“The hill’s a bit slick,” he said. “It might be safer not to drive down. There’s a side path we can take that’s not so steep.”
I was glad I had worn boots. But it turned out I didn’t need them. The chief led us around some evergreen shrubs, which had been concealing one of the most pleasing things I had ever looked at: a large wooden sleigh hitched to a pair of white horses. Joanne had a little fit of delight, shrieking and dancing. The sleigh seemed to be made entirely of wood, including its runners. It was painted white, and it resembled a boat more than anything else; a boat that might have been used in some sort of ceremony in an ancient culture. We climbed in and the chief arranged a scarlet wool blanket over our laps. Then we set off down a gently winding path. It wasn’t a smooth ride, and I thought the lack of bells was a minor flaw, but all things considered, I thought it was delightful, and Joanne thought it was about perfect.
Chief Rudd dropped us in front of Evelyn Coleridge’s house and said he would be back to pick us up in an hour. I was going to suggest that maybe our hostess should be the one to decide how long we should stay, but the chief didn’t seem to invite any discussion of the matter. He seemed more like his usual grim self after we got into town. As usual, the streets were deserted, although the snow on the sidewalks was surprisingly well trampled. There had been quite a bit of activity at some time recently. As Joanne and I walked to the door of Mrs. Coleridge’s house I began to feel uneasy. It might have been just the excitement of the sleigh ride, but my emotions seemed more complicated than the ride would account for. I had the definite sensation that someone was about to scream.
I paused for a moment to look along the street. At first I didn’t see any decorations of any kind. No lights, wreaths, or municipal tree. And then I noticed that on the front of the Meeting Hall, and farther off, on the mausoleum in the cemetery, there were touches of red. I couldn’t be sure, but each structure seemed to be decorated with a simple draping of red silk. It was nothing elaborate, but in contrast to the starkness of the village, the effect was dramatic.
Evelyn Coleridge opened the door of her house, and Gwendolyn Hopkins ran out to embrace Joanne. Whatever my emotions were, they were trivial compared to Gwendolyn’s. Her face was flushed, and she was so wildly animated that you had to assume that someone had either just given her or taken from her the thing she most wanted out of life.
Fortunately, Mrs. Coleridge seemed to be in control of herself. Not that she was exactly placid, but she confined her demonstration of emotion to a discreet nibbling of her lower lip. The girls ran off into the house, and Evelyn and I went into the sitting room and sat. I was carrying my portraits of Gwendolyn, which Joanne had wrapped spectacularly, if not neatly. Since our time was apparently short, I called Joanne and suggested that she present the portraits to Gwendolyn.
The presentation was simple. Gwendolyn managed to keep her body—with the exception of most of the muscles in her face—still while Joanne said, “Merry Christmas to my best friend in the whole world,” and handed over the package.
Gwendolyn put the gift on the table and embraced, kissed, and thanked, first Joanne and then me. She got permission from Mrs. Coleridge to open the package. Then Gwendolyn moved to the other side of the room, where she carefully untied the photographs. She looked at each one for a few seconds, and, smiling, took them one by one to Mrs. Coleridge, who was smiling too. I remembered that there hadn’t been a lot of smiling when I had shown the photographs in my apartment in the city, and I decided that I had done the right thing in bringing them back to Childgrave. I had kept only one to give to Joanne as a remembrance of Gwendolyn and Childgrave in case we didn’t get back to the village again.
After Gwendolyn had finished looking at the portraits, she walked over to me and kissed my hand. “I told you they would be all right,” she said. Then she and Joanne went upstairs, not in their usual wild scurry, but sedately and gravely.
Mrs. Coleridge smiled at me. “Thank you for the photographs, Mr. Brewster. The town will cherish them.”
“It was a pleasure. But actually, I meant them for Gwendolyn, not for the town.”
Mrs. Coleridge began to bite her lower lip again. “Yes,” she said. “Of course you did.”
“Maybe you could tell me about the children,” I said.
“The children?”
“The girls in the photograph. The ones other than Gwendolyn.”
“They are from the past. The past is always with us. There is nothing mysterious about that. Any of us can see the past.”
“I don’t seem to have much of a knack for it.”
