Spirit (5 page)

O
ther travelers arrived, in a wave of perfumes and coffee breath, rustling coats smelling damp from snow, excitement mingling with impatience. The Goodravens watched them quietly, trying to gather the full entertainment value from each. Most of them were elderly, perhaps part of various historical societies, but a group of college men provided some color.

Tess heard one of them, a likable overweight fellow, jokingly say, “Is this ice festival good for meeting girls, or not, Sattler? It's not just pruny old maids with stalactites on their noses, is it?”

His friend, Sattler, was the tallest of them, a lanky, relaxed young man with a blond goatee, who gave the overweight college boy a knock-it-off glance.

Tess had the oddest feeling that they were hiding some kind of lie. She didn't know what it could be. But it left an acrid taste in her mouth, and Tess Goodraven was rarely wrong about such things.

The college boys took their seats, and Tess smiled to see them jostle each other and roughhouse. She sometimes forgot that she and Tobias were young at all; they had lived too much to feel very
young, and living like older people, on their parents' money, had made them somewhat old in spirit. She knew Horrick thought of them as naughty children, but he was a crotchety old turnip himself, in her opinion.

In the murmur of conversation, she heard the overweight student, Ned, arguing with Michael, a gloomy, sullen young man, thin, cold, and bespectacled. “It's going to be amazing, it'll be the talk of the music school,” Ned said to him.

“You're an idiot,” Michael replied.

Ned turned to Tess and Tobias. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Is it or is it not brilliant to take the work of Nietzsche and set it to music for an opera?”

Tess just stared at him.

“Singing it in German,” he went on. “Isn't that the smartest thing you've ever heard? Would that not be truly greatness?”

“I don't know,” said Tess, amused. “I…don't speak German.”

Ned was annoyed, but the other student, Michael, seemed satisfied. The train lurched forward, giving Tess a jolt, and Tobias took her hand. “You said you weren't afraid.”

She tried to look calm. “You're with me. I'm not afraid.”

But she was. She was afraid whenever she stepped out of their New York house, though she took pride in the fact that it never stopped her. She just carried her anxiety with her and rolled it into a ball in her stomach.

From the window, Tess could see Celia the innkeeper outside at her carriage, sadly watching the train depart. From what Tess had observed, Celia was constantly bickering with her coachman. The conversation was easy to imagine:

He would be saying, “It's not my fault you can't go. I'm not your husband.”

“He doesn't control me,” Celia would say. “I can hop aboard that train any time I want.”

“Let me stop it for you,” the driver would say caustically. “I'll throw myself in front of it.”

And Celia would snipe at him, “You won't get extra pay for it.”

“The day I get extra pay…”

“Oh, shut your mouth.”

Tess smiled at her ideas. She knew she was closer to the truth than not. How awful for Celia to be ordered about by her husband, Tess thought. But it was common. Tess was more concerned about being left behind than chained up; Tobias was too wild, and she wondered sometimes if she could keep hold of him.

In the growing snowfall the train charged away from the Salem station.

As steam blocked her window, Tess looked over their companions in the car. From their spot near the back, she and Tobias could see everyone. The older couple closest to them were named Gil and Elaine. Gil was a relentlessly serious man with a great port-wine mark that stretched across his face from his forehead to below one eye. Tobias whispered that he looked as if his wife had hit him over the head and the blood had stained him permanently. Elaine seemed to be a rather gracious individual, quietly anticipating the celebration to come.

“Getting worse out there, you'd say?” Gil was saying, gazing out the window. He seemed to issue a standard grunt at
the end of his remarks.

“I would have rather stayed in,” his wife answered, “but it's probably good for me to go. They're doing fireworks at the end of it?”

“Yes. They'll do fireworks. They spent a good deal of money on them.”

“Was that one of your recommendations?”

“One of the few things they listened to. The Blackthorne investors were so stupidly impatient, unh? You don't have a winter carnival to draw people to your town. You're supposed to bring them in spring or summer. Make them forget the harsh Decembers.”

“You're involved in the carnival?” Tess asked him.

He seemed annoyed by her forwardness. “Yes, I'm a history professor. I study human-migration patterns. The Blackthorne council paid me to figure a way to bring people back to town.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“Not to have this carnival. I told them the key ingredient in drawing people to a place is lust.”

“Lust?”

“Yes, ma'am. We mustn't shy away from the word, unh? If your land has nothing to offer—far from city and culture, hard and mediocre farming, winters cruel and long—then you use the lure of starting a family. I said to the town elders, “Give some little bit of property to all the young women you can find, and spread the word in every metropolis that your town has the prettiest unmarried ladies the world's ever seen.” Let nature do the rest. Learn from P. T. Barnum. Advertise. They just laughed me off.
They said modern inventions like telephones and fancy trains were more to their liking. Waste of money, hmm?”

