by John Saul
“Why not?” Chad asked. “What do you think you’re going to do about it?”
The urge to turn and run was almost irresistible, but Seth steeled himself against it. “The same thing I did to Zack last night,” he said softly.
Not even a flicker of fear crossed Chad’s expression, but Seth was sure he’d seen Zack flinch. Chad only moved even closer, so he was towering above him. “You think you can jump me like you jumped Zack?” he demanded.
“I didn’t—” Seth began, then realized it didn’t matter what he said. The attack he’d been afraid of all day would take place anyway. Grabbing his backpack, Seth tried to duck away, but it was too late. Chad smashed him up against the bank of lockers, slamming his head so hard against the metal that for a second Seth thought he might pass out.
“You listen, you little shit,” Chad hissed, clutching Seth’s shirt and shoving his face so close that Chad was spitting on him as he spoke. “You jump Zack, you might as well have jumped me! So I’m going to make you wish you were dead, get it? I’m going to hurt you so bad you’ll never—”
At the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, Chad let go of Seth as quickly as he’d grabbed him. By the time the principal appeared at the top of the stairs, Chad was busily working the combination of his own locker, and Zack and Jared appeared to be paying no attention to Seth either. Phil Lambert, though, had been the school principal long enough to read the entire situation in an instant, and he focused on Chad, the only one of the four boys in the corridor who wasn’t looking at him. “Something wrong, Jackson?” he asked.
Chad turned around, shrugging. “Just can’t get my stupid lock to work.”
“Then maybe you should get the custodian,” the principal suggested. “And even if Jackson has a problem,” he said, addressing the others, “shouldn’t the rest of you be in class?”
Zack Fletcher and Jared Woods jumped at the opportunity to escape the principal unpunished, and Seth held back just long enough to let them start downstairs before he hurried down the hall toward his trigonometry class.
Though every eye in the room shifted from the teacher to stare at Seth when he entered, and the teacher himself was glaring, all Seth was aware of were the words Chad had spoken to him.
I’m going to make you wish you were dead. . . . I’m going to hurt you so bad . . .
Marty Sullivan swore in disgust as he stared at the sodden tuna fish sandwich, the already blackening banana, and the thermos of coffee that, even if it weren’t cold, he knew would be as bitter as the bile rising in his throat at the thought of eating one more of Myra’s crappy lunches. Christ, wasn’t it bad enough that he had to eat out of a tin box every day? The least she could do was try to come up with something decent for him. But no, every day, the same damned thing—a soggy sandwich, some kind of half-rotten fruit, and a thermos of her lousy coffee. There was a tavern half a mile away, and since Jack Varney had already made him work through what should have been his lunch hour, maybe he should just dump Myra’s whole mess of a lunch in the trash barrel and go treat himself to some fish and chips and a couple of beers.
And take the rest of the day off.
He was still considering that possibility when Varney called his name. Well, the hell with him, he thought. He’d already given Varney two extra hours in the morning, and he knew the rules—unless it was an emergency, he had a right to an hour to himself.
Then Varney yelled at him again, and this time Marty looked up, more out of irritation than any interest in what the job foreman might want. When he saw Ed Fletcher wearing one of his fancy-ass suits and leaning against his Mercedes, his irritation grew into anger. If his snotnose brother-in-law was here to fire him, he wouldn’t give him a chance. He’d quit, and the hell with all of them. The hell with the Fletchers, and if Myra gave him any crap, then maybe he’d just say the hell with her too. Moving to Roundtree was the dumbest thing he’d ever let her talk him into, and if she still wanted to stay, then maybe he’d just let her. She and her weird kid both. After the way Angel had been acting—and the way she’d looked this morning, like some vampire witch from Hell—he figured he could do just fine without them. Maybe he’d just take off to California, or even Hawaii; God knew he wasn’t looking forward to another winter in New England.
“For Christ’s sake, Marty,” Ed Fletcher yelled. “You gone deaf in your old age?” Marty heaved himself to his feet, glowering, and started toward his brother-in-law. “Hey, take it easy,” Fletcher protested when he saw that Marty’s right hand was already balled into a fist. “I just want to talk to you.”
