Thanks to all those who participated in The Wire’s 2011 Seacoast Halloween Fiction Contest: The Masquerade. This year’s stories had to be set on the Seacoast and incorporate the theme of masks or disguises. We received a number of excellently written and highly spooky submissions, and selecting the best was a difficult task. A panel of judges from The Wire and RiverRun Bookstore (special thanks to Gwen Gallassio) reviewed each submission and voted on the best overall story. Congratulations to Abby Winzeler for taking top honors with her fabulously chilling “Do Not Eat the Halloween Candy.” An honorable mention goes to Ronald T. Campbell for his story, “The Death of Ruth Blay,” which finished second in the voting. Now, lock your doors, lower the blinds, light a few candles and enjoy their dark tales of dismay.

DO NOT EAT THE HALLOWEEN CANDY - by Abby Winzeler

Colin’s mother had made a pact with herself when her son was born: The only horror stories that she would tell him were those that were rooted in reality. There would be no ghosts, ghouls, spooks or monsters, not unless there was actual proof that they existed. Her boy would understand who the real villains were, was her thinking. No delusions for him.

She had grown up precocious and resentful of her smarts. So resentful, in fact, that she had proven herself reckless by having a baby at seventeen. Just to show she wasn’t as perfect as they all thought.

 

“Cowabunga, dude!” Colin whispered this phrase out of a faint embarrassment that his mother would hear him trying on the dialogue that went along with his Halloween costume. He was eleven years old, at that age where he was just starting to think about what it meant to be cool.

Still, he felt excited by the image of himself as Michelangelo, the partying Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, in the mirror above the bathroom sink.

“You’ll be retro,” his mother had explained to him when she’d brought the orange eye mask and armored shell costume home for him from Re-Enhabit, the local second-hand store. “Vintage. A thing of the past, brought into the present in a more meaningful way. Someday we’ll get to irony and postmodernism. For now, just think that you’re a resurrection of something really terrific from when I was a little girl.”

Colin never understood even half of what his mother said, but he enjoyed listening to her. She was different from the other parents of the kids at school. For one, she didn’t have gutters and valleys on her face like they did, and for another, it seemed like she had a special vision that allowed her to see things that they couldn’t see. Colin had the underlying sense that his mother was really a superhero.

“Cowabunga, dude!” He squinted his eyes and tried his best to look menacing, like he was tough enough to inhabit the New York City sewer system and battle bad guys. The mask made it easier to believe, but he still wasn’t quite there yet.

The trick-or-treaters spilled out onto the street just as the sun went away. Their pillowcases, meant for holding candy, looked like phantom limbs against their costumes.

“They’re out,” Colin said to his mother.

“All right,” she said, a glimmer in her eye. “It’s time to go, lovely.”

She wore a white outfit that they had covered in squiggles of paint. “I’m dressing as Abstract Expressionism,” she had explained. “It’s a response to traditional modes of painting. Instead of painting an actual picture, people tried to harness the raw energy that caused people to paint. They attempted to display that raw energy on the canvas.”

Colin couldn’t stop thinking about raw energy and what that might mean.

They left a cauldron of candy on the front porch, got in the car, and drove slowly toward Wallace Sands Beach. They had visited the beach every trick-or-treat night since Colin could remember. The people in the coastal town in which they lived were progressive, forward-thinking, and veered toward the left, but Colin’s mother told him that she still felt more off-center than them, in a direction that wasn’t left or right, up or down. She said she was in another dimension altogether.

“I don’t like tradition,” she had explained to him when he was old enough. “Halloween is about being spooked, and how can anyone ever be afraid of candy? I’ll buy you all the sweets you want tomorrow, but for tonight, we’re going to go to the beach, where it’s eerie and quiet. And we’re going to tell ghost stories.”

There were never any ne’er-do-wells at the beach. Colin’s mother told him that this was because vandals liked to smash pumpkins and egg people’s homes, so their jurisdiction on Halloween was neighborhoods and storefronts, not beaches. She parked at the far end of the beach, by the abandoned hotels with bleached-out sea grass and futile signs advertising free cable and Internet.

The moon was at half-mast. It sprawled over the sand in dappled light that looked like undulating earthworms. Colin shuddered deliciously at the sudden feeling of isolation that he experienced as they walked down the beach. He didn’t know it, but his mother was imagining that each of their shadows was a representation of themselves from a parallel existence that had managed to squeeze through the boundaries of space and time. She was always talking about time. Exactly one year ago, she had frightened him very badly by talking to him about black holes and the concept of relativity. That had been last Halloween’s ghost story.