His wife was shaking her head. “He'll tell you more than you want to know. My husband is a man of ideas. How I love him.” Elaine laughed.

That was a lie. She hated him and Tess could feel that it no longer even troubled the older woman. It smelled like the lingering stench of rotten fruit.

“My husband is much the same,” said a beautiful, cheaply dressed young lady. “An engine of ideas. I can never get enough.”

That was a lie as well. The woman thought often of killing him, which left a black stain in the air wherever she went. Tess smiled weakly. The husband, in his twenties, had lean good looks and clearly knew where every strand of his dark hair lay. Tess decided to call these two Mr. and Mrs. Tawdry-Sinful.

The man grinned at Tess with indecent intentions. Then his gaze moved on toward another woman, whose eyes flashed in his direction.

Tobias took all this in with amusement. “Love is everywhere, isn't it?”

Tess looked back at him, but Tobias was hardly bothered by Mr. Tawdry-Sinful's behavior. She began wishing he would be more jealous. Now there was a sense she rarely got from him.

Jealousy was hardly a rare commodity, she mused. Other girls seemed to find Tobias, with his confidence and easy manner, more than a little attractive. And his low, assured voice. Women loved the voice.

The historian might have been right about the power of lust.
To the Goodravens, it appeared as heat, and a vivid musky smell. In fact, even as Gil had mentioned it, Tess had noted his wife's interest in several of the younger men on board. It was completely hidden from most, but Tess was bothered by the woman's lack of decorum, even if only in her daydreams.

These kinds of considerations were nothing Tess ever spoke about to anyone but Tobias, because no one would understand her, except perhaps another spiritualist. The vocabulary for describing human feeling was, sadly, too limited. But for Tess and Tobias, after the trauma of the theater fire—and with every spirit encounter since—emotion had become a palpable thing.

It wasn't just that she and Tobias took feelings in from others like a scent or a pressure upon the skin or like sounds or flashes of light, but on top of that, there seemed to be so many more
types
of emotion than was usually understood to exist.

Emotion flowed around them like highly distinct, living things and there were so many sentiments for which there were no words. Tess had many times been witness to the special worry a person had for a missing pet, which manifested as a tingling in her heart. She had also recognized that peculiar disconnection between what some people expressed and what they actually said, as when an impolite woman spoke harshly but continued smiling. This she and Tobias experienced as a low hissing, much like a teakettle before it screams.

One could fill an encyclopedia with these unnamed sentiments. The Salem graveyard experience in particular had been, for an instant at least, a blasting of all the emotions at once as the spirit entered. She understood how Tobias could crave these
communions.

The train clacked onward. The interplay with the Tawdrys and Mr. Boring Wine Mark was over, and Tess was left listening to the college crew chattering wildly up ahead.

“—what's the truth of it?” asked Ned. “The festival grounds are supposed to be haunted by Blackthorne's witches—but who
were
these witches?”

Sattler's pretty friend Annette waved away this idea and spoke up for the first time. “If you lived around here,” she said, “you'd laugh about it. A silly old legend is what it is. The ‘Runaways of the Salem Witch Trials' sounds spooky, but I don't think it ever happened.” Tess wasn't sure she liked Annette; she seemed excessively happy and not very bright, like a kitten rolling around a ball of yarn, excitement tumbling out of her. “The only thing I know,” the girl added, “is an old nursery rhyme we used to say about one of them…‘Old Widow Malgore, dance upon her grave—”'

Others on the train joined in. “—Old Widow Malgore, she keeps a devil slave…Old Widow Malgore, your daughter never knew, Old Widow Malgore, the curse you made for two…”

The chant began to break up, people forgetting the rest of the ditty, except Annette: “Old Widow Malgore, your devil will break free…” as others finally recovered the tune, shouting out, “And vengeance you will see!”

“Well, what does all that mean?” Ned laughed.

Annette shrugged him off. “Oh, I don't know. Ask Michael; he knows more about it, I think.”

It seemed to Tess that Annette might be hiding feelings for the
serious, bespectacled Michael, but she couldn't be sure. Certainly Sattler, her companion, did not know of any romantic betrayal; he had introduced Annette as his finacée, with no trace of discontent. As for Michael, Tess could see his interest in the girl was obvious and mixed with painful remorse. This Michael was a young man with a conscience, perhaps.

She noticed the wine-marked historian, Gil, looking at his wife, wanting to interrupt the discussion.

But it was Michael who spoke. “After the witch hunts, Blackthorne got wiped out by an epidemic, and no one ever rebuilt 'til now. It became a ghost town. I heard they burned the witches in the old town square, but no one knows the whole story.”

