As well she might be, Hopkin thought. This business could cost her the highest price there is. In this world, at least.
Hopkin led off the questioning, as was customary.
“Susan,” he said gently, “You have heard Sheriff O’Bannion testify how he did discover that—” he gestured toward the device “—in your room. Do you deny that it was there?”
“No, Your Lordship.” Her voice trembled a little.
“And you have also heard Goodwife Abbandando swear that she saw you use it to coax forth voices. Do you deny this?”
“No, Your Lordship, I do not.”
This caused murmuring among the spectators, which Hopkin silenced with a glare. Turning back to the witness, he asked sternly, “Do you therefore admit to being in league with the Devil?”
The girl began to shake her head to and fro, saying, “No, Your Lordship, no, never! I have naught to do with the Evil One, or with any of his works!”
Hopkin leaned back in his chair, signaling to Bolton that he might take up the interrogation.
Peering at the witness with his piggy eyes, Bolton said slyly, “This instrument you were seen using, when did the Devil give it to you?”
“The Devil never give it to me, Your Lordship! Never!”
“How then did you come by it?”
“It were my brother’s. I found it one day, among his things.”
“Your brother! What is his name? Is he in this courtroom?”
“His name is — was — Jonathan, Your Lordship. He died last year, of the cholera.”
“Dead is he? How very convenient!” Bolton’s sarcasm was as ponderous as his wit. “How do you propose we question this brother of yours, then — through necromancy? Has the Devil taught you that forbidden art, as well?”
“I know nothing of necromancy! I know not even what it is! I have no truck with the Devil!” The girl began to weep softly.
Bolton drew breath to speak. but Hopkin touched his arm lightly. The fat man subsided, looking like a spoiled child being denied a third piece of cake.
Hopkin waited for the girl to compose herself, then nodded to Dufrain.
“So, you believe the device belonged to your late brother?” Dufrain’s voice was clear and calm, with no hint of Bolton’s theatrics.
“Yes, Your Lordship.”
“Know you how he may have come by it?”
Susan Bright hesitated. “I— I think mayhap he did build it, Your Lordship.”
There was more murmuring, which Hopkin again stifled with a stern look.
Dufrain paid the spectators no heed. “How could a mere boy fashion a device such as that?”
“He told me he had found a book, your Lordship. In the ruins of an old house, out in the countryside.”
“The Devil’s book!” cried a woman from the third row of seats.
Hopkin banged his gavel once, loudly. “This court will be in good order,” he said sternly, “or this court will be cleared!”
Once calm had been restored, Dufrain asked the girl, “Can you identify the book your brother used? Is it among these here?” He gestured toward the evidence table, on which rested several volumes seized from the Bright home.
She approached the table as if it had teeth and claws. Glancing up at Hopkin, she received a nod of encouragement, and stepped closer. After only a moment’s perusal of the stack of books, she picked one out. “This is the one, your Lordship. Jonathan said he found the knowledge in here to build the device. He said it was something called a… a rah-DEE-o.”
The word was repeated in a dozen or more muttered remarks before Hopkin gaveled the courtroom quiet. He bid Susan Bright return to the witness chair, and signaled to Dufrain that he wanted to take up the questioning again himself.
“Even if you did not make or procure this device yourself, Susan, why did you employ it to listen to the Devil’s voice?”
“I had never touched it afore that night, your Lordship. I knew not how to operate it, but I must have touched something in error, for suddenly there was this voice that came from it. I was so surprised, I just sat there before it, listening.”
“Do you not know the danger of giving attention to the words of Satan, child?” Hopkin’s voice was not unkind.
“But they could not have been Satan’s words, your Lordship,” she protested. “It were a man’s voice, true. But it were praying — praying to the Lord Jesus….”
* * *
“The poor twit of a girl meant no harm. She used bad judgment in keeping her brother’s little toy rather than turning it over to proper authority, but methinks she is no more a worshipper of Satan than I am.”
The courtroom was empty, except for the three magistrates. It had been so for nearly two hours as they deliberated.
“I tried my best to break her, as you saw, but she never abandoned her account,” the Reverend Hugh Bolton went on. “Some small chastisement may be in order. Mayhap the father should be instructed to take a strap to her, redden her buttocks so that she must take her meals standing for a week. But even such as that may be unnecessary — the trial itself has taught her a valuable lesson already, I’ll wager.”
“Before court, you had declared her already tried and convicted, Hugh,” Hopkin said quietly.
The big man shrugged uncomfortably. “As you rightly pointed out, Matthew, my judgment was too hasty. I had failed, although briefly, to pay heed to the oath we all have sworn. But the evidence seems clear, now.” He shook his head solemnly. “There be no witchcraft here — just a silly girl who chanced upon a dangerous plaything.”
“The evidence supports no such notion,” Roger Dufrain snapped. His boyish face was set sternly. “The girl knew the dangers, yet she willingly ignored them. She deliberately invoked the demon Technology.”
