Alice was freezing.
Her fingers felt like cold bits of metal, unfeeling, and unwieldy.
Her legs had no feeling past her knees.
She was underground in a prison.
The cold Atlantic had seeped in and now constantly covered the ground, coming up just past her ankles.
She often wondered if it might freeze her in place, locking her feet in ice.
She could feel rats swim by her in the blackness.
First she felt their whiskers testing for obstacles, then their wet, matted hair, and finally she felt their little tails whipping her skin as they passed.
Even though she was starving, she would never lower herself to eating a rat.
God would provide for her in some form.
She heard other prisoners catch the rats sometimes in the darkness.
She would hear the splash of the water, and the incessant squeaking until the crack of their little neck.
She didn't blame others for doing what they needed.
Some of the prisoners were whole families, and parents were surely providing for their children.
When a family would arrive, at first, they would pray together.
She could hear their hushed voices, and the tiny hope held therein.
Out of the darkness, sometimes anger would erupt.
A man or a woman fighting against reality, refusing to submit to the darkness and the hand they had all been dealt.
Then the bright red anger would drown back into the cold black bleak nothingness.
She could hear the families comfort each other after such outbursts.
Eventually the families would simply weep quietly together.
She could almost hear them clutching each other so tightly.
In her mind, she could see their pale haggard faces, each one scrunched so hard, with tears streaming through the wrinkles.
It pained her to hear the children crying in the wet, shivering darkness.
But it was much worse when they ultimately stopped crying.
Then there was just the silence of fate accepted.
The silent sound of a child coming to terms with death at such a young age was deafening over the soft swish of the water.
But Alice had no tears left, only the suffocating chill of depression.
She was resigned to her fate, whatever God deemed it.
She knew not why God had marked them for death.
She had done nothing wrong.
She had devoted her life to teaching children.
She had committed no wrongs against her fellow men.
Why was it so hard for the elders of the town to see this for the lunacy it surely was?
She felt the devil's work in the town.
The devil had no place in her breast.
The devil resided, not in the children and families all around her, standing in the freezing water, but in the wicked girls.
They had succumbed to evil, and their influential pranks had turned to mass murder.
Surely when Alice was younger, she had danced secretly with her friends.
She had laughed and told stories around a fire.
Most people of the town knew that even though pleasure was indeed the devil's entry, he need not be allowed in.
But this public spectacle was different.
The elders were so intent to show their strict interpretations of chastity and piousness, that all common sense had been devoured.
Alice heard the large oak doors opening around the corner of the prison.
She saw the small amount of light offered from the moon.
She could barely make out the two men walking towards her with chains in hand.
She smelled garlic on one man's breath as he reached above her and unfastened her wrists, letting them drop ungracefully to her sides.
As she started to collapse, the other man caught her roughly and forced her to stand while they fastened her arms into new shackles.
They led her out slowly, as she had seen them do with so many others before.
She turned her head slightly to the right and saw nothing but shapes in the darkness, punctuated by the shining of eyes, large and small.
They dragged her up the stairs into the night.
For the first time in weeks, she felt her feet as they scraped across the rough stones and ground of the woods.
Then her head drifted into darkness again.
When she awoke a few minutes later, there was a rough rope loosely lying around her fragile neck.
There was a man talking to her, but she didn't hear him.
Instead, she heard the twisting of rope in the breeze.
She looked above and behind her to see that her rope was connected to a large tree.
The oak tree on top of the hill.
Her favourite tree, which overlooked the cemetery and the harbour.
She had spent many summers, reading and leaning against it, thinking on the beauty of life.
She saw that several others were still hanging from the tree, twisting with every slight gust of wind.
She heard their ropes creak and their bodies sway.
A hand grabbed her face and forced her to look at the man speaking to her.
Even in the dim light, she could see the spittle flying from his mouth.
She could see the anger on his face.
Was he angry at her, or angry at himself?
Was it her fault the whole town had gone mad?
Did he blame Alice?
Perhaps it made his job easier.
Convicting the innocent.
Strangling children with lengths of rope and watch their tiny eyes fill with tears.
He kept asking her a question, but she knew the answer didn't matter one way or the other.
He signaled to the man beside her, and he stepped back.
There was a whoosh of air, and Alice was choking from the weight of her wooden legs and metal hands.
She didn't struggle or fight.
Alice simply swayed and let herself drown to death in the lovely night air.
Alice knew she wasn't a witch.
No one in Salem was.
She slowly fell asleep again, knowing it was all just lunacy, and God would sort it out as soon as she woke up.
