The Tale of Halcyon Crane

by Webb, Wendy

  The policeman shook his head. “In this state, all murder cases are considered open until they’re solved. We haven’t looked into this case since your father’s death—since he went missing thirty years ago. But that doesn’t mean the case is solved.”

  “So there’s no way for me to get a look at the file.”

  “Unfortunately, no.” And he went back to his work, or pretended to. Defeated, I gathered up my purse and went outside into the sunshine.

  “Lost the battle but not the war,” I muttered to myself as I walked up the street.

  Back at the house, I saw Iris had already set out some leftovers for lunch—ribs, bread, and a steaming cup of stew from the day before. She was at the stove when the dogs and I burst in through the back door.

  “Won’t you join me for lunch, Iris?”

  “No, miss, I’ve already eaten. This lunch is for you.” She also handed me a cup of tea, steam filling the air in front of me. It was a scent I didn’t recognize—a strange herbal concoction of earthy smells: moss, leaves, and autumn. “Your mother’s special blend.” Iris smiled, remembering, as she sat down at the kitchen table beside me, and I knew it was time for her to continue her story.

  “I told you that Hannah recovered from the loss of her girls with strength and courage,” Iris began, “but that’s not entirely the case. She did go on with her life, and she and Simeon did have another child: your grandfather, Charles Hill. He lived and died in this house. But that’s a story for another day.”

  I took a big bite of the ribs, chewing slowly as she continued.

  “Hannah went on with her life after the girls died, it’s true, but it was not without suffering and not without foolishness. She was destroyed by the loss of her daughters, as any mother would be. But the difference between Hannah and any other mother was that Hannah knew she had conceived those babies only with the help of the Witch of Summer Glen.”

  I felt that familiar chill creeping up my spine. Iris’s eyes grew dark and cloudy.

  “For weeks after the girls’ deaths, Hannah was consumed by a sort of madness. She was convinced that the children, while not actually alive—she had been at their funeral, everyone on the island had attended—were still hovering near her. Unexplainable things would happen around the house: a clock falling from the fireplace mantel, glasses shattering, doors opening and closing of their own volition. Hannah came to believe that the girls were causing these things to happen, and she concluded, to her horror, that her precious daughters were someplace between life and their heavenly reward. The girls hadn’t made it to heaven, Hannah believed, and she was frantic for their safety.”

  “What did Simeon think about all of this?” I interrupted.

  “Simeon?” She sneered. “He was a good man, to be sure, but an extraordinarily practical one. He put no stock in the otherworldly. Clocks falling, glass shattering, doors opening and closing—these things could be easily explained. This was, and is, a drafty house.

  “He had no idea, remember, that Hannah had visited the witch Martine in order to conceive those babies and that his daughters were the direct result of a spell. So he humored his wife. A bereaved mother must be permitted ample time to grieve, after all, no matter what form that grief takes.

  “Privately, however, he visited with the minister on the island—a devout missionary with no tolerance for anyone who did not conform to the line of strict church doctrine. He also consulted her doctor, who quietly suggested medication or even committal if Hannah’s hysteria didn’t resolve itself in short order. So Simeon held his breath and waited, watching his wife closely as he talked to her in the most gentle of tones.

  “One afternoon when Simeon had gone to work, she saddled up her horse and rode to the other side of the island. She had questions, and she knew only one person who could answer them.”

  “Martine.”

  Iris nodded. “Although it had been nearly nine years since she had last seen her, the witch was waiting. Hannah told Martine the whole tragic story: her daughters had perished in the blizzard but had somehow managed to guide their mother to safety, sparing her their tragic fate.

  “ ‘I am convinced they are still with me, there in the house,’ Hannah said to the witch.

  “ ‘How do you know this?’ Martine asked, absently handing Hannah a cup of tea.

  “ ‘I can feel it,’ Hannah answered, drinking it. ‘I feel their presence near me. And things have happened around the house. Glasses break. A clock fell. Doors open and close.’

