by C. C. Finlay
Proctor laughed aloud at that, and it was as if the act of laughing caused him to let down the dam of his defenses, so that the weariness he’d been feeling flooded over him again. He hid a yawn behind his hand. When it had passed, he lifted his head to Paine. “Will it bother you if I sleep on the floor for a while?”
“Not at all, it’s a free country,” Paine said, with considerably more warmth than he had used earler.
Proctor rose. “I’ll go over there against the wall, out of your way.”
“No, here by the fire, where it’s warmest,” Paine said, rising to gather his papers. “You’ll sleep better, and I think I’m done for now.”
There were a couple of threadbare blankets folded on another chair in the corner. Proctor took them to a spot on the floor near the fire, used one for a pillow, pulled the other to his chin. He shifted a few times, then lay there with his eyes closed but unable to fall asleep. He was thinking about Deborah, about his decision to stop their charade. All he had left to do was choose whether to stay with the army awhile longer, or head back to The Farm to rejoin the others.
Paine’s pen scratched another sheet of paper or two, and then the Scotsman rose and quietly stirred the coals, adding a new log to the fire. In the renewed heat, with the soothing spit and crackle of the fire nearby, Proctor finally fell asleep.
The room was cold and dim when he awoke abruptly. A hand shook him roughly, and he was staring up into Tilghman’s face. The officer’s expression, usually calm and thoughtful no matter the circumstances, was filled with rage.
“Come on, Quaker boy,” he said. “Howe’s army is across the river—it’s another retreat.”
“What?” Proctor said, grabbing his hat as he jumped up. He was still drowsy, only partially grasping that the anger was not directed against him. “How did they—?”
“No one knows,” Tilghman said, gathering up the blankets and rolling them into a ball. “There are nothing but our soldiers along the whole length of the Palisades. It’s like their progress was concealed by a fog, only there’s no fog. If some slave girl named Polly hadn’t seen them first and raised a warning, we’d still have been sleeping when they fell on top of us.” He grabbed Proctor by the shoulder of his jacket and flung him toward the door. “Now go!”
“But my shoes,” Proctor said, looking back to where he’d kicked them off. He bent to put them on, and when he looked up Tilghman was gone already.
Proctor hopped on one foot, buckling the shoe on the other, and stopped, propped against the doorjamb. A cold drizzle fell. “Of course,” he murmured.
Rain blew in under the brim of Proctor’s hat and ran down his face. Outside, in the mud and the rain, discipline collapsed like a straw house. Men ran, some shouting orders, others curses; here and there solitary men stood still, heads hung, dejected. Two couriers were shoving and swinging at each other over who would take the last saddled horse.
Then the men blurred to Proctor’s vision, and for a second all their ghosts emerged in sharp relief. They all were agitated, attacking their unwilling and unwitting hosts, dragging them one way or another, twisting their heads to see every slight, tripping them so they fell in the way of every random strike or blow.
Proctor wiped the rain out of his eyes, but he could still see the ghosts. Whether a puppet master somewhere, his hand inside their spectral forms, stirred them to violence, or whether they savaged on their own initiative, spurred on by the prospect of release at the American army’s ruin, Proctor couldn’t guess. Nor did he think it mattered. Even though he was not cursed like the soldiers, he felt cold fear rushing through him just from being so near it. He was close to the bridge—if he crossed it, he could escape the British forces and eventually make his way back home again.
Of course that would mean abandoning Deborah at the fort.
The two men were still fighting each other over the horse. Proctor grabbed the reins from their hands and knocked them both sprawling into the half-frozen mud.
The horse was equally eager to escape. As Proctor swung into the saddle, it bolted from the camp. He turned it toward Fort Lee, bent to its neck, and let it gallop.
The first refugees Proctor passed coming out of Fort Lee restored his hope. Several hundred men marched in orderly file, making good time toward Washington’s headquarters and the nearby bridge. Proctor reined in his horse, easing over to the verge of the road to let the men pass. Several called out the news to him, urging him to turn around. Only when they came close to him could he see that they carried very little more than the clothes they wore and personal weapons—all their gear, the tents, the stores, the winter supplies, must have been left behind.
