Mystick Moon
By Terry L. White

  CHAPTER ONE

 Rebecca could not sleep. She stared out the small porthole beside her bunk and wondered about the strangely forbidding place that would soon be her new home.

The moon shone brightly on the waters of Bloody Cove. The town, betrayed by the twinkling of one small lantern, seemed distant and closed under the baleful glare of Sachem’s Head, the promontory that guarded the harbor.

These strange names, falling from the sailor’s lips as they grunted at capstan and line, sent shivers of apprehension down Rebecca’s spine. She was glad the disembarking of the Endeavor’s passengers had been delayed until morning. As uncomfortable as her berth was in this tiny cabin beneath the ship’s deck, it had become a kind of home. She closed her eyes against the reflection of moonlight across the choppy water and tried to make sense of her short and eventful life.

At ten, Rebecca often had to think very carefully before she could understand the odd things grown-ups did and the reasons they did them.

When Rebecca’s mother told her they were to sail to the Colonies to start a new life, she had been uncertain of all that might entail. Certainly her own life had seen enough beginnings and endings over the past two years.

First of all, her father died; and everything about her world had changed. Gone were the dancing lessons, the tutor, the new dresses of shiny silk and subtle velvet Rebecca had always taken for granted. Gone, as well, was the gracious and elegant home of her birth, exchanged a few months after her father’s burial for a small apartment in a part of London so run down and seedy her mother did not dare to let her walk about in the fresh air for fear the Rebecca would come to some dire, nameless harm.

Rebecca’s first new home had been three small rooms; a kitchen with a smoky hearth, a parlor as cold as a tomb in the winter season in which they moved house, and the narrow, dark bedroom Rebecca shared with her mother.

Not that Rebecca had minded sharing a bed so very much. She had never liked sleeping alone in the nursery of their other, grander home. Still, her whole life had become so very different.

The flat Elizabeth had taken in her newfound poverty was somehow friendlier than the stylish townhouse where all too often Rebecca’s childhood dreams had been plagued with scenes of red destruction, peopled the pale, ethereal faces of her family. Not that she hadn’t dreamed in the flat surrounded by muffled voices and strange thuds and crashes of her neighbors’ daily life, but the dreams had been mundane, colored by the shades of generations of hopeless striving of the previous occupants of their dank and alternating sweltering or chilly rooms.

Rebecca had once, before everything changed and in a waking dream, seen her pretty cousin Molly fall down a flight of stairs and lie, still and white, at the foot. There had been an awful look of shocked stillness on Molly’s familiar face. Rebecca had run at once to tell her mother about her strange vision.

Elizabeth had pooh-poohed the idea—and her daughter’s oddly disturbing vision—until a message edged in black told of the fatal fall of her own dear sister’s youngest daughter.

Molly, a winsome child of peach and cream beauty, pride of the family, had tripped and fallen on the stair. Her neck was broken in the accident. Death had been instantaneous.

Elizabeth, dainty feet propped on a petit point hassock, had crumpled the evil missive and stared at her fey daughter with something like horror in her eyes.

“How did you know?” Elizabeth’s voice had been irritable, heavy with grief. “How did you know Molly would die?”

“I dreamed it, Mama.” Rebecca could only whisper.

Rebecca didn’t like that sort of dream, especially when it concerned people she loved. But the dreams still came, whether she wanted them or not, whether she was sleeping or not. Her vision of a cousin’s untimely demise had not been the last she had seen in her young and strife-torn life.

Rebecca had been so disturbed by the odd distance in her mother’s voice the day Cousin Molly died the dreams had stayed away for a while, perhaps held at bay by the terrible fear and guilt Rebecca carried over her cousin’s accidental death. But in time they came back, as dream monsters always do.

She had, one dreadful morning between sleep and waking, seen her own dear father lying upon the pavement of a narrow, darkened street, his head in a black, viscus pool of blood, his pockets turned out white against the darkness of his fine woolen suit, his face ashen and still.

Rebecca did not recognize the squalid alley in which her father lay, but the staring of eyes of death were no stranger to this child.

She had been frightened to tears upon waking fully and had cried incessantly until Nanny had taken her to Elizabeth. It took much cuddling and petting before Rebecca relaxed and told her mother about this new dream that had frightened her so.

Elizabeth, unwilling to believe her daughter might have been given another prophetic dream, especially one foretelling such a dire end for the true love of her life, shivered and sent Rebecca upstairs for her morning lessons.