  “ ‘But they have not contacted you? They have not spoken to you since the day they died?’

  “ ‘No,’ Hannah admitted, ‘but I am sure they are with me.’

  “Hannah began to feel hazy and random, as though her thoughts weren’t her own. The edges of reality began to blur, the world disappeared, and she saw nothing except the old witch’s face.

  “ ‘What do you want of me, Hannah Hill?’

  “ ‘I want to communicate with my daughters,’ Hannah replied. ‘I want to tell them I’m all right. I want to know that they’re all right.’

  “ ‘Summoning the spirits of the dead is not a thing to be done lightly,’ Martine warned. ‘Summoning the spirits of the dead who were given life through witchcraft is all the more dangerous.’

  “ ‘Why is that?’

  “ ‘By calling them to you, you’re asking them to stay in this world. Are you prepared for that?’

  “ ‘They’re my daughters,’ Hannah insisted, her head heavy and dull. ‘Are they all right? Do they need me to do something for them? I want to know. I need to know.’

  “ ‘Are you certain?’ Martine asked.

  “ ‘Yes,’ Hannah murmured.

  “ ‘So be it. I will come to you when your husband is away. Together we will summon the girls, and you will have what you desire.’ “

  As I listened to this part of the tale, something nagged at me. “Iris,” I interrupted. “How do you know all these things? How can you possibly know the conversations that took place between Hannah and Martine?”

  Iris looked annoyed by the question. “Just listen, Halcyon. It will all become clear in time. Do not interrupt.”

  I settled back into my chair, murmuring, “Sorry,” while Iris cleared her throat, took a sip of tea, and prepared to continue.

  “Hannah thanked Martine and left. It was only when she was away from the house, deep in the cool air of the woods, that she realized she had not asked Martine for what she really wanted: help in seeing that her girls would get their reward in heaven. No matter. Martine had said she would be able to talk to the girls. She would sort it all out then.

  “The minutes dissolved into hours and seeped into days as Hannah anxiously awaited Martine’s visit. Every day Simeon left the house for work, Hannah would sit expectantly in the kitchen, at this very table, staring out to the road beyond the house.”

  Iris pointed an arthritic finger toward the windows behind me. I fidgeted in my seat, imagining my great-grandmother sitting just where I was sitting, waiting for a witch who would contact her dead daughters. I thought of my own ghostly visitors, if that’s indeed what they were, and shivered. I sipped my tea, hoping to feel its warmth inside.

  “Finally, the day came,” Iris continued. “Martine, disguised in a hooded cloak, appeared at Hannah’s back door. She was carrying a small velvet bag.

  “ ‘You are sure no one else is here?’ Martine asked her, looking around the room furtively. Hannah nodded. But she was not correct. Hannah did not know I was here, along with a young cousin of mine from the mainland. My mother was here as well, doing the wash in the laundry house, which at one time stood where Madlyn’s garden is today.”

  I looked out the window and saw the ghostly outline of a crude wooden building. Iris’s mother was carrying loads of white sheets out of its door toward the clothesline. I shook my head. Am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing?

  Iris interrupted my vision. “Look deeply, child. Deep within yourself.”r />
  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You will.” Iris smiled. “The visions will solidify. Soon I’ll become little more than a narrator for what you’re seeing with your own eyes. After that, you won’t need me at all.”

  “Iris, you’re not making any sense.”

  “You’ll soon see.” Then she continued the story. “I suppose Mrs. Hill was too wrapped up in her desire to talk to her daughters again to have thought about the maid and her daughter. My cousin Jane and I were playing outside in the big stand of cedar trees when we saw Martine coming up the drive.

  “Of course, when we saw her we ran to the house immediately to get a better look. We had heard tales of the Witch of Summer Glen, but we had been much too afraid to cross the island to spy on her as the other children did. Now, here she was, coming up my very own drive!

