She let Steve lead her. She followed him to the green and gold sign that read SALEM WITCH TRIALS MEMORIAL, and then let him lead her down the brick path and along the stone wall. He went slowly, sniffing his way, occasionally lifting his leg to mark his territory.
By the time they came to the opening and the entrance Steve had already done his business, but something drew her on. It had been years since she’d been inside the grounds. Maybe it was time to go in again. Maybe facing up to Salem’s history of witches a little would put things in perspective, would help the strangeness of the dreams she was having disperse.
She followed the path in, followed the wall to look at the memorials. SARAH GOOD, HANGED, JULY 16, 1692, she read. Someone had laid a flower on the grave, a red rose. REBECCA NURSE, HANGED, JULY 19, 1692. The stone of this one was mossy and harder to read. On Susannah Martin’s grave someone had left a cornhusk doll with red string tied around the neck, wrists, and waist. There were words written on its dress, but rain had smeared them and she couldn’t read them. Beside it was a wreath of white flowers. She wasn’t sure what kind exactly. There was a candle, too, the wax having puddled on the stone.
She walked a little farther, found a slab of stone embedded in the ground, something she remembered her mother having shown her in her childhood. The stone was weathered now, the words mossy and faded but still legible. GOD KNOWS I AM INNOCENT, they read. She stared at them a moment, sobered by them, then moved to another stone, this one partly cut off by the walls surrounding the memorial, which had been laid on top of them. Strange thing to do, considering several of the witches had been killed by being pressed to death with heavy stones. She brushed the gravel aside. TO MY DYING DA-, it read. I AM NO WIT-.
She stayed looking at it for a long moment, until she felt Steve tugging at her, trying to get her to move on. Did it help her to come here? Did it make her feel better? Could anything make her feel better?
She didn’t know. No. She couldn’t say.
As soon as Alice came out of the bath, he was there holding her robe for her, helping her to put it on. She sighed, but let him slip it on her.
“I’ll just put on some—” she said.
“No need,” he said. “There’s no law against playing the piano in a bathrobe. There’ll be plenty of time to get dressed later.”
She protested for a moment, then gave in, deciding that she’d waste more time arguing than in just getting it over with.
She allowed him to lead her by the hand out of the room and to the piano bench. His witch book was already there, open on the front of the piano, open to the entry for Hawthorne’s diary for September 16, 1692.
Francis dragged his finger down to the bottom of the page. Tapped his finger at the end of a series of musical notes that were drawn across the bottom of the page. Next to them was a strange symbol, a circle with a cross and some other strokes in it. Two dots as well.
“That symbol,” said Francis, pointing to it. “It was on the sleeve of the record they played.”
“That exact symbol?” asked Alice. “Or just something that looked like it?”
Francis shook his head. “I’m almost certain it was precisely that symbol,” he said.
“Almost certain,” she said. “But not completely certain.”
He ignored her, his hand drifting back to the musical notes. “Okay,” he said. “Along the bottom here are a series of musical notes. Can you play them?”
“Of course,” said Alice. “My mother didn’t pay for twelve years of piano lessons for nothing.”
“Of course she didn’t,” said Francis. “Let’s hear it.”
She looked more closely at the notes. There was only an upper stave, and it was a little strange. Instead of five lines it had only four, which meant she had to do a little guesswork about where things started, which line was missing. Maybe it wasn’t even the same notational system. Still, she gave it a try.
“That’s not it, is it?” asked Francis.
She shook her head. No, it didn’t sound right. She moved her fingers a little farther up the keys and tried again. This time the first chord and the notes that followed were discordant, but they still felt intentional, like they were part of a larger structure.
“I think that’s it,” she said.
Francis nodded. He went over to the stereo, pressed PLAY on the cassette tape in its deck. It was the radio tape, Alice realized, the tail end of the recording of Francis’s appearance on the radio show. Someone announced the Lords, and then music started.
He let it go for a moment, then shut it off.
“So is it the same?” he asked.
Alice furrowed her brow. She thought she already knew the answer, but she played the notes on the piano again anyway. Meanwhile, Francis rewound a little, and when Alice was done he played the tape a second time.
“Yes,” she said. “Embellished, but basically the same. So?”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” asked Francis.
Alice laughed. “Not really,” she said. “You said yourself this symbol was on the record. Somebody else obviously had this book and took the name, the tune, and the symbol from it. No big mystery.”
Francis pulled a frown. He came over and sat down on the bench next to her.
“Play it again,” he said.
Alice began playing the notes over and over. She sighed. It’d be afternoon, probably, by the time he’d let her get dressed.
Back in her apartment, Heidi found herself just sitting on her bed. How long she’d been there, she couldn’t say. Every once in a while she’d come back to herself, think about getting up and going to do something, but by the time that happened she was already beginning to sink back into a stupor.
After a while, she realized she was looking up, trying to see something. What? She didn’t know quite what. There was something hanging over the bed. She felt it, but no, there was nothing there, only empty air. But why did her eyes keep wandering up, looking to whatever wasn’t there? There was something about the air there, something thicker than air should be. She couldn’t see anything and yet, somehow, she still felt that something was there.
I’ve got to get up,
she told herself.
I’ve got to leave.
And yet she didn’t feel any desire to move. Any time she tried to budge, she felt as if all the energy had drained from her body.
She watched the sunlight slowly coming through the window diminish and then disappear entirely. Then night came, and the glass became dark. She stared up into the air above her, waiting for something to happen, for something to appear.
Francis sat with the portable phone gripped in one hand. He had the white pages spread open on his lap. He was scanning his finger rapidly down the page when Alice came in.
She was dressed now to go out, her hair and face done up, wearing a scoop-neck top, black tights, and a jean skirt. Francis took her in approvingly at a glance before letting his gaze return to the page.
