Eliot Pattison - Original Death

“Where do they go to?”

“Beyond, and beyond.” The woman kept cackling, holding the bottle up to an eye and looking at Duncan through its bulbous translucent glass.

Duncan clenched his jaw in frustration. He gazed at the wampum belt, knowing that without Conawago he would never unlock the riddle of its beads. “Your son and his students. How do I find them?”

“People think there is forgiveness on the other side,” the Welsh woman croaked. “But that is where payment is made.”

“Damn it!” he snapped. “There’s children to be saved, woman! Enough of your gibberish.”

She cocked her head toward a bear skull he had not seen before, suspended from a roof beam so that it seemed to float in the air. She seemed not to see him now. As he watched uneasily, she began to unbutton her soiled linen blouse. “Enough of your gibberish,” she echoed. With one quick movement she pulled the blouse down, below her small, pinched breasts. “Here is where they go!”

Her chest was covered with scars and tattoos, a maze of small deliberately inflicted scars and ink depicting stick figures of humans, a tree, and a bear. Around and through it all was a tattoo of a long snake, its head facing a sun rising over a vertical line. Her torso began to undulate, and the snake began to move. A small, fearful cry escaped Duncan’s throat. She was a witch after all.

“You won’t even know what to say when he finally speaks to you,” she said in a surprisingly level voice. It had the sound of an accusation.

As Duncan gazed at her hideous disfigured torso, his jaw moved up and down but no sound came out. “Whom must I speak to?” he finally asked.

“The Revelator,” she replied, her eyes wild again. As she laughed the snake writhed on her naked flesh. “The Revelator summons you! He will seize the heart from your chest and wring the truth out of your miserable life!”

He dropped the beads, grabbed the crumpled paper, and fled.

“People say Albany is at the edge of the world,” the man in the brown waistcoat observed. “But they’re wrong. We live between the edges of two worlds. The pressing blade of European settlement and the sharper edge of the tribes.”

Duncan had found Thomas Forsey, one of the two brothers who owned the clothier, smoking a long-stemmed pipe on the back step of the big brick building. He nodded to his workers as they filed out, murmuring polite farewells, at the end of their workday. Duncan had told him he was a scout, looking for Mrs. Eldridge. “Her son is a schoolmaster. He and his students are missing.”

Forsey tilted his head and studied Duncan as if deciding whether to believe him. “Who did you find?”

“She was there, in that hut with the skins and skulls.”

“There is a fortune-teller who lives there,” Forsey said, taking another puff on his pipe. “‘The Welsh Oracle,’ some in the taverns call her. People buy her a drink and ask when to plant their grain. For a whole bottle she’ll tell you what to name your child and how you will die.”

“I thought I was going to meet Mrs. Eldridge.”

“When she is here, the meek Hetty Eldridge is the best seamstress we have. There is also a drunk who lives in that hut, though thank God no man’s ever been drunk like her. And there is the ghostwalker.”

A ghostwalker. It would explain much, Duncan realized. Inhabitants of the settlements used the term to refer to the uncertain souls who had been captured by the tribes and later released, usually after many years of living as a member of a tribe. “How long?”

“Who knows. Long enough. I remember Mr. Conrad Weiser of the Pennsylvania colony coming here many years ago, looking for signs of her. She had been taken in a raid on a farm in the Tulpehocken country long before, just after being married. There was a deal struck with some Mingoes ten or twelve years ago. They agreed to return captives to the army in exchange for some guns and blankets. She came back dragging a half-blood son with her.” For many captives the return to European society was more difficult than their original capture. It was why they were called ghostwalkers, for the way many never fit back in, for the way they stayed between worlds, often wandering aimlessly.

“She has her job here,” Duncan observed. “Why does she live in such squalor?”

“Hetty and I have a game we play. Every time she collects her monthly wage, I offer her a room in our attic. Every month she thanks me but refuses. She wants full wages, nothing deducted for room and board. But she never collects them. She worked hard to educate her son, but after he left her nest he went back out among the Mingoes for a few years. A month after he finally returned, he murdered some Dutch patroon’s son over a card game. He escaped custody but he was still found guilty. She is convinced of his innocence and has me send every shilling to a barrister in New York town who is petitioning the crown for a pardon.”

“But she has two sons? There is one who is a schoolmaster.”

Forsey held up a hand, as if he did not want to hear more. “One son. You must be thinking of someone else,” he said pointedly.

Duncan was more confused than ever about the woman and the hell dog that had watched him so ravenously when he had retreated from her hut. “She smelled like she was drunk but. .” he searched futilely for words, “but she wasn’t.”

“The rum doesn’t go into Hetty like it does other humans. It’s like it becomes a spirit of another kind, a spirit of the other side, some say, that possesses her at such times.” Forsey seemed to try to grin but the effort became a grimace, which quickly faded as he looked over Duncan’s shoulder. He dipped his head in greeting to someone and slipped back into his building.

“Christ’s Blood, Duncan!” a man behind him snapped, then pulled him off the step. “You must have a death wish!”

Captain Patrick Woolford was a man who looked elegant in any uniform, even the roughspun ranger tunic he often wore, but the man before Duncan was haggard and nervous. A pistol was stuffed in his belt, and the pan of his rifle was primed as if he expected an attack at any moment. He spoke no more until he had led Duncan into the shadows of the stable at the rear of the property.

“My God, man! They are searching for you up and down the lakes!” Woolford exclaimed. “Murder of a corporal in the 42 ndthey say.”

“They are wrong, Patrick.”

“Of course they are. But this army is in a hanging mood. You have to flee. Come back to my room above the old tavern, then tonight slip into the forest with Conawago for a month or two. Go to the Iroquois towns. Go to Sarah Ramsey. Anywhere but here.”

“And what are you doing here? You are supposed to be in the North striking the coup de grâce on the French.”

“I am in the North, in the West, even in New York town. My men are scattered. General Calder says rangers are good at operating in the shadows, and he has taken to using my company for shadow errands. I was heading for the fort at Oswego when he summoned me back.”

“Because of the murders?”

“Not exactly.” Woolford cocked his head. “I heard of but one murder.”

Duncan gestured him toward two thick cut logs used as splitting blocks. They sat among the woodchips, and he explained the journey he and Conawago had taken to find Conawago’s long-lost kinsman and the horror that had awaited them when they finally reached Bethel Church.

“I know Bethel Church,” Woolford said in a hollow voice. “A village of Christian Mohawks.”

“Who were forced to stand in a line and wait for a hammer to their skulls. Women and men in the full of life. A young maiden. And one Nipmuc, tortured as if he were the object of the raid.”