  “My cousin and I looked through the window and watched as Martine opened the small crimson velvet bag and began setting items from it on the kitchen table: a lace cloth, candles, dried herbs. Then she said, ‘I need one personal item from each of the girls.’

  “Hannah left the kitchen and returned a few moments later with three satin ribbons. “ ‘They wore these in their hair,’ she murmured, clutching the ribbons as though they were sacred talismans.”

  My breath caught in my throat at this. Satin ribbons?

  “Martine nodded her approval silently and gathered the ribbons in the center of the table. She placed the candles around them. Into the flame of one of the lit candles, she sprinkled an herb of some kind, which produced a crimson-colored smoke and a dark musky scent so strong it reached even to our young noses, outside the window. And then Martine began to speak in a language I did not understand. She was saying strange-sounding words, over and over and over—an incantation. She seemed to have slipped into some sort of altered state, a trance, because her eyes began to roll back into her head, exposing the whiteness around them.

  “I looked at Hannah, and she was still as the grave. She seemed hypnotized. She was staring into space, not looking at Martine, not looking at us through the window, just staring.

  “I, too, began to feel a sort of pull toward oblivion. I tried to move but could not, trapped as I was, right there, at the window, watching this witch cast a spell that would summon the dead.

  “Suddenly I understood the words Martine was saying. She had begun to chant the girls’ names, over and over again. Persephone, Patience, Penelope; Persephone, Patience, Penelope. She was calling on their spirits to return.”

  As Iris chanted the girls’ names, I felt as though I became the little child outside the window, peeking in at the scene. Through the hazy windowpane I saw Martine’s grizzled face, Hannah’s blank stare, the kitchen transformed into how it had been a century earlier—no microwave in the corner, no stainless-steel fridge—just two women sitting at the kitchen table, summoning the dead.

  “Persephone, Patience, Penelope,” Iris went on, her face contorting into the sort of trancelike mask Martine’s face had worn.

  I felt the ribbon on my cheek. I wanted to cry out for Iris to stop. Was she was summoning those children just as Martine had done almost a century ago? I didn’t want to find out. I tried to tell Iris to stop whatever she was doing, but I couldn’t move; I couldn’t speak; I was trapped in the web Iris was weaving with her words.

  Now the scene shifted. I was no longer the girl outside the window but Hannah. Vaguely, somewhere in the distance, I could see Iris sitting next to me, eyes rolled back in her head, chanting an incantation to three dead children. The clearer, more tangible image before me was that of Martine sitting across the table. I was seeing what my great-grandmother had seen, here in the kitchen, nearly ninety years ago.

  A crash from the living room caused the vision to dissipate like steam rising from a teacup. I shook my head to clear my confusion as the kitchen door flew open and slammed closed, again and again and again. This brought Iris out of whatever spell she was weaving as well, and she looked at me with clear, dark eyes.

  I jumped up from the table. “What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded to know, looking around wildly. Several glasses had fallen from the shelves and shattered on the counter. Thankfully, the doors had quieted down of their own accord.

  Iris just smiled and shook her head. “I’m merely trying to finish the story. There is much more to tell.”

  “I’m not at all sure I want to know the rest, to tell you the truth,” I said, holding fast to the back of my chair. “I mean, look around. Did all those glasses just fling themselves off the shelf?”

  “I’ll clean them up as soon as we’re finished,” she said.

  “That’s not the point. Were you trying to summon those girls, just like Martine did?”

  She looked at me and said, in a voice not entirely her own, “I do not need to summon Penelope, Patience, and Persephone. They are here. When the witch summoned them that day, she called them to this house from beyond and they have been here ever since.”

  I sat down hard. It was true, then.

  “There is more to the story, child, more you must hear.”

  I nodded weakly, and Iris went on.

  “As Martine chanted the girls’ names, glasses began to break, doors began to open and close, and Hannah, when she was able to break free of the spell Martine was wrapping around the table, sprang to her feet and cried, ‘Girls! Girls! It’s your mother!’

