The Salem Season

Key vocabulary

a candle — свеча

wax — воск

a wick — фитиль

a counter — прилавок

a till — касса

a shift — смена (рабочая)

a tourist — турист

a costume — костюм

a stall — ларёк, палатка

a pedestrian street — пешеходная улица

crowded — переполненный

a season — сезон

a landlord — арендодатель

a rent — арендная плата

to close up — закрывать (магазин)

The First of October

Salem shuts the street to cars at seven in the morning on the first of October and does not open it again until the second of November.

June Hale watched them do it from the doorway of her grandmother’s shop with a cup of tea going cold in her hand. Two men from the city put out the barriers, one at the Washington Street end and one at the New Liberty end, and a third man brought the signs. It took nine minutes. It took nine minutes every year, and June had watched it every year since she was five, and she had never once seen anybody stop to look at it except her.

By half past eight the stalls were going up on the Common. By ten the first coach had arrived from Boston. By eleven Essex Street had about four thousand people on it and a man in a full skeleton costume was doing something with a unicycle outside the museum.

The season was open.

—June, said her grandmother from inside. The pumpkin ones.

—I put them out.

—You put out six.

—There were six in the box.

—There are twelve in the back and I need all twelve on that table by the door, because it is the first of October and the first of October is pumpkin, said Margot Hale, and it does not matter what you or I think about that.

Hale and Co. had been at 41 Essex Street since 1908 and had sold candles the entire time.

That was the whole business. Candles. Beeswax and soy and paraffin, tapers and pillars and jars and tea lights, plain white ones in packs of fifty for churches and restaurants, and, for the month of October, a range of scented ones with orange labels that June’s grandmother described as an insult to the trade and made four thousand dollars a month from.

The shop was narrow and deep, with a wooden floor that sloped towards the back, and it smelled of wax the way a bakery smells of bread. There were shelves on both sides from the floor to the ceiling. There was a counter halfway down with a till on it that was newer than everything else in the building and looked wrong. Behind the counter there was a door to the workroom, and behind the workroom there was a yard with a fence and two bins and a cat that belonged to nobody.

On the left of Hale and Co. there was Mystic Wing, which sold crystals, tarot decks, incense and forty dollar readings, and which had a purple sign with a crescent moon on it.

On the right there was The Third Eye, which sold crystals, tarot decks, incense and forty five dollar readings, and which had a black sign with a crescent moon on it.

Between them, Hale and Co. had a plain white sign with black letters that said HALE AND CO. and, underneath, in smaller letters, CANDLES.

—Everyone thinks we are a joke, June said, once, when she was fourteen.

—Everyone thinks we are boring, said her grandmother. That is different and it is much better.

The first proper customer of the season came in at nine minutes past ten.

She was about fifty, in a good coat, with a Boston accent and a bag from one of the shops on Derby Street.

—Do you do anything for protection? she said.

—We do candles, said Margot Hale.

—I know, but do you do a protection candle? Black salt or anything?

—No.

—Oh.

—The lady next door does, said Margot. She does them in three sizes and the middle one is the best value. Tell her Margot sent you and she will not charge you for the box.

The woman looked slightly confused, thanked her and went next door.

June waited until she was out.

—You just sent forty dollars next door.

—I sent forty dollars next door on the first of October, said her grandmother, and in exchange Nadia will send me every single person who comes into her shop and asks for a plain white taper, and by the thirty-first that will be about ninety people, and they spend more than the woman in the coat.

She put six more pumpkin candles on the table by the door.

—Also I like Nadia, she said.

At eleven the man with the unicycle came in, still in the skeleton costume, and bought two boxes of plain white tapers and a lighter.

—Fifty in a box? he said.

—Fifty in a box.

—You are the only shop on this street that sells anything I actually need.

—I am aware, said Margot Hale.

June rang it through. Twenty two dollars. The man paid in cash, put the boxes in a bag that already had a bicycle pump in it, and went out, and through the window she watched him get back on the unicycle outside the museum with a bag of a hundred candles on his shoulder, which was, she thought, roughly what October in this town looked like from the inside.

June worked the shop every day in October. That was the arrangement and it had been the arrangement since she was fifteen. School until half past two, shop until seven, homework at the counter between customers, and on Saturdays and Sundays the full day. In exchange she got paid properly, above minimum wage, in a way that her grandmother refused to discuss and that June had worked out at sixteen was about three dollars an hour more than anybody else on that street was paying.

She was seventeen. She was in her last year at Salem High. She had four college applications open on a laptop that lived under the counter, and she had not finished any of them, and it was the first of October, which meant she had thirty days in which she would have no time to think about it at all.

That was, she admitted privately, part of why she liked October.

In the two hours after lunch the shop took four hundred and sixty dollars, which June knew because she rang all of it through, and about three hundred of it was pumpkin.

The rest was interesting if you had been standing behind that counter for three Octobers.

There was a woman who bought nine plain white tapers and asked whether they were pure beeswax, and was told yes, and paid without looking at the price. There was a man of about thirty who came in, looked at nothing, said the word Hale as though he were checking it, and left. And at ten past twelve a boy of maybe nineteen came in and asked for a hundred metres of wick, which is not a thing anybody asks for, and Margot Hale went into the workroom and came out with it in a paper bag and did not charge him.

June said nothing about any of it, because in three Octobers she had learned that asking got you an answer that closed the subject.

At half past twelve her mother came in with two coffees.

That was still new. Catherine Hale had come back to Salem on the eleventh of September, after nineteen years in Portland, Oregon, with two suitcases and a job interview and no explanation that anybody had considered sufficient. She was forty-four. She had June’s hair and none of June’s patience, and she had spent three weeks in the house on Chestnut Street being extremely careful and helpful and had not once come into the shop for longer than four minutes.

—Busy, she said.

—It is the first of October, said Margot.

—I know what day it is, Mum.

—Then you will know why it is busy.

June took her coffee and got out of the middle of it.

There is a particular way that two people who have not lived in the same house for nineteen years talk to each other in a shop, and June had been watching it for three weeks and had not yet decided whether it was going to get better or worse.

At two o’clock a school group came in, forty children, and bought two hundred and eleven dollars of pumpkin candles in eleven minutes, and June ran the till and her mother wrapped and her grandmother stood at the door and counted them out in fours, and for about a quarter of an hour it was almost like a family that worked together.

At four, Priya arrived.

Priya Rao had been June’s best friend since the fourth grade and had, in September, started a podcast about Salem, which she recorded in her bedroom on a microphone her brother had left behind and which had, so far, eleven listeners, four of whom were her family.

—Episode three, she said, coming through the door. October in Salem: fun for tourists, hell for everybody who lives here. I need a quote.

—No.

—One quote.

—Priya, I am working.

—Mrs. Hale, said Priya, do you have anything to say about the impact of the Haunted Happenings festival on year round residents of Salem?

Margot Hale did not look up from the wick she was trimming.

—One million people, she said. Forty two thousand residents. Twenty four times our own population, in thirty one days, on eleven streets.

Priya held the phone closer.

—And?

—And they are welcome, said Margot Hale. Every single one of them. And I will say that on your podcast and I mean it, and anybody in this town who complains about it can go and look at what happened to Lynn.

Priya turned the recording off.

—That was a really good quote and you did not even have to think about it.

—I have had thirty one Octobers to think about it.

—Fifty two, said June.

—Thirty one that mattered, said her grandmother.

They closed at seven.

Closing up took twenty minutes and it was the same twenty minutes every night. June cashed up and counted the float and wrote the number in a book. Her grandmother went round the shelves with a clipboard and marked what needed restocking. Then she went into the workroom and did something for about four minutes with the door half shut, and then she came out, and then they turned off the lights and locked the front door and went out through the yard.

June had watched the four minutes in the workroom perhaps a thousand times.

She had asked about it exactly twice, at nine and at thirteen, and both times her grandmother had said that she was checking the orders, and both times June had accepted it, because at nine and thirteen you do.

At seventeen she had begun to notice that there was nothing in the workroom that took four minutes to check.

—Gran.

—Mm.

—What do you do in there?

—I check the orders, said Margot Hale, and turned off the lights.

They walked home the long way because it was the first night of the season and because her grandmother, who complained about October from the first of the month to the last, went out of her way every single year to walk through the middle of it.

Essex Street at eight o’clock on the first of October is not a quiet place.

The string lights were on between the buildings. There were two food stalls outside the museum and a queue at both. Somebody had set up a speaker on the corner by the visitor centre and was playing something with a heavy bass line that came up through the bricks. There were perhaps six thousand people on that street, and about a third of them were in costume, and the rest were carrying bags.

June saw four witches, a Frankenstein, a group of eleven people dressed as different flavours of a soft drink, and a man in a completely ordinary suit who had painted his face green and who looked more unsettling than everybody else combined.

—Do you know what I like? said her grandmother.

—What?

—That it is loud.

They stopped at the corner by the pharmacy, where the street narrows and the crowd bunches up, and stood for a moment because there was nowhere to go.

And June, waiting there with her bag on her shoulder and her grandmother’s arm through hers, looked up the street towards the Common and felt something she had no word for.

