The Darkening Dream (14 page)

Salem, Massachusetts, Sunday, October 26 through dawn Thursday, October 30, 1913

A
LEX PAUSED IN FRONT
of Salem’s red brick neo-Italianate public library. He’d been thrilled at the thought of meeting Sarah alone, but now his stomach churned.

Notices plastered the foyer columns: “Public Safety Guidelines for the Current Crisis.” He ripped one down and brought it into the reading room.

He found Sarah surrounded by stacks of newspapers, still in her school clothes. A pair of spectacles — he hadn’t even known she needed them — pinched the bridge of her nose. She was so focused on a notebook filled with dense shorthand she didn’t see him until he slapped the notice from the lobby on the table.

She glanced at him. “Oh, hi.” Then the notice. “At least ‘Stay at home after dark’ is sound advice. We need to find this thing before it kills again.”

“How can I help?” Alex pulled up a chair.

She struggled to unfurl a many-leaved map of Salem.

“I combed through two years of obituaries, making a list of possible unnatural deaths. A seventy-five-year-old, died in bed, okay. Hit by a trolley, okay. Dead in an alley at forty, bad. Died during daytime, off the list.”

“That’s a long list.”

“Apparently one percent is typical,” she said, “about five hundred a year. The rate’s been steady for the last ten years but it’s gone up fifteen percent since January.”

“And no one noticed?”

“The paper blamed it on immigration and argued for an increased police budget.” She handed him the notebook. “If you read out the address of each death, I can mark their locations. Maybe there’s a pattern.”

It was slow going, mostly because it took her a while to find each spot. He felt a stab of disappointment. He’d hoped the afternoon might entail something more than putting dots on a map. While he waited for her to pin down an address, he peeked at her notebook. Most of it was written in some alphabet he didn’t recognize, but one sentence jumped out from a recent page: “Only you can stop us.”

Halfway through, it was obvious the deaths weren’t evenly distributed. He pointed to the biggest mass of dots.

“What’s this group of buildings across from Derby Wharf?”

“The cotton mill?” She put her hand beside his, covering the cluster of suspicious deaths. “That place is a death trap. Besides those we marked, there were dozens of daytime incidents.”

Her hand was warm and his head buzzed.

“It’s also the biggest employer in town,” she said. “8,000 people work there — including Sam. Let’s go through all the deaths nearby.”

She removed her hand and started to rifle through the papers.

Alex reached over and caught her hand.

“You’re beautiful when you’re excited about something.”

She turned to look at him. Her brown eyes widened and her breaths were shallow. Best of all, she squeezed his hand back.

He was close enough to catch her scent. Breathing it in stopped thought and, for a moment, speech — which was hardly like him at all.

“You smell good,” he said. “Like linen and roses.”

Sarah smiled. “That’s my mother’s doing. When she folds my clothes, she puts rose petals in the drawers.”

“I like it.”

“My father complains that his suits smell of flowers, but I think he likes to be reminded of my mother.”

He tried to slide his chair closer to her, and the legs barked against the tile floor.

Sarah jerked her hand away. “I can’t.”

“Can’t, shouldn’t, or don’t want to?”

“Shouldn’t.”

“Then you want to?”

She blushed. “It’s so complicated. My family’s very close. Religion, courtship, they’re all bound up together. I try not to think about it.”

She reached over and patted his forearm with her hand.

“Let’s be friends. I need one right now, especially since Anne is barely talking to me.”

“Okay. You want to get back to the list of deaths?”

It wasn’t the most romantic topic, but he’d pushed things as far as he dared, today. At least she hadn’t slammed the door in his face.

Monday night at seven o’clock, Alex followed Sam through the gates of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company. The mill was a collection of brick structures with plain windows and column-like chimneys that belched coal smoke. All Sam’s job called for was an able body and a willingness to work. Pay was by the bale.

“So what exactly are we looking for?” Sam asked as they joined the small crowd outside what he called the ‘opening room.’

Alex shrugged. “Something that makes people dead.”

They stepped into what Alex quickly decided was a snowstorm in hell. The temperature was over 100 degrees, the humidity high as an August afternoon just before a thunderstorm hits. His lungs immediately rejected the cotton fibers, and he found himself coughing amidst a thick cloud of them.

Pairs of men muscled huge bales off a belt and threw them in a line. Others broke open the cotton with pitchforks and machetes, while a third group tossed handfuls of the soft white stuff into the iron maws of a dozen machines that chewed chunks of cotton and excreted piles on the far side. Gears and belts whirled about, an ear-pummeling horde of infernal mechanisms driven by overhead drive shafts.

Alex and Sam worked side by side, feeding the row of machines.

“I wanted to ask you,” Sam said, “now that no ladies are around. Did something else happen with the girl on the island? Something you left out?”

“We did kiss,” he said. “Maria and I.” In the burial chamber, on a limestone staircase leading down into stale blackness, she’d put her hand on his chest and pushed him into the stone wall. Alex could still feel the silky touch of her lips.