  “But the girls weren’t bothering with their mother that day. As I said, these girls were not normal children of the day. They were mischievous to the point of viciousness, even in life. It was as though they didn’t have souls at all. Nary a conscience among them.

  “Martine and Hannah did not see my cousin and me, crouched and shivering with fear beneath the kitchen window, but Persephone, Patience, and Penelope did. They homed in on my cousin, the poor thing. I’m still not sure why they left me alone; perhaps because I had been their playmate in life.

  “I heard them giggling and whispering as they descended upon my poor cousin Jane. They pushed and jostled and kicked her. They pinched her and tripped her. I should have intervened, should have done something to help, but I was just as terrified as Jane was. I cowered behind a bush and watched as Jane ran screaming from her invisible tormentors. The last I saw, she was tumbling over the cliff.”

  I sat there staring at Iris in stunned silence for a moment. “What do you mean, the last you saw of her?”

  “I mean Jane died that day, Halcyon. They found her body in the exact spot where the girls had died a few months earlier.”

  · 19

  I think I know why my father took me away from here,” I told Will later that night over dinner.

  When he arrived on my doorstep a few hours after Iris had left, I flew into his arms. I had been terrified the rest of the afternoon in the house alone. Hearing the story about Hannah, Martine, and the girls—and poor Jane!—had pushed me over some kind of precipice. This had gone beyond a few odd ghostly encounters that would make interesting dinner party conversation. Now I felt as though I had been drawn into a nightmare. I had suddenly become the unlucky sap who happens upon the children of the corn, the traveler whose car breaks down in a town filled with vampires.

  I stayed with the dogs in the kitchen until Will got there, not wishing to venture into other parts of the house, areas where three evil little girls could be lurking. I busied myself making dinner. The dogs sensed my uneasiness and kept close, curled up next to me all the while.

  Now I was serving Will a slice of Cornish pasty and telling him everything—how Hannah and Martine had summoned the spirits of the girls, how Iris had been watching from the window and saw the whole thing unfold, how poor Jane had been driven to her death by the three spirits.

  “That’s an incredible story.” Will shook his head. “I wonder if any of it’s true.”

  I held my soup spoon in midair. “You think Iris was making it up? Why would she do that?”

  Will b
ackpedaled. “I’m not saying she fabricated anything, but it all happened a long, long time ago, when Iris was just a child. An old witch, spells, incantations, summoning dead children—you have to admit, Hallie, that it sounds like a legend. Something straight out of a child’s imagination.”

  “I’d love to believe Iris’s story was just her imagination working overtime, but I’ve seen the girls. One of them, at least.”

  Will nodded. “Or what you believe to be one of the girls.”

  “What I believe?” I stared at him. “I’m not crazy, Will, if that’s what you think.”

  “I know you’re not.” He backpedaled again, putting his palms in the air as if to hold back my anger. “Okay. Let’s go with the theory that everything Iris told you today is the honest truth; nothing was embellished, nothing overblown. What now?”

  “It might explain why my father took me away.” Will started to shake his head in disbelief, but I cut him off before he could speak. “Just hear me out. What if my father found out about this story somehow? Maybe he saw the girls himself, just like I have. Maybe . . .” My words trailed off. I hoped Will would pick them up.

  “Okay, I’ll play along. Maybe the girls were threatening you.” He continued my thought. “That’s reason enough for a father to resort to drastic measures to save his daughter, certainly.”

  “It is,” I said, suddenly tearing up at the mention of my dad. I wished he were here to make sense of this, to tell me why he had taken me away from this place all those years ago.

  Will took my hand. “Have you remembered anything at all from that time?”

  I shook my head. “Not a thing.”

  “That could say something in itself,” Will speculated. “I remember a lot about our childhood friendship. You don’t. It suggests you might have experienced some kind of trauma that was best forgotten.”

  This theory had occurred to me while I was cowering in the kitchen, terrified, waiting for Will that day. The intense fear seemed familiar somehow, as though I had felt the same thing in the same place before.