Dufrain walked to the evidence table and picked up the book that Susan Bright had identified in court. “Look you here,” he said, pointing to the cover illustration. It showed an adolescent boy holding a thin glass tube with a rounded bottom. The boy was staring raptly at the tube, which was partly full of some liquid that bubbled fiercely and emitted a stream of smoke. Above the image were printed the words, “101 Science Projects.”
“The covering itself shows the book’s intent,” Dufrain proclaimed. “What does this painting manifest, if not the conjuring of a demon? How could the girl gaze upon such an image and not know the black work such ‘projects’ must involve?”
Dufrain returned the book to the table and sat down again, facing the other two. “You know the law, and the reasons therefor.” His voice was quiet again, but charged with passionate conviction.
“We are all well versed in the law, brother,” Hopkin said. “That is why we have been entrusted by God with administering it.”
“Then leave us not forget why the law exists. The Great Burning, as our forefathers have recorded, destroyed all the world but this tiny corner. Fire and disease and deadly gasses ravaged the land, everywhere but here. God spared Salem for a reason, my brothers.”
“We know the Gospel of Richard as well as you do, Brother Roger,” Bolton said, frowning. “You need not preach it to us.”
Dufrain held up a hand, palm outward. “I mean not to offend, I would not do so for all the world.” He dropped his hand and leaned forward. “But I fear for our people, left alone amid this destroyed world. If the Devil gains a foothold among us, where can we flee? Twenty-five leagues beyond Salem, the water becomes poisonous, the air unbreathable. And deadly creatures await the unwary — the demon Radiation, the witch Sarin, the serpent Anthrax, and all the others.”
Dufrain stood, walked across the courtroom to a nearby cabinet, and removed a large parchment from one of its drawers. Returning to the others, he unfurled it to display a map labeled “Normerica.”
“Behold Salem, our home,” he said. “And beyond, what did the wis
e mapmakers write here—” he pointed with a jabbing finger “—and here, and here, also. Of what do they warn us?”
“‘Here be dragons,’” Hopkin read, his voice sounding weary. “You impart nothing we did not learn in childhood, Brother.”
Dufrain tossed the map aside and resumed his seat. “But can we then ignore the implications of what we have learned?”
Hopkin looked at his former protégé with narrowed eyes, “And these implications would be….”
“That we must be vigilant, always, against the Devil’s infestations. For if he once gains disciples in this community, if the Lord should see that his mercy in sparing us was for naught….” Dufrain shook his head, as if in contemplating unimaginable catastrophe. “No, the girl is guilty, my brothers, and she must burn, for the sake of her soul. And for the sake of all of us.”
There was silence in the great room. Finally, Bolton said, “Much though I respect my younger Brother’s fervor, I cannot but think him overzealous and misguided in this particular matter. My vote remains unchanged.” The two of them looked at Hopkin for a long moment, before Bolton continued, “That puts it up to you, Brother Matthew.”
* * *
The hour was late, but Matthew Hopkin remained in the courtroom, alone. He had sent Bolton and Dufrain home some time ago, desiring solitude for his contemplation. “Return here in the morning, at 7 of the clock,” he’d told them. “You shall have my decision then.”
The case was troubling to him. He found himself inclined toward leniency, but he wondered whether this might spring from his reluctance to send a young, pretty girl to the stake.
Although he personally found executions repugnant and never attended them, Hopkin had signed death warrants before. Were he unwilling to do so on principle, he would never have accepted appointment to the bench. But Hopkin’s eldest daughter bore a passing resemblance to Susan Bright, and he worried that this might be influencing him.
It was almost four in the morning before the truth suddenly came to him, like lightning from Heaven. He pondered it for several minutes, then pared his discovery down to its barest essentials: “If the opinions of my Brother Magistrates had been reversed, would it have made a difference to me? If Bolton, a fatuous ass, had called for the girl’s death, would I have disagreed, on principle? If Roger Dufrain, who is young but possessed of both intelligence and integrity, had urged acquittal, would I not even now be asleep in my bed?” Hopkin smacked his knees with his open palms and stood. “Answer: Yes. Yes. And, again, Yes.” He never realized that he had been speaking aloud.
Hopkin yawned, and stretched some of the kinks out of his shoulders. His spirit was calm now. The girl would be set free, with a stern warning to avoid anything that bore even a whiff of forbidden Technology. Hopkin thought that even Bolton’s suggested whipping would be unnecessary.
It was too late to return home for even a few hours’ sleep, and too early to obtain breakfast anywhere. He would simply have to pass the time until the rest of the village began stirring.
Another yawn creaked Hopkin’s jawbone. He wandered over to the evidence table, which still bore the items that had been introduced in the trial. He glanced at a few of the innocuous books, making a mental note to have them returned to the Brights tomorrow. A small pile of handwritten affidavits sat nearby, and he flipped through them idly.
The only other item was the radio.
Foolish looking thing, really, Hopkin thought. He wondered where the boy Jonathan had found the bits and parts that had gone into the making of it. Manufacture of such things had been forbidden since The Great Fire, and no one alive these days would possess either the materials or the knowledge, God be praised.
