Book Excerpt
“Please talk to me,” he said, gazing
up at the painting. Just like almost
any portrait of a Puritan woman,
Rebecca Nurse was unquestionably
not pretty in her black dress with a
high white collar. She sat in a rocking
chair working on a piece of
embroidery as her unsmiling face
gazed out of the portrait.
Until very recently, John had hated
the portrait, which had come as part
of the furnishings of the house he’d
inherited from his great aunt. His
aunt’s one condition on giving him
the house had been that Rebecca’s
portrait had to remain hanging in
the house. For years John had never
understood his aunt’s reasoning, but
he had honored that condition,
hanging the portrait out of sight.
He used to joke that Rebecca Nurse
had been “as ugly as a Rottweiler
with a sore ass,” but that was before
the spirit of Rebecca Nurse helped
him avenge the murder of his late
wife. Until a few weeks ago, John
Andrews would have scoffed at the
idea of spirits, and when Rebecca
first appeared to him, he had feared
he was losing his mind. However,
after the events of the past few
weeks, his cynicism, or what he
might have called his reporter’s
skepticism, had been totally
demolished. He no longer had any
doubt spirits existed or that they
could communicate with the living,
or, for that matter, that Devil
worshippers had been living around
him in Salem.
It turned out the Coven had
operated in Salem for the past three
hundred years and been responsible
not only for the Salem witch trials,
of which Rebecca Nurse had been the
final victim, but also for countless
blood sacrifices over the intervening
centuries. John Andrews knew he
was a man whose sense of certainty
about everything in life had been
badly weakened.
In fact, he now acknowledged that
the spirit of Rebecca Nurse was the
reason he had survived the events of
the past month. She had been the
key to unlocking the Coven’s foul
secrets and had shown him the
secret door that allowed him to
attack them in their underground
lair. In so doing she had opened him
up to the mystical or spiritual
power—whatever it had been, he
still had no idea what to call it—that
had allowed him to kill the leaders of
the Coven. As a result, John had
moved Rebecca’s portrait and it now
hung where it belonged, in the place
of highest respect and visibility in
his home, right above the
mantelshelf.
Having spent his professional life
as a journalist, Andrews had been
armored with a heavy sense of
skepticism and doubt that would
have made it nearly impossible for
anyone to convince him of the things
he had now experienced personally.
These days he not only believed that
the spirits of the dead could
communicate with the living, he
actually missed having that
communication and wished Rebecca
Nurse would continue to guide him
as she had in the days when they
struggled together against the
Salem Coven. However, as if their
victory over the Coven had somehow
released her spirit to go wherever
spirits went when they were at
peace, Rebecca Nurse remained
silent as she had in the days
following Andrews’s final battle with
the Salem Coven.
Andrews stood in front of the
painting for another few seconds.
“Not talking to me again today? You
even there anymore, or have you
gone on permanent vacation? Not
that you don’t deserve a permanent
vacation, of course, after everything
that happened to you. I hope you’re
someplace with palm trees and a
nice beach and people to bring you
those little drinks with umbrellas in
them. And no offense, but I hope you
can finally get out of those heavy
black clothes, maybe get some
shorts and sandals.” Finally, he
shrugged, knowing anyone who
overheard him would think he was
absolutely nuts, and he went to
the front door to bring in the
morning papers. He grabbed
The New York Times, Wall
Street Journal, and Washington
Post, tossed them onto the
counter, went to the
coffeemaker and hit the on
button then went back, pulled
the papers from their plastic
tubes and started scanning
the morning headlines.
He always read The New
York Times first and skimmed
over the paper’s descriptions
of disasters and conflicts
around the world: another
battle in Afghanistan, a car
bombing in Iraq targeting
Shiites, flooding in
Thailand, a riot over
growing unemployment in
Spain. Strangely, when
Andrews read world
events, he actually found
they relaxed him. At least
these were
straightforward things
that happened month in
and month out, year
after year. A