Her Dear and Loving Husband (9 page)

“She’ll be here,” Jennifer said.

He walked back into the store, heading for his place behind the counter where he had a clear view of everyone coming and going. He wanted a whiff of strawberries and cream as soon as Sarah stepped onto the wharf. He wanted to see her face as soon as she arrived at the shop. Instead, he heard the heavy, plodding footsteps he recognized from the library, and he knew Kenneth Hempel stood behind him. He tried to silently will the reporter to go away and leave him alone, forever, but Hempel still stood there. Jennifer nodded when she saw the reporter in her mother’s store.

“Good evening, Mr. Hempel,” she said. “Welcome to the Witches Lair. I see we have yet another Dracula here this evening. Have you come to suck my blood?”

“Good evening, Miss…?”

“Mandel. Jennifer Mandel.”

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Miss Mandel. And Professor, how unexpected to see you here this evening. Not in costume I see.”

James turned to face the reporter. “Not this year, I’m afraid. I like your costume though. There have certainly been a lot of Draculas here tonight.”

“I’m not Dracula. I’m Van Helsing.” Hempel grabbed at his belt and unsheathed a wooden cross that had been whittled into a stake. He held it an inch from James’s face. “Van Helsing the Vampire Slayer.” 

As James stared at the wooden stake he wondered if he would have to kill Hempel right there in front of everyone in the store. If it came to a test of strength between Hempel and James, James would win. That was one of the first lessons he learned on his earliest hunts—he had the oppressive power to overwhelm his prey. After a tense moment, James realized that Hempel didn’t intend to pierce him that night, at least not with the stake. 

“A rather convincing costume, Professor Wentworth, don’t you think?”

James kept his eyes on the stake as he spoke. “I believe you’re referring to Buffy.”

“Excuse me?”    

“Buffy is known as a vampire slayer. Van Helsing is known as a vampire hunter. Even so…”

“But aren’t they the same thing?” Hempel’s brow furrowed as he considered. “Come to think of it, hunting and slaying are not the same thing. You don’t need to do one to do the other. Doctor Van Helsing was very methodical in the way he hunted Count Dracula, wasn’t he? He gathered the evidence and considered the facts before he made his plans to uncover his prey. He even followed the wicked vampire back to his home to capture him, though he left the actual slaying of the cursed monster to others more capable of such things. Yes, I am Van Helsing after all.”

James knew Hempel wasn’t entirely right about Van Helsing, but he didn’t dare say so. The reporter stepped closer and smiled the same self-satisfied grin James had seen in the library. “You see,” Hempel said, “you needn’t fear me, Professor. I don’t want to slay vampires. I want to hunt them, flush them out into the open. People need to be warned because some of them are a danger to humanity. But you’re right—I am more of a hunter than a slayer. Thank you for clarifying that point.”

Jennifer walked around the counter and put her arm around Hempel’s shoulders. 

“If you’ll follow me, Doctor Van Helsing, I believe I may be able to find a vampire or two for you around the shop. You won’t need to do much hunting tonight.”

She led him to a group of small children, each dressed as a ghost, a witch, or a vampire, and the children laughed when they saw the man with a wooden stake at his side. Hempel seemed charmed by them.

“My children are getting into their costumes so they can go trick-or-treating tonight,” he said. “I’m on my way home now to escort them around town.”

He pretended to chase the children through the store as they squealed with delight, and suddenly the stake he carried looked more like a toy than a weapon capable of killing someone in the store. Push a wooden stake against a man and he’ll laugh because it won’t hurt. The worst a human would suffer is an annoying splinter beneath the skin. Push a wooden stake against James and witness the blood-splattered gore one expects from the special effects of a low-budget horror film. At least that’s what James had been told. He had never seen it himself, and he hoped he never would.   

James watched Hempel as he played with the laughing children, and he was sad that, for some reason unknown to him, the reporter had taken it upon himself to expose James’s well-guarded secret. Hempel seemed like a nice enough fellow, a family man who might not be a bad person exactly but someone with a serious vendetta. James was concerned about what Hempel knew, but he didn’t pursue it any further that night with the Halloween-costumed crowds streaming in and out. He wanted the problem to disappear.

