Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1

by John Vorholt;Arthur Byron Cover;Alice Henderson

  “I have no problem doing that,” said Rick. “It smelled like a thousand dead skunks piled on top of one another, lying on a bed of liver and castor oil. We couldn’t have failed to notice it if we’d tried.”

  “I got ill,” said Lora.

  “Big time,” said Rick deliberately. “Luckily, I’d taken an antacid before dinner—for my ulcer, you know. When the ghost of Sarah Dinsdale appeared above us, we couldn’t have been less in the mood for occult explorations. But there she was, nonetheless.”

  “She was the scariest ghost I’ve ever seen,” said Lora. “Most ghosts are pretty alienated from reality to begin with—they say purgatory gets on a specter’s nerves—but this one was frightening, paranoid, and utterly confident in her spectral dignity. You never knew how she’d respond to any one of your questions.”

  “She blamed the smell on us, too,” said Rick resentfully. “Said we weren’t conjuring her up correctly. I took umbrage at that.”

  “It wasn’t long before she began asking us questions,” said Lora. “And she insisted on answers! Threatened to go back if we didn’t talk. Well, you never let a specter go away if you can help it. It just isn’t done in polite society.”

  “Of course,” said Giles. “What did she want to know?”

  “Where you were,” said Lora. “How you were faring on this mortal coil. Things of that nature.”

  “I had never heard of you, of course,” said Rick.

  “What did she say, exactly?” asked Giles impatiently.

  Lora answered, “She said you had a good head on your shoulders. But then she implied you’d lost it before and that you might again if you weren’t careful.”

  “This is all very interesting,” he said guardedly, “but how seriously am I supposed to take this warning? Especially since I’ve never heard of the ghost before and have no idea what she could possibly be talking about.”

  “This is not the first time we’ve heard a dire warning or received a vague, almost nonsensical clue that’s required action on our part,” said Rick. “In the past, we’ve solved murders long set aside by the authorities. We’ve also added significantly to our stock portfolio by taking advantage of what spirits have told us about the immediate future. It all depends on the situation.”

  “We don’t know exactly what Dinsdale was talking about,” said Lora, “so we don’t really know what we might have to do. But when the clutch comes, we’ll be there for you.”

  “Yes. Well, ah, thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” said Giles. “I may seem a little awkward occasionally, but I think I can take care of myself.”

  “So long as you don’t have to fight any teenage girls,” said Rick with a smirk.

  “Buffy is not just a teenage girl, she’s—” Giles caught himself; he’d almost let his pride cause him to spill the beans. “She’s a black belt, a gifted brawler in the most profound sense of the word.”

  “She can’t guard you as well as we can,” said Rick.

  “I’ve no doubt whatsoever, but I feel pretty safe,” said Giles, which was definitely untrue, but he had to maintain a facade of not taking them seriously. “Besides, there are times when—ahem—a man must do what a man must do, and I’d rather be by myself when I do them.”

  “We’re still going to be close by,” insisted Rick. “We’re very good at this bodyguard thing. We’ve had lots of practice.”

  “Ever lose any of your charges?” Giles asked.

  “We don’t talk about that,” said Lora tensely. “There were extenuating circumstances. How were we to know there’d be a killer shark in that lake?”

  “Our failures have been few and far between,” Rick said. “Barely worth mentioning, in fact.”

  “Well, I feel safer already,” said Giles. He sipped his lousy coffee, barely noticing the taste. He suppressed the sudden urge to excuse himself and go home for a nice, long nap.

  “Sorry I left you for a baseball game,” said a still-woozy Xander as Willow walked him home. “I just wanted to be a manly man.”

  “And baseball is the way to prove your manliness?” asked Willow, clearly confused at his logic.

  “Yeah. You know what it’s like to be one of the few who can actually remember all the strange doings in Sunnydale, to know you’ve performed some pretty brave—”

  “Or foolhardy,” interjected Willow.