Try to concentrate as she might, Rebecca had not been able to erase the aching image of her father’s dead face. Her book brought no comfort or distraction. She was hardly surprised an hour later she heard her mother’s scream of outraged shock.

A pair of constables, as alike as twins in dark uniforms hardly brightened by their official brass buckles and buttons, had come to tell Elizabeth of the robber who had accosted her husband as he made his early morning way to work through the poor section of town that lay near his foundry.

“The perpetrator had not contented himself with gold. Or perhaps Mister had put up a fight. In any case, very sorry, Mum, to bring you this shocking bit of news.”

“How did you know?” Elizabeth sobbed, and looked at Rebecca with something like horror when the constables had retreated to their headquarters and official papers. “Only a monster could see such a horrible, horrible thing.”

Rebecca, frightened by the harsh note of fear in her mother’s voice, had hidden her head in her hands. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind at that moment that her strange visions the cause of all the sorrow in her mother’s life.

***

Then there had been the funeral, and their removal from their home after endless tedious discussions with lawyers and creditors, during which Elizabeth had listened in stony silence and accepted the fact her prosperity had quite dissolved with her husband’s death, while her guilt-ridden daughter hid in corners, and tried to will her father back to life.

Rebecca’s Papa was dead, she knew she was the cause. She had to be. The pictures in her mind always came when she was happy, but then everything went black and someone she loved was dead. Somehow, deep inside, Rebecca knew if she could no longer see the visions, the terrible events they depicted would end as well.

And so, with all the fire in her small body, Rebecca told the dreams to go away. They did for a while, but sometimes they would return in the night and she would wrestle with images of death and blood until she could struggle toward wakefulness, sickened by premonitions she could neither control nor understand.

Tonight on the Endeavor Rebecca had no dreams or visions, but rather a vague dread for the new life that would come, whether she willed it or not. If anyone had asked, she could not have said why she felt so edgy, only that she did.

The cove in which the Endeavor lay anchored seemed peaceful enough, but why would a beautiful harbor such as the one she glimpsed through the dwindling twilight be daubed with the name of blood?

“Bloody Cove,” she whispered and cries of unspeakable pain and torture ran beneath her consciousness. The cries linked Rebecca to an event she somehow understood had passed some years before.

Dancing figures, some in familiar European garb, others clad in feathers, furs, and beads, dipped and swayed in a macabre dance of scarlet death. The moon glittered on the waters of Bloody Cove and suddenly Rebecca knew without knowing this was a memory of the past and not a future event she saw.

She sighed in relief. If she had been cursed with a dream of her future, who knows what she would have done, for Rebecca had been uneasy about their journey to the colonies ever since she had been told she was to go.

Every time she thought about her new home in New England Rebecca felt a pang of fear invade her consciousness. Mystick Town, although her stepfather had spoken highly of the place, did not feel as if it were going to be a good place to live.

The wolves were what worried her most.

Mr. Stark, Mama’s new husband, Rebecca’s new father, had mentioned the wolves a hundred times as they prepared for their odyssey to the New World.

“The beasts are a plague. So bad—” he said, passing his sadistic hearsay for wisdom with a nod of his oblong Saturnine head. “—folks dare not leave the safety of their homes without arms, and some have even cut enormous slabs of stone to guard new graves to protect the bodies of their dead.”

Rebecca did not have to work very hard to imagine wolves; great doglike beasts with gleaming golden eyes and teeth like glistening ivory knives. They whined at the doors of her imagination, ready to devour her if she did not acknowledge their very real threat. Their tails thumped the ground as they drooled and waited.

Now the Endeavor lay outside Mystick Town the wolves seemed very near and dangerous. Rebecca shivered and huddled more deeply into her blanket which smelled of sickness and the bodily humors of a tedious and uneasy voyage. Her skin itched, from being weeks unwashed, from the small vermin that infested the thin straw mattress upon which she rested.

Her hair had been combed and plaited afresh daily, but it was greasy from being long unwashed, and her clothing was frayed and threadbare from continuous wear.

Rebecca was unused to being neglected in the past, which had grown dimmer and more distant with every passing moment. Until she’d met Master Stark, Elizabeth had always put her child’s needs first.

Rebecca knew her mother had not understood she would not have her trunks close at hand throughout the voyage. Their luggage had been stored in a deep hold, forbidden to the Endeavor’s passengers. In time Elizabeth had given up trying for permission to go below to find clean clothing for her family. The undershift Rebecca slept in was the one she’d worn the day they’d embarked upon this journey into the unknown.

Never in her life had she felt so unclean, or so alone.

