Serafina and the Black Cloak

by Robert Beatty

  “I’ve explored pretty much every room on the first, second, and third floors,” the young master said to her, “and the stables, of course, but the other parts of the house are like foreign lands to me.”

  As the boy spoke, she could tell he was trying to be polite, but his eyes kept studying her. It was nerve-racking. After all those years she’d been hiding, it felt so strange to have someone actually looking at her. It made her stomach twist, but at the same time, her skin tingled all over. She knew she must look completely ridiculous standing before him in the remnants of her pa’s old work shirt, and he must have noticed her hands were dirty and there were smudges all over her face. Her hair was as wild as a banshee’s, and there was no hiding its streaked color. How could he help but stare?

  She reckoned he knew most of the guests and servants, and she could see him trying to figure out who she was. How out of place she must seem to him! She had two arms and legs like everyone else, but with her sharp cheekbones and her golden eyes, she knew she didn’t look like a normal girl. No matter how much she ate, she couldn’t put any weight on the feral leanness of her body. She wasn’t sure if she looked more like a skinny little shoat to the Vanderbilt boy or like a savage little weasel, but neither of those animals belonged in the house.

  There was a part of her—maybe the smart part—that wanted to turn tail and run, but she thought that maybe the young master might be the perfect person to tell about the girl in the yellow dress. The silky-laced adults with all their highfalutin airs wouldn’t pay a smudge-faced girl any mind. But maybe he would.

  “I’m Braeden,” he said.

  “I’m Serafina,” she blurted out before she could help herself. You fool! Why did you give him your name? It was bad enough that she’d allowed herself to be seen, but now he had a name to go with her face. Her father was going to kill her!

  “It’s good to meet you, Serafina,” he said, bowing, as if she deserved the same respect as a proper lady. “This is my friend Gidean,” he said, introducing her to his dog, who continued to sit and study her malevolently with steady black eyes.

  “Hello,” she managed to say, but she didn’t appreciate the way the dog stared at her like it was only his master’s command that kept him from chomping on her with his gleaming white teeth.

  Gathering her courage, she looked at Braeden Vanderbilt nervously. “Master Braeden, I came up here to tell you something that I saw…”

  “Really? What’d you see?” he asked, full of curiosity.

  “There was a girl, a pretty blond girl in a yellow dress, down in the basement last night, and I saw a man in a—”

  As the coterie of ladies and gentlemen began to flow out of the Tapestry Gallery and move toward the main doors, the handsome Mr. Thorne broke away and approached Braeden, interrupting her.

  “Are you coming, young master Vanderbilt?” he asked encouragingly in his Southern accent. “Our horses are ready, and I’m anxious to see your latest riding skills. Perhaps we can ride together.”

  Braden’s face lit up with a smile. “Yes, sir, Mr. Thorne,” he called. “I’d like that very much.”

  As soon as Mr. Thorne rejoined the others, the young master’s eyes immediately returned to Serafina. “Excuse me, you were telling me what you saw…”

  At that moment, Mr. Boseman, the estate superintendent and her pa’s boss, came stomping up the stairs. He’d always been a scowling-faced curmudgeon, and today was no exception. “You there, who are you?” he demanded, clutching Serafina’s arm so hard that she winced. “What’s your name, girl?”

  Just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, a sudden commotion rose up in the main hall. A disheveled, overweight middle-aged woman still wearing her nightclothes came rushing down the Grand Staircase from the third floor. She crashed into the crowd in a flurry of hysterical panic.

  “It’s Mrs. Brahms,” Mr. Boseman said, turning toward the disturbance.

  “Has anyone seen my Clara?” Mrs. Brahms cried frantically, reaching out and grabbing the people around her. “Please help me—she’s gone missing! I can’t find her anywhere!”

  Mrs. Vanderbilt moved forward and took the woman’s hands in an attempt to calm her. “It’s a very large house, Mrs. Brahms. I’m sure Clara is just off exploring.”

  Worried discussion spread through the crowd. All the ladies and gentlemen of the riding party began talking to one another in confusion, wondering what was happening.