Alice put her hands on her hips. “Who are you calling at this hour?” she asked.
“Huh?” said Francis, without looking up.
“Francis, who are you calling?”
“Oh,” he said. “I was thinking of calling that girl Heidi from the radio station.”
“What?” she said. “And what exactly did you plan on telling that girl Heidi from the radio station?”
“I was planning to tell her what I discovered about the music,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why?” he repeated. He looked up, finally read her angry expression. “Well, it’s only… I thought she might find it interesting.”
“Interesting,” she said, folding her arms.
“Yes, interesting.”
She came forward and plucked the phone out of his hand. She carried it away, put it back on its wall charger.
“What’s the problem?” asked Francis, genuinely surprised.
“You know what, Sherlock—let’s drop it,” said Alice. “This is getting silly. First an hour or so of having me play the same piece of music over and over again, and now this?”
“Really?” said Francis. “You don’t think she’ll find it interesting?”
“No,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t.”
Francis sighed. He pushed the phone book closed, slid it off his lap and onto the couch. “All right,” he said.
For a moment she just stood there, looking down at him, and then her expression softened and she came over to him. She moved the phone book over on the couch, snuggled in beside him.
“Maybe we should have a date night,” she said.
“I thought date night was Friday,” he said. He spoke as if slightly hurt, like he hadn’t gotten a memo that he should have been sent.
“Yes,” she said slowly, “usually we do go out on Friday, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t go out other days, too. I was kind of hoping that we could have a date night tonight and you could take me out.”
“Um, sure,” said Francis, still half distracted. “But isn’t it a little late at night to be heading out on a date?”
“Well,” she said, “you could take me to the midnight screening of
Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder
.”
He stiffened a little. “Please tell me you’re not serious,” he said.
“Oh, I’m serious, my friend. Besides, you have free passes, right?”
He didn’t answer, just hung his head.
“Wait a minute,” she said, pulling back a little and folding her arms across her chest. “You didn’t pick up the free passes?”
“It was just,” he said, “with the way things went, I just couldn’t. I meant to go back and get them, but…”
“Francis,” she said sternly. “You promised.”
“I know but—”
“Well we’re going,” she said. “Your treat.”
Francis thought for a moment. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “
Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder
it is.”
One moment she was sitting on the bed, unable to move, staring up at the ceiling, and the next thing she knew she was wandering through the streets of Salem with no idea of how she’d gotten from one place to the other. It was strange. Suddenly there she was, walking through a seedy-looking industrial neighborhood that felt both familiar and unfamiliar, moving through a cloud of steam coming out of a vent. There on the side of the wall had been plastered a poster with that same symbol that had been on the box of that fucking record.
The Lords Are Coming
, the poster said.
She stumbled a little, kept walking, not sure what else to do until she figured out where exactly she was and how to get home. The windows on one side of the alley had been boarded up, some of the boards torn away, and the wall had been tagged. There was also, a little ways down, another poster. This one showed a terrified girl in torn clothes running through an open field, screaming, glancing back over her shoulder. Behind her was Frankenstein’s monster, its arms stiffly extended.
Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder
read the top of the poster, in words that looked like they were dripping blood.
Who would post promotional posters here?
she wondered.
Kind of a waste, right?
And then suddenly she realized that she knew this place after all, knew it all too well. Her steps slowed, stopped entirely. For a moment
she stood there, on the verge of turning around and going back, but then, almost against her will, she began moving forward again.
She approached a brown metal door in the side of a brick wall. Here she was. For a moment she stared at it.
I could still turn around
, she told herself.
I could turn on my heel and walk back to my life and still be okay.
But she knew it was too late for that.
She knocked softly on the door. She waited a moment and when it didn’t open she knocked harder, pounding this time. Abruptly the door opened a crack and Heidi saw a man’s pale and unshaven face, his bloodshot, angry eyes. He looked her up and down, suddenly recognized her.
“Ah, Heidi,” he said. “Returned to the fold I see.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said.
“And yet here you are,” he said. “How serious are you? Needle serious?”
She shook her head. “I just need something to make me feel better.”
He nodded and grinned, showing a set of carefully filed teeth. “I know what you need. Have any love for me?”
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a carefully folded bill, pushed it through the crack in the door. She saw the man’s three-fingered hand take hold of it and pull it in, and then the door closed.
She stood alone in the alley, shivering. She told herself again that she could leave anytime she wanted, but it hadn’t been true the first time she’d said it and was even less true now. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and tried not to think.
A moment later the door slid open and his hand shot out. She put hers forward and he shook it, leaving a tiny packet in her palm when he released his grip. Then the door closed and she walked away.
On the way home she passed through Leppin Park, deserted at this hour. She was surprised to see the monument there: a bronze statue of Samantha Stevens from
Bewitched
riding a broom across a crescent moon.
Wow
, she thought.
Start the day looking at memorials to witches and end it looking at bad sculpture of a TV sitcom witch. Only in Salem.
She reached out and touched the statue’s smiling face. The bronze was very cold, almost too cold to touch. For a moment, she had the impression of cold bleeding into her from the statue, running up her arm and wriggling its way deep into her bones. She held her hand steady a moment, cupping the face, and then slowly made her way home.
Francis grumbled a bit getting dressed, but finally gave in to the movie, beginning to enjoy himself. Alice was right—there was no reason that Heidi would want to know about what he’d discovered. It would just make her nervous, most likely. He had a hard time remembering sometimes that not everybody in the world was interested in knowledge for its own sake.
Despite his grumblings going out the door, Alice knew that it was a bit for show, so she let him do it, let him keep it up until they were almost to the theater and then she told him sternly he had to behave. But that was fine with him. He was having a great time, and even if he would be exhausted tomorrow from having gone to a midnight show, that’d be just fine.