Midnight in New England: Strange and Mysterious Tales Read online

  Midnight

  in New

  England

  Copyright © 2007 by Scott Thomas.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph © Gerolf Kalt/zefa/Corbis

  Interior illustration by Christopher Cart

  ISBN: 978-0-89272-732-2

  Printed at Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois

  5 4 3 2 1

  Down East Books

  Camden, Maine

  A division of Down East Enterprise

  Book orders: 800-685-7962

  www.downeastbooks.com

  Distributed to the trade by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data:

  Thomas, Scott, 1959

  Midnight in New England : strange and mysterious tales / by Scott Thomas.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-89272-732-2 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. New England—Fiction. 3. Horror tales. 4. Fantasy fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.H6423M53 2007

  813’.6--dc22

  2007019396

  For Peggy

  Table of Contents

  The Dead of Midwinter

  Herrick’s Inn

  Laben Blois’ Death

  Pistols and Rain A Troubling Wound

  The Laughter of an Angel

  A Bitter Kiss

  A Speck of Rust

  Like Beasts, or Demons

  The Challenge

  A Death in the Field

  November Rain

  The Recurrent Silence

  The Collector in the Mill

  Marcy Waters

  Whispers

  A Milion Dying Leaves

  Joseph Warren’s Invention One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Sleep of the Flower God

  The Puppet and the Train

  The Copper Mask

  The Franklin Stove

  Wrought-Iron Skeleton

  Sharp Medicine

  The Second Parsonage

  The Dead of Midwinter

  It was shortly before the time of Victoria and winter had come to our small New England village. Winter, unlike so many travelling merchants who failed to notice the place, knew just where to find us.

  There was white on the fields and flat against the roofs and nesting in the crooks of trees; it smothered the pond where ice had prepared a surface.

  It was harsh and cold that December, as I recall it, and one was made to understand why so many creatures hibernated. The temperature had a personality all its own, fumbling about our homes like great invisible hands determined to find flaws through which to usher drafts.

  The drafts themselves were like a disease that stole into the blood where (reversing their polarity) they spawned fevers, as if to mock us, as if to say, here is the warmth you dearly miss. But it was not the spring’s soft warmth, nor even the summer’s swelter that burned under the flesh.

  The snow was blue with moonlight when our neighbour Caleb Wightman woke from his dream. The midnight church banged like a wagon full of kettles, its noise spreading over and falling upon the houses like heavy snow.

  Unsettled by his dreaming, Caleb lit a candle and sat shuddering in his bed. Despite the bitter air, his nightshirt was damp against his skinny frame and the candle’s glow made the drops of sweat on his brow glint like the heads of copper nails.

  Caleb was an old widower, his beloved Hannah now six months in the churchyard; so he attributed her voice to the wind, or a remnant of his dream. Too cold and unsteady to bring himself to abandon his covers long enough to re-light the fire, he opted to remain sitting there, half-cocooned.

  New England’s wintry wind was a unique musical instrument capable of a wide range of sounds. Shaping itself to the hills, or stealing through the birches, it might hiss like a sleigh, or roar like the sea, or brush against a house like a cat. Caleb had never heard it sing until that night.

  The wind knew his name, it seemed, but it was not the wind, he determined at length. It was the voice of his wife.

  In the middle of the snowy night, I was awakened by a small hand that found my foot through the blankets. Lifting my head, I looked to see the pale, dishevelled figure of my young Patty.

  “Father,” she said, “Mr. Wightman is out dancing in the snow. He’s unclothed.”

  I chuckled, and rising to return the child to her bed, assured her that she had merely been dreaming. I tucked the covers up about her throat.

  “Listen,” Patty said, “he is singing.”

  “The wind and nothing more,” I insisted gently, stroking her head.

  The girl seemed to have a slight fever, I found. I told this to her mother when I returned to my own chamber. We would need to mind her closely, as the village had lost a number of its residents in the preceding weeks. Fever was a devious thing—a killing heat in the year’s deep cold.

  Settling back into my mattress, I heard the breeze rattling the windows, a mist of flakes now sighing through the surrounding wood. It hissed like the kegs of cider fermenting in the cellar.

  “That’s curious,” I noted in the morning, pulling the curtain aside to see what the clouds had brought us.

  “What’s curious?” my Wilmot asked.

  “There appear to be tracks in the snow.”

  She peered over my shoulder. Tracks were not uncommon—often we woke to find evidence of deer and smaller beasts.

  “Good heavens,” Wilmot said, a hand against her bosom. “Whoever would go barefoot in such weather?”

  I dressed myself and headed out, snug in great coat and hat and gloves. While snow continued to accumulate, as if to hide the imprints, I saw that they did indeed seem to come from a human’s naked foot. I followed them.

  The trail meandered erratically, but eventually brought me to the whitened road, then westward toward the edge of the village. Tree and reed and bush were softened in their white dressing, and the far hills scarcely showed for the innumerable layers of falling flakes.

  The longer I followed the tracks, the more I was made conscious of the words my Patty had spoken the night before. Perhaps poor old Mr. Wightman had fallen prey to some form of lunacy. He had been troubled with grief since the loss of his Hannah.

