Spirit Read Online Free

mind.
    Tess and Tobias remained in the parlor, facing each other, cellos straight, bows fallen, discussing the danger they might confront if they looked any further into the lives of the Salem witches. Despite Tess’s misgivings, she knew resistance would lead nowhere.
    â€œThe Unseen Ones…were not innocent, she said…,” mumbled Tobias, pondering the parting message of the graveyard spirit. “How very, very interesting.”
    Chilled, and not just by the weakening fire, Tess half wished to return to common, everyday interests—but nothing about her life with Tobias was normal. Even the music they’d been playing had been learned from an encounter with a ghost in Vienna.
    She sighed. “Shall we speak of witches again, then?”
    Visions of hellish engravings, page after page of tortured witches, floated into her mind, illustrations from the books they had been reading lately. “If you want to understand that cemetery spirit, Tobias, we must retrace our path in history. Now, I don’tknow about ‘Unseen Ones’ but witchcraft has always seemed an excuse for persecuting women…and pagans…and little more than that, as far as I’m concerned.”
    â€œWitchcraft,” he repeated, turning the word in his head. “A way to power. Power to bewitch men.”
    â€œPower of flight.”
    â€œBroomsticks and black cats.”
    â€œBlack candles and black magic.”
    Tobias’s voice became distracted, lost in thought. “They said in Boston that the Salem witches could move things with just the exertion of the mind, project themselves to be in many places at once…”
    â€œNonsense. There were struggles in the church, mere infighting. Calling someone a witch was a perfect way to wrench the neck of an irritating rival. Where’s the real mystery in it?” She remembered woodcut illustrations of women screaming in panic. Down through history, you could find eruptions in the boundless hatred of men toward women, or really, in the powerful toward the weak. She wished he didn’t find the imagery so exciting.
    â€œThese young women of Salem were behaving as if possessed,” Tobias argued.
    â€œWell, witches made an easy scapegoat for any strange conduct—”
    â€œExactly. Which means there was strange conduct going on to begin with. Something caused their behavior, so what was it? Something was wrong with those girls.”
    â€œYou’re really not going to let us play today, are you?” Tess carefully set her cello against a bookcase.
    â€œGo through the theories again. One at a time.”
    With a deep breath, Tess began. “One: The girls in Salem were hysterical, surrounded with crazed religious dogma, day in and out. Two: Perhaps they were faking possession by the devil. Once they started, they got more status and attention, and couldn’t easily stop—”
    â€œThat spirit we saw in the graveyard did not seem hysterical. Or deceptive.”
    â€œBut it passed through us quickly, and there were distractions. You can’t discern facts from a ghost.”
    â€œIn the accounts of the time, there was a slave woman who saw something.”
    â€œPlease,” said Tess. “That slave woman was trying to satisfy her master, saying what he wanted to hear. She was the only one not executed, because she cooperated…and because her owner would have lost his property—her. Who knows what she saw?”
    â€œShe spoke of seeing a devil in the woods.”
    â€œInsanity.”
    â€œBut it’s in the public record that she said it. Under oath. She spoke of the witches appearing and disappearing—”
    â€œThey were hallucinating, all of them there in Salem,” she conjectured. “They were under the influence of a chemical that developed in the grain. Blood poisoning causes you to see things, you get crazed and feverish, you lapse into a