The Salem Season

She could see the crowd. She could see the stage and the woman on it and the screens either side. And through all of it, above the heads of the people in front of her, there were threads.

They came up out of the crowd. One from every person, or nearly every person, thin and pale gold and not very bright, going up about two metres and then bending. They bent all in the same direction. They ran together as they went, three and four and eleven joining into one, the way water does on a window, and by the time they got to the stage there were perhaps twenty of them, thick and slow moving, and all twenty went into the woman in the cream coat and did not come out.

June stopped breathing for a moment.

Then she looked down at herself.

There was one coming out of her.

It came up from about the level of her collarbone, thin as a hair, absolutely steady, and it bent to the left with all the others and went towards the stage.

—June, said Priya.

—Yeah.

—Are you all right? You have gone weird.

—I am fine.

—You have gone extremely weird.

—I am fine, said June, and stepped backwards out of the crowd.

The thread came with her.

She took four steps and it stretched and stayed with her, and she took four more, right to the fence, and it was still there, going from her chest across forty metres of people to a stage.

She put her hand up through it.

Nothing. No feeling, no resistance, no warmth. Her hand went through it the way a hand goes through the beam of a projector, and the thread did not move at all.

Then she looked at the woman on the stage properly for the first time and found that she could see something else, which was much harder to look at and which she thought about for weeks afterwards.

Verity Cole was standing in the middle of about twenty streams of it, and she was not holding still. She was moving very slightly, backwards and forwards, a few centimetres at a time, in a way that would have looked to anybody else like a person shifting her weight.

She was not shifting her weight. She was adjusting.

June had watched her grandmother wind a wick onto a spool five hundred times, and it looked like that. It looked exactly like somebody doing a job with their hands that they had done every day for years and could do while thinking about something else.

June looked at the screens on either side of the stage.

The camera was on Verity Cole’s face in close up, six metres high, and on the screens there was nothing above the crowd at all. No threads, no gold, nothing. Just a woman in a cream coat with her eyes half closed and three thousand people in front of her.

Whatever this was, a camera could not see it.

—Beautiful, said Verity Cole, into the microphone. Now let it go.

Three thousand people let out a breath.

And the threads went out.

Not slowly. All at once, everywhere, like a light being switched off, and the field of gold over the crowd was simply gone, and there was a park at night with a stage in it and a woman standing in the middle of the stage with her hands together, smiling.

June sat down on the grass.

—Okay, said Priya, kneeling next to her. Now you are being properly weird and I am going to get you some water.

—I am fine.

—June, you have gone the colour of that fence.

—I need to go home.

—Give me the water, said June.

—You are shaking.

—It is cold.

—It is fourteen degrees, said Priya Rao, and you were fine ten minutes ago, and I have known you since we were nine, and something has happened.

—Priya, if I tell you I do not want to talk about it, will you let me not talk about it and be annoyed with me tomorrow instead?

Priya thought about it for about two seconds.

—Yes, she said, and sat down on the wet grass next to her without another word, which is why she had been June’s best friend since the fourth grade.

The talk finished at twenty to nine.

June did not hear the last ten minutes. She sat on the grass by the fence with a bottle of water Priya had bought and watched three thousand people applaud for a long time, and then watched them start to leave, and this was the part that stayed with her.

They came past her in twos and fours, going out through the gate towards Washington Street, and they were happy. That was not in question. Almost every single one of them was talking, and about a third of them were talking about how good it had been, and June heard a woman say the word incredible four times to four different people.

And they were tired.

Not the ordinary tired of a Thursday evening. There was something else in it and June could not name it for another two days. A man in a green jacket stopped in front of her to answer a phone call and said, twice, that he was fine, and then said, in a slightly puzzled voice: no, I do not know why either, and hung up. A woman of about twenty five stopped by the gate, looked at her own phone, frowned, and typed something and deleted it and typed it again.

And a boy of about eight, going past on his father’s shoulders, said, quite clearly:

—Dad, what were we doing?

—What do you mean?

—Just then. What were we doing?

—We were listening to the lady, said his father.

—Yeah, said the boy. But what were we doing?

And his father laughed and said that he was tired and that it was late, and they went out through the gate, and June sat on the grass by the fence and got extremely cold.

She stayed until the field was nearly empty, because Priya was interviewing people at the gate and because standing up seemed difficult.

The fair carried on. That was the strange part. Forty metres away the big wheel was still turning and the fried dough stall still had a queue and a group of teenagers were throwing balls at a stack of tins, and none of it had stopped for a second, and nobody on that whole nine acres appeared to have noticed anything except a seventeen year old girl sitting on the grass by the fence.

Priya walked her home.

She talked the whole way, which June was grateful for, because it meant she did not have to.

