Beyond Midnight

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Scotty, suspecting a trick, looked at Russell for his reaction.

  Russ said tersely, "It's a little late now."

  "Yeah," said Scott, still with a wary look.

  "I know it is," Helen admitted, suddenly tired of it all. "Go see Janet and she'll set you up with the paint you need."

  After the child was returned to her grateful mother, Helen spent the rest of the day aching to pick up the phone and call Nat. But she resisted, preferring to wait to see who came for Katie after school.

  Peaches came. Suppressing a sense of disappointment that bordered on despair, Helen watched from a classroom window as Peaches, with an animated Katie skipping alongside, steered the child to her own car, a two-door Toyota. Next to the Toyota was parked a silver Mercedes convertible with its top down. Peaches settled Katie into her car seat, then paused for a long, admiring once-over of the sleek silver automobile before slipping into the driver's seat of her Toyota.

  She'd rather have the Mercedes, Helen realized.

  Or, for that matter, the Porsche.

  The thought came out of nowhere, but once formed, it lingered.

  The Porsche, the mansion, the diamond bracelet. Peaches wanted it all. She didn't give a damn about Nat; she certainly didn't give a damn about Katie. She was after the money, pure and simple.

  Suddenly it all seemed so clear. How else to explain the nanny's unending pleasantness; her constant, hovering manner? It went beyond mere professionalism—beyond sainthood, even; Mother Teresa scowled more often than Peaches. All this time, Helen had assumed that Peaches was genuinely in love with Nat. Those adoring looks, that smitten laugh—lies! She was after the money. Helen knew it, now, in her soul.

  The question was, how far would Peaches go to get it?

  Helen spent the next half hour on the phone, tracking down herbalists in the area. She'd formed a crazy little theory, almost on the spot, as she watched Peaches drooling over the Mercedes convertible. Ironically, it came as a result of the research she'd done into the possible causes of the 1692 Salem hysteria.

  At least one scholar had theorized that the girls who'd been bewitched had in fact been suffering the effects of a fungus that had contaminated their bread. The disease was called ergot, caused by a grain fungus of the same name. The effects of the poison were far-ranging: everything from extreme headaches to convulsions, psychosis, and death.

  Ergot. Naturally the word had jumped out at Helen. Last night, amid the thunder and lightning and driving rain, it had seemed merely a bizarre, eerie coincidence that Linda Byrne had died of an overdose of a prescribed ergot derivative. But now, after the Mercedes, Helen was not so sure.

  After dropping off Russ and Scotty, Helen sought out her herbalist. She'd been told that the owner of the Health and Happiness Food Store, tucked away in a dingy side street in nearby Peabody, would be back at four-thirty.

  She was there waiting at four-twenty-five, trying to look as if she shopped regularly in the funky, dark, unfashionably dreary store with its two crowded aisles of mysterious roots and herbs and limp, untreated vegetables.

  At the half hour, an ancient wall clock with a neurotic tick let out a burp of a chime, and an old Chinese man, older even than the clock, pushed open the wood-framed door and shuffled inside. Small, dark, as wizened and dusty as his store, the owner was dressed in traditional garb, from the small cap that fit snugly over the white hairs of his skull, to the black cotton slippers on his small, delicate feet.

  "You find you want?" he asked Helen with a shopkeeper's concern as he passed.

  "Not exactly," said Helen, feeling her way into her strange request. "I'm looking for certain information. They told me on the phone that you would know if anyone would ...."

  The shopkeeper's expression remained impassive.

  Helen smiled ingratiatingly. "Ergot," she said. "Is it still around nowadays?"

  "Skiorshum?" he said.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "You want skiorshum?"

  "No, I'm talking about the disease—ergot. In rye bread. Is it still possible to get bread that's infected with ergot?"

  "Ah ... skiorshum."

  "No," she said, feeling as if one of them was speaking martian and one of them wasn't. She tried again. "When you buy commercial rye bread from a supermarket, it's made from flour that's free of any fungus—ergot, that is. But I want to know if someone could get hold of flour that's bad. If someone could make bread from it, say, that would get someone else sick."

