Chain of Souls (Salem VI) by Jack Heath, John Thompson Page B

of the library. When he looked at several instruments on the wall he saw that the temperature in the room was sixty-five degrees and the humidity was 45 percent.
    "You want to see the same material you were looking at the last time?" D'Angelo asked.
    John nodded, and the archivist disappeared into the stacks and came out a minute later with three boxes that he placed on one of the research tables. John opened the first box and felt his pulse quicken as he saw the stacks of letters and other writings all carefully organized and separated. D'Angelo cleared his throat before John did anything else, and when John looked up the archivist reviewed with him the proper methods for separating and handling the ancient pages to avoid any possibility of damage.
    John sat down at the table and began to carefully remove the documents from the first box and look through them. There were letters from various early residents of Salem, personal journals from people whose names meant nothing. He saw several pages of farm reports, recording how much corn, wheat, and sorghum one of the Putnam farms had produced, how many oxen they owned, how many head of milk cows, how many beef cows, how many calves had been born, how many pigs and sheep. He saw the document written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and skipped past it because he'd already read it.
    John went through the first box and the second without finding anything that gave him pause. He was on the contents of the third box, close to the bottom, his eyes starting to glaze over when he found a packet of three letters bound together with a navy blue ribbon. He gently slipped the ribbon off the letters, unfolded them, and began to look them over.
    Almost at once he saw that the letter was addressed, "Dear Elizabeth." He felt his pulse kick because it was the first thing he'd seen that related to the curious notation in
Paradise Lost.
    He struggled to read the old-fashioned writing and after several minutes he thought it said, "Thee hast been well prepared for thy role and responsibilities. Be thee obedient to thy Master and diligent in thy duties and remember fondly those who hath trained thee for thy Greatness in the New World. We hope this letter finds thee well in that far place and that the Astarte brought thee safely to the shores of your new home in reasonable comfort and without undue travail."
    The Astarte! It must have been a ship, John realized. But then what did
Asthoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner
possibly mean? How did a person equate to a ship? If Astarte was the name of the ship that had brought Elizabeth Turner to the New World, why was that important enough to warrant a margin note in his great-great-grandfather's book?
    He looked through the other papers, which had been held by the same ribbon, but they were addressed to different people, perhaps within the same family, but shed no further light on his questions. The only other piece of paper in the packet was curious because it consisted of two renderings, the first of a house with lines drawn through it, and the second on the bottom half of the page showed what seemed to be a world map with lines radiating outward from what looked like the southwest corner of England.
    Something about the drawings caught his eye, and he stared at them for some time trying to understand their meaning. Whatever their purpose, they had been drawn with great care. The drawing of the house, which resembled many of the wealthier homes in Salem, was a house with six gables, each of the gables being the beginning of one of the lines. The house seemed to be oriented very specifically to lines of the compass, with north, south, east, and west shown separate from the lines that radiated from the gables. Below it, the larger map was again very carefully executed, and its purpose seemed to be to extend the lines from the gables outward around the world.
    John looked at where the lines intersected with land and noted that one of those points seemed to cut through