Character Profile: Mark from Salem's Daughter: The Haunting

Character Profile: Mark from Salem's Daughter: The Haunting Mark is easy to underestimate because the whole story initially points you toward the possession itself. There's a frightened family, a boy who isn't acting like himself, priests trying to help, and Anna and Braden trying to figure out what they've walked into. You're looking for the thing doing this. Mark is already there among the people around the family. The reveal is that he's William Ray Jones's surviving son. He was sent away to an aunt after what happened to his family, and now he's the person helping his father return. The dead man needs someone alive to carry out his plans. Mark has made himself useful. For me, the scene that explains him best is his conversation with Lettia in the basement. She's tied to a chair. He tells her that she was the portal his father used all those years ago and that none of this works without her. Then he cuts her wrist for the ritual. He understands what his father did to her. He knows her gift was the reason she was used. That knowledge doesn't make him stop and reconsider. It tells him exactly who he needs to capture to make the next attempt work. You can understand wanting your family back without pretending that makes the method acceptable. His reunion depends on taking other people's bodies. Anna is supposed to become his father. Lettia is taken over by his mother. A child is used for his brother. These aren't empty places waiting for the Jones family to come home. There are people in them, and Mark has helped arrange for those people to be pushed out. When William returns, he tells Mark he's done well. That little moment matters. Mark has been working toward being reunited with his father, and now he gets the approval that comes with finishing the job. The rest of us can see what he's done to earn it. His father sees a son who followed through. The ending is rough. Once the plan has fallen apart, Mark breaks down and apologizes. Anna tells him she understands that he wanted to be with his family. She embraces him, and for a moment it looks like we're getting the scene where the person behind all this finally has to face what he did. Then she burns him down to a skeleton. Braden and Lettia look horrified. The book has just introduced a disturbing bargain involving Anna's soul, so I wouldn't treat that last scene as a simple statement that this is how Anna normally handles a defeated enemy. It leaves a much uglier question hanging over her, too. Mark helped turn other people's lives into the materials for his family's return. His last scene doesn't erase that. It also doesn't give us the comfortable ending where he apologizes, gets taken away, and everyone goes back to being who they were before this started.