He ignored them the same way they ignored the frantic and ineffective struggles of their own cursed companions. When the end of the line passed him, he kicked the horse on again, throwing up clods of mud as they rushed on. Within half a mile, he had to rein in a second time. Stragglers filled the road in all manner of dress and organization. Some ran away in their bare feet and underclothes, as if British bayonets were nicking their heels and elbows.
No, not British bayonets, but cursed spirits. The dead souls trapped with the men stabbed numinous daggers into their tender spots and tore futilely at the mortal flesh with translucent, bony fingers. The men, unaware of the ghosts that Proctor saw so clearly, were driven to panic and lost all sense of purpose. Trunks lay abandoned in the road, along with scattered clothes, military supplies, and even weapons. Someone in a panic was trying to unhitch a team of horses from its carriage in order to escape more quickly. The crowd fighting over the wide-eyed, stamping animal saw Proctor and surged toward him.
Though no horseman, he closed his eyes and ran the horse straight at the low wall bordering the road. He took a breath in relief as it leapt over the barricade. Now free of the mob, Proctor took off across the fields toward the fort. It sat in the distance, a low, brown wall flattened by the hard iron of the sky. Like a dropped wallet at the side of the road, waiting to be picked up.
The gates stood wide open. Proctor walked the horse inside. Under one porch roof, protected from the drizzle, a solitary officer sat eating breakfast off a table covered with a linen cloth; his slave, in better clothes than those worn by many of the ordinary soldiers, cleared the dirty plates away while his master carefully wiped the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief. Not twenty feet away, a mob had broken into the rum stores and were already drunk. With their arms around one another, they swayed back and forth, singing “Yankee Doodle.”
The ghosts swirled around, weaving in and out of the mist. It gave Proctor a headache just to watch them. One man they grabbed by the ear, whispering things only he might hear. Another man they led by the nose toward some plate of bacon abandoned in the rush to escape. The next one they dragged by the collar, flinging him against a man who immediately spun around with his fists.
It was as though they gained strength from the nearness of the necromancer who ruled them. Or perhaps, knowing that their last hours on earth were numbered by the impending defeat of the American forces, the cursed spirits wanted to experience life one last time, and so they seized it by proxy, dragging their cursed hosts any direction they could. The more intense the experience, the better.
Proctor used the horse to push his way through the looters, drunks, and lost souls. The last were men standing vacant-eyed, the cursed spirit overlapping their own souls so far they no longer knew who or where they were. He came to the tent where Deborah had been treating the sick, and he dismounted.
On his way in, Proctor ran into another man staggering to the entrance on his way out. The man was barefoot, wearing only trousers held up by suspenders and a shirt with more holes in it than fabric. His chin rested on his chest. For a second Proctor took him for a lost soul; the spirit shackled to him had merged so far into his body, it was hard to see. Then Proctor caught the stink of rum, so strong it made his stomach turn.
“The woman here, the nurse,” he said, unable to squeeze pa
st the man. “Have you seen her?”
The man lifted his head.
He was not a lost soul, but a soul possessed. The spectral eyes behind his eyes burned like white-hot flames; the grin behind his own mouth twisted into a leer.
“Get in line,” the man said, his words sounding like a voice layered upon another voice. “A fine peach like that, I intend to finish pitting it myself before it’s wasted on a British prick.”
Proctor swung his fist at the man’s face, as a reflex. Despite the stink of rum, the man laughed, easily dodging the blow. Proctor pulled back his fist to punch again, but stopped when the man lifted his hand to show the fascine knife he held there. The wicked curve on one end matched the uneven smirk on the drunk’s doubled face. A stain on the sharp edge might have been blood.
“Oh, lookee, the Quaker’s angry,” the man taunted in the same echoey voice. “I’m shaking in my boots.” He looked down. “Oh, wait, I’m not wearing any boots.”
While the man admired his own rough humor, Proctor drew on his talent, swallowing the power like a man about to drown.
“He only is my rock, and my salvation,” he quoted from the Psalms. “He is my defense.”
The drunk sneered, laughing at Proctor. “What good do you think a Bible verse can do you?”
The last syllable was not even out of his mouth when a fist-sized rock that Proctor had summoned from a pile across the yard slammed into the side of the man’s head.
The ghost must’ve felt it coming, turning the man’s head at the very last second, because the rock only glanced off his cheek instead of laying him flat. It threw him off-balance, though. Proctor hurled his body into the man, knocking him to the ground, where he gripped his wrist and slammed it down until the knife came loose. He jammed his knee into the drunk’s gut and pinned his throat to the ground, squeezing as hard as he could while he lifted his head and scanned the tent.
“Deborah?” he called out. “Deborah!”
Something like icicles pierced his arm, and he gasped. The man, too drunk and stunned to resist hard, did little to free himself, but the cursed spirit possessing him thrashed like a cat in a sack. Its arms flailed, struggling to get a grip on Proctor, stabbing chills through him every time it grabbed at him.
The spirit’s bright eyes flared brighter, and the sneering grin on its face twisted into laughter of triumph. Proctor’s right arm, pinning the man’s neck, went tingly and numb. All the air rushed out of his lungs.
The dead soul had grabbed hold of his own living spirit and was tearing it out of the flesh of his arm. The numbness shot up his arm and through his shoulder, almost touching his heart.
With a choked cry of fear, Proctor rolled off the possessed man and away from him, tearing his soul free from the spectral grasp. Blood thundered back through his arm, followed by burning pain.
The other man rolled over to his knees, holding his throat, gasping for breath. The spirit trapped in his body corkscrewed around, trying to drag him back into the attack on Proctor.
When he and Deborah had first seen the curse, and tried to cure the volunteer in Gravesend, they had stopped short because they feared destroying the man’s own soul.
Proctor didn’t stop to worry about this man’s original soul. The original spell, which Deborah had taken from the gospels, came back to his tongue.
“By the finger of God, I cast out devils!”
He felt the power flow through him, filling his numb arm with life, and he pointed it at the man on the ground. He saw the spirit start to rise out of the body, and his joy rose with it.
But it was not to be so easy. In the same instant, the man stirred, and Proctor hesitated, afraid for his soul. The spirit snapped back into the body of the drunk, who lurched to his feet. The spirit trapped inside him gave him an oddly doubled image, as if Proctor’s eyes were crossed. The outer body was sluggish and heavy-limbed, but the inner body twitched like flame, white-hot and quick with rage. When he spoke, the doubled voice became one, echoing from far away, as if through the canyon of the man’s throat.
“What do I care for your Bible verses when I am trapped in this hell?” it growled
He lunged at Proctor, raising his fist.
“By the finger of God, I cast out devils!” Proctor cried again. The spirit was willful, but the flesh was weak, and Proctor stepped inside the drunk’s slow lurch to punch him in the jaw.
The man flew backward, falling over a cot and breaking its leg, to lie motionless on the ground. There was a burst of dust, or maybe a flash of pale light, and then nothing.
Proctor shook his hand, which hurt knuckles-to-wrist. “All right, so that was more my fist than my finger.”
He stepped cautiously over the body. After a second he poked it with his toe, ready to leap back. But nothing happened. The cursed spirit was gone, and Proctor did not think it had gone to a better place.
“God forgive my soul,” he whispered. Now that the fear had left him, the possible evilness of his act appalled him. He knelt quickly beside the body, checking for a pulse, for a breath, and found none. The shock of breaking the curse might have killed the man as well as casting out the other soul. Both were victims of the German necromancer who had placed the curse on them.
The sound of gunshots outside snapped him to attention. “Deborah!” he cried, spinning around, checking every corner of the tent, under the scattered piles of blankets. He was both relieved and alarmed when he didn’t find her.
He ran out the entrance and saw the officer who had been eating breakfast calmly riding out the gate on Proctor’s horse. He sprinted after him for a few steps then stopped when he realized how futile it was.
