“You g Goodman Brown.”
For a few moments the printer felt confused, uncertain of what to do. He had an impulse to scoop the piles of type onto the galleys, to begin the laborious process of checking the face of each letter and sorting it into the appropriate compartment in the case. Instead, he pulled himself to his feet, tore off his apron and visor, and hurried to the front of the shop. He pulled on his jerkin and strode out the door.
Past the meetinghouse he saw a figure in black moving down the path that led into the woods. The printer began running after him. By the time he reached the edge of the woods, the cloak had disappeared, and so he stopped beneath a spread of bare, twisted branches to rest and gather his thoughts. Remembering the tremor in his wife’s voice that morning, the tears in her eyes, he looked back down the dirt road. But his cottage was too far off to be seen.
When his breathing was normal again, the printer followed the path into the woods. Under the shield of wilderness the sky grew darker, the air cooler. As the bushes crowded closer to him, the path faded under his steps. In his confusion, he thought he was passing a rock or a stump that he had passed minutes earlier. Silken white flowers clustered at the edge of the marsh, though it was the wrong season for bloom. A heavy branch let go and crashed on the bed of the woods. A jay cackled insanely. The printer’s head throbbed, and he could not get his last glimpse of his wife’s fair hair from his mind.
Sunk in a gloomy hollow, through a ring of dense, black-needled cedars that turned morning into evening, he caught sight of the glimmer of a fire, and he could hear voices. At first he thought they were singing a hymn, but as he drew near it sounded more like a chant. He entered the circle of light and saw the stranger in the cloak, both arms raised: the scarf no longer covered his face, and the fire in the pit revealed a dark stain across his left cheek. Behind him was a semicircle of men, women, and children, but they stood far back, their faces hidden in the shadows. The chanting stopped.
“Come,” the stranger called across the clearing, waving the printer towards them. “Come and join your neighbors, your friends, your family.”
“Nay, my people would never be part of such an unholy gathering,” spat the printer.
“Approach the fire and you shall see them better.”
The printer held his ground, but then the flames leaped red and yellow out of the pit and he saw the faces of members of his congregation, including the pious old woman who had taught him his psalms. And the lad, son of a neighbor, who sometimes helped him gather firewood. The bony-faced deacon stood among them, too, in his familiar, worn gray coat, head slightly bowed.
“What say you now?” the stranger demanded.
“I do not believe any of this!”
“Ah, then look closer still.”
Now the printer saw his mother among them, wrapped in her knitted brown shawl, her face withered by years of sacrifice; in a moment his father, wearing his ink-stained leather apron, stepped out of a group of sullen figures.
“Father, Mother! — how come you from both sides of the grave to be in this fiendish place?”
Neither of them replied.
“Come and enter our circle,” the stranger bade.
“It is all a terrible dream,” said the printer, backing up.
The stranger laughed, a gurgle that seemed to boil up out of his intestines, and then the printer saw her — his kind and loving and bewitched wife.
“Constance!” he shouted, but she did not seem to hear him.
Leering at her with sharp crow’s eyes, the stranger raised his hooked fingers and beckoned, and the printer’s wife obediently stepped out of the coven. When she stopped beside him, the stranger lifted his shaggy arm like a huge black wing and unfurled it across her shoulders. The fair young bride seemed to shudder under its spread, but did not move away.
The printer’s face filled with blood, and he began to stride across the fire-lit clearing. Noticing his approach, his wife let out a faint shriek and retreated, becoming a shadow among the dark configuration of sinners. Now the stranger flung the cloak off his back, and in a flash there stood in his place a chalky-faced, dark-haired woman in a burial winding-sheet.
Though he was amazed by the transformation, the printer continued to move toward the figure in the burial wrappings. The woman began to unwind her sheet, baring a dry shoulder and blue breasts, but in the blink of an eye the printer saw a bent, white-haired man standing in the spot where the dead woman had been. The old man was holding a vase filled with clear, sparkling fluid, and he peered at the printer.
Shivering more from confusion than from the cool morning air, the printer paused in mid-stride. But now the old man stepped close to him and extended the vase with both hands: “Take a drink of sweet sin,” he rasped, “and you shall never grow old.”
Instinctively the printer reached out to receive the sparkling fluid, but the clawlike hands reminded him that the old man with the vase and the woman in the burial sheet had been conjured by the stranger in the dark cloak — miserable magic, evil tricks to cloud his mind. Determined not to be fooled by dark spells, he slapped the vase out of the old hands, spilling the fluid and leaving a black stain on the dusty earth.
The old man let out a long, low wail, as if the air had been let out of him, and shrank down until all that was left on the place where he’d stood was a writhing fat green snake.
The printer backed off, frightened, and searched for his family beyond the fire. But his wife, father, and mother were not among the villagers. Then he noticed the stranger’s walking stick lying beside the fire. Quickly kneeling, he grasped the crooked stick and slid it rapidly across the ground, catching the snake and sweeping it into the pit: The serpent hissed as it sprawled across the tongues of fire, which flared up in thick sulfurous flames.
A cry of horror rose from the villagers, and when the billowing smoke disappeared, the printer was alone in the clearing.
It took a long while to find his way back through the wilderness, and by the time he reached the main street of the village, his lungs were pained by rapid intakes of cold air. But his head no longer throbbed from the blow of the stranger’s walking stick. The sun had untangled itself from the clouds, melting the frost. Now there were a few people out on the commons gathering kindling for their morning fires, filling buckets with water at the pump. On the steps of the meetinghouse the deacon, in gray coat and cap, was wielding a straw broom briskly. With no letup in his stride, the printer watched him intently.
At the schoolhouse he turned down the lane, crunching dry leaves and twigs like the wings of birds underfoot. He arrived at his cottage in a few minutes. Opening the door, he found Constance seated in a straight-backed chair beside the fire in the hearth. She was mending a pair of his trousers.
She looked up in surprise and said, “You are home early, John.”
“Did you go out this morning, Constance?”
“Where might I be going in such a cold mist?”
“To meet someone in the woods.”
“No,” she protested, “I have not done so,” and setting her sewing aside, she rose from her chair.
“Yea, I saw you with my own eyes,” he said sternly. “You have been behaving... oddly... these many weeks.”
“Impossible!” she cried. “I have not stepped outside the door. It is you who have not been yourself, John. I have not slept easy since you took this new work.”