The Monster's Corner

by Christopher Golden

  Then again, I am a creature of the underworld, that underworld which must not be acknowledged, or, if so, imagined as nothing short of sin.

  I didn’t see myself as sinful; I saw myself as happy, appreciative of God’s great wonder in the world. Of course, to me, that wonder did come to include an extremely handsome young man known as Caleb Martin.

  Caleb was one of those reformers who had come to the New World. He didn’t believe in idolatry; he did believe in hard work and the goodness of man.

  I am a creature of the flesh. I was madly in love with the man—and in love with his flesh—and I didn’t need a license to enjoy it. But here I was, playing the game of the “Godly” and the religious, and when he wanted marriage, I agreed.

  There was one snag. We had to apply for our marriage, and the “law” in the area was a man named Samuel Bridgewater. He had come across the Atlantic for freedom of religion—but he quickly expelled any man who didn’t believe in his religion.

  I almost acted up then, and I suppose I should have. But I was in love. And Caleb believed strongly in his God, and in his community. I believed in Caleb.

  Things might have gone badly. On board the ship that had brought us, Samuel had suggested to me that since I was from Scotland, and new to the group, I should consent to be his wife. He could protect me in the New World. I was saved from this fate worse than death when Caleb happened upon us with several of the other men, and Samuel was forced to withdraw. Caleb’s love for me was obvious, and with everyone seeing our true love and devotion, Samuel Bridgewater could either give us his consent to marry—or show his true colors as lecherous old bastard. Samuel Bridgewater wanted power more than he wanted me.

  I noticed soon after that Samuel Bridgewater turned his focus and attention on Caleb’s sister, Elizabeth.

  But she was in love, too, with a handsome young fellow named Josiah.

  And, when we came to the New World, it seemed we would live happily. Elizabeth married her Josiah, and I had my precious Caleb.

  We were living, in my mind, a wonderful life. Caleb went off by day to work our fields; we built a charming house with friends. We were by the sea, and I’d seldom seen anything more beautiful than the whitecaps crashing against the coast. In time, Caleb took to the sea occasionally, but I was never afraid; I would follow him at times in spirit, soaring over those whitecaps and watching the men as they sought to evade pirates and find the great catch. I knew that Caleb would always come home to me.

  And then we would have those nights. I’d see the look in his eyes when he returned to land, and I would quickly be in his arms, and by night I would watch the firelight play upon his bronzed flesh, and I would be in ecstasy, wondering only how I would explain myself when the years went by, and wishing there were some magic that could turn him to what I was, and that we could be together forever.

  Elizabeth and Josiah lived nearby, and she gave birth to a lovely little girl, and I stood in the church again as she was baptized, and I looked at the radiance in Elizabeth’s eyes, and I was sorry that Caleb and I would never know such magic. Caleb didn’t seem to care. We were happy together.

  Happiness, apparently, can’t be an eternal state. Caleb and I took a trip to the north; somehow, my darling Caleb, like myself, had an affinity with the native population, and he had been asked to negotiate with a tribal council. I enjoyed our trip, especially heading up to Gloucester, where, once again, the natural beauty of the earth seemed joyous itself.

  I suppose I should add here that one flaw to our lives, in my mind, was the ten hours we spent each Sunday listening to the various preachers in church. I mean, seriously, if there were devils living in the woods, making pacts with young girls, I would have known about it. But that’s the way it was. I had cast my lot with a group that seemed to believe that they knew what God was saying when other men did not understand.

  I sat there many a Sunday silently longing to tell them that they didn’t have any better communication with God than any other man, including the “pagan redskins” they thought to be such terrible sinners, no better than beasts, sure to rot in the fires of hell when they passed. I kept my silence, because I was in love with the beauty of the coast, and Caleb.

  So it was that we returned from our trip up the coast to find that Elizabeth had been arrested—for witchcraft.

  Two local girls swore that they’d seen her with a cloven-hoofed devil in the woods; he’d had a book, and she’d signed it, stripped off her clothing, and started dancing in the woods.

