The Truth of All Things

by Kieran Shields

  “Archie”—Emma leaned in through the doorway—“there’s a woman here to see you. She won’t come in.” Then she added in a whisper, “Amelia Porter.”

  Lean threw on a waistcoat and buttoned up as he made his way to the door.

  “Mrs. Porter. What a surprise,” he said with complete honesty. He hadn’t expected to see the medium again so soon after the séance. “Would you like to come in?”

  The woman shook her head, though by the way she glanced about, Lean could tell she was not altogether comfortable outside the door either.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

  “Yes. That matter you came to see me about.”

  “We’re still investigating.”

  “I know. You see, I … I haven’t been sleeping well since you came. There are”—she gave a little shrug—“things that remain unresolved, that have not been allowed to rest.”

  “Have you seen anything else? Anything you think might help us?”

  “Nothing specific. Just a feeling, a sort of dread.” Her gaze dropped to the floor, and Lean suspected she was holding something back. “It’s like … have you ever knocked on a door and no one comes to answer? But you stand there because you know they’re just inside, waiting for you to go away. That’s sort of how it is for me. Only in reverse. I’m the one inside the door, waiting for the person outside to knock. And afraid of opening the door when they do.”

  “Mrs. Porter, are you sure you won’t come inside? Have a cup of tea or something?”

  “No. I’ve only come to give you this.” She pulled a folded paper from her coat pocket but did not yet hand it over. “I was at my kitchen table this afternoon, had just put the kettle on and was making my shopping list. The next thing, the kettle’s steamed itself dry and I’d written this. Maybe it will mean something to you.” She forced the note into his hand, then turned away. She made it five steps before he called to her. He saw her shoulders hunch together slightly, tensing for his question.

  “Yes, Mr. Lean?”

  “I know you’re not active as a medium. But in the past year or so, have you been visited by a man, maybe smallish with dark hair, wanting to learn about occult matters, witchcraft? Maybe the Salem witches in particular?”

  Mrs. Porter thought a moment. “No, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s quite all right. Thank you anyway. You’ve been most helpful.”

  Mrs. Porter retreated several more steps, then stopped again, not turning back to face Lean.

  “I’m sorry. I lied earlier.”

  Lean said nothing, and the night stretched out between them, silent and empty.

  “I have seen something else. I’ve seen you, Mr. Lean. And there’s death all around you. Promise me to God you’ll be careful.”

  Lean set Mrs. Porter’s paper on a table in Dr. Steig’s study, and the others gathered around.

  “ ‘The darkness rising beware the Good woman and her child,’ ” read the doctor. “What do you suppose it means?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Helen, “but it certainly is disturbing.”

  “I’ll say,” added Grey as he pointed above the cryptic message to where Amelia Porter had begun to write her shopping list. “ ‘Five pounds of parsnips.’ I mean, honestly, how many parsnips can two people eat?”

  Helen’s head sagged toward her shoulder. “They could be having people for dinner. People do that sometimes—socialize, talk about things other than murder and dismemberment.”

  “Ghastly business,” said Grey.

  “Returning to the note,” Dr. Steig said. “She was unaware what she had written?”

  “Automatic writing. Some mediums do it while in a trance,” Helen said.

  “Still doesn’t explain all those parsnips. It’s not as of you can serve them as an entrée.”

  “Can you please be serious for a moment, Grey?” Lean said. “I find this message, and the obvious concern displayed by Mrs. Porter, alarming.”

  Grey nodded, and Lean took this as the closest he would receive to an acknowledgment of his concern.

  “The ‘darkness rising’ bit. She mentioned that in the séance,” said Dr. Steig.

  “It’s vague. So is the part about the good woman and her child. Why ‘beware’? Does this ‘good woman’ pose some threat?” asked Helen.

  Grey glanced at the note again. “Good is capitalized. Perhaps it’s not a description but a name.”

