Читать книгу The Keepers: Christmas in Salem - Beth Ciotta, Heather Graham - Страница 10

Winters came with a vengeance to Salem, Massachusetts. When settlers had first come to the shores of the then colony, many had not survived. Those who had settled Salem and her environs had been devout Puritans, and they had seen the Devil in the darkness, in the forests that surrounded the land they worked so hard to cultivate. They were, in fact, so convinced that the Devil was in the forest that they believed he also somehow entered their homes—and from this belief came the terror of the witch trials. But people learned the bitter lesson of the cruelty they had perpetuated. Salem’s name became famous in history, the city itself a place dedicated to the awareness of man’s inhumanity to man, where people could learn from the past so that they never again allowed such cruelty and injustice to occur.

By the twenty-first century, the city welcomed any and all, embracing those of different ethnicities and becoming a place where every religion was welcome, from Wicca to Buddhism to the more traditional forms of worship.

Even now, it was easy to understand how people without electric lights, without communication, could play on old grievances, look around the woods where natives they didn’t understand were lurking, where God only knew what might emerge from the never-ending forests and the land beyond, and fear what they didn’t comprehend. When winter came, the wind howled and ice formed on houses. They sat huddled before their fires and feared what lay beyond.

When winter was at its height, darkness came by late afternoon, and they shivered in their homes and prayed for dawn. Then.

But this was now.

And the darkness had never been anything like this.

At first the darkness had seemed to come normally. October arrived, and with it Halloween, Salem’s favorite holiday. November followed, and daylight savings time was gone. Then winter came, and with it, shorter days.

And that was when the darkness began to extend its reign.

People would get to work, stare at the sky and say, “Wow. It’s not light yet.”

Children would get out of school in the afternoon and say, “Wow. It’s dark already.”

The mayor called the governor; the governor called the president.

The president called the experts at NASA.

But they were all completely stymied. Because the darkness had settled only over Salem, Massachusetts.

For the most part, the citizens of that fair and historic city lived with it. But each day they grew a little more concerned, a little edgier. They became prone to rudeness, to attacking one another. They behaved the way people had a way of behaving whenever they were …

Afraid.

With winter came the holiday season. For the city’s Wiccan community, the winter solstice was the day of highest importance, and while they tried to make it a time of celebration, many were short-tempered, their moods as dark as the sky. Hanukkah was not much better. Now as the community moved to welcome Christmas, their shared but unspoken fear was that Christmas Day would dawn with complete darkness, and rather than being the celebration of rebirth it was meant to be, Christmas would bring something evil leaking from the stygian darkness that enveloped the city.

And even in this enlightened day, they began to wonder.

Was the Devil more than a myth, and was he running loose in the world?

Was he back wreaking havoc in the Salem woods—this time for real?