The Tale of Halcyon Crane

by Webb, Wendy

  PART THREE

  · 30

  You’re not going back there alone,” Will said to me, over breakfast at Mira’s the next day.

  When we arrived at the inn after a damp, rainy ride in Mira’s carriage, we simply fell into bed and into a deep sleep, dogs curled up at our feet, not awakening until midday. I didn’t even have a change of clothes with me, so I thought I’d head back to Hill House in the light of day and pack a few things.

  “It’s daytime,” I said stupidly. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. And anyway, I’ve been living there for two weeks now. If they wanted to do anything beyond tease me, they’ve had plenty of opportunities. I’m not afraid now. I was last night but I’m not afraid now. I’m really not.”

  How afraid did that sound?

  Mira had run into town for some groceries, so she couldn’t dissuade me, and Will wasn’t convinced by my bravado. He was shaking his head, and only then did it occur to me: The scratches on his face were all but gone. I could barely make out their faint trails on his cheeks. It was as though they, too, were phantoms or figments conjured up by Mira’s call to the dead, dissolving with the light of day.

  “I just wish you’d come into town with me,” he muttered, knowing he wasn’t going to win this battle.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I told him, as though that meant anything whatsoever in the context of what we were discussing.

  But it was true. It was one of those rare late-fall days, just as you’re preparing for the onslaught of snow and chill and cold, that surprises you with a burst of summer, a day of respite and reprieve from the harsh weather that will certainly be descending in very short order.

  “Here’s what I’ll do,” I began, by way of compromise. “I’ll pack some things for us, just in case we decide to stay here at Mira’s again tonight. I’ll clean up all the debris from the séance, and then I’ll take a picnic lunch outside and wait for you. And I’ll keep the dogs by my side the whole time. How’s that?”

  The sky was a deep cloudless blue and the temperature must’ve been climbing into the sixties—not a heat wave but, in late November on this island, quite an unusual occurrence. I leaned against Will as we walked toward my house, the dogs running in long circles around us.

  “You know what didn’t occur to me until just now?” I said. “Iris. She’ll be there. I won’t be alone.”

  Will smiled. “Small comfort. Like she can do anything if the ghosts try to push you down the stairs. But it’s something, anyway.” He kissed me as he veered into the barn to hitch up Belle, who had spent the night in a stall vacated by one of my mother’s horses.

  I ran up the steps, took a deep breath, and opened the back door. Iris was already here: the glasses were washed and put away, chairs pushed neatly under the table. I opened the door to the dining room and found her, broom and dustpan in hand, sweeping up the ribbons. The scent of roses was still overpowering.

  She gave me a sharp look. “What happened here?”

  Suddenly, I felt like a small child caught in the act of doing something wrong, something forbidden. Had we? I was almost afraid of saying the words, but I managed to squeak out, “We tried to contact the girls.”

  “Tried? I’d say you succeeded.” She sniffed as she picked up the dustpan full of ribbons and made her way to the kitchen door to dump them. “That was a mistake, Halcyon. The last time someone contacted those girls, somebody died.”

  I remembered the story of Hannah’s séance and shivered at the thought of poor Jane going over the cliff.

  “I think it’s time you heard the tale of Halcyon Crane,” Iris said, and walked out the back door, leaving me alone with my fears and my questions.

  It took a moment before I followed. Iris had gone down the drive and into the garden, where she was sitting on one of the stone benches. As the dogs curled up on their beds in the kitchen, I trotted down the drive and joined her.

  “You need to fully realize your gift,” she said to me there in the garden. “You need to own it and use it, now that you’ve called the girls to you in this very real way. You are more powerful than they, and much more powerful than any supposed medium you had here. Now is the time, Halcyon, to realize who you are.”

