The Salem Witch Society

by K. N. Shields

  Moving away from the rocky shore, with its cluster of summer cottages, Lean led Doran north. The island was more or less level, with scattered stands of woods in front of them, allowing a decent view of the landscape, though it was dark beneath the new moon. As they moved closer to the point, still unable to make out any clear details, Lean felt his heart begin to thump louder and louder in his chest. He was trying to move through the tall grass and brush quietly but was struggling to restrict his pace to a brisk walk. His eyes scanned the dark horizon, searching for any spark or sign of flame. There was nothing, and his gaze drifted northwest to the lights visible across the water in Portland. Grey was there, still analyzing the evidence, searching for anything they had missed, guarding against the possibility that they had once again misjudged their man and left him alone in the city to wreak havoc as he’d done with the murder of Dr. Steig.

  “Damn!” Doran roared past him in the second it took for Lean to detect the source of the giant man’s sudden outburst. One hundred yards ahead, a red spark appeared, flickered out, then reappeared. The small dot of fire rushed sideways in both directions and quickly began to climb.

  Lean sprinted forward, arms pumping. His gaze was fixed on the spreading flames, though Doran partially blocked his view. He was amazed at how quickly the Irishman’s massive strides were outpacing his own. Ahead, in the light of the building flames, Lean saw the form of a small body supported a few feet above the ground. Panic seized his mind, but he clung to one thought, inarticulate but all-encompassing: Delia herself was not yet on fire.

  A shot exploded from straight ahead, and Tom Doran went down, tumbling violently head over feet in the tall grass. Lean instinctively threw himself down on the ground, rolled, and got to one knee, pistol in hand. In the fleeting seconds it had taken him to rise, he saw that Doran had regained his own feet and was sprinting forward again.

  Lean heard a furious scream pierce the darkness. A woman in a long white dress appeared in the light of the flames. She grabbed a stick of wood from the fire and bolted forward, swinging the flaming brand at Tom Doran. He flung an arm out, knocking the blow aside and sending the woman tumbling. Three more strides and Doran was rushing into the fire, madly kicking both legs, sending flaming branches in every direction. He reached in and swept Delia’s limp form from the center of the blaze. The hem of the little girl’s dress had caught fire, but Doran extinguished it as he engulfed the small figure within his own massive bulk.

  “She alive?” Lean shouted.

  “Yes! Yes, she’s good!” Doran sank to his knees, still cradling Delia.

  Lean exhaled, part of the horrible weight falling from him in an instant. His eyes darted all around the rocky point. Helen was nowhere. He dashed off again, veering to his left in pursuit of the woman in the white dress. She was easy enough to follow; she still clutched the burning torch that she had used to attack Doran. The woman was not a fast runner, and Lean quickly closed the gap between them. As he approached, he saw the flame rise higher. He momentarily thought that she was raising it over her head before he realized that she was scampering up a short rise of smallish, sharply angled rocks.

  They were very near the ocean now; the craggy outcropping on which the woman stood stretched a short way out into the water. Lean quickly bounded up the rocks in pursuit. The woman reached the end and turned to face him. In the light of the torch, standing just twelve feet away, she bared her teeth in a twisted, furious snarl. Her red hair was pulled back, and her eyes were sheer hatred. He recognized her as the woman who had chastised Peter Chapman on the rail platform in Salem. He raised the pistol, aiming directly at her chest.

  “You’re under arrest!”

  Her snarl eased and spread into a menacing grin.

  “Give it up. I won’t think twice of killing you after what you tried here tonight.”

  “Tried?” the woman hissed. “Fool—the Master is rising even now. You can’t stop him.”

  “The girl’s alive.”

  “He doesn’t need her”—the woman spit out the last word—“that useless rag doll. Any life will do. And the stronger the spirit offered up, the brighter the flame calling him back to us.” The woman dropped her arm.

  “Don’t!” Lean made it one step forward before the torch flame touched the bottom of the woman’s dress, then blazed upward.

  Lean whipped his coat from off his back, thinking to tackle the woman and smother the flames, but her hair was already burning. She screamed, and her arms shot skyward like two fiery pillars. Lean tried to move closer, but the woman was stumbling backward, still shrieking in horrific pain and trailing a strong scent of burning oil. She must have doused the wood when she planned to sacrifice Delia and stained her own dress in the process. Lean swung his coat, striking the woman’s side. He was about to attempt a tackle when she turned and ran headlong off the rocks. She dropped down into the ocean, leaving a sickening hiss in her wake. After several seconds, the charred form drifted back to the surface. The dead body, and with it the knowledge of Helen’s whereabouts, lay in the dark water, motionless except for the bobbing of the waves.

  Lean’s knees started shaking as the rush of the immediate danger faded. He sat on the rocks and glanced out over the water at the lights of Portland. Grey was there. There was still hope for Helen.

  73

  The throbbing ache in her wrists drew Helen back, through a foggy haze, to consciousness. She felt hard boards beneath her, pressing into her hip, as the gauzelike shroud fell away from her mind. She tried to remember where she was. Maybe in her house—or Delia’s room. An image came storming back: The woman was standing in her doorway, and then she was lunging forward. Delia! Helen tried to call out but was stifled. She worked her jaw to and fro and pressed her tongue forward. A cloth had been stuffed into her mouth. She gagged and coughed.

