Children of Salem

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Thomas set to building a fire, not wishing to wake anyone in the house, as for the first time in recent memory, all was quiet and peaceful on his return from Andover and the wizard. But when he lifted a log from the woodbine, a frog croaked up at him and leapt out at him, its eyes wide and accusing. If the thing had had fingers, it would have been pointing at him. It seemed a demonic, ominous omen, this creature that’d gotten into his home, a possible familiar sent to spy on them, as a familiar’s eyes, read by a witch, could see all and all that the creature, be it frog, mouse, or lice had recorded in its eye.

Putnam stumbled back and fell on his rump, and the frog leapt forward between his stockinged feet.

“My God! Wardwell said they’d send their familiars.” Wardwell had warned of spiders, vermin, such things as flies, centipedes, lizards, or toads. “Any one of which,” Wardwell had insisted, “could be acting as eyes and ears for the evil ones—spying on you and yours.”

The green animal housing a demon certainly acted like a witch’s familiar; it was quite well known and documented that witches not only communicated with such vermin and low forms of life, but that they directed their movements. It was reason enough to stomp a spider, or in this case a frog whose fishy eyes blinked at him a moment before it again croaked as if trying to speak Thomas’s name.

Thomas pulled himself together and crawled to his knees. The log he’d lifted lay beside him. “Too much to drink,” he tried to tell himself, “on top of whatever was in Wardwell’s tea.”

Ever so slowly, gently, he lifted the splintery log, thin enough to get a single hand around, and he brought it into his body. He raised the log overhead, preparing to bring it crashing down on the bulging eyes as the spirit continued to stare as if placing a curse on him. It made him wonder if it were possible for jailed witches such as Goode and Osborne—one of whom he’d helped corner and haul to jail—could do as Goode said to him—take the form of a creature like this and give him the evil eye through a toad.

Thomas let the log fall, and a loud gunshot-like sound replied as it smacked the wood floor. He lifted the log and to his astonishment no smashed green thing lay below it. It was as if the toad had vanished and magically so. He imagined old Goode in her cell at this moment cackling at his fear.

A single candle lit the room, leaving most of it in shadow and sharp-cut, black corners. Where has the evil thing got off to? Where if not back to its conjurer?”

Again it croaked, mocking his efforts. He found it somehow behind him, leaping toward deeper shadow. Putnam moved the candle with it, following the creature’s shadow reflected against one wall, the reflection looking indeed like a crawling shape, like that of a woman the size of Goode. This made Thomas start and his hand holding the log shook for fear of missing yes, but also for fear of hitting his mark.

The frog leapt twice more as if it’d determined a destination. It seemed bent on his wife’s room.

Putnam stalked on hands and knees closely now, and once within range, he bolstered all his courage for Anne’s sake, and he lifted the firewood piece again for the kill. How much drink have I had tonight, he again wondered—wondered if it were all a drunken man’s nightmare. He had crawled beneath the table, his hand on the table leg when the toad leapt back toward him and landed on the table leg at his fingertips so close he felt its warm breath here.

Got you, he thought, and Thomas struck full force. The result was excruciating pain and a yelp out of Thomas as the log smashed into his other hand—fingers flattened between wooden leg and wooden log. He howled more in a scream of terror and pain, waking his wife and the children in the loft.

More light flooded the room, Mrs. Putnam entering with her whale oil lamp. The overhead trap sent light down as well, Mercy holding a second lamp high.

In the middle of the floor, Thomas rocked with the pain in his hand, moaning, tears freely coming.

“What happened?”

“The witch’s familiar came for you!”

“Where, where?” Mother Putnam cried out.

The children joined in, chanting, “Where, where?”

“What familiar?” pressed Mrs. Putnam.

“A toad! A toad with human eyes in the back of its bloody head.”

She examined his hand, saying, “I see no toad, but I smell rot gut whiskey enough.”

Mercy and Anne had come down the stairs, and they made a search for the toad, but none could be found.

Mrs. Putnam wrapped his hand in bandages, as Thomas lamented, “I almost had it. I almost crushed the damnable thing, I tell you—drink or no drink. Anne, it was her, that witch we jailed—Goode, I tell you sent it. Give me the evil eye, it did.”

“Almost killed it, did you?” She finished off the bandage.

“For you, I meant to kill it for you. ’Twas heading for your bedchamber, Goodwife.”

“Yes, dear. I’m sure.”

“Best give your room a thorough search, too,” suggested Mercy.

Anne Junior stood nodding beside Mercy. “Yes, Mother, it wouldn’t do to not be thur-thur—what Mercy said.”

“God blind me, then! Go ahead, children. Give it a look.”

Thomas whispered to his wife where they remained at the table, “I have something to tell you and you alone.”

Anne sensed the urgency in his tone to mean now. For any modicum of privacy, she’d have to send the children back to bed first. When Mercy and Anne Junior could find no sign of the frog, she pointed to a knot hole in the floor and lied. “I saw the fool thing skitter out here. Now the two of you, back up and to bed!”

The children obeyed and Anne remarked to Thomas how dutiful Mercy had become since her and Anne’s recent afflictions. “Somehow these attacks they’ve suffered, I suppose, has taught them that all our teachings and those of the minister are not simple clap-trap and talk from old people. Now . . . what is it on your mind, now that you’ve wakened the house?”

He looked up to see that the trap door was closed tight and that Mercy was not listening in. Although it was closed well, he still ushered his wife into their bedroom and closed the door.

“Why’re you acting so strange?” she asked. “What is it you wish to tell me, Thomas?”

“I have done it.”

“Done what?”

“As I swore I would.”

“You’ve gone to Andover?” Her eyes widened, a half smile forming.

“Yes.”

“To see the wizard?”

“What other reason to go there?”

“What’ve you learned?”

“Only what we already suspected, but it’s now confirmed in my mind, and not just what others have told me is so.”

“Confirmed how?”

Thomas described in detail his two visits to Wardwell and the final results. When he’d finished, she grabbed his hands in hers. “I knew it. How often’ve I told you so? How often?”

“It corroborates your brother Henry’s indictments.”

“If only the dead could indict the living.”

“God forbid!” he said with a gasp. “If so, we’d all be in stocks and chains.”

“Not the righteous among us! No need for them to fear,” she countered.

”But he—Wardwell, he has, and we will act on Henry’s behalf, Henry and the children.”

“Poor Hopestill.” Mrs. Putnam teared up. “I’d so thought she was going to survive long-long-er.”

Hopestill had been their last child before the birth of Anne Junior. There’d been an earlier Anne Junior, but they’d lost her as well and saw no harm in naming their tenth attempt at a child Anne Junior as well. Their combined hope had in fact completely abandoned them after Hopestill’s death, and now what a cruel irony her name had become—Hopestill. Not a stillborn but dead nonetheless before she could learn to properly suckle a teet. And then cruel fate had given them a new hope, a new glimmer of faith as time brought about Anne.

They huddled now together, husband and wife, secure and sure in the knowledge that’d been brought to them by the spirits and corroborated by the wizard and his magic mirror.