—Episode four is going to be so good. I got nine interviews. There is a man from Rhode Island who has been to eleven of her events and he could not tell me one thing she has ever said, he could not do it, I asked him three times and he kept saying it is more of a feeling.

—Priya.

—And I got the whole ninety second bit on tape, which is going to be great for the podcast, because you can hear three thousand people go quiet, it is genuinely eerie.

—Priya.

—What?

They had stopped at the corner of Chestnut Street.

June opened her mouth to say it.

I saw something. There were threads coming out of everybody’s chest and they went into her and they came out of me too and I could not see them before this evening.

She stood there with it in her mouth for about four seconds and then understood, completely and all at once, that she could not say it. Not because Priya would laugh. Priya would not laugh. Priya would take it seriously and get her phone out and want to know everything, and would then have it, and would be a person who was carrying it, and June had no idea what that meant yet.

—Nothing, she said. Send me the episode when it is done.

—It will be Thursday.

—Send it Thursday.

—You are being so weird tonight.

—I know.

—Are you okay? Actually?

—I do not know yet, said June, which was the most honest sentence she had produced all evening.

June walked the last hundred metres of Chestnut Street on her own.

It is one of the most beautiful streets in New England and it was completely empty at half past nine, and she did not look at any of it. She looked at the air above the street, and at the space over the rooftops in the direction of the Common, and she saw nothing at all, and she could not tell whether that was a relief.

The house was dark except for the kitchen.

Her mother had gone to bed. Her grandmother was at the table with a cup of tea and a plain white candle burning in a brass holder, which she had never once done in front of June, and which June did not think about until much later.

—You are early, said Margot Hale.

—Yeah.

—Was it good?

June stood in the kitchen doorway with her bag still on her shoulder.

She had prepared four different ways of saying it on the walk from Chestnut Street, and all four of them fell apart, and what came out was:

—Gran, what is a thread?

Her grandmother put down the cup.

She did it very carefully, and she took slightly longer over it than she needed to, and she did not look up straight away.

—Sit down, said Margot Hale.

—Gran.

—June. Sit down, and I am going to lock the front door first, because I have wanted to have this conversation for about four years and I am not doing it with a door open onto Chestnut Street in October.

Chapter 3. Four Things

Key vocabulary

a rule — правило

a witness — свидетель

intention — намерение

a cost — цена, издержки

to charge (a price) — брать плату

a ledger — учётная книга

an anchor — якорь, опора

to hold (a working) — удерживать

a spell — заклинание

a trade — ремесло

to inherit — унаследовать

a bloodline — родовая линия

to practise — практиковать

ridiculous — нелепый

to take something seriously — относиться серьёзно

Four Things

Margot Hale locked the front door, and then she checked it, and then she went into the front room and closed the curtains, which she did not do in October because the house was one of the ones people photographed and she said that closed curtains looked unfriendly.

Then she came back and sat down and put both hands flat on the kitchen table.

She sat down opposite her granddaughter, and for the first time in June’s life she looked like a woman who had been waiting for something and had stopped being able to put it off.

—Tell me what you saw, she said. All of it. Do not tidy it up.

June told her.

It took about eight minutes and it came out in the wrong order, and twice she had to go back, and her grandmother did not interrupt once except to say, at one point, how many joined together, and to write the answer on the back of an envelope.

When it was finished, Margot Hale said:

—The boy on the shoulders. Say that again.

—He said: what were we doing.

—Twice?

—Twice. And his dad said we were listening to the lady, and he said yes but what were we doing.

Her grandmother looked at the candle in the brass holder for a while.

—Right, she said. I am going to tell you four things. I have been putting this off since you were thirteen and your mother has been telling me to do it since she came back, and she was right, and I am going to say that to her tomorrow and it will be the first time in nineteen years.

She turned the candle holder a quarter turn on the table, which June had seen her do a thousand times and which she now suspected was not nothing.

—One. What you saw is real, it happens, and you are not the only person who can see it, but you are one of very few, and the number in this town is currently four.

—Four people.

—Four, said Margot Hale. Me. You. A man called Roland Pike who is eighty one and does not leave his house. And a woman who is currently living in a rented place on Federal Street who arrived on the twenty ninth of September.

June sat with that.

—Verity Cole.

—Verity Cole.

—Gran.

—Two, said her grandmother, because if I stop I will not start again. Two is how it works, and it is very simple and everybody gets it wrong. It takes three things. Intention, cost and witnesses.

She held up three fingers and put one down.

—Intention. You have to want a specific thing. Not a feeling. A thing. And it has to be one thing, and you have to be able to say it in one sentence, and if you cannot say it in one sentence you have not got an intention, you have got a mood.

She put the second finger down.

—Cost. Everything is paid for. Nothing is free, and there is no version where it is free, and anybody who tells you otherwise is either lying or is about to be extremely surprised.