“I knew it.”

Only five minutes since they’d entered the room, and already sweat drenched his body. Sam stripped off his shirt. Alex did too, but soon fibers coated his skin, making him feel like a tar-baby rolled in feathers. His eyes and nose stung, and the world didn’t hold enough spit to get the cotton out of his mouth.

“Just a kiss?” Sam yelled.

Alex wished he could forget the surprise on her face when Dmitri’s wooden shaft pierced her breast. He wiped sweat out of his eyes and yelled back. “Have you got a better story?”

The bigger boy laughed, soundless in the din.

“Last summer.” He looked damn pleased with himself. “One of my mother’s friends asked me over to chop firewood. Churchgoer, too. Fun while it lasted.”

Did that kind of thing happen here in America? Alex shoveled more cotton into the device.

“Don’t tell the girls,” Sam said. “Especially not Sarah.”

He nodded. Some things were just between men.

A barefoot boy approached them with a bucket of water and a ladle. Sam took the handle and passed it to Alex, who downed an entire tepid cup despite the cotton particulates coating the surface.

Resuming their work, Alex found he needed to concentrate. Rotating blades swept the cotton into the machine, spinning so fast they were almost invisible. All the nearby men had arms crisscrossed with scars, and one worker had only three fingers on his left hand. A careless move could be catastrophic. No more talk of kisses. Or Sarah.

The next day Alex was so sore he could barely move, but he managed to slog through another uneventful night… for a dollar thirty-seven. Although the work was tedious and tiring, he got a certain pleasure from demolishing the bales, trying to optimize his motions so as to move the most cotton with the least effort. The third night, Sam had family obligations, leaving Alex to work alone.

Not long into his shift, an oiler — boys of about eight or nine who lubricated the spinning machines — tripped and pitched forward. Arms out to break his fall, one of his hands landed in the exposed gearbox.

For an instant, the boy’s face was blank.

Then the screaming started. Only fifteen feet from Alex, his shrieks were barely audible above the constant mechanical roar.

All around, heads turned toward the commotion. The hand was buried to the wrist, but the gears still ground away. Blood squirted, slicking the cogs and staining the nearby cotton.

Early to reach the scene, Alex and another man grabbed the boy before he collapsed. The line supervisor arrived cursing and slammed the Stop button. Someone put a belt around the boy’s wrist to serve as a makeshift tourniquet.

“Timmy, you damn fool!” the supervisor screamed. “Now this machine’ll be off-line for hours. You two,” he pointed at Alex and the other man, “get him out of there. You,” pointing at a third, “get a fixer and the nurse.”

Timmy’s screams faded to whimpers, but his pale face was contorted in pain.

The man beside Alex took a loose bit of leather belt and offered it to the boy.

“Bite on this,” he screamed over the din. “We’re going to pull your hand free.”

Timmy looked terrified, but he bit down on the leather.

“Slow or fast?” Alex asked. One hand rested on the boy’s wrist, the other steadied him. The blood had stopped spurting, but the sticky fluid still oozed through Alex’s fingers.

“Slow,” the man said. A third worker tried to roll the gears in reverse to free the trapped limb.

It was in the midst of all this that Alex noticed a fellow watching from the shadows. He was tiny, barely five feet tall, and emaciated. His skin was pale, his hair plastered to his skull. His gaze was locked on the hand in the machine, but where others looked horrified, this man looked expectant.

As they wrestled to free him, Timmy stiffened and screamed, but Alex held tight. At last the hand — what was left of it — came free. The other man tightened the tourniquet while Alex held the boy’s face against himself so he wouldn’t see the hand. The two middle fingers were gone, and the gear had chewed into the meat of the palm.

Alex looked back at the man in the shadows. His face had a pinched look, and he licked his lips.

“Anyone have anything clean?” the older man yelled.

Someone brought a length of white sheet, probably one of the mill’s products. Oil and grease from the gears coated the wound. The man with the sheet tried to wrap the hand gently, but Timmy still writhed in agony. Someone passed them a bottle of whiskey.

“Drink as much of this as you can.”

“Okay, boys,” the supervisor yelled, “show’s over. Get back to work. You two, bring him to the nurse. Then back on the line or it won’t just be the boy’s pay I dock.”

Alex returned to his place. He searched for the tiny man with the greasy hair, but he was nowhere to be found.

At the end of his shift, Alex was among the first out the door. He sprinted across the courtyard and stood where he could watch the workers filing into the night. It was very dark — the moon had set, but the sun had not yet risen. Most of the crowd drifted toward the pay office, but the short man with greasy hair broke off and made for a nearby gate.

Alex followed. He hung back, but his quarry paid little attention. The man had an odd gait, not fast or slow, a sort of scuttling shuffle. He left the factory grounds but instead of taking the road back into town approached the half-abandoned warehouse district by the old estuary wharves, where he ducked into an alley between brick buildings.

Alex peered down the narrow passage. It was dark, and he didn’t see any movement. Slinking down the corridor, he heard a faint scraping sound.