Their accusers got to the foot of the gallows ahead of the cart, awaiting them. The accusing children and many adults who’d accused the condemned continued to scream in torment and agony at the foot of the gallows. Some wallowing in the mud and shouting that the invisible cohorts of the condemned were trying to suffocate them in the mud. It turned into a mud romp and a mud fight, the stuff being slung over the heads of those crowded nearest the afflicted children.

Seeing this from where they stood on a buckboard at a good distance, Jeremy said to Serena, “Blood and mud pies they will have and laugh in private to make fools of us all.”

Serena held an arm around her father, who had insisted on being on hand. As had Joseph and Tarbell. Ben had gotten on a horse and had ridden in the opposite direction, and no one knew where he might end up this day.

“Sad day in New England when nothing short of hanging five women can end this suffering,” Francis said, his eyes raining tears.

“Goodwife Nurse has lived a lie!” shouted Anne Putnam Senior, her eyes wild, her voice giddy, her clothes covered in mud that continued to fly, thanks to her daughter and the others.

“She’s a murderer! Same as Goode!” shouted Thomas Putnam, his uniform splotched from the mud slinging as well.

“She’s flying over the gallows!” screeched Mercy Lewis, pointing overhead and circling. “Do you see? Can you not see her invisible shape!”

“There, there!” They all pointed to the top of the gallows and the treetops and many saw a strange, preternatural wind moving the leaves.

“Evidence it is! “ shouted Mary Wolcott. “Evidence Mother Nurse has sent her invisible demon through the bars to chase after us!”

Mercy Lewis screamed, “Belying the hag’s false serenity!”

“Look you all here!” Anne Putnam Junior held up a knitting needle dripping blood to the sunlight. “She’s stabbed me with it, here!” She held up her underarm, displaying a splotch of blood.

“She done stabbed me in my petticoats!” added Mercy, showing a bloody splotch on her clothes.

The accused by now were ordered from the cart and onto the gallows steps. Soon they lined the gantry, facing the crowd.

Goode shook rattling chains and her fists at the crowd and laid on a terrible curse on them all but in particular, she signaled out Reverend Samuel Parris. “May your life dry up like bone, and may your progeny curse you forever!”

Rebecca raised a single hand and the crowd silenced their booing of Goode to hear her soft words. “I forgive you, one and all. You know not what you do.”

This slowed the cries for blood for half a minute until Anne Putnam Junior fell over in a dead faint. Other of her young colleagues in the business of seeing into the Invisible World of Satan screamed and chanted that Mother Nurse did it. Mercy shouted, “That Nurse witch has struck Anne down by use of her invisible other shape!”

The crowd chose once more to join in the chant to hang the witches.

The nooses had been placed over each of five heads now covered with grain sacks, save for the two most callous of the witches, according to the children—Goode and Nurse, who had both declined the blindfold, each for a different reason. Opposing reasons—Goode so she might face her accusers and continue cursing them with her evil eye and to spit venom at the crowd; Rebecca because as she cried out, “I will meet my Maker as I am.”

Reverend Parris in a show of mercy, pleaded for a final time for the condemned to petition him for mercy, to recant any oaths they’d given George Burroughs and the Antichrist, to save their souls by way of confession. None shouted for Parris’ so-called mercy, and Goode, seeing a bucket of water at her feet kicked out and sent it splashing over Parris’ black coat and face. Goode giggled and shouted, “The water is like my curse on ye, Samuel Paris—a stain on your soul! Reverend!”

The trap below Goode was pulled hard by the hangman as if anxious to shut her up; in that instant, Sarah Goode danced on air, body fell and yanked so hard as to crack her head on the underside of the platform—a crack loud enough to bring a groan to many in the crowd. The crack and subsequent snap of her neck swapped prominence with one another. Her legs didn’t kick long as she was almost instantly killed, but her body continued an eerie twitching to the shouts of the crowd. Clapping rose from the accusers.

This clapping continued as Susannah Martin’s form dropped, and Mrs. Putnam swooned, fainting straightaway to Little Anne’s terrifying revelation that even in death, Susannah Martin’s spectral self had stabbed her mother. She held up a bloody hand to prove it. The hand was discolored with red and the brown of dried mud.

