“No, I think I’ll stay in. Sorry,” she said when she saw the thunderous look on his face. “I was teasing. I promise.”
They were close again. So close he could feel her heartbeat, feel her breath. The compulsion to simply reach out and pull her to him, press his mouth to hers, was almost overwhelming.
He really needed to leave; he didn’t know her feelings for him. He needed time himself—away from the temptation of being with her.
He stepped back. “I’ll get here around nine-ish, okay?”
“Perfect. Thank you,” she told him.
She closed the door between them. He waited until he heard the bolt slide, and then he headed to his car.
*
That night, sleeping—though perhaps not exactly sleeping—Devin found herself on Gallows Hill again.
She was part of the air, there in her mind but not in the flesh. It was the end of summer, she thought. Right when the nip of autumn hinted now and then that fall would be brief and the warm days of summer would quickly give way to winter’s bitter chill.
She heard the sound of the death cart that brought the condemned to the hanging tree.
As the cart drew closer she heard sobbing. Any conversation was whispered, but sobbing was allowed. One could cry for the fact that the devil had come to Massachusetts and targeted the vulnerable among them.
This time she caught only fragments of conversation.
“...must be done.”
“She’ll be the death of all of us.”
“What difference...legal or illegal?”
“If she is gone... no mockery in court.”
Devin couldn’t see the speakers, couldn’t even tell their sex, though she thought there were only two of them. She tried to hear more than the brief snatches of conversation that hung on the air, but she couldn’t.
The sound of the cart grew louder.
That...and the weeping.
She awoke with a start.
This time she was shaking, though she didn’t feel frightened. She ran out to the parlor. The television was still on, showing reruns of Perry Mason.
“Devin! What is it, dear?” Auntie Mina asked.
Devin was already busy at the bookcase, searching through all the titles. Auntie Mina had loved a good mystery. There were shelves of fiction. There were also numerous books on herbs, on witchcraft, on the history of religion and on just about every other topic that dealt with spirituality.
There were also history books. She was looking for one that Aunt Mina had purchased forever ago—a reprint of a work that had first been published in the early 1800s, as she recalled. It had been written by an author named Michael Smith, who’d claimed to be a descendant of Hattie Smith, who had been arrested for witchcraft, confessed and then rotted in jail for almost a year after the last hangings. His conclusions had been hotly disputed, if she remembered correctly.
“Devin?” Aunt Mina said worriedly.
“I’m all right, Auntie Mina. I’m looking for the Smith book on Salem.”
Aunt Mina looked at her curiously. “The Smith book? Really? It’s never been considered one of the better histories of the area. Why that book in particular?”
“He wrote about a young woman from Salem Village who had been accused. She was never arrested because she simply disappeared.”
“Yes,” Auntie Mina said. “I remember reading about her.”
Devin found the book at last. She looked at the copyright page and saw that the first printing had been in 1804. It had been reprinted once in 1886 and then again in 1964.
“You found it,” Auntie Mina said. “You’re going to want the last few chapters. The first half deals with the situation here in Salem in the context of the witchcraft panic across the Christian world at the time. But the second half is specifically about the people here in Salem. I was particularly touched by the story of little Dorcas Good. Only four and half years old when she was arrested. Poor thing. She confessed to the magistrates that her own mother was a witch, and that she must have been, too. But who knows what those so-called ‘examiners’ put into her head. She was in jail for over ten months and came out of it completely insane.”
Devin took the book to the sofa and sat down. Her ghostly aunt followed her. Somewhat disturbed by the very late—or very early—hour, Poe let out a few squawks of protest to let Devin know that they should both still be sleeping.