Traitor to the Crown (22 page)

“The owner of the inn thinks his name is Warburton,” she answered. She folded her arms across her chest and looked out the window. “But no, nothing. He said that he was going to find Gordon, the man he was telling us about, but I don’t think he had any idea where Gordon might be.”

Proctor had the same impression. “I think that our friend, Mister Digges Church Warburton, is a man with his fingers in an awful lot of pies. He could get distracted, and we might not see him again for weeks. London is only a dozen miles away. We can walk there and see what we can find on our own.”

He looked out the window at the village. It stood on the edge of Epping Forest, and in many ways it reminded him of the small villages he knew in Massachusetts. There was an inn, a small plain church, a smithy, and a handful of houses. But in other ways, it wasn’t like home at all. It felt ancient, older than the oldest man he had ever known, and infirm with its age. The inn had almost as many gables as windows, all slapped on haphazardly, as if the building had grown from a shed over the centuries by slowly accreting rooms. Chimneys zigzagged from the rooftops as randomly as the additions. Outside, a thirty-foot maypole of slender ash rose higher than the rooftop, its simplicity a stark contrast with the building itself. The rest of the village matched the inn in character and style. There wasn’t a straight line anywhere: every door was lopsided, every wall leaned, every rooftop needed repair. The people of the village were bent odd by their own weight, an accumulation of misery, of death, loss, and betrayal. Digges told them that Proctor and Lydia had come from the Bahamas, and were looking for a quiet place to recover from some unspoken tragedy, and the people accepted it without question.

He squeezed his head to stop the pounding. Darkness
swam before his eyes, and his stomach rolled over and over, even though it was empty.

“You won’t be able to walk anywhere until you get well,” Lydia said.

“I’m not sick,” Proctor replied. “I’m just—”

He fell forward off the chair onto his hands and knees.

“Proctor!”

“Stay back,” he said, panting for air. “I can stand up—”

He fell over on his side and his temple slammed into the floor. The world around him went dark except for a single line of light, lashed at him like a whip from a distance beyond reckoning.

He rolled over, trying to dodge the whip. But the cord slashed into him, bright and painful, winding around his soul like a windlass reeling in an anchor.

He blindly grabbed at the floor, but though his nails scraped the joins, the smooth wood offered no serious purchase for his fingers. He could feel himself being pulled away, out of the inn and out over the green hills of England, just as he had been before, the time in Spain when Deborah tried to reach him. She hadn’t received his letter. Or she had, and she was calling for him anyway. There was a rush and desperation to this call. Despite his resistance, he flew across the ocean in a blink. Though he was only a spirit, he felt the wind and the power of the lash that reeled him in. He wrapped his hands around the cord of light, to keep it from slicing him in half, and clenched his jaw to keep from screaming in pain.

His eyes popped open, and he was standing in the farm house. This was not the dream, this was not anything like the dream. A bad floorboard sagged beneath his feet, he smelled the bucket full of diapers by the door, and Maggie squirmed in his arms, slapping her tiny palm against the window.

He wanted to look at her, wanted to see his daughter,
but he could scarcely see a thing. It was as black as a bad night, heavy with storms. The throbbing pain in his head was gone but it had been replaced by a thick and ominous sense of fear.

He stared out the window. He knew it was daytime, so he expected daylight, but everything was dark. Not dark like an eclipse, but dark like the sun blotted out forever. The smell of smoke was everywhere.

That much was like his dream. He tensed, expecting the heat of invisible fires to press in on him at any second.

A voice, muddled by distance and panic, sounded behind him and he turned. Abigail held two candles. She offered one to him.

The candles barely lit the room. He could see the noon meal sitting uneaten on the table, a rack of diapers hung to dry beside the fire. He turned back to the window and the darkness. It made no sense. He could not even guess what was happening. It was as if the day had arrived without a sun. It felt like the end of the world was happening.

But that wasn’t possible. The world wasn’t ending in England—it had been an ordinary spring day there.

It wasn’t possible for the world to be ending, but it was fact.

