Salem VI:
Chain of Souls
By Jack Heath and John Thompson
he girl’s feet kicked up small
puffs of dust as she walked
down the dirt lane. The
greens, blues, and reds of her
plaid skirt seemed to pulse
with every step, and the wind tossed
the blazer covering her white blouse,
each gust making it rise and writhe
as if trying to escape the strain of
her backpack straps. Her hair was
dark, tied in a neat ponytail, and her
face had a youthful glow that
betrayed her age. She was at best
thirteen, maybe fourteen.
The sky overhead was a swirl of
heavy gray clouds that seemed to
threaten rain, yet the path was hard
and bone dry. An ancient stone wall
ran along beside the lane; and
beyond, the ground rose to what
should have been a verdant meadow.
Instead, sheep grazed on scabby
brown grass that clung to the hillside.
The man looked down on the scene
with growing dread. Something was
terribly wrong. He called to the girl,
imploring her to turn around, to go
back to wherever she had come, but
his voice, barely escaping his mouth,
faded into the heavy gauze of the
approaching storm. He tried to run
after her, but his movements were
slow and restrained, like a fly
trapped in ether.
This was a dream, he knew it was a
dream, but through the horror of his
past he understood that something
about this dream was more, was real.
The man cried out, screaming at the
top of his lungs, but the girl kept
walking.
Up ahead of her an enormous oak
webbed the ground with twisted
shadows, its barren limbs catching
what little light there was, and
deeper, beyond the edge of the
shadows, was pitch black, as if some
terrible secret was hiding in the
darkness, waiting for the girl
there—something he could feel,
something he knew with all his
senses was horrible beyond words,
that related to another place,
another girl.
Suddenly, his dream changed, and
he saw the place where he had found
the other girl. It was a room of
white tiles with shackles set into
the walls, the girl’s nude body
sagging in the chains, her belly slit
open and her intestines spilling
obscenely, the floor pooled with
blood. The young girl, the one with
the backpack, was walking into the
exact same fate.
John Andrews bolted awake, his
body tense with panic, his heart
pounding, his pillow and sheets
soaked with his sweat. Beside him
Amy gripped his shoulder and
switched on the bedside lamp.
“John,” she said, her voice soft yet
urgent. “It’s okay. You were having a
dream.”
Andrews pulled up his knees and
brought his head forward, balling
himself up like a child hiding from
the world. “The Coven,” he groaned.
“It’s over,” Amy assured him as she
worked her fingers into his
shoulders, trying to unknot the
muscles. “They’re all dead, all of
them. They can’t hurt anyone
anymore.”
John tried to focus on the warm
light from the lamp, the reassuring
touch of Amy’s hands on his
shoulders, on the words she was
speaking. More than anything, he
wanted to believe her and be assured
the Coven had finally been destroyed.
He was safe in his bed on Pickering
Wharf in Salem, Massachusetts, he
told himself. He wasn’t on some
dusty lane in god-knows-where.
There wasn’t a girl in danger. Amy
was right. The Coven was gone.
After all, hadn’t he seen the bodies
of the leaders? There was no
mistaking the fact that they were
dead because he was the one who
had killed them, all of them except
his friend Rich Harvey, who had killed
himself, and he had seen that with
his own eyes, too.
It was hard to imagine that all of
those things had taken place just a
week earlier. Already it seemed like
another lifetime or another world
because the discoveries had been so
horrifying, the violence so unbelievable.
John knew that over the past week
his mind had shut down, almost like
it had been shocked into a state of
suspended animation. He hadn’t
thought about the Coven; he hadn’t
relived the bloody scenes. He had
just gone through his days with his
mind almost blank, getting up, taking
long walks, eating, sleeping, never
allowing himself to process the
atrocities of the previous weeks.
Now he realized he was starting to
come out of it and re-enter the real
world, and he was enough a student
of psychology to know that
nightmares were a natural part of
reawakening. This bad dream
wouldn’t be the last one, and it was
probably perfectly normal.
Only something nagged at him. He
remembered some- thing Captain
Card said when they were alone
together in the underground warrens
of the Coven. John hadn’t thought
about it until now, but he was sure
that Card said there had been a
seventh member of the Coven. Card,
a Massachusetts State Police
detective, had been very cryptic and
tight-lipped, and the few things he
had let slip seemed to have only
leaked out by accident. John wracked
his brain to recall what else Card had
said. He recalled something about
the fact that the ultimate leader of
a Coven was apparently called the
Inquisitor, and hadn’t Card also said
that all the Covens were organized
the same way?
All the Covens, plural? The word
had sat in his brain for the past
week like a cancer, silent and waiting
to be discovered. John felt a
sickness deep inside. His mind reeled
and images and memories of visions
past—visions of Rebecca Nurse—
came flooding back. As hard as he
had tried at first to deny those
visions of his long-dead relative, he
had finally accepted that they were
real. Now the same part of him that
knew Rebecca Nurse had been real
knew what he had just seen was no
dream. The girl was real and she was
still walking, just entering the deep
shade beneath the ancient tree.
What waited for her there was the
same evil he had defeated before; he
could feel it. That meant the Coven
might be gone from Salem, but it
wasn’t destroyed.
John sat up and turned to face
Amy. “What?” she asked, seeing the
alarm etched on his face.
“It’s not over. It’s not even close to
being over.”
W
Chapter One
hen John Andrews
walked downstairs the
next morning to make
coffee, he stopped at
the bottom of the
staircase and looked into the living
room at the portrait of his ancestor,
Rebecca Nurse.
ALL PHOTOS BY LEAH WALKER.
T
Prologue