Serafina and the Black Cloak

by Robert Beatty

  The only good news was that it seemed like he hadn’t spilled the grits about her existence to Mr. Vanderbilt. Was Crankshod a hero? A villain? Or was he nothing more than a common rat-faced coward? She looked around at Mr. Vanderbilt, Mr. Crankshod, and the other men. She was beginning to see how difficult it was to determine who was good and who was bad, who she could trust and who she had to watch out for. Every person was a hero in his own mind, fighting for what he thought was right, or just fighting to survive another day, but no one thought they were evil.

  Gidean wasn’t so forgiving. He charged toward Mr. Crankshod right away and started barking and snarling at him. Maybe dogs really can smell fear, Serafina thought. Or at least cowardliness…It didn’t look like Gidean was actually going to bite Mr. Crankshod, but he wasn’t going to let him off without a good barking-to. The other men watched in amusement, but Mr. Crankshod was none too pleased by the dog’s attention.

  “Oh, shut up, you stupid mutt!” Mr. Crankshod shouted, and raised his arms to strike the dog with his ax.

  Braeden and Serafina were too far away to help, but Mr. Thorne clamped his hand onto Mr. Crankshod’s arm and stopped him mid-blow. “Don’t be a fool, Crankshod.”

  “Aw, what the…Just keep that mangy cur away from me,” Mr. Crankshod grumbled and stomped away.

  Braeden ran over to Gidean and Mr. Thorne. “Oh, thank you, sir, thank you so much.”

  “It’s good to see you’re all right, young master Vanderbilt,” Mr. Thorne said cheerfully, patting Braeden’s shoulder with his leather-gloved hand. “Sounds like you’ll have some big stories to tell everyone at dinner tonight about your adventure through the forest.”

  “Did you see anyone else when you arrived?” Braeden asked him, still holding Gidean but looking around again for Serafina.

  “Not to worry,” Mr. Thorne said. “Those yellow-bellied sorts aren’t the type of men to stick around after an attack. I’m sure they’re long gone by now.”

  Despite his reassuring words, Serafina noticed that he was wearing an elegant dagger on his belt and wondered if he had half expected to encounter the bandits himself.

  “I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Thorne,” Mr. Vanderbilt said, shaking his head angrily as he walked up to them. “But it’s hard to believe that bandits would venture such a brazen attack so close to Biltmore. I’m going to ask the police to increase their patrols of the road.”

  Braeden didn’t seem to be listening to much of any of this. He just kept looking out into the trees. Serafina wanted to let him know she was all right, but she couldn’t let all those men see her, and she definitely didn’t want to have to explain who she was or why she had been in the carriage with Braeden, so she stayed quiet and out of sight.

  Braeden squatted down and put his hands on Gidean, who was looking out into the trees in her direction. “Can you smell her, boy?” he whispered.

  “What are you doing?” Mr. Vanderbilt asked gruffly.

  Braeden stood, knowing that he’d been caught out.

  “Who are you looking for, Braeden?” Mr. Vanderbilt asked him.

  Serafina sucked in her breath. That was the question she had been dreading. Who was Braeden looking for? This is where her and her pa’s secret would come out. Braeden’s answer to his uncle’s question had the power to destroy her life.

  When Braeden hesitated, Mr. Vanderbilt frowned. “What do you have to say, Braeden? Spit it out.”

  Braeden didn’t want to lie to his uncle, but he shook his head and looked at the ground. “Nothing,” he said.

  Serafina breathed a sigh of relief. He’d kept his promise. He wasn’t going to tell. Thank you, Braeden. Thank you, she thought, but then his uncle lit into him.

  “You’ve got to buck up, son,” Mr. Vanderbilt said. “You’re twelve years old now, and that’s plenty old enough to handle yourself properly. Don’t be scared of what’s going on here. You’ve got to take charge of yourself. Be a man. We’re only dealing with bandits here, thieves.”

  “I don’t think it was bandits,” Braeden said again.

  “Of course it was. This is nothing a Vanderbilt can’t handle. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, sir,” Braeden said glumly, looking at the ground. “Just hungry, I guess.”

  Mr. Thorne stepped in to rescue him. “Well then, by all means, let’s get some food in you,” he said enthusiastically, putting his arm around Braeden. “Come on, I raided the kitchen on my way out. I brought a sack full of pulled-pork sandwiches, and if that doesn’t suit, we’ll dig right into the raspberry spoon bread.”

  Braeden glanced one more time into the forest, then turned and followed Mr. Thorne.

  Serafina desperately wanted to give poor Braeden some clue that she was out there and that she was safe. If she had been any other kind of girl, she would have left some sort of token for him when she left, a signal of their connection—perhaps a silver locket, a lace handkerchief, or a charm from her bracelet—but she was a wild girl and didn’t have any of those possessions to give.

  As the men gathered around Braeden, happy and relieved that they’d found him, Serafina noticed Mr. Rostonov, the bearded and portly Russian ambassador, step away from the others and stand alone at the edge of the road. Braeden had told her that Mr. Rostonov didn’t know English too well. The poor man gazed tearfully into the forest, as if wondering whether his dear Anastasia had been murdered by what lurked in its shadows. He took out a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose. Braeden had said that Mr. Rostonov and his daughter were only scheduled to stay at Biltmore Estate for a few days before they returned home to their family in Russia in time for Christmas. But when Anastasia disappeared, he had stayed on, continuing the search for her. Mr. Rostonov couldn’t bear the thought of returning home to his wife without his daughter. Back over by the carriages, some of the men went over to Mr. Crankshod, who was still put out by the incident with the dog, and thanked him for leading the search party to Braeden. But there was something about Crankshod, all smiling and greasy, that raised Serafina’s hackles. What was he really doing? Where was he when the Man in the Black Cloak attacked? Did he work for him? Or was he him?

  She looked suspiciously at Mr. Vanderbilt, too. She didn’t like the way he was so tough on Braeden, telling him what to do and not to do and how to feel. He had no idea what Braeden had been through. He didn’t listen any better than her pa, and he seemed far too quick to accept Mr. Crankshod’s story that it had been bandits.

  Braeden had said that his aunt and uncle had secretly sent him away for the night, so few people would have known he was going to be on the road at that time. And he had said that his uncle trusted Mr. Crankshod. Were they working together?

  She tried to think it through. Was it really possible that Mr. Vanderbilt was the Man in the Black Cloak? Did he have some terrible need to swallow up all the children at Biltmore?

  After the men cleared the second tree from the road, those who weren’t continuing on to search for Nolan climbed back into the carriages. The coachmen began the intricate task of turning all the carriages around in the tight quarters of the narrow road so that they could head back to Biltmore Estate.

  “I want you to ride with me in my carriage, Braeden,” Mr. Vanderbilt said. “Mr. Crankshod will drive us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Braeden said, “I understand, but we need to bring my horses home.” His horses had been harnessed, but there wasn’t a coachman to drive them.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Mr. Thorne volunteered. He walked over to the horses, patted their heads gently as they nuzzled him, then climbed up into the empty driver’s seat and gathered the reins.

  Serafina saw Braeden smile, relieved that Mr. Thorne was willing to help, but something struck her as a bit odd. Many gentlemen were accomplished riders, but few had any experience with driving a carriage, which was a servant’s job.

  Mr. Bendel, who was riding his thoroughbred, came up alongside Mr. Thorne. “Well, there you go, Thorne. You’ve got a fallback positio
n if you ever lose your fortune.”

  “I have to get a fortune before I can lose it,” Mr. Thorne said humbly.

  The two gentlemen laughed with each other, but then Mr. Bendel became more serious, tipped his hat to Mr. Thorne and Mr. Vanderbilt, and joined the search party of half a dozen riders that was heading out to look for Nolan.

  “Don’t wait on supper for me,” Mr. Bendel called back to his friends as he rode off with the other horsemen.

  Soon the carriages were all moving and heading down the road toward home.

