by C. C. Finlay
“Please, Emily,” he interrupted softly.
“Let me finish!” she said, slamming her fist against her hip. “That you received my letters is made evident by your presence on this doorstep, because otherwise you would not know where to find me. And yet the first thing you do when you come to see me, after all this time, is beg for money?”
Everything she said was true, although it had seemed more complicated than that at the time. It seemed more complicated than that now. When he spoke again, his voice started to shake. “You deserved—you deserve—better treatment than I’ve ever given you. But we have turned everywhere, and have nowhere else to turn. My—”
He had started to repeat the lie my sister and I, only Emily knew better. She peered around him to see if anyone else was standing there.
“Good night, Mister Brown,” she said.
She slammed the door on him.
He turned away, his shoulders sagging. He didn’t know where they would turn to now for food or shelter. But he was glad Deborah had not been here to see his humiliation. Then he glanced up and thought he saw the back of her dress disappear down the next street.
She had followed him. He started to run after her, but someone else stepped out of the shadows, an old woman in rags smoking a pipe. The coal dimmed for just a second, but in that second she looked like a sack of old clothes stuffed with straw. Then she puffed it back to life.
Just like Bootzamon.
Was there another creature like Bootzamon on the loose? She followed the same street Deborah had taken. Proctor ran after her, dodging a couple of barefoot apprentices with open sores. He rounded the corner and lost her. Then a rowdy bunch of drunken sailors moved on and he spied her again.
He stepped into a doorway and watched her small frame totter down the street. He felt the tickle of magic on the back of his neck.
The streets grew narrower, the houses more ramshackle, the smell of human habitation more intense. Raw sewage mixed in the gutters with rotted food and animal droppings, and the smell of cheap tobacco was all around. Voices came from every dwelling. Despite the late hour, children ran in and out of doors, and played games in the street. The scarecrow woman glided past them, past displaced farm wives and painted whores. Proctor edged closer to her, hiding behind a broken crate, a rain barrel, a grocer’s stall.
The scarecrow woman paused in front of a tavern to puff on her pipe. The Fighting Cocks. Where he’d left Deborah standing. His heart raced in panic. Deborah was nowhere to be seen. He turned to look back the way he had come.
A tomahawk slashed at his head and he dodged it just in time. The steel slammed into the wood of the stall.
Proctor looked at the gloved hand that still held on to the handle of the tomahawk. At the other end of the arm was a scarecrow in an old farmer’s jacket with a gunshot hole through the chest.
“Bootzamon.”
The eyes flared fire, followed a second later by the coal in the pipe.
“Not expecting me, were you?” asked the odd, disembodied voice. The creature tugged with both hands to pull the tomahawk loose.
“I thought I killed you,” Proctor said. He took a step, intending to run away, but he staggered as if all his power had been suddenly drained from him.
The tomahawk came loose.
“I was already dead,” Bootzamon said. “All you did was ruin a nice suit of clothes.”
Proctor groped for a weapon, closing on a dropped piece of firewood. The tomahawk slashed at him again, and he barely blocked the blow. A shock rippled from the firewood through his arm.
Bootzamon swung at him again and Proctor jumped back. Behind him, the street started to empty. Anxious faces peered from windows and doorways, but no one came to help.
The tomahawk slashed at him again, and again Proctor deflected the blow and retreated. The next swing bit into the wood and stuck. A low, rumbling laughter started somewhere in the hollow of Bootzamon’s body and echoed off the narrow streets.
“You should see the fear in your face—it’s marvelous,” Bootzamon said, and he blew a cloud of smoke from his inhuman mouth. Then the scarecrow shrugged his invisible sinews and tore the wood from Proctor’s hand.
Proctor searched around desperately for another weapon or any way to escape. He dodged behind a broken crate, shoving it at Bootzamon. The scarecrow leapt nimbly over the debris, casually pulling the firewood off the end of his tomahawk and tossing it aside. Proctor grabbed a rain barrel and tipped it over, splashing it across the scarecrow’s legs.
“I don’t dissolve in the rain, like some sugared candy,” Bootzamon said.
With a roar of effort, Proctor picked up the nearly empty barrel and dumped the remaining contents over the scarecrow’s head.
He dodged the falling barrel, but his pipe was extinguished. The illusion of his human features disappeared.
“Dickon!” Bootzamon cried. “My pipe!”
There was a crackle of electricity, and the smell of brimstone and saltpeter. The horned and human-shaped demon, no bigger than a cat, popped out of the ground like he’d been shot out of a cannon from hell.
Proctor caught the creature by the throat as it flew into the air.
Dickon screeched like a rabbit caught in the teeth of a big dog. It thrashed and twisted, scorching Proctor’s hands and slashing at him with its tail. The hot coal began to burn through Dickon’s hand, and it screamed as it reached out to smash it into Bootzamon’s pipe.
Proctor ran the other way, still holding tight to the imp Dickon.