  The shopkeeper's eyelids lowered an infinitesimal amount. "My flour good flour."

  "Oh, no, I didn't mean to imply—I just meant, is the fungus still around that was such a scourge for so many hundreds of years? You know, in France; in the rest of Europe; maybe even in Salem?"

  A veil came down between the shopkeeper and Helen. "You from FDA?"

  "No, not at all," said Helen, annoyed with herself for not anticipating the language barrier. She condensed her quest to its essence: "I'm only trying to find out whether it's possible to get hold of ergot. If an evil person could still do that."

  "You want skiorshum, you go Bristol-Myers," he said gruffly, and then he shuffled to the back of the store and disappeared behind a curtain.

  Chapter 25

  Sorry I'm late, kids," Helen yelled to no one in particular as she dropped her purse and briefcase in the hail. When no one in particular answered, she paused, still holding the bag of groceries she'd picked up after her farcical visit to the herbalist, and said, "Anyone home?"

  Becky was on the kitchen phone. Her voice, louder than usual, sounded puzzled and animated. The pitch, the tone, the speed of it were unlike anything Helen had ever heard from her before.

  Helen went straight to the kitchen.

  Becky hung up the phone, took one look at her mother, and blurted, "Someone killed Anna's cat!"

  "Oh, no," said Helen. The floor beneath her feet seemed to sink halfway to hell. "Oh, no."

  Becky stood there, making quick fluttery motions with her hands, like a baby bird flapping its wings in distress.

  "And her mother thinks I did it! Mom! She thinks I did it! That was her on the phone. She called and said they found the cat behind the house and its throat was slit—and I was like, Oh my God, and she said, what do you know about it, Becky? like I knew something about it, and I said, nothing, and she says, Becky, tell me the truth and I said I am telling you the truth and she just ... freaks. Like, she just started screaming at me on the phone, Mom—screaming! I didn't hear half of what she said, it was all about Satanists and dead chickens and black clothes and things like that and oh my God—what is going on, Mom? And she said, she said she knew about our house being exorcised and I said what are you talking about? And she said that we cooked blood and the police had to come because of the smell and—"

  At that point Becky finally stopped for a breath and burst, instead, into tears. She threw herself into her mother's arms and clung to her. "What's happening, Mom?" she cried, racked with sobs. "What's going on ... what's going on? I'm not a devil worshipper ... what does she mean?"

  "Oh, honey," Helen said, holding her daughter tight, trying to stroke away her appalling bewilderment. "Oh, honey, never mind, never mind. It has nothing to do with you ... nothing at all. You've been caught in this ... this evil and we ... we have to get out of it somehow, we have to make people understand we haven't done anything."

  But all the while, Helen was thinking of nineteen others with the same dead hope.

  Becky shuddered violently and said through chattering teeth, "Who could d-do that to a p-poor little cat ... who could d-do such a thing?"

  Her wail turned loud with new misery; she loved animals too much to be able to handle this. It was Becky who'd insisted on adopting one-eyed Moby from the shelter; Becky who was forever finding homes for strays. She'd paid for ads, paid for shots, given her time at the shelter.

  Even now, Moby was perched on a kitchen chair, waiting for the wailing to stop so that he could have his supper.
He decided to nudge Becky along, planting his paws on her hip and giving her a soulful look. Becky picked him up and pressed him to her shoulder, rubbing her tearstained cheek on his flank, as if she could amend someone's cruelty to Anna's cat with kindness to her own.

  Becky, a Satanist.

  It was too much.

  "Damn it to hell!" Helen cried, slamming an open palm on the marble counter. "Why us? What have we done to deserve this? There's no logic, no reason for it!"

  Through the curtained window of the kitchen door she caught a glimpse of movement in the back hall—Russ, no doubt, backing away from the torrent of emotions that was going on inside. Somehow his reluctance to face their agony infuriated her; it made Helen say something she regretted for the rest of her life.

  "It never would've happened—none of this ever would've got started," she said loudly, "if it hadn't been for that stupid, damned graffiti! One dumb stunt—one moronic episode—and our lives are ruined! We're going to lose the school, lose our good name, lose everything!"