“It’s lunch hour,” Marty growled. He shot a furious look at Varney. “It shoulda been lunch hour two hours ago!”
Ed Fletcher’s eyes rolled impatiently. “God forbid I should transgress on one of your precious union rules.”
“I’m just sayin’—”
“I know what you’re saying,” Fletcher cut in. “So why don’t you for once in your life find out what’s going on before you get mad?” Before Marty could answer, Fletcher tilted his head toward the man leaning against his car. “You know Blake Baker?”
Marty’s eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “Should I?”
Blake Baker extended a hand toward Marty. “My boy knows your girl. Seth?”
Marty ignored the other man’s hand and spat into the dirt. “I don’t want that little punk hanging around my daughter. And I told him that too,” he said, suddenly certain that he knew what was going on. This Baker prick was trying to get him fired. “Caught him with her once, but all I did was tell him to stay away. I didn’t hit him or nothin’ like that.” He spat again, and snorted derisively. “’Course, I’d’a had to catch up with him to hit him, and the way he was running, that wasn’t gonna happen. Guess I put an end to him messin’ with Angel.”
“Not according to Zack,” Ed Fletcher said.
Marty cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
Ed shrugged. “Seems Seth and Zack got into it last night.”
“Shit,” Marty said, “Zack’d bust that little punk’s face so fast it’d make your head spin.”
Ed Fletcher’s expression tightened. “Well, that’s not exactly how it turned out. He wound up at the hospital getting four stitches.”
Marty stared at his brother-in-law in disbelief. “You gotta be kiddin’ me!”
“I wish I were. The thing is, neither Blake nor I can figure out exactly what happened. But Zack says Seth has been acting weird since he started hanging out with Angel.”
“I already told you,” Marty said, “they’re not hanging out!”
Ed sighed heavily. “That’s not the way I hear it. Zack says they eat lunch together every day, and they were at the library together the other night, and now they’ve started taking off after school together.”
Marty wheeled on Blake Baker. “If your kid’s messin’ with my girl—”
Ed Fletcher cut him short. “Will you just keep your shirt on long enough to listen? No one’s saying Seth’s ‘messing’ with Angel, as you put it. But he sure messed with Zack last night.” Before Marty could start talking again, Ed told him as much as he knew about what had happened last night—or at least as much as Zack had told him. “The thing is, he keeps changing his story, but even when he changes it, it doesn’t make any sense. And it doesn’t make any sense that they found blood on a tree branch that’s nine feet off the ground. It’s almost like someone threw him up against the branch.”
Suddenly, Marty recalled what had happened yesterday afternoon, when Angel shoved him down the stairs, knocking him unconscious.
Except that he had no memory of being shoved down the stairs. Sure, he’d been drinking a little, and he remembered the storm that struck in the afternoon, and going up to Angel’s room. . . . In fact, now that he thought about it, he remembered that Angel heard him open the door, and she turned, but hadn’t actually come at him.
And the cat hadn’t come at him either.
But something had come a
t him—some kind of force he couldn’t see. It was like he was just picked up and thrown backward, and a second later he was tumbling down the stairs.
Like Zack had been thrown?
Then he remembered what Father Mulroney had told him, the legends about what had gone on in Roundtree centuries ago, and the storms that came up sometimes.
Storms like the one yesterday afternoon, when Angel hadn’t been home, and when the Baker kid hadn’t been home either, according to Ed Fletcher. “I think maybe you better go talk to Father Mulroney,” Marty finally said, his voice hollow.
Blake Baker gazed at him in bafflement. “Father Mulroney? What’s he got to do with this?”
“He told me some stuff,” Marty said. “He told me what’s been going on around here, okay? So don’t talk to me—go ask him!”
Ed Fletcher drew in a deep breath. “All right, Marty, suppose we do go ask Father Mike? What’s he going to tell us?”
