by Julia Fine
From the library I could watch for Matthew’s return. I was growing to appreciate his presence at Urizon. He was useful around the house: quick to start the fire, good with Marlowe, exceptionally tidy. As my first contemporary, I found him infinitely interesting to watch. He had a habit of tugging at his hair when he was thinking, of chewing on his pencil while studying, of crinkling his eyes when he laughed, which he did easily and often. Matthew was a better cook than me, and in the evenings I would sit at the kitchen table while he conjured dinner out of what we had left in the pantry.
“How do you know how to do that?” I gestured toward the large pot that bubbled on the stove.
“What? Make pasta?” Matthew smiled. “The directions are right there on the box.”
“All of it. The setting up and cleaning up and planning. All the things that Mrs. Blott would do for Peter and me. Did she teach you?”
“Well, when you’re one of seven kids, you get used to taking care of the others.” He rummaged in the cupboard for a potholder.
“Seven!”
“I know,” said Matthew with a smile. “I say that to my mother all the time.”
“Seven brothers and sisters.” I couldn’t imagine having even one.
“Well, six. I’m number seven. Or I guess I’m number two—there’s my older brother, me, then all the others.” Matthew took the pot of pasta from the stove and a rush of steam obscured him as he drained it.
“They must miss you, now that you’re away at school.”
Matthew shrugged. “Maybe a little.”
I found myself missing him when he was gone during the day. I told myself it wasn’t him precisely, but human company—an ear other than Marlowe’s to discuss the day’s events and plan tomorrow. Still, each time I heard a noise from the front yard I looked up from my research, hoping that Matthew had returned. Often, the sound was just a car barreling by on its way into town, though twice I spotted a man on a motorbike, parked outside our front gate, staring up at Urizon. At first sighting, I ignored him, assuming him enamored with the beauty of our large estate, the structure of the house. When he appeared again the next day, this time turning off the engine, climbing down off his bike, I thought he must need some assistance. I bookmarked my page and left the library, stepping out our side door, ready to offer what guidance I could. By the time I reached the front lawn, my thin blanket shielding me from the breeze, my slippers wet with dew, the man was gone. The only sign he hadn’t been imagined was the faint whiff of exhaust that lingered at the edge of the drive. Prior to Peter’s disappearance and my journey through the wood, this stranger might have consumed me. I might have spent hours dissecting his intentions, imagining he’d come to kidnap or to rescue me, to steal Urizon’s meager treasures. Now that I was mired in an actual mystery, I barely paid him mind, dismissing him as a curious tourist—it was not uncommon for a few a year to make their way to our estate, much to Peter’s chagrin and my excitement—while focusing my attention on the more pressing questions at hand.
Had my father actually gone to find me? If so, did he believe this map held some vital clue? After all, it was focused on the forest where he had last seen me, and he’d written my name across the bottom. But then why wouldn’t he have taken it with him? And in the back of my mind the niggling question: Had he left me here on purpose? Now that Mrs. Blott was gone, was Peter afraid to be alone with me, tired of caring for me, ready to resume the life he’d led before I was born? This last thought crept up on me regularly. Each time I brushed it away, trying to convince myself that it was ridiculous while fearing it to be true.
On the day of our departure, Matthew skipped his morning exercise to sit for an exam, reciting absurd combinations of letters and numbers as he packed up his study sheets and laced his boots. I was to have myself ready upon his return, an instruction repeated the night prior, and again as he was walking out the door. He need not have worried—I was eager to begin our search. When he pulled into the drive some hours later, I was quickly out the back door and clambering over textbooks, clearing room for myself in the front seat of his car, and for Marlowe in the back seat just behind me.
“Are you sure you should be so close to the . . .” Matthew gestured toward his leather valise, twisting almost fully around to move it over. “Oh,” he said, “I think the seats are leather, too.”
“They aren’t,” I said snippily, “they’re just an imitation. But even if they were I would be fine.”
