Sacrifice (18 page)

Silas lay on the ground, his now toothless face looking a lot like ground meat. His leg had suffered a compound fracture. Parker ordered two men to stand him up for sentencing. They grabbed Silas under the shoulders and lifted him waist high. Silas cocked his head and stared up at Parker with his one eye that still worked. He mouthed the words “I am innocent.”

Parker pronounced a sentence of death. But hanging would be too good. He ordered Silas bound to the mill’s paddle wheel, head down across the buckets that ran around the rim. When the brake was released, Silas would be killed by his own machinery, submerged and suffocated as he finally drowned.

A cheer arose at this just verdict. Silas was in no shape to offer resistance. Men tied his limp body to the mill’s paddlewheel. A few villagers speculated he was already dead. But his first turn around the wheel proved his heart was still beating. He rose from the water spitting and sputtering, cursing those who surrounded him.

The mob responded in kind and shouted that he deserved worse. By now Dolly Jamison’s parents were there. They hurled rocks at Silas as he passed for a second partial drowning. When he rose from the water the second time, he shouted the names of the council members and told them they were damned to hell. He swore revenge, revenge on all of them. Jonas Parker laughed.

It would take Tom Silas five trips around the wheel to die. To prevent soiling the gravesites of the God-fearing townsfolk of Sagebrook, they did not bury Silas in the church graveyard, though where they did lay his bones was not mentioned.

“Let him rest eternal with the blood of his victims around him,” Jonas Parker said.

The Dutch assistant was never seen again. The author guessed that the man could not work in a house where children had been murdered.

Ken snapped back to 1980 at the end of the chapter. Goosebumps prickled the flesh on his arms. The author had penned that section with pride, even described it as a strengthening event for the growing town. The town leaders were all heroic, Jonas’s exhortation to the crowd a polished speech. The miller was an evil villain, his protestations of innocence all lies. The mysterious Dutchman was a lead never followed.

But Ken knew time had passed a different verdict on their actions. A descent into mob rule and the summary execution of a possibly innocent man? These were not events to be proud of. There was a good chance the people even knew it then. Why else would they bury a body right away, location unmarked, except to, perhaps subconsciously, hide the evidence of their actions? No wonder the current sanitized versions of the town history made no mention of the Trial at the Mill. Salem, Massachusetts would probably erase a few years of its history if it could.

But his unease around the event wasn’t what told Ken the trial was the antecedent of the Woodsman incidents. The clincher was the chapter’s sole woodcut illustration. It was a picture of the crowd outside the mill, along the north side, the great, soon-to-be-murderous paddlewheel in the background. The town council stood at the base of the wheel. Jonas Parker was solemn and center stage, hand upraised like prophets of old. Two burly men held Tom Silas at the shoulders, unbeaten in this G-rated version. It was Tom’s picture that made the hairs on Ken’s arm stand on end. His nose was elongated and pointed. He wore a hat, a kind of tri-corner design with narrow sides swept back like a delta-winged jet. A unique hat that the Half Dozen found all too familiar.

Silas was the Woodsman.

The pieces fit. The spirit returned to target the families of the council members, or their descendants. That’s why the family trees were so important to track, to know who was at risk, at least until whatever age the Woodsman (or should he be the Miller?) could no longer work his black magic. At some age enough cognitive reasoning had to be available to reject the illusions; otherwise the Woodsman would have returned to finish off the council members themselves. Of course, you could always get your ass struck by lightning if you wanted to see Silas’s spirit in action.

Now all the Half Dozen had to do was figure out how to kill a ghost.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was ten p.m. when Marc snuck off to the upstairs phone extension. His mother was loading the dishwasher, her last ritual before bed each night. His brothers had been asleep for hours and Dad was glued to the “if it bleeds it leads” stories on the Channel Eleven News. Now would be Marc’s best window to get some answers.

The family tree needed some explanation, but he couldn’t imagine getting it from his mother. Most conversations with her came across as thinly veiled arguments, and those were about crap like why she had to use wheat bread for his lunch. Asking about why she never mentioned a family history so firmly rooted in Sagebrook would get a stone wall if she didn’t want to talk about it. Since she hadn’t mentioned it to him in seventeen years, he bet she didn’t want to talk about it.

Marc pulled the phone into the upstairs bathroom and tucked the cord through the gap at the bottom of the door. He left the light in the room off, as if that would somehow muffle the conversation. He dialed his grandmother’s number from memory. Since he was five, his parents had awarded him that honor when they called on alternating Sunday evenings.

“Grandma, it’s Marc.”

“Oh my,” she said, confused. “Is it Sunday?”

“No, Grandma. I just wanted to talk to you. Catch up on some family history.”

“That’s so nice,” she said. Her genuine gratitude made Marc feel guilty for not speaking to her more often.

“You were born on Long Island, right? More specifically, right here in Sagebrook.”

Pause. “Now how would you know that? I never even told
your mother
that.”

“I just found out that your family had been here for generations.”

“Yes, my father’s side of the family went back to the 1700s. We moved upstate right after I was born. My father got a job in Owego.”

Grandma recited the line as it had been recited to her and as she had recited it to others. But the statement rang hollow. She was born during the Great Depression. The odds of there being a greater job opportunity in boondocks Owego than outside New York City were slim. And who moves with a newborn anyway?

The founders kept track of the family tree either in the hope that the kids were destined for greatness or fear that they were shadowed by doom. Marc guessed it was the latter. He fished with his next question.

“They really moved to protect you, didn’t they, Grandma?”

No pause before an answer this time. “How do you know all these things?”

“I researched the town history,” Marc said. “After I found out I was on a list of the founder’s descendants.”

