“Too bad you won’t live long enough to enjoy it,” said one of the constables, laughing.
“What happens when I die?” she asked. “Who gets the land?”
“Your former patron, of course,” the marshal said. Through Freya’s marriage, her husband’s death, and her subsequent arrest, Thomas Putnam would soon become the richest landowner in Salem Town.
chapter forty-three
Fork in the Road
“Leave me alone!” Someone was shaking Freddie when all he wanted was to sleep. His head pounded as if it had been struck on the side with a steel bat, and he heard a faint, annoying buzzing sound, like fluorescent lights. A glare pressed against his eyelids. He covered his head with his arms and tried to shut it all out. What had happened last night? Had he tied one on with Troy at the North Inn again? He rolled onto his side and curled into a ball. He would retrace his steps later when he could think.
“Rise and shine, sunshine god!” came a rumbling voice.
“Get up!” Hands pushed at him from all sides.
“What time is it?” He groggily opened his eyes and made out a blur of pixies around him. “What are you doing here? Go away!”
He turned back onto his side and glanced around. He was in bed in a hospital wing. The room appeared as still and colorless as a black-and-white photograph. It was certainly not the twenty-first century but another era entirely. What was going on? Where was he? This sure didn’t look like anywhere in North Hampton.
Begrudgingly, he pushed himself into an upright position. Rows of black metal-framed beds—each with two plump pillows, crisp white sheets that illustrated the term hospital corners, and a folded gray blanket—ran along the length of the room, separated by tall windows that flooded the room with a glaring white light. Globe lights dangled from the high ceiling, serving no purpose whatsoever, filled with dead moths. The gray marble floors gleamed, reflecting the harsh light. Then there was that grating low hum in the background, coming from nowhere in particular.
“Whew!” said Idrick, twirling his gray felt hat. “We were worried there for a second. Do you need anything, Freddie?” His voice had an unpleasant echo.
Nyph came over and placed a hand on Freddie’s shoulder. Her hair looked electrified. She had black smudges all over her face, one white glove, which was blackened, and her green satin gown was tattered and torn, revealing her combat boots.
“What happened to you?” he asked before realizing he looked just as bad—his jeans dirty, his sweatshirt torn. He lifted a sleeve to his nose: it smelled of flowery fabric softener.
Everything came back to him in that instant. Going through the portal at Fair Haven down the yellow brick road to the bottom of the world. Meeting the serpent. Playing riddles. Getting his trident back. Killing the serpent. The explosion. “Where are we?”
Irdick sat down beside him. “A waiting station on the yellow brick road. Sort of a nonplace, hence the colorless atmosphere. Neither here nor there, if you get what I mean.”
Kelda sat on Freddie’s other side as she attempted to open an overly complicated plastic red cap on a bottle of water. “You and Nyph were taking way too long, so we came searching for you. We went down to Jörmungandr’s lair but there was nothing but a pile of snake bones, scales, and ashes. Then we started digging a little and found you two buried underneath all that rubbish. Good riddance, by the way. He was a pest.”
“So we brought you here to recover,” Sven said smugly. “You’re welcome.”
“You all right, Nyph?” Freddie asked.
“Yeah,” the little pixie said wanly. “I’m okay.”
Freddie smiled. “What about the trident?”
“It wasn’t there,” Irdick replied, shrugging. “We looked.”
“But I had it—I used it—”
“Yeah, we know, but it wasn’t there, man.”
Freddie cursed. He needed fresh air—the hospital was stuffy and smelled of formaldehyde. He pushed at the pixies, trying to stretch out. “Open a window, please.”
“Don’t!” said Sven. “For one, you might go into a perpetual slumber. The air is filled with the serpent’s poison—his dying breath. But we do bring some good news. Whatever you did down there reopened the passages of time somehow. Either that or the Fallen, those Blue Blood vampires, are getting their act together finally. As they say, that’s another story, but something’s definitely going on in the passages of time.”
“Oh, and we got our powers back,” added Irdick. “Can’t you feel it?”