  I sighed. “I have no idea how to do what you’re suggesting. I’ve tried, but I—”

  “That’s why I’m here, child: to teach you, to unlock your sight with my stories. And now I’m convinced that this last one, your tale, you need to see on your own. It’s the only way.” She fished a few black-and-white photographs out of her apron pocket and handed them to me. “Look deeply, Halcyon, and then empty your mind of all thought. Let your spirit drift in the ether. When you’re hovering there between worlds, call the spirits to you, your mother and father, and they will show you what you need to see.” She fell silent, leaving me to ponder the photographs in my open palms without benefit of her explanation.

  I saw me, as a baby, my mother and father smiling broadly. A birthday party with just one candle. My father lying in the grass with me sleeping on his chest. I let myself become absorbed in the photographs until I could almost sense the moment in time they contained—the smell of the grass that day, the taste of sugary frosting . . . I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind of other thoughts, listening to the sound within my own ears, feeling the soft breeze on my face, until another scent swirled about me: a familiar cologne. My father’s cologne.

  I opened my eyes but was unable to see what had been in front of me. There was no stone bench, no garden, no cliff beyond, no Iris. Only my dad, younger than I, sitting in a room in Hill House that I took to be his study. He was staring out the window absently, running a hand through his hair. How full it looked, back then. My mother, obviously pregnant, swept into the study wearing a long purple dress and dangly earrings and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Money’s not the issue, Madlyn, you know that.” My father sighed. “I’m just worried about what kind of father I’m going to make. Am I ready for this? Are we?”

  Madlyn laughed, a musical trill that sounded familiar and sweet. “Nobody’s ever ready to have a child, silly. They come into our lives when they’re ready.”

  Noah looked into his wife’s eyes and collapsed in the face of her optimism. “I guess you’re right. This baby’s coming, whether we feel ready or not.”

  That scene dissolved into thin wisps of smoke taken aloft on the breeze, to be instantly replaced with the image of me, wriggling in my bassinette, my father leaning over me, beaming. “Let her sleep, Noah.” My mother smiled at him and led him out of the room.

  I saw another image then. My mother, her long auburn hair pulled back in a scarf, was sitting at the desk in her bedroom suite, squinting and scowling at a group of photographs she had laid out in long rows. I watched her gather them up in a hurry and shove them into a file when my father came into the room.

  “I’m worried about Halcyon,” he said to her.

  “What else is new?” My mother rose from her desk and took him in her arms. “You’ve got to be the most doting father on this planet. What is it this time, my love?”

  “Madlyn, I know we’ve talked about this before, but you really have to listen to me this time. I’ve been trying to tell you, honey, our little girl is blind.” Blind? My father went on. “She never makes eye contact with anyone, not even you. She doesn’t react to toys or faces or animals. You’ve got to face it, honey. We need to take her to a doctor.”

  His earnest, pleading words sent a familiar chill up my spine. I watched a curly-haired toddler, unsteady on her feet, turn and walk directly into a wall. But that image didn’t jibe with the next one that floated in front of my eyes: me as a toddler, looking directly at a woman whom I recognized as Hannah and laughing as she covered her face with her hands and then dropped them, crying, “Peek-a-boo!” before she dissolved into the air as my mother swept into the room. Image after image flickered into view then, like a slide show, me talking and laughing and playing with Hannah and Simeo
n and Amelia. I wasn’t seeing what was in front of me—but I was seeing beyond the veil into the world of the dead.

  Noah tried again one afternoon. “Madlyn, I think we might have another problem with Hallie. I know it sounds crazy, but I heard her talking to your mother today. And it’s not the first time.”

  Madlyn laughed. “That’s ridiculous. She has an imaginary friend, that’s all there is to it.” But I could hear what my mother was thinking. She herself had spent her childhood talking to a dead twin, so to her this was normal behavior.

  “How can she talk about pretty white ribbons and that brown furry teddy bear and the red leaves in the garden when she’s blind?” Noah wanted to know.

  “Honey, don’t question it,” Madlyn told him, turning him around and rubbing his shoulders. “This house has a way of doing strange things to people. Don’t worry about it. My dad didn’t talk until he was five years old, and look at him now.”

