Chain of Souls (Salem VI)

by Heath, Jack

  There was a pause while D'Angelo seemed to think it over. "Well, you're not an academic and those documents haven't even been properly catalogued yet. Usually the only people allowed into our Rare Book and Manuscript Collection are working on academic projects, but in this case I certainly believe we should make an exception. I think that article would be a wonderful idea."

  Having made an appointment for early the next morning, John got off the phone with D'Angelo, and then made three more quick phone calls, first for a case of cold beer to be delivered from a nearby deli and then for pizza and takeout Chinese. Everything arrived around eight and everyone took a break and ate and drank a few beers. Afterward they continued to plan out the first edition of the new paper, worked on the masthead design, the typefaces, and other issues.

  At about nine o'clock, John told the staff it was time to go home. They would meet tomorrow and continue the process. People wandered out to their cars, while he and Amy stayed behind to lock up and turn off the lights.

  "Want some company?" Amy asked. "Or would you rather be alone?"

  "Please come over," John said, rubbing his eyes and realizing how absolutely drained he was. That thought brought another reflection, that he was perhaps the most unromantic man on the face of the earth. How many other men, given the chance to sleep in the same bed with a woman who looked like Amy, would have done anything but hold her for most of the nights they had been together? "I have nothing left, but I'd sure like to know you're there beside me."

  She came up and rested her hands on his chest. "Life is going to get better, and then we're going to live like normal people."

  He looked at her and nodded. "I hope so."

  When they got back to his house, John went upstairs, took a shower, and got into bed, feeling so tired he expected to be asleep before his head hit the pillow.

  As soon as he closed his eyes he had the strange sensation he was someplace else and his eyes snapped open. Only when he looked around, he realized he must have been dreaming because he felt just as exhausted and wrung out as he had before he got into bed.

  He was on a narrow dirt road that wound along between two hilly pastures. A stone wall ran along the path on both sides of the road, and beyond the walls sheep grazed the hillside. He was alone, and even though he had the feeling he'd been to this place before, he didn't recognize it at first.

  Ahead of him the road curved sharply and ran beneath the branches of a huge and ancient tree. The shade beneath the tree seemed unnaturally dark, and when he focused on it he remembered the girl he had seen walking down this same road. He had been afraid for the girl because she had been walking toward a place where he had sensed the presence of great evil. Now, even though he sensed all those things again, when he tried to stop walking he found he couldn't. His feet just kept moving as if someone else was controlling them and forcing him to take step after step.

  Up ahead the darkness got closer and closer, almost as if it was moving rather than him, and then a second later he was inside it and following the road around a sharp bend to where he could see a house in the distance. The feeling of incipient danger grew even stronger. The house was old and austere but nothing unusual, just a clapboard structure similar to many in New England, with a steep pitched roof and a number of chimneys and gabled windows along the top.

  In spite of its rather normal appearance, something about the house made him want to stay faraway. His feelings of dread were growing stronger by the second, but they weren't powerful enough to overcome whatever force was drawing him onward. He came to the outside of the house and finally managed to bring himself to a halt. There was no one else in sight, but he was certain the house was not empty. A feeling of great evil radiated from its walls like heat pulsing from an oven.

  He looked at the downstairs windows, but at first he could see nothing because the light reflected off the glass and made them opaque. After another second he caught a flicker of motion in one of the upstairs windows, and when he tilted his head upward he recognized Sarah. She was standing very straight, her hands behind her back as if they might have been bound. Sarah was looking down at him, but her lips weren't moving. She was not trying to call out to him, rather she was staring at him, and her eyes seemed cold and distant as if she was rendering some harsh judgment against him.

  Upon seeing her, John ran to the front door and tried to open it, but it was locked. He kicked it and then slammed his shoulder into the wood, but it was thick and well built and would not budge. He went around to the windows and tried to raise them, and when that didn't work he tried to break one by throwing a rock through it but the rock just bounced off the glass. It seemed as if some sort of force field protected the entire house.

  It didn't hurt him physically to touch the force field, but each time he came into contact with it he saw terrible, familiar images that stung him as if they were electric shocks. His mind conjured pictures of dead bodies, horribly mangled and disfigured, and walls smeared with blood. He smelled the overpowering copper stench from vast quantities of spilled blood and also the reek of feces from disemboweled and ruptured intestines.

  Almost brought to his knees by the images, he jerked away from the wall, but even as he did, he realized the pictures in his head weren't of the underground room where the Salem Coven had performed their horrible blood sacrifices. The room looked very similar, but was different somehow. He suddenly felt a terrible chill as he realized that the pictures were telling him that Salem wasn't the only place, that there were other killing rooms equally as horrible as the tile-walled room beneath Salem.

  He backed away farther and looked up at the window again, but now Sarah was gone. In her place he saw the young girl he had seen walking the dirt road during his dream several nights earlier. She was looking down at him, her skin the pallor of death, her mouth running bloody on both sides, her eyes dead.

