Deadly Harvest

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Epilogue

I
t began when Mary and Brad Johnstone went to the psychic fair and happened upon the tent offering readings. Neither of them believed in such things. Still, as Brad said, with a wry grin, “When in Rome…And this looks like the place that guy at the museum was talking about.”

Of course, it was possible to get a reading just about anywhere in Salem, Massachusetts—especially now, on Halloween. They'd already been through several haunted houses, visited costume shops and met locals ranging from wiccans to historians. A guy they'd talked to at a museum dedicated to local history days had told them to get a few readings, because they would all be different, and given them a rundown of some of his favorite places to go.

Not long after that, Mary had gotten her first reading in a shop called the Magick Mercantile, run by a couple of real wiccans, Adam and Eve Llewellyn. She looked like a hippie, and he dressed all in black. He chewed gum nonstop, though, which made him look a little more normal. Brad doubted that Adam and Eve were their real names—everyone here seemed a little theatrical—but they had been nice. Eve had looked at Mary's palm and assured her that her ability to dance would take her far. Talking about it afterward, they were both sure they hadn't mentioned her profession. “Maybe they saw you on that local access show you did,” Brad suggested. In any case, it had been a nice look into the future.

This guy, though…He was pure Halloween creepy. He was wearing a cape and a turban. Tall, dark and lean, he had piercing eyes darkened by liner and shadow.

Inside his tent, he had a small table covered in dark fabric lightened only by a design of moons and stars, with a crystal ball on a stand in the middle of it. Everything was so carefully arranged that his tent could have passed for a permanent place of business. There were sculptures everywhere: Egyptian gods and goddesses, dragons, demons and more.

Mary immediately asked, “Are you a wiccan? A witch or a warlock?”

The reader offered her a wry smile. “There are no warlocks in the wiccan religion. Wiccans are just wiccans. And, no, I'm not a wiccan. Just a simple reader of signs, of the moon and the stars, and all that has come before.”

“I'm Mary Johnstone, and this is my husband, Brad,” Mary said. She almost tripped over the word
husband.
She remembered just how recently they had been headed for divorce.

“And I am Damien,” the reader told them.

“Can we stay together?” Mary asked him. “A double reading, I guess.”

She was actually feeling a little chilled, she realized, then told herself not to be silly. This was Halloween. Things were supposed to be scary. Like a horror movie. What good was a horror movie if you didn't jump a little?

She still felt oddly uncomfortable. But she would be fine if Brad stayed in here with her.

“Of course,” Damien said with a smile. “What I see…will be what I see. Sit down. There are two chairs.”

They sat at the table. Brad squeezed Mary's hand. She reminded herself that they were on vacation, far away from the Florida beaches of home and doing something entirely different. They were trying to heal old wounds and start over again. They were going to have fun.

“Now, look into the ball,” Damien told them with a flourish.

Mary looked, and decided the man was certainly a master of effects. The clear crystal ball began to swim with mist. As she continued to stare into it, she thought she saw fire. A fire leaping toward an unseen sky. Then the fire faded away, and she found herself looking at a desolate hillside. There were a few scrawny trees, with gnarled branches. And there were people. She couldn't hear them properly, but they seemed to be chanting. Suddenly a scream broke through the chanting. She almost jumped, but she realized Brad was at her side, grinning, having fun. She had too much imagination, he always told her that. And she was too timid.

She reminded herself they were repairing their relationship. That they both needed to work at it, even if he was the one who had strayed. He never would have wanted a lifetime with Brenda, she told herself. She had only appealed to him because she was brash, willing to take chances, and because she was…slutty. Mary couldn't help a moment's rancor.

Brad loved her, and she knew it. But she had been hurt. Still, she didn't want to ruin their future by dwelling on the past. She was going to make some changes, starting with becoming more adventurous.

Brad's hand was tight on hers. He was with her now. She believed that he loved her, and that they could make it.

“In the dark and in the mist, there lie the places of danger. Let not the hand that holds you slip, for when the wind blows and the trees dip, there you find death,” Damien said. “Look to the ball, keep your eyes on the crystal.”

She was
compelled
to look back. She heard screaming again, and sobbing full of deep agony. The branches of the trees were like skeletal hands. Snow began to fall, and then…

Suddenly she was staring at the corpse of a woman, dangling from a hangman's noose tied to one of the skeletal branches. A scream caught in her own throat as the body rotted right in front of her eyes.

“Indians,” Brad said. He sounded almost bewitched. “Sorry, Native Americans.”

She managed to tear her eyes from the deathly scene to stare at Brad. He was smiling, clearly seeing something entirely different.

“The first Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, marveling.

She had to get out of there.

“You're really good,” Brad told Damien.

Damien smiled at him, then turned to Mary, and she thought there was something nasty in his stare, something licentious and…evil.

“Touch the crystal,” Damien commanded them.

No. She wasn't going to do it.

But she was compelled. It was a projector of some kind, she told herself. It was a holograph. Had to be.

Whatever it was, whatever the compulsion, Brad felt it, too. Their hands still joined, they touched the crystal ball.

Now, when she stared into its depths, she saw corn.

Rows and rows of corn.

Cornfields filled with scarecrows and an overwhelming sense of evil.

Was Brad seeing the same thing now? Whatever he saw, he was staring at the ball as if hypnotized.

