Devon intercepted him. He took the boy by the shoulders and looked down into his round button eyes. He was startled by the raw terror he saw there, but Alexander did his best to keep his eyes averted. For an instant Devon wanted to disbelieve what he saw, to dismiss it as Alexander’s game. Pity me, the poor innocent frightened child, abandoned by my father. But the kid was trying too hard to disguise his fear. He didn’t want Devon to know that he was scared any more than Devon had wanted the boy to know of his own fright at being locked in that room the other day.
But what could be frightening him?
“It’s all right, Alexander,” Devon tried. “It’s okay to be frightened sometimes. We all get frightened once in a while. Tell me what’s wrong. Maybe I can fix it.”
“You think you could?” He laughed. “You really think you could?”
“I could try. At least by talking about it—”
“I can’t! He won’t let me!” The boy shuddered against Devon. His eyes searched back and forth across the room.
“Who, Alexander? Who won’t let you?”
The boy was silent.
Devon looked closely at him. The boy’s eyes were like burning coals. His mouth curled in a snarl that seemed so alien to his smooth, childish features. It was the expression of an adult, a cynical, bitter man.
“Let me go,” Alexander said.
Devon complied. The boy settled back into his beanbag chair. With the remote control, he switched the channel to Major Musick. Devon walked up behind him to watch.
On the screen, four rows of blank-eyed children sat in low-rise bleachers. The children were clapping, all in unison, like little robots, or like those windup monkey bands. The camera scanned past the gray masked of their faces. It lingered on the face of one of them: a skinny boy in a crew cut, his face a mass of freckles.
Major Musick came out then, making his entrance from behind a frayed red velvet curtain. “Hello, boys and girls,” he barked. “What shall we sing today?”
Just what was it about this creature that so entranced Alexander? Devon watched as the boy hunkered down to raptly watch the show. Major Musick launched into a crazy song about big black birds flying through the sky. Devon observed the painted lips, the big red nose, the little darting eyes surrounded by enormous white circles.
“He’s creepy,” Devon told Alexander.
But Alexander wasn’t paying any mind, just singing along in a low childish voice to the song about the birds.
Devon shuddered, putting his questions aside for now, and left Alexander to his clown. More than anything else, he just wanted to get out of that room.
“He needs a shrink,” Cecily said as they walked out to the stables, the sky darkening above them. Yet another storm was looming on the horizon. “His mother was loco. It must run in the family.”
“Cecily, I know you think the ghosts in this house are harmless. But I’m not so sure.”
“Oh, Devon, really.”
She slid the bolt aside and pulled open the door. Devon inhaled the thick air of the stable, heavy with the pungency of straw and manure. Cecily’s horse, Pearlie Mae, was a champion, a beautiful white Morgan with sharp pink ears and wide blue eyes.
Devon caressed the side of the animal. “Does Alexander ride?” he asked.
Cecily laughed. “You kidding? That little porker? He just sits in front of the computer or the TV and eats Ring Dings all day long.” She shook her head. “I tried being friendly to him when his father first dumped him here, but he’s just so miserable.”
“I’m worried about him,” Devon told her.
“With reason. Too many of those things can kill you!”
Devon smiled wearily. “I wasn’t talking about Ring Dings.”
“Then what?”
“I’m not sure,” he told her. Pearlie Mae snorted. “Tell me something. Do you think Jackson Muir really was a warlock?”
Cecily moved in close to him. “Oh, Devon. Maybe we’ve filled your head with too many of our stories. Our ghosts aren’t menacing. Pretty soon you’ll get used to them. They’ll fade into the background, like the wallpaper.” She reached up and put her arms around his neck, pulling him close to her so that he could feel the contours of her breasts against him. “You were just so manly at the pizza shop today,” she told him.
For a moment, so close to Cecily, the smell of her hair enveloping him, Devon forgot all of his fears. All thoughts of demons and ghosts and secret rooms were chased from his mind by his proximity to this beautiful girl.