  Sure enough, the trail led to the Wightman house, a sad thing sitting there in the cold, though the stark, contorted maples around it were soothed by the snow. No smoke issued from the large central chimney.

  I trudged to the door and rapped with my stick. I waited, blinking in the snow, but no answer came. I knocked again, louder this time, and called out a hullo.

  At length I tried the door and found it unbolted. It was chill and tenebrous inside and the smell of wood smoke was only a memory from charred log remnants in the keeping room.

  “Hullo, Caleb,” I called into the still house, where my inquiry dissipated without reciprocation.

  I made my way up the stairs and to my neighbour’s bedchamber. The cold was sharpest in that room. Even so, Caleb Wightman was sprawled without garments on his bed, free even of his bedcovers. He was a ghastly sight to see, bony and blue and staring up into the netting of his bed canopy. He was cold to the touch, having been dead for some hours.

  I noticed the window to the right of the panelled fireplace wall was open and a dusting of snow had lighted on the sill. Shivering, I turned to close this when from behind me, from the direction of the bed, I heard a soft voice wheeze…

  “She kissed me.”

  The window banged down and I spun to regard the figure on the bed.
It appeared as if he was smiling.

  After summoning the undertaker, the reverend, and the sheriff, I made my way home through the cold. The church bells rang noon, their repetitions muffled by the relentless snowfall.

  A friendly, if ghostly, chain of smoke was drifting up from the chimney of my house and I stomped my boots on the stoop to loosen the snow. Welcome warmth greeted me in the kitchen, though there was woe in my young wife’s eye.

  “Something is the matter, my dear?” I asked.

  “Patty is not well, I fear. Her fever worsens by the hour.” She wrung her small hands and added, “She imagines strange things…”

  Without bothering to remove my coat, I thumped up the stairs and then stepped softly into my daughter’s room. She looked so very small there on the bed, her meagre bulk only slightly mounding the covers, the mound rising weakly with her breath. Her eyes were closed and there was sweat on her forehead, like beads of gilted ice in the fire-glow.

  Though I meant to be quiet, Patty stirred. Her eyes opened and she wheezed.

  “He kissed me,” she said with a smile.

  Herrick’s Inn

  Sudbury, Massachusetts,1757

  Sudbury, Massachusetts, 1757

  Spring had come to the woods behind the inn—the evidence was both subtle and grand. Fiddleheads poked up from the damp, dark earth at the edge of the pond, like the unfurling tails of tiny submerged dragons. Flowering trees stood in the midst of their bare grey counterparts, radiant bonnets of pink in the lowering evening light. Breezes rustled the dry brown carpet of leaves that winter had left behind, as dusk brought a coolness that might have passed for September. But this was the first of May, and lovers met in the quiet spring wood.

  Rebecca Herrick was the innkeeper’s only surviving daughter. The other three had perished ten years previous when Rebecca was young. Consumption had come reaping. Now, at eighteen, she was her father’s prize, and was it any wonder? She was an angelic creature, her hair an amber spill framing the round pallor of her face. Her features were fine and her figure appealingly plump. Her father did his best to keep her in the kitchen, safely away from the eyes of the lonely travellers who frequented the inn.

  But her father had failed to keep John Easty from noticing the girl. The young doctor’s apprentice, who had been visiting an ill brother in Grafton, was on his way back to Boston when he stopped at Herrick’s Inn. It was December dusk and a sluggish snow had fallen on the round New England hills, had whispered into the grey woods. The old inn had been a welcome sight, its windows warm and golden. The innkeep’s daughter had been a welcome sight as well.

  Warming by the fire, John had watched as the girl went about her duties in the tavern room. She was graceful and sweet and her laughter had a lilting quality as it rose up into the dark beams above.

  Subsequent visits to Herrick’s Inn followed, and John courted Rebecca, unbeknownst to her father. At first they met in the woods behind the inn, but later John climbed a tree by the inn and stole into her bedchamber. They spent several nights together over the following months.

  Now, under the cool, darkening May sky, the lovers embraced within their shelter of trees, a tethered horse nearby. John could smell the kitchen smoke in Rebecca’s hair as he pressed her to his chest. Her belly was against his, soft and warm—not the hard, pouting thing it had been during his last visit.

  Rebecca’s parents had never noticed that she had been carrying a child. Her plumpness, apron, and the full skirts common to the day had kept the fact secret.

  “It was dead at birth,” Rebecca said in a whisper.

  “Oh, dear,” John groaned, holding her tighter.

  “Not to worry, I buried him in a lovely spot and said prayers.”

  “A boy?”

  Rebecca nodded against him. She felt him shiver and said, “Please do not fret. It is really for the best. Father would have done away with me, if ever he knew.”

  John agreed quietly.

  Rebecca pulled back and looked up. She gave him a fetching smile and touched his cheek. “We are together, nothing matters so much as that.”

  John took her hand and kissed it. “Yes. That is what matters.”

  They moved slowly toward the inn and its outbuildings. The windowless icehouse was a dark shape in the gloom. Geese flew honking over a willow and a breeze rattled the leafy carpet.

