Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem Read online

  Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem

  Title Page

  PART I

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  PART II

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  PART III

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  PART IV

  Epilogue

  Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem

  by

  Vera Jane Cook

  An Imprint of

  Musa Publishing

  Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem

  By Vera Jane Cook

  Copyright © Vera Jane Cook, 2011

  Smashwords edition

  …

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  …

  This e-Book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.

  Musa Publishing

  633 Edgewood Ave

  Lancaster, OH 43130

  www.MusaPublishing.com

  …

  Published by Musa Publishing, December 2011

  …

  This e-Book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. No part of this ebook can be reproduced or sold by any person or business without the express permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-61937-918-3

  Published in the United States of America

  Editor: Rory Olsen

  Cover Design: Lisa Dovichi

  Interior Book Design: Coreen Montagna

  Warning

  This e-book contains adult language and scenes. This story is meant only for adults as defined by the laws of the country where you made your purchase. Store your e-books carefully where they cannot be accessed by younger readers.

  For Marianna and the mist, and the fog, on Lake Road, with Annabel.

  PART I

  DOMINION

  Chapter One

  Some say I am a stain on your history, a nameless statistic—a grotesque misfortune that is alluded to in your textbooks. I cannot disagree. Allow me to introduce myself as I am. Patience Annabel Horton is my given name, though I refer to myself as Annabel, never much caring to claim a virtue I do not possess. I am in spirit form for the most part, though it was not always so.

  It was in the year 1692, in the village of Salem, in the state of Massachusetts, that I swung by my neck. Many of us died there, such needless, senseless tragedies.

  There was evil in Salem Village in 1692, but it was not in the soul of any of those women they hanged. Poor Goodwife Nurse, now she was the saddest of the lot to be taken to the tree. No more of a witch than poor Bridget Bishop. No one was safe from the devil’s fire; certainly I was not, not with my detachment, my disinterest in the other girls of my village and their silly games. You see, I knew I had powers, and it kept me apart, but I told no one my secrets. Of course, I only tell you now because it no longer matters.

  But I am not here to condemn anyone for my suffering. So do not be alarmed. As you may or may not know, men who believed they were doing God’s work chastised many of Salem’s citizens as witches and brought us to trial. Many, like myself, were hanged. I was eighteen years old.

  I will tell you what really happened in Salem Village before the century turned. You never learned the truth of it. Your history books do not contain the truth, but I will open the veil of time for you.

  * * * *

  Before my death, one year to be exact, a presence came to me.

  “Who goes there?” I called in the dark. The form was like mist. The answer was like wind.

  “Leave me, ghost,” I whispered coarsely.

  The wind became a breeze and caressed my lips. I knew I had been kissed, and I shuddered.

  “Who are you?” I asked softly. The form appeared to be that of a man.

  “Yours,” I thought I heard him say.

  “You hold me in your arms, and yet I cannot see you.” I looked around the room. I felt his movement. Once again, he came so close.

  The wind was like a dance as it lifted the hair from my brow. The air around my body felt so light and sensual. I seemed touched by a gentleness. It caused my heart to pound.

  “Show yourself,” I commanded.

  He circled the room, a tall gray mist. I was sure his hair was black, his eyes as dark as evening.

  After that, I waited for him every night, and almost every night he came to me. It was not long before I fell in love with this spirit, as helplessly in love as any restless young woman can be.

  These ghostly visits continued right up until my physical death. I always knew when he was near because the air would become faint with the scent of fresh rain and I would feel drugged with the fragrance that lingered in my room.

  “You smell like late afternoons in summer, after a rainfall,” I told him, but he did not answer. He spoke to me so seldom. It was quite by chance that I heard his whisper.

  “Matthew,” he said.

  “Matthew is your name?” I asked.

  I listened so carefully as the shutters moved and some papers on my bureau fluttered like wings.

  “Matthew?” I asked again. “Oh, please speak more. Tell me where you come from?”

  My illusive shadow was silent.

  “Matthew. Matthew, speak to me! Show me your face. Let me see the hand that strokes me.”

  Suddenly, the wind returned. “I am so far,” he uttered.

  “Surely you must be a spirit from another time,” I said.

  Miraculously, the papers on my bureau flew around and around again, as if chasing each other in a playful game of tag.