  Another image materialized: Will, as a boy! With me in the garden, right where I was now sitting. He was chasing me around one of the benches and suddenly I stopped, turned, looked directly at him, and leaped on him. I knew I was seeing the first moment of my own sight. Will’s was the first face—other than a ghost’s—I had ever seen. A warmth overtook me and I laughed, watching my young self lying on top of Will, tickling him mercilessly. I grinned, thinking of the night before. Not much had changed.

  “I can’t believe it,” Noah murmured tearfully to Madlyn as he held me tightly in his arms.

  “It’s just like my father and his speech,” Madlyn whispered over my shoulder. “I don’t care why it happened or how, only that she can see now. That’s all that matters.”

  As I learned from the next vision, I had not lost my ability to see beyond the veil, and I saw how frazzled my dad was becoming with my mother’s constant denials that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “Hallie! Halcyon Crane!” he would call as he pounded through the trees in front of the house, looking for me yet again. I would disappear during the afternoons, exploring the house and the grounds and especially the woods. More often than not, he’d find me lazing in the grass watching the sailboats come and go in the harbor, or brushing the horses with my grandfather, or playing in the shade of one of the great oak trees that stood near the cliff. But on this day I wasn’t in any of those places, and it was getting dark.

  Noah’s breath started to catch in his throat as he ran through the grounds, calling my name, the exposed roots and gnarled branches clawing at his shirt and his hair. He was lumbering through the stand of trees in front of the house, nearly blind himself with the fear of never seeing me again. “Hallie!” His voice was shrill, frantic.

  “Here, Papa,” came my voice from within the trees. Noah stopped and looked around wildly, but he couldn’t see me. “Not there! I’m over here!” Suddenly, a rustling in the bushes. “Boo!” I cried, leaping onto my father’s legs and holding on tight. Beads of sweat had begun to dot my father’s forehead. He bent down and scooped me up, holding me close to his heart. I saw that I had been perilously close, three or four steps, from the edge of the cliff.

  He held me tight; I could smell the baby shampoo in my hair, mixed with wildflowers and lavender and water and night.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?”

  Noah put me down and knelt beside me, face-to-face. “You know the rule about the cliff.”

  I squirmed and shrugged. “I was just playing.”

  “I don’t care, young lady. You’ve been told never to play by the cliff alone.”

  I looked at him with innocence in my eyes. “But I wasn’t alone.”

  Noah shook his head and sighed, confusion and dread apparent on his face. “Who was with you?”

  “My friends,” I explained. “We were playing hide-and-seek.”

  A dark shadow crept over my father’s face. A childhood game had become dangerous. It had led me to the cliff edge.

  What I saw next made me suddenly cold: me on the bluff with three ghostly playmates—the girls. We were sitting across from one another, playing patty-cake and singing:

  Say, say, oh, playmate!

  Come out and play with me.

  And bring your dollies three.

  Climb up my apple tree!

  The sound wrapped around my throat like an ice-cold hand. I saw my father scooping me up away from them into his arms. I saw them waving at me. I saw his terrified face before I put my hands over my own.

  “But I play with them all the time, Daddy! And other people, too! Grandma and great-grandmother, especially. Grandma fell and lost a baby.”

  My stomach began to tighten and I was having trouble breathing. This is it, I thought to myself. I’m about to learn everything now. I had an overwhelming urge to get up and run from that bench, to shake the vision from my eyes, because I knew what I was going to see next—my repressed memories of the day Julie Sutton died.

  The memories had stayed hidden in some dark recess of my brain for a reason, I thought, in a wild attempt to justify not hearing the rest of the story. Maybe I shouldn’t know what happened. Up to now I had been just fine not knowing, after all. Why dredge up the past? But then again, what was the point of hearing all these family tales from Iris if I wasn’t going to hear—or see—my own?