  Samuel Bridgewater was our local judge, magistrate—power. He truly believed that he had the ear of God, and that God had given him complete authority in matters of sin and heresy and all such other rot. Bridgewater had nearly caused the extinction of our kind in the area, since he had deemed a nephew of a local chief to be Satan himself, and he’d executed the boy. Twenty men had died in defending our little colony, and it had been my dear beloved Caleb who had spoken with the chief at last, and compared those twenty lives lost to the one of the chief’s nephew, and thus brought about peace again.

  But I honestly believe that the worst of all was the simple fact that Elizabeth had rejected Samuel Bridgewater, and he meant to get his revenge.

  He didn’t like being rejected.

  He hated me by then, and yet, perhaps, somewhere inside himself he had the good sense to stay away from me.

  But, you see, Elizabeth was my sister now, and I loved her.

  Elizabeth had been in love with Josiah for as long as I had known her and Caleb. Samuel Bridgewater was an old, creepy-looking, evil little man—whether he claimed the ear of God or not. Elizabeth and I had giggled over him often enough. We knew that he had managed to force some of the village lasses to do his bidding. It was despicable, but as Caleb told me, we were not to judge others but to live our own lives.

  I had thought Samuel Bridgewater a pompous ass, but not as harmful as he would prove to be. I wanted to at least blind him after the affair with the chief’s nephew, but I kept myself under control; I was in love with Caleb.

  Oh, how foolish! Samuel, it seemed, was getting his revenge.

  Elizabeth was arrested and brought to jail; her husband was crying by the fire every night, and her beautiful baby girl had been left without a mother, though they were talking about charging her baby as well!

  We watched and waited while Elizabeth’s trial date approached. I was itching to do something but praying that all would be well. Again, Caleb believed in the law, and in the goodness of men. “Bridgewater is misadvised; he is not a monster. This will not continue,” Caleb told me. “This is our home; we will abide by the law, and make it a good one.”

  I loved him, and so I agreed.

  But then came more of the ridiculous testimony against Elizabeth. Oh, the things that people said! And then my darling Caleb took matters into his own hands.

  He stood before the judges and gave them a piece of his mind. He ridiculed them for being idiots, ready to believe mischievous girls who were probably afraid of being in trouble themselves for having been caught in the woods.

  “An infant!” Caleb roared, his dark eyes flashing, his handsome features intense. “You would accuse an infant, one of God’s sweet innocents, of being guilty of witchcraft? Are you daft, men? Are you daft? My sister is as sweet and saintly as any woman might be, and yet, because of the outrageous accusations of others, you chain her at night? As my good friend John Proctor said, these girls will make devils of us all! Have you no sense, my fellow men of God? What great power would allow such absurdity to exist? Look to your souls, men!”

  Ah, my poor Caleb. Somehow, he had forgotten that despite his words, John Proctor had found himself then accused of witchcraft.

  Oh, those wretched girls! One of them suddenly fell to the floor, tearing at her hair. “He looked at me!” she cried. “He looked at me! And now … the pain, oh, dearest God, help me! The pain!”

  I started to rise; Caleb looked at me and shook his head. But before I
knew it, Caleb was being shackled and dragged away to join his sister.

  I fought my way into being able to see him; I wanted to do something drastic, but he smoothed my hair back. “You are still free; we need you out there. We need the help of the governor, for he is a righteous man, and perhaps he can stop this madness. You must go to him, and quickly.”

  The death toll was mounting; already, we had seen so many innocents hanged. They had been the pious, the elderly, like Rebecca Nurse. They had been the outcasts, those suspected of sleeping with men without the benefit of marriage, like poor Bridget Bishop.

  “Caleb, I’m afraid to leave you,” I said. Then I started speaking quickly, in a whisper. “Caleb, if you will just trust me … we can get out of here with Elizabeth and the baby and her husband … please, believe in me, I can do this!”