  Serafina wanted desperately to go with them, but she knew she couldn’t. She remained hidden in the bushes. She had to suppress a sense of panic that she was being left behind, that she’d never be able to find her way through the forest back to Biltmore. And she missed Braeden’s company already. As she watched the carriages recede into the distance, she thought, Good-bye, my friend, and she hoped he was thinking the same.

  But even as the carriages disappeared, she felt a tingling sensation course through her limbs. She should have been frightened to be in the forest alone. All her life she’d been told to stay away from it, but now here she was. Far from Biltmore. Alone in the trees. And she had an idea. She was downright keen on it. She just hoped that it wasn’t going to get her lost. Or killed.

  As she stepped onto the empty road and looked down the length of it, she had a weird and foreign feeling from being so far away from her pa and Biltmore and all the commotion there. She half expected to burst into tears, go running after the carriages, and wail, Wait! Wait! You forgot about me!

  But she didn’t. And she felt rather grown-up about it.

  The sun was well up now and casting a lovely warm light on the trees. Birds were singing. There was a gentle breeze. Things weren’t so bad in the forest.

  But then she looked down the long road winding through the trees and remembered that she was eleven miles from home.

  “I’ll try to be home for dinner, Pa,” she said with a pang of uncertainty in her stomach, and she started walking. But she wasn’t exactly heading for home. Not directly.

  The Man in the Black Cloak had seemed to know the forest very well, and she remembered the tales of folk going missing. She had a creeping suspicion that the Man in the Black Cloak might be in some way connected to the abandoned village that she’d heard tell about. She had decided she was going to find the old village and see if it gave her any clues. Why would all the people in a town abandon their homes and leave?

  There was a part of her, too, that was anxious to delve into the shadows of the forest, to see this mysterious world. It drew her, not just because she’d been forbidden by her pa to come here, but by the thorny truth of her pa’s own account: she’d been born here.

  She decided to walk on down the road a spell and see what she could see. Perhaps there would be an old sign pointing to the abandoned village, or perhaps she’d meet someone along the road who might be able to tell her how to get there. One way or another, it seemed like it would be pretty easy to find an entire town.

  As she walked, her mind kept drifting back to her pa. She wished she could get a message to him. He’d be worried sick about her, especially with the horrible tales of disappearing children. She wondered if he ever got the dynamo working.

  It created the one thing that everyone other than her needed so desperately at night: light. Who in the world would purposely damage an electric generator? And who would even know how to do something like that? Her pa was the only man on the estate who knew how it worked. Him, and maybe George Vanderbilt if he referred to one of the books in his library.

  She thought that it was interesting how just about everyone had a special talent or skill, something they were naturally drawn to and good at, and then they worked years to master it. Nobody knew how to do everything. It wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough time in the night. But everyone knew something. And everyone was a little different. Some people did one thing. Others did another. It made her think that maybe God intended for them to all fit together, like a puzzle made whole.

  It still stunned her when she tried to imagine her big, train mechanic pa carrying a newborn baby out of the forest and taking care of her all those years. It had never occurred to her until now that she belonged anywhere but in the basement with her father, but now her mind ran wild with questions and ideas. She was anxious to get home, but walking down that road, she felt a little exhilarated that she was free and on her own. She could go in any direction she chose.

  She walked for an hour without seeing a soul, nothing but blue jays and chickadees twitching about her, a few squirrels chattering away at her, and a mink dashing across the road in front of her like his life depended on it. She wasn’t even sure she was still heading in the right direction anymore, but she figured she couldn’t go wrong if she stayed on the road.

  Then she came to a three-way split.

  The left road was the widest and seemed to be the most traveled. She got down on her hands and knees and studied the rocky ground. It was hard to tell, but she thought that maybe she could see the indention of carriage wheels. But the middle road was wide and clear as well, with occasional dents in the ground that might be from the hooves of horses. Either one of these roads could be the road to Biltmore.