“Release him,” Bootzamon said, his voice rustling like straw in the wind. “Release him or your death will be longer and infinitely more painful than your life.”
He raised the tomahawk to strike Proctor, but with his pipe out, the magic binding his body together had begun to fail. His straw hand, too weak to hold the hatchet, dropped it in the street.
“Dickon!” Bootzamon cried. His knees buckled and he fell in the street. “Dickon, come to me! At once!”
The imp lashed like a snake. It smashed the hot coal against the back of Proctor’s hand. “Everything that can endure fire, you shall put through the fire, and it shall be clean,” Proctor recited. His well of magic felt empty, but he dug down deep and pulled everything he had into the protective spell. “Everything that can endure fire, you shall put through the fire, and it shall be clean …”
The imp’s struggles grew weaker. The coal in its hand faded and grew cold. Bootzamon struggled once more to reach him, rippling like a sack of straw full of mice.
And then he fell still.
“Sorry, Dickon,” Proctor said. But he was afraid that now he would be stuck with the imp, cursed to carry it forever.
With a piercing wail of despair, the imp smashed the coal against its own head, destroying it in a rain of ash and soot. Then Dickon turned to smoke, pouring through Proctor’s fingers and sinking back into the ground.
When it was gone, Proctor stood there, panting, looking at his hand. The back of it was covered with scratches, and he had burns halfway to his elbow. But he had done it—he had beaten Bootzamon again.
“Proctor?” The voice was soft, tentative.
He spun around, clenching his fist, ready to strike.
Deborah stood there, holding so much power she shone like a lantern in a steeple top.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He released his fist and dropped his hand to his side. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
“I … I saw it attack you. I … I didn’t know what to do,” she stammered. “Was that … ?”
“Yes, that was Bootzamon.”
“Is it dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He remembered his failure to get any aid from Emily. “Deborah, I—”
He was interrupted by another voice that said, “Deborah?”
Only the voice sounded like a curse. The scarecrow woman knelt beside Bootzamon’s limp body. Her pipe was clenched firmly in her artificial mouth, and she breathed fo
rth a stream of smoke.
“Who—?” Deborah asked.
Her words were cut short by a shrill scream of rage that seemed to come from the scarecrow and from everywhere around them at the same time. The scarecrow lurched to her feet and flung herself at Proctor and Deborah. She had fists full of straw pulled from Bootzamon’s body.
“I offered you power!” the scarecrow screamed. “I offered you life! And you repaid me with this … this curse!”
The coal in her pipe flared. For a second she took on more nearly human features, like the ghost of a person behind the mask of gourd and rags and straw.
“The widow Nance,” whispered Proctor.
“But—” Deborah said.
He grabbed her arm. “Run!”
The straw in her fists erupted into flames. They had taken only a few steps when the first ball of fire whizzed wildly past their heads and burst against the side of a tinder-dry house. The second fireball missed them too, splashing flames across the wood. Fingers of burning magic jumped out of the flames, skittering up the walls and across the rooftops.
“She’s trying to trap us,” Deborah cried.
Proctor covered her with his body and dragged them to the ground as another fireball flew over them, singeing his hair.
“Fire!” someone shouted nearby. The Fighting Cocks was already ablaze, and a second house was rapidly catching flame. Another voice screamed, “Fire!”
Proctor scooped Deborah up around the waist and looked for a clear way out of the inferno that crackled all around them. He carried Deborah into the next street, but the widow Nance pursued them.
“Run!” she screamed. “I’ll burn it all down around you—I’ll burn it all!”
Proctor dragged Deborah with him, dodging through the warren of alleys and streets. The widow Nance followed them like an avenging angel, snatching any material at hand and setting it ablaze as she hurled it after them.
“That way,” Deborah said, pulling Proctor toward a broader street. “I think the river’s that way.”
Nance cast the fireballs ahead and behind and to either side, so that flames surrounded them. Panicked crowds surged past them, running the opposite way, desperate to escape their matchstick houses. Proctor held his elbow across his mouth, choking on the smoke, stumbling blindly through the stinging ash.
Deborah clutched Proctor’s arm and dragged him back. “We’re trapped—this is a dead end.”
She was right. Rickety tenements, their rooftops already on fire, surrounded them on three sides. They turned back, but it was too late.
The widow blocked their way. She walked down the alley, cackling as she came. Her rag and straw body had caught flame at several places.
“I hope your death is as painful as mine was,” she screamed. “I hope you linger for days, burned beyond healing.”
Her head turned from side to side, searching for something to throw at them. Seeing nothing, she reached into her chest and pulled out a fistful of her own stuffing. She raised it above her head, speaking words of power.
Deborah fumbled through her pockets for salt, stammering a spell of protection. Proctor wrapped his body around Deborah to guard her.
The straw in Nance’s fist flared bright as sunrise. In an instant, the flames ran down her arm and turned her into a torch. Her clothes whipped away in fire and ash. The charred dowel-and-spindle bones that held her together clattered to the street. Only her mad laughter, hollow and bodiless, remained, mixing in with the roar of the fire until Proctor heard nothing but the flame.
