Death Trance

Three

Before lunch, I took a solitary walk across Salem Common, the collar of my coat turned up against the cold, my breath fluttering like smoke. All around the Common, the bare trees stood in the silent fright of winter, like a gaggle of Salem witches, and the grass was silver-faced with dew. I went as far as the bandstand, with its cupola dome, and sat down on the stone steps, while a little way away from me, two young children played on the grass, tumbling and running, leaving figure-eight tracks of green across the lawns. Two children like ours might have been: Nathaniel, the boy who had died in his mother's womb. What else could you call a boy who was going to be born within sight of the House of the Seven Gables? And Jessica, the girl who was never even conceived.

I was still sitting there when an old woman appeared, in a bundled-up Thrift Store coat and a shapeless felt hat, carrying a carpet-bag that was more backing than carpet, and a red umbrella, which she inexplicably opened, and left beside the steps. She sat down only four or five feet away from me, although she could have sat anywhere.

'Well, now,' she said, as she opened a brown paper bag, and took out a liver-sausage sandwich.

I looked at her cautiously. She probably wasn't as old as she had first appeared to be, 50 or 55 maybe; but she was so shabbily dressed and her hair was so white and frayed that she could have been mistaken for 70. She began to eat her sandwich, with such neatness and gentility that I couldn't take my eyes off her.

That was how it was, for almost twenty minutes, on the steps of the cupola bandstand on Salem Common, on that cold March morning; the woman eating her sandwich and me covertly watching her, and people passing us by along the radial paths which crossed the Common, some strolling, some intent on business, but every one of them chilly, and every one of them accompanied by their own personal mouth-ghost of frozen breath.

At five before twelve, I decided it was time to leave. But before I went, I reached into my coat pocket and took out four quarters, and held them out to her, and said, 'Please. Just do me a favour, will you?'

She stared at the money and then she stared at me. 'People in your position shouldn't be giving silver to witches,' she smiled.

'You're a witch?' I asked her, not very seriously. 'Don't I look like a witch?'

'I don't know,' I smiled. 'I've never seen a witch before. I always thought that witches carried broomsticks, and black cats on their shoulders.'

'Oh, superstition,' the old woman said. 'Well, I'll take your money, if you're not too worried about the consequences.'

'What consequences?'

'People in your position always have to suffer consequences.'

'What position is that?'

The woman rummaged in her bag and eventually produced an apple, which she polished on the lapel of her coat. 'Alone, aren't you?' she asked me, and then bit into it, chewing on one side of her mouth like a Disney chipmunk. 'Not long alone, but alone nonetheless.'

'Perhaps,' I said, evasively. I was beginning to feel that this conversation was heavily laden with unspoken implications; as if this woman and I had met on Salem Common for some predestined purpose, and that the people who walked all around us along the common's radiating pathways were like chesspieces. Anonymous, but there for a special reason.

'Well, you know the best of that,' the woman told me. She took another bite of apple. 'But that's the way I see it, and I'm not often wrong. It's a mystic talent, some people say. But I don't see any harm in calling it for what it is, especially here in Salem. Good witch territory, Salem; best in the country. Perhaps not a place to be alone, though.'

'What do you mean by that?' I asked her.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were a peculiar pellucid blue, and there was a scar on her forehead like an arrow, or an upside-down crucifix, in the faintest glistening red.

'Everybody has to die sometime, that's what I mean by that,' she said. 'But it's the place you die, not the time, that makes the difference. There are spheres of influence; and sometimes you can die within them, and sometimes you can die without them.'

'I'm sorry,' I told her. 'I don't really understand what you're saying.'

'Suppose you died in Salem,' the old woman smiled. 'Salem is the root, heart, bowels, and belly. Salem is the witch's boiling-pot. What do you believe those witch-trials were really all about? And why do you think they stopped so sudden? Have you known anybody show such remorse, so quick? Not I. I never did. Not as quick as that. The influence came, and then the influence fled; but there are days when I believe that it didn't flee for good and all. It depends.'

'Depends on what?' I wanted to know.

She smiled again, and winked, and said, 'All kind of things.' She raised her head to the sky, and revealed around her throat a neck-band that looked as if it were made of braided hair, fastened with silver and turquoise. 'The weather, the price of goose fat. It depends.'