“So if you went into space, faster than the speed of light,” she’d concluded at the end of her tale, “when you came back to Earth, you would barely have aged, and yet you might not be able to find my gravestone and leave flowers on it, because so much time would have passed that my name in the stone would have been eroded.”

They sat, side-by-side, on the beach. The lights in all of the houses were out. Most of the people left when summer ended. Colin and his mother had brought a battery-operated radio with them, and it crackled lightly.

It was tuned to the local station. The deejay was playing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

“Do you think sea creatures like candy?” Colin asked his mother. Her abstract expressionism sparkled off of refracted moonlight from the small waves in front of them, and he thought she looked radiant, her raw energy liable to ignite without notice.

“I think they have different priorities,” his mother said. She smiled. “And besides, no one’s ever found evidence of dentists’ offices under the sea. Can you imagine what the fishies would do if they ate too much candy and lost their teeth, with no one there to fix them?”

Colin breathed a sigh of relief. He had a small bag of chocolates in the pocket of his sweatshirt, and he’d been feeling guilty about eating them in front of the sea creatures. Now he ripped open the bag and boundlessly indulged.

“I wanted to tell you about megatsunamis tonight,” his mother said to him. She was staring at a point far out in the ocean. “You know what a tsunami is, right?”

He nodded. “A tidal wave. A rush of water.”

She squeezed him to her. “Well, a megatsunami is just a bigger, more powerful tsunami. For a long time, they’ve been viewed as theoretical. Mythical beasts, sort of, like the Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch and those kinds of things. A lot of times, the only evidence of waves on that large of a scale are from people who reported that they saw walls of water, rogue waves, when they were in their boats in the middle of the ocean. But people never believe these stories. They say a mind wanders when it’s out on the water. They say it goes to crazy places.”

“I would believe them,” Colin said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

His mother wrapped a blanket around him, pulled him closer to her. “In 1958, there was a megatsunami that wasn’t in the middle of the ocean. It happened in Alaska, in a place called Lituya Bay. Alaska is a long way from here, lovely, okay? Look out at the ocean in front of you right now.”

Colin did as he was told. The water was mostly flat and not agitated.

“There are some places that are geographically made for tsunamis, and some that aren’t. Lituya Bay was made for tsunamis. But the New Hampshire coastline wasn’t. The odds of there being a tsunami here are very low. I just wanted to tell you that, before I go any further.”

She held her hand out for some of his chocolates.

“In 1958, there was a big earthquake in Lituya Bay. It triggered a huge landslide, causing rock and ice from glaciers to plummet into the bay. The water was displaced, and generated the biggest known tsunami to date. It was 1,740 feet tall. Can you imagine that? That’s taller than the Empire State Building. About 300 feet taller than its spire.”

Colin looked out at the water once more. Low tide seemed to be happening quickly. It looked like the water was afraid of something on the shore and was running away. He had the impulse to turn his head to check for predators. That’s what Michelangelo would do, after all. But instead of being brave, he snuggled deeper into his mother.

“There were some fishing boats out in the bay when the megatsunami came roaring in on its 600 mph waters. Can you picture that? Faster than an airplane.”

The radio hissed. The music halted for a moment, like a skipped heartbeat, then started up like normal again. The air seemed rife with troubled arrhythmias.

“There was a married couple on one of the boats. They said that with the quake and the wave, it looked like the mountains and the glaciers were dancing, that the world was moving in ways it shouldn’t. There was a daddy with his son on one of the fishing boats.”

The water was still moving away. In the far distance, against the horizon, there seemed to be a whitecap, extending from one end of Colin’s vision to the other. He rubbed at his eyes. Maybe his mask was making his vision fuzzy.

“All at once, they felt themselves being lifted up, up, up. They had somehow managed to get on top of that swell, 1,740 feet above the world. They rode it in, and it took them high up in the surrounding mountains. The water went back into the bay, and left them lodged in the spruce trees. They’d gone for a hike, is one way of putting it.”

Colin cleared his throat. “Mommy, I think something weird might be happening.” He pointed out at the ocean. “The water’s running away.”

He could feel his mother become rigid. “That’s what happens,” she whispered, “right before a tsunami. The water is sucked back into sea to add volume to the wave.” She shook her head. “But that can’t be. It’s not possible.”