  Dr. Steig went to his bookshelf and pulled down the 1892 Directory of Portland and Vicinity. He flipped through the pages. “Here we go. There’s only one woman by that name, Miss Nellie, a laundress boarding at 56 Maple, which appears to be the home of her father, William, a shoemaker. And the last name is spelled with an ‘e’ on the end.”

  “Wait just a minute.” Helen bolted up from her seat and moved to the table. She began riffling through pages of stacked research. “Given that the killer enjoys using names of Salem victims, it just seems a bit of coincidence that … Here we are. Sarah Good. No ‘e’ on the end. She was in the first group of women accused as witches. Hanged on July nineteenth, 1692.”

  “Does it say there if she had a child?” Lean asked.

  “That’s why I remembered her. Dorcas Good. Four years old. Also accused of witchcraft.”

  Lean sat at his kitchen table, the pages Helen had assembled spread out before him like some oversize game of solitaire. Most of the passages had been copied from the texts of the Reverend Charles Upham and George Lincoln Burr, referencing the actual transcripts from Salem as well as contemporaneous witnesses and writers like Deodat Lawson, Cotton Mather, and Robert Calef, the last a rare voice of reason amid the collective Salem delusion.

  He had gone through a larger stack of writings, boiling them down to the handful of pages that remained under his nose. This reflected the sum of Sarah and Dorcas Good’s role in the Salem tragedy. A mother and her very young daughter, singled out for accusation and condemnation for an illusory crime against God and their fellow colonists. Lean tried to think of the Puritans as mere human beings: flawed, imperfect, reacting to the fears and prejudices of their own ignorant age. But each time he read through the notes, his anger grew.

  He closed his eyes and reminded himself of his goal, the connection he had to find. “The darkness rising beware the Good woman and her child.” He picked up a page and started to read once more the story of the arrest and trial of the first of those accused as Salem witches.

  Salem Village, 1st of March, 1692. After prayer, the constables produced Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba. Sarah Good was first examined. In bringing her forward first, the prosecutors showed that they were well advised. There was a general readiness to receive the charge against her, as she was evidently the object of much prejudice in the neighborhood. The family was very poor; and she and her children had sometimes been left to wander from door to door for relief. Probably there was no one in the country around against whom popular suspicion could have been more readily directed. She was a forlorn, friendless, and forsaken creature, broken down by wretchedness of condition and ill-repute.

  Next Lean took up the transcript from the hearing where Sarah Good was first charged. It was a transcript in the loosest sense only, capturing not so much the exact words spoken two hundred years ago, but rather the impressions of a prejudiced and convinced recorder, concerned primarily with justifying a result that was never in doubt.

  Examination of Sarah Good before the Worshipful Esqrs. Jn. Hathorne & Jn. Corwin. Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity with? —None.

  Have you made no contracts with the Devil?—No.

  Why do you hurt these children?—I do not hurt them. I scorn it.

  What creature do you employ, then?—No creature: but I am falsely accused.

  Have you made no contract with the Devil?—No.

  Sarah Good, why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you thus torment these poor children?—I do not torment them.

  How came they thus to
rmented?—What do I know? You bring others here, and now you charge me with it.

  We brought you into the meeting-house.—But you brought in two more.

  Who was it, then, that tormented the children?—It was Osburn.

  Lean took a cigarette from his coat and glanced down the hall at the bedroom door. Emma would be sound asleep. He moved a chair to the window, lit the cigarette, and blew a deep chestful of frustration and doubt, about two centuries’ worth, out into the dark night. The examination of Sarah Good gnawed at him. The magistrate, Hathorne, an ancestor to the author Nathaniel, conducted the judicial proceeding more like a police interrogation. Reading over the record of the hearings and the trials, Lean could not escape the sense of wrongdoing.