“Nonsense. Come, take my hands.” I did as I was told. “Now close your eyes.” I closed them and felt something similar to a mild electric shock. And then I saw—not in the way you see something in your imagination, but actually saw, as if my eyes were open—a girl about the age of Gwendolyn. The girl was wearing the kind of white dress that seemed to be the standard costume in Childgrave. I pulled my hands away from Evelyn Coleridge’s hands and opened my eyes. The vision, or whatever I had been seeing, vanished immediately—which is what I wanted, because the girl I had seen had been lying on the floor, obviously dead, with a stain of fresh blood on the front of her dress.
I looked at Evelyn Coleridge, who seemed to be examining my expression very carefully. I said: “She was dead.”
“Yes.”
“I mean, she had been killed.”
“Yes. Is that unacceptable to you?”
“Of course it’s unacceptable to me.”
“You could not imagine accepting it?”
For some reason, I hesitated. Then I thought of Joanne. “No,” I said. “I really can’t imagine it.”
“I did not suppose so, Jonathan. There is really no reason you should at this point.”
At this or any other point, I thought. We sat in silence for a minute or two. I felt tired and out of place. Did I have a place anymore? I had been eager to leave the city, and now I was eager to leave Childgrave. If I had a place, it was with Sara. But where was Sara? I might as well ask. “Have you heard anything from Sara?” I said.
“Sara is well,” Mrs. Coleridge said, not exactly answering my question.
“I’d like to see her.”
“You must be patient. I understand you are a patient man.”
“I used to think so.”
“It is helpful for one to question one’s assumptions occasionally.”
It’s also helpful for one to stop being pompous occasionally, I thought. Especially if one seems to have a casual attitude about the killing of young girls. And for the first time I admitted to myself what I had been trying to pretend could not be true: For some reason, little girls got killed in Childgrave with the knowledge and approval of its saintly citizenry.
“Joanne and I had better be getting back to the city,” I said.
Evelyn didn’t protest. “It was good of you to make the journey,” she said.
I called Joanne, who surprisingly came along without complaining when I told her that we had to leave. I tried not to look at Gwendolyn, who seemed a little less like a privileged person and more like a frightened child. The sleigh was waiting at the end of the street, and as the four of us left the house Chief Rudd climbed into it and drove toward us. Mrs. Coleridge and Gwendolyn didn’t wait for the sleigh to arrive. They said an unemotional good-bye and went into the house. As the door closed, its brass knocker glinted. Someone had polished it—the child’s head that I had first seen on the door of Sara’s apartment in the city. It reminded me that Sara was part of Childgrave and its traditions. I wished she were with me to explain some of those traditions.
Instead, Delbert Rudd was with me. Joanne and I settled ourselves in the back of the sleigh and started the trip up the hill. I wasn’t feeling as elated as I had when we arrived. The sleigh seemed merel
y uncomfortable, and the horses stank. I wondered whether it was worth trying to make conversation with Chief Rudd, who was perched in the driver’s seat. What would I say? He saved me the trouble.
“Going back to the city now, are you?” he asked.
“That’s right. I suppose this is an important night in Childgrave, isn’t it?”
“It is, Mr. Brewster.”
I was going to ask him if they had a candlelight service at the Meeting Hall, but then I remembered that all their services would be candlelight services. The thought would have made me smile in Manhattan, but now it just depressed me. I settled for asking: “Do you have some kind of public celebration?”
“I wouldn’t say a celebration. An observance, I’d say.”
“A meeting?”
“A meeting, yes. And we start our fast.”
“You fast? How many hours does the fast go on?”
“Not hours. Days. Seven.”
“A seven-day fast? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“No, sir. Not at all. We don’t move around too much. And we’re allowed water, of course. There’s more dangerous things.”
Oh, really? I thought. What would Delbert Rudd’s idea of a dangerous activity be? “What sort of thing do you have in mind?” I asked him.
“It’s dangerous to make light of someone’s faith. You probably don’t believe that, living in a big city. I would imagine you worry about someone coming up in back of you on a subway platform, or you fear that when you get home, the door will be ajar, a panel punched out of the wood you thought was so strong. You don’t worry about someