Fiona stood at the front of the meager crowd at the Keller to see the Chief Cocks. She’d unsuccessfully tried to convince Alan that their new band name might be a bad idea, but he’d insisted on keeping it. “Chief cock,” he’d said, was a cool historical term for a boxer.
With a slight sense of trepidation, Fiona had made her way to the loud and claustrophobic all-ages show. The few times she’d come to the bar, she’d ended up pressed between sweaty college students, inhaling the stench of stale beer, though the black Xs on her hands prevented her from ordering anything more exciting than soda.
Tonight, only a few patrons lingered in the bar. Lucas and Celia had plenty of room to dance while the Chief Cocks played one song after another about historical diseases. Fiona had tried to join them during a song about leprosy, but her feet had stuck to something on the floor.
“You know the kind of thing I need!” Alan jumped up and down. “Balance the humors when I bleed…”
“Tobias and Alan are looking good,” Mariana shouted to Fiona just as the song ended. The end of her sentence echoed through the room, and she hid behind her black bangs as the sparse crowd cheered.
“Thank you. We’re the Chief Cocks!” Feedback pierced the room as Alan spoke into the mike.
When the set ended, Lucas and Celia said their goodbyes. Fiona grabbed Mariana’s arm, and they hurried the stage where the Chief Cocks packed up their instruments.
“That was great,” said Mariana.
Tobias pulled off his lute. “Thanks. I don’t think we’re very good yet.”
“Should we meet you outside?” shouted Fiona.
“Yeah, I’ll be out. Alan’s going to help Joe take his drums home.”
Fiona looped her arm through Mariana’s, and they wrapped up against the cold, heading to the dark street in front of the Keller to wait for Tobias. The temperature had dropped while they were inside, and the girls huddled together.
As Fiona nestled into her friend’s shoulder, she heard footfalls on the pavement. She looked up from Mariana’s down jacket.
Munroe stood before them with her arms folded. Her deep red hair hung in a tangled ponytail, and she glared at them through red, puffy eyelids. Behind her loomed two tall jocks, one skinny and one very round, both wearing Mather varsity football jackets. The skinny one’s chin jutted out, and he made popping noises with his gum.
“Where’s Tobias?” Munroe’s voice trembled.
Fiona didn’t have a good feeling about the two jocks. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
Munroe stepped toward her, narrowing her eyes. “He cursed my boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry about Sully,” said Fiona. “Um, I haven’t seen—”
Before she could finish lying, the door swung open and Tobias stepped out with his lute case. The thin football player lunged forward, punching Tobias in the jaw. Tobias dropped his lute as he slammed against the door. He sprung forward, swinging and landing a punch in return. As he did, the other jock rushed toward Tobias, pinning his arms behind him. While Tobias struggled, Munroe inched toward him, her arms crossed.
“I know what you did.” Her voice was icy.
He took a deep breath, gazing at her. “I’m sorry he died, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Tears filled Munroe’s eyes as she grabbed his shirt collar. Her hair seemed to blaze under the yellow streetlamps. She hissed, “I know you killed him with magic.” She stepped away and nodded toward the skinny boy, who punched him in the jaw.
“Stop it!” Fiona yelled. She grabbed the lute case from the ground and swung it hard into the football player’s lower spine.
“Ow!” He turned to Fiona, towering over her. “Did you just hit me with a violin?”
“It’s a lute,” she said, brandishing the case. “And there’s more where that came from.”
The Keller’s door opened again, and a bouncer poked his head out. “Everything okay out here?”
As the jocks released Tobias, a serene grin replaced Munroe’s scowl. “They were just messing around. There’s no problem.” She turned to her lanky friend, stroking his jacket. “Let’s go.” They strolled off down Commonwealth Avenue.
Tobias straightened, rubbing his jaw as the bouncer disappeared.
Fiona gave him a worried look. “Are you okay?”
“I could have taken him if there weren’t two of them. It wasn’t really a fair fight.”