  Miss Clara Brahms, Serafina thought. That’s the girl in the yellow dress.

  The whole time, Mr. Boseman kept his hand clamped on her arm.

  She wanted to leap forward and tell everyone what she’d seen, but then what would happen? Where did you come from? they’d demand. What were you doing in the basement in the middle of the night? There’d be all sorts of questions she couldn’t answer.

  All of a sudden, Mr. George Vanderbilt, the master of the house, walked into the center of the crowd and raised his hands. “Everyone, may I please have your attention,” he said. All of the guests and servants immediately stopped talking and listened. “I’m sure you all agree that we need to delay our ride and search for Miss Brahms. Once we find her, we’ll resume the activities of the day.”

  George Vanderbilt was a slender, dark-haired, intelligent-looking gentleman in his thirties with a thick black mustache and keen, dark, penetrating eyes. He was well known for his love of reading, but he was a fit and healthy-looking man, too, who seemed far younger than his years. And Serafina wasn’t the only one who thought so. She had heard the servants in the kitchen joke that their master must have secretly discovered the Fountain of Youth. Mr. Vanderbilt was a meticulous dresser, and as she admired his commanding presence, she couldn’t help but notice his clothes, too. In particular, his shoes. Like the other gentlemen present, he wore a gentleman’s riding jacket, but instead of riding boots, he wore expensive black patent-leather shoes. As he strode across the hard surface of the marble floor, his shoes made a familiar clicking sound…the same sound that she’d heard in the corridors of the basement the night before.

  She looked at the other men’s shoes. Braeden, Mr. Thorne, and Mr. Bendel wore riding boots in preparation for their outing, but Mr. Vanderbilt was wearing his dress shoes.

  He approached the lost girl’s mother and consoled her. “We’re going to search this place from top to bottom, Mrs. Brahms, and we’ll keep looking until we find her.” He turned to the ladies and gentlemen and waved over the footmen and maidservants as well. “We’ll break up into five separate search parties,” he explained. “We’ll search the entire house, all four floors and also the basement. If anyone finds anything suspicious, report it immediately.”

  Mr. Vanderbilt’s words struck fear into Serafina’s heart. They were going to search the basement! The basement! That meant the workshop! With a mighty twist of her body, she yanked herself out of Mr. Boseman’s grip and darted away before he could stop her. She bounded headlong down the stairs into the basement. She had to warn her pa. The leftovers from last night’s dinner, the mattress she slept on…they had to hide it all.

  Serafina rushed up to her father in the workshop and grabbed his arm. Trying to talk and catch her breath at the same time, she gasped, “Pa, there’s a girl missing just like I said, and Mr. Vanderbilt’s searching the whole house!” Her words tumbled out with a mixture of urgency and pride. As she hurriedly reminded him of what she’d seen the night before, she was sure that he’d see now that she wasn’t dreaming or making up stories.

  “They’re searchin’ the house?” he asked, ignoring everything else. He turned and quickly gathered his cooking supplies and razor from the bench, then dragged her mattress into the hidden area he’d constructed behind the tool rack. There could be no evidence of their living there when the search party came through.

  “What about the girl I saw disappear?” she asked in confusion. She couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t more interested in what she was telling him.

  “Children
don’t just disappear, Sera,” he said as he continued his efforts.

  Her heart sank. He still didn’t believe her.

  Her pa looked around the room one last time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and then he looked at her. For a moment, she thought he was finally going to listen to what she was saying, but then he pointed at her hairbrush and snapped, “For God’s sake, girl, pick up your things!”

  “But what about the Man in the Black Cloak?” she argued.

  “I don’t want you thinking about anything like that,” he barked. “It was nothing but a nightmare. Now hush up.”

  She flinched from the words. She couldn’t understand why he was being so mean. But she could hear the worry in his voice along with the anger, and in the distance she could hear the search party coming down the stairs. She knew it wasn’t just the threat of discovery that scared him. He hated any talk of the supernatural or any sort of dark and fiendish forces out in the world that he couldn’t fix with his wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers.