  "Mom, don't yell like that," Becky said, aghast.

  "No, damn it, I'll yell all I want! It's the only thing I can do; don't you get it? Don't you see how trapped we are by this? We can't win! We can't say we're innocent. No one ever believes that. But we can't say nothing or they'll think we're guilty! What choice does that leave? Should we just make up something, the way the poor fools did the first time around? Should we just lie and say, yes, we're Satanists, we've done despicable things and please forgive us? Gee! With any luck, maybe we can avoid a trial and imprisonment. Maybe we can just stand around in pillories on the Common for a while. Maybe that'll do the trick!"

  Becky fell back into a kitchen chair, blasted by the force of her mother's fury. Moby hunkered down in her lap, still hungry, still begging, still purring.

  In a broken, tragic whisper, Becky said, "I didn't know."

  The image of her daughter sitting there burned itself into Helen's mind and heart. Every tiny detail of it, from Becky's wet lashes and runny nose to the small black cat who was purring so hard that Helen could see his shoulders trembling. It was a picture of innocence: innocence defiled.

  Overwhelmed, Helen fell to her knees alongside her daughter and laid one arm on her shoulder, the other across her lap, encircling her. "Becky, Becky ... I love you and Russ more than life itself, you know that. I would do anything for you. That's why I was so angry now ... because I feel so helpless to stop this. But I promise you: One way or another, I will put a stop to it."

  Helen forced herself to smile as she smoothed away a long, golden band of hair that had broken free from the single braid into which Becky had bound her hair. Then she stood back up, desperately needing to shower and put on something different, something fresh and clean—something unrelated to the day's awful events. On her way out of the kitchen she saw a can of cat food still jammed in the electric can opener, half-opened.

  She left it there, knowing full well that Becky would not let Moby go unfed.

  ****

  The calls began coming that night: hate calls, hang-up calls, and finally, at three o'clock—the witching hour itself—a death threat. Helen disconnected all the phones and, after reassuring her children that it was just a drunken prankster, sat up at the window of her bedroom, watching the street for cross-burners and fire-bombers.

  It was the longest, most harrowing night of her life. She had known grief, and she had known fear; but she'd never known such stark, lonely apprehension before. It seemed to Helen, in her hyperalert state, that she could hear the rumbles of the approaching mob; smell the creosote of their burning torches. Would they come and drag the children and her from their beds? It seemed all too possible.

  At one point, shortly before dawn, Helen thought she saw something move in the privet below. She slid the bedroom screen up, ready to throw down a needlepoint stool—her only weapon—on the possible intruder. But then the night became quiet again, and the air became still, and she decided that the mob had not yet reached her doorstep.

  She told herself that she'd read too deeply; that she'd taken Salem too profoundly into her heart. But then she remembered other preschools, other hysteria. Other trials. Some of the recent accused had been found innocent and their reputations handed back to them, charred and tattered. Others—others still languished in prison. Were they guilty? Innocent? Helen didn't know. She could only know about herself, about her children. And they were innocent.

  And she was alone, all alone, in her fight to prove it.

  Eventually the first dull light of morning made its reluctant appearance, halfheartedly nudging away the specters of the night. Aching and sore, Helen stood up and stretched and decided before anything else to reassure herself that her children were safe. After that she'd make coffee. After that, a shower. A cheerful dress. A nourishing breakfast for all of them. Because that was how big hills were climbed: one small step at a time.

  She walked quietly down the hall, careful not to wake either exhausted child. Becky's room came first. The door was ajar. Helen pushed it open a little farther, wincing at the squeak. Becky was deep in sleep, her head cocked awkwardly on the pillow, her mouth slack. Helen listened to the sweet, rhythmic sound of her daughter's muffled snore, taking immeasurable comfort in it.

  One small step at a time.

  Pulling the door quietly shut, she tiptoed across the hall. Russ slept much more lightly than his sister; Helen didn't dare risk turning the doorknob and intruding on his space, so she simply stood there, wishing good sleep and long life for him.