“Well, you had me there to back you up.” She stuffed her hands in her pockets as they began their walk to the subway. Ice on the sidewalk reflected the garish neon signs above.
“That’s true. They didn’t know my secret weapon. My lute-swinging avenger.” He smiled, holding his jaw.
“Let me see the damage.” Below the streetlights of Kenmore Square, Fiona appraised the growing bruise on Tobias’s jaw and the blood running from a split lip.
“Hang on.” After trawling through her bag, she brought out a package of tissues to wipe the blood off his chin.
“Do you still like the guy you told me about before? The one you had a disastrous conversation with?”
Surprised by the question, she studied his face. “Yeah. But I haven’t really talked to him. Unrequited love is lame, isn’t it?”
“Are we gonna get on the subway?” Mariana called, seemingly out of nowhere. “It’s freezing.”
Fiona started, spinning around.
“You forgot I was here, didn’t you?” Mariana smirked.
16
Thomas
Thomas Malcolm had all but forgotten his recent conversation about Maremount as he swayed under the glaring lights in the boxing ring. He held his opponent, Adam “The Calculator” McCarthy, in a clinch, blocking out the crowd’s noise. Thomas trapped the accountant’s arms, almost catching his breath before his opponent broke free. Adam hunched forward, uncorking a wild right hook to the body that failed to connect. Thomas’s limbs felt heavy and slow, as if he were fighting through a flood of molasses. A fat drop of sweat stung his right eye, but he tried to focus on the larger man across from him. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself forward, straining to maintain some kind of form as he threw a double-jab at his opponent. Easy, Thomas. Come on.
Adam telegraphed a haymaker and Thomas, reading the trajectory, pulled his chest back. Adam missed, losing his balance. As he considered whether he should move around or clinch again, the bell rang overhead. He shielded his eyes against the glare.
After a few moments, the announcer’s voice boomed through the room, prolonging his words. “We have here the former welterweight champion. And it has been decided, after a fantastic performance, and by unanimous decision, we have a new winner of the White Collar Boxing Championships, Thomas ‘The Historian’ Malcolm!”
Adam stepped toward him, lifting Thomas’s gloved hand. Closing his eyes against the bright lights, Thomas let himself fully absorb the crowd’s cheers for the first time. A wave of euphoria swept through him before he looked around again. He didn’t know a single person there.
He slid off his gloves, shook hands with Adam, and slipped quietly off the stage. As he found his way back to the empty locker room, he pulled off his headguard and wiped the sweat from his forehead. In the shower, he was alone with his thoughts. After the high of the arena and the screams of the crowd roaring for the champion, the locker room’s silence unsettled him. Back in London, he would’ve had ten friends there, ready to celebrate into the small hours. Instead, he’d have to go out by himself and wait for a seat at the bar, surrounded by bankers.
The Champion. This word had been coming up a lot lately. After those two girls had visited him with a story about a King Philip poem, he’d continued reading about the Angel of Hadley. Hawthorne called him the Gray Champion—a mysterious old Puritan on a “shadowy march.” That part he’d already known, but as he’d read more about the legends, he’d found something that nearly made him spit out his coffee. He didn’t want to make too much of it. He was a researcher, not some fantasi
st. He wasn’t one of the raving lunatics you saw in the park shouting into the air about conspiracies.
He finished dressing and zipped up his coat as he left the locker room. After pushing through the gym’s crowd, he stepped into the cold. He pulled out his tobacco pouch and papers while he crossed the street into the park. Much of the snow had melted, and slushy water pooled in paths through the Common. He strode past the old site of the elm, marked by a small plaque set into the ground.
SITE OF THE GREAT ELM
here the sons of liberty assembled
here, jesse lee, methodist pioneer
preached in 1790
the landmark of the common, the elm,
blew down in 1876
That was only part of the story, but he supposed it would have been a bit morbid to mention the bodies that had swung below the tree.
As he continued toward Beacon Hill, his forehead tingled, like strands of hair brushing his skin. He smiled, shaking his head. When he was a kid, he used to think walking through a spider web meant you’d encountered a ghost. He rubbed his forehead.