It was not a sound. It was a sort of pull, up and to the left, the way you feel a bus go past behind you. It came from the direction of the Common, and it lasted about two seconds, and then it stopped.

She turned her head.

—What? said her grandmother.

—Nothing.

—June.

—I thought I felt the ground move.

Margot Hale did not say anything for slightly too long.

—It is a crowd, she said. Six thousand people on cobbles. You feel it in the buildings.

—Yeah.

—Come on. I want to be in by nine.

They walked up Church Street towards Chestnut, away from the noise, and June looked back once, at the top of the street, at the lights and the crowd and the glow over the Common where the fair was setting up for tomorrow.

She would not have been able to explain, then, what she was looking for.

At home her mother had made dinner, which was still surprising after three weeks.

They ate at the kitchen table, the three of them, and talked about the school group and the woman in the coat and the fact that the landlord had put the rent up again in August, by two hundred dollars, which Margot had paid without arguing and had not mentioned until the middle of September.

—We should talk about that at some point, said Catherine.

—We are not talking about it in October.

—Mum, if the rent has gone up two hundred a month, that is two thousand four hundred a year, and if it goes up again in August then…

—Catherine, said Margot Hale. It is the first of October and I have been on my feet since seven and there are thirty days left. We will talk about it in November and I will show you the books and you can be as sensible at me as you like.

Her mother stopped.

—All right, she said.

—Thank you.

—I am only trying to help.

—I know you are, said Margot, and it came out gentler than the rest of it. I know. And you have been back three weeks and you have been extremely careful with me and I have noticed, and I would like you to stop, because it is making me nervous.

Catherine Hale laughed, which June had not heard very often.

June went up at half past ten.

Her room was at the front of the house and it looked down Chestnut Street, which is one of the most photographed streets in Massachusetts and which, in October, has a queue of people taking pictures of it from six in the morning.

She lay on the bed with her laptop and opened the college applications and read the first question on the first one, which asked her to describe a challenge she had overcome, and closed the laptop again.

Then she lay in the dark for a while and listened to the town.

You can hear the Common from Chestnut Street on a still night. It is about half a mile away and it comes across the roofs as a low sound with no edges, and on the first of October it went on until about midnight, and June lay there and listened to it and thought about the pull she had felt on the corner by the pharmacy.

It had come from the Common.

It had felt like something moving past her, going the same way as everybody else, and it had felt very slightly like the moment when water goes out of a bath.

At about eleven she got up and went to the window.

The sky over the Common was orange with the lights. You could see the top of the big wheel they put up for the month, turning very slowly with nobody on it, and you could see the glow of about nine hundred people who had not gone home yet.

And you could see, if you had a particular kind of eyesight, which June did not know she had and would not find out about for another twenty two hours, a thin thread of pale gold going up from the middle of all of it, bending east, and running away over the rooftops in the direction of the water.

She saw nothing at all.

She stood at the window for four minutes, thought about the fact that she had not started a single one of her applications, decided to start one tomorrow, and went to bed.

Downstairs, at twenty past eleven, her grandmother sat at the kitchen table on her own with a candle in front of her.

It was a plain white taper about eight inches long, the kind they sold in packs of fifty for churches and restaurants, in a brass holder that had been in that house longer than anybody living.

Margot Hale lit it.

She watched it for about a minute. Then she took a pencil and a small hardback notebook out of her cardigan pocket, opened it near the back, and wrote:

1 Oct. Common. Large. Not local.

She looked at what she had written.

Then she added one more line, and underlined it, which she had not done in the notebook since 2011.

She felt it.

Key vocabulary

a crowd — толпа

a stage — сцена

a microphone — микрофон

a speaker — колонка, динамик

an audience — аудитория, зрители

a queue — очередь

a fairground — ярмарочная площадь

to gather — собираться

to notice — замечать

a thread — нить

to drain — утекать, сливаться

exhausted — измотанный

dizzy — испытывающий головокружение

to blink — моргать

to make sense — иметь смысл

The Common

Salem Common is a public park of about nine acres with a bandstand in the middle and a black iron fence around the outside, and for the whole of October it stops being a park.

The fair goes up on the second. It takes one day. When June went past on the way to school at half past seven there were four lorries and a lot of shouting, and when she came back at three there was a big wheel, a wall of stalls selling fried dough and lobster rolls and hot cider, a stage at the north end with lighting towers on both sides, and about two thousand people.

By six there were five thousand.

She had not planned to go, and the reason she went is worth putting down, because it was not curiosity and it was not Priya. She had planned to work until seven, go home, and finally open the first college application.