  She turned to go, then paused; then turned back to the door. Russell's DO NOT DISTURB sign wasn't hanging on its hook. Last night had been traumatic enough so that the usual rules of order might not prevail, but: Russell's DO NOT DISTURB sign wasn't hanging on its hook.

  Helen took hold of the doorknob, gave it a sharp turn, and swung the door wide. Her son's bed was its usual jumble of clothes and blankets; the sight sent a sigh of relief surging through her.

  And then she saw that he wasn't in it. Foreboding gave way to panic as Helen ran up to the bed and snatched a sheet of notebook paper, raggedly ripped from its spiral, from the middle of the deep blue bedsheet.

  Mom,

  It's all my fault, I know it. How could anyone blame Becky? It's stupid. If they want to blame somebody, let them blame me. You can make up anything you want. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. And then maybe they'll leave Becky and you alone.

  Your son Russell x

  PS. Tell Becky she can have my CDs. All except Sonic Youth. Those go to Scott.

  She read the note again.

  And again.

  Nothing so far had prepared her for what she was feeling. The dreadful events of the last few weeks suddenly seemed like small bumps in the road compared to this. Russell: gone. The pain was numbing. For one long hellish instant she thought she'd been knocked unconscious.

  She read the note again. It had never occurred to her that Russ would react to the episode by running away. She'd imagined him in danger from drive-by shooters, marauding gangs, vicious muggers. She'd never imagined him in danger from his family.

  Had he run away? She read the note again. Suddenly the words seemed ambiguous, ominous.

  It's all my fault.

  Helen had warned Russ—over and over—about drink. She had talked to him—knowledgeably and calmly—about drugs. But never, ever had she brought up the subject of suicide. The idea was simply too taboo. She hadn't wanted even to put it into his head.

  It really doesn't matter.

  Words of despair.

  Oh, God—would he? Helen raced to the phone and punched in the infernal three numbers to get the police. Instead of the coffee, the shower, the dress, the breakfast— the police. Before searching ... praying ... crying—the police.

  "Find him," she begged after telling them everything they wanted to know about her missing son. "I'll be there in twenty minutes with the photos. Find him."

  His name was in t
he computer now, connected to thousands of other computers. Pray God the system worked.

  Helen ran down the hall and rousted Becky out of bed. "Find him!" she said after waving Russ's note in front of her. "Check all his haunts. The video parlors, the movie theaters—check Salem Willows Park. He could be there, sleeping under a tree. Take this photo with you. I'll drop the others off with the Salem police, then go on to the state police. Aunt Mary can cover our phone. He can't have gone far."

  Becky wasn't a morning person. Droopy-eyed and clutching the photo in one hand, she stared at the note in her other, trying hard to focus on the urgency of it all.

  "He called you 'Mom'," she said at last.

  "You're right!" Helen snatched the note back. Mom, it said; not ma. "He wouldn't do that unless he were feeling—"

  "Already homesick," said Becky with a sleepy smile.

  Despair, Helen thought, then shoved the idea away. "Homesick," she agreed, almost fiercely. "Yes. Already."

  "And look at that tiny x next to his name," Becky added, her natural optimism shining through her weariness. "You know how Russell feels about words of love. He only uses them in code."

  Helen was ashamed to admit that she thought the "x" was an allusion to Generation X—the lost generation, as some of the kids liked to tag themselves. "You're right ... she said again, but this time she was even less sure. "It doesn't matter. We've got to find him, Becky!"

  Helen sprinted down the stairs and across the back hall to her aunt's apartment and, despite the hour, banged on the door and then let herself in. Through the open door of the darkened bedroom she could see her aunt still trying to struggle into a bathrobe.

  "Aunt Mary—it's me." She apologized for waking her aunt up, then helped her into a fuzzy pink robe and sat her down at the ancient enamel-topped table in the kitchen. Sliding a cordless phone across the distance between them, she said carefully, "I'm expecting a call from Russ sometime today. I'll be in and out, and I'm afraid of missing it."

  There were mornings when Aunt Mary had trouble getting into gear mentally; but this wasn't one of them. "It's six-thirty A.M.," she said, fixing a surprised look on her niece. "Where is he?"