I knew I should not take offense at questions asked in my best interest, and it was only this past year that I’d discovered it was safe to touch a hide, so long as it was tanned. Under controlled conditions I had stroked a strip of leather, and upon its failure to react, became rather too ambitious. The Blakelys had amassed a great deal of taxidermy, which I next suggested that we try, not realizing that some amateur artisan had done a shoddy job with the animals’ preservation, and quickly learning that a hollowed, chemicalized beast was no more domesticated than its organ-endowed brother, breaking a Blakely family heirloom, and begging the question, said Peter, of what made up a soul. None of this seemed fit to share with Matthew in the moment.
We drove past the turnoff to Mrs. Blott’s cottage, Mr. Abbott’s bungalow, the post office. We rounded the curve that would take us through the village.
WHILE SEARCHING PETER’S office I had come across a letter written by William Blakely, founder of Urizon, to a noble he was courting for his daughter, claiming that the village of Coeurs Crossing hadn’t come to prominence until Urizon itself was erected. William’s assertion was subject to debate, as no one else would ever call the village prominent, and it had in fact existed long before his estate as home to farmers and foresters, families who could trace their roots back thousands of years. In the latter half of the last century, as Urizon fell from favor and fame, the village had fared only slightly better. Its population fell within the low thousands. Coeurs Crossing lacked the charm of some of the quainter locales of similar size, and thus the wealthy had bypassed it when choosing where to build their country homes, leaving us little in the way of municipal resources. The nearest hospital was an hour’s drive away. The university and its surrounding town absorbed most would-be tourists. Back when the modern trade roads were built—the highways that would carry timber and coal and other northern resources to the thriving cities of the south—the villagers of Coeurs Crossing had protested the felling of a certain grove of trees, claiming their spiritual significance more meaningful than the money that would come from steady travel. Thus the grove near Coeurs Crossing was spared, the highways diverted elsewhere, leaving the village in relative obscurity.
This grove, a part of the same wood that bordered my home, lent our region a frightening aura that even the sunniest days could not entirely overcome. Refusing its removal tied the village to the sorts of superstitions Peter studied, reinforced the rumors of a woodland power, the tales of a Blakely family curse. In my mind, the Coeurs Crossing that sat beside the wood was dark and dusty, eerie and empty as Urizon’s shuttered rooms, filled with grim faces and ominous birds circling low skies. The few glimpses I’d been given of the village during my childhood had all reinforced this notion. Before my birth, Peter’s studies had been largely anthropological—he had a keen interest in folklore, in the ceremonies that began as sacred ritual long before the dawn of what we called civilization and had continued in truncated forms ever since. When we were not experimenting, he’d return to these former occupations. Sometimes, if I’d been good, he’d let me join him.
“The early savage,” Peter once told me, biting into a cherry turnover with relish, “believed in sympathetic magic. He did his work on imitations of the object that he wanted to affect. A poppet, for example, or a ripened fruit to represent the sun. In this regard, his ritual had all the trappings of modern scientific theories of cause and effect.”
We were seated at the top of Urthon Hill, the highest point on the Blakely property, which looked out over the dirt road to
the village. Mrs. Blott had prepared us a picnic, and I sat on a frayed blanket, nibbling at a biscuit and drinking lemonade. I was ten, and unimpressed.
“Their philosophical model,” continued Peter, “was quite advanced compared to the religious frenzies that followed. To practice our Western religion is to ascribe the cause of everything to the will of some great power, a mercurial creature whose favor we might court. Quite the opposite of scientific methodology. The savage never pandered. He saw himself as catalyst to action, responsible for nature, for the summer, for the rains.”
Below us, villagers were gathering, their outfits brightly colored, their faces masked, knocking each other about like sea-swirled marbles. One man (the Wild Man, said Peter), was dressed all in brown, adorned in leaves and white-budded branches that made him seem born of the hawthorn, wide as its blossoming expanse. He sat atop a stocky piebald horse and waited for the others to ready themselves. From our perch high above them we could not hear his words, just the twittering of voices, his playful growl, bursts of joyous laughter, the cymbal-crash of girls’ delighted screams. Had they thought to look up, they might have seen us: two small figures looking down from our high tower, observing.