  I knew he could not reach me, could not fully pass beyond the barriers between us. Yet I felt him like an artist must feel his subject.

  “You are tall,” I said. “Your shirt has cuffs of white and I
have images of your smile. Does time part us, Matthew? Are the centuries between us too vast?”

  I saw a shadowy light. It shone before me and revealed a man of great height, but in a split second the light was gone, the image within too oblique to recall.

  * * * *

  Soon after his first visit, I received letters. They appeared out of nowhere. I would find them all over the house, always beginning: To my wife.

  “What’s this?” I stammered as I held the letters in my hand.

  Know that I love you and I’ll come to protect you, he had written.

  His notes were always signed with the letter M, for his first name.

  “Matthew,” I whispered. “How is it that you can leave notes about the house and yet not show me your face?”

  But my ghost was silent and could not find a way to answer me.

  “Why do you sign only with the letter M?” I asked. “Is Matthew really your name?”

  Silence remained, as still as the night wind beyond my window.

  I began to think that I had truly gone insane. Oftentimes, I doubted the presence of my ghost, and I questioned Father about the mysterious letters. For surely, I thought, the sun must be too hot and had affected my brain.

  “Father, I have received notes of affection. Do you know who sends them?”

  Father laughed. “A neighbor’s boy must surely be culprit to the bow of Cupid, daughter.”

  Ha! I knew better. No neighbor’s boy in Salem would dare call me his wife. I frightened the boys of my village. They thought me haughty and illusive. Oh, there was a young man from Andover with the courage to court me, and I might have married him if not for my fascination with my ghostly lover, but I never got that chance.

  It must be you who writes me. Mustn’t it be so, Matthew?

  If only I had known then that it would be centuries before I would see the face of my beloved. But in 1692, I could only cherish his words, so I made myself a wooden box and covered his letters with a beautiful purple cloth. I placed all the letters inside. I then covered the box with a square piece of coarse fabric and hid it under the tallest elm tree by Frost Fish Brook. Many afternoons that year I read the letters in the shadow of the branches. The writer’s hand was full of lovely twists and loops, and the ink was black.

  Had I not died so soon, I might have lived my life with my ghostly lover and never come to know him as a man of flesh. I would have assumed that some lost spirit had written the letters and had found a way to leave them inside the house. But, that innocence was not to be, and it was not fate that made it so.

  It was Urbain, Urbain Grandier, and the power given him.

  Chapter Two

  This is my magic, my ability to see spirits, or to feel them. But is it evil? Is it harmful to anyone? I think not. None of us were of the devil, and Reverend Parris’s slave knew it. Yes, Tituba knew it. The children knew it too. I begged Father to take me to New York to escape the madness of murders around us, but we could not leave the farm, and Father did not believe that any harm would ever come to me. My brothers swore they would protect me, but I knew better. I knew I would be named a witch and taken to the tree. I could not sleep at night or enjoy the sun as it burst upon me in the mornings.

  Soon enough, they served me my warrant as I lay in the field praying that God would see fit to help me. Ann Putnam had accused me. She hardly knew me, but she had seen me in Andover buying wheat and grain for the farm. My brother James tried to shield my face from hers when she fell on the ground before me and writhed at my feet. She pointed and held her side in pain.

  “She torments me!” she screamed.

  I fell into my brother’s arms and wept.

  “Look into her eyes,” she called to all who listened. “They are of the devil, green as evil’s slime.”

  I turned from her accusations, but she would not desist.

  “Begone, witch,” she called.

  And the townspeople came and stood around me. They looked into my eyes and said, “Yes, it must be so.”

  “She accuses everyone that comes to mind,” I pleaded.

  “She is weak and stupid,” I heard my brother say.

  I took his hand. I knew that I could not prevent my fate, surrounded as I was by fools.

  I hated the insidious evil that had inflicted the village. God, cure them, I prayed. They have surely gone mad.

  * * * *

  I knew the truth and tried to speak it, yet none would hear it. There was only one other that knew as much as I did: the Reverend’s slave girl, Tituba. Yes, Tituba knew. She recognized the darkness and made a pact with the devil, and the devil saved her from the tree. I made no pact with the devil; I swayed by my neck in the August sun.

  You might as well know the truth. It was the slave girl that told the children stories of witchcraft. That is true. The stories came with her from the slave ships. They were a part of her heritage. But it was Thomas Putnam that used the Arawat to incite the children.

  “Give them your magic,” he told her. “I will see you safely removed from Salem when the time is right.”

  And why should she not survive in a land that sold her kind like meat at the village square?

  “What will you have me do?”

  He bent down close and held her face firmly in his hand. “Fill their heads with the nonsense that is in yours.”

  So Tituba planted the seed in the minds of the children because Thomas Putnam bade her to do so. The ignorance and cruelty that surrounded her was fuel for the devil’s fire. Do not blame the slave girl. She believed she would save her own soul by recognizing evil when she stood in the presence of it.

  I will tell you where the evil thrived in Salem. It was in the child, Abigail Williams, and in the deviousness of the town leaders. They should have destroyed the girl right off and recognized the vindictive plan behind Thomas Putnam’s perfidious handshake.

  What wickedness there was. Surely, both were the devil’s prey. Tituba knew this. She also knew that none would accept that evil could dwell in a child’s soul. Yes, Tituba knew better, and she saw the devil’s presence in the child the day she followed the girl out to Crane River.

  It was an afternoon in late spring. I learned of it as I sat in jail awaiting my trial.

  Tituba had watched as Abigail Williams held a child’s puppy, a sweet thing named Lark, under water, despite the poor dog’s struggle for freedom. Tituba had fallen to her knees in fear as Abigail held poor Lark down by his neck and sang a church song as she did. The puppy yelped and whined for air, but Abigail continued to sing and to giggle and to hold the poor dog down until it was silent.

  Tituba watched quietly as the child dragged the dog’s poor limp body from the water and poked it with a stick. The sweet brown hair was matted and wet, the eyes still open in fear. Then Abigail sat by the dead puppy and sang. Certainly, the child was the devil’s own, and Tituba knew it. Anyone who was not of the devil would have known it.

  Later that evening, Tituba went out to Porter’s Hill with fresh chicken blood and called forth the witches of light. She asked for protection against the white man’s evil. She called forth the witches, but it was the devil who answered her call.

  The next morning, when Tituba awoke, she began to tell Abigail tales of witchcraft.

  “Drink this potion,” she told the child. “And the devil will come to you. You will have the power of Satan’s sword.”

  Quickly, Abigail drank the chicken blood.

  Soon, under Thomas Putnam’s instruction, Abigail, believing herself infused with the power of Satan, convinced the other children to follow her lead, and they pointed their fingers at Putnam’s enemies.

  “There is the presence of the devil in this town,” Thomas Putnam told the courts. “We must cleanse our streets.”

  “Nay, we must cleanse our souls,” they cried.

  The entire town fell under Thomas Putnam’s control. Under the name of God, Putnam served the devil. Abigail was only possessed with her own meanness. She was
a perfect vessel for the devil’s insidiousness. The other children were only pawns in Urbain’s game to upset the pious and sacred God-fearing village of Salem. Yes, Urbain Grandier, the devil’s own disciple, was having his day once again. Urbain had a perfect conduit for his plan. But Abigail Williams had no real power. She was no better a witch than Tituba. You must remember that once the devil’s servant was through with Abigail and Putnam’s insatiable hatred, he cast them all aside and left Salem.

  I thought that the devil came to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 because there was too much of God to be found there. I thought he came because Tituba called him and the child Abigail could receive him. But he did not come because of God or Tituba…or even the demented Abigail. He came because of me. For many of your centuries, I did not know that. But I know it now. The devil rejoiced in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. But the devil always rejoices. Your world is shrill with the devil’s laughter. He continues to make fools of us. Perhaps he always shall.

  Chapter Three

  It is difficult for me to speak of my physical death, but I will share with you all that I can recall of it. Hear me well, new friend. It may ease your pain to learn that death is only a cacophony of singular experiences…a trick of perception. I did not know that in 1692 as I faced the rope. The texture of the cord lay against my skin with such cruel ambivalence, for it caressed me like the comfort of a lover’s hand. I thought it would feel rough and coarse and burn my flesh, but that was not so. The rope was painfully soft, as velutinous as a cat.

  What a beautiful spot it was on Gallows Hill, near Town Bridge, just south of Stone’s Plain. The morning was ablaze in amber light on the day of my death, and birds fretted in the sky, oblivious to human insanity.