The Grimoire
Set a half-century before the infamous 1692 Salem witch trials, the story of a forgotten coven of accused New England witches is told via the quest of an enigmatic witch-finder known only as “Q.” who has been appointed by the colonists of Massachusetts Bay to “discover” the witches they fear are lurking among them.
Q. is accompanied by the equally mysterious Thomas Morton--who may or may not actually be the devil in disguise--and becomes increasingly obsessed with his discovery of the titular “Grimoire”, a purportedly magical book. The pieties and improprieties of the mistrustful New England colonists are recounted in this darkly comic tale of what is perhaps the strangest period in America’s history.
Excerpt
They have ridden straight there at a brisk pace, tiring out their horses, and now they stand in curious limbo. Neither in nor out, and for a long-drawn moment they think that they might be left just there, just so. To await perhaps the Second Coming.
The two men are dressed in silk, one dark, one light. The first has short and bone-white hair, the other has longer hair of raven-feathered black. The servant girl bars the threshold and eyes them with ferocity.
“There is no room here for to spend the night,” says she. “There’s a tavern on the green, best seeke ye there.”
The white-haired man thinks then, she has forgotten and they have all forgotten me. Perhaps assumed or rather hoped that l be dead just like the witch.
But he is not dead like the witch is, only old. He is merely old, so old and in some strange manner aged even beyond his God-allotted years. And the witch, he knows, they have not forgotten and shall not forget. The curse of her mortal coil had been lifted from them but not the oppression of her immortal soul. She hangs still across their horizons, black as sackcloth, hot as blood.
“Wherefrom hail ye?” asks the girl.
“Speak ye truthfully: we hail from hell.” whispers the man with hair like raven’s pinions into his ear.
“We are come from Salem-town,” says the other.
“Precisely,” whispers the first.
The girl does not seem to regard the tall dark laughing man at all but looks only upon the lighter. Perhaps this one does remember me, he thinks, if only dimly. She is old enough to remember and thirteen years ago is not so long as it is unlucky.
Yet remember him or nay, there is naught more that needs to be said. The very name of Salem is enough. At that name the girl’s pole-cat visage begins to soften.
“From Salem-town..” she repeats.
“We seeke an audience with your master, that is all.”
The girl looks uncertain.
“But so late anight…”
“We shan’t require much time,” answers the shorter man slowly, with infinite patience. “Just a few brief words with your master.
Then we shall be on our way.”
Three quarters of an hour later, the white-haired man emerges. He is relieved that they did not throw him in the jail, though he would not have fought them if they had. He bears in his possession a hand-drawn map which he had told them he would incinerate after using, as well as the lantern to be used in that burning and in the finding of the grave. He holds the lantern high to slash the misty dark and walks on.
The salt-tang of the marsh and the damp sea-cold cling to every inch of skin and every moon-white follicle of his hair. Light burns behind the leaded glass windows of the houses arrayed around the green. They seem entirely to ignore his existence but he knows it is not so. In a town so small as this one no stranger nor emissary of the outside world goes unnoted. He pulls the brow of his hat down tightly and goes on, leaving the square behind.
It would not do to have put her where the cattle graze. So the map said, so common sense agreed. He walks on to where the salt grass ends and the forest begins its spread. Then further on he finds a path within the arbor.
Then further still and following his scribbles, turning past a tall grey pine scrawled in miniature upon his map, along a crude footpath tramped flat by deer or Indians. Further along he seeks for landmarks commensurate with his map, sees only twisting oaks and writhing scrub.
He stops.
There is something else, a black on black place where the nascent moonrays do not go. Under the gnarled branches of ancient cedars it is as though God had dropped his paintbrush, had forgotten his own pronouncement regarding light. There is no mark to recommend the void there but the absence of any mark makes it seize him all the more. He pauses, looks again at the map in the glare of the lantern, looks back up.
Then two yellow eyes peer at him from out that emptiness. In the light of the eyes he see a huge black mastiff, crouching upon its haunches, waiting upon him.
He draws near to the dog and then the dog rises up unhurriedly and then is gone. He pulls the shovel from off his back and begins to dig there.
The marsh mud is wet and heavy. His arms first quake and strain to lift it up. Then he finds some strange strength within himself and he digs faster.
Down he goes and he had suspected she would lie shallow and she does. He stops when metal clangs off the shovel tip. He drops the shovel, wipes the sweat from off his forehead, crouches down then into his own hole, digging all around her with his front paws like a dog.
And some unholy miracle of the salt marsh or perhaps not of this earth has preserved her form exactly as he remembered. He claws the mud from off her gangly limbs, still clothed in the rags she had worn in her final destitution. He claws the mud from off her hollowed chest, her goose’s neck, her withered teats. He claws the mud from off her body but he does not exhume her face. He does not and cannot look on her visage once more, not even in death. So her head remains stuck beneath the mud.
A great spire arises from out her chest, like one of the great old cathedral spires but kittywampus. It is made of muddy iron and rusted blood-red. He realizes it is no hearth poker or scrap of gridiron but must have been made expressly for what it was now.
“Such sophisticated craft wrought to such crude purpose,” says a voice from above his hole.
He looks up and sees the visage of the dark one peering down.
“While their divines debate the minutiae of Calvinist election these bumpkins are staking old hag’s corpses in the muck to prevent them from arising on judgement day.”
He himself turns back to his work and exerts himself in pulling up the stake.
“Peradventure she had struck them all impotent. Imagine that--a curse of unholy flaccidity upon all of those Puritan pricks. Imagine their consternation and the relief of their poor wives. And only with her demise the curse revoked--or lifted, I should rather say, to the tune of many merrie toasts, raised mugs and members.”
He does not reply. The stake is stuck deep within a mound upon her breast and it is curious heavy. He braces himself with feet astride her and pulls the slippery thing up from the ground, swiveling it from side to side. The mud gives and then her body gives too, her cracked ribs yielding where the stake had braced them, all of it falling in until the sharp point of the stake shoots out.
“But you,” the dark man asks him, “You are a different sort of creature than they. Why do you this, and why now? Why give you a fig for their vulgar superstitions?”
The man with the white hair tosses the stake out into the forest. He sees that what had made the stake so heavy was a rusted horseshoe which they had hung upon it, the like of which they hang furtively upon the sides of their cottages and barns. A charm of good fortune applied to desperate ends. He wipes his hands. He looks up and seems to think on this, and then for the first time in some long years, he answers the other’s query.
“I do not reckon that I know.”
Thus he says, and that is all. On hands and knees now, he clambers up from his hole, then sets the lantern fire to the map. In the seawind it flares up and burns away quickly to a puff of sparking ash. He looks at her bones, then rests his own old bones for a moment more before taking up his shovel.
He begins the work of burying the witch anew.