He saw Jennifer watching Hempel and recognized her petulant face, the one that let everyone know she was agitated. The more she watched Hempel the more set her features became. When Hempel turned away, she snapped her fingers and the potion bottles shattered into glass and dust. The reporter glanced nervously around to see what had happened.

“I thought you had to wiggle your nose to do that,” James whispered.  

“That’s on television.”   

From across the shop Olivia grunted in frustration. Unhappy at her daughter’s blatant display of witchiness, her arms were crossed over her chest while her fingers tapped an agitated tune—the perfect picture of a perturbed mother. Jennifer shrugged. 

Hempel, visibly upset by the exploding bottles, said good night as he walked to the door. Jennifer escorted him, her arm around his shoulders, smiling to his face.

“Good night,” she said, brushing the bottle dust from his cape. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”

She stood by the smoking cauldron, watching until he was gone. When he was safely down the wharf, she joined James by the counter.   

“He needs to be turned into a toad,” she said, “or a rat.”

“You said you could only use your spells for good.”  

“It would be a good thing to make that odious little man run through the sewers for the rest of his life. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. He didn’t touch me.”

“So that one isn’t a legend.”

“That one isn’t a legend.”

“You can be killed by a wooden stake?”

“I can.”

“But you live in a wood house.”

“I live in it, Jen, I’m not being pierced by it. If I were pierced by the wood that would be a different story.”

“Different how?”

“My blood would gush where the stake pierced me, and I could die from the loss of blood alone. Or it could make me too weak to fight, and if I were weak and someone decapitated me…”                                                                                                                                                                                 

“All right, James, enough.” Jennifer held her hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m making the horror movie I’m seeing in my mind disappear.” When she settled herself, she asked, “What do you think Hempel wants?”  

“To be the one who uncovers the undead in Witch City. What recognition he would receive if he were the first to prove that such beings exist. Good enough for the Pulitzer Prize.”

“I think you should talk to him,” Timothy said. The boy had come back into the store without his cape, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his face still streaked with blood. “I think I should talk to him. I want to tell him the truth.”

“You will do no such thing,” James said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Timothy’s dilated-black eyes widened. “I don’t think it would be as bad as you think. I think people would understand.”

James scoffed aloud. “You think people would understand? I can tell you a story about how little people understand.”

Timothy could be a foolish boy, and the foolish are the first to act foolhardy. James knew Timothy was young, especially for their kind, but the boy was stubborn in his wish to be free of hiding and James needed to make him see the dangerous road he wanted to travel. Timothy would unleash not his own personal freedom but havoc and fear, leaving destruction and desperation behind. He had to understand. 

James grabbed Timothy’s collar and dragged him to the storage room. When they were alone inside, James threw the boy with more strength than he intended and Timothy crashed into the shelves of candles and incense, knocking everything to the floor with a thud that sounded like it would reverberate across Massachusetts. It took every ounce of restraint James had within him to not tear Timothy limb from limb. He was so angry he was tempted to find the Doctor Van Helsing wandering the streets of Salem and borrow his stake. That is all it would take, one push of the wood into Timothy’s preternatural skin and the promise of immortality would be gone in an instant. James struggled to settle himself, to count to twenty, to think about happier days, to find compassion for the boy who only wanted to be free of hiding every night forever. Finally, James was calm enough to speak.

“People will not understand. You will start a vampire hunt if you confess to Kenneth Hempel.”

“You’re so old fashioned. You think it’s still the seventeenth century, but things are different now. You don’t know anything about people today.” 

James sat on an overturned shelf and wondered how to explain what he knew to the stubborn boy.   