Her mother breathed softly on the bunk below, her body anchored by the heavy limbs of her new husband, Graham Stark. Rebecca shrank from the thought of her stepfather’s hard, unkind hands touching her gentle mother’s skin. He touched Rebecca often as well, pinching and slapping her for every small transgression.

In a reaction as unconscious as it was primitive, Rebecca hated the thought of Mr. Stark’s hands and lips claiming the breasts that were once hers alone. She winced each time the man passed a proprietary hand across Elizabeth’s bosom when he thought no one was looking.

Rebecca did not like Mr. Stark, but she thought he was well named. Mr. Stark had thin eyebrows and lips, and his ears hugged his long head to near invisibility. His voice rang often with the Puritan’s “thee’s” and “thou’s,” but Rebecca soon came to understand Master Stark did not mean these words in the humble and neighborly spirit of their fellow travelers.

They were, she knew, a means to his own somewhat nebulous ends.

Mr. Stark meant to become a wealthy man in the New World. In the privacy of their tiny cabin he made no bones about having no real religious reason for joining the colony.

Of course, Stark possessed a mask, the one that made his presence acceptable to his fellow pilgrims, but it fell away when he and Elizabeth were alone in their cabin, one dearly purchased luxury that separated the Stark family from the religious dissenters who made up most of the rest of the Endeavor’s passengers who suffered a much less pleasant passage in the ship’s damp, stinking hold.

Rebecca stirred, tossed on the creaking narrow bunk.

“Does the brat never sleep?” her stepfather hissed to Elizabeth Hunter Stark. He knew the chit lay awake nights, listening to them when they whispered under the covers.

Elizabeth stirred wearily and drew herself to the furthermost reaches of the narrow bunk which was all the bed she had known since embarking on this dreadful journey.

“Surely she sleeps,” she murmured, wishing her husband did not rest so closely and warmly by her side. “Rebecca is a good child, if she is too aware for her years.” Elizabeth excused her daughter mildly.

Stark’s hand stole between her thighs, fumbled with the moistness at their joining. Elizabeth released a breath, half moan of resistance, half sigh of resignation, and allowed her husband his dubious pleasure in silence. Mating with Stark had not been what she’d imagined during their courtship when her prospective husband had offered her a release from her poverty and sudden chastity.

Elizabeth’s first marriage had been for love and the sexual congress involved had been of a higher order, a release to spirit for both parties, not the sticky, pounding coupling of Mr. Stark’s preference. She had not been prepared for the icy meetings of a loveless marriage, had not yet accustomed herself to the utter lack of feeling that accompanied her intercourse with Stark.

Still, as she had so often told her daughter, Elizabeth had entered into the marriage willingly, and hoped for distraction from the constant grief that nearly disabled her after her beloved Raymond died. She had wed, and now crossed the ocean together with a stranger to find a new life. Learning too late she did not love her new husband, Elizabeth also knew her promise of faith until death would not be a lie.

She was bound to her new husband by a thousand ties, the newest, more frightening and imposing than any that had come to this point in her life.

She was pregnant with Graham Stark’s child.

Her courses had not come with the moon’s passing, but Elizabeth had not forsaken her aversion to her husband’s embrace now the threat of pregnancy far away from home and medical attention no longer loomed as formless danger. Her new child, conceived in apathy, would occupy Elizabeth’s body and then her days.

There were times she thought her life would be better when it was born.

Elizabeth sighed remembering how, when Rebecca was conceived, Raymond had laughingly chided her for her lusty conjugal behavior. How surprised they had both been to learn pregnancy had released her from fear of her own sexuality. It had been a wonderful time, those months she had carried her daughter, wonderful even, after Rebecca was born, but life was Stark was different, harder, despite his endless promises. Elizabeth felt nothing but disgust and dread as he labored noisily over her swelling body.

Rebecca heard, but did not fully understand, these thoughts of loss and resentment above her mother’s soft moans of resistance. Were these thoughts her fault as well? If her mother had been childless, would Elizabeth then have not had a better chance to make an amiable match with a man more suited to her sensibilities than the judgmental and forbidding Mr. Stark?

Rebecca did not know, but she wondered.

The moon slowly sank into the cove as the mists of morning enveloped the Endeavor in gray and clinging shrouds. The sounds of men’s voices, of children whimpering to wakefulness, brought Rebecca to the happy awareness that soon she might soon quit her hard, verminous bed and be carried to the shores of Mystick Town itself.

She still did not think it would be a happy place to live.