They kissed.
In her stall, Pearlie Mae whinnied and whipped her tail. Devon eased Cecily back, gently removing her arms from around his neck.
“Cecily,” he said, “I can’t deny that I like you a lot. But this stuff that’s been happening ever since I got here—I’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed. “All right. I’m going to try something. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m going to try.”
She looked at him strangely.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. Once, trying to impress Suze back home, he’d tried lifting the front of a Volkswagen. It hadn’t worked. But now he wasn’t trying to impress Cecily as much as enlist her help; he needed an ally in fighting whatever it was that threatened him, and maybe Alexander, too.
“Watch the door,” he told Cecily.
Devon closed his eyes and visualized the stable door. It was standing wide open, the way they’d left it. He concentrated as hard as he could and—
The stable door swung shut.
“Whoa!” Cecily shouted. “How’d you do that?”
“I can just … do things,” Devon replied, adding, “sometimes.”
She stared at him. “Do something else.”
“I don’t know if I can,” he told her.
“Then how do I know that wasn’t the wind?”
He sighed. He looked around. His eyes came to rest on Cecily’s horse. He concentrated.
And within seconds Pearlie Mae levitated three feet off the straw-covered floor.
“Oh my God,” Cecily breathed, her face going white.
Devon brought the horse gently back to earth.
“Oh my God,” Cecily said again. “That was definitely not the wind.”
“Ever since I was a kid, I could do this stuff.” Devon smiled awkwardly. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen, try as I might. But see, Cecily, that’s why I’ve got to discover the truth of who I am. Why I’m like this. And I’m certain my dad sent me here so I could find out.”
“Oh my God,” was all Cecily said again, sitting down on a bale of hay.
Devon sat down beside her. “Do you think I’m a freak?”
She looked up at him, and finally smiled. “I could never think that, Devon.”
He sighed. “Good. Because I need your help. You’ve got to believe me when I tell you what I’ve seen in that house. What I’ve seen all my life.”
So he told her about the demons—the green eyes in his closet back home, his father’s admonition that he was stronger than any of them. He told her about Alexander’s prank and about what he found in the East Wing. The portrait. The door.
“It’s not like I don’t believe you, Devon,” Cecily said when he was finished. “It’s just that—I can’t adjust to the idea that there are demons in Ravenscliff. Ghosts, sure—but Mother always told me I had nothing to fear from anything in that house. She might be odd, but I can’t believe she’d let me stay here if there was any danger.”
Devon considered this. “I don’t think there was—not before I arrived, at least.” He looked at her. “I have a theory. I think somehow my coming here has stirred things up. Gotten whatever forces are here all riled.”
“But why?”
“Something about who I am. My past. Where I came from.”
“Your real parents?”
He nodded. “And I think Alexander knows something. Maybe not consciously even—but he’s
got some connection. Cecily, he locked me in that room in the East Wing for a reason.”
“Yeah,” she said, “to scare you. Devon, I’ve told you that Alexander is a screwed-up kid. Has been all his life.”
“But how much now is his own screwed-up-ness and how much is Jackson Muir?”
“Jackson Muir? You think our so-called warlock has something to do with your demons?”
“I’m starting to think so.”
Cecily frowned. “Devon, I can’t deny something weird is going on, not after seeing you in action at Gio’s and what you just did to Pearlie Mae. But why do you think Jackson Muir is involved? He’s just a legend. I should never have encouraged that warlock talk—”
“I know it was him that I saw in that locked room. The Voice tells me I’m on the right track, and the Voice has never failed me yet.”
“Well, if any of our ghosts were to go psycho on us, it would be Jackson.” She looked over at Devon. “How much do you think my mother knows about all this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But she knows something, I’m sure. Something about who I am.”
“Do you think she knows about—what you can do?”
“I don’t know.” He considered the idea further. “No, I don’t think she does. And I don’t think she should, either, for now.”
“Okay,” Cecily agreed.