  He woke up wide-eyed and sweating and breathing like a bellows. Beside him Amy slept soundly. He knew she must have been just as exhausted as he felt because he had not managed to wake her. He sat with his skin drying in the cool air as he stared through the half-open curtains at the dark harbor and the darker ocean beyond.

  He knew without any doubt that something was happening to him that he could not explain. Whatever it was, it wasn't like it had been when he'd seen the spirit of Rebecca Nurse. That had been strange and disorienting at first, but at least it had been outside his body. What he felt now was that a door was opening somewhere in his mind, and in some way it was connecting him to things that were very faraway but which were also real, or were at least very close to real.

  The only thing that made him believe these dream/visions were not the beginning of madness was that he was certain in some strange, yet inexplicable way they were connected to Sarah. Somehow, if he could learn to interpret them and understand them, it would help him get his daughter back. At least that's what he wanted to believe.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE NEXT MORNING JOHN PULLED INTO THE parking lot at the Peabody Essex Institute at eight o'clock sharp, climbed out of the car and dragged his exhausted body toward Plummer Hall. More than anything he would have loved to have stayed in bed because he felt as if he'd barely slept. He'd finally managed to fall back to sleep again the night before, but only after lying awake exhausted and unable to calm down after the dream that had awakened him.

  The Phillips Library usually opened at nine, but Joe D'Angelo apparently had a very busy day, and so he had asked John to come before the regular operating hours. True to his word, D'Angelo was standing outside the front doors as John arrived.

  "Thank you for doing this," John said.

  "Not a problem," said D'Angelo, shivering slightly as he turned, opened the door, and ushered John inside. He was tall and thin with bony shoulder bones that stuck up like two knobs beneath his threadbare cardigan sweater. His mostly bald scalp was unusually pink, probably from the cold John thought, and D'Angelo's glasses were fogged up from having come out of the w
arm library into the morning chill.

  "I hope you weren't waiting for me for long," John said, glancing at his watch to make sure he wasn't late.

  D'Angelo shook his head. "It wasn't being outside. It's being inside with the overheated library, and then going into the freezing rare books section and then back into the overheated library. I'm either too hot or freezing all day long. It's no wonder I have a perpetual cold."

  D'Angelo walked him through the main reading room, then opened a door that said "Private" and led the way down a flight of steps to another door marked "Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. Restricted Access." He opened the door's electronic lock with a magnetic card that hung around his neck. John followed the archivist into a small room where there were coat hangers for extraneous clothing and cubbyholes for personal effects. There were also five or six navy blue cardigan sweaters hanging together at one end of the coat rack with "Property of Phillips Library" stenciled in white letters along the back. On the far wall was another door that read:

  NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY

  WEAR GLOVES AT ALL TIMES

  NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED

  John had been here once before and knew the drill. He took off his overcoat, hung it up, donned one of the cardigan sweaters, and then went over to the clear plastic box that hung from the wall and took a pair of white cloth gloves. While John put on the gloves, D'Angelo reached into the pocket of his cardigan, pulled out his own pair of gloves, and put them on. Then he opened the next door and led the way into the rare books room. Right away, John felt the temperature and humidity change. The room was considerably cooler than the rest of the library. When he looked at several instruments on the wall he saw that the temperature in the room was sixty-five degrees and the humidity was 45 percent.

  "You want to see the same material you were looking at the last time?" D'Angelo asked.

  John nodded, and the archivist disappeared into the stacks and came out a minute later with three boxes that he placed on one of the research tables. John opened the first box and felt his pulse quicken as he saw the stacks of letters and other writings all carefully organized and separated. D'Angelo cleared his throat before John did anything else, and when John looked up the archivist reviewed with him the proper methods for separating and handling the ancient pages to avoid any possibility of damage.

  John sat down at the table and began to carefully remove the documents from the first box and look through them. There were letters from various early residents of Salem, personal journals from people whose names meant nothing. He saw several pages of farm reports, recording how much corn, wheat, and sorghum one of the Putnam farms had produced, how many oxen they owned, how many head of milk cows, how many beef cows, how many calves had been born, how many pigs and sheep. He saw the document written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and skipped past it because he'd already read it.

  John went through the first box and the second without finding anything that gave him pause. He was on the contents of the third box, close to the bottom, his eyes starting to glaze over when he found a packet of three letters bound together with a navy blue ribbon. He gently slipped the ribbon off the letters, unfolded them, and began to look them over.

  Almost at once he saw that the letter was addressed, "Dear Elizabeth." He felt his pulse kick because it was the first thing he'd seen that related to the curious notation in Paradise Lost.

  He struggled to read the old-fashioned writing and after several minutes he thought it said, "Thee hast been well prepared for thy role and responsibilities. Be thee obedient to thy Master and diligent in thy duties and remember fondly those who hath trained thee for thy Greatness in the New World. We hope this letter finds thee well in that far place and that the Astarte brought thee safely to the shores of your new home in reasonable comfort and without undue travail."