Then at half past four Priya sent nine messages in a row.

episode 4

i need crowd noise

june

june i need crowd noise and you have a phone

also verity cole is on at 8 on the main stage and there is a queue already

a QUEUE. for a FREE THING. at 4pm

i want to interview people in the queue

please

i will buy you fried dough

June looked at the message for a while and then wrote:

who is verity cole

The reply came in eleven seconds and was a screenshot of a profile with 2.1M under the name and a photograph of a woman standing on a beach at sunset with her arms out.

manifestation coach. she is HUGE. she has rented a house here for the whole month and she is doing free talks and paid circles

paid circles are $180

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS

June closed the app and put the phone under the counter.

At seven her grandmother said, without being asked:

—Go.

—I said I would help you close.

—June, I have closed this shop on my own nine thousand times.

—I was going to do my applications.

—You were going to open your laptop and look at it, said Margot Hale, which is not the same thing, and which you can do just as badly at eleven o’clock tonight. Go with Priya. It is the second of October and you are seventeen.

She was already reaching for the clipboard.

—Take a jumper. And be home by half eleven.

The Common at eight o’clock in the evening on the second of October has a particular smell, which is fried sugar and diesel from the generators and cut grass and about six thousand people.

The queue went along the path and doubled back on itself twice, which meant that somebody had organised it, which meant that somebody had thought about it in advance.

June found Priya at the edge of the queue with the microphone out.

—Right, said Priya. I have eleven minutes of queue interviews and they are gold. There is a woman here from Ohio who has flown in for this. Flown. For a free talk in a park.

—What does she actually do?

—Manifestation.

—Priya.

—I do not know, said Priya. That is the whole point of the episode. I have listened to four hours of her and I could not tell you what she does. She says things like: the universe is not withholding, you are.

—What does that mean?

—I have no idea and two point one million people find it extremely helpful.

They got fried dough and stood at the back, because the front of the crowd was already packed and because Priya wanted the wide shot.

The stage was fifteen metres across with two screens and proper lighting. Somebody had put a single armchair in the middle of it, and a small table with a glass of water, and nothing else.

At three minutes past eight the music dropped and the lights came down and about three thousand people made a noise.

Verity Cole came on from the left.

She was twenty nine and she looked like her photographs, which is not true of everybody. She was tall and had long dark hair and she wore a cream coat and boots and she came out with no microphone stand and no notes and stood at the front of the stage and waited until the noise stopped, which took about forty seconds, and which she let happen without doing anything at all.

Then she said:

—Hello Salem.

The noise went up again.

June, who had come because of fried dough, found herself watching quite carefully, because whatever else was true, the woman was extremely good at this.

—Is she good? said June, out of the side of her mouth.

—That is the wrong question, said Priya, who had her professional voice on. Ask me whether she is effective.

—Is she effective?

—Look at the queue for the merchandise stand.

June looked. There were about ninety people at a stall on the left of the stage buying candles, which she noticed for reasons that had nothing to do with anything at that point and which she remembered very clearly two days later.

The talk lasted forty minutes.

It was, June thought afterwards, about seventy per cent nothing. There were stories about a difficult year in 2019, and about a flight to Lisbon, and about a woman in Denver who had written something on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. There was a section about how everybody in the crowd was, in some sense, already the person they wanted to be. Priya recorded all of it and would later describe it in episode four as beautifully constructed and completely empty.

Priya kept the recorder up for all of it and made notes with her thumb on her phone at the same time, which was a skill she had acquired in about three weeks and which June found genuinely impressive.

—She has said the word carrying nine times, Priya said at one point.

—Is that a lot?

—In forty minutes? It is a choice.

But at about thirty minutes in, it changed.

—I want to do something with you, said Verity Cole. It is very simple and it will take about ninety seconds and I would like everybody here to actually do it rather than watch other people do it.

Three thousand people went quiet in about four seconds.

—I want you to think of one thing you are carrying that you would like to put down, she said. Not a big one. Do not go for the big one tonight. A small one. A conversation you have been avoiding. A message you have not answered. A thing you said in June.

Somebody in the crowd laughed and then stopped.

—Have you got it? Everybody got one?

A noise of agreement.

—Right. Now I want you to hold it, said Verity Cole, and look at me while you hold it.

June was standing at the back of about three thousand people on a piece of grass in the middle of Salem, and this is what happened.

It started at the edges of her eyes.

She thought it was the lighting rig, because there were four lights on a tower to the left of the stage pointing back over the crowd and they were doing something with the smoke from the machine. So she turned her head to check, and the thing at the edge of her eyes turned with her, and did not go away.

Then it moved to the middle.