Nearby, a woman wearing candy-cane earrings and pink tube socks shrieked at a bench. “They drink blood! Vampires! The people in the government—you think you know, but you don’t know. The government drinks blood…” She tottered over, slumping onto the ground, defeated.
You got a lot more crazies around here than you did in London—a symptom of the dismantled mental health system, he supposed. At least the light in Boston was a significant improvement over the grim London skies. As he walked toward the State House, a tawny glow gleamed over the snow.
Toward the western edge of the park, the sun blinded him, and he shielded his eyes. Someone was heading right for him. As she drew closer, he recognized one of the girls from the posh school. Fiona.
“Hey. What are you doing here?”
She nodded toward Boylston Street. “My school’s just around the corner. I was gonna try to find you. Aren’t you supposed to be in a boxing match? I saw your picture on the poster.”
He beamed. “Just finished. Won the championship, as it happens.”
“No way! I can’t believe it! That guy looked so much bigger than you on the poster.”
His smiled faded. “Right, cheers.” He rubbed his hands together in the chilly air. “Well, it’s been fun chatting, but I’m off to celebrate with a drink.”
“Can I come?”
“Oh no, I’m not sponsoring that. You’re not old enough, and I know you’ve got some kind of curfew. What do you want to go to a bar for?”
She looked off into the distance. “That’s what people do when they’re depressed about love, right? You sit at the bar, ordering shots until the bartender asks you to leave. I mean, they won’t serve me alcohol.” She shrugged. “But I could get a soda.”
He remembered his last breakup during college, a series of vitriolic arguments with his girlfriend, Anna. There were the drunken phone calls, the nights of vomiting on the bus, and the hangovers that left him shuddering in bed for days. “That’s not real life. That’s just in the movies. Adults deal with heartbreak by just moving on.”
“Oh.” She shivered. “Well, I’m glad I found you. There’s something I wanted to ask. You told me about a sorcerer. Someone who could raise an army from the ground.”
Thomas would have liked to be inside, enjoying a pint with someone his own age, but this would have to do for now. “I told you there was a legend about it.”
“What if it already happened? My friend—the one from Maremount—said there’s a sorcerer leading a supernatural army. They call him Rawhed. Is there anything else you can tell me about the legend?”
He sighed. He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to divulge what he’d learned. “I’ve been reading a bit more about it.”
“What did you find?”
He smiled and glanced down for a second. “Well, it’s an odd little story actually. Some time in the 1800s, a little boy named Enoch Cosgrove was wandering around the Plymouth forest. He met two beautiful women, and they led him through the woods as the sun set. Little Enoch fell asleep by a tree. When he awoke, he was surrounded by witches holding quahog shells. They told him that an evil sorcerer would appear one day—an Angel of Death. They said that only one thing could kill him. They told the boy to memorize something, but of course he forgot it.”
She stepped toward him, pulling her coat tighter. “What did they want him to remember?”
He exhaled a cloud of mist. “A poem about King Philip.”
17
Tobias
Tobias’s face throbbed from the beating he’d received days before, and he inhaled the steam from his chamomile tea. Despite Munroe’s best attempts to spread rumors of his involvement in Sully’s death, he felt a sense of calm. Inside the old building, high above the frozen ground, he relished the warmth of his room. The only noise was the gentle clicking of Alan’s keyboard.
After finishing his tea, Tobias closed his eyes, lying back and pulling up his blankets. He thought of Maremount as he did every night, and of standing in the long grass with Eden by Athanor Pond, watching the sky turn a hot salmon color while the sun rose. Once, as they’d stood by the bramble bushes, he’d pricked his finger, and Eden had kissed the single drop of blood. He could picture the silent ferryman of Athanor Pond as though he were standing before him. His fingers were long, white talons.
Tobias ran, briers scratching his legs in the thicket. He no longer stood by the water, but in the Tuckomock Forest along a deer trail. He caught a flicker of a bony man stalking him through the old oak trees. Behind him, the hunter snapped twigs, closing in on him. He was desperate for his pike. He looked down to see a child’s hat, covered in blood. He tripped and sprawled flat on the path.
Scrambling to get up, his vision went dark, and he struggled for breath. As the air drained from his lungs, a gnawing dread replaced it, as though his body were rotting from within.
He woke and gasped in the dark, quiet room. He tried to sit up, but his muscles wouldn’t obey. In the corner of the room, a shadow moved. He tried to push himself up on his elbows, but he was paralyzed. He closed his eyes, and something rustled at the foot of his bed. Am I still dreaming?
His eyes snapped open, and he stared at a silhouette hovering by the end of his bed. When it shifted toward him into the faint moonlight, he saw silver hair curled over a withered face. The only sensible thought he could muster was that this old woman must be a teacher’s guest who’d lost her bearings. He tried to tell her she shouldn’t be here, but his lips wouldn’t obey.
The old woman glided closer to his head as he struggled to sit up. She reached a gnarled hand to his shoulder, and then quickly—too quick for such an ancient creature—she pressed on top of him, her knobby knees jabbing into his ribs. With horror, he saw a desiccated face approach his. He closed his eyes as a weight compressed his chest. How could a withered crone be so heavy? His body filled with dread as the old woman forced her brittle mouth on his, draining him of breath.
“What’s going on?” Alan’s voice, thick with sleep, cut through the silence.
The creature jerked upwards, and Tobias opened his eyes again, gasping. The woman crouched above him had transformed, now looking like an aged version of his art teacher, Ms. Bouchard. Her large eyes blinked in bewilderment as her shriveled face rotated toward Alan.
“Ms. Bouchard? Why are you sitting on Tobias? What happened to your face?”
Ms. Bouchard scuttled backwards toward the end of Tobias’s bed. Her head swiveled back to look at Tobias, her face contorted with rage. In a panic, Tobias blurted out the childhood rhyme he used to say before bed:
Heigh diddle diddle,
a nighttime riddle
to shield my flesh and bones.
The devils will yell
to hear such spells
and the goblins run off with the crones.
Ms. Bouchard lurched backwards. Her skeletal feet sought out the floor for balance, and
she doubled over. She clung to her stomach with skeletal hands. Her head wrenched backwards, and her face grimaced toward the ceiling. She shrieked, joined by screams from Alan. Cracks opened in her skin, and with a sharp report like a ship’s cannon, her body ruptured into lumps of flesh, bone, and dust. Particles of the art teacher sprayed all over the room.
Clearly, there was more to his nighttime riddle than he’d been raised to believe. Tobias looked down at his arms. The powdery pieces had turned into droplets of blood on his skin. He gulped in air as if drowning, but then had the horrible thought that he was inhaling bits of Ms. Bouchard.
“What the hell was that?” Alan cried out, staring at his gore-spattered arms.
Tobias gasped for breath, coated in the creature’s flesh. It wasn’t the first demon he’d fought, but he’d never killed anything before.
“She’s all over us. How do we get rid of this?” Alan shouted.
“I don’t know.” He tried to smear the blood droplets off his arm.
Alan looked at his bloody hands. “Did you kill it with magic? Can you do some kind of magic to get rid of this?”
A cleaning spell wasn’t a bad idea. He closed his eyes, chanting a spell for tidying between short breaths. As he spoke, all the dust, bone, and blood swirled off their bodies and beds, depositing itself in the trash. Alan gaped at him, and then stared at the trashcan as though it might birth another monster. After a few moments, with the room in its normal state again, the heaving of their chests returned to normal.
Tobias glanced at the trashcan. “I didn’t know that rhyme could kill anything.”
“It’s a good thing it did. She looked like she was about to suck out your soul. Do you think she’s killed anyone before? Do you think she killed Sully?”
The sound of footsteps approached on the wooden floorboards outside the door. A key rattled in the lock as they sat in silence. The door creaked open, and Mr. Grunshaw’s bearded face poked through. “What in God’s name is going on here?”
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