  “I believe in the law,” he told me, his eyes gentle and beautiful, and he stroked my hair. “Get to the governor, and all will be well,” he assured me. “I believe in God, and in the law, and God will force men to see the truth and the error of their ways.”

  Let me say right off that I certainly believed in God more than anyone; I knew that there was a great father, and I had led my life hoping to seek his good graces, despite the circumstances of my birth into a species that was not considered to be among the saintly.

  I knew, too, that he preferred men to discover their own mistakes; he taught lessons, but on his own terms and in his own time, and I wasn’t ready to let him save Caleb and Elizabeth.

  “Believe in me, and in goodness, my beloved. Get to the governor,” he told me.

  I was so in love with him. Caleb was tall and strong, and ever beautiful and steady, as determined as a rock to stand against the crashing waves of the insanity occurring here.

  I used the last of our savings to pay for his and Elizabeth’s stays in jail; I comforted Josiah, her husband, and I left him like a lost lamb to care for the baby. I headed off to find the governor.

  Well, by that time, the governor’s wife had been accused, and the man was suddenly awakened to the insanity of it all. It was one thing to accuse poor old deaf women and possible whores, and quite another to accuse the governor’s wife.

  I was halfway to Boston when I received this information. I quickly turned around, knowing that a stay had been put on all the executions.

  As I returned, I heard horrible stories. Giles Corey—whom I couldn’t feel too badly for, since he had given testimony against his wife—had been pressed to death. He had cursed Salem and the sheriff before he had died. It had all gotten worse; news traveled so slowly that people were being executed even after the order that it all cease until we heard from Mother England.

  As this news reached me, I panicked. Old Samuel didn’t have the power to go against the judges in Salem, but he was a bastard through and through.

  When I reached our little town, the streets were empty. I went to Elizabeth’s house, and I found Josiah there. He was on the floor; he had been struck and knocked out, and the baby had been taken.

  I patched him up as quickly as I could, but he couldn’t walk. I had to leave him. I hurried to the town square.

  I arrived in time to see that Elizabeth’s body lay at the side of the hanging tree; my beloved Caleb was about to be pushed from the ladder.

  Like George Burroughs, onetime minister, my dearest Caleb was saying the Lord’s Prayer, and to no avail.

  “No!” I shouted the word, and as I did so, my fury entered into the air, and the wind picked up and lightning struck.

  “You see!” Samuel Bridgewater called from the back of his horse. “It’s she; it’s she who is the witch, she who dances with Satan, and she has infected them all!”

  Dance with Satan? I’d never liked the little bastard of a fallen angel, and I had no intention of dancing with him. The very concept was totally inane.

  I ran to the circle before him and I stared at him with all the fires of hell arising in my eyes. “Witches! Wizards? You accuse these people. You wretched bastard! If they were witches, they’d have made you pay.”

  Samuel Bridgewater stared at me. He smiled icily. He knew they had no power.

  What he didn’t know was that I did.

  “Hang him!” he roared, referring to Caleb.

  I turned, and not in time. For a brief moment, I saw the love in my husband’s eyes—and then I saw him swing, and I heard as his neck snapped, and I knew that he, like Elizabeth, was dead. Something inside of me broke at that moment—including self-preservation.

  “String up the infant!” Samuel Bridgewater shouted loudly. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

  And they called me a monster!

  I lifted my arms, and I called upon my powers, and all the powers of death and evil and destruction. I pointed at Samuel Bridgewater.

  “Let that which claims piety and is nothing but evil suffer all the tortures and agonies of the truly damned, and let the self-righteous learn the truth of love—and vengeance!”

  Well, I must say, having bottled up my powers for all those years served me well. Lightning started raining across the sky and striking the ground. Fires burst out everywhere, and the wretched executioner—who had been about to string up Elizabeth’s infant daughter!—quickly climbed down the ladder with the child. He ran to where I stood, delivering the baby to my feet and falling to his knees.

  “Spare me!” he cried.

  I didn’t give a damn about the fool. He was a lackey, obeying Samuel Bridgewater, lest he find himself strung up.