  The Puritan judges and magistrates set verbal traps for the accused, ambushing them with leading and disingenuous questions, browbeating them with unconcealed incredulity and animosity. They assumed guilt from the first and sought nothing other than to coerce anything that could be perceived as a confession. As Upham’s treatise had noted, every kind of irregularity was permitted. Accusers were allowed to make private communications to the magistrates and judges before or during the hearings. In some instances, as in the case of Sarah Good, the magistrate endeavored to deceive the accused by representing falsely the testimony given by another. The people in and around the courtroom were allowed to play a role, by clamors and threatening outcries; and juries were overawed to bring in verdicts of conviction and rebuked from the bench if they exercised their right to do otherwise.

  Lean flicked the cigarette butt out the window, then watched it plummet and strike the paved alleyway below in a pathetic burst of sparks that flickered and vanished. He dragged the chair back to the kitchen table and flipped through the pages to find what he considered the most flummoxing event in the whole of the Salem witch trials, an incident at the trial of Sarah Good as reported by a skeptical Robert Calef.

  One of the afflicted fell in a fit; and, after coming out of it, cried out at the prisoner for stabbing her in the breast with a knife, and that she had broken the knife in stabbing of her. Accordingly, a piece of the blade of a knife was found about her. Immediately, information being given to the Court, a young man was called, who produced a haft and part of the blade, which the Court, having viewed and compared, saw it to be the same; and, upon inquiry, the young man affirmed that yesterday he happened to break that knife, and that he cast away the upper part,—this afflicted person being then present. The young man was dismissed and she was bidden by the Court not to tell lies; and was employed after to give evidence against the prisoners.

  Lean reread the passage, and his mind struggled against the impossibly flawed words on the page. A witness, testifying about an invisible specter supposedly sent forth by the accused, was caught red-handed before the judges maliciously attempting to plant the sole piece of physical evidence from a witchcraft attack. The only response of the judges was to tell her not to lie again before she continued testifying against the prisoner in a matter punishable by death.

  He took up another page and began the far more depressing portion of his search for a clue to Mrs. Porter’s warning.

  Dorcas, a daughter of Sarah Good, was brought before the magistrates on March 24. She was between four and five years old. When led in to be examined, Ann Putnam, Mary Walcot, and Mercy Lewis all charged her with biting, pinching, and choking them. The afflicted girls showed the marks of her little teeth on their arms. The evidence was considered overwhelming; Dorcas was committed to the jail, where she joined her mother and an infant sibling who would die before its mother was hung that summer.

  On the 26th of March, the magistrates were at the Prison-Keepers House, to examine the Child, and it told them it had a little Snake that used to Suck on the lowest Joint of its Fore-Finger; where they Observed a deep Red Spot, about the Bigness of a Flea-bite, they asked who gave it that Snake? Whether the great Black man, it said no, its Mother gave it.

  By the account of the Boston jailer, it appears that they both were later confined there: as they were too poor to provide for themselves, the country was charged ten shillings for two blankets for Sarah Good’s child as well as the following charges: “May 9th, Chains for Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn, 14s. May 23d, Shackles for 10 Prisoners. May 29th, 1 pair Irons.” Even little Dorcas Good was put into chains, based on the belief that extraordinary fastenings were necessary to hold a witch, along with the assertion of the “afflicted” that their sufferings did not cease till the accused were in fetters.

  Little Dorcas Good, thus sent to prison, lay there chained in the dark, dank cells for seven or eight months. The permanent effect on her mental condition is reported eighteen years later in her father’s petition for damages resulting from the expense of looking after her. Dorcas Good’s father alleged that, “being chain’d in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrified that she hath ever since little or no reason to govern herself.” He was allowed thirty pounds in restitution.

  Lean rested his head in his hands and muttered, “ ‘The darkness rising beware the Good woman and her child.’ ” If there was some connection between Sarah Good and the current killings, he just couldn’t see it. All he could see was a five-year-old shackled to a stone wall in an unlit cell, screaming in fear, all because of some fantastical ramblings about a pet snake. Lean considered the unfathomable and often absurd statements that his own son’s imagination produced every day and shook his held in disbelief at it all.