Silent and stoic and unable to move, they watched the wall of water coming in. Colin’s mother sat behind him and held him protectively. It was a whitecap, that much was true, but there was something about its trajectory toward shore that led them to understand that whatever the sea was bringing in was not primarily water, but made up of something else altogether.

Things moved in prismatic light, with stilted speed and off-kilter pauses.

“There’s been a warp somewhere,” Colin’s mom finally stated. “I can’t explain it, but time has folded.”

The whitecap approached the shore, cresting leisurely. In the moonlight, its froth was revealed to be made up of many sharp, white points that for a moment appeared like an array of shark fins. The points moved in unison, as if they were waltzing together. And then suddenly, without much warning because the darkness had obscured much of its travels, the wave crashed in front of them, just a few feet away.

“Mom, are they birds?” Colin could barely get out the words. Fear was tightening his throat.

The water had receded quickly, and left a bizarre carnage in its wake. Spilled in front of them were a pile of white masks. The masks had long white beaks and glass eyes that glittered obscenely. More horrifyingly, the masks were attached to bodies, waterlogged bodies shrouded in thick black robes that lay motionless on the sand in front of them.

The radio crackled and the movement of the atmosphere seemed momentarily derailed. “Thriller” ceased, and there was an emergency tone that came out of the small radio speaker.

“Hi, folks, this is Bruce Pingree, your radio deejay. We, uh, we have some kind of situation on our hands and I’m not sure how to describe it.” The equanimity of their favorite radio personality’s voice was lost to a serrated version riddled with fear. “I, uh, I don’t want to go all ‘War of the Worlds’ on you all, but something has happened in town. Something we don’t entirely understand.”

One of the figures in front of them experienced a jolt of movement and then struggled to its feet, a marionette come to life. Its resurrection seemed to shoot a contagion out from it, and the other figures rose up like they were all connected to the same power source.

“They’re plague doctors,” Colin’s mom said. Her voice was shaking, and it merged robotically with the interference coming from the radio. “They attended to people hundreds of years ago, people who were very sick with bubonic plague, which is a terrible illness that killed many people. People thought the plague was caused by bad air called miasma, and so the doctors’ beaks were filled with scented substances meant to turn the bad air good again. The mask was thought to protect them.”

The doctors were lined up. They filled the beach, receding into the dark depths in numbers unknown. They stretched slowly, as if they had woken from a very long nap. In unison, they began to sway from left to right and eventually found a rhythm. They all wore thick-brimmed black hats.

“The plague happened hundreds of years ago,” Colin’s mother continued.

“So the doctors are retro?” Colin asked. His mouth tasted like old chocolate and fear.

“Yes, lovely. Yes. Very retro.” She tried to laugh, but wasn’t successful.

The radio let out a sizzle. “It appears that there has been some kind of bio-terrorist attack on the city of Portsmouth. It, uh, seems that the architects of this attack have engineered an infectious, fast-moving form of the bubonic plague and released it during the height of trick-or-treating.”

Of course, plague wasn’t caused by putrid air, and no amount of scented substances could dissuade the yersinia pestis bacterium from running its course. Plague doctors had been, in fact, second-rate doctors who injected themselves into dangerous suicide missions because they had often failed at establishing themselves as professional doctors. Still, something about their entry into a century far-removed from their native time seemed to endow them with miraculous powers of healing that went against common sense.

“Scientists have hypothesized, uh, that this particular strain of bacteria was manufactured to feast off of candy and replicate faster due to an immense sugar high. We can’t be sure that this is the case, but we are urging people not to eat their Halloween candy.”

The tidal wave of doctors in front of them began to approach Colin and his mother. They were following orders, it seemed. They were going to do their jobs. Colin’s mom covered herself and her boy in the blanket, and flattened them both to the ground. They felt a brief breeze as the doctors glided over them. Sprung from the ocean from the fold in time, the doctors moved toward Portsmouth. Their wavelength was epic in scope.

“Did you hear me, folks? Do not eat the Halloween candy! That is the only preliminary caution we can give you at this time. Members of the CDC have been dispatched. Stay tuned for more details.”

Colin and his mother stared out at the ocean in front of them, which was again flat and motionless.

“Mom, there’s two masks,” Colin pointed out. “There’s two masks that washed in. But no bodies are attached to them.”

