The Curse of Salem

by littlejoefan

Chapter One – Love Unfulfilled – 30^th October 1860

“No,” she said. I, being young, did not hear her for a second, pressing my lips onto hers. I was eighteen and in love. She resisted even further. “No, Joe!”

“Why not?” I murmured, feeling deflated.

She got up and walked away. Thinking I had offended her, I followed her away from the lake where our two horses were ground-tied, grazing, sipping at the water’s edge and nibbling at the sparse grass. The trees were becoming thicker as we headed further into the wood and the sunlight grew dimmer.

“Why, Danielle?” I repeated. Trying to make myself as non-threatening as possible I reached for her arm. She turned to face me, her face a picture of misery. “You – you said you wanted to.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She was trembling.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t mean to press you.”

“You didn’t. You’ve been awful good to me, Joe.”

“So what’s wrong? You led me to believe…”

“I know. I do love you, Joe.”

“And yet you won’t even kiss me.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to.” She started walking again and I followed. “It’s that…there are things about me you don’t know.”

“So tell me.”

“It’s a strange tale. And a long one.”

“It’s alright. I have time.”

“And I don’t even know whether I should tell you. You will think me mad.”

I laughed softly and sat beside her on a log. She offered me her small hand and I engulfed it into my much larger one. She leaned her head on my shoulder and I caught the scent of fresh soap on her silky hair. My desires were starting to drive me crazy and I yearned to kiss her but I knew she did not want me to. Instead I brushed her curls with my lips.

“Ah, Joe! If only! I long for you, I really do! But…once you have heard my story you will understand why. Why I cannot be yours. Why I cannot be anybody’s.”

As she proceeded, I noticed it was growing dark and cold in the wood. It was a bright October day, fresh but warm. But the sun could not penetrate the canopy overhead and the birds did not sing. I shivered. I got the feeling we were not alone, but who or what was with us, I could not say.

Chapter 2 – Danielle’s Story – A Deadly History

“Well, Joe, I hope you are ready for a long story!” She watched me incline my head so she started. “My family is from Massachusetts. They made their way West about twenty years ago.”

“Same as my family,” I said in a low voice. Pa and my brothers came before I was born. It took them a long time, though! We were from Massachusetts, too. Boston.”

“Not far. Salem.” She hesitated and gave me a wry smile. “You’re probably familiar with its history?”

“A bit. We learned a bit about it at school. Witches?”

“Yes, that’s right….Witches.” We heard a low wind and the denuded trees rustled about us. My skin crawled. I just could not understand why. The sun had been warm earlier and it was only two in the afternoon. Yet the light had darkened so much it looked like twilight was about to drop. I tightened my hold on her and she nestled closer to me. “Witches…I suppose you don’t believe?”

I scoffed. “Of course I don’t! No-one believes in witches!”

“Some of us do.”

“Only idiots.”

“I believe.”

“I’m sorry, Danielle. But…but how can you? They don’t exist!”

“They do. And I, more than anyone, should know.”

“You’ll be telling me next that you are one. If you are, you sure as heck don’t look like one.” I tickled her little button snout. “Where’s your hooked nose? And your pointy hat? And shouldn’t you be about four times older? They’re all about eighty, aren’t they?”

“You may laugh, but they do exist. Generations have learned to mock them. To think they’re wizened old crones with, as you say, hooked noses and pointy hats.” She smiled sadly. “But the truth is they could be anyone. Man, woman, child, old, young, beautiful, ugly. You cannot tell by looking at them. People mock them because they are afraid.”

“Ach, Danielle, this is nonsense! I just cannot believe you’re taken in by all this rubbish!”

“I have seen them.”

I started. “You have?!”

“In my dreams.”

“Oh,” I smiled. “Dreams aren’t real, though.”

“They’re not dreams. They’re premonitions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They are signs of what will happen. It has happened many times before. My family is cursed.”

“Curses now?” I laughed, but she did not smile. “Come, now!”

“It all happened many, many years ago,” she sighed. “My grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother.”

“That’s a lot of grandmothers,” I teased.