  Somewhere, very far away, I heard Iris’s voice. “Keep looking, Halcyon. It’s right there before you.”

  But I didn’t see Julie, not just yet. What I saw was my mother, entranced with her photography, her own gift, oblivious to everything going on around her. The capturing of souls was a heady thing; it intoxicated her, I could see it in her eyes. Every time she developed one of her photographs, she was like an addict, insatiably drawn to what she would find there. I saw it clearly: This gift, this obsession, left very little time for other things, like husbands and children. That’s why she didn’t see I was in danger. And I knew then this part of the tale was cautionary. I made a mental note to remember that I, too, risked addiction. I needed to keep my eyes on what was really important.

  “So what if she’s having visits from previous occupants of this house?” my mother said to Noah, waving off his fears. “They’re my relatives, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Maddie, I think we should leave the island,” he pleaded. “Let’s get away from here.”

  “Are you kidding?” she spat back at him. “Leave my father here alone? No, Noah. Absolutely not.”

  I saw more arguments, then. Doors slamming, tears from both of them. “This is a wonderful place to grow up,” Madlyn told her husband. “Hallie has friends and a great school and a whole island to explore—without cars to run her over. You’ve got a fine job, and I can do my work from here. These are my roots and they’re Hallie’s roots. You can’t seriously want to take her away from all of that because you think she sees ghosts.”

  She said that last bit with a kind of sarcastic venom that Noah had never before heard from his wife, and I saw the defeated look on his face. Nobody was leaving the island. Desperate, grieving, and frightened, he whispered into my ear that he’d protect me as best he could, promising to watch me with a hawk’s keen eye.

  Then the scene shifted, and I saw somebody new on the island shopping for groceries. She followed my father and me out of the store and touched him on the sleeve. He turned and saw a young woman. She looked into his eyes and said, conspiratorially, “I can see that your daughter has quite a gift.”

  I could almost hear Noah’s heart beating. He took a deep breath and whispered, “What do you mean, a gift?”

  “The sight. I have it, too.”

  He grabbed the young woman’s arm and hustled her over to a quiet corner of the street. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or how you know what you know, but I really need to talk to you,” he said to her.

  Now I saw the woman’s face more clearly than I had before. Mira? It couldn’t be. And yet there she was, her face younger and brighter than I knew it to be, but plain as day.

  I watched my fath
er meet Mira for a clandestine dinner on the mainland that evening. Of course they couldn’t be seen together on the island—word would get back to my mother in a flash—so they picked an out-of-the-way restaurant not far from the ferry dock. He told Mira everything: how I didn’t see until I was three years old but was constantly talking about visual things and people and animals, how I regained my sight in an instant one day, how I was immersed in stories of my ancestors’ pasts, how I had always played with imaginary friends but now those games were turning dangerous.

  “What does your wife say?” Mira asked him shyly.

  “She discounts it, all of it. She is totally in denial and says I’m insane to be worried. I’ve tried everything to make her understand, but she won’t listen, she won’t . . .” His words trailed off into a sigh.

  I watched as a coy grin appeared on Mira’s face and knew she was very glad to hear this. I saw images of the two of them meeting again and again, intimate dinners and rendezvous at out-of-the-way hotels. They had had an affair? I felt sick. All those times she had been so friendly toward me, so helpful, she had never once said anything about this.

  Then I saw Julie Sutton’s parents drop her off at the house for the afternoon. My father found us playing in a third-floor room, sitting on the floor with a tea party spread out before us. I was pouring imaginary tea from a pot and chattering away to Julie and to the stuffed bears I had positioned as the other guests.

  “You girls are playing so happily up here, honey.” He smiled at me, relieved to find me immersed in a normal child’s activity—a tea party with a real live friend—and went on his way down the stairs.

  But then came the screaming: high-pitched, horrible screams. My father flew back into the room and found me, scratches bleeding all over my face, locked in a struggle with, to him, what was an unseen foe. But I could see exactly who it was.