—Paid with what?

—I am coming to that. Third.

She put the last finger down.

—Witnesses. And this is the one that nobody outside the trade understands, and it is the reason this town is what it is.

She leaned back.

—Nothing works alone, June. Nothing. You can sit in a locked room with the best intention in the world and the purest heart in New England and you will not move a teaspoon. It needs to be seen. It needs people who are aware that something is happening, and the more of them there are, the bigger the thing you can do.

June looked at her.

—How many for a teaspoon?

—Three, said Margot Hale, and looked pleased. That is a very good question and it is the right one. Three people, paying attention, for something the size of a teaspoon. Eleven for a candle to light itself. About forty for something you would tell your friends about.

—Can I ask something stupid? said June.

—There are no stupid ones tonight.

—Does it have to be people? Could you do it with a camera?

Her grandmother looked up sharply.

—Why do you ask that?

—Because there were two screens next to the stage and her face was on them six metres high, and I looked, and there was nothing above the crowd on the screens. The camera could not see it.

—The camera cannot see it, agreed Margot Hale. That is well spotted and it is also not what I asked. Why did you ask about cameras?

—Because there were about nine people filming.

Her grandmother did not answer for a moment.

—Put that to one side, she said. We will come back to it and I do not want to come back to it tonight.

—And three thousand?

—Three thousand, said her grandmother, on a stage, on a lit field, in October, in this town, all of them consenting, all of them looking in the same direction.

She stopped.

—Three thousand is more than I have seen in one place since 1998, she said, and I am not going to pretend to you that I slept last night.

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere on Chestnut Street a car went past slowly, looking for a parking space that does not exist in October.

—Third thing, said Margot Hale.

—That was three things.

—That was one thing in three parts. Do not be clever, it is twenty past ten.

She got up and filled the kettle, which she did when she wanted to be doing something with her hands.

—Third thing is who pays.

—The person doing it, said June.

—No.

—Then who?

—The witnesses, said Margot Hale, and turned round. Every time. Always. That is the entire trade. That is what people mean when they say a price. The cost of a working is taken out of the people who watched it, in proportion, split between them, and the more of them there are the less each one pays, which is why big is safer than small and why everybody wants a crowd.

June sat with her hands round a mug of tea that had gone cold.

—Paid with what? she said again.

—Small things.

—Gran.

—I am not being vague, said her grandmother. That is the actual answer. It comes out in small things, and it is always something that is easy to lose and hard to notice. A day of memory, usually a dull one. The taste of something. Your ability to feel cold for a while. Two weeks of patience with your family. A tune you used to know.

—That is horrible.

—Yes, said Margot Hale.

—No, but that is genuinely horrible.

—Yes, said her grandmother again, and did not soften it, which June appreciated later and did not appreciate at all at the time.

June thought about three thousand people going out through a gate.

—The boy, she said. The one on the shoulders.

—The boy paid about ninety seconds of memory, said Margot Hale. From about ten minutes before. He will never get it back and he will never miss it and by tomorrow he will not know there is anything to miss. That is what it looks like from the inside, June. It does not look like anything. That is the whole problem with it.

—And me?

Her grandmother looked at her.

—What did you have for lunch on Monday? she said.

June opened her mouth.

She sat in a kitchen on the second of October and could not remember what she had eaten for lunch two days earlier, and then thought, quite reasonably, that most people cannot, and then could not decide which of those two thoughts was true, and this, she discovered over the following month, is the exact feeling that the whole thing runs on.

—I do not know, she said.

—No. And you never will, and it does not matter, and if you spend the next thirty days checking you will go mad. I have watched somebody do that.

—Who?

—Fourth thing, said Margot Hale, and sat back down.

—Can it be undone? said June. If somebody has paid, can you give it back?

—No.

—Never?

—June, if there were a way of giving it back, this town would look extremely different, said Margot Hale. You can stop a working. You can break an anchor. You can make somebody’s next one cost them more than it is worth. You cannot return what has already gone, any more than you can put a Tuesday back.

The fourth thing took the longest.

—Our family does not practise, she said.

—What?

—We do not do it. We have not done it since 1971 and we do not do it now and you are not going to be taught it.

—Then what are we?

—We are chandlers, said Margot Hale, which is the old word for candle makers, and which is on the deeds of that shop in 1908 and on a document I have upstairs from 1804.

—Gran, that is not an answer.

—It is the whole answer and I am going to explain it, said her grandmother. Sit still.

She turned the brass holder another quarter turn.

—A working needs to be held, she said. Intention, cost, witnesses gets it started. Something has to hold it while it happens, or it goes off all at once and does whatever it likes, and that is where people get hurt. So you need an anchor. A physical object that the working sits in while it burns.