  “You must wait until you see my parents’ window go dark,” Rebecca reminded the man. “My window shall be unlocked.”

  “Unlocked, yes, of course—I shouldn’t want to break it,” he joked.

  Rebecca squeezed his hand. “I’ve missed you so,” she said, and then headed off across the small grassy field that separated the woods from the back of the inn.

  When the last of the laughter had died away in the tavern and the last guest had staggered up to his room, Rebecca hurried to sweep the floor and wipe the ale-scented tables. Her hair, loosened from under her bonnet by the steam in the kitchen, hung in her face.

  She straightened the chairs and made certain that the logs were safely positioned in the hearth before taking up a candle and climbing the stairs to her room. The inn was quiet at this late hour, but for some muffled snoring, heard as she passed the guest rooms.

  In her chamber, she set the candle down by the bed and quickly, though cautiously, unlocked and partly opened her window. She had taken to keeping it shut in all weather, ever since the strange noises had begun coming from the woods some weeks back.

  Rebecca removed her bonnet, combed out her long hair and pinched her cheeks to give them colour. She heard sounds coming from outside, someone moving slowly up the great old maple that grew close to the inn. Smiling, she removed her garments and tossed them aside, unceremoniously. The air gave her a chill. She slid into bed, pulling the covers to her throat, resting her head back on the pillow she had used to smother the baby.

  While the candle was largely burnt down, the wick could have used a trimming, and the flame burned too high. The glare on the glass prevented her from making out the vague figure that was now pushing open the window.

  John stood in the dark wood, stomping in place to keep warm, as one by one the windows in the distant inn went dark. The chill made him restless, made him imagine the heat of Rebecca’s body.

  The leaves rattled somewhere, and once he turned and thought that he saw a small hunched animal duck behind a tree—a skunk or a raccoon, likely. Animals sounded in the dim expanse of tangled trees. Living in the city, he had grown unaccustomed to the sounds of wildlife, had forgotten how some birds could sound like a baby crying.

  Another window went dark—the window that belonged to the innkeeper and his wife. Grinning, John stepped out from the edge of the wood, into the small field.

  A light glowed in Rebecca’s room. He had reached the inn, old and sombre looking, rambling—the ancient structure added to over the years, grown out from its original humble size. There were several scraggly lilac bushes along the base of the structure, their purple flowers just days from blooming. The stately maple loomed, reached up past Rebecca’s open window, towered over the roof.

  John grunted as he hefted himself into the lower branches. There were a good many sturdy limbs to climb on—no worse than a ladder. The window was close, he could see the candlelight wavering on the ceiling of the room. He heard something as well, but could not readily identify the sound. Was it slurping?

  Successful at last, John gripped the edge of the open window and pulled himself up. He looked in at the bed, at Rebecca dead and naked upon it, with a small grey form crouched on her belly. Its hairless head was round, and it stopped nursing at a pale breast to turn and glare at him. It hissed.

  Somehow John managed not to scream. He scrambled awkwardly down the tree and fell several feet from the bottom. He ran to where his horse was tethered, just inside the dark wood, and spurred it swiftly to the road.

  His heartbeat matched the pounding of the hooves, as the mare galloped along the track. Even when John close
d his eyes he could see the baby’s face, like a small rotting pumpkin, the disintegrating flesh lit softly, internally, as if by a chunk of the moon.

  Mostly he saw the eyes—darker than a skull’s, darker than the night into which his horse carried him.

  Laben Blois’ Death

  Laben Blois had a farm just north of Barnstable. His overworked plough horse, who Laben’s children called Old Maggie, but he just called “damn lazy nag,” died one winter’s night when the barn caught fire. Without a horse, Laben didn’t know how he would run his farm. He had suffered a poor harvest the previous year and could not afford to buy another horse. Laben, however, knew of an old Indian man in a cabin in a valley three miles to the south. Laben’s children called the man Buck.

  Buck kept mostly to himself, though he traded animal furs with the local villagers on occasion.

  Laben knew that Buck had a beautiful auburn mare. He decided that he could make better use of the beast than the old Indian could.

  So, Laben crept off one night after his wife and children had gone to sleep. He walked on dirt paths until he reached the cabin where old Buck lived. It was a still moonless night. Laben leaned on his rifle, outside, waiting. The old Indian was still awake, for an amber light filled the cabin’s windows.

  Laben moved for the door, but it opened just as he reached for the latch. Old Buck stood silhouetted in the doorway. Laben’s surprise set him several paces back, but he quickly recovered the composure to fire a shot into the big Indian shadow. Old Buck tottered, moaned, and fell dead.

  Laben buried the body in a shallow grave and rode off on the prized auburn mare.

  When spring came early, Laben ploughed with the auburn mare and planted. Summer breathed fullness into the fields, butterflies spun through the fertile air. Autumn brought Laben the richest of harvests, the sweetest corn and heavy golden squash.

  Then winter came, one late November dusk, with sneering winds and sleet like ice-locusts. At dinner that evening, Mary Blois, Laben’s oldest daughter, said that she and a friend had been playing in the woods near where old Buck had lived, before his disappearance. She said, “He’s back.”