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grabbed hold of one of the spikes and the mallet. One by one he drove the spikes through the openings in the mask.
    He drove them into the eyes first, pounding them just far enough to blind Morgan and lodge them painfully in her sockets. Her body thrashed awkwardly, the veins standing out on her neck, her head immobilized. Then he drove one into the left side of her forehead. The spike, he knew, would tear away the flesh on the side of her temple and slowly gouge through the bone and then slip painfully along the exposed brain, tearing the tissue there just a little. The spike into the right side of her forehead would do the same, and the two together would reduce the little movement she had within the mask to nothing. Her body continued to thrash and her muffled screams echoed inside the helmet. It was terrible to hear, but never before had Hawthorne been so convinced that God’s will was being fulfilled.
    Perhaps now, now that the pain was so great, if asked to renounce Satan and his minions she would do so, Hawthorne couldn’t help but think. But no, a sterner and more severe part of him thought. She had had her chance. Now it was too late for her. God’s mercy would not be granted her.
    Ignoring both Morgan’s screams and the shrieks of the burning witches behind him, ignoring the stink of burning flesh and the smoke billowing up the chimney, Hawthorne positioned the final spike in the hole in the center of the forehead.
    “You have sold your soul to the Devil,” he said. “And to the Devil you shall now go.”
    He waited the briefest moment and then slammed the mallet hard onto the head of the spike, driving it deep through the bone and into the witch’s head. Blood gushed uncontrollably through the holes in the mask and Morgan’s body began to thrash violently, and then suddenly she fell still.
    Dead at last , thought Hawthorne, and he turned away, trying not to think of her final threats toward him and his children. What had she meant that they would be Salem’s everlasting plague? No, bestnot to think about it, he told himself. These were the rantings of a deranged woman in fear of death. Just as before, as always, God had protected him. God would continue to protect them, he thought, and tried not to look at Virgil’s corpse. He told himself, not altogether convincingly, that they had nothing to fear.

Chapter Seven
    The town of Salem had changed much over the years, the dirt paths and wagon tracks replaced now by paved roads. The waterfront, once so bustling and lively with the spice trade, was now filled with shops for the tourists who came to Salem year-round, interested in the town’s past. The only three-master in the harbor was a replica and was now a museum. There were still a few fishing boats, but the majority of the trade had moved a little way away, to the more commercial town of Gloucester. The customhouse that Hawthorne had once worked in was still there, a stately redbrick building with white pillars that resembled a schoolhouse. Near where the witches had been killed was now a paved pedestrian downtown: tourist shops, witch museums, witch tours. Next to a cart selling hats and T-shirts, two women with tags reading “I’m a Wiccan” were prepared to answer any and all questions.
    But just a few blocks away from the center of town, the character of Salem changed. The streets became quiet, the tourists all clinging to the waterfront and the museums downtown. Here, the neighborhoods were old and historic, the houses painted traditional slate blue or dark red. The newer ones were New England late Victorians, large, impressive structures that these days were often split into multiple apartments. But there were among them federal houses with mullioned windows and hipped roofs, with the facades covered in wide, flat board siding. Less common, but still present, were theearlier Georgian colonials, wooden and barnlike in structure, with gambreled roofs, flat fronts, and double-sashed windows. Rarer