  Tears dripped out of her eyes and ran across her face. She was on her right side. She opened her eyes, and after a few moments the blurry picture of the dark, confined world came into focus. There were a few points of light. She stared at them until the candle flames became clear. At first she thought there were a dozen, but soon she realized it was only the same two candles, reflected back many times over in the dusky panes of glass that surrounded her.

  She could see that she was in a small room, circular, with a short wall of exposed planks about three feet high, above which the room was lined all around with windows. There was only darkness beyond. A droning sound was coming from somewhere behind her head: a voice, almost singing, but the words were difficult to discern, foreign, and all running into one another.

  Above her, in the flickering candlelight, she could make out a painted compass on the circular ceiling. A metal hook in the center supported a long brass telescope. As she continued to glance about the room, Helen guessed that the entire space was perhaps eight or ten feet across. There was a narrow door directly opposite her, and to one side was a raised platform, the edge of which held a sort of trapdoor that swung up to allow entry from a stairway below. On the other side of the doorway was a bench, upon which was a coiled length of rope and several half-gallon glass jars. These were filled with liquid, and each appeared to hold some dark mass.

  A man entered the room and moved to where a candle sat on the black bench. He loosened the belt of his long, dark robe and wriggled out of the garment. Beneath, he was wearing a dark vest over a long-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. The man had a thick, curved blade tucked into his waistband. The sight of it sent a shock through Helen’s mind: the billhook used to carve the cross on Maggie Keene’s chest.

  “Your friend is an unexpectedly troublesome man. … No bother, though.” The man grinned at Helen. “No bother at all.”

  He took up the dark cloak and one of the candles. Helen watched him as he exited the room and made his way around, on the walk outside, to a spot directly opposite the door. She twisted her body and craned her neck. From the light of the man’s candle, Helen was able to make out that he had some woo
den stick or pole around which he draped the cloak. Then he set about positioning the pole so that, in the candlelight, it cast a shadowy outline of a man. She could hear the man’s light footsteps moving back around until he was just outside the door to the small room. Then there was silence.

  Helen’s heart was racing, and she fought to keep her own muffled breath in check as she listened for any sound. Soon there came a slight creaking noise. The trapdoor in the floor opened an inch or so. There was a pause, and it opened several more inches. Helen saw a face appear. The head turned quickly, shooting glances all around to take in as much of the scene as possible. Perceval Grey.

  She tried to scream at him through her gag. Still supporting the trapdoor with his left hand, Grey raised his right, revealing a gun. He held the barrel vertically to his lips, motioning for silence, then eased his way into the room. Grey was only a few feet from her, and Helen continued to try to shout warnings as he looked around the room. She saw his eyes linger on the windows opposite the door, where the fake shadow of a man flickered through the glass.

  Grey slid over to her, keeping low to the floor. He set his gun down beside her and then bent over to reach the knots that bound her wrists behind her back. Helen began to thrash her body, desperately shaking her head in the direction of the door. She realized a second too late that her own struggle to alert Grey had obscured the sounds of the killer entering the room. She saw the dark figure rise up swiftly behind Grey.

  Grey’s head swiveled around as his hand shot out for his pistol. There was a quick movement, and then Helen heard a sickening thud. Grey released a surprised grunt that was cut short. His body slumped forward onto Helen. The sudden weight of him knocked the wind from her. Grey’s head came to rest upon her collarbone, and a few seconds later she felt warm, thick drops of his blood trickling down her neck.

  74

  Lean urged the horses on, though he was hard-pressed to ignore their protests any longer. The beasts’ sides heaved and glistened with sweat after the mad dash of several miles from the shore in Cape Elizabeth. Doran’s two men had been left behind there. The lightened load let them make good time, with Lean cracking the whip more often than he should, across the bridge and along the winding path up Commercial Street.

  Doran cradled Delia the entire ride. The girl had obviously been drugged, and she fluttered in and out of consciousness during the frenzied boat crossing back to the mainland. When first asked about who had taken her, the girl had mumbled something that included the words “black coat,” before her quivering lip crumpled into a series of sobs. Lean and Doran had gently but relentlessly pressed her for information on her mother’s whereabouts, even though each attempt eventually led to tears, the child whimpering for her mommy.

  Finally, when Lean asked, “Did he say anything? What did the dark man say?” he was rewarded with one more cryptic muttering: “The lord of the air.” The girl’s eyes, already closed, had squinted tighter, her brow furrowing slightly. Lean realized that the phrase had confounded her, a reference queer enough to lodge itself deep in the child’s mind, where she could secretly puzzle over the literalness of the statement.

  Once ashore, Lean had turned his attention to driving the carriage and Doran had settled into silence with Delia slumped in his arms. Makeshift bandages of knotted handkerchiefs were tied around the big man’s left thigh. The leg had bled freely, but Doran was lucky in that the crazed woman’s bullet had only cut a line along the meaty portion of his leg. Although Doran denied any need for medical attention, Lean could see that the man’s face had gone a shade paler from his normal ruddy complexion. On the few occasions when Lean glanced at the pair huddled behind him, he could see Doran grimacing as they rumbled over the uneven road.

