by Alex Bledsoe
“I don’t know, sir,” the man said. “It wasn’t anything to do with the locomotive, I’m certain. I know all the ways that the engine shakes.”
Additional jolts hit the train, shaking it from side to side.
“Still not the engine?” Richard asked the porter.
The man was obviously scared. “No, sir. That’s something coming through the tracks.”
A third series of jolts rattled the train, but these were much less intense. Whatever it was, they seemed to have outrun it.
* * *
In the lavatory, Sean pushed open the small window. Unbidden, unwanted, Sophronie’s voice came back to him from that day at her son’s grave:
Lost my baby, lost my son
Lost my only, my only one
Can’t go back, don’t have the will
Can never go back to my Sadieville.
He took off his suspenders, tied one loose end around the lavatory’s door handle, and the other around his own neck. He cinched both as tightly as he could. Then, already choking for breath, he squeezed through the window and let himself fall.
It was an hour before his friends realized he was missing, and nobody found his body, beaten to a pulp against the train car, until the next stop for coal and water.
I
THIS IS REAL
(ONCE AGAIN)
25
Can’t go back, don’t have the will,
Can never go back to my Sadieville.
Azure’s voice faded, and there was total silence. Then the normal sounds of the forest resumed, like a volume knob slowly turned up. The night winds returned as well, rustling the top branches high above.
The First Daughters, though, remained silent. The song had done its job, and the spell that hid the story of Sadieville and the tragedy of Sophronie Conlin was gone. The tale opened like a blossom in the First Daughters’ minds, producing memories that slotted into mental files alongside the things they’d always known. It didn’t happen all at once, or in the same way for everyone, so they looked at each other as much as they could in the dark, confused and overwhelmed.
Then, when it was all sorted, the same things ran through each of their minds:
Sadieville, a town they destroyed, and then decided to forget;
Tucker Carding, who’d been there and was here, yet whom they all only vaguely seemed to recall;
And finally, the cave. The passage back to …
None of them dared complete that thought.
At last Mandalay said, “Thank you, Azure.” Her voice was shaky with the new knowledge. It might have been the first time the girl hadn’t known part of Tufa history.
“That’d jerk a tear from a glass eye,” Carnelia Rector said with a sniffle. Someone handed her a tissue.
“The song carries the magic,” Azure said. “So only those who hear it will know what we now know.”
“And if we sing it for someone else?” Bronwyn Chess asked.
“Then they’ll know, too.” She took a bottle of water from her bag and gratefully drank it.
“So we all agreed to forget all this?” Bronwyn’s mother, Chloe Hyatt, said in disbelief.
“We did,” Bliss said. She remembered it now, as plainly as anything: the meeting of the First Daughters after the Sadieville disaster, Viney Conlin tearfully announcing Sophronie’s murder, the decision, the agreement of the Silent Sons, and the mass singing on Emania Knob that locked all the memories away.
And spearheading it all had been Tucker Carding. Hadn’t he? Bliss sorted through the images bursting through her mind, looking for the reason. Tucker had always been there, always been involved … right?
“There’s one more thing,” Azure said. “Those students I mentioned, who are here to find Sadieville? Tucker Carding brought them to me, just like he made sure Sean Lee and Sophronie got together.”
“I know Tucker,” Adria Feldman said uncertainly. “I mean … I think I do. Right?”
“We all know Tucker,” Mandalay said. “We know him when he’s here, and we forget him when he leaves. That’s how he’s managed to slip around without anyone noticing.”
“Leaves?” Berra Banks asked. “Where does he go?”
Mandalay held up her hands for silence. She stepped into the middle of the circle. “There’s one question we don’t have the answer to, and it’s more important than I think any of you realize. Why did Tucker Carding want Sean to meet Sophronie in the woods?”
The women all looked at each other blankly. “Well, I mean…” someone started, then trailed off.
“Sean,” Bronwyn said slowly, “was the canary.”