Marty opened his mouth to speak a single word: witchcraft. But he couldn’t bring himself to utter it. Let them hear it from the priest; let them think it was the priest who was crazy. “You ask him,” Marty said once more. “Let him tell you.”
Chapter 41
NEVER HEARD SUCH A PILE OF CRAP IN MY LIFE.”
Father Mike Mulroney shrugged almost disinterestedly and offered Blake Baker a faint smile. When Baker and Ed Fletcher had rung the rectory bell half an hour ago, he’d been surprised to see them. Both of them were members of the Congregational church across the street, and as far as Mulroney knew, neither of them had ever set foot in his church. He had a vague memory of Fletcher’s wife, Joni, showing up a few times—mostly on Easter—but even that had stopped years ago, and he suspected that her churchgoing habits were dictated far more forcefully by her profession than her convictions, which meant that she too was now a Congregationalist. Thus, when two prominent members of the church across the street appeared at his front door on a Monday afternoon, he’d assumed it must be church business of some sort. After they told him how they’d come to be there, he decided that he was right, at least in an oddly abstract way. After all, the church these two men went to was the same one that burned Margaret and Forbearance Wynton several centuries ago.
Now, in response to Blake Baker’s crude summation of his remarks, Mulroney tipped his head in recognition that, despite their crudeness, he wasn’t going to utterly discount Baker’s words. “I’m just telling you the same thing I told Martin Sullivan last night,” he said, “which is nothing more than what I’ve read over the years about the history of the town.”
“It sounds like you expect us to believe in—what?” Ed Fletcher hesitated, searching for a better word than the one that came to mind. But he didn’t find one. “Witchcraft?” he finally said. “Come on, Father—this is the twenty-first century. We don’t believe in superstition anymore.”
Mulroney spread his hands. “The difference between faith such as yours and mine, and what people like us often like to call superstition, is something that seems to elude me more and more with each passing year.”
He rose from his chair, moved to the window, and gazed at the huge old oak tree that stood in the graveyard across the street like a great silent sentinel. “Doesn’t anything about that tree ever strike you as strange?” he asked. He turned back to the other two men. “Its canopy is almost perfectly round, which is peculiar in and of itself. Still, it could in part be accounted for by careful pruning, except the tree doesn’t show any signs of ever having been pruned at all. Also, according to every record I’ve been able to find, the tree was already there when the town was founded. The town was named after the tree, gentlemen, and that was more than three hundred and fifty years ago. Even the trees down at Oak Alley in Louisiana aren’t anywhere near that old.”
“So it’s old,” Blake Baker said. “And no one’s ever pruned it—so what?”
The priest shrugged. “Maybe nothing at all. I just find it curious that not only does the tree show no signs of ever being pruned, it shows no signs of ever having burned or been struck by lightning either.”
Ed Fletcher frowned. “Maybe it never has been.”
Father Mulroney met Fletcher’s gaze. “But it has, Ed. I’ve seen it myself. The storms that came up out of nowhere yesterday and a couple of days before that? I was watching, and that tree was struck half a dozen times. And there’s not a mark on it.”
For the first time, a flicker of uncertainty came into Blake Baker’s eyes. “Well, there’s got to be some kind of explanation. I mean, maybe—” But before he could go on, a gust of wind slammed into the rectory, and outside, a huge thunderhead took shape. “Jesus!” Baker said. “Where did that come from?”
As the sun vanished behind the dark cloud that seemed to have come literally out of nowhere, another blast of wind struck the rectory. The structure shuddered again, followed by a blinding flash of lightning and then a crash of thunder that rattled the windows. Blake Baker flinched under the onslaught, but Ed Fletcher remained where he was, gazing out the window.
“You see?” Father Mulroney said softly as rain began to slash down from the sky.
As if to underscore the priest’s question, another bolt of lightning shot out of the sky, lashing into the top of the great oak tree and vanishing in a shower of sparks as another clap of thunder exploded. The uncertainty in Blake Baker’s eyes coalesced into fear. “I don’t get it,” he whispered, almost to himself. “What’s going on?”
