big enough deal to appear on a dozen pages.
“Hey, Eddy.”
She kept reading. “This book is wicked. Can I borrow it?”
“Sure. But listen. Maybe I’ll write to this Reverend dude.”
That made Eddy look at him over the top of Infinity. “Why?”
“I don’t know. He must be pretty cool, coming up with this ad and getting it to look so real. And I can ask him what the hell he’s talking about, apprentices and Masters of magic and all.”
“Yeah,” Eddy said. She bugged her eyes out and got sarcastic-breathless. “You better do that right away. You know what Mr. Horrocke said. He said, ‘It’s your destiny, Luke.’”
Of course she did the Darth Vader imitation just as the Stones segued into a discount furniture ad and Dad dumped the radio volume. “What’s whose destiny?” he asked.
Eddy knew better, but she was on a roll. “It’s Sean’s destiny to be an e-mail wizard’s apprentice. See, he found this ad at the bookstore—”
She’d propped her feet up on the back of the passenger seat, so Sean couldn’t kick her. Shut up shut up shut up, he willed in her direction.
Either his telepathy worked or Eddy came back to her senses. She knew how paranoid Dad was, especially about Internet freaks. Like they were after geek-boys, not the girls hanging their boobs out on Facebook.
“What ad?” Dad prompted. The traffic was so tight, the Civic might as well have been parked; Dad was able to turn around and look at them. Sean hustled the clipping into the book, the book into the map pocket on his door.
“This dumb joke ad,” Eddy said. She’d switched voices from breathless to bored. “Apply to be a magic apprentice. Nothing much.”
Dad’s eyebrows vanished into the shock of hair that fell over his forehead. “You didn’t really think about answering an ad like that, Sean.”
“God, Dad. I was just kidding Eddy. I can’t believe she took it seriously.”
Eddy put her feet down and gave Sean a kick to the ankle, as if he were the one who deserved kicking. He stifled a yell.
“Because that would be stupid,” Dad said. “You know how many scammers and predators there are on the Internet. I don’t have to tell you.”
Not more than ten times a day. “I know, Dad.”
The cars ahead started moving. The cars behind started honking. Even so, Dad gazed at Sean for what felt like a whole minute before he faced forward and drove. “I would hope you know by now.”
Sean had signed up for the online ghost-hunting course (with Dad’s Visa) four years back, when he was twelve, a kid. Dad might forgive, but he never forgot. “I do know,” Sean said. “Besides, I don’t even have the ad. It’s back at the bookstore.”
He got his feet up before Eddy could kick him again. He kept them up until she glared, shrugged, and went back to reading her book.
Once off Main, the Civic cruised unimpeded toward Orange Point. Tour buses at the Hanging Ground Memorial slowed them down again. They’d checked out the Memorial that morning, or Sean would have asked to stop. The sun had dropped low enough to spill pale gold over the ocean and the cliff-top grasses and the tombstones of hanged witches. It looked like a movie scene the special-effects crew had colorized to make everything pop. Sean craned around to see the path that led to Patience Orne’s grave. She’d been such a bad-ass witch that they’d planted her away from everyone else, in a little clearing surrounded by scrub blueberries and dune roses. The edge of the cliff was a few steps from her splintered stone. Sean pictured the stone new, and Redemption standing over it. Maybe he’d gotten so worked up mourning, he’d thrown himself over that convenient edge. Except he couldn’t have. He’d lived long enough to put an ad in the 1895 Advertiser.
Sean laughed.
“What’s up?” Dad asked.
“Nothing. Except I was thinking we should get double anchovies on the pizza. And pineapple.”
Dad and Eddy went into bouts of bogus retching. As they began the descent into Kingsport, Sean slipped The Witch Panic from the map pocket and hid it under Dad’s seat, where it and the newspaper clipping could stay safe until he got a chance to do something about them.
2
Stupefied by his pizza binge, Sean slept through the trip from Arkham to Providence. He woke up when they stopped at Eddy’s house, but he was too late to keep her from jumping out with his Mythos book. It was after nine, and traffic was light; Dad made it home in five minutes and went straight over to his studio. His eagerness to get to work on the new commission was good luck for Sean—he recovered The Witch Panic in Arkham unseen and, after checking his recharged phone for messages, flopped on the back-porch glider. The scent of cloves and ginger and myrrh wafted off the pages as he flipped through them. Nice but weird. Most old books
were sneezy with dust and mold. Maybe the last owner of this one had burned incense all the time, some kind of special preservative, the Crypt Freshener of the Pharaohs.
