Salem Village, Massachusetts
December 1692
The fire has always mystified them. An unimaginable power from God, its form unknowable. An infinite source of light and heat. Of destruction.
The Reverend Samuel Parris had never understood why they hadn't burned the witches, like they had in Europe. He hated that they'd all been hung — save for Giles Corey, who'd been pressed to death by stones — on Gallows Hill. Such a human execution seemed to lack to the fervent justice that such heretics needed. Witchcraft had no place in his town, let alone his home. His poor daughter, Betty, had been afflicted for over a year. Their kin, Abigail, had been the first accuser. Their slave, Tituba, the first accused.
His hatred of the witches, of the hysteria, of the madness in his church, had mounted, its form crystallizing. Just the way the humidity in the New England summer air had a way of solidifying in the winter into ice in the lungs, so too had the Reverend's hatred of the witches formed into its own kind of ice: Clear. Sharp. Deadly.
The fire mystified them, but the witchcraft tortured them. Reverend Parris paced in his modest home, a team of horsemen awaiting his instructions.
"How far?"
The horse captain answered him with confidence."Far enough that they could never return to Salem. They are likely not to survive the journey as it is."
Parris looked at Massachusetts Governor, Sir William Phips, who'd ordered him to entertain this asinine compromise. "If they shall die by God's hand in the wilderness, then why shan't we bestow upon them justice ourselves?"
Phips growled. "We have discussed the matter at length, Reverend." He and Parris both knew it was imprudent to ignore the allegations but outrageous to condemn them all to death. Still, Parris had a stronger taste for blood — or perhaps for burning flesh — than the governor. "Enough is enough. I will not hang another unless His Majesty says so, and he does no such thing. We are already impugned for our crimes against the other nineteen."
The captain and his horsemen waited silently. They knew the instructions they had received, but they also knew they had to wait for Parris and Phips to come to the same conclusions on their own.
"How long is the journey?" Parris asked.
The captain paused. "We are not certain. We have heard only rumors that we can go so far west. I expect we may return when this winter gives way to spring. At worst, we may return with the summer sun." He swallowed uncomfortably at the falsehood, his conscience guilty. None of the six would survive the journey ahead of them.
Finally, Parris obliged. Addressing the captain, he said, "We are decided then. Take them before the night has passed. Gather whatever you need and leave now."
Without another word, the captain and his horsemen left the Reverend's home. In the street, thirty-two horses waited: one for each of the six, and twenty-six more, each with an accused shackled to it.
The horsemen were as prepared as they could be for the journey ahead. Their only regret was taking so many of the small community's horses with them when they knew they'd never return. But they dared not question their purpose. They had made peace with risking their lives. Witchcraft had no place in Salem, no room for it in God's world at all. But they were quiet vigilantes, these six, who could remain complacent no longer. They were charged with keeping their town, their religion, from murdering any more than it already had.
Many in Salem could not bear to witness the massacre that would result if these children were put on trial, but these six men were motivated not solely by beneficence. Instead, they were driven by purpose, acting as if God Himself had sent the word to them to remove the accused from Salem and bring them to safety.
But it wasn't God who compelled them.
In the seasons preceding this midnight ride, nineteen souls had hung from the gallows of Salem, accused and convicted as witches. Five more had died in prison. Now, just months after the most recent execution, the town was reeling from a mass accusation: Twenty-six children were believed to be witches. The grievous claim appeared legitimate and was taken very seriously by more than just the zealous reverend. Alexander Raven, a respected member of the community, had made credible accusations about all twenty-six. His own daughter was among the accused.
As an act of forbearance, Sir William Phips had decided to exile the accused instead of hanging them. It had been only one week before that the twenty-six had been taken from their homes and imprisoned. Now each sat shackled to a horse, shivering from fear and frost, and certain that the horsemen marched them in an uncommon fashion toward death.
Reverend Parris and Governor Phips stood in the lane watching as the accused and the horsemen disappeared into the frozen blackness of night.
From his doorstep, Raven watched as they rode. He shut the door before they were out of sight.
They headed westward with no plan but to continue on until they had gone far enough. It took a season to reach the point where the men had decided to drop these children, defenseless against the elements.
Their ride was treacherous. Their horses labored in the frigid winds as they trekked across uneven terrain, slowly climbing through mountain passes, struggling on steep declines. The sky shone a glaring white-grey as if snow that never dissipated hung in the air and clung to their skin. Each day they followed the path of the setting sun, driving the horses until their hooves could take no more. The accused witches were silent, save for sounds of quiet prayers, tears.
Seven of the twenty-six died en route. A girl with brown hair, blue eyes, and freckles was the first to pass on, still upright on her horse until they approached a sharp incline and her rigid, frozen body fell from the horse. It was dragged, hooked to the saddle, for fifty meters before the chains broke loose. A rosy-cheeked fifteen-year-old boy, whose father was friends with Reverend Parris, began to shake late one night, convulsing and crying out into the dark as he labored for each breath, until he labored no more. A horseman's nose, fingers, and toes began to sear in hot pain in the cold wind, turning black before he met his end. A second horseman had lain on the ground one night, too far from the fire. He never awoke.
