I rushed into the house, with Sam and his mother behind me. I skidded into the kitchen. The water was still running in the sink. It overflowed now, water dripping against the floor with the shattered glass.
My mother wasn’t there.
My fingers clenched. “She was just here . . . ” I whispered.
Sam’s mother gathered me to her, a reflex. She buried my head in her shoulder. I felt Sam and his mother exchange heavy glances over my head.
My mother was gone. And so were the crows
Sam went to search the parlor, calling for my mother.
I pulled myself free of his mother’s grasp, mumbling that I would look upstairs. Deep down, I didn’t want the neighbors to see my mother’s finery, squirrelled away from view. I hoped that she had crawled off to her bed, that she had fainted. But the quilt covering her bed was as smooth as she’d made it this morning. The bathroom was empty.
I saw Sam’s mother at the top of the stairs. I saw her looking at me, then past me, at my mother’s silk drapes. I’m not sure what she thought, if she thought anything.
I opened my mouth to speak, not knowing what to say. I don’t know if I meant to mumble some excuse about the drapes or to start crying.
But Sam shouted from below. “Come here! Come outside!”
I flew down the stairs, out into the yard. I circled around behind the house, to the swing in the cottonwood tree in the back yard. Sam was kneeling over a limp figure at the edge of the line of sunflowers. I recognized my mother’s cotton dress. Her feet were bare.
I fell to my knees beside my mother. She lay sprawled upon the grass, gazing up at the sky, unblinking. Her arms were covered in fine red scratches, as if a murder of crows had tried to pick her up where she fell. In her left hand, she held a sunflower with all the seeds culled out of it.
A crow stood at her head, gently plucking at strands of her hair in a worried fashion. It only flew away when Sam shook his hat at it. But I could feel its eyes on us from deep within the field.
The doctor said my mother was suffering from exhaustion and a weak heart. After spending many long minutes listening to her heart with a stethoscope, he sent her to bed. I was given a bottle of laudanum to administer to her at sunrise and sunset. Sam’s mother helped me dress my mother in a ruffled dressing gown—she owned no plain ones—and tuck her in bed under her fine linens. Sam’s mother’s rough hand lingered on the embroidered edges of the sheet.
The figure that lay there after everyone had left was not my mother. She lay there, thin and cold and staring up at the ceiling. When she slept and when she woke, she rambled on about the crows and the flowers and storms and strange shadows. How the crows had come to rescue her from her rattling heart and take her away to the sky. None of it made any sense. Her eyes were far distant, looking through me and through the thick plaster walls to the sky beyond.
She stayed that way for days, neither awake nor asleep. She was between worlds. I bathed her as one would a child, daubed the scratches with antiseptic, and pinned her hair up. I saw streaks of grey in it now that had never been there before. The neighbors came by to bring casseroles and to offer any assistance they could.
I thanked them and asked for them to get word to Mr. Mauer that the harvest was ready to be taken in. It was almost Halloween, and my mother had always been insistent that this task be done by then. I did not let anyone see her. I did not want them to gawk at her in this oddly unanchored state.
I slept beside her at night, listening to her shallow breathing. I was afraid that she would somehow stop and slip away if I quit observing. I laid my hand to her breastbone and felt it rise and fall, all through the night, night after night. I would finally fall asleep near dawn, exhausted, when the rays of sun filtered in through the silk drapes. I spiraled into strange dreams that I hadn’t had since I was a little girl. Dreams of flying, of seeing the land from far up above, with our house a postage-stamp-sized speck in the fields.
One morning, I awoke to the sounds of machinery. I pressed my head into the pillow, wanting to drain a few precious moments’ more of sleep from the sunny day. My mother was sleeping quietly. I pulled the quilt up over my shoulders, my muzzy thinking circling around whether I would prepare eggs or biscuits for breakfast with bacon.
But my mother lurched bold upright in bed, eyes wide open, and shrieked.
I clasped her arms, pressing her back to the bed. “Mother, it’s all right!”
Her skin was glossed with sweat, and her eyes were wide and unseeing. “Don’t let him take the sunflowers!”
I smoothed a dark curl from my mother’s face. “Mr. Mauer is doing as he always does. He’s harvesting the seeds. Today is Halloween. Remember?”
My mother shook her head hard and balled her hands into fists. “No. He must leave some for the crows.” Her fists became claws, tearing at my arms. I cried out as her nails drew blood.
I extricated myself, peeling her hands away and pushing her back to the bed. I felt her fear pressing against me, like humidity. It felt like a shimmering, tangible thing.
I backpedaled out of the room, dove down the stairs and out the door, into yard. Above, the sky was a sickly yellow. I could see the combine making its last orbit, near the house.
I ran after it, shouting at Mr. Mauer to stop. He couldn’t hear me above the noise of the machine; his sunburned neck didn’t even turn. The machine plowed down the sunflowers near the house, chewing them up like some terrible locust. Dust roiled in his wake. There was nothing I could do.
The combine turned left, left in its orbit back around the field. It left me standing among the splintered, stubbly stalks piercing the earth.
I heard the solitary call of a crow. I turned, seeing a crow perched on the gutter of the house. He watched me with dark eyes, cold in an almost human wrath.
Something had changed. I could feel it.
I tried to placate my mother. I drew the drapes and lied to her, telling her the sunflowers were safe. I told her that when she felt better that we could carve our pumpkins. I knew full well that our neglected pumpkins had caved in on themselves on the porch and had the musty scent of rot about them. I placed a cool cloth on her head and gave her laudanum to help her sleep. She still tossed fitfully. It was as if she could sense the nudity of the earth.
I could sense it, too, the way the wind rose that night and scraped through the remnants of the field. The wind howled so hard that it leaked around the panes of the bedroom window and moved the drapes like ghosts. Once or twice, I went to the window and tried to peer through it. But the glass was covered with dust and bits of frass and brown petals from the ruined sunflowers.
I had never felt afraid in my own house before. I had never felt compelled to make certain that all the windows were latched and that the doors were locked. Maybe it was the way the glass rattled in the sashes and the way that the wind sucked down the fireplace, but it sounded like a breath over a bottle. Hollow. Alive.
Something scratched at the front door. My breath congealed in my throat. It was not the rhythmic digging of a dog coming home. This was a thin, prolonged scratching, as if someone drew a rake over the door.
I hoped it was a broken tree branch shoved by the wind, that it would simply stop. But the scraping continued, deliberate, rhythmic. Perhaps it was a Halloween prank perpetrated by the older kids from town . . .
I turned my head to gaze at my mother. I don’t know if I expected her to protect me, as she always had, from bees and taunts to fevers.
But she was beyond that, now. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and sweat glossed her face. The drug and the fever had finally brought her into silence.
My hands chewed at the blanket. Deep in my chest, I knew that I would have to protect her.
I fought the urge to pull the blankets over my bed. I drew the covers back and forced my bare feet to the floor. I reached underneath the bed for the loaded rifle my mother kept there.
With quaking hands, I clutched the gun to my chest. I crept toward th
e door, past it, out into the hallway.
I stared down the stairs, at the back door. The scratching was clearer now, drawing down the wood. Through the stained-glass panels at the top, a shadow moved, shadows against shadows. I heard no giggling and whispering of children.
My heart pounded as I descended the steps. I lifted the stock of the rifle to my shoulder. My hands shook and my skin was slick with sweat.
“Who’s there?” I demanded. I meant it to come out as a fearsome roar, but it came out as a whisper.
Whatever was out there heard me.
The scratching halted, and I sucked in my breath.
A great fluttering sounded behind me, like thousands of bird wings. I pivoted toward the fireplace. Wings hammered against the chimney and against the flue. In an explosion of black wings and yellow dust, birds exploded from the fireplace. Hundreds and hundreds of black-winged birds.
I screamed. I screamed and crouched down, clutching the gun. Claws and feathers tore past me, churning darkness.
And the door imploded. It ripped back on its hinges, slamming against the wall and breaking out the glass. Wind and dust and debris tore into the house. I curled my hand over my tearing eyes, as I struggled to see . . .
. . . struggled to see the silhouette framed in the doorway.
At first, I thought it was a man. But it seethed and moved with black feathers. It walked across the scarred floorboards toward me with the clawed feet of a bird, the claws leaving terrible scars in the wood.
I clutched the gun, ratcheting back the slide. The shadow swept over me, yanking the gun from my grip. I sprawled before it, my hands balling into fists.
It loomed over me. I was given the impression of a cloak of feathers, but the creature wore the face of a man. His face was pale and angular, hair long and black.
And the eyes were what stopped me. The eyes looked familiar. Dark as tea leaves, like mine.
The bird-man regarded me with an inscrutable expression, cocking his head.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I’m sorry for the sunflowers.”
He spoke to me then. He spoke to me in a voice like gravel, the hoarse voice of the crows. “Every boon demands a sacrifice.”
“Don’t hurt my mother.”
“Your mother . . . ”
He reached toward me with a pale, clawed hand. I screwed my eyes shut, certain that he intended to rip my throat out.
I felt pressure around my neck. The chain on the diamond pendant snapped. I gasped, my eyes snapping open.
The crow-man held the yellow diamond in the palm of his hand, head cocked, staring at it. He reminded me of one of the crows looking at a bottle cap, entranced by the shininess.
He reached forward then, pushing a tendril of hair behind my ear. I was reminded of the crow standing in the yard over my mother’s hair. It was an oddly tender gesture that rattled my teeth with its familiarity.
He stood. Without another word, he turned and swept out of the doorway that howled with dust and wings.
My mother died the next morning. All Souls Day. She died without ever waking up. I found her with her face pressed to the pillow, her jaw slack like a small child’s. She was pale and gaunt as a skeleton of a bird as I washed her and dressed her one last time.
I knew that the crows had taken her from me. As a sacrifice.
I sanded and painted the scratches in the door and the floor. I swept the dust from the parlor and gathered each feather from the house. I found them for a long time afterward, jammed in lampshades, drawers, and even between cushions.
The work kept me busy. I opened the windows to air the smell of death from the house. But it only brought in the scent of fresh-turned earth from the hole dug for my mother’s grave underneath the cottonwood trees. She would lie beside her mother and all the women who had come before, under a simple stone marker.
I had occasion to think about things, about all the mysterious material things we had. I used to think that we had them because we deserved them.
No, we had traded for them. And I had violated our end of the bargain.
The dust storms came in after that, stripping all the seeds from the earth. It chewed the paint from the side of our house and ruined the neighbors’ crops.
It was as if something unholy and hot descended upon the land, like a desert. Walking to meet Sam, I would lose track of the dust-covered road, my head wrapped in a scarf to keep from tasting the dead earth.
“We’re moving away,” Sam said when spring brought the worst storms yet. “West. To California. Where there’s work.” He reached out to take my hand. “Come with us. Come with me.”
I shook my head. “I can’t leave my home.”
“There ain’t nothing here but dust and wind,” he said. “Nothing living.”
I shook my head. My mother loved this place. I would stay. I stood on my front porch and watched as the family went down the road with all their things packed in the back of their pickup. Sam sat in the back, his legs dangling over the tailgate.
I watched until the truck was a speck on the horizon.
I felt truly alone, then.
I saw to it that the field was planted thick with black seed. Mr. Mauer said it was no use, that nothing would grow this year, that all the yellow dust blown in had ruined everything. There had been no rain for months. But I insisted. I paid him. Money was one of the only things that talked, these days. And I still had some.
I watched the fields, waiting, not knowing if anything would grow. The crows were mysteriously absent.
I sat at the edge of our field . . . my field . . . on the dry and ruined grass.
I knew, deep down, that this was not enough. I had an oasis, an enviable life. The women in my family had made a bargain with the crows. One that I had unwittingly broken. I didn’t know what I could do to fix things. What sacrifice could I make to bring it all back?
I clambered to my feet and ran back into the house. I gathered all our fine things: the jewelry, the dishes, the silverware, the crystal. I brought these treasures and a shovel to the edge of the field. I jammed the shovel into the pale amber earth, turning it up. I dropped a handful of pearls into it. I covered the hole, dug out another two paces away. I tossed a dinner plate into it. The china shattered into shards, cutting my bare foot. It didn’t matter. I kept on. I kept planting the only things I had to give: the shiny baubles and the fragments of the riches we enjoyed. Anything . . . anything to call back the quiet, satisfyingly bucolic life I’d led before my mother’s death.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I worked. “I didn’t understand.”
My tears speckled the soil, along with blood from my foot. I worked until the sun set, burying all the fine treasures my mother had so carefully passed down to me. Coins, watches, paper money . . . it all went into the earth. It had come from the earth, and I gave it back.
Even my mother’s wedding ring, though now I doubted if there had ever been any man here with her, only a shadow with feathers who perhaps smoothed her hair the way the crow had in the yard.
When it was accomplished, I fell to my filthy knees beside the disturbed earth. “Please!” I cried to the darkness. “Please bring it back . . . all of it.”
I pressed my forehead to the ground.
Nothing answered me.
I think I must have passed out there, in the dust. The cut on my foot was more serious than I’d thought. I only know that I woke in the morning with my cheek pressed against the cool soil. I reached up to rub dirt from my eyes.
When my eyes cleared, I spied a crow pacing in the distance, along one of the furrows, pecking for seeds. Small green sprouts reached like fingers up from the furrows.
Rain began a soft patter along my back, sticking my dress to my skin, like a caress. I pulled myself to a seated position. My arms were covered in small red scratches, as if I had tried to hold a dozen angry cats. A crow feather was stuck to the shoulder of my dress, glossy and black as obsidian.
I turned my face up to the
gray sky, where crows swirled, and I smiled. I reached up for my hair, finding it neatly tucked and twisted behind my ears, knotted and braided. Feathers prickled through, feeling stiff where they had been carefully wound in my hair.
I had sown. I would reap. I would begin again and carry on as my mother had, in a new cycle and a new season, with the old earth.
Laura Bickle’s professional background is in criminal justice and library science, and when she’s not patrolling the stacks at the public library she’s dreaming up stories about the monsters under the stairs. (She also writes contemporary fantasy novels under the name Alayna Williams). Laura lives in Ohio with her husband and five mostly-reformed feral cats. The Hallowed Ones, her first young adult novel, was published in 2012; its sequel, The Outside, will be out in September 2013. For more information, please see www.laurabickle.com.
ALL SOULS DAY
Barbara Roden
“I want to see the haunted house.”
Debra had smiled when she’d seen Richard’s text, following hard on the heels of the announcement that the following year’s World Conference on Disaster Management would be held in Toronto. I’m guessing this means you’ll be at the conference she’d texted, to which he’d replied with a smiley face.
Typical Richard; and typical of him to recall a throwaway comment she’d made once, about her grandparents living on the same Toronto street as a haunted house. That had been at a conference in San Jose, four—no, five—years earlier. She hadn’t known Richard then, but he’d been one of a group of them sitting at a table on the outdoor patio. A sudden wind had sprung up, and someone had asked where that came from, and she’d been amazed to hear someone say, in a soft Texas accent, “Where I come from, we’d have said someone whistled for it.”
“M. R. James!” she’d said in delight, to the bemusement of almost everyone else at the table. The one exception was a slim, dark-haired man sitting three places down from her, who grinned. “Quis est iste qui venit?’ she’d added, and his grin widened.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 32