The newspaper clipping fell out on Sean’s chest. He set it on the wicker table by the glider, well away from his sweating Coke can, and looked at the page it had marked. In ghost stories, people were always reading the future by picking a Bible passage at random. The passage in front of him was in an appendix of short biographies, and it was titled “The Unfortunate History of the Reverend Redemption Orne.” Damn. Eddy would never believe it. She’d say Sean had marked that page on purpose, but he hadn’t. The last time he’d shoved the clipping into the book had been in the car, when Dad was getting nosy and Sean was trying to get it out of sight quick. In an emergency like that, how could he have picked any particular page? Random, baby.
Sean started reading:
Redemption Orne was born in Cambridgeshire, England, in 1669, the only surviving child of nonconformist minister Jonathan Orne and his wife, Susan Cooke. In 1681, the Ornes emigrated to Boston. There Redemption attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College and earned a reputation for scholarship, eloquence and piety that attracted the notice of such influential figures as John Eliot, in whose Algonquin Bible Redemption took much interest.
In 1690, Redemption graduated from Harvard and published several well-received tracts. His uncle Richard Orne, an early settler in Arkham and one of its most prosperous merchants, invited him to become teacher at the new Third Congregational Church. Redemption accepted and soon won the approbation of pastor Nicholas Brattle and the congregation.
Redemption also took on the spiritual guidance of a village of Christianized Nipmucs near Dunwich, where he boarded at the house of Enoch Bishop and his daughter Patience. From the Sachem, Peter Kokokoho, he learned the topography, flora and fauna of the wild interior. Of the Nipmucs, Redemption would privately write: “While during the day the Indians pray to our Lord Jesus Christ, at night, when the hills speak, I fear they turn to other gods.”
Patience, too, knew other gods. Dunwich believed Enoch Bishop to be a wizard, but that lonely town knew better than to oppose him. Under Enoch, Patience had studied witchcraft since she’d been old enough to dance upon the stone-crowned hills. Though she used the craft to cure, hers remained a dark power.
It appears that Redemption was too smitten with Patience to perceive her true nature. In 1691, he married her. In 1692, following the sudden deaths of Richard Orne and his wife (deaths later ascribed to Patience’s magic), Redemption became sole heir to his uncle’s estate. During this prosperous period, Redemption’s fame spread through the colonies, and he wrote his natural and spiritual history, The New Wildernesse. Soon after, their daughter, Constance, was born.
As the Witch Panic intensified and spread to Arkham, suspicion fell on Patience. As noted in trial records, the Black Man had favored her with a monstrous familiar and it had devoured many domestic beasts and several people. Many testified to seeing this daemon kill soldiers sent to arrest its mistress. Patience was hanged on Orange Point.
Redemption fell under suspicion when his secret journal revealed he had known of Patience’s witchcraft. He was imprisoned but disappeared before trial. Some speculated that the Black Man had spirited him away. Others less fanciful believed he had escaped into the woods and there met some unknown but natural fate.
Much of Orne’s printed work was destroyed after his fall from public grace. A few volumes and tracts may be found in the collection of seventeenth-century literature at the Arkham Historical Society, while Orne’s journals have recently been removed to the Archives of Miskatonic University.
By the time Sean finished the mini-bio, the back of his neck was prickling, and not from heat rash. He had gotten the same prickle from H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, the ones so loaded with details that they’d momentarily convinced Sean that in his fiction Lovecraft was telling truths the government didn’t want told. The government couldn’t let people know about Elder Things and transdimensional monsters and giant blobs of protoplasm. Everyone would start jumping out windows. Well, Sean wouldn’t jump out a window—he’d be cool with it. But that wasn’t the point.
The point was, why should he get prickles from the Orne bio? It didn’t give any details. Like, how did Patience kill old Richard and his wife? What did Patience’s familiar look like? Did it swallow cows and passersby whole, or did it leave little bits behind, covered with slime to show how it wasn’t wolves or bears that had done it? To be fair, that stuff was probably in the actual book. The bio was only an appendix.
Sean skimmed it again. Some lines popped out at him. Dunwich was afraid to mess with Enoch Bishop, a wizard. Patience knew other gods and used her magic to heal people, but it was still a dark power. All that sounded like the writer believed in witchcraft. But in the end, he poked fun at the people who thought Redemption was grabbed by the Black Man. The writer said the “less fanciful” believed that Redemption escaped and died of natural causes.