  There was a sound from the back of the apartment, a moan coming from Owen’s room. Lean took a lamp and walked back down the hallway, where he eased open his son’s door. The flame guttered for a moment. It was a humid July night, and the window was propped open with a foot-long scrap of wood.

  Owen let out another low moan that sounded almost like a protest. Lean peered in the direction of the boy. There was something different. He held the lamp high and moved a step closer. Then he saw it: a dark shape squatting on the sleeping boy’s chest. Lean took two quick steps forward and swung at it. The back of his hand connected with a dense, furry mass. The thing sprang from the bed. It hissed, and Lean caught the glare of its eyes. He waved the lamp, and the cat leaped to the sill, then darted out beneath the open window.

  Owen stirred at the commotion. Lean bent and kissed the boy’s head. “It’s all right. Back to sleep now.”

  He lifted the window higher and stuck his head out. The peak of the small roof above the side entrance to the building was less than three feet below. A nearby tree branch would have let the cat jump to the roof and make its way in. Satisfied, Lean was about to pull his head back into the room when he caught sight of a dark shape. He looked down the alley where something, or someone, had definitely moved.

  He closed the window and returned to the hallway, leaving the boy’s door ajar. By the time he retrieved his pistol and made it outside to the alleyway, there was not a living creature to be seen. He heard several voices passing a block over, but a trip up and down the alley and around the corner showed no trace of any dark shadows, human or feline.

  Lizzie Madson tromped up the last dark flight toward her third-floor apartment, one hand on the loose rail, the other halfheartedly holding up the hem of her brown linsey dress. There was the faint rumble of a trolley car moving away in the street below, but otherwise the building was still. Each stair creaked out its lonely objection. She knew that the neighbors were out; the telltale mix of loud voices was absent from the hallway. She reached the top step and took her key from a pocket sewn inside her short jacket. Peering closely in the dim hallway light, she worked it into the lock, then closed the door behind her. The apartment was not fitted for either gas or electricity. She drew a packet of wooden matches, broke one off, and struck it to light the candle she kept on a small stand just inside the door.

  “You here?” There was no answer to her call.

  Lizzie stepped around the corner into the parlor and stopped short. She gasped and took a half step back
before she realized her error. Surprise gave way to curiosity. Across the room, near the doorway to the kitchen, a white dress was hanging from a peg. For an instant, Lizzie had thought a person was standing there. She crossed over, her eyes fixed on the long-sleeved dress with a sweeping skirt and white lace trimming around the neck. She set her candle down on a table; only then did she see the coiled rope that was set there. Beside the rope was a long filleting knife, the kind used in the fish stalls. Lizzie’s brow furrowed at the sight of the strange items on the table. They definitely hadn’t been there when she left earlier in the afternoon.

  “Hello? You home?”

  With her mind still mulling over the puzzle, she turned back again to look at the white dress. Out of the corner of one eye, she saw a flash of blackness—a shadow cast by the flickering candlelight—only too solid, too real.

  Before she could look, a hand was over her mouth. A weight pinned her left arm to her side, and she felt her chest being compressed, the air squeezed from her body. She was spun around and slammed face-first into a wall. Lizzie squirmed and flailed, but the body behind her was strong, pinning her up against the wall so that only the tips of her toes touched the floor. She reached out with her right hand, trying to shove away from the wall, but couldn’t find the leverage to force her attacker backward. Lizzie’s right hand went up to her face. She clawed at the hand that held a rag to her mouth, gagging her. Only now was she aware of an odor stinging her nostrils. Her eyes began to well up.

  “Sorry, love …” His voice paused in silent struggle.

  She could feel his lips brushing against her ear. The voice had been low, with an undercurrent of animal rage, but she recognized it as his. Lizzie’s stinging eyes blurred further, and then the tears slipped down her cheeks. For a few seconds, she could hear only the rush of blood pounding in her ears and her own muffled cries, sounding far away as if chained down deep in the pit of her stomach.