“Right,” Mandalay said. “Sophronie was supposed to get Sean to go through the passage. If he got through, then perhaps the Tufa could, as well. If he didn’t, he was just a stray from this world, and nothing for the Queen to get upset about.”
“But love got in the way,” Chloe said sadly.
“As it tends to do,” Mandalay agreed.
“That film’s been around for a century,” Chloe said. “Why did it turn up now?”
“Who brought your daughter back from the war?” Mandalay said, turning as she spoke so that she faced them all. “Who sent a vision of Rockhouse Hicks to Rob Quillen? Who let Bo-Kate Wisby find her way home? Who let Ray Parrish live long enough to complete Chapel of Ease? Who brought Duncan Gowen to justice?”
In the silence that followed, the trees around them shivered as a gust of wind tore through them.
“The night winds,” Chloe said.
“But those poor kids,” Azure said. “Is it fair for them to be used like this?”
“I don’t know about ‘fair,’” Mandalay said, “but maybe that’s why the night winds sent two of them this time. So Tufa enchantments wouldn’t get in the way.”
“So what do we do?” someone asked. “Sit and wait?”
“For now, we spread the song. Let everyone know. And then, yes. We sit and wait.”
26
Junior Damo’s laugh filled the air. As always, it was thick with contempt, mockery, and venom.
He sat beside Mandalay in a rocking chair on the post office porch. This was where they held court, so that people who had problems or needed disagreements adjudicated could find them. This morning, the town was deserted, and no one came to them for wisdom. Which meant they could discuss the events of the previous night’s meeting of the First Daughters.
Mandalay sighed as Junior continued to roar. She did that a lot around Junior, her opposite number who led the other half of the Tufa community. If the Tufa had an overall leader, Mandalay was it; but Junior had taken the place of Rockhouse Hicks, the six-fingered former leader who’d died (hopefully) three years earlier. While alive, he had been the undisputed leader; now neither of his successors had quite managed to fill the power vacuum.
“Are you finished?” Mandalay asked when he finally stopped long enough to draw a breath.
He wiped his eyes. “Just about.”
“Good. Because this ain’t funny.”
“Oh, it’s pretty fucking hysterical,” Junior said. “You First Daughters plumb outsmarted yourselves, didn’t you? Singing a huge part of our history away, and now having it come back to bite you in the ass.”
“Your people were involved, too. Rockhouse agreed with us.”
“I bet he did, but you know what? I bet that was because he knew someday it’d all end up like this. And he knew how damn funny it would be. Too bad the old SOB missed it.”
If he missed it, Junior added, but only to himself. In the three years he’d been in charge of his half of the Tufa, in quiet moments when no one else was around, he swore he heard the voice of old Rockhouse whispering hints and instructions, as if he’d never left and Junior was just his puppet. Occasionally he even glimpsed shadowy forms that resembled Rockhouse, but they always vanished when he looked directly at them.
“The song is spreading,” Mandalay said. “Your people are going to want answers. And more importantly, lead
ership.”
“Where the hell am I supposed to lead them? Sadieville is fucking gone.”
“The cave isn’t.”
He snorted. “The cave? Some crazy girl’s story? I thought the Queen threw Rockhouse here, and he landed on Eskatole Mountain, or Emania Knob, depending on who you believe. So now you’re saying he was sent crawling through a hole?”
“Stories change over time.”
He looked directly into her eyes and said snidely, “But weren’t you there? Ain’t you the one who knows everything from all the way back?”
She’d never wanted to punch him so much. “I know, Junior, that some important decisions are coming up, and like it or not, your people will expect you to have both knowledge of it and an opinion about it.”
“And if I tell them it’s just nonsense, just a folk tale like Lorena’s ghost up in Half Pea Hollow?”
“Then you better pray you’re right. Because if you’re wrong, your people may lynch you.”
Then the two leaders of the Tufa both folded their arms and turned away from each other, like an old married couple at the end of a another pointless argument.