“You are in danger,” Damien told Brad. “You loved, but you betrayed, and now you're weak. And because you're weak—” he turned to Mary “—
you
are easy prey.” Damien spoke as if the words gave him pleasure. “He lacks the faith in himself necessary to fight for you, so you will be lost in the mists of evil.”

Brad stood abruptly and looked down at Damien, furious. “What the hell is this? You should be arrested. We didn't come here for this kind of crap.”

Damien rose, too. “I'm sorry you didn't like the reading, but the crystal tells the truth. It speaks, not I.”

Brad threw a twenty on the table, then grabbed Mary's hand firmly and pulled her out of the tent with him.

Back on the pedestrian mall, they were surrounded by people laughing, having fun. A group of kids burst out of one of the haunted houses, laughing. An old man, trying to avoid all the rush, slipped into a coffee shop. A woman walked by with two little girls dressed up as fairies. Even the dogs walking by were in costume.

“Leave it to me to pick the jerk,” Brad said apologetically.

“Hey, don't worry. He felt he had to put on a show, that's all.” She was careful to speak lightly. Brad had been really angry, maybe even shaken. It was strange, the way Damien had been able to sense the tension they were escaping and home right in on it.

But now, out here, surrounded by shrieks of delight, quiet conversations, silliness and games and laughter, the visions in the crystal ball seemed like fading images, nothing more.

“I'll tell you, though, that turkey dinner looked fabulous. I'm starving,” Brad said. “I swear, I could almost smell turkey. Though now that I think about it, I'm not sure those In—Native Americans were sitting down to dinner. They had hatchets, and they looked angry.”

Mary smiled. A breeze was blowing. It felt fresh and clean. She already felt like laughing, though it did trouble her that she hadn't seen any turkey dinner. A holograph should have been a holograph, right? Or maybe there were different projectors. The guy might be an asshole, but his act was a good one.

And she was
not
going to let herself be unnerved by it.

Still, over a late lunch she couldn't help asking him, “Brad, was that turkey dinner all you saw?”

“Well…”

He sounded reluctant, she thought, and wondered why.

Finally he went on. “At the end…I know this sounds crazy, but there was this cornfield, and this body that…” He looked at her and said, “Forget it. It was just some stupid illusion.”

“Why were you so angry?” she asked.

“Because he pegged me for a jerk,” he said, looking at her apologetically. “If Jeremy were here, he'd know how the guy pulled it off. In fact…” He laughed. “I can just see Jeremy staring at that stupid crystal ball, then getting up and figuring out where Damien—or whatever the jerk's real name is—keeps all his special-effects equipment.”

Mary smiled. “He's in New Orleans almost all the time now, huh?”

Jeremy Flynn had been Brad's partner when they had both been forensic divers for the police department. He'd been Brad's best man at their wedding, and through everything, he had never lied to her, remaining her friend as well as Brad's. And Brad was right. Jeremy would have revealed Damien as the fraud he was.

After lunch, Mary announced that she was ready for some actual history, so they headed toward one of the town's famous cemeteries. It struck her as a poignant place, and she couldn't help the tears that filled her eyes.

“What's the matter?” Brad asked.

“Nothing. I was just thinking,” she said.

“Well, let's get out of here,” he told her. “It's this place that's making you sad.”

No, it's not really the cemetery, she thought. It's that man, Damien, and the things he said.

“I love you, you know,” he told her.

She looked into his eyes. “I know. And I love you.”

She was shaking slightly; she knew he thought she was too easily frightened.

“I'm going to look at a few more of the graves, read some of the stones,” she told him. She squared her shoulders and walked away from him with quick steps, pulling a small guidebook out of her purse and calling out to him, “I've been reading about this. The garland symbolizes victory in death, and the winged hourglass is for the swiftness of passing time. Skeletons and skulls are for mortality. These angels are for heaven, and these ones here are for little children.”

Brad seemed to be getting into the spirit. He was standing by a stone several feet from her. “There's a hooped snake on this one. What's that for?” he asked.

“Eternity,” she informed him.

He walked down the path, putting more distance between them, and found an aboveground tomb. He sat down on it, watching her. “Hey, my feet are starting to hurt. How about we find a nice happy hour?” he asked.

“I don't think you're supposed to sit on someone's grave,” she warned him. A broken stone seemed to beckon her from its spot by one of the huge trees that punctuated the cemetery. The tree's expanding roots had broken through several of the nearby stones.

“Hey, don't go too far,” Brad called to her, lying back on the stone tomb and staring up at the sky. “People are leaving. We don't want to wind up locked in here.”

“We'll be fine,” she assured him.

As she walked toward the stones, she felt the breeze pick up. And, she realized, darkness was coming. Fast. And with it, though she hadn't felt or seen any sign of fog before, a silvery dew thickening the air.

She walked more quickly, stepping past the tree to get a better look at the stone that had caught her attention, and stopped dead.

Someone had cleaned and re-etched the stone, which dated from the late sixteen hundreds. It looked almost exactly like dozens of others. There was a death's head at the top, and scythes and hourglasses along the borders.

And then she noticed the name.

Mary Clare Johnstone.

Her name.

Her name
exactly
.

She felt something clutch at her throat, and weakness swept through her. She went down on her knees and placed a hand on the stone, as her dizziness grew worse.

From somewhere, she could hear laughter. Children having fun. Mothers calling out to them. Husbands speaking to their wives.

She closed her eyes against the sight in front of her and saw the hill and the tree. The tree with the skeletal branches and the hangman's noose.

And the woman, dangling at the end of it.