“If you’re going to mock I shan’t tell you.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sat forward but I kept my hand on her shoulder. “I know you don’t believe, Joe. But it’s true. Her name was Susanna Baron. Her mother was called Betty Parris.”

“She was one of the accusers?” I screwed up my face, trying to remember.

“That’s right. Many people died because of her and her friends. If the devil does exist, Joe, it exists in those girls, not in the poor people they accused. Her father was the Minister but he never knew God.”

“It was a long time ago, honey. Best part of two hundred years. Of course I’m sorry for them but it was so long ago. Witches don’t exist, never have. It was just hysteria.”

“She was cursed, Joe. One of her victims…Betty was there…”

*

She told me the story. As she spoke, I closed my eyes and leaned back.

The children started to behave strangely, she recounted. I could almost see their faces as they frolicked in the woods around the fire, terrifying each other with tales of witchcraft and pacts with the devil. Her father, the Reverend Parris, had always terrified her with his sermons of damnation and hellfire, and it seemed the girls were determined to take it one step further. She yearned to know what the future held for her so began to engage in white magic. Innocent, but not so innocent.

“She turned to evil, Joe. Nine years old! She began to have fits, shrieking, barking, writhing on the floor. She complained she was being tormented, pricked all over, bitten, and that she was being bewitched.”

“Sounds like a classic case of hysteria to me,” I murmured. “Perhaps someone should’ve taken a switch to her.”

“Perhaps. But they didn’t, they believed her. They said the Evil Hand had been laid on her.”

“The Evil Hand?”

“Witchcraft. She said the great Black Man came to her. And then…then the accusations started. She accused Sarah Good. And she was the one who cursed her.”

“I’m not surprised!|”

“Betty had tormented her. They threw Sarah into a dungeon with her little girl, Dorcas. Dorcas was only four years old and was driven mad with pain and terror. She never got over it all her life. Sarah was going to have a baby but that didn’t save her. She gave birth in the straw and filth and the baby died.” Danielle watched me as I gave an involuntary shiver. “Then as they dragged her to the gallows she saw Betty and Reverend Noyes. He’d been hell bound on proving her a witch and had sold his soul so he could condemn her. He badgered her on and on as they put the rope around her neck. Eventually she told him she was no more a witch than he was a wizard and that if he took away her life God would give him blood to drink. Twenty-five years later he choked to death on his own blood.”

“Coincidence.”

“Coincidence? Then she saw Betty in the crowd. She screeched and pointed at her as they fumbled to put the cord around her wrists. ‘You, Elizabeth Parris, I curse you to the depths of hell! You have driven my little girl mad, you have killed my baby and now you are killing me! I will be waiting for you in the Inferno, child, and the last face you see shall be mine! I curse you, your daughter, your daughter’s daughter, unto the end of time!’ ”

“Danielle,” I hushed, patting her shoulder. “It was centuries ago. It was evil, I grant, but it was said by a woman driven out of her mind by grief. She was no more a witch than I am! She has no power. She is dead. She cannot reach beyond the grave.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. The deaths started. Not Betty, not her daughter, Susanna. But Susanna’s daughter, Abigail. They said she was beautiful. She married, had children, one of them was my ancestor. But one day she became ill, sweating, rambling, writhing in torment. They called the doctor but he could not find what ailed her. She was mumbling that she was cursed, that her heart was burning with the pangs of hell. One day she wandered off and disappeared. Her husband searched and searched for her. He found her body by the lake, limp, dead. They said her beauty was even greater in death than it had been in life.”

I clicked my tongue. “That proves nothing!”

“But it keeps happening.” She looked around her, her face stricken with fear. “Tomorrow is All Hallows’ Eve. That is the day. It’s the day when the curtain is rent between this world and the next. So many of my ancestors have died on that day. Every couple of generations. My grandmother died. Mother said she wandered off, as if in a dream. Exactly the same as Abigail. Mother was very young when it happened. She remembered her father’s grief as he walked into the yard, his dead wife in his arms. It was then he told her about the curse.”