They heard the first pitter-patter of raindrops on the stable roof. “We should get going,” Devon said.
They secured the doors to the stable tightly in advance of the storm.
“Devon,” Cecily said, whispering in the damp dusky air.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for trusting me.”
He grinned. He reached down and took her hand. Together they hurried back up to the main house.
The storm hit just before dinner, rocking the house like the slap of a giant hand. Great purple fingers clawed across the sky, bringing darkness early to the coast. The rains pounded the earth with a force strong enough to release stones from their lodgings, sending tiny avalanches of rock and soil down the steep cliffs along the roads. Echoing claps of thunder set the dogs all to howling; ferocious lightning crackled against the sky, silhouetting the spires of Ravenscliff above the village below.
When Alexander failed to come down to dinner—a rare gathering his aunt had intended for the whole family, minus (of course) old Grandmama—Mrs. Crandall sent Simon up to fetch him. When the caretaker returned to report that the boy wasn’t in his room, the matriarch of the house let out a long sigh. “That incorrigible child. I’ve told him repeatedly not to be late for dinner.”
Simon served their roast turkey, carved on an enormous silver platter. Devon was famished, and he ate heartily—but something about Alexander’s absence unnerved him. There was a sense of something amiss, something wrong. There’s your sensitivity again, Dad was telling him in his mind.
After dinner, as Simon cleared away the plates, Devon asked Cecily to accompany him through the house to search for Alexander.
“Do you think he might have snuck back into the East Wing?” she wondered.
“Simon said he nailed that panel shut,” Devon told her. “But who knows if there are other ways into that place.”
The thunder startled both of them then, and the lights went out. “Ever wonder why they call this Misery Point?” Cecily laughed.
“I figured it out the first day I was here,” Devon replied.
They both lit candles and made their way through the dark. They searched every room in the main part of the house: the kitchen, the dining room, the parlor, the study, the library, the bedrooms, the playroom. But no Alexander.
“Could he be outside?” Cecily asked, looking out the parlor window just as a great flash of lightning illuminated the vast stretch of the estate leading out to Devil’s Rock.
Devon was looking out too. “Hey, I think I just saw someone out there,” he said. “When the lightning came—”
Cecily unfastened the hook and opened the panes outward. “Alexander!” she called. “Are you out there? Are you crazy?” She pulled back in. “Duh. Like I don’t know the answer to that question.”
“Let’s look in his room and see if his coat is gone.”
Indeed it was. “Oh, Devon, I hope he’s all right,” Cecily said, finally genuinely concerned about her young cousin. She lifted a teddy bear from the boy’s bed. “This storm is awfully intense.”
Devon felt a shudder but suppressed it. “It’s not the storm I’m worried about.”
She managed a smile. “Hey, if Jackson Muir is behind this, as soon as he gets a hold of that brat, he’ll send him back!”
Devon looked at her. “Stop making light of this. I believe Alexander is in danger.”
She looked back squarely, suddenly terrified. “You really do, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “At least, I believe it’s worth—”
He paused. Alexander’s laptop computer sat on a table next to his bed. Devon peered down at it. A Word document was open, containing just one line of type, in all capital letters.
HELP ME. HE’S COMING.
Cecily saw it too. “What do you make of that?” she asked.
It was precisely at that moment, beneath the steady pounding of the rain, just before a thunderclap shook the very foundation of the house, that they heard the unmistakable sound of a child’s scream.
The Woman in White
The storm raged all through the night like a lover spurned. As he searched for Alexander near the cliffs, Devon came to understand why the villagers claimed to hear Emily Muir on stormy nights such as this. Behind the wind, the echo of her screams remained high and clear. Devon was even sure he saw her once, in that portentous second when the lightning illuminated the dark woods: a shrieking figure in a long white gown, fingers clawing the night.
He feared approaching Devil’s Rock any closer: what if, in his terror, Alexander had plunged from its edge?
Cecily drew closer to him. She was bundled in a bright yellow raincoat, the hood pulled tightly around her face. Wisps of her red hair poked from beneath the elastic, dripping down into her eyes. Devon carried a large flashlight. Its beam swung through the shadows, exposing tree trunks with limbs now as bare as the arms of skeletons, their fiery-colored leaves blown away by the wind. But despite calling the boy’s name over and over for the last hour, there was no sign of Alexander Muir.
“You heard the scream, too, didn’t you?” Devon asked. “I’m not imagining it?”
“I heard it,” Cecily admitted. “Oh, Devon—where could he be? Why would he come out in a storm like this?”
Thunder rattled them both suddenly, and they paused in their steps. The flashlight sputtered, then dimmed. Cecily made a small cry, but Devon shook it, bringing the flashlight back to life. Ahead of them somewhere was Simon, whose raspy voice calling after the boy had now faded into the steady beat of the rain, which exploded the earth with its ferocity, splashing mud up onto their shoes and pants.
Raw terror burned in Devon’s gut. Cecily was right to wonder what had possessed the boy to come outside on a night like this. Even more disturbing was the scream they’d heard. Had he fallen from Devil’s Rock? Had he—Devon shuddered—been led there by Jackson Muir and then pushed?
In his mind he couldn’t shake the image of that decomposing face, the maggots in its teeth, its rotting breath in Devon’s ear.
Help me, Alexander had written. He’s coming.
Who else, Devon feared, but Jackson Muir?
“We’ve got to look down at the beach below Devil’s Rock,” Devon shouted through the driving force of the rain.
“Oh, Devon,” Cecily cried.
Through the mud they pushed onward. They’d have to be careful themselves: at the edge of the cliff the wind rushed and swelled with a force far greater than anywhere else along the coast. Cecily had told him that a tourist trespassing on the Muir estate two summers ago had been swept off the peak by a sudden and malevolen
t gale. His broken, mangled body had been found six miles down the coast twelve days later. His camera was still in its bag over his shoulder.
Cecily steadied herself at the brink. “Even if he fell, we couldn’t see from up here,” she gasped into the wind. “It’s too dark.”
“Maybe I should go down,” Devon said.
“No need,” came the deep, coarse voice of Simon. He stepped out of the shadows beside them. A fog suddenly rolled in off the sea; it obscured the little man’s features. But his unkind eyes still bore through the night like red embers. Devon recoiled.
“What do you mean, no need?” Cecily asked.
“I’ve just been down there,” Simon told her, his unevenly cut black hair plastered down around his face and into his eyes. “There’s nobody on the rocks. If the boy fell, he’s washed out to sea. We’ll have to wait until morning, see what turns up.”
“Oh,” Cecily muttered, putting her hands over her face and starting to cry.
“Come on,” Devon said, placing his arm around her and leading her back across the estate.
About three o’clock in the morning, the storm finally abated. The rain turned soft, hushed, and nearly invisible. Now the only sound was the mournful call of the foghorn, warning ships not to come too close to this place.
Mrs. Crandall had finally called the sheriff. At first, she was uneasy about summoning the law onto the Muir estate. The Muirs regarded their grounds as a private fiefdom, a sovereign state, Devon had come to learn. “I don’t like policemen prowling around my property,” Mrs. Crandall had sniffed.
But she’d finally relented when Devon and Cecily had stumbled into the foyer of the great house, drenched and dispirited. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Simon had said from behind them. “I wish I could give you better news, but the boy just wasn’t no where to be found.”
In Misery Point, when Mrs. Amanda Muir Crandall called the sheriff, there was no delay. There was no paperwork to be filled out, no excuses about the lack of personnel at three in the morning. Precisely seven minutes from the time she hung up the receiver, a sheriff’s deputy was knocking at the front door of Ravenscliff. Cecily let him in, still towel drying her hair.
Sorcerers of the Nightwing (Book One - The Ravenscliff Series) Page 13