  “—actions, and to want everyone to know about everything: the doings and the actions. But you can’t, so you’d settle for just being a normal person who can do normal things like playing baseball—”

  “Or having a girlfriend,” said Willow, leading him on, although she knew in advance it wouldn’t do any good.

  “You want a girlfriend?” Xander asked, surprised.

  “Never mind. Tell me about your strange dream.”

  Xander cleared his throat. “Well, to begin with, it seemed so real. I feel like I can recall every detail. But that wasn’t the strangest part.”

  “Go on.”

  “Remember Giles’s dream that took place in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony? Mine appeared to happen at roughly the same time. But even that wasn’t the strangest part.”

  “Xander, get to the point.”

  “It’s embarrassing. I dreamed I was a girl. Or rather, a woman. A full-grown adult woman.”

  “I always knew you had a feminine side,” said Willow, smiling.

  “I didn’t!” Xander exclaimed.

  “Boys rarely do. Perhaps you should tell me exactly what happened.”

  They sat down on a bus stop bench and he began talking. At first he was reluctant, but as he got going, he couldn’t help himself. Besides, if he couldn’t trust Willow with the dream, then who could he trust?

  At first the dream was like all dreams—series of mixed-up images, half-profound, half-absurd. All the images resonated with the power of real life, only they had little to do with the experiences of a teenage boy growing up in sunny Southern California. They had more to do with the experiences of growing up a young girl in seventeenth-century New England.

  The images included reading the Bible at home, feeding the farm animals, growing the vegetables, and going to church. Apparently the young girl went to church quite frequently, as did practically everyone else in the vicinity. Only she didn’t like it.

  This is where the images took on a different character. Before, everything was bathed in light. Now the dream settings became rather dark—more pleasant, occasionally, but always dark. During these parts of the dream, the young woman felt much more free, as if she was finally in control of her life after a long period of imprisonment. Xander tried not to exert his will or even his thoughts. He just let the dream unfold.

  The images included several of walking through a forest of exquisite, pristine greenery teeming with everything from huge colonies of insects to squirrels, skunks, and hedgehogs. The bears and wildcats, Xander somehow knew, had been pushed out by the Puritans some time ago, though of course a few always ventured into the farmlands hunting for sheep and goat.

  The young woman walked through fields of purple wild-flowers. She harvested wild mushrooms and dug up mandrake roots in the forest. She searched for stones and metals by the streams. She slew frogs and mummified them, and then she went into caves and slew bats. Those were mummified too, according to ritual with the muttering of spells and chants.

  The young woman traveled to these places during both day and night, but she especially enjoyed those nights when she was alone. It was then that she danced beneath the moon, communing with nature on a level so primitive and barbaric it horrified Xander.

  Finally the dream returned again and again to those times the young woman spent at church, concentrating on the appearance—but never the words, apparently—of the charismatic young preacher, John Goodman. She saw in him potential that she saw in no other man, the potential to be a worthy life-partner in marriage.

  Of course, they were apt to disagree over what type of marriage ceremony mig
ht be appropriate.

  By now the bond between Xander and his dream alter ego was so strong Xander didn’t know where he ended and she began. Conversations, memories, books read—it all blended together. Xander was becoming a new person. In a new time.

  Xander knew exactly when and where he was: in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. His name in the dream was Sarah Dinsdale, and she was most definitely a witch. Up until a certain point she had avoided being victimized by the hysteria—which was ironic, because while she was fairly convinced most of those accused were innocent, she herself was guilty, guilty, guilty.

  It was a situation that Sarah must have felt inevitable, because she was strangely calm when the church scenes faded out and the courtroom sequence faded in. She stood in chains in the square pen the courtroom reserved for the accused; a large orange W was sewn on her dress.

  The stern, robed Judge Danforth regarded her severely. Nine angry men sat in the jury box. Sheriff Corwin stood in the back of the courtroom. Cotton Mather, the famed scholar and witch hunter from Boston, stood at the prosecutor’s table asking questions of a pale, nervous John Goodman, who sat fidgeting in the witness chair.