It sounded like they never found Redemption’s body. What if it was because he didn’t die? He was alive in 1895. He was alive right now, because he had an e-mail address. And a time machine, for traveling back to 1895.
Man, he was giving himself a headache, trying to come up with a logical explanation. Good thing it was fun. Sean glanced at the clipping, which trembled in the breeze from the ceiling fan. Then he glanced across the backyard to the carriage house. All the second-floor windows were lit up, so Dad was still hard at it.
He carried book and clipping to the family-room computer and pulled up the e-mail account he used for online gaming. It would be safe to e-mail the Reverend from that, and, come on, it wasn’t any lamer to go by Lord Grayfalcon than it was to go by Redemption Orne. Sean clicked for a new message. He read the circled ad once more. He typed: Hey Rev, I found your want ad that says you’re looking for an apprentice in magic. Me and my friend think it’s way cool how you faked the old newspaper clipping. How did you do it anyway? The old guy at Horrockes didn’t seem to know and if you can stump a guy like him you’re good. So you’re really into this Orne guy. I’m reading about him in the book where the ad was. Looks like he rocks.
Sean paused. It was always tricky to joke on the Internet, especially if you didn’t know the person. But he couldn’t chicken out now. He typed again: Anyhow I was wondering if you’re still looking for an apprentice. I think I’d rock as one. Do you have to be out of high school or what? Lord G.
No use typing more when the message would probably bounce anyway. Sean added a blind cc to Eddy and hit send.
Five minutes later, when he was deep in the latest flame war on his Warcraft forum (Orcpwner versus U_All_Sukk), he got an e-mail alert. That would be from Eddy, chewing him a new one. Except it wasn’t. It was from “Reverend Orne,” and the subject was “The apprentice position.”
The prickles hit Sean’s neck again, big-time. He stared at the new e-mail. Okay, here was what was going to happen: He was going to open it, and it was going to be a picture of some gross sex act (apprentice position, ha-ha), and under that would be a giant LMAO noob, you fell for it. Which would be fine; he could deal with that.
He opened the e-mail. There was no picture. There was one scant paragraph: Thank you for your interest in the position of apprentice in magic. I would enjoy discussing it with you. If you remain interested, chat with me tomorrow at four o’clock p.m. My ID is rorne. Cordially, Redemption Orne.
While Sean was still cranking his jaw off the keyboard, Eddy texted him: hey lord g get on NOW
Sean texted back: u got my cc huh?
i cant believe u did that ur so DEAD if ur dad finds out
omg he already answered
????
orne
shut UP
rly—he said ty 4 yr interest, chat tomorrow 4 pm.
u going to???
hell yeah
idk i still think ur crazy can i sit in?
sure il
l come over yr house after work
good bc mom is making strwbry pies gag >_<
Sean would get to eat Eddy’s share, since she had a freakish hatred of strawberries. He was about to type no problem when the porch door opened, then smacked shut. A quick gtg was all he could get in. Eddy would understand. Luckily, Dad made a stop at the refrigerator—bottles rattled in the door. That gave Sean time to pocket his phone and tuck The Witch Panic and the clipping under a couch cushion.
A bottle gasped open in the kitchen. “Sean? You’re not on the computer, are you?”
Sean shut it down. “No. Except to check my e-mail.”
“That sounds more like a ‘yes.’”
“I’m off now.”
“It’s almost eleven. Joe-Jack’s picking you up for work at six, right?”
“Right,” Sean said. Maybe it would rain. Hard. Joe-Jack couldn’t rebuild a porch in a downpour. That would give Sean a chance to hang out at Eddy’s and prep for his interview with the Reverend by reading the book she’d cruised with.
“Sean? Bed.”
“Right, Dad.” Before Dad could come into the family room, Sean retrieved The Witch Panic and hit the stairs running.
3
The next morning was depressingly cloudless. Dad dragged Sean out of bed at five thirty, shoveled raisin bran down his throat, and packed him into the J-J REMODELING van five minutes short of six.
J-J stood for Joe-Jack, and Joe-Jack was Joseph Jackman Douglass, who back in his hippy days had dropped out of law school to learn carpentry. Since then, he’d been restoring old houses to their original splendor, only with all the modern conveniences. Joe-Jack was skinny, and his ponytail and beard were streaky gray, but if the working guys in his favorite working-guy bars tried anything, they’d find out that every ounce on him was knotty muscle. Not that working guys messed with Joe-Jack. He got along great with them, being all for the rights of labor except where his own employees were concerned.
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