Duglass Evelith turned over the last few pages of the black notebook. 'Esau Hasket now fully realized what devilry he had unleashed on Salem, and he was shrewd enough to understand that the witch-hunts were only the beginning. The demon presumably took its strength from slaughtered animals and from human hearts, and used the dead whose hearts it had already taken to bring it more. The hysteria of the Great Delusion was increasing; and Hasket foresaw a time when the skies would be permanently dark, and the walking dead would overwhelm the living.'
That's why the cemetery beside the Granitehead shoreline used to be called "The Walking Place," ' I put in.
That's correct,' said Duglass Evelith. 'But the curse on Granitehead came later, after Esau Hasket had determined that he would rid Salem of the demon once and for all.'
'How did he do that?' asked Edward. 'Surely the demon was powerful enough to prevent anyone from exorcizing it.'
'Hasket went to the Narragansett wonder-worker, and bribed him with promises of huge sums of money if he would help him to contain the demon for long enough to ship it out of Salem and make sure that it never returned. The wonder-worker was extremely reluctant to help at first, because the demon had severely injured him in their last confrontation; but eventually Hasket upped the price to nearly 1,000 in gold, which the wonderworker found irresistible. Now the wonder-worker knew one thing: and that was that the demon was susceptible to intense cold. It was the lord of the region of the dead, the god of hellfire, with uncontested dominion over the furnaces and grates of everlasting torture. It is said, in fact, that bodies lose their heat so quickly when they die because this particular demon extracts it for its own nourishment; and that all the walking dead could be detected by their utter coldness. Every last ounce of thermal energy had been drained from every last cell, in order to keep the lord of the region of the dead both thriving and powerful.
The Narragansett wonder-worker therefore suggested to Esau Hasket that the demon could be paralyzed inside Dark's old cottage by the introduction through the doors and windows of twenty or thirty cartloads of ice; that the demon could then be contained in a large insulated vessel also packed with ice; and sailed as quickly as possible northwards to Baffin Bay, and dropped into the ocean. Hasket could see no other way out, so he agreed.
The plan was carried out in late October, after the David Dark had been hurriedly prepared to carry this one malevolent item of cargo. Despite the bloody loss of two horses as they approached the cottage, and the blinding of three men, the wonder-worker was able to contest the demon with his spells just long enough for the doors and windows to be smashed down with picks and axes, and for the ice to be tipped into the room where the demon presided. At the dead of night, the gigantic skeleton was carried out of the cottage, and laid inside the specially-made copper vessel which Hasket had ordered to be prepared. More ice was packed inside, ice which could constantly be replenished through a special trap, and then the copper lid was welded closed. Micah Burrough was actually there that night: just like anybody else whom Hasket felt he could trust. The capturing of the demon had taken 30 good men and many hundreds of pounds. Within the hour, the copper vessel had secretly been loaded aboard the David Dark, and the ship's captain had announced that he was ready to sail.
'As they were rowed away from Salem wharf, however, the adverse wind began to rise sharply, and even within the harbour the sea began to blow rough. The captain signaled back to the shore that he would rather return to his anchorage, and wait until the storm had died down before he attempted to sail; but Hasket was terrified that the demon would escape from the ship if it had to be kept in harbour overnight, and he ordered the David Dark to sail at all costs.
'Well, you know the rest. The David Dark was rowed out beyond Granitehead Neck; and then she put up the barest minimum of sail with the intention of sailing as far as possible in a south-easterly direction, in the hope that when the storm died down she would then be able to tack northwards past Nova Scotia and head for Newfoundland and the Labrador Basin. But — whether it was entirely the force of the storm, or whether the will of the demon had anything to do with it — the ship was driven back into Salem Sound, and sunk somewhere off the west shore of the Granitehead Peninsula.'
'Were there any witnesses to the sinking?' I asked. 'Did anybody see it from the shore?'
'No,' said Duglass Evelith, closing the book and resting his mittened hands on it possessively, like a cat with a dead blackbird. 'But there may have been one survivor. And it is that one possible survivor who has supplied me with the only reasonable estimate of the spot where the David Dark might have gone down.'
'Somebody survived the wreck?' asked Edward, incredulously.
Duglass Evelith raised one cautionary finger. 'I said only that it was possible. But three or four years ago, when I was reading the family diary of the Emerys — you know, the Granitehead marine instrument makers — I came across a curious reference to a "wild-eyed man" whom Randolph Emery's great-grandfather had found «half-drowned» on the Granitehead shoreline in the fall of 1692. Now, this particular diary, the Emery diary, was written between 1881 and 1885, so there's no saying how accurate this story might have been. But Randolph Emery's great-grandfather had used his account of finding this "wild-eyed man" in order to instruct his heirs in the technique of establishing your position at sea by the use of nearby landmarks. For the "wild-eyed man" had said that his ship had gone down not more than a quarter of a mile offshore, and that after it had sunk, and he had found himself tossed on the waves on a length of broken spar, he had been able to ascertain his position by the landmarks he had seen through the spray. To his left, to the north, he had seen the beacon on the easternmost headland of Winter Island lined up with the beacon on the easternmost shore of Juniper Point. Ahead of him, as the tidal stream swirled around and took him in towards the shore, he could see a tall tree which sailors used to call The Hapless Virgin, on account of the way its trunk was twisted around like crossed thighs, and its branches were flung out like appealing arms — he could see the top of this tree lined up with the peak of Quaker Hill. Now, the Hapless Virgin, of course, has long since gone, but it's possible to work out almost exactly where it was from the drawings and paintings of Salem Harbour and the Granitehead shoreline which were made at the time. So — it's a very simple matter of basic trigonometry to find out where the David Dark went down.'
'If you knew all this, why didn't you do something about it before?' asked Edward.
'My dear sir, do you take me for a fool?' asked Duglass Evelith. 'I personally had neither the money, the equipment, the youth, nor the inclination to go searching for a wreck that more than likely had rotted away centuries ago. But, at the same time, I didn't want to publish my findings, because of the very arguable nature of the laws regarding historic wrecks. Once I made it known where the David Dark was lying, divers would be swarming down there in their hundreds, vandals and enthusiastic amateurs and souvenir-hunters and plain professional thieves. If there did happen to be anything left worth salvaging, I didn't want to see it pillaged, did I, by bungling tyros and aquatic muggers?'