On the seventy-fourth cold morning, they reached a clearing flanked by shallow hills. Frozen streams lined grey and icy earth. The sky was white with frost. The team of horsemen decided they had done all they could.
The remaining four men released each of the accused, one by one, and let them off their horses. They freed the youngest, Hannah, who was just twelve years of age, first. She stood shakily on the ground and began to walk, looking like a newborn colt as she struggled to remember how to move her legs. Each of the survivors felt a mixture of fear and relief as the captain removed the shackles. They looked at the dead, frozen ground around them in terror, certain that this would be their end.
As the last of the accused, nineteen-year-old John Surrey, stepped off his horse and into his new freedom, he turned to the captain and spoke. "You tell Parris that his conscience shan't be any clearer for sending us here than for hanging us from the gallows. This is surely a death sentence," he said, his face raw with forming icicles. John Surrey looked at the other exiled children. "If this be not Hell, I know not what it is."
The fierce expression on the eldest boy's face would stay with the horsemen until they died, wondering what it was they were all dying for. As the horsemen drove their team of horses back east, the young people roamed, eyes glued to the horizon line of perpetual nothingness. They watched the horsemen until they rode out of sight against a rising sun. None made it back to Salem.
The months that followed were austere. It had been a colder winter than even the winters in Massachusetts, with more snow and wild air that stabbed through the skin like daggers. The icy hell clung on into months that usually felt like spring in Salem.
By their sixty-third day in the bleak wilderness with no food or drink, only fourteen of them — eight girls and six boys — remained. They had wandered in the wild, desperate and terrified. Each of them prayed: some asking their Lord to end their suffering, others begging for their lives.
By some miracle none of them understood, the fourteen survived.
They went on to live in the desolate land for nearly two more years before deciding to travel farther west in search of a less exposed terrain. They lived through impossible conditions. Frigid temperatures and ice storms hardened them in the winter. In the summer, blazing heat in the open plains flayed them against the battered earth like meat beaten with stone. Their move west was a search for comfort. They hoped that a more mountainous, secluded environment might prove more hospitable.
They hiked in a bright spring and summer across lush landscapes, thick forests, and rocky inclines before they reached a green mountain range they would declare their home. They never left.
Since they were abandoned, the fourteen survivors had been able to go without food or water for weeks at a time. Despite the fact that it had taken them months to learn to start a fire with snow-covered wood or build a shelter with no tools, each of them stayed strong. None had fallen ill or lost limbs. It never occurred to them what an impossibility this was. Instead, they wondered why so many of their number and two of the horsemen — even so many of their community in Salem — had fallen ill and died in conditions less severe than the ones they had endured. They idly mused how fragile those lives must have been in comparison to their own. They marveled at how the Lord had blessed them.
They counted off their time in days, unsure of what day it was when they left Salem or reached their new home. On the 671st day after their abandonment, an older girl, Sarah, voiced something many of them had noticed: Hannah had not grown or changed in any way since they had arrived. Her clothes still fit, unlike many of the others, whose clothes had grown slack as they had grown thinner, or too short once they had grown taller. But her young physique had remained; she was no more womanly than she had been when they left, despite having been born fourteen years before. She also began telling fantastical stories of happenings in a land not far from theirs, of things she saw that would happen, describing events in the unknown land or speaking truths about what would become of the fourteen survivors. They began to wonder if it was more than an active imagination.
Nor had the oldest of them, Lizzie, grown or changed since their exile. But she had been born in 1670, so it was more difficult to determine what changes should have occurred. As their 671 days turned into nearly 1,300, and they had settled in their newer, greener, mountainous homeland, they began to notice that many of the youngest boys from Salem outpaced Andrew in size, in height. He was seventeen when they left Salem, but the others were growing into men. They made simple conclusions about the physical oddities: Perhaps it was that the harsh conditions had caused Hannah, Lizzie, and Andrew to be smaller, malnourishment impeding their development.
But in reality, all three were strong, almost impossibly so. Little Hannah could carry logs as thick around as she was. Andrew could pull tree stumps from the ground with his bare hands. Lizzie was always awake when others fell asleep in the wilderness and when they rose in the mornings. They assumed it in her nature to protect them, but in truth she never slept.
One late autumn night, fourteen quiet survivors laid calmly on the mountainside, asking God why He would keep them alive only to live in such misery. It was then that a cool breeze turned quickly to a cold wind. Rains drove in from the western plains, and then snow danced in the air, covering the ground around them. The survivors hastened to find dry wood to burn. A fire would not keep them warm, but it dulled the pain of the wind. Though this night they hadn't acted in time. Their wood was slick and snow-covered. It could not ignite.
They cursed the night sky, launching screams of anguish at one another. They were each exhausted, enraged to spend another night in darkness and frigidity. They could endure the cold; they could not do so painlessly.
Overcome with frustration — from his failed fire building, from his existence — Andrew threw his hands up to the sky. In an instant, the wood they had piled together erupted violently into flames.
The fire has always mystified them. An unimaginable power from God, its form unknowable. An infinite source of light and heat. Of destruction.
This was the beginning.