Freddie stretched. “Yeah, I felt it when I held my trident again. But right now I just feel like crap.” He brought a hand to his temple and rubbed. “Ouch!”
Kelda handed him the water bottle. “Drink!”
Freddie sighed, trying to think beyond the excruciating thumping in his head. He drank the water, which was ice cold and delicious. He blinked. His headache had miraculously vanished. A little hydration went a long way. Hangovers and the murder of serpents seemed to require the same remedy.
“So the passages are open—what are we waiting for? Let’s go get Freya back,” he said.
“Not so fast,” Sven said. “Freya’s fine. Val went to get Thor and Erda to fetch her.”
Freddie raised an eyebrow. He wondered what Ingrid’s cop boyfriend thought of that.
“While you’re still missing your trident,” Kelda reminded. “We need to find it! That thing’s too dangerous to leave around.”
“Destroyed a bridge, killed Jörmungandr, who knows what else it will do next,” piped in Irdick, who couldn’t stop fussing with his hat—twirling it with a flourish, then tossing it upward, where it hung in midair. He grabbed the hat suspended above him and placed it back on his head.
“It can’t have gone far,” Kelda said. “Probably just went deeper into, you know…” Down below…
The abyss.
Limbo.
Freddie remembered the painting of Balder at Fair Haven and realized here was a chance to save Killian as well. “Okay then, let’s—”
Kelda cut him off, placing a finger to his lips. A noise reminiscent of a sneaker skidding on a basketball court came from the adjacent room, then heels, two resounding sets, clacked along the marble floor. “Nurses Fenja and Menja,” she whispered, eyes wide. “The twins make the rounds every hundred or so years. Don’t make eye contact, or they’ll see you. Hide!”
The pixies scrambled under the bed, and Freddie hid under the sheet, pulling the blanket over him as the clicking heels approached. He had heard of Fenja and Menja, who were jötnar, snow giants. So now the twins roamed the halls of the hospital waiting station. He wondered what would happen if he did make eye contact.
After the destruction of the Bofrir bridge, the gods had been scattered, displaced hither and thither in all the corners of the nine worlds of the universe, some like his family, the Vanir, had been trapped in Midgard. These two seemed to think working as nurses was far better than being slaves chained to a king’s grindstone, which was pretty much all he knew of the sisters’ history. Although they had cleverly eluded King Fróði by grinding out the stone that produced his happiness and wealth until there was nothing left of it and their shackles fell loose.
The door to the hospital room swung open, and two giant nurses in white uniforms and caps strode in with clipboards. The sisters looked left and right, strutting down the aisle between the rows of beds, heads held high.
Freddie peeked out from under the blankets, but he was too distracted by the sisters’ formidable cleavage to make eye contact. He pulled the sheet over his eyes as they clipped past. When Fenja and Menja reached the end of the room, one of them flipped a switch. The room went pitch-black and the maddening hum from nowhere abruptly stopped.
There was the sound of the door opening and closing, and Freddie and the pixies came up for air. “All clear?” he asked.
“Yeah, they’re gone. And they seem to have taken everything else with them,” Nyph said, annoyed.
They
were standing in nothing—the hospital was gone, as were the beds and the floor. Freddie looked around. It was familiar. After all, he had once been imprisoned here for five thousand years. This was the abyss.
“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go get my stuff back,” he said.
chapter forty-four
Crucible
“Oh dear! I believe we’ve arrived.” Ingrid pulled her silk cape and petticoat from the muck, hopping to a drier spot in her brown leather lace-up boots. She was relieved to see Troy standing by a stone trough, looking about, his dark leather suitcase in hand. Along with his hammer, he had packed two ingots of gold for the trip. As pious and pure as Puritans portended to be, they were not above receiving a bribe.
A horse nudged her with his nose, and she patted his neck. “What’s the date, Mr. Horse?” Needless to say, the horse did not reply.
Troy turned to Ingrid. “Here, give me your bag.” He took Ingrid’s luggage and hid it with his beneath some bales of hay. “I don’t think the Salem witch hunts qualify as pleasurable, but traveling with you, my dear ‘Mrs. Overbrook,’ certainly is!” He followed this with a wink and that fetching dimple of his.