“I promise that your mother didn’t know,” Grandma apologized. “She couldn’t. I never told her.”

Marc didn’t answer. The weight of the silence would make her continue.

“She and your father moved there before you were born. It was a coincidence that I’d been born there. When they first moved, they rented in Smithtown where it was safe.”

Marc didn’t like the use of the word “safe.”

“I had no idea they were in Sagebrook until after they bought the house,” Grandma continued. “But they didn’t have kids, and your mother had such trouble conceiving…”

Marc winced at being reminded his parents had sex.

“…so it would still be safe.”

That was twice she’d used “safe” in the past tense. That meant now it wasn’t.

“Once she told me she was expecting,” Grandma said, “I asked her to move. I
begged
her to move at least twenty miles from town. But she wouldn’t do it.”

“Because you didn’t tell her why.”

“Sakes, I barely know why,” Grandma said. “While I was growing up, I never could put the story together. My father’s side of the family would visit us, but until I was ten years old, we never visited them, never even got invited. No one else thought it was strange, so I never did. My father badmouthed Sagebrook at every opportunity. Too expensive, too snooty, too small. Even the relative that still lived there jumped on the curse Sagebrook bandwagon.

“At the end of my father’s life, heart failure was sapping the strength out of him and I was alone by his side in the hospital. The medication he was on made him fade in and out, but each time he was coherent, he’d grab my hand and tell me to stay away from Sagebrook and stay safe.”

Three times now with “safe.”

“He told me a bunch of things. They were all jumbled up. A vengeful spirit hunted children of the founding families. Accidents weren’t accidents. He said there weren’t enough amulets, whatever that meant.”

Marc knew exactly what that meant.

“The whole thing sounded like half myth, half truth,” Grandmother said. “But my father had never been so serious, never been so scared. So I tried my darndest to keep your mother away from there, just in case.”

A lot of things now made sense to Marc. The bits of the story his grandmother relayed meshed with the colonial period clothes the Woodsman wore. The “vengeful” part of the description certainly provided where to look for motive. Another uncomfortable silence filled the line as Marc pondered these things.

“But it’s okay,” Grandmother added. “It’s all stories. Nothing ever happened to you.”

Marc thought about wandering off the town dock at age three, his stubborn case of hydrophobia and his “gift” of being able to watch the Woodsman hunt his victims.

“No, it’s all just stories,” Marc said. “But you need to do something for me. You need to get Albert and have him spend a week with you. Tomorrow.”

Silence again. “What happened?” Grandma asked.

“Nothing, yet,” Marc said. “But you want Albert safe, just in case. Danny’s old enough to be out of danger.”

“I could send Tommy down to pick him up. He has tomorrow off.”

“Perfect. Mom won’t turn you down. She never does, even at the last minute. And Albert loves your house.”

One last, long pause. “My father couldn’t fight that thing,” Grandma said. “Don’t you try.”

“I’ve got lots of help,” Marc said.

Now he was certain he’d need it.

Chapter Forty

The morning meet-up before school the next day transformed from the usual cut-up session to a full-blown council of war.

The day was already warm, but the six of them were wedged into Dave’s Vista Cruiser, windows rolled up to keep anyone from catching their conversation. It had been instantly uncomfortable, and Bob told Dave his father was a cheap bastard for buying a car without air conditioning.

Marc relayed what he had learned from his grandmother, though he skipped the part about his mother’s fertility issues. Ken told them the story of Tom Silas.

“No wonder we haven’t gotten anywhere,” Dave said. “We’re looking for a woodsman when we should be looking for a miller.”

“The whole thing makes me want a Miller,” Bob said. “Preferably a draft.”

Bob put on a dopey grin and waited for the laugh that never came. He shrugged and lit a cigarette.

“What the hell?” Dave said. “Don’t smoke in my car. There’ll be an assistant principal out here thinking we’re all getting high.”

Bob gave Dave a bored, resigned look. He rolled down his window and blew a smoke ring out of it. He hung his arm and the cigarette outside.

“Happy? Now it’s clearly harmless tobacco for all to see.”

“Me and Dave had an incident at the beach yesterday,” Paul started. He told his story of the phantom girl in the red bikini.

Before anyone could express disbelief, Bob related his brush with death in the diner basement.

“So not only can we see the Woodsman,” Ken said, “but it knows we can, and we just made its hit list.”

“Not all of us can see it,” Dave said. “I didn’t see the girl on the beach.”

“Jeff and I both saw the Woodsman on the village green,” Ken said.

“So what’s different about you?” Bob asked Dave.

“Other than my Adonis-like looks?” he answered.

“He didn’t have his brain fried,” Jeff said. “When we all got ourselves electrocuted on the water tower, he was on the ground. The brain is just electrical synapses, like a bunch of switches that pass small charges from one section to the other. A few thousand volts could have burned a few of those open or closed and accessed whatever section Mother Nature cuts off as we get older.”

“Nice explanation,” Marc said. “But it doesn’t keep us safe.”

“We’ll keep each other safe,” Ken said. “The Woodsman seems to have to focus on one victim, target the illusion to that individual. If we stick together in pairs, one will always do a reality check on the other.”

“And other than turning homo,” Dave said, “what’s our excuse for wanting continuous contact with each other?”

“Finals,” Ken said. “We’re studying.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Yeah, my mom will buy that all six of us are ‘studying.’ Not in a million years.”

“No, no one will buy that,” Ken said. “We’ll do it in pairs. Say we’re pulling a late-night cram session. My mom’s cool if I have someone over.”

“Someone would have to come over to my house,” Paul said. “She’ll have to see it to believe that I’m studying.”