“Someone knows.” At the very back of the train, a dark, impressively tall man interrupted in a low, accented voice. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that concealed his face, and his figure blended with the darkness, where the window shades had been drawn against the glare from the snow.

Tess expected him to educate them, but instead he turned his head, by way of introduction, toward an older gentleman, who had a long cascade of gray hair and piercing eyes. He looked frail and skeletal, resembling a mummy.

“This fellow here knows,” said the foreign-sounding man. “As we were waiting for the train, he told me some things that may concern you….”

His tone worried Tess. The Mummy and the Giant, that's what the two men looked like. She shivered, not least because the older man's gaze had fallen to her and was sending out great tides of
fear and anxiety, an awareness that something awful awaited Tess and all the others as well. No, it was more than awareness. It was a
surety
.

W
hile the tall foreigner eased back into the shadows, everyone's interest turned to the elderly man, who introduced himself as Josiah Jurey. He smiled, but his grin seemed forced.

Michael smiled back at Jurey, humoring him. “So, then, are you an expert in folk legends and ghost stories?”

“Folktale, you say? A little bit of progress comes in, and the truth becomes a folktale,” Jurey replied, dismissing all things youthful and ignorant. “There were three of them. Came up here to escape the witch trials in Salem. They were followed, hunted down, and killed. But they were hanged. Not burned.”

The foreigner who sat nearby seemed to enjoy seeing the college boy set straight. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but his head tilted toward Michael as if scolding him.

“The truth is, it's something of a Romeo and Juliet story…,” Jurey added.

“Well,” prompted Tess, “everyone loves a romance.”

“Everyone loves a tragedy,” said Tobias.

Jurey, licking his thin lips, needed little encouragement to tell the tale. “There was a young man, Wilhelm, who was seeing a girl
named Abigail, back in Salem. And her mother, she hated the boy. It was a fierce hatred. She believed the boy had killed her husband when they were clearing old growth on his land. A falling tree had pinned him down, and the man was crushed to death before help could arrive. But the mother believed it was murder. You see, the father had disliked this boy to begin with. No one was good enough for his daughter.

“Not long after the father died, others died mysteriously, and the witch-hunting began; and Wilhelm and Abigail joined with the whole town to watch the hangings, never knowing they'd be enmeshed in it.” His grim voice with its New England lilt was entrancing. “One way or another, mother, daughter, and suitor all ended up in Blackthorne. They were tracked down and killed, all three, accused of witchcraft: the young man, Wilhelm, for consorting with witches and the girl, for the darkest of magics. The crowd, they forced her to kiss the lips of the dead Wilhelm, before she died herself. It is a known fact. And what they say is…well…in dying these witches somehow left a curse on every person who ever sets foot on this ground to die and be tortured after death, with such brutality that the very soul itself bleeds away.”

No one took a breath.

“Or some such,” said Jurey, with a touch of pleasure.

The mention of a doomed couple in 1600s Salem gave Tess a slightly unwanted thrill—a delicate disturbance not easily explained by the fact these two had also been reckless and young.

The tawdry man reacted unkindly. “Sir, you seem to have an
unhealthy interest in—”

“Then came the deaths,” added Jurey. “Murders. Infants dying in their beds. Suicides. An epidemic came through Blackthorne and wiped everyone out.”

“Well, that's quite a lot of death,” said Tess. “A curse is almost convincing, I'd say.”

“Why? Because there was some sickness? An epidemic, unh?” Gil, the historian, looked at her with contempt. “It's now believed it was cholera, which even today kills people the world over—the devil's work, maybe, but we don't say it's witchcraft. We're smarter than that. The people in Blackthorne let superstition get the best of them, and it drove them to insanity, unh?”

“But people around here believed in the curse, didn't they?” said Jurey. “The town died out. No one ever went back in to live there.”

“So many terrible things happened there. Why go back now?” Tess wondered.

“The railroad's built new lines between Salem and Vermont, and they want a shortcut to them,” Gil's wife, Elaine, answered her. “That takes 'em right through here. Someone decided to have the winter carnival in Blackthorne to try to bring people back in. The old men of Boston and New Haven who own the town need new blood—young people like yourself—coming here to settle. They can't have this great ugly hole between townships….”

Gil scowled. “You ask me, they ought to cover up the history, the traditions, any trace of the whole thing. You can put a pretty bow around it, but people don't like this ‘witching' talk. They're superstitious. Part of old Salem even changed its name to Danvers.”
He looked around the car. “Fact is, there are people on this train who are related to those that killed the witches. They don't want that blood on their hands.”

Some passengers did indeed look disturbed.