“The Wild Man will ride three times around the center of the village,” said my father, “and when he’s finished he’ll decapitate a frog. In the past the people thought that they were having some impact on the season, that they’d chosen this evening and through ritual were asking their gods to make it the longest of the year. As if they were the true cause of midsummer, midwinter. As if they controlled the passage of the time. Today, we’ve abandoned such pretense. Now we simply repeat what has always been practiced, too superstitious, too silly, to question things.”
“Might we join them?” I asked.
We might not.
“So it always is,” said Peter, by way of explanation, “that the layman partakes in his ritual, blind to the true powers that be.”
“Might I don a mask and watch from down below?”
I might not.
“Too dangerous,” I remembered Peter saying, jotting something in his notebook, “far too wild.”
I’d imagined my own wildness was transmuted through these rituals in the village, was the consequence of some mistreated toad or misheard prayer. I’d assumed every villager as chary as Tom Pepper, the solicitor, whose small eyes scanned our sitting room twice over before he would sit down to take his tea. Who knew what spirits could be watching, what ancient impulse lay in wait? Now, in Matthew’s car, counting streetlamps and stop signs, I realized the debauchery I’d witnessed was uncommon, as repressed beneath these carefully paved streets as my own impulse under Peter’s regulations.
The sun was out in full force as Matthew drove past the lower school, the grocer’s, the whitewashed fences and wooden swing sets and neatly parked cars. Coeurs Crossing was pedestrian, comfortable and quiet, with no sign of the savagery that Peter had insisted waited just outside our door. It was all painted picket fences, cozy pubs, well-labeled road signs. Cobbled streets and schools, neatly parked cars. A young boy rode a bicycle. A man in coveralls pruned a flowering bush at the side of a church. I leaned my forehead on the car window, paralyzed by awe.
How was this here, so near Urizon? How had I not known, when I looked down from our hilltop, what it was that I saw? I felt a sudden stab of loss at my discovery—the tangible existence of a modern village that, for me, had shared a space with far-off planets, fairy castles—the existence of a village with playgrounds and blue plastic bins for its recycling, with signs posted on streetlamps advertising a found kitten, with flagpoles and tulips and a stray football rolling down a hill. We drove past the firehouse, the tailor, a little shop called Holzmeier’s proclaiming that it sold “metaphysical souvenirs,” which Matthew and I tried to make a guess at.
“Ale glasses.” I giggled, drunk on novelty.
“Local witches’ littlest fingers.”
“Holy breast milk.”
“Quilts made by somebody’s grandmother.”
Mrs. Blott’s face flashed through my mind, followed by Peter’s. This was not the time for laughter, for indulgence. This was not the time to push my boundaries outward, expand the borders of my own sorry self.
“I think,” I said, all humor gone, “it would be best if we go in and find out for ourselves.”
“What, inside the building?” Matthew shook his head, inhaling sharply as he braked for a young child chasing a ball into the street. He rolled his shoulders, regaining composure. “I’ve been in that shop before. It’s very small—too many things we might knock into.”
“We?”
“Besides, it’s all your usual mumbo-jumbo. Piles of fancy books in front, cult meetings in the back, trying to profit off all sorts of superstitions.”
“That sounds useful,” I said. “That is exactly what we need.” Though its facade was modest, the same discolored brick and brown-trussed plaster as the shops that surrounded it, I felt that were a bogeyman watching me, sharpening his claws, this shop would be his prime location. If there was a darkness comparable to my own that remained in Coeurs Crossing, this was surely where it hid.
“Some quack selling us evil eyes and cow’s blood?” Matthew frowned.
“Piles of books. Superstitions. Experts who might know about the map and the spirals.”
“I wouldn’t call the folks who work there experts,” said Matthew.