Colin’s mother bent over to reach the masks. They were covered in a thin sheen of brine and emanated an odor of roses, mint, and reopened history. They smelled like a used bookstore. She handed one of the masks to Colin and he put it on over his orange face mask. With his armored turtle shell, he made an unnerving anachronism.

“I think we might have just been recruited,” his mother said. “What I’m saying is, I think we need to catch that wave.”

“Cowabunga, dude,” Colin said, mustering up a loud bravado. He was glad he had practiced this line. It sounded authentic to the outside world, but inside he wasn’t so sure.

His mother put on her beak mask, took his hand, and stood up. She had to squint her eyes to attain some kind of frame of reference, to ascertain exactly where the tidal wave of doctors had gone.

“We’ll have to run to catch up,” she said, patting her son’s behind. “You ready?” It was the first time she had ever followed a crowd, but this time seemed somehow different.

The radio sat by the shore, abandoned. “I repeat,” the deejay’s voice said, fading out on a stream of static, “I repeat. Do not eat the Halloween candy.”

# # #

THE DEATH OF RUTH BLAY - by Ronald T. Campbell

In the year 1768, on a cold evening in the quaint old town of Portsmouth, retired sea captain Thomas Weare emerged from his dry goods shop. He was dressed in a wool greatcoat and top hat, with a whale-oil lantern held in one hand. He flinched nervously when the bell atop the church in the square suddenly began clanging the hour of six. Turning back to the door, he was nervously fumbling for his latchkey when a hand on his shoulder startled him.

“Ahoy, Captain!”

With a gasp, Thomas dropped the key and spun, raising the lamp in his trembling hand. He immediately recognized the face of James Wallingford, a young solicitor who worked in the law office next door.

“Oh, ‘tis you, James,” he said with a sigh of relief. “Good evening to you.”

“Sorry I spooked you,” the lawyer apologized. “If ever there was a haunted night in Portsmouth, it is tonight.”

“Aye.”

“Fancy a pint at The Bell?”

Thomas bent to retrieve his key and then locked the shop’s front door. “Aye, that would be welcome! ‘Twas a hard day.”

“Yes, a very hard day,” James confirmed as the two companions turned and walked up Paved Street, with Captain Weare holding the lantern out to light their way.

“I shall never forget her screams, as the Sheriff carted her to the gallows,” Thomas recalled grimly.

“Agreed, it was a horrid sound, but it was not Ruth Blay that was screaming.”

“No?” Thomas asked in surprise.

“She was just sobbing quietly. What you heard were her friends and supporters screaming as they trailed the wagon and begged Sheriff Packer to stop.”

Thomas shook his head sadly. “Poor girl.”

“Ruth was hardly a girl, Captain. She was thirty-one.”

“Truly? I would have thought closer to twenty.”

“Thirty-one,” the lawyer repeated, “and certainly old enough to know better than to conceal the birth of an illegitimate child.”

When the companions reached the corner, a blast of icy wind racing up Daniel Street from the river scoured their faces. Captain Weare quickly turned his back to it and adjusted his muffler so that it covered his nose and mouth.

Now with a muffled voice, he asked, “Do you think she killed her baby, James?”

The lawyer shrugged. “God knows. But whether Ruth’s daughter was stillborn or murdered does not matter under the laws of our Province. The baby’s corpse was found hidden under the floorboards of a barn in South Hampton. No one witnessed the birth, so by law, the mother is presumed to be guilty of murder.”

“’Tis a hard law.”

James grunted unsympathetically.

“Perhaps one day we will have fairer laws on this side of the Atlantic,” the captain commented.

“Careful, Thomas,” the lawyer hushed his friend, “that is dangerous talk. You are sounding like those self-proclaimed patriots that prattle on about freedom and liberty. If they are not careful, they may be the next ones hanging on Gallows Hill.”

For a minute, there was an uncomfortable silence as the two men turned and began walking down King Street. James broke the tension by asking, “Did you witness the execution?”

“Aye, along with most of Portsmouth I imagine.”

“I was standing near the top of the hill with the other solicitors.”

“What a tragedy that Sheriff Packer received the governor’s reprieve too late to save her.”

The lawyer scoffed, “Reprieve? Nonsense! What makes you think she received another reprieve?”

“Everyone in the crowd saw the Governor’s messenger arrive and hand Sheriff Packer a note. Ruth Blay had barely stopped kicking. We assumed it was the reprieve her friends were expecting.”