  The Astarte! It must have been a ship, John realized. But then what did Asthoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner possibly mean? How did a person equate to a ship? If Astarte was the name of the ship that had brought Elizabeth Turner to the New World, why was that important enough to warrant a margin note in his great-great-grandfather's book?

  He looked through the other papers, which had been held by the same ribbon, but they were addressed to different people, perhaps within the same family, but shed no further light on his questions. The only other piece of paper in the packet was curious because it consisted of two renderings, the first of a house with lines drawn through it, and the second on the bottom half of the page showed what seemed to be a world map with lines radiating outward from what looked like the southwest corner of England.

  Something about the drawings caught his eye, and he stared at them for some time trying to understand their meaning. Whatever their purpose, they had been drawn with great care. The drawing of the house, which resembled many of the wealthier homes in Salem, was a house with six gables, each of the gables being the beginning of one of the lines. The house seemed to be oriented very specifically to lines of the compass, with north, south, east, and west shown separate from the lines that radiated from the gables. Below it, the larger map was again very carefully executed, and its purpose seemed to be to extend the lines from the gables outward around the world.

  John looked at where the lines intersected with land and noted that one of those points seemed to cut through the northern coast of North America, very close to where the colony of Massachusetts was located. Another line went through Northern Europe and Russia. The lines were confusing because they didn't seem to have any real meaning that John could determine. Also, because the house from which the lines originated was irregular in its design, the lines did not radiate evenly. They weren't anything like the spokes of a wheel, but shot off at odd angles. Thus another line went through Southern China and crossed what John guessed would probably be North Korea. Another went through Central Africa; another bisected South America and Mexico.

  Why had someone gone to such trouble and put such effort into a paper drawing? John wondered. Were these supposed to represent trade routes? He didn't think that made any sense, but then what was the purpose? He was pretty sure that Puritans hadn't believed in wasting time on non-essential tasks, and yet a lot of artistry and a lot of time had been expended to make the drawings. Another question was, if they were so important, why hadn't the artist made it larger and put it on canvas instead of paper? Then, other questions occurred to him. Who had this been sent to? There was no other writing on the page, no indication of the recipient.

  He looked at the folds in the paper then laid out the other letters that had been in the bundle. Wondering if the map had been folded along with one of the other letters, he took the pages one by one and laid them atop the map. The creases on only one of the letters exactly matched the map's folds, as if the same careful hand had folded them at the same time. It was the letter written to someone known only as Elizabeth.

  John felt a surge of fresh energy as he looked at the letter and the map. The references to greatness and obedience to a master, to a ship named Astarte, and now the lines that radiated off the gables of the house, one of which intersected the New World at what looked like the location of modern day Salem. All of it was vague, but he knew he was onto something here, something strange. He didn't have any idea what it meant yet or where it might lead, but he knew in his gut he had to start pulling this thread to see where it led, and he had to do it as fast as he could. He couldn't articulate why, but he believed at some level beyond intellectual understanding that wherever this went, it was going to take him to Sarah.

  He knew it was against library policy, but he snuck his cell phone out of his pocket and used it to take pictures of both documents. Then he returned the documents to the box and rang the buzzer that would summon Joe D'Angelo to come let him out and to return the boxes to their proper places in the stacks.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JOHN WAS BACK IN HIS CAR BY HALF PAST NINE, but sat in the parking lot, the engine turned off, and drummed his fingers on th
e steering wheel. He didn't know where to go or what to do. He'd learned a little bit more about the Coven, at least maybe he had, but how was it possibly going to help him find Sarah?

  He needed to do something, but there was nothing he could do. He had no information, no course of action. In addition, he knew he needed to at least show his face at the Salem News and pretend to work. However, instead of heading straight to the paper, he drove back to his house. Needing to take a run to try to banish his exhaustion and wear down some of the anxiety that was going to render him totally useless if he couldn't get it under control pretty quickly, he changed into his running clothes, did a cursory stretch, and then headed out. As he began to jog, he tried to empty his mind of conscious thoughts about Sarah or Elizabeth Turner or Astarte, and instead let his inquiries and associations run free and seek some order on their own.

  The drawing of the house and the lines coming off the gables and extending around the world had disturbed him for reasons he couldn't articulate. It seemed to have lodged itself in his mind, because when he closed his eyes, he could still see it as if it had been burned into his retina. Who exactly was Elizabeth Turner? What part of England had she come from? Who had her master been? What was the significance of the name of the ship on which she had sailed to the New World? Was it just coincidence that she ship's name, Astarte, was also the name of one of the angels who had helped Lucifer in his rebellion against God in Paradise Lost? And even so, what could any of this have to do with Sarah?

  Why did he have such a strong compulsion to dig into history when his daughter was missing in the present? Was it because he just needed to do something to feel like he was making progress, or were his instincts guiding him in the right direction? And what about the dream or the vision he'd had on two different nights of the girl walking on a dirt lane and a house that looked almost exactly as though it could be the one in the drawing? And what about seeing Sarah in the window of that house? What did it mean?