  The first question Mather directed at Goodman was, “And when did you first hear the unholy call of this Sarah Dinsdale?” His words echoed in Xander’s mind like reverb at a rock concert.

  Sarah Dinsdale suddenly shouted, “I object, your honor! That question is prejudicial and implies I have already been found guilty!”

  The people in the court were shocked—she had dared to speak without the permission of the court! Sheriff Corwin grumbled something about Sarah being mighty darn guilty in his opinion.

  Judge Danforth glared down sternly at Sarah Dinsdale. “Nothing would please me more if you were found to be innocent of those crimes of which you stand accused,” he said, his tone belying his words. “But do not forget you are forbidden to speak, woman. You would do well to be silent, lest the crime of casting a spell on a member of the court is added to your long list of crimes.”

  “What do you mean by ‘prejudicial’?” Mather inquired, idly scratching beneath his wig.

  Judge Danforth seemed satisfied with Sarah’s silence. He gestured for Goodman to break his. Goodman cleared his throat, apparently with some difficulty because he took quite a while doing it. Meanwhile, Mather folded his arms and drew himself to his full height. He had been waiting for this moment for some time and was impatient with Goodman’s delay.

  Finally Judge Danforth cleared his throat. Loudly. He and Goodman looked each other in the eye, and suddenly Goodman knew what to do.

  He spoke. “It was during winter,” he began softly, “and I was thinking of the pagan holiday then being observed by those citizens of the Old World, the very ones who persecuted we Puritans for not practicing religion properly. I happened to be walking by the modest home of Goodwoman Dinsdale. And I confess, I did think about her of my own free will.”

  “And what exactly,” asked Mather, “did you think about her?”

  “I thought it odd that such a pleasant young woman, so lovely and so hardworking, so obviously capable of running a household, was unwed. And at her age too.”

  “One might say the same about you, sir Goodman,” said Mather easily. A few women in the courtroom giggled, but Judge Danforth’s stern look quickly put a stop to that.

  Goodman blushed, and this pleased Sarah Dinsdale, although at the moment things did not look promising between them. “In any case, passing by Miss Dinsdale’s house, I perceived the distinct odor of mincemeat pie.”

  The audience gasped. It was forbidden to bake mincemeat pie in the winter, because in Europe the baking of mincemeat pie was a major part of celebrating Christmas, which Puritans believed was a pagan holiday.

  “I knocked upon her door, and when she opened it to greet her guest, I pushed my way in. And that was when I saw, much to my chagrin, that Sarah Dinsdale was already among the damned.”

  “I see, my son,” Mather said almost tenderly. “Then what course of action did you take?”

  “The only one available. I denounced her. I had no choice. For in her kitchen I saw mummified bats and parts of frogs. I saw roots and other ingredients from the recipes of Old Scratch himself! I knew then and there she was unclean—that she was a witch!”

  “A witch! A witch!” shouted many in the court, until Judge Danforth’s threat brought a renewed sense of order to the proceedings. During that time Goodman could not look Sarah in the eyes, but she could look in his. And she liked what she saw there.

  For there was no hate and no pity in John Goodman’s eyes. There was only guilt—guilt that he was the one who had been forced, in his view, to denounce her.

  “Since then, knowing she is a witch has made no difference. I cannot get the heinous female out of my mind. She haunts my dreams, she occupies my every waking thought. Surely she has cast a spell on me; she has looked upon me with her evil eye and devoured my soul.”

  Sarah could not resist a smile. Hearing those words had made worthwhile all the suffering she’d endured the past few weeks in the witch dungeons controlled by Sheriff Corwin.

  Sarah was still smiling, inwardly at least, when the scene shifted slightly and Xander heard and saw, through her eyes, Judge Danforth pronouncing the death sentence: She will hang by the neck until she is dead! Sarah was confident this would never happen, even when Judge Danforth remarked that he would like to see Old Scratch save her now.

  “Not Old Scratch,” said Sarah. “Just a close personal friend.”