June looked at the candle on the table.

—Yes, said Margot Hale. Now you have got it.

—Candles.

—Candles. Because a candle is the only anchor that tells you when to stop. A stone will hold a working forever. A ring will hold it for fifty years and then somebody sells it at a market in Rowley and it is on a stranger’s hand. A candle burns for four hours and then it is over and there is nothing left but wax.

She tapped the table.

—That is our trade. We do not do workings. We make the things that hold them and we make them so that they run out. Twelve hours, four hours, ninety minutes, twenty. There is a hundred metres of wick in the workroom and there is a reason every single spool is a different thickness.

June thought about the boy of nineteen who had come in on the first of October and asked for a hundred metres of wick.

—The special orders, she said.

—Twenty three of them, said Margot Hale. Twenty three people in Essex County who buy from me, and I know what every one of them does, and there is a book in the workroom with all of it in.

—The four minutes.

—The four minutes.

—What do you actually do in there?

Her grandmother put both hands flat on the table again.

—I write down what happened in this town today, she said. Every night. Who worked, where, roughly how big, and what it cost. I have done it every day since 1971 and my mother did it before me and hers did before her, and there are forty one books in a cupboard in that workroom, and the first one starts in November 1804.

June sat absolutely still.

—You are saying our family are the people who write it down.

—I am saying our family are the people who write it down, sell the anchors, keep them small, and do not work, said Margot Hale. That is the trade. It is not glamorous, it is not exciting, and everybody on that street thinks we are the boring shop, and that is exactly the point, and I have been extremely happy doing it for fifty two years.

—Why did we stop? said June.

—Stop what?

—You said we do not practise since 1971. That means we did before.

Her grandmother took a long time over that one.

—Yes, she said.

—What happened in 1971?

—I am not doing that tonight.

—Gran.

—June, said Margot Hale, and there was something in her voice that June had heard perhaps four times in her life. I have given you an enormous amount in one evening and you have taken it well and I am proud of you. That one costs me something and I would like to be sitting down properly and not at twenty to eleven on the second of October. You will get it. Not tonight.

June let it go, which she was not certain about afterwards.

—Does Mum know? she said instead.

—Your mother knows everything I have told you tonight and about four things I have not.

—Is that why she came back?

—I do not know, said Margot Hale. She has not told me and I have not asked her, because we have nineteen years to get through and I am doing it in the order that seems least likely to end badly.

—Then tell me about her, said June.

—Verity Cole.

—Yes.

Margot Hale got up and took the notebook out of her cardigan pocket and put it on the table between them, and opened it near the back, and turned it round.

29 Sept. Federal St. Arrived. One woman, no coven, hired help only.

30 Sept. Nothing.

1 Oct. Common. Large. Not local.

2 Oct. Common, main stage, 20.03 to 20.44. Approx 3,000 consenting. Took memory, low grade, spread thin. Anchor not identified.

June read it three times.

—You were there tonight, she said.

—I was at the back by the bandstand from ten to eight.

—You told me to go.

—I told you to go, said Margot Hale, because you have been able to feel it since you were about fifteen and you have not known what it was, and I have been waiting for the year when the thing was big enough that you would see it instead of only feeling it, and I did not expect that year to be this one, and I am not sorry.

—You could have told me first.

—Yes.

—Gran, you could have told me first and then I would not have sat down on wet grass in front of three thousand people.

—June, I have been a chandler for fifty two years and a grandmother for seventeen and I am considerably better at the first one, said Margot Hale. Yes. I could have told you first. I have been getting that wrong since 2011 and your mother will confirm it at length if you ask her, which I would rather you did not do before Sunday.

She closed the notebook.

—Now, she said. Ask me the question you have been holding since you sat down.

June looked at the table.

—Is she going to do something bad?

—That is not the question.

—Then what is?

—The question, said Margot Hale, is why a woman with two point one million followers, who could fill a room anywhere on this planet, has rented a house for thirty one days in a town of forty two thousand people.

—Because it is Salem in October.

—Because it is Salem in October.

—Because of the crowd.

—Because there is nowhere else on earth where a million people turn up in one month and think about this on purpose, said her grandmother, and because the thirty first of October on Essex Street is about a hundred thousand people in eleven streets, and because there is no permit in the world that stops somebody standing in the middle of that with an intention.

She blew out the candle.

—And because she is not doing one thing, said Margot Hale. She is doing it in pieces. Four events so far and there will be more, and every one of them takes a little and none of them takes enough to notice, and something in this town is being filled up.

—Filled up with what?

—I do not know.

—What is holding it?

—I do not know that either, said her grandmother, and that is the part that has stopped me sleeping, because a working that size needs an anchor, and I have sold every serious anchor in this county for fifty two years, and I have not sold her one.