“Listen to me, Timothy. You and I and the others like us, we’re not the only ones of our kind. As long as there are some who hunt we can never be out in the open. As long as there are some people need to fear, then all of us must hide. If they think one of us is evil, then they’ll think all of us are evil, just like Levon said. And how can we convince them otherwise? Once people make up their minds about something it’s almost impossible to make them think differently.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. People think in stereotypes. They don’t see shades of gray. They see extremes, black or white, yes or no, right or wrong, hero or villain. And they’ll do whatever they need to do to prove that they’re right even if they’re wrong. People don’t like to be wrong. They’re afraid of what they don’t understand, and they won’t understand us. I hardly understand us and I’ve been this way a long time. Far longer than you. I’ve seen things you cannot begin to imagine. Do you have any idea how many people have suffered because of the madness of a few? There was suffering right here in Salem.”

Timothy stood up from the scattered mess. He picked the coin belts up from the floor, folded them, and put them back on the only shelf left standing. “Are you talking about the Salem Witch Trials?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Your wife died then, didn’t she?”   

“She did.”  

“Was she one of the people who were hanged?”

As much as James didn’t want to dwell on those memories, he felt he had no choice. Timothy needed to know the consequences of madness.   

“No,” James said. “She died in jail before she went to trial. They postponed her trial twice. At the time I thought the later court dates would help because there were several women from the village willing to testify against her and swear that our unborn baby was the spawn of Satan. I was naïve about human nature then. I thought if I could speak to them I could help them see the error of their lies and convince them to speak the truth about my wife. Yet even after I pleaded with them they insisted they had seen Elizabeth consorting with the Devil. I was terrified. I knew that if my wife were convicted of witchcraft she would be hung, and I took no comfort knowing that the magistrates would stay her execution until after our baby was born. They said they were forbidden to harm the innocent unborn child.” James laughed a wicked laugh. “They didn’t want to harm an innocent baby, but they had no qualms harming an innocent woman. After Elizabeth was arrested they kept her in irons in a rat-infested dungeon, and there she died. The last time I saw her was the day she was arrested.” 

“Were you turned then?”

James felt the weight of his creation story heavy on his shoulders. For each of their kind, their creation story wasn’t mythic or grand. It wasn’t a holiday to celebrate, like a birthday or an anniversary. James didn’t eat cake and burn candles to commemorate it. It was the tale of the night he died—one of the hardest parts to remember.   

“No,” he said. “I wasn’t turned when she was arrested. I wasn’t turned until after she had been in jail a fortnight, I mean, about two weeks. She never knew me this way.”

“Who turned you?”

“I don’t know. I can remember his face, but I never knew his name. I haven’t seen him since.” 

James paced the storage room, jogging himself into remembering the scene. Some memories were so difficult to see clearly, either because he couldn’t or didn’t want to. It was so long ago. 

“After Elizabeth was arrested I’d go to the jail where she was being held. I pleaded with the magistrates in charge of the trials, self-important imbeciles who were pleased that now everyone would see the power they could wield. I tried to explain how it was all a mistake. My wife had no marks on her that would identify her as a witch. She never conjured spirits. She never sent her specter to harm anyone. I tried to find out who had accused her, but no one would answer me. They said it would all come out at her trial. They said there were even more witnesses than I knew of to corroborate the accusations. What other witnesses, I asked? But no one would say. 

“They tried to confiscate everything we owned as they had done to others who were accused, but my father said it was his property so they left us our house and everything in it. People we knew signed their names to a petition stating they had never seen my wife in any act of witchcraft and we were faithful members of the church. But someone had accused her, someone weak and petty, and then others, women she considered her friends, people she trusted and loved, began corroborating the lies. Yes, they saw her use spells, they said. Yes, they saw her specter doing harm to others or consorting with Satan in the night.”

 “Who accused her?” Timothy asked. “Who would do such a thing?”

“I heard whisperings that it was her sister-in-law, her brother’s wife, who made the first claims against her. She was an unpretty woman, her sister-in-law, bloated, spotted, and pale, with strings of black hair that flew out from under her white cap. The gray, swollen bags beneath her eyes held years of untold scorn, or an excess of ale. I knew she was jealous because Elizabeth was happy with me while she was unhappily married to Elizabeth’s stubborn, overbearing brother. I suspected it was true, that she was the one who made the first claims, but I never knew for certain. Then Elizabeth was moved to the jail in Boston.”