“We're going into the last piece of America where the Salem witch trials are still a fresh scent in the air,” Gil went on. “Folks here remember it well. But history is finally blowing it all away. They're even going to put in electricity up there. Scare away the spooks.” His joke failed, and Gil retreated. “Oh, calm yourselves. Now, just because the town slaughtered a few witches and then was wiped out by a plague doesn't mean there's a curse on it.”

Everyone stared at him in dead silence. Tess wanted to laugh.

“Well, it's an
adorable
story,” said Tobias. “I think you should use that to attract people. I mean, there are all kinds of nutty fudges who would love to see where they killed the witches. You should make it the theme of the carnival. Nothing says Christmas to me better than the skeletons of real-life witches, I can tell you that.”

As usual with Tobias's remarks, no one was quite sure what he meant at first.

“You should roll out all their old, wormy remains and let us have a look,” he continued. “I've yet to see the person who doesn't enjoy seeing a shrunken head or a good hanging, and there's always a big turnout at any funeral wake with an open casket. If you really want people to come to your festival, you've got to get those bodies out and let people get their pictures taken with the witchy cadavers. Dig them up. Someone must know where they are, don't you think?”

Everyone gaped at him. Tess smiled at them broadly.

They were off to a wonderful start with these people.

The train headed into a curve, affording a view of a big ice-coated wooden archway up ahead, with a playfully carved witch's face upon it.
WELCOME
had been written on an ice slab nearby. Everyone seemed disturbed at the sight of the witch's image at that particular moment.

“Fact of the matter is,” added Tobias, “that's why we're here.”

“What's why?” asked Gil.

“Well, the ghosts, of course. There's talk that those witches didn't pass on quietly. They're still up there.”

Tess added, “We've been all over the world searching for spirit habitations. Who would've thought there was an authentic one right here in New England? I'm positively embarrassed we didn't know about it before.”

Tobias looked at her sympathetically. “You can't know about all of them, dearest.”

Everyone in the car was now staring at them.

“This habitation could be as good as the one in Switzerland,” she said.

“Don't get your hopes up, sweetie,” Tobias replied. “It could be a hoax. “You come all the way out, you pay your money, and what is it? Nothing but flashing lights and hokum.” He paused. “Of course, flashing lights have their appeal….”

A dour-faced, prudish woman looked at Tess with some disgust. “You really seek out ghosts?”

“Dear lady,” said Tess, “nothing gives a rush of blood to the body like a good spirit possession. “You feel it right down to your intimates. It's a thrill you will not soon forget.”

The prudish woman looked shocked. “You've done this sort of thing in the past? Why?”

“Well, I don't want to disturb you by calling it an addiction,” Tobias interjected, “but let's just say, you've never really lived until you've been tickled from the
inside
.”

Tess and Tobias smiled sweetly.

It was so easy to shock people these days, it almost wasn't fun. Still, there were some passengers who were not bothered at all by talk of death and phantoms. Tess felt the steady gaze of the dark foreigner fall upon her.

“I fear no ghosts,” he said, “nor anything else.” The man—was he Italian? Spanish?—was leaning forward just a bit, into the window light, opening his coat so Tess and everyone else could see he was armed, pistols glinting silver against his dark clothes. “I've been hired by some of these rich old men who own the town. I'm here to make certain there is nothing to fear, neither among rowdy men drunk on spirits nor among spirits who wish to drink the blood of men.” He gave a stern smile, and Tess could see the edge of a handsome but unshaven jaw beneath his square Western hat.

“I shall do my best not to fear any dead witches,” she said to him.

Tobias looked at the foreigner. “Is there a reason you above any other would be hired for this protection?”

“I have been here and there. Seen the West. Seen blood. Seen death. Seen guns.”

“All in one place, or one at a time?”

The foreigner was unamused. “You speak like one who has never seen a fight.”

“True enough, I suppose,” said Tobias. “But I have other strengths. I have seen the unseeable. How about you, sir? Were you lucky enough to have encountered the supernatural in your journeys?”

“I will say this: I've made up my mind that I won't judge other's beliefs. There's nothing certain, except that God favors the strong. I go where there's money. Witches or not, I come prepared to kill what needs to be killed—”

“There
are
witches in these woods,” Josiah Jurey interrupted. “And they are to be respected.”

Tobias looked at him with a touch of surprise.

In the moving light, Jurey looked tremendously old, with rivers of wrinkles on his face. “I've hunted their kind in a thousand corners. What you have here has dug itself in and drawn power from a sacrosanct place, forbidden and frightening even to the Indians, long before we came. Those who draw from the wellspring in this darkness will not leave easily. They will be strong. The two hundred-year mark of their death will grant them new vitality. They will travel on demons, with blood in their wake….”