Dark Rites. Heather Graham

the young people swayed to his sect.

      Missy Prior was a stunning young Puritan woman, an orphan who survived through selling produce from her small garden and from doing handcrafts—mending and sewing. Ezekiel Martin wooed the girl.

      She turned him down. Sweetly. She talked about her youth—and mourning for her parents.

      Ezekiel was hurt—deeply offended.

      Since he’d never made it to being ordained—suspected of not being a learned or good man himself—his orations weren’t sanctioned by the church. But according to the diary of an ordained minister of the time, Ezekiel was capable of talking the good talk; he could preach convincingly and sway people, and he had a following that terrified the others before they even began to become aware of just what kind of a danger he could be.

      He lured many people away from Boston, taking them west. There, he created the village of Jehovah.

      Jehovah was no longer in existence, but it had once been situated between present-day Barre, Massachusetts, and what was now the Quabbin, the massive water reservoir created in the Swift River Valley.

      Missy Prior, along with some of her friends, had been ahead of Ezekiel; she’d left Boston in order to escape Ezekiel’s attention, and she’d had a cottage in the woods, right in the area that Ezekiel would soon name Jehovah. It seemed that no matter how far she went, she couldn’t outrun Ezekiel, a man who had become obsessed with her.

      There was nowhere else to run, and Missy’s friends were forced from her side as Ezekiel gained power and determination. But she still wanted nothing to do with Ezekiel.

      He, in turn, woke one night screaming and shouting words of warning about Missy—and he woke the population of Jehovah and rounded them all up in front of Missy Prior’s cottage.

      And he’d showed them all the words that had been written in the earth.

      Hell’s afire and Satan rules, the witches, they are real. The time has come, the rites to read, the flesh, ’twas born to heal. Yes, Satan is coming!

      According to the diary and journals from others who had lived during the time, Ezekiel then proceeded to convince a number of people that he was their salvation. They could not stop the arrival of the devil; they could only embrace him when he arrived. He would reward them, of course, if they were to come to him through his vessel on earth—Ezekiel Martin.

      Missy Prior was terrified; she had turned down a madman one time too many.

      She feared for her life.

      She didn’t die; not then. She was taken in to be “healed” by Ezekiel.

      Missy Prior, however, wasn’t enough for Ezekiel.

      Ezekiel did what those who were both charming and evil at heart had a talent for doing—he seduced his followers into his House of Fire and Truth, a cult in which, of course, they followed a Mighty Power, pretending to still be Puritans to those around them, since those who were not Puritans in the colony at the time were killed or banished. What he was really doing, ministers and public officials became certain, was practicing out-and-out witchcraft or Satanism. He, Ezekiel, as Satan’s disciple on earth, was absolute ruler with absolute power, demanding the sweet fruit of the innocent and beautiful among the maidens, bestowing those he had used and deflowered upon those of the men of his congregation, those who had earned his admiration and devotion.

      Missy Prior tried to flee. She was caught. By then, of course, Ezekiel had many women. She was to meet the fate reserved for one who betrayed her master. Death.

      How that death came about, Vickie could not ascertain with certainty. She tried a number of her resources. Some suggested she was burned, not as a witch, but as a heretic. Some said that she might have actually been drawn and quartered, and others suggested that her throat was slit and that her blood was passed about to imbue the rest of the congregation with strength.

      But while the Massachusetts Bay Colony was, at that time, still working under the charter that allowed for Puritan rule, the Crown did have a decided interest in the county. Cromwell had died in 1658 and Charles II had been asked back to rule in England—a good majority of the population had grown weary of Cromwell’s very strict ways. Charles happened to have men in the colony, soldiers under Captain Magnus Grayson. Grayson eventually got wind of Ezekiel’s activities. Heading into the village, he hadn’t the least problem demanding the immediate arrest of Ezekiel and his little pack of cronies. The small would-be self-governing colony was dispersed. Ezekiel found himself deserted when his men were faced with the armor and arms of the king’s men, and he slit his own throat—swearing that Satan would embrace him in his fiery power, and he would live again.

      Captain Grayson had found skeletons and an altar stained with blood. It was believed that one of the skeletons found belonged to poor Missy Prior.

      It seemed a heartbreaking story to Vickie.

      Poor Missy.

      She had been relentlessly pursued by Ezekiel Martin in life.

      Perhaps her only escape from him had been in death.

      Jehovah had been quickly begun—and even more quickly ended.

      Captain Grayson had loathed and been sickened by the entire place, and he’d had all of what had been Jehovah burned to the ground. The settlement disappeared into the landscape, and where it had been, no one now knew.

      Erased from memory.

      But not all memory.

      Because someone was violently attacking people and leaving behind the words Ezekiel Martin had once written into the earth in order to have Missy Prior.

      Vickie couldn’t wait to tell Alex the depths of what she had discovered.

      She looked at her phone and tried Alex’s number again.

      No answer...

      “Alex! Where are you?” she murmured aloud.

      And she wished that she wasn’t alone. She wished that Griffin would come soon.

      It seemed that the wind suddenly began to howl outside.

      Summer was waning and fall was on the way.

      And it sounded as if the earth itself was moaning...

      Crying out a warning.

       2

      Griffin sat behind the desk in David Barnes’s office, typing out the last words of his report regarding the evening. As he did so, he saw everything replay in his mind. He shook his head, damning himself. He couldn’t see how he could have stopped what had happened.

      The door opened and Rocky walked back in. “How’s it going?”

      “Almost through here,” Griffin said. “I’m waiting for a callback from Dr. Loeb.”

      “Medical examiner? Theodore Loeb?” Rocky asked.

      “You’ve worked with him?”

      “No,” Rocky said, “but I did meet him at a crime summit a few months back. Guy is brilliant and looks like a mad professor, right? Crazy white hair and thin as a sack of bones?”

      “Yep. That’s him,” Griffin agreed. He drummed his fingers on the table. “I don’t know what he can tell us about our dead man that we don’t already know. He appeared to be healthy before, young and hardy looking. And now dead. Suicide capsule. What makes someone do that?”

      Rocky took a seat in one of the chairs in front of the desk. “Well, usually you have to be more afraid of living than you are of dying, I imagine.”

      “Right. Afraid of what—or who—he had to face.”

      “That’s a solid theory, anyway,” Rocky said.

      “If we look at most things that have had