She narrowed her eyes at him as she straightened Freya’s gold pendant at her neck, then pulled the large hood of her cape over her head. Had it been too much to hope that Troy would not read into her choosing to go with him as a sign of affection? She felt a pang when she thought of Matt back there, alone, unable to help.
The jarring, headachy feeling one experienced coming out of the passages was not dissimilar to jet lag, and it did take a few days to adjust. Time traveling could sometimes be more approximate than accurate, especially while journeying backward. Ingrid hoped they hadn’t landed too far off their mark.
Troy dusted the hay off his cape, adjusted his high-crowned hat, and they stepped into the pale light of a small cobblestone alleyway. It was early morning and a fishy, rotten scent laced the cool, salty air. Ingrid immediately recognized that smell on the breeze—and the alleyway.
They had landed in the right place. This was Salem Town, and Ingrid had lived here once before, even had some very fond memories of the small port.
That is until…
She felt her knees give way as they strolled along the cobblestones.
“You all right, Mrs. Overbrook?” Troy asked. He placed a hand at her waist to steady her as she walked.
She nodded her thanks.
She had loved the town until the marshals came for her and Freya, wrenching her and her sister from Joanna’s grasp. Ingrid brought her trembling fingers to her temple and sought to shut the memories out as they strained to push their way back. Now it was a matter of finding out if they had arrived at the proper time, before the date of Freya’s hanging.
They heard noises somewhere down the way and walked out onto Essex Street, where a crowd waited, restlessly peering in one direction. A craggy-faced woman slammed into Ingrid. “Come and buy your witch poppet! Hang her from a noose!” she sang, carrying a basket of little rag dolls in scarlet bodices with embroidery thread tied around their necks. Like the red paragon bodice Bridget Bishop wore when she allegedly came to men as a specter in the night, smothering and choking them, Ingrid remembered with a start.
Ingrid knew exactly what day it was now. These early risers had eschewed their morning labors for some entertainment.
It was Friday, June 10, 1692.
The day the first witch would hang.
“Bridget Bishop!” Ingrid whispered.
“The cart!” Troy said gravely. “It should be coming up Prison Lane. What can we do to stop this, Ingrid?”
She shook her head. “Nothing!” Her heart sank. “It’s too late!”
“Bring the witch bitch!” someone cried.
“Witch bitch!” people echoed.
“Teach the whore witch a lesson!”
“Come and buy your Bridget Bishop poppet and hang her from the noose! Hang her right here!” sang the street peddler, twirling a Bridget doll on her finger from the string at its neck. A mother bought one for her child.
Ingrid tried to quell the panic rising in her throat. Freya was here somewhere—but where? Freya could hang any day now. All they could do was find her as quickly as they could.
The crowd cheered and hooted. Feeling faint, Ingrid grabbed Troy’s arm, and he tugged her protectively against him. The crowd shoved them against a wall. Bridget Bishop was to hang at eight A.M. at the top of Gallows Hill.
Bridget was a proud, intelligent woman with what one of her accusers described in his deposition as a “smooth, flattering manner.” The poor, doomed woman had been carefully selected as the first to stand trial because she had the most damning evidence against her with a tainted past and history with the courts. The judges had wanted this first win.
This was what Ingrid knew: Twelve years ago, Bridget had been summoned to court on suspicion of bewitching some horses and turning into a cat. Though she had been cleared of these charges, it didn’t matter. The stain on her reputation had remained. Plus, she had been to court for marital quarreling (her face was bruised), considered a criminal offense, and another time for calling her second husband an “old devil” on the Sabbath. She and the husband had paid for the offenses by standing gagged back to back for an hour in the market square with notices of their crimes posted on their foreheads.