As he moved across the room, from window to window, from the outer door to the boarded-up door to the old house, he realized that he was with Deborah. That she had called to him and brought him to her.

The darkness alone did not explain the level of panic he felt coursing through her blood. He wanted to reassure her. She wasn’t reaching out to him for reassurance, though. She needed help. She needed power.

But why? He felt stretched too thin to understand, like yarn wrapped around the spindle of her spirit, pulled off a wheel the size of the world. The colors were drained
from everything, and the world revealed itself in shades of charcoal, bone, and ash.

He—she—handed Maggie to Abigail, whose face was marked by the mixture of determination and fright that seemed so characteristic of her. Then he—she—ran to the door that he had nailed shut. He saw Deborah’s small hands in front of him grab hold of the board, but he felt his strength flow through her arms as she gritted her teeth and yanked. The nails screeched as they came out of the wood, and she cast the board aside. She ran into the old part of the house and stood in front of the old hearth.

Blood flowed through the mortar, just like the blood splattered there by Cecily when she made a black altar of it. Drums thundered from far away, echoed by the tramp of countless boots, as if legions were marching on The Farm. With each beat of the drums, the stones that blocked the fireplace shook as if they were hit by a hammer. Little pieces of mortar dust fell to the floor, leaving a thin coat of dust across the drops of blood.

Deborah!

He called to her, wanted to warn her, wanted to tell her to run, to flee.

But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hear him. Instead, he could feel her drawing on him, trying to reel him in. He felt a tingling, a tickle, running over an invisible skin stretched across the sky.

He could see the lines of power forming as she performed her spell. They lit up the gray world like lightning illuminating the night. She drew power from the protective spell the two of them had laid together on the new hearth, flowing it through the beams and the joints of the house, running it over the paths worn by their feet in the floor. She drew on all that power and patched it over the old hearth like a poultice over an open wound.

The analogy was apt—the bleeding stopped. The stones
pulsed but his masonry held. The drums continued but the tramp of marching footsteps halted.

He—Deborah—ran back through the door, closing it behind her and barring it. When had she put a bar on it? She did another quick spell to seal it as well. She was working too fast—he was spread too thin—for him to follow her work.

She ran back to the window.

Outside, the dark sky churned like soup brought to boil. The sky was black with clouds, but they were no ordinary clouds—it was like smoke from a fire so vast and so distant that it rose up and blotted out the sun. He reached through the window and tried to brush the smoke away. If he could wave his arms, he could clear it away. Instead he felt it flow around him, sticking to him like a film on the back of his neck.

Not the smoke. He didn’t feel the smoke. He felt a presence in the smoke.

Suddenly he was back in the house again, behind Deborah’s eyes, desperately trying to reach her, to help her understand. She had to seal off the house, from the smoke and the thing hiding in it.

Tiny flakes of ash fell from the sky like filthy snow.

The window frames rattled, not from any wind, but from the punch of an invisible fist just like the blows that crashed the hearth. The drums intensified. The legions resumed their march.

Abigail rocked Maggie in her arms. Oh, God, Maggie was so much bigger than he remembered. She had become this little person, and she desperately wanted her mother. She was flinging herself out of Abigail’s arms, straining to reach Deborah. Abigail clutched her tighter, her mouth set grimly as tears streamed from her eyes.

And he was there.

He—Deborah—shouted at Abigail for salt but Abigail
stared at the window and didn’t respond. He—Deborah—ran to the cupboard. He took the bag from the shelf and felt the rough grains trickle through his fist like sand through an hourglass onto the windowsill. They stuck to the sweat on his palm but he didn’t pause to brush them off. He ran to the next window and poured salt along that sill too. He felt the words shape his mouth, almost understood what he was saying, but something distracted him, a tickle at the back of his neck.

Somewhere, far away, he could feel the flames feeding these clouds of smoke, and those flames had the form of a demon wrapped in a red coat of fire. Its heavy brow was topped with horns, and it wore a mocking grin across the bloody smear of its mouth. The clouds of smoke spread over the landscape like a vast, scaly arm. At the end of the arm was a taloned hand, and the hand was stroking the back of his—Deborah’s—neck. The fingers were sliding around his—Deborah’s—throat.