I suddenly felt like a complete tourist. Here I was, letting some half-dotty woman string me along with stories about 'spheres of influence' and witches, and actually taking her seriously. She was probably going to offer to tell my fortune next, if the price was right. In Salem, where the local Chamber of Commerce enthusiastically exploits the witch-trials of 1692 as a major commercial attraction ('Stop by for a Spell,' they entreat you) it was hardly surprising that even the panhandlers should use witchcraft as a selling-angle.

'Listen,' I told the woman, 'just have a good day, all right?'

'You're going?' she asked me.

'I'm going. It's been nice talking to you. Very interesting.'

'Interesting, but not believable?'

'Oh, I believe you,' I said. 'The weather, the price of goose fat. By the way, what is the price of goose fat?'

She ignored my facetious question and stood up, brushing the crumbs off her worn-out coat with a hand that was blue-veined like cheese. 'You think that I'm begging for money?' she demanded. 'Is that it? You think I'm a beggar?'

'Not at all. I just have to go, that's all.'

A passer-by stopped to watch us as if he could sense that an interesting confrontation was about to develop. Then two more stopped, one of them a woman, her curly hair turned into a strangely radiant halo by the winter sun.

'I will tell you two things,' the woman said, in a trembly voice. 'I shouldn't tell you either, but I will. You will have to decide for yourself if they are warnings or riddles or nothing but nonsense. You cannot be helped, you know; for the life we lead on this earth is a life without help.'

I said nothing, but stood warily watching her, trying to work out if she was a simple lunatic or a not-so-simple con-artist.

'The first thing is,' she said, 'you are not alone, the way you believe yourself to be, and you will never be alone, not for evermore, although you will pray to God sometimes to release you from your companionship. The second thing is, you must stay away from the place where no birds fly.'

The passers-by, seeing that nothing particularly exciting was going to happen, began to disperse, and walk off their separate ways. The woman said, 'You can walk me to Washington Square, if you care to. You are going that way?'

'Yes,' I said. Then, 'Come on, then.'

She gathered up her bag and folded her red umbrella and then walked beside me to the west side of the common. The common was enclosed with decorative iron railings, which threw spoked shadows across the grass. It was still very cold, but there was a noticeable inkling of spring in the air, and a summer very different from last year.

‘I’m sorry that you thought I was talking nonsense,' the woman said, as we emerged on to the sidewalk of Washington Square West. Across the square stood the Witch Museum, which commemorates the hanging of Salem's twenty witches in 1692, one of the fiercest witchhunts in all human history. In front of the museum was the statue of Salem's founder Roger Conant, in his heavy Puritan cloak, his shoulders glittering with dew.

This is an old city, you know,' the woman told me. 'Old cities have their own ways of doing things, their own mysteries. Didn't you begin to sense it, just a little, back there on the common? The feeling that life in Salem is a puzzle of kinds, a witch-puzzle? Full of meanings, but no explanations?'

I looked away from her, across the square. On the opposite sidewalk, among the crowds of tourists and pedestrians, I glimpsed a pretty dark-haired girl in a sheepskin jacket and tight denim jeans, a stack of college-books held against her chest. In a moment, she was jumbled up in the crowd, but I felt a funny catch at my heart because the girl had looked so much like Jane. I guess lots of girls did, and always would. I was definitely suffering from Rosen's Syndrome.

The woman said, 'I have to go this way. It's been an unusual pleasure to talk to you. It's not often that men will listen, not the way you do.'

I gave her a half-hearted smile, and raised my hand.

'You'll want to know my name, of course,' she said. I wasn't sure if that was a question or a statement, but I gave her a nod which could have meant yes and could just as easily have meant that I didn't particularly care.

'Mercy Lewis,' she said. 'Named after Mercy Lewis.'

'Well, Mercy,' I told her. 'Just make sure you take care of yourself.'

'You too,' she said, and then she walked off at a surprisingly fast pace until she was lost from sight.

For some reason, I found myself thinking of the words that Jane used to read to me from the Ode to Melancholy. 'She dwells in Beauty — Beauty that must die; and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu…'

I turned up my collar against the cold, pushed my hands deep into my pockets, and went to find myself some lunch.