During his fight, the rest of the fort had emptied, even of the drunks, who staggered, arms linked, out of sight, down the road, or ran singly, like thieves caught in the act, across the sodden fields and away.
“Excuse me, sir, but are you a Friend?”
Proctor turned at the voice; it was the officer’s slave, who had been left behind. Proctor considered answering that he was no Quaker, but thought better of it.
“Yes, I am a friend,” he said.
“Am I wrong to assume you are looking for Miss Deborah, the Quaker nurse?”
Proctor’s heart leapt up. “Yes! Have you seen her?”
“Yes, sir,” the slave said, calmly removing his white gloves and folding them into his pocket. “She left shortly before you arrived, helping one of the sick men along to the bridge.”
“Thank you kindly,” Proctor said. “If I find her, may I tell her who I am to thank for the news?”
“Caesar, sir,” the slave said. By mutual unspoken consent, he and Proctor hurried to the gate. As they went, Caesar stooped to pick up a musket that had been dropped. “Tell her not to worry ’bout me none,” he said. “Tell her I gone over to the British side to be a free man.”
He spied a powder horn and flints among the scattered items, stopping to retrieve those too.
Proctor opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. “I’ll tell her that, Caesar,” he said finally. “But if you stay with the American side, you’ll have your freedom too.”
Caesar looked away and laughed. “Someday, maybe. But why wait for freedom someday when I can have my freedom today? That’s what Howe promises.” He turned his face back to Proctor. “You give my best to Miss Deborah now. She’s a true friend to slaves, but no friend to slavery.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She spoke a word or two. Said I could trust you, if you came this way.”
Proctor stopped and shook his head. He was never going to understand Deborah. She’d been drawing on his talent, making his power a slave to hers, for months, but now she was against slavery. Proctor thrust out his hand. After hesitating a moment, Caesar took it and they gave each other one solid shake.
“Good luck to you then,” Proctor said.
“Next time you see me coming, keep your head down, sir,” Caesar said.
“I’ll do th
at, friend.”
They went separate directions. Caesar turned toward the advancing British lines, walking with his head held high and an eagerness to his step. Proctor watched him go for a second, then checked the sky. Somewhere behind the heavy blanket of clouds, the sun had passed noon. There would be an early nightfall today. He set a quick pace the way he had just come, back toward the Hackensack River and their last bridge to freedom. Inwardly, he swore at himself for wasting time. He must have just missed Deborah originally, when he cut over the fields and away from the road. Now while he ran through debris abandoned by the army as it fled, he didn’t know where he’d find her again. She could have been forced to leave the road for the same reasons he had, and there would be no signposts to point her way.
He had almost caught up with the drunken stragglers when he heard a loud huzzah and the rattle of drums behind him. It brought back the rush and fear he had experienced at Lexington, during the battle that started the Revolution. Only this time, instead of British Redcoats, German jaegers, mercenaries, their green jackets brilliant against the brown-and-gray landscape, crested the road behind them. It would be nothing for them to overtake the last remnants of the Continental army and defeat it. The Americans had already done half their work for them, leaving a trail of plunder like bread crumbs along the road.
The non-uniformed rabble ahead of Proctor broke in a panic, shouting, shoving men aside and trampling one another in their mad rush to escape. The cursed spirits shackled to their flesh displayed everything from despair to glee. He hurried after them, taking frequent glances over his shoulder. He watched the enemy soldiers enter Fort Lee.
The fort on Brooklyn Heights, White Plains, Fort Washington, and now Fort Lee: one after another, every American stronghold had fallen. With every fall, there were fewer men left to fight.
He looked ahead, at the men fleeing across the wet winter landscape in bare feet and shirtsleeves. It scarcely seemed to matter if the Hessian mercenaries overtook them—they were already defeated. No wonder so many of the spirits were gleeful; Proctor bet that the condition of their curse was nearly fulfilled. When the American army was no more, they would be free to go on to heaven or hell, each as his due.