What I never told you of is this: Days later—I don't know how many—Master Gabriel called some of us in again. It had grown colder, and the wind got bad at times. When it blew, the great tree shook, and you could hear its scream through the branches. At times it seemed like it was a voice calling. We couldn't tell whose; we didn't want to know. The body was still up there; white bone showing through the tattered black rags.

​

Master Collins wanted it down. Swinging as it was, right in front of his big fancy window, we didn't wonder why. So we climbed back up into that great tree, two others and me. It was a fearful sight, the skull grinning and the black rags flapping in the wind; the cold itself biting at our bones. But the Master wanted it down, and his temper was fearful too. So we did it, Jonas and Tom and me; we cut the body loose and lowered it down to the ground. The Master had a box for it, and chains made up, and a place for it to go. No, I don't know where. He was going to show us that, but I never found it.

It befell that I was the one who lifted the upper part of the body into the box. I reached under, getting the back of the skull with one hand. The eye sockets were bare, the teeth grinning. I thought of how strange it was for all the flesh to go so fast; there weren't that many birds out at that time of year, all gone because of the cold. Then I think I slipped on the muddy ground, or maybe something else moved to trip me. I don't know, but I found myself on the ground, the bones laying right atop me.

​

My heart gave a mighty lurch as I looked up into those empty sockets. Then something hard and tight circled my right wrist and squeezed like the crush of a vice. I think I yelled—I don't remember rightly—and tried to scramble out. It was like those bony arms were aholding onto me, like the weight of those bones was keeping me pinned to the earth. I was struggling, and Tom and Jonas were helping; they got the body pulled to the side, but something was still holding my arm fast. The last thing I saw was the witch's bony fingers, clamped tight around my wrist.

​

Well, they told me I fainted dead away, and it was Jonas and Tom who did as Master Collins told them. What they did with the body I have no wish to know. My arm was never right since then, and I keep it covered up, so I don't have to see the marks those fingers left, deep as a brand in my flesh. I went back to the farm, and now can do near as much with one arm as others with two. I don't bemoan my fate. I count myself the lucky one. It was only my arm she got. Both Jonas and Tom were found dead later, those same finger marks dug deep in the flesh of their necks.

​

II

 

Charles Collins, 1810

​

The feel of their hands was still with him, bruised deep on arms and shoulders, and his ribs sent stabs of pain from where he had been kicked when he had fallen. Gabriel had laughed then; his memory of the nervous titter overlain with the sound of the last words he had heard spoken.

​

“For eternity, brother.”

​

The words had reverberated and echoed off the dank walls of this underground chamber, Gabriel's mad laughter following as the doors clanged shut. The place was pitch dark and stank of mildew and decay. Panic had seized him—mindless, he'd thrown himself again and again against the solid oak-and-iron door, bloodying hands and bruising shoulders until at last he'd collapsed in a panting, exhausted heap upon the floor.

​

He didn't know how long he had lain there in a nightmarish stupor of drained rage, grief and terror. In the blackness, with no sound, time vanished and the only images in his mind were half-formed phantoms: Laura's contorted face as his hands forced her under the icy water again; the bloody flecks on Strack's lips as his horse pounded the minister's flesh into the ground. And sometimes, dimly, the faces of his parents, two cold effigies floating, a spectral haze at the edges of his vision.

​

Faces of the dead. Ready to welcome him.

​

He shifted painfully, injured ribs making him cough. Pain stabbed, clutching him greedily. Then, at last, the nausea passed a little and other things intruded: the sound of his breath, rasping in his lungs; his heartbeat, pounding in his ears; the dry crunch of the ground beneath as he changed position. The blackness was so intense his eyes ached with the strain of attempting to see something—anything. Closing them did no good; the impenetrable dark still pressed painfully inward. Neither diminished the fear, the knife edge of panic sawing at his guts.

​

Buried alive. His mind admitted the words and veered away. He could feel his own laughter welling up and fought it, slamming his fists against the doorway again and again until the skin had split and sticky blood stuck his fingers together.

​

He quieted again, nursing his pain as a bane to the insanity that threatened since watching her death. That image returned, vividly etched in his mind: the skeletal branches of the tree; the long black cloak they had dressed her in; the wild gold of her hair against the tinny autumn sky. The rope around her neck; the blue fire of her eyes, possessing his for a moment, then roving upward to one of the house windows; the angle of her head, after she fell.

​

 ...Charles...

​

He started at the sound of the voice and twisted his head in a vain attempt to see. No further sound came, but with a shock, his mind finally focused again, snapped out of the delirious haze his panic had thrown him into.

​

This was the deepest chamber beneath the house, he remembered, meant for a root cellar, but never used. He'd explored it all when he was much younger. The cold was seeping into his bones; quite likely he'd die of it before the thirst claimed him. A scant comfort, that.

​

Rage again filled him at the thought of his brother triumphing—weak-willed, petty Gabriel. That excuse for a man had never deserved the wife he had had—not a woman that vibrant, that beautiful, that compelling. Not Angelique, that child of the demons or the angels, not one who knew so much about heaven and hell combined.

​

With a start, he remembered the last light he had seen. The drunken guttering of the torches as they swayed and dipped, held by some farmhand toward the back of the struggling group. Insane shadows twisting upon the walls. Harsh, geometric lines scantily revealed by the thrashing light. A wooden box in the center of the room, and Gabriel's words again: "You shall have her...for eternity, brother."

​

He scrambled toward the center of the room, heedless of the stabbing pain that flared in his ribs and the pounding in his head. It was there in the center; his hands grabbed against rough wood. He dragged himself along until he had measured its length, then set his hands to pry at the lid.

​

The cover was wooden as well, and not nailed down. Wood scraped against wood as he shoved it fiercely aside. It thumped upon the dirt floor beyond, the sound loud in his ears; all sound magnified by the total darkness. Breath coming in excited gasps, he reached inside without hesitation. His hands, though, were gentle as they explored what lay within.

​

By chance, he encountered the skull first, the bone as smooth and clean as if the woman it had housed had been dead many years. His hands held the memory of her soft golden hair, of her flesh like satin, of the soft fine line of her brows and the flutter of her lashes. He caressed the bone, not really feeling it at all, his memories more alive than this reality.

It was several seconds before he noticed the oddity. The bone underneath his hands was rounded and smooth. No obstruction, no gaping holes. It was the back of the skull, not the face.

​

He explored further, hand tracing down the rag-covered backbone, feeling the hard joints of the ribs at either side. Down further, he encountered something even more startling—the hands, bones still joined together, were chained at the wrists. And even lower, he found that iron spikes and rings had been set in the wood, and the ankles chained down as well.

​

His mind, numbed, finally formed the picture: the body, with its wrists and ankles chained, had been placed in the coffin face down. A peculiar horror filled him. He had never been much for society's conventions, but this violation of the treatment of the dead cut somewhere deep inside.

​

He wanted to laugh again, let in the madness. Memories of old superstitions danced in like ghosts: Uneducated villagers with old wives’ tales and fanatics, afraid of their own shadows when the sun set. Chain the dead down; keep them from walking. Turn the face of the witch toward hell.

​

Let not the dead rise up and walk to haunt the dreams of the living. There was a dizzying roar in his head which peaked and passed. Somewhere, pain lived as well, but it was somewhere far away.

​

...Charles...

​

The voice again, drifting in the stillness, very real.

​

"Angelique," he whispered.

​

There was warmth beneath his hands. Softness. His fingers now pressed against warm flesh. Slowly, following her form, he moved forward until his fingers tangled in silky hair.