  “But it’s real!” she demanded. “The girl’s actually gone, Pa. I’m telling the truth!”

  “A little girl’s gotten herself lost, that’s it, and they’re lookin’ for her, so they’ll find her, wherever she is. Get your wits about you. People don’t just vanish. She’s gotta be someplace.”

  She stood in the center of the room. “I think we should both go out there right now and tell them everything I saw,” she declared boldly.

  “No, Sera,” he said. “They’ll spit nails if they find me livin’ down here. They’ll fire me. Do you understand that? And God knows what they’ll make of you. They don’t even know you’re alive, and we’re gonna keep it that way. I’m talkin’ to you dead straight now, girl. You hear me?”

  The sound of the search party could be heard down the corridor, and it was coming their way.

  Clenching her teeth, she shook her head in frustration and stood before him. “Why, Pa? Why? Why can’t people see me?” She didn’t have the courage to tell him that at least one Vanderbilt already had, and that he knew her name. “Just tell me, Pa, whatever it is. I’m twelve years old. I’m grown up. I deserve to know.”

  “Look, Sera,” he said, “last night, somebody sabotaged the dynamo, did it some real damage that I’m not sure I can mend. If I don’t get it fixed by nightfall, there’s gonna be hell to pay from the boss, and rightly so. The lights, the elevators, the servant-call system—this whole place depends on the Edison machine.”

  She tried to imagine someone sneaking into the electrical room and damaging the equipment. “But why would someone do that, Pa?”

  The search party was making its way through the kitchens and would arrive in the workshop at any moment.

  “I ain’t got time to think about it,” he said, moving toward her with his huge body. “I just gotta get it workin’, that’s all. Now do what I tell ya!”

  He charged around the room and hid things with such roughness and loudness and violence that it frightened her. She crept behind the boiler and watched him. She knew that when he was like this she couldn’t get anywhere with him. He just wanted to be left alone to do his job and work on his machines. But it was gnawing at her, and the more she thought about it, the madder she got. She knew it wasn’t the right time to talk to him about everything she’d been thinking and feeling, but she didn’t care. She just blurted it out.

  “I’m sorry, Pa,” she said. “I know you’re busy, but please just tell me why you don’t want anyone to see me.” She stepped out from behind the boiler and faced him, her voice getting louder now. “Why have you been hiding me all these years?” she demanded. “Just tell me what’s wrong with me. I want to know. Why are you ashamed of me?”

  By the time she was done, she was practically screaming at him. Her voice was so loud and shrill that it actually echoed.

  Her pa stopped dead in his tracks and looked at her. She knew she had finally reached down inside him and grabbed that armored heart of his. She’d finally stirred him up. She felt a sudden impulse to take it all back and dart behind the boiler again to hide, but she didn’t. She stood before him and looked at him as steadily as she could, her eyes watering.

  He stood very still over by the bench, his huge hands balled into fists. A visible wave of pain and despair seemed to pass through him all at once, and for a moment he couldn’t speak.

  “I’m not ashamed of you,” he said gruffly, his voice strangely hoarse. The searchers were now only one room away.

  “You are,” she shot back. She was trembling in fear, but she wasn’t going to give up this time. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to shake him to the core. “You’re ashamed of me,” she said again.

  He turned away from her so that she couldn’t see his face, just the back of his head and huge, bulky body. Several seconds of silence went by. Then he shook his head like he was arguing with himself, or furious with her, or both—she wasn’t sure.

  “Just keep your mouth shut and follow me,” he said as he turned and walked out of the room.

  Scurrying after him, she caught up with him in the corridor. Her body felt queasy all over. She didn’t know where he was taking her or what was going to happen. She could barely suck in breaths as he led her down the narrow stone stairs to the subbasement and into the electrical room with the iron dynamo and thick black wires that spidered up the walls. They had left the search party behind them, at least for a little while.