  They went directly to Helen’s house in the hope that she might miraculously turn up there at some point. More realistically, the girl was sure to come around sooner or later and be hysterical at the absence of her mother. Lean hoped that familiar surroundings might lessen the fear, even a tiny bit.

  After depositing Doran and Delia, Lean came outside and climbed on top of the cab. He was still wrestling with that phrase: “the lord of the air.” Was it just a passing remark, meaningful only within the impenetrable darkness of the killer’s mind? Or was it possibly an actual clue? For lack of anything else that offered any glimmer of hope of finding Helen, Lean immediately attached a great importance to the phrase. He turned the words over, letting the phrase chase its tail round and round in his head. He recognized the title from his readings on the Salem witches; it was a moniker that the Puritans had attached to Satan. But there had to be something more to it. Otherwise he was lost—and so was Helen.

  Maybe Grey could pull a linguistic rabbit from his hat and ascribe some concrete meaning to “the lord of the air.” On his way toward Grey’s High Street rooms, Lean passed a police call box. He thought of stopping to telephone ahead to Grey, but the idea of standing still for so long, waiting for the operator to connect the call, was unbearable. Minutes later he was rapping at the door, in nearly as much of a lather as the horses, waiting for the landlady to undo the latch. He heard Mrs. Philbrick puttering about just inside the doorway, and then the door inched open and a wary eye appeared.

  “Oh, it’s you, Deputy Lean. What a relief.”

  “Mr. Grey in?” Lean said as he barged past into the hallway.

  “No.” Then she muttered, “Thank heavens.”

  “How long ago did he leave?”

  The landlady shrugged. “Under an hour, I suppose.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No. He was in a right frenzy, but not a word about where he was headed.”

  “Did he say anything at all?”

  Mrs. Philbrick was shrinking back, her eyes edging wider at Lean’s barrage of questions. “Nothing that I can recall.”

  “Well, what was he doing in his rooms just before he left?” Lean started up the stairs and heard Mrs. Philbrick plodding after him.

  “That’s the odd part. He wasn’t in his rooms.”

  Lean stopped short on the stairs, and the landlady bumped into him.

  “I went to his door, and I heard him thumping around above,” she said. “So I went down the hall to the ladder that leads up to the roof door. He comes clambering down, nearly landed on me.”

  “What was he doing up there?”

  “I’m certain I’d have no idea.”

  Lean saw a flicker in her eyes, a look perhaps of embarrassment at having to answer these questions about her peculiar tenant.

  “Come now, Mrs. Philbrick. This is a matter of the gravest importance. Tell me what he was doing.”

  “Seemed to be reading. Had some papers with him.”

  “Anything else?”

  Her head started to shake, denying any complicity in what she was about to reveal. “And he was spying on people.”

  “Spying on people? What are you saying? Come on now, out with it.”

  “It’s true. He came rushing down from the roof, hands me some papers and a telescope.” She nodded at the last bit for emphasis. “Then he dashes into his rooms, comes bolting out again, in a fierce rush for the street.”

  “Telescope? Where’d you put it? And the papers.”

  “I left them just inside his door. I don’t like to go in there when he’s out. Course, going in when he’s home isn’t much to grin at either.”

  “How do I get to the roof?”

  “Up there, past Mr. Grey’s. There’s a closet door in the hallway.”

  Lean bolted up the rest of the stairs. Grey’s door was unlocked. Just inside was the telescope and a few pages. Lean seized up the papers, a grand total of three. They were crumpled; Grey had clutched them, perhaps in excitement at having discovered something. Lean pored over them by the light of a gas jet inside Grey’s parlor. Each page held a single entry.

  The first page was Amelia Porter’s warning to Lean: “The darkness rising beware the Good woman and her child.” Grey
had dismissed the woman as a charlatan, but there was no denying that this very writing is what had tipped them to Helen and Delia’s abduction. The second page was more from Amelia Porter, one of the quotes they had recorded from her séance: “A tower standing in a pool of darkness. It’s thick like blood and filling with darkness. There’s a spark there. I can see a flame. There’s still time. Dear God, please hurry.’”

  The third paragraph was the last entry from the Riddle of the Martyrs. Lean didn’t have to read it—he’d long ago memorized every word—but his eyes raced over the page once more, hoping some new idea would make itself known. The words from the pages flowed through his mind. Blood, fire, tower, darkness, rising, empty, filling, time, hurry. No answer came to him, but the same must have been true for Grey until he’d seen something from the roof. Lean shoved the pages into his pocket and snatched up the telescope. In the hallway a narrow door he’d never noticed before blended in with the drab wallpaper. Inside the small closet, wooden rungs nailed into the wall formed a ladder. Lean made his way up and emerged onto a flat rooftop. At first it appeared empty except for chimneys and vent pipes. Then Lean noticed papers lying scattered around. He seized up a few and by match light recognized them as more notes from the investigation. Grey had tossed these aside, so Lean did the same.