* * *
In the parsonage beside the Triple Springs Methodist Church in Unicorn, just past the Cloud County line, Bronwyn Chess and her minister husband, Craig, looked down at their sleeping daughter Kell on her first night in her new toddler bed.
Craig bent down and kissed her on the forehead, tucked the blanket under her chin, and watched her fingers, no longer tiny but still small, delicate, and beautiful, curl around the edge.
“She’s got your chin,” Bronwyn whispered.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” he teased. “And she’s got your eyes.”
“Hope her personality has both of our good qualities, too.”
He put an arm around his wife. “If she’s got your courage and nerve, it won’t matter what she got from me. She’ll do just fine.”
Bronwyn looked up at him. That first time she’d seen him, five years earlier when he’d come by her parents’ house in his official capacity to see if she needed anything as she recovered from her war injuries, she’d known he was the one. It helped that he was handsome, and funny, and good-hearted almost beyond belief.
She had broken with the First Daughters over Craig. Even her mother wanted her to choose a Tufa husband, someone who would help keep the Tufa bloodlines pure. They’d tried to fix her up with Terry-Joe Gitterman, younger brother of her old boyfriend Dwayne, but he’d been only seventeen at the time. So she’d cut a deal, one that kept the Tufa lines true, yet let her make her future with Craig.
Even now, people whispered that Craig wasn’t actually Kell’s father. The little girl was too true, too magical, to be his. But Bronwyn knew that, in all the ways that counted, Kell was his. Kell was theirs.
And now she had to threaten all that certainty.
They carefully closed the bedroom door, then walked into the kitchen, her arm around his waist. She got a beer from the refrigerator and said, “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
Bronwyn opened her bottle. Deep breath, she thought. “I need to talk to you.”
“About the First Daughters meeting?” Craig was no Tufa, but he knew a lot about them, including what they really were, and how highly Bronwyn ranked in their hierarchy. Being married to a First Daughter was, it turned out, a lot like being married to a minister. Both had responsibilities to their communities that took them away from home, often with no warning.
“Yeah. We found out something … amazing.”
“Which is?”
“There may be a way for the Tufa to return home. To where we’re really from.”
“I thought you were all banished.”
“We were. But that doesn’t mean we still are.”
“Wouldn’t you have been … I don’t know, notified somehow?”
“Beats me. I may be a pureblood Tufa, but I was born here. All I know about where we came from are the stories I’ve heard.”
“Who told you those stories?”
“Mandalay and Bliss. They both remember it firsthand.”
Craig nodded. After knowing them for years, he had no difficulty believing both Bliss and Mandalay were, at some level, old enough to recall things from prehistory. But he couldn’t stop the way his stomach both tightened and dropped, leaving a huge hole inside him. He finally asked the only question that mattered.
“If it’s true, will you go?”
Bronwyn took a long drink from her beer. “I don’t know, Craig, I honestly don’t. It’s such a huge possibility.” She burped lightly. “I’ve heard stories about it all my life: how beautiful it was, how beautiful we were when we were there. How much magic filled the air. How could I not want to go?”
He nodded toward their daughter’s room. “And us? Do we get to come?”
“I honestly don’t know that, either. Kell probably can, since she’s got so much true Tufa in her. But mortals who wander in don’t usually fare so well. If the stories are true,” she added.
“I know some of those stories,” Craig said. And he did; when he realized exactly what Bronwyn, and now his daughter, truly were, he’d read everything he could get about it. There were hundreds of stories telling how ordinary people often suffered if they so much as encountered the Good Folk; even the name “Good Folk” was a charm against their supposed indifferent malevolence. “If I go, is there any way you can protect me?”
She shrugged with the bottle. “Same answer.”
He looked down at his own fingers on the tabletop. As a minister, he was used to counseling people facing tough decisions, and he tried to see Bronwyn that way, as just another parishioner needing his objectivity. “Bronwyn, we have a life here. We have a family. Whatever waits back there, it can’t be that. So I guess the question is, which is more important to you?”