  “We’ll hole up in here,” he said as he pulled the door shut with a heavy thud and locked them in. As he lit a lantern against the darkness, she’d never seen him look so serious, so grave and pale, and it frightened her.

  “What’s happening, Pa?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Ya ain’t gonna like what I got to tell ya, but it might help ya understand.”

  Serafina swallowed, sat on an old wooden spool of copper wire, and prepared herself to listen. Her pa sat on the floor facing her, with his back against the wall. Staring down at the floor and deep in thought, he began to talk.

  “Years ago, I was workin’ as a mechanic in the train yard in Asheville,” he said. “The foreman and his wife had just had their third baby boy and their home was full of joy, but while everyone else celebrated, I sat alone in a kind of self-made misery. I ain’t proud of it, the way I was soppin’ around that night, but things just weren’t workin’ out for me the way they were supposed to in a man’s life. I wanted to meet a good woman, build a house in town, and have children of my own, but years had gone by and it hadn’t happened. I was a big man and not much to look at. I sweated all day on the engines, and those few times I encountered any womenfolk, I could never find my words. I could talk about nuts and bolts till the mornin’ come, but not much else.”

  She opened her mouth to ask a question, but she didn’t want to disrupt the story that was finally pouring out of her pa.

  “That night, while everyone was tipping the jug,” he continued, “I was feelin’ pretty poor, and I headed out. I went for a long walk, just walkin’ like ya do when you got too much on your mind to do naught else. I went deep into the forest, up through River’s Gap, and into the mountains. When night came, I just kept walkin’.”

  It was hard for her to picture her father traveling through the forest. All those times he had warned her had led her to believe that he would never set foot in the forest. He hated the forest. At least he did now.

  “Were you scared, Pa?”

  “Naw, I weren’t,” he said, shaking his head and still looking at the floor. “But I shoulda been.”

  “Why? What happened?” She couldn’t even imagine what it was. The flicker of the lantern cast an eerie shadow on his face. She had always loved his stories, but this one felt closer to his heart than any story he had ever told.

  “As I was walkin’ through the woods, I heard a queer howlin’ noise, like an animal in terrible, writhing pain. The bushes were movin’ somethin’ fierce, but I couldn’t quite
make out what it was.”

  “Was it somethin’ dyin’, Pa?” She leaned toward him.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, looking up at her. “The ruckus in the bushes went on for a spell, then the noise stopped all sudden-like. I thought it was over, but then a pair of greenish-yellow eyes peered at me from the darkness. Whatever sort of man or beast it was, it circled slowly around me, taking one position and then another, studying me real careful, like it was trying to make a decision about me, whether I was worth eatin’ or just lettin’ be. I sensed a real power behind those eyes. But then the eyes disappeared. The beast was gone. And I heard a strange mewling, crying sound.”

  She straightened her back and looked at him. “Crying?” she asked in confusion. That definitely wasn’t what she was expecting.

  “I searched through the bushes. Blood covered the ground, and in the blood lay a pile of small creatures. Three of ’em were dead, but one remained just barely alive.”

  She got off the wooden spool and crouched down beside her pa. She stared at him, totally absorbed in his story. In her mind, she could see the bloody creatures on the ground.

  “But what kind of creatures were they?” she asked in amazement.

  He shook his head. “Like everyone else who lives in these mountains, I’d heard the stories of black magic, but I never gave them much credit until that night. I studied the one that was still alive the best I could in the darkness, but I still couldn’t figure what kind of thing it was. Or more like my mind just couldn’t believe it. But when I finally took up the creature in my bare hands and held it, I realized that it was actually a tiny human baby curled into a little ball.”

  Serafina’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “What? Wait. I don’t understand. What happened? How did a baby get there?”

  “The same question was runnin’ through my own mind, believe me, but one thing I knew for certain: regardless of how she came into the world, I had to get this baby some help. I bundled her up in my jacket, hiked back down the hill, and carried her out of the woods. I took her to the midwives at the convent and begged them to help, but they gasped at the sight of her, muttering that she was the devil’s work. They said she was malformed, near to death, and that there was nothing they could do to help her.”