My heart gave a mights 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, and they got the body pulled to the side.
Something was still holding my arm fast. The last thing I
saw was the bitch'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 Darks 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
wails of this underground chamber, Gabriel's mad laughter
following as the doors clanged shut.
     The place was pitch dark and stunk 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.

                          37