Mayhap the boy found the pieces in the same place he discovered the book. We should ask the girl Susan if her brother revealed the location to her. That house should be found, if possible, and burned to the ground, the rubble covered with earth.
He picked up the piece of wood on which the “radio” was mounted. Such things ought to be—
“—make contact with communities of survivors throughout the Eastern United States, or what was once the United States, and, we hope, will be again.” Hopkin gaped. He had barely touched the thing, and yet this thin male voice was suddenly coming from it. He stood as if paralyzed, listening to the faint but understandable words that issued from the strange device.
“We have now established radio contact with communities in Portland, Maine, Durham, New Hampshire, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, New Haven, Connecticut, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. We hope to increase the power of our transmissions soon, and, with God’s help, get in touch with other isolated cities, and towns, and even groups of people who have managed to get their hands on an old radio and find a way to power it with solar batteries or wind turbines or something similar. This is radio station WPAX, Kingston, Rhode Island.”
The speaker paused, and took an audible breath before continuing. “And we have more good news to report tonight — a party of eight men from New Haven arrived here yesterday, after traveling through areas formerly thought to be impassible due to radiation and other lingering poisons of the war. It would appear, the Lord be praised, that the terrible effects of that time are finally lifting, which should allow us to eventually link up with other communities and end the terrible isolation which has—” The voice began to fade, then disappeared completely. The room was again silent, so quiet that Hopkins could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. His mind could barely contain all that he had heard. He face formed a beatific smile, the like of which had not been seen there since the day of his ordination into the ministry. Think of it! The Lord had spared others besides the people of Salem and its environs. And they were using Technology — not to worship Satan but to communicate in a Godly way, one with another. And the land beyond Salem was becoming livable again, which meant….
Hopkin’s smile melted like a snowflake on a hot stove. Strangers would come to Salem, after all this time. People with new ideas, foreign ways, unfamiliar modes of speech and… different religions?
The good people of Salem would be tempted by these things. Some might find them more attractive than the gray conformity that the Church imposed to keep God’s people from straying into sin, the kind of sin that had caused the world’s destruction in the first place.
Except it seemed that the world had not been completely destroyed, after all. One of the central tenets of the Faith, that God had preserved Salem, and Salem alone, would be proven to be a lie. And what then? What would happen to the Church, its teachings, its traditions, its power — its Ministers?
Ministers like Hopkin.
He looked with new understanding at the device he held. He had been fooled — yes, even a righteous man like himself could be fooled into thinking that this was an innocent toy. But now the scales had fallen from Hopkin’s eyes. He knew that he was holding the Devil’s handiwork.
He raised the radio above his head and smashed it down onto the table’s edge, breaking it in two and picking up the pieces and one by one smashing them also and when they were too small to break further, jumping upon them where they lay on the floor then grinding the bits with the heel of his boot until there was nothing recognizable left, nothing dangerous, nothing at all. Hopkin stood bent over, his hands braced on the evidence table, his breath coming in gasps like a man who has just been chased for miles by a savage beast.
After a few minutes he straightened, wiped his brow, and brushed a few errant splinters from his sleeve. He picked up his cloak, put it on, then went around the courtroom extinguishing the oil lamps. He left the one nearest the door until last.
If the girl were acquitted, it would be only a matter of time before someone else began to tinker with the Devil’s tools, with disastrous results for the people of Salem — and for those who ruled them.
When Hopkin met with Dufrain and Bolton, he would vote “guilty,” and that would b
e that. The invasion by the wicked world outside would be held at bay, perhaps indefinitely.
The girl would burn today, and, as penance for his own sin of pride, he would make himself watch. In the meantime, he desperately needed fresh air.
Hopkin opened the door and extinguished the last of the lamps. Then, drawing his cloak tightly around him, he went out into the dark.
* * *
“Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
* * * * *
damnation.com
“So, have you heard about this new web site?”
“Which one’s that?”
“The one that lets you sell your soul to the devil.”
Martin’s mouth was full of cheeseburger, so he just shook his head. After swallowing, he said, “Don’t need to. I’m a college professor, remember?”
Croft frowned at him. “Yeah, me too. So what?”
“So, that means I’ve already sold my soul to the devil.”
“Bullshit, man. If anybody’s been making deals with the Evil One, it’s these kids who graduate from here and go to work for fucking Wall Street, with starting salaries about three times what you and I make.”
“The devil pays well, apparently,” Martin said with a twitch of a smile. “But what’s this web site you’re talking about?”
“One of the kids was telling me yesterday, after class. It seems to be a hot topic of conversation around the dorms, these days.”
“Sounds like one of those urban legends — you know, you look into a mirror and say the boogyman’s name three times, then he appears and cuts your heart out with a chainsaw.”
Croft shrugged. “Maybe. Wouldn’t be the first time that kind of crap caught on among the kidlings.”
“Me, I feel like catching onto some dessert,” Martin said, and stood up. “The cherry pie looked pretty good today. You want anything?”
The Devil Will Come Page 5