The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

good one.”

I loved him, and so I agreed.

But then came more of the ridiculous testimony against Elizabeth. Oh, the things that people said! And then my darling Caleb took matters into his own hands.

He stood before the judges and gave them a piece of his mind. He ridiculed them for being idiots, ready to believe mischievous girls who were probably afraid of being in trouble themselves for having been caught in the woods.

“An infant!” Caleb roared, his dark eyes flashing, his handsome features intense. “You would accuse an infant, one of God’s sweet innocents, of being guilty of witchcraft? Are you daft, men? Are you daft? My sister is as sweet and saintly as any woman might be, and yet, because of the outrageous accusations of others, you chain her at night? As my good friend John Proctor said, these girls will make devils of us all! Have you no sense, my fellow men of God? What great power would allow such absurdity to exist? Look to your souls, men!”

Ah, my poor Caleb. Somehow, he had forgotten that despite his words, John Proctor had found himself then accused of witchcraft.

Oh, those wretched girls! One of them suddenly fell to the floor, tearing at her hair. “He looked at me!” she cried. “He looked at me! And now … the pain, oh, dearest God, help me! The pain!”

I started to rise; Caleb looked at me and shook his head. But before I knew it, Caleb was being shackled and dragged away to join his sister.

I fought my way into being able to see him; I wanted to do something drastic, but he smoothed my hair back. “You are still free; we need you out there. We need the help of the governor, for he is a righteous man, and perhaps he can stop this madness. You must go to him, and quickly.”

The death toll was mounting; already, we had seen so many innocents hanged. They had been the pious, the elderly, like Rebecca Nurse. They had been the outcasts, those suspected of sleeping with men without the benefit of marriage, like poor Bridget Bishop.

“Caleb, I’m afraid to leave you,” I said. Then I started speaking quickly, in a whisper. “Caleb, if you will just trust me … we can get out of here with Elizabeth and the baby and her husband … please, believe in me, I can do this!”

“I believe in the law,” he told me, his eyes gentle and beautiful, and he stroked my hair. “Get to the governor, and all will be well,” he assured me. “I believe in God, and in the law, and God will force men to see the truth and the error of their ways.”

Let me say right off that I certainly believed in God more than anyone; I knew that there was a great father, and I had led my life hoping to seek his good graces, despite the circumstances of my birth into a species that was not considered to be among the saintly.

I knew, too, that he preferred men to discover their own mistakes; he taught lessons, but on his own terms and in his own time, and I wasn’t ready to let him save Caleb and Elizabeth.

“Believe in me, and in goodness, my beloved. Get to the governor,” he told me.

I was so in love with him. Caleb was tall and strong, and ever beautiful and steady, as determined as a rock to stand against the crashing waves of the insanity occurring here.

I used the last of our savings to pay for his and Elizabeth’s stays in jail; I comforted Josiah, her husband, and I left him like a lost lamb to care for the baby. I headed off to find the governor.

Well, by that time, the governor’s wife had been accused, and the man was suddenly awakened to the insanity of it all. It was one thing to accuse poor old deaf women and possible whores, and quite another to accuse the governor’s wife.

I was halfway to Boston when I received this information. I quickly turned around, knowing that a stay had been put on all the executions.

As I returned, I heard horrible stories. Giles Corey — whom I couldn’t feel too badly for, since he had given testimony against his wife — had been pressed to death. He had cursed Salem and the sheriff before he had died. It had all gotten worse; news traveled so slowly that people were being executed even after the order that it all cease until we heard from Mother England.

As this news reached me, I panicked. Old Samuel didn’t have the power to go against the judges in Salem, but he was a bastard through and through.

When I reached our little town, the streets were empty. I went to Elizabeth’s house, and I found Josiah there. He was on the floor; he had been struck and knocked out, and the baby had been taken.

I patched him up as quickly as I could, but he couldn’t walk. I had to leave him. I hurried to the town square.

I arrived in time to see that Elizabeth’s body lay at the side of the hanging tree; my beloved Caleb was about to be pushed from the ladder.

Like George Burroughs, onetime minister, my dearest Caleb was saying the Lord’s Prayer, and to no avail.

“No!” I shouted the word, and as I did so, my fury entered into the air, and the wind picked up and lightning struck.

“You see!” Samuel Bridgewater called from the back of his horse. “It’s she; it’s she who is the witch, she who dances with Satan, and she has infected them all!”

Dance with Satan? I’d never liked the little bastard of a fallen angel, and I had no intention of dancing with him. The very concept was totally inane.

I ran to the circle before him and I stared at him with all the fires of hell arising in my eyes. “Witches! Wizards? You accuse these people. You wretched bastard! If they were witches, they’d have made you pay.”

Samuel Bridgewater stared at me. He smiled icily. He knew they had no power.

What he didn’t know was that I did.

“Hang him!” he roared, referring to Caleb.

I turned, and not in time. For a brief moment, I saw the love in my husband’s eyes — and then I saw him swing, and I heard as his neck snapped, and I knew that he, like Elizabeth, was dead. Something inside of me broke at that moment — including self-preservation.

“String up the infant!” Samuel Bridgewater shouted loudly. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

And they called me a monster!

I lifted my arms, and I called upon my powers, and all the powers of death and evil and destruction. I pointed at Samuel Bridgewater.

“Let that which claims piety and is nothing but evil suffer all the tortures and agonies of the truly damned, and let the self-righteous learn the truth of love — and vengeance!”

Well, I must say, having bottled up my powers for all those years served me well. Lightning started raining across the sky and striking the ground. Fires burst out everywhere, and the wretched executioner — who had been about to string up Elizabeth’s infant daughter! — quickly climbed down the ladder with the child. He ran to where I stood, delivering the baby to my feet and falling to his knees.

“Spare me!” he cried.

I didn’t give a damn about the fool. He was a lackey, obeying Samuel Bridgewater, lest he find himself strung up.

Oh, no.

It was Bridgewater I was after.

“Dance with the devil, eh?” I said. I walked toward him, now surrounded by a raging fire myself. I fell to my knees by the body of Elizabeth, and I cradled her in my arms.

“Dance with the devil!” I roared again, and I passed her broken body to him. With sightless eyes, her body began to animate, to jerk and twitch, and drag him along. And there, in a sea of fire and a wind that roared with the power of a nor’easter, Samuel Bridgewater danced through the copse with the body of the woman he had coveted — and killed.

And he screamed, and screamed, for her body had become fire, and he couldn’t free himself from her, so where they touched, he burned and burned.

I was from Scotland. Witches were burned there. And if there had ever been a man who might be considered an evil witch, in my mind, it was Samuel Bridgewater.

Finally he was screaming so incoherently and in such agony that I walked back to him. I didn’t give a damn