  The people in the court erupted with shouts of shock and anger. Sarah surveyed them with a regal, contemptuous air, and Xander couldn’t help wondering if it was true that if you dream of your death, then you really die. He was afraid he would find out when the scene next shifted. …

  … Only instead of cutting to the gallows, the scene cut to Sarah Dinsdale sitting contentedly in her dungeon cell, chained to the wall. A visitor arrived, sitting down on a three-legged stool on the other side of the bars.

  It was John Goodman.

  It was obvious he was coming as close to her as he dared. He fidgeted nervously and couldn’t find a comfortable way to sit. He clearly wished he was anyplace else but here within these cold, damp stone walls, which were stained with the blood of accused witches who had confessed upon pain of torture; presumably the poor women had already gone on to receive their “just rewards.”

  Sarah, for her part, couldn’t make up her mind how she felt about John Goodman’s appearance here. She knew she should hate him. But his reaction to seeing her prepare her witch’s stock had only been true to his nature, and even now something in his eyes reminded her why she’d desired his attention in the first place.

  “I’ve come to say good-bye,” Goodman finally said softly.

  “Are you certain you haven’t offered me one last chance at redemption?” said Sarah defiantly.

  “You should repent,” said Goodman flatly.

  “Why? To ease your guilty conscience?”

  “I did not choose these feelings I have toward you, Sarah Dinsdale. I do not hold myself responsible.”

  “Then who is responsible for them?”

  “I think you are.”

  “It is true I cast a spell over you, Reverend John Goodman. But my spells are too weak to last this long. Perhaps my spell merely revealed an emotion that was already there.”

  Goodman’s complexion wavered between becoming red with anger and pale with fear. He smashed his fist against the bars of Sarah’s cell. “That is impossible! I could not—cannot—have these feelings toward a proven witch of my own volition! Release me from this curse! I beseech you!”

  Sarah threw back her head and laughed. She also bumped her head against the stone wall, but she tried to hide that and concentrate on her laughter instead. “My most profound apologies, Reverend, but I can no more release you from your heart than I can free you from your conscience.”

  Goodman stood and nodded grimly. “The
n that is how it must be. You are damned. I pity thee.”

  “I have never knowingly harmed another. I have used my powers only for good, only to help others. How then can I be damned?”

  “Because your powers are derived from Old Scratch, and He corrupts all good that He touches.”

  “There are many ways to be damned, John Goodman, as I suspect you are about to find out.” She grinned wickedly. At the moment she had no doubt which of the emotions she felt toward Goodman was dominant. “Perhaps there is a last wish I may grant you before I go forth to be damned.”

  “I would”—he cleared his throat—“appreciate it greatly if you would cease visiting my dreams, so that I may sleep in peace.”

  Sarah laughed again; never had she tasted a victory so sweet. “There are things not even a witch can do.”

  “May you face your death bravely,” said Goodman as he turned to leave.

  “The least of my worries,” said Sarah casually as the scene shifted slightly and a rat sniffed about on the stool where Goodman had been. Sarah, still chained against the wall, looked down at her feet where several other rats sniffed about. She was not afraid of the rats. Their presence here meant she was no longer alone.

  Through the bars she could see the moon setting in the sky; it would be dawn soon. A terrible stench permeated the air. Things became damp with the coming of the early morning fog. A wolf howled, an owl hooted, someone in an adjoining cell screamed. Two of the rats began fighting over a discarded piece of bread.

  Through it all, Sarah felt relieved. Help was on the way. He did not disappoint her.

  She just saw his face for an instant, a flash from a reality whose existence she could barely grasp. She sensed the face’s terrible green complexion; its horrible fangs; its dead, remorseless eyes—eyes somehow capable of peering into the deepest reaches of her soul.

  She liked feeling exposed that way. How could she fail to trust the Despised One?

  The scene in the dream shifted again, to when Sarah had already escaped and was running through the forest. The forest was pitch-black, clouds hid the moon, and the ground was covered with bush and thicket, yet Sarah made her way with ease, as if she was doing nothing more difficult than navigating through her own house in the dark.