The third trap flew open and Elizabeth How fell kicking, her death rattle drowned out by further clapping and cheering. The fourth trap went and with it Sarah Wildes whose overlarge eyes had always marked her as a witch in Topsfield. Those same eyes now grew as her throat was stretched and she kicked until no more movement was left, and yet some in the crowd said her eyes remained alive and staring and emitting an evil on anyone who stared too long into her gaze.

Only Rebecca remained and some cried out from the crowd, urging her to return to her former pious life, to give up her coven names, and to repent of her evildoing. But it was as if Rebecca could neither see nor hear any of them, including Parris, until her gaze skyward came down on him. For a long, silent moment, with Parris halfway up the gallows stairs, their eyes met. In that moment she seared his soul with a smile, and Samuel Parris had one realization that made him stumble from the gallows.

“What did she say to you?” Putnam asked him.

Deacon Ingersoll grabbed hold of Parris who seemed to have become dazed—perhaps bewitched at the last by Rebecca Nurse. “Did she say something? I could not hear over the crowd and the accusers!”

“No, she said nothing.”

“The eye? She gave you the evil eye?”

“I-I’m all right. None of them can touch me,” he lied. Deep within his soul, Parris had felt a painful truth, that he had just looked into the eyes of one of the chosen among them—someone who from the beginning of time—had her name in God’s book; he realized she was innocent of every single accusation raised against her. He realized that it was the first time he had considered the woman completely without guilt, and that she was bound for the place every Puritan prayed for, and he also realized at the same moment that he was not. That his soul was trapped here and in perdition if not Hades.

# # # # #

From the distance that they chose to safely maintain, the Nurse family watched the inevitable tragedy unfold at the gallows, seeing the condemned summarily killed one after the other while armed militia and guards stood all around to prevent any disturbance of this officially sanctioned murder. And they had seen the moment between Mother Nurse and Samuel Parris, and how disturbed he appeared as he stumbled off. He did not stop but rushed away, going back toward the village in his black uniform, alone. He did not turn back and did not watch when the final platform was dropped, its hinges crying out.

Rebecca had lost a great deal of weight while in prison, and when she fell, her weight was not so taut on the rope as the others, all of whom were heftier. As a result, Rebecca suffered longer—so long, in fact, it was no longer fun for the more sober among the crowd, especially when they watched the blood spilling over her lips and marring her clothing at what seemed the very spot where Christ had been pierced by a Roman spear while he suffered on the cross. In fact, someone shouted, “She is a martyr to this madness! She is closer to God and Christ than any man, woman, or child here!” The voice sounded like some drunkard, but in a moment Serena and Jeremy realized it was Ben! He had come with a wagon, the rear decked out with blankets and a pillow like an oversized coffin. He drove through the crowd, parting them and placing the bed of the wagon as close to his mother’s body as he could. Tarbell and Joseph rushed to join him, and by now Ben had a huge knife in hand, making his way beneath the gallows, and shouting through the drop, “You, bloody hangman! You cut her down or I will!”

For some time the crowd had fallen silent, as they’d been watching Rebecca’s considerably slower death throes. None of them had ever seen five witches hung all in a row, nor anyone take so long to die in this manner as Mother Nurse. Some thought she may have escaped death somehow.

Herrick, Putnam, and a small army of armed men had also moved in on Ben when they saw the knife and understood his intentions. Others held back Tarbell and Joseph at gunpoint. By this time Jeremy had leapt into what was building to a fight.

“The magistrates have ordered the condemned remain here!” Herrick challenged Ben below the gallows, holding a smooth bore gun on him, the men within two feet of one another.

“What do you mean, remain here?”

“They’ll swing here until nightfall. It’s my orders.”

“You filthy barbarians!” he shouted loud enough for all to hear.

“It’s a matter of example,” replied Herrick. “An example to anyone who turns to the dark arts and—”

“My mother is no witch and never was!”

Jeremy had somehow managed to meander and zigzag through the crowed to get to Ben. He stepped between Ben, brandishing the knife while Herrick pointed his deadly weapon on one side, and Ptunam—itchy finger at the ready—on the other side. Jeremy had no weapon and he held both hands in the air. “No one need get hurt here.”

“Tell your kinsman here, Mr. Wakely,” began Herrick, never taking his eyes off Ben, “the bodies of the hanged witches remain swingin’ on the rope the rest of the day.”