As she had been talking the wind had whipped up, shaking the trees around us, and the light was almost gone. We had not been sitting there long, it cannot have been later than half past two in the afternoon. I could feel my flesh crawling but it was also true that my irritation was beginning to mount.

“Danielle,” I started firmly. “This is nonsense. All this talk about witches and curses and devils!”

“I told you that you would think me mad.”

“I don’t think you’re mad. You’ve just been filled up with this rubbish from your family. You’re not going to die! It’s impossible, it just can’t happen.”

“And what about all those women, Joe? Generations of them, all in direct descendance from Betty Parris. Doesn’t it strike you as odd, that they all die on the same day? In the same way?”

I did not know what to say. My mind forbade me to believe. “It’s coincidence.”

“Once may have been. Maybe even twice. But this has happened four times now in less than two hundred years. And it’s always the same. The victim falls into a trance and suffers. Then she wanders off and is never seen again. Alive, that is.”

“That’s not going to happen to you. Halloween is only in twenty-four hours and you’re not feeling peaky, are you?” I tried to joke, putting my hand on her brow.

She flinched away and got up. “You still joke! You still don’t believe!”

“Of course I don’t! And I shall remind you of it on November 1^st. I shall expect a great big kiss from you!”

“Oh, Joe!”

She took to her heels and ran from the wood. I quickly followed her. As I emerged from the treeline, the sun shone down with greater strength than before. The light was severe, almost white, after the darkness of the copse.

Chapter 3 – Young Death

I had been rather shaken by her story but I was not one to believe in demons and hobgoblins. I felt annoyed with her family for filling her head with such nonsense. That night I could not sleep. I tossed and turned and when slumber finally came to me, I felt cold wind in my face although the sun shone fiercely. I was mounting a hill and a knot of dread was collecting in my stomach and rising through my chest. For some reason I knew there was something horrific on the other side of the crest but something pushed me forward. It was something important, even imperative.

My boots skidded through the dirt as I climbed. I was out of breath as I got to the top.

There below me was a collection of thirty or forty people. They were dressed strangely, men in frock coats and stiff hats, women in poor dresses, their hair collected in kerchiefs and snoods. I raised my eyes and looked beyond them and my heart went cold.

From the branch of the tree three bodies swung back and forth. Their lives had evidently only just been ripped from them for one was still jerking in her death throes. A girl was weeping in the crowd, hushed by her elders. I knew her name was Betty Parris.

*

I woke up with a start, crying out with horror. Why had I been taken back all those generations in my nightmare? Could it really be that Danielle’s story had shaken me that much? Today was the day when so many of her ancestors had died. I felt like slapping myself for my idiocy.

I was much quieter than normal – so quiet that my brothers and father seemed perturbed. Something was disturbing me. I remembered the dread I had felt in the dream but now I was awake, my eyes wide open. Even as I set out with Hoss and Adam to help round up some cattle who had strayed, there was something in my mind. Something I couldn’t quite reach, couldn’t quite guess at.

“I’ve got to go,” I said eventually.

“Go?” Adam asked, turning. “Go where?”

“I’ve gotta go see Danielle.”

“Little Joe! Can’t you get your mind off that girl for five minutes?” Hoss cried. “See her in your spare time. You ain’t leaving me and Adam to do all the work.”

“It’s important. I…I think she’s sick.”

Adam pulled up and glared at me. “This is ridiculous. She was OK yesterday, wasn’t she?”

“Ye-e-s. But she told me something. She was troubled. I’m worried about her. I’ve got to go, Adam.”

“Oh, alright. You’d better get back as quick as you can. If Pa knows you’ve been slacking he won’t half tear you off a strip.”

I set off at a gallop before either of them could say anything else. As I travelled, fields and trees whizzed past me at a blur. Danielle’s house was not far distant and I could be there in ten minutes. Cochise could rest a while, I could see my love, reassure myself and be on my way. And we could both have a laugh at my foolishness.

I clopped into the yard, tied my horse and ran to the door. The place had a derelict, forsaken feel about it and there was no sign of life. There was a scream from the building and I pounded on the wood, my heart racing. There was a silence and then the sound of feet dragging. The door slowly opened. Danielle’s father stood there, in his nightshirt, unshaven and gaunt.