  Only the third road was different. It wasn’t even right to call it a road, but what used to be a road. Two old, rotting fir trees had collapsed, making an X across the path. Thick vines of poison ivy and smothering creeper grew all around and seemed to strangle the two fallen trees. This road obviously hadn’t been traveled by carriage or horseback in years. She wasn’t even sure a person on foot could get through.

  She didn’t see any sign or marker that identified the road, but it seemed possible that an old, unused pathway like this might lead to the abandoned village. Maybe the state of the road choked off the town. Or maybe the forest took back the road when the townsfolk disappeared. In any case, if she had any hope of solving the mystery of the Man in the Black Cloak, she needed clues and information. Where did he come from? What was his story? How could she stop him?

  Poison ivy had never affected her the way it did other people, but she still climbed carefully through the thicket of vines and thorns. On the other side of the two crossed trees, she came into a boscage of rotting, dead snags, with rocks on the ground as sharp as ax blades. The narrow, overgrown track twisted and turned, and dove down into a rocky ravine, and she couldn’t see what lay beyond.

  As she gazed at the darkened passage, a shiver went through her spine. She had no idea where it would lead her, but she started down the path.

  Serafina followed the shadowed path for a while, crawling over fallen trees and through nasty thickets, until she came to yet another split.

  As she was trying to figure out which direction to go, she heard faint sounds drifting through the branches. The sounds had an eerie, unearthly quality to them. She thought it might be nothing more than the wind blowing through the trees, but when she listened very carefully it almost seemed like there were people calling to one another in the distance and children playing.

  With no other clues to guide her, she decided to go toward the sounds and see what she could find. If she passed a house, then perhaps the inhabitants could point her in the right direction.

  The path led her around a sharp curve and plummeted into a steep, bracken-choked ravine, then it climbed back out again, making its way among large moss-covered rocks and old trees twisted by wind and age. Desperate for soil, the trees’ roots clung to the rocks like giant hands, their massive fingers plunging into the earth beneath them.

  This place is terribly creepy, she thought, but she kept going, determined to keep moving forward.

  Unlike normal trees, which grew upward toward the sunlight, these had gnarled, contorted branches, as if they had been twisted by agonizing pain. Many of the trees stood dead and bare, withered by disease or some other killing force. Still more of the trees lay dead on the ground, their trunk
s crisscrossing one another as if a giant had pushed them over.

  As she made her way, a mist rose up from the leaf-covered forest floor, and a fog set in that obscured her view of the terrain around her.

  Oh, great. If I can’t see, I’m gonna get lost for sure.…

  She turned around to head back toward the last split in the path, but the fog became so thick that even this simple navigation was impossible. She tried to control her fear, but she felt the panic rise up in her. She gulped for air as the mist surrounded her and she lost her sense of place and direction. She began to realize that she’d made a terrible mistake in leaving the main road. Stay calm, she thought. Just think it through.…Find your way home.…

  Her foot hit a lump, and she tripped and fell forward onto the ground. Her hands and face touched something wet and slimy buried in the leaves. She gasped when she saw that it was the bloody carcass of a deer or some other large animal. Its body had been eviscerated, its guts ripped out. Its head and hind legs were missing, but from what was left over, it appeared that it had been purposely cached here.

  She gagged as she got up onto her feet, wiped her hands on the bark of a slimy tree, and moved on, desperate to find the road.

  When she heard voices ahead, she felt a swell of hope. She moved quickly toward them. Maybe they’re travelers, she thought. Perhaps there’s a hunting shack ahead.

  But then she stopped in her tracks. They were the same eerie noises she had heard before, but this time they were much closer: hoarse, raucous calling sounds, but with a strange, almost human quality, like some kind of weird children running and playing in the forest. A surge of fear swept through her. Her legs and hands buzzed with agitation. The sounds were above her and all around her now, and still she couldn’t see them.

  “Show yourself!” she demanded.

  Something brushed past her shoulder and she whirled, crouching to the ground to defend herself. A burst of rushing air made her skin crawl as a black shape flew over her and then landed in a tree.