She didn’t answer, but looked down at her own fingers wrapped around the beer bottle. The silence grew between them until it seemed to thicken and become a barrier separating her from her husband and daughter, possibly for good.
* * *
Deep in Cloud County, Bronwyn’s parents, Deacon and Chloe Hyatt, also sat across their kitchen table from each other. They had no drinks, but both wished they had. Chloe had just sung “Sadieville” for Deacon, and now the heavy silence between them hummed with tension.
Both Deacon and Chloe were full-blood Tufas. Because of the Tufas’ malleable relationship with time, they remembered those first years in this new world. Their memories of before that, of the glories of the Tufas’ original home, were vague and indistinct, but overwhelmingly positive. So the thought of returning should have elated them. Instead they felt morose and uncertain.
“Everything we’ve worked for,” Deacon said at last. “We’d have to leave all that. The house, the farm, the land. Aiden, unless he wanted to go. And Kell. Our Kell.”
“Their” Kell was their oldest child and elder son, the namesake of Bronwyn’s daughter, who’d died in a knife fight with a Tufa from the other group. He was buried on their land, and they visited the site regularly. Blood-soaked ground bound the Tufa to a spot more thoroughly than any charm, and the thought of leaving him behind was enough to have them both tied up in knots.
“Did you talk to Bronwyn?” Deacon added.
Chloe shook her head. “She left before I could. I’m sure she’s talking it all over with Craig right now.”
“He won’t take it well.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if you told me you might be leaving without me, and taking my kids with you to boot, I wouldn’t take it well, either.”
“At least we have Aiden,” Chloe said. “He’ll come with us.”
“Will he? He’s a teenager now. He might decide to stay. This is the only world he’s ever known.”
“He’s also still a boy. We can make him.”
“But we won’t.”
Chloe smiled sadly. “No, we won’t.”
* * *
In the dark hallway that led to their bedrooms, Aiden listened to his parents discuss the latest news. He’d overheard the Sadieville song, and felt both elated and terrified that they’d decided to leave such a monumental decision about his future up to him.
He went into his room and picked up his banjo. It had belonged to his big brother Kell, and he’d begun messing with it only in the last year, as he felt the true weight of Kell’s absence.
Carrying it, he slipped out through the bedroom window, tangling loudly in the yew bush just beneath it. As he skulked across the yard, he saw his parents through the screen door, seated at the table and looking at each other intently. He didn’t really think he’d slipped away unnoticed; but then, his misbehavior was a minor thing compared to what he’d overheard.
When he was out of sight, he used the flashlight app on his phone to find his way through the woods to the Hyatt family plot, a little cemetery deep in the forest, accessible only to those with either permission or right by blood. Any others simply wouldn’t be able to find it, just like the hidden cave.
Kell’s tombstone shone new in the faint starlight, its white marble a stark contrast to its faded, worn, and moss-covered neighbors. The old saying was that you could kill a Tufa but they didn’t just die, so there were long gaps in the dates between the stones. Anyone trying to put a family tree together would be completely frustrated.
He began to slowly play the Cook Creek Girls’ “White Oak Mountain,” not singing but just expressing the melody as softly and cleanly as he could. And as he did, he pondered.
He thought about his friends. Many were Tufa, not purebloods like him but with enough of it that they could make the journey with no consequences. But some just couldn’t, and would have to stay behind no matter what their friends did. They would have to face, and live with, the fact that they were simply not good enough, not Tufa enough, to make the trip to what was essentially their promised land.
And as always when he played the banjo, he thought about his big brother Kell, and wondered what he’d have to say about all this. He missed his brother’s presence, that male energy that was in between his own adolescent angst and his father’s rock-solid taciturnity. Kell was supposed to be here now, to help guide him through everything that was about to happen.