Salem VI
Rebecca’s
Rising
by Jack Heath and John Thompson
Prologue
Burlington, Vermont,
October 17, 1978
T
he man stood in the shadows,
shivering, rocking from foot
to foot to keep his toes from
freezing and watched his
breath whiten in the cold air.
It was only mid-October, but up here
in Vermont the unseasonably frigid
night felt like January. Across the
street the lights of Davis Hall
burned through the clear air and
reflected a dull glow off the
frost-rimmed grass.
The man checked his watch. Nearly
four a.m. Most of the college kids
seemed to have turned in for the
night, because the vast majority of
the room lights were off. The man
didn’t care about most of the kids at
all. He cared about one single kid, in
room 321, and he didn’t care about
hours, and he knew the room’s three
occupants were totally dead to the
world. He’d made sure of that,
because earlier that afternoon,
dressed as a University of Vermont
janitor, he had picked the lock on their
room and injected their pony keg
with a little mixture of his own, a
concentrate of dissolved sleeping
pills that would put them down deeper
than the alcohol ever could. The whole
point was to make sure they were
sufficiently unconscious so the
smoke and heat could do their job.
And now as he watched the
window, he saw the first wisp of
smoke escape. It was very subtle.
If he hadn’t been staring at the
window he never would have seen
it. It meant that the very small
incendiary device he had planted in
one of the room’s electrical outlets
had ignited and was starting to feed
on the old dormitory’s walls. The
him in the way a parent might. He
cared about him the way a risk
management specialist cares about
looming liability. The kid wasn’t a
problem yet, but the man knew he
had the potent