A building collapsed, sending a shower of flames and sparks across the narrow street and lighting another house on fire.
“Can you call the rain?” Proctor asked.
“Not this fast, not with this weather,” Deborah said. Tears streamed from her eyes.
“Then we must save ourselves.” He grabbed Deborah by the hand and skirted the burning pile of the widow’s remains. The flames seemed to jump at them, but they ran by and escaped the dead-end alley.
Outside in the street, a crowd fled in one direction, carrying Proctor and Deborah along. Soon they found themselves in a street without flames, and then came to one without smoke, and then north to an open commons where men were running the other direction in an attempt to fight the fire and keep it from spreading to the rest of the city.
Proctor and Deborah stumbled free of the crowds and stood in the dark on the trampled grass. Their faces were black with soot, and they smelled of smoke.
Deborah turned back to look at the fire, clearly visible over the nearer rooftops. A thick column of black smoke roped its way into the darker heavens. Her jaw was set, and her face was grim.
“There’s nothing we could have done,” Proctor said.
“Did she give you the money?” Deborah asked.
Proctor hesitated for a moment. “Did who—?”
Deborah’s face grew blacker, but she continued to stare at the flames.
“You mean Emily Rucke,” Proctor said. He swallowed, his throat raw from the smoke. “She said no.”
With her head hung despondently, Deborah turned and walked away from him.
After a moment, he followed her without speaking, trailing her the way he’d trailed the scarecrow through the city streets.
The crowds were thick—refugees once turned refugees twice. Those who’d lost their homes because of the war now lost their shelter because of the fire. But wherever she went in the crowd, Proctor found her again. A chain of energy seemed to bind them, the way that lightning connected sky and earth. Whenever he lost sight of her, he would close his eyes for a moment and sense the energy, then follow her to it.
They spent the night, with other newly homeless families, in Artillery Park. The area around the park had been untouched by the flames. Neighboring families offered sheets and blankets to the refugees.
Deborah simply found a place on the grass and lay down. Proctor sat beside her, watching the crowds for enemies.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said after a while.
“Neither am I,” he said.
“We’ve got no food. We’ve got no way home. We’ve got no one to turn to.”
“I’ll find work,” Proctor said.
“I’m sure it’ll be easy to find work, what with only hundreds or thousands of men in the same spot you are, now that their homes have burned. Charity will be just as easy to come by, I’m sure.”
Proctor leaned his face against his hands and rubbed his eyes. The action hurt the hand, slashed and burned by Bootzamon’s imp, and it rubbed soot into his eyes and made them sting and water. Near them in the park, a mother gathered half a dozen children to her. The youngest cried inconsolably in her arms while she tried to comfort the others and make them lie down. The only thing that came to him was a Bible verse that Deborah had quoted recently.
“And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.”
Deborah lay still for a moment, then she too sat up, facing the mother with the crying children. “Are you chastising me or saying a spell for luck?”
“Neither,” Proctor said. “Just reminding myself that if Jesus sent out His disciples with no food, no money, and no extra clothes, and they could still fight evil and change the world, then we might do as much.”
“He sent them out to heal the sick,” Deborah said.
“The soldiers under that curse are sick,” Proctor said.
“We have yet to heal one of them.” She gestured at the mother with the children. One of her boys was throwing a tantrum and threatening to run away. “Meanwhile, we’ve burned people’s homes and ruined their lives.”
“That’s not our fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
The mother didn’t even have a dress, only her nightgown. Proctor guessed she wasn’t more than a year or two older than he was. All the children were under the age of seven. The boy throwing the tantrum—the oldest—ran away. He
r shoulders sagged, too weary to give chase.
Proctor cut off the boy with outspread arms.
“What’s your name?” he asked, smiling.
The tears and the screaming stopped. The boy’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. He turned and ran back to his mother, hiding his face in the hem of her gown.
The mother scowled at Proctor in warning, then hurried her children off to another corner of the park.
Proctor stood there, deflated.
Deborah chuckled at him.
“I was only trying to help,” he said.
“The people we’re trying to help don’t want our help.”
The mother in the nightgown glanced back to make sure he wasn’t following her. “Why not?” he said.
“Because they’re afraid of us,” Deborah said. “If you saw yourself right now, you’d be afraid too.”
He looked at his hands, which looked the way his hands always did, if a little worse for wear, then over to Deborah, hoping for an explanation.
“You look as scary as that bogeyman creature you fought outside the tavern—your clothes are ragged and dirty, you haven’t shaved in a couple of days, you’re covered with soot and blood, and you stink of smoke and sweat.”
“What’s a little dirt?” Proctor said, trying to brush the soot from his sleeves and pants. He made up his mind to find a stream in the morning and clean himself up.
“It’s not just the clothes,” Deborah said, more softly. “Your eyes are sharp with a hint of madness, and your voice has the raw edge of anger to it when you speak.”