Choking off the words of his protective spell.

Stealing his breath.

No.

Choking off
Deborah’s
words, stealing
Deborah’s
breath.

Proctor shook off the paralysis of fear. The demon wasn’t a creature of flesh, but a creature of spirit. Deborah could never seal the farm house as long as she was tethered to Proctor’s spirit and his spirit was tethered to his body across the ocean. Like lightning running down a kite string to a key. It was her connection to him that made her vulnerable.

He could feel the demon crawling, all calluses and nails, down his back to get into the house. The stump of his missing finger burned as badly as if it had just been cut off all over again.

Proctor immediately tried pulling away from Deborah, but it was like trying to crawl out of his own skin.

In the weird split perception that he had, he felt Deborah’s emotions alongside his own. She sensed him trying to pull away, and she held on to him more tightly, angry that he was abandoning her, tying his spirit to hers with knots.

The tie would prove to be a noose for them both if he couldn’t make her understand, if he couldn’t pull away.

His spirit thrashed, like a fish on a hook hoping to snap the fisherman’s line.

The demon laughed—a sound that pierced the whitewater noise clogging Proctor’s ears—and clawed its way hand over hand, moving inexorably toward Deborah and the house. Something in Proctor’s fear and panic reached Deborah, and her own fear accelerated. She looked toward Maggie, wailing in Abigail’s arms.

Proctor had a glimpse of the demon’s bloody intent: use Proctor to reach Deborah, possess Deborah and use her to sacrifice their innocent child, then draw on the power of the child to summon its loyal host, the legions of demons that would emerge from a hellgate in Salem to march across America.

Everything the demon needed was present: a link to the spirit world, a powerful witch for its host, the blood of an innocent to feed its evil power.

Let … me … go …

Proctor tried to force the words out of Deborah’s mouth. She doubled over, coughing as if there were something in her throat.

Abigail came over and knelt beside her, trying to help her. Maggie’s tiny hands reached out from Abigail’s arms and grabbed fistfuls of her mother’s dress.

The demon came closer. The flames on the candle flashed brighter as it approached.

Proctor forced his—her—head up.

“Let … me … go …”

The words came out like a croak, but they broke
through the noise of the rapids in his ears. Abigail stared at him—at Deborah—with wide eyes and asked what he—she—meant.

Maggie dragged herself out of Abigail’s grip, spilling onto the floor.

Deborah could not pick up her daughter. Her fingers tore at her throat, trying to breathe.

The candles on the table and the mantel flared, shining as bright as torches, melting all the wax into puddles in seconds. The room plunged into darkness.

Proctor—Deborah—crawled on her hands and knees across the floor. Proctor tried to pull away, tried to climb out of Deborah’s skin, but she wouldn’t let him go. The more he struggled to escape, the tighter she held on.

Maggie’s wail pierced the pitch black. Abigail called out Deborah’s name over and over.

The walls of the house shook as though a great wind would smash them to matchsticks at any moment. Outside, the out house exploded in a shower of splinters. The barn rattled, near collapse.

And Proctor realized that his spirit was tied at two ends, one in England and another here at home at noon on the darkest day he’d ever known. If he couldn’t break the bond on this end in time, cutting off the demon’s path past Deborah’s wards, he could unravel the knot at the other end and board himself inside the house with her.

It might mean the end of him. It might leave his body a dead shell. But it was worth it to protect his wife and daughter. If this was how D was a danger to him, so be it—he’d always been willing to lay his life down for her.

He sent his mind back through his spirit. Past the wall of the house, between the darkened earth and the polluted sky. When he reached the vast cloud of smoke, he found the gloating visage of the demon in the red coat. Proctor darted one way, feinted the other, then shot past it like a wild creature escaping from some corner trap.
For a few seconds his world was a blur of sky and ocean, green hills and pale stars.

The demon let him go. Proctor was still tethered to Deborah, and the demon climbed down the other end of that rope.