“Wishful thinking by her sympathizers, I assure you,” James affirmed. “This is how false rumors get started. The message was simply a request from Governor Wentworth to the Sheriff requesting a full report when the execution had been carried out.”

“Oh.”

As they approached John Greenleaf’s Bell Tavern, the two gentlemen saw a crowd of people with lanterns and blazing torches turn at the crossroads. Amidst a clamor of banging drums, tooting horns, and clanging bells, the mob paraded towards them down the middle of King Street.

“What is this?”

“It looks like trouble to me,” said the lawyer grimly.

At the head of the mob were a dozen masked men, including an evilly-grinning Guy Fawkes, a long-nosed Devil, a black-hooded Inquisitor, a murderous Iroquois, a hideous pirate, and a multicolored jester. They were all prancing and miming foolishly. Following them were dozens of townspeople. Most had mufflers or scarves over their faces to hide their identities as well as shelter them from the cold. Several women attired in mourning dresses, with black veils covering their faces, followed the procession.

As the lout wearing the Guy Fawkes mask passed the two gawking men, he thrust a straw doll dressed as a High Sheriff towards them and jabbered, “Join us, friends. Sheriff Packer is going to dance on the end of a rope!”

The merchant and the lawyer exchanged glances. With a sense of foreboding, they followed the noisy mob. Turning the corner, the parade marched past the three-decker church and strode towards Sheriff Packer’s imposing mansion on the corner of Low Street.

The mob halted in front of his house, with the angry townspeople standing in a semicircle around the capering masked men in the middle of the street. James and Thomas stood at the back, neither one daring to interfere. They tightened the scarves over their faces as the freezing easterly breeze returned.

Spooked by the commotion, hounds at the nearby Langdon and Pickering homes began howling. Poplar branches scraped in the wind, sounding like the rattling of dead bones. Ghostly demons flickered on the walls of the High Sheriff’s house as the crowd’s lanterns threw eerie shadows.

Guy Fawkes declared, “These are the charges against High Sheriff Thomas Packer. First, Ruth Blay was innocent!”

There were shouts of agreement from the crowd.

“Second, the Sheriff hanged her an hour earlier than scheduled.”

“Is that true?” Captain Weare whispered to James. “Was the hanging earlier than ‘twas supposed to be?”

“No, that is just more malicious gossip,” the lawyer replied. “Governor Wentworth moved the time back to 10 o’clock on his final execution order.”

“Do you know why the sheriff was in such a hurry to murder this poor, innocent girl?”

“Why?” townspeople replied.

“Charge number three: Sheriff Packer was late for his dinner!” Guy Fawkes accused.

There were gasps and angry imprecations from the crowd.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the lawyer muttered disgustedly.

Someone near the back of the crowd suddenly pointed south and asked, “What is that?”

The mob turned and saw a disembodied amber light slowly descending the hill across South Mill Pond.

A shrill voice cried, “It is coming from Gallows Hill!”

A woman screamed in terror.

The mob watched breathlessly as the light crossed the causeway. They began to hear the ponderous clomping of hooves. After a wait that seemed endless, their lanterns illuminated a plodding plow horse ridden by a tall man wearing a black greatcoat with the collars raised around his face. His eyes were hidden by a slouch hat pulled low. The amber light came from the tin lantern he held in his gloved left hand.

The specter circled the crowd and stopped his horse beside the iron fence that surrounded the Sheriff’s house. He slowly looked over the gathering. His entire face was covered or in shadow, and wispy vapor rose over his head as he exhaled. He said nothing.

After a moment, Guy Fawkes gathered his courage and continued. “Sheriff Packer’s fourth crime: while poor Ruth Blay struggled on the gallows, the Sheriff received a reprieve from the Governor! Did he try to save her?”

“NO!” shouted the mob.

Captain Weare and James exchanged a knowing glance as the crowd began seething with anger.

The man in the Guy Fawkes mask pronounced sentence. “For your crimes this day, High Sheriff Thomas Packer, you are hereby sentenced to be hanged until you are dead.”

The surrounding townspeople cheered. The hooded Inquisitor withdrew a miniature gallows from his robes and held it above his head. Another roar sounded when the Devil produced a length of rope and tied it to the gallows.

“Time to dance, Sheriff!” snarled the Devil

Onlookers laughed nervously.

As the Iroquois began beating a funeral tattoo on his tom-tom drum, the Devil tied the rope around the fake Sheriff’s neck. With a hideous, spine-chilling scream, the Inquisitor raised the gallows over his head again and shook it to make the hanging doll wiggle and bounce.

“It is the Devil’s Dance!” exclaimed Guy Fawkes.

The crowd cheered and clapped.

Holding his hands up and calling for silence, Guy Fawkes declared angrily, “Bloody Sheriff Packer was in a hurry to murder Ruth Blay so he would not be late for dinner. If he had waited until the hour set forth by the Governor, Ruth Blay would be alive this night! Her reprieve would have arrived in time to save her!”

The mob turned murderous and began edging forward.

Guy Fawkes shouted towards the mansion, “WE KNOW YOUR CRIMES, SHERIFF PACKER! COME OUT, AND ANSWER FOR THEM.”

The house remained dark and silent.

“DEATH to TYRANTS!” the Devil yelled.

“Aye, DEATH to TYRANTS!” shouted the Inquisitor as he shook the small gallows.

The crowd began chanting the words. “DEATH to TYRANTS! DEATH to TYRANTS! DEATH to TYRANTS!”

“What do you say, boys?” snarled Guy Fawkes. “Shall we drag the Sheriff out and let him answer for his sins?”

“AYE! DEATH to TYRANTS!” his followers cheered.

Guy Fawkes, followed by The Devil, the Inquisitor, and the rest of the masked marauders surged towards the Sheriff’s front door.

A booming command suddenly rang out like the thunderous voice of God, “STOP!”

With a click of his tongue, the spectral rider moved foreword and halted in front of the crowd, with the big horse’s body barring the walkway to the sheriff’s house. After lowering the collar of his greatcoat and removing his floppy hat, the stranger raised his lantern higher to let the people see his face.

“It’s the minister!” several voices whispered in surprise, and the words echoed through the mob. The mysterious horseman was the Reverend Doctor Samuel Langford, minister of the North Church and spiritual leader of the North Parish.

“There will be no more violence today,” he affirmed.

Guy Fawkes warned, “Stand aside! We do not . . .. “

“QUIET!” Reverend Langdon demanded in his best wrath-of-God voice. “As our Lord and Savior once said to an angry mob much like this, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone’.”

Looking down from his equestrian pulpit, the reverend reached out his right arm and pointed directly at the ringleader in the Guy Fawke’s mask. “Tell me, Enoch Hubbard, are you without sin?”

He smiled thinly when the man gasped and took a step backwards.

“Yes, I know who you are, Enoch. Your heathen mask may hide your face, but your clothes and demeanor betray your identity.” He swept his finger over the crowd. “I know all of you.”

There was silence except for the rattling of the poplars. The vengeful mob instantly transformed into a huddle of humble parishioners. Some hung their heads in shame.

The reverend continued kindly, “You are the heart of this community: the hardworking, well-meaning, God-fearing populace of Portsmouth. I am honored to serve you and count myself as one of you. Many feel that an injustice occurred today, but that is not for you to decide. As you know, I am no friend of the Royals . . .”

The crowd laughed. Two years before, Reverend Langford had led the local rebellion against the British Parliament’s Stamp Act.

“. . . but Sheriff Packer is an honorable man,” he continued, “and he did his duty, as compassionately as possible under difficult circumstances, and according to the dictates of his high office. The death of Ruth Blay is not the fault of her executioner, nor does the blame lie with the court that condemned her. Not even our honorable Royal Governor of the Province, John Wentworth, or his Royal Majesty King George could have saved this lost soul. Ruth Blay’s death is the will of God, and only He may judge her immortal soul, as He will one day judge all of us.”

After a moment’s pause, he smiled and requested, “Please, friends, join me in prayer.”

Ten minutes later, Reverend Langford said, “I promise that your message tonight will be heard. The High Sheriff and our beloved Royal Governor deeply care for this community and listen to the voices of its people. Now, return to your homes, cherish your families, and live your lives in harmony with God.”

The crowd began to quietly disperse. Even the masked troublemakers skulked away, leaving their effigy trampled in the mud.

“I will have that pint now, James,” whispered Captain Weare.

By the following morning, Ruth Blay’s body was cut down from the gallows and buried in an unmarked grave north of a pond in the field where she died. Ruth Blay was the first person interred in what became known as the South Cemetery, and she was the last person executed in Portsmouth.

# # #

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