At what was to be Bridget’s very last trial, the afflicted girls—the Salem foursome: Abigail Williams, Betty Parris, Mercy Lewis, and Ann Putnam Jr.—had provided all the drama the judges had needed to seal the deal. They fell into fits as soon as they were brought into the meetinghouse and saw Bridget. They cried out all the usual: how Bridget’s specter did pinch, bite, and choke them, and insisted they sign her book.
Ann, who had begun to emerge as one of the most quick-witted, claimed Bridget had wrenched her from her spinning wheel and carried her on a pole to the river, where she threatened to drown her if she did not sign the book. Abigail said that she saw ghosts appear inside the meetinghouse. “You murdered us!” they cried at Bridget. Mercy Lewis confirmed she saw the ghosts, too.
The girls had been ruthless, unrelenting. They mirrored Bridget’s gestures in an exaggerated way, confounding the woman as the judges badgered her with circuitous questioning.
But Bridget held her own quite well. She said she had never seen these girls prior to her examination. She was from Salem Town and had never even set foot in the village before. Why would she wish harm to complete strangers?
Poor Bridget had not one friend to attest to her character, let alone a defense lawyer. Neighbors testified she was a witch. A man claimed she had struck his child with a deadly illness that killed him. Men said her form had come to them at night in a red bodice. A strip search by jury members yielded a “preternatural teat” between Bridget’s “vagina and anus.” Finally, there was also hard evidence: poppets found in Bridget’s cellar walls. Ingrid had often wondered if those rag dolls had not been planted to solidify the case.
“Here she comes! Here she comes!”
Ingrid craned her neck. All she could see were caps, hats, dirty clothes, and capes. Troy pushed forward, and the crowd ceded enough for them to move to the front. It all unraveled like the very worst kind of dream, but there was no waking from it.
“There she is!”
“It’s the witch!”
“Witch bitch!” the chant took up again. “Hang the witch!”
The procession moved westward on Essex: men on horses, magistrates, judges, marshals, constables.
Inside the cart Bridget stood upright in chains, holding up her shaved head, arms crossed over her soiled and torn shift. Her piercing brown eyes with dark circles beneath them stared out above the crowd, her full lips, parched and scabby, moving faintly. Ingrid could tell Bridget had been an attractive, sensual woman, but all of that had been beaten out of her now. She looked gaunt, dirty, tired. She glared down at the crowd jeering at her.
Ingrid recog
nized two key players from her past. There they were again: the burly, somber, and formidable Mr. Thomas Putnam, dressed in black upon his horse, and the sniveling Reverend Parris in his minister’s collar and frock, walking behind the cart, Bible in hand.
Then the afflicted girls appeared. They were anywhere from twelve to seventeen and, apparently, well enough to be here despite the “witchcrafts” inflicted “in and upon” their bodies, as Bridget’s death warrant stated. They worked the crowd, whisking them into a furious frothing frenzy, striding close to the cart, mocking the poor, bereft Bridget. They sneered. They smiled in ecstasy. Ingrid remembered them from her own trial in Salem Village, when she and Freya had used the same futile defense as Bridget. Why would they wish any kind of harm to girls they had never met nor seen prior to court?
“She’s praying,” Ingrid remarked, observing Bridget’s moving lips. “Praying for us to see her innocence.” She tugged at her hood to conceal her tears. Troy stared stoically. The sun flooded the street. The crowd smelled dirty and sweaty. If it weren’t for Troy to hold on to, Ingrid would have crumpled.
The cart approached, and Ingrid heard the girls’ words. It was all theatrics.
“Getting yours now, aren’t you?” said one very prepossessing girl, whom Ingrid gathered was Abigail Williams, one of the ringleaders.
An older girl with a fair complexion—Mercy Lewis, it had to be—cried out, “You look so very proud now, but when you see the noose, we’ll see if you look proud then, Goody Bishop! Oh, how you did taunt and torture me!”
“You won’t be torturing us anymore!” added a third young girl. Ann Putnam?
Ingrid felt a chill.
They were untouchable. Monsters.
Ingrid and Troy fell wordlessly into step with the procession following the cart down Essex. What was there to do or say? This was their history, a history of blood and madness. Little girls telling lies and spreading evil.