  Oh, no.

  It was Bridgewater I was after.

  “Dance with the devil, eh?” I said. I walked toward him, now surrounded by a raging fire myself. I fell to my knees by the body of Elizabeth, and I cradled her in my arms.

  “Dance with the devil!” I roared again, and I passed her broken body to him. With sightless eyes, her body began to animate, to jerk and twitch, and drag him along. And there, in a sea of fire and a wind that roared with the power of a nor’easter, Samuel Bridgewater danced through the copse with the body of the woman he had coveted—and killed.

  And he screamed, and screamed, for her body had become fire, and he couldn’t free himself from her, so where they touched, he burned and burned.

  I was from Scotland. Witches were burned there. And if there had ever been a man who might be considered an evil witch, in my mind, it was Samuel Bridgewater.

  Finally he was screaming so incoherently and in such agony that I walked back to him. I didn’t give a damn about his pain; I wanted him to understand me.

  “I will let you die, you wretched piece of human refuse!” I assured him. “But first you must know! You must see the truth. Evil is not in a color or a species or a religion; evil is more alive in your heart than in any true witch or wizard! You are the monster!”

  He started to point at me. He started to say that I was truly a monster, and all there must know it. But his lips caught fire.

  And, at last, in a flurry of fire and ash, he disintegrated at my feet.

  The wind died; the fires died. My heart was broken; my fury and vengeance were spent.

  There were a number of people from the town there, in that copse that surrounded the hanging tree.

  And they all just stared at me.

  I realized then, of course, that I had showed everyone there exactly what I was. Not a young woman who danced in the woods with the devil, and no twisted fool who had signed a pact with Satan.

  No, I was the real thing. I could kill their cows, I could cause heart attacks, I could perpetuate all the evil of which they were accusing others.

  Try to string up a real witch?

  Not likely!

  Yet that was no solace. He had managed the real evil of murder, because I had believed in my beloved Caleb and tried to be the good wife following the law.

  My temper and my pain had gotten the best of me. Despite my years with Caleb, I hadn’t gotten over that Old Testament sentimentality.

  An
eye for an eye, a life for a life.

  But now Samuel Bridgewater was dead. And the townspeople were staring at me. They would be afraid to touch me, of course, but that didn’t matter much. I would be an outcast. Still, what did I care? My Caleb was gone. Elizabeth, my best friend, was gone as well.

  But, of course, there was her precious daughter, another little Elizabeth, at my feet.

  My heart ripped in two, my eyes filling with tears, I was startled when Ian Freeman, one of the respected townsmen, came to me. He didn’t fall on his knees; he was truly a good man and worshipped his one God.

  But he bowed his head to me. “Please!” he said, and I thought he was going to beg for all their lives.

  “Please, stay, help us,” he said.

  I smiled dryly. “I am the monster you fear,” I told him.

  He shook his head solemnly. “Well may they call you monster; to us, you are salvation. One man’s monster is another man’s beloved friend,” he told me. “Forgive us; forgive us that we all became afraid of the threat, not of a monster, but of a man. Stay, we beg you.”

  I didn’t know if I could. I had acted too late; the man I loved and my best friend were dead.

  But Josiah was still there, a broken man, and little baby Elizabeth.

  I nodded. I would stay.

  There were no more arrests and no more executions in our area. I raised little Elizabeth with all the love that I had given her uncle and her mother. I tended to Josiah, who remained a broken man, a ghost of the fine human being he had once been.

  I saw Sheriff Corwin, who had caused all the misery in Salem.

  I smiled at him.

  He had a heart attack and died.

  That made me happy. Call me evil; that made me happy.

  In due time, of course, Elizabeth grew up and married. I stayed near her.

  I watched as the time of witches came and went; I watched the American people gather and fight the Revolution, and I stayed with my new family. I was the beautiful aunt who never seemed to age.

  After the Revolution, we moved south. I saw the evil of another war, as states seceded, as men died pathetically on that battlefield.