“According to the oldest legends in Roundtree,” Father Mulroney said almost placidly, “someone is practicing witchcraft even as we are talking.”
Baker’s eyes fixed on the priest. “Who?” he demanded.
Father Mulroney’s lips curved into a sardonic smile. “Wasn’t it you that just said something about all this being—what was it?” He hesitated, as if trying to remember the exact words, then continued. “Ah! ‘A pile of crap,’ I believe you said.”
Blake Baker ignored both the priest’s tone and his words. “If you know what’s going on, you’d better tell us,” he said, as yet a third bolt of lightning shot out of the sky, and the rectory once more trembled under the crash of thunder.
“According to the legends, it always comes from one place,” the priest said as the thunder died away. “The old house at Black Creek Crossing. And it always involves an adolescent girl.” Before either of the other men could say anything, there was a sharp rapping at the study door. “Come in,” Father Mulroney called, certain he knew who it was.
The door opened, and Myra Sullivan stepped in. “Father, what’s hap—” she began, but her words died on her lips as she saw the two men who were with the priest. “Ed?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Instead of answering her question, Ed asked his own. “Did Angel go to school this morning?”
Myra’s eyes flicked from her brother-in-law to the priest. “What—” she began again, and this time was interrupted by Blake Baker.
“Angel?” he repeated. “That’s your daughter?”
Myra frowned. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Well, I don’t understand either,” Blake Baker stated, his voice hardening. “According to Father Mulroney, here, your kid’s some kind of witch or something, and—”
Myra turned to face Father Mulroney, her face ashen. “You’re a priest!” she breathed. “How could you say such a thing? How could you even think such a thing?”
“I didn’t say Angel is a witch, Myra. I—”
“You might as well have,” Baker fumed, wheeling on the priest. “And given the way my kid is acting, maybe she is!” He turned to Ed Fletcher. “I think it’s time you and I got to the bottom of whatever happened last night. I’m going over to the school and find Seth. If Zack was telling the truth, my boy’s in so much trouble, he’ll never forget it.” His furious eyes fixed on Myra. “And if I find out your girl was involved—”
“My Angel wouldn’t—”
But Blake Baker wasn’t listenin
g and cut her off. “You coming, Ed?” he asked, and stormed out of the study without waiting for an answer. Ed Fletcher followed a moment later.
A shocked silence hung in the room as Myra Sullivan gazed at Father Mulroney in bewilderment. Finally the priest sighed, gently took her elbow, and guided her toward the front door. “School will be out in another twenty minutes,” he said quietly. “I think maybe you should be there. And I’d better go with you.”
Seth Baker had been thinking about it ever since lunch, when first Angel had taken off, then Chad, Zack, and Jared cornered him upstairs by his locker. If Mr. Lambert hadn’t come along—
But Mr. Lambert had come along, so his nose was still unbroken, his eyes unblackened, and his teeth intact. This afternoon, however, after school, things would be different. They wouldn’t come after him at school, of course, where one of the teachers might well see them. No, they’d wait until later, when they were all away from school, and corner him somewhere. And then, judging from the fury in Chad’s eyes after lunch, they’d give him a beating that would be far worse than anything his father had ever given him.
At least his father only hit him with the belt.
Chad and Zack—and maybe even Jared—would come at him with anything that came to hand.
He knew it wouldn’t do any good to just hang around after school either. By now, Zack would have told everyone he knew to keep an eye on him, and even if he outwaited everyone, sooner or later they’d lock up the school and he’d have to leave. And Chad would be waiting, with Zack—his head bandaged—right beside him. He would have no chance at all. It was all Seth thought about through fifth period, and during the break before his history class he knew people were watching him, whispering, and he wished he could just disappear.
Like Angel had disappeared. But where had she gone?
Then, when he saw the flash of light through the window at the far end of the corridor, followed so quickly by the crash of thunder that he knew the lightning had struck within a block or two of the school, he knew where Angel had gone. She was in the cabin, and the fire was burning on the hearth, and the old wrought-iron kettle was heating. And Seth knew what he had to do.