“Ah, you, Little Joe.”

“Mr Blake! Are you alright?”

He shook his head. “No. No, I’m not.”

“What’s wrong? Is Danielle alright?”

“It’s happening again.”

“What? What?!”

“The curse.”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense! Danielle told me yesterday! There’s no such thing as curses!”

“Come with me, Joe.”

There was another scream and then another, even more blood-curdling. I pushed past him and barged into the side room.

There on the bed was my sweet Danielle. A doctor and a woman were bent over her, trying to control her body as she twisted and contorted her body. Her hair was wild and she was drenched in sweat.

“Danielle!” I cried. “Danielle!”

“Oh, Little Joe! You came!”

“Danielle, honey! What’s wrong?”

She turned her bloodshot eyes upon me. “It’s happening, Joe. As it was foretold.”

“What tommyrot! You’re making yourself ill!” My fear was making me angry and cruel.

The doctor was holding her wrist, his eyes on his pocket watch. “I don’t think so. Her pulse is through the roof. She’s burning up. She’s not faking this, Little Joe.”

“Oh, oh!” she screeched, arching her back. “I feel it! I feel the knife! It’s pricking me! It’s in my heart! My mind!”

“Ssshhh,” the woman said, dabbing her face with a cold cloth.

“Danielle! Honey!” I brushed past the attendant and took her hand, pressing my lips upon it. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive,” she gasped, struggling to breathe. “I love you.”

“Doctor, can’t you give her anything?”

“I have some opium. That should calm her.”

Her father and I stayed with her as she wept and screamed, twisting in her misery. Eventually the opium took effect and she lay sedated on her sweaty sheets. She could not bear the blanket upon her for she said she was in flames.

The old man looked dead on his feet and I gently told him to go and rest. We had been sitting with her for hours.

“I do not want to leave my girl.”

“I will watch her. Mr Blake, you will be ill. Don’t worry, I’ll fetch you in an hour.”

So we were alone. She was worn out, her face etched with pain, as pale as the grave. I leaned back on the pillow, her hand in mine. I kept dozing and coming to. The hours went on and Mr Blake and I took turns watching her. As the light started to fade, she came to, choking and writhing.

“Father! Joe! I’m in such pain!”

The temperature in the room dropped to such an extent we could see the breath streaming from our mouths and noses. The branches of an old tree tapped on the window pane and the candle we had lit a short time ago was starting to gutter.

“Joe?”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“I’m afraid. I don’t want to go to hell.”

“What are you talking about? You’re not going to go to hell! For a start, you’re not going to die! I won’t let you!”

She was silent. Mr Blake started to weep.

“It was Betty’s fault! Her evil could only lead to more evil!”

“Mr Blake, hush! You’ll upset her!”

To this day I do not know what happened. How could we slumber at such a time? But we did. The candle went out and the room was only lit by the moon as it shone through the small window.

“Light the candle, Joe.”

I lit it and turned back to Danielle. But the bed was empty. She was gone.

*

We searched and searched that night. My family had been out of their minds with worry and made their way over. They joined in the fruitless quest, gathering hands from the Ponderosa to help them. As I rode, seeking amongst the rocks, tears poured down my face. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be! And yet it had all happened as she had predicted. Not my Danielle! Not my beautiful Danielle!

I suddenly remembered something she had told me. The lake! The small lake where we had stopped yesterday. I rushed there, my heart thudding with the horror of it all. And disbelief. It just couldn’t be true.

I dismounted and walked around the lake’s edge, peering in the moonlight. And I found her. Her limp, cold body. I roared with pain and held her close to me, my lips upon hers.

“Please, please!” I was whimpering like a child. “Don’t be dead! Don’t!”

She did not answer. I violently cursed the evil brat who had started all this so many years ago. Betty Parris. She had robbed me of my loved one. I stood up, her body sagging in my arms. And yes, as I looked at her, she was even more beautiful in death than she had been in life.

*_*_*

Note – Although the historical events and names in this story are true, I have taken some dramatic licence with the facts.