“More expert than we are.”
“Maisie, I’m telling you, it’s useless. And too crowded to comfortably have you poke around asking questions. What if you accidentally brushed against a walking stick, or some old freeze-dried rat?”
“I’d think the superstitious sorts would love that,” I said. Matthew grimaced. “But really, you’re making it sound even more enticing. Just the sort of place that Peter might have made acquaintances, the sort of people who might know about his work. What if I wait for you here, and you just bring the map and ask them? Find out what they know. There’s no harm can come from asking.”
This last must have been an expression I’d read somewhere, as it was certainly not one that my father or Mrs. Blott had ever used with me. As a child, my harm had all begun with asking: What would happen if I touched this; how could that possibly hurt? Better, I’d been taught, to firmly corral curiosity. I would find out when I was older, they said, and should save the sorts of questions whose answers spawned action for Peter’s experiments and labs.
But Peter was gone. Until he had come home again, all experiments would have to be my own.
Matthew sighed. “All right,” he said, “if you promise to stay in the car with the dog, I’ll go in and see about the spirals. You should keep the map here. Just in case.”
He parked the car a short walk from the shop’s entrance, behind a large, unlabeled van, its back hatch propped with cardboard boxes, apparently in the midst of being unloaded.
“Stay here,” he instructed. I could not tell if this direction was intended for myself or for my dog. I scowled. As Matthew exited the car, three chatting mothers passed along the sidewalk with their baby carriages, and I sank lower in my seat, cowering from their gossip, as if just by looking at me they might learn of my curse. I remembered the one trip to the ocean I’d taken with Peter, the anonymity of the endless pebbled beaches and rising tides. My father had never explained his logic, why I was welcome to journey (under strict supervision) to a place so far from home, and yet forbidden to visit the village. I’d understood instinctively: Coeurs Crossing was too near us, too incestuous, too small. It would be too difficult to contain gossip if the village discovered my dangers.
Once Matthew had gone I pressed the locks down on the car doors, but then promptly pulled them up again, ashamed of my anxiety. Still slumped, half hidden by the dashboard, I stared directly ahead, watching as two men returned to the white van in front of me. They wore matching jackets, embroidered at the chest with red lettering I was too far away to read, although I c
ould tell that the boxes they transferred from the souvenir shop were heavy, requiring both men to grip each one. Sacred rocks, I imagined, or statues.
Marlowe squeezed in beside me, brushing up against the glove box. Suddenly aware that this could be my only chance to investigate Matthew’s car without him in it, I pulled myself up and pushed Marlowe away to examine its contents: a broken pencil, his car insurance, an empty bag of chocolate candy, a single little girl’s pink glove. Why just the one? Was a little girl waiting somewhere with its partner? Was it stolen? Did Matthew’s outer kindness hide some dark depravity, an anger that would compel him to come across a child and snatch away her—
Of course not: the surname Hareven was written next to a phone number in blocky letters on the glove’s inner tag. A daughter? He was much too young. He’d mentioned younger siblings. A sister, then. It was easy to imagine Matthew holding a tiny, ungloved hand. It suddenly occurred to me that Matthew’d had a full life before he had met me. How naive I’d been to imagine myself his only company, simply because he was mine. A torso hid under his T-shirt; in his head, thoughts all his own. When he went jogging, closed the violet bedroom door, he did not disappear into some void, Paleocene and stagnant, waiting for my consciousness to summon him. I shuddered and reached back for Marlowe.
The couriers in front of me returned from their second trip, slamming the van doors. Before they could climb into the front seat, they were stopped by a new man, much younger, dark-haired and tall with a striped scarf and chiseled jaw. The three spoke for a while, the larger of the workmen gesticulating grandly, broad shoulders heaving as he seemed to either chuckle or to cry. Eventually the two workers climbed into their van and pulled away, leaving the younger man behind. There was something familiar about him, although I could not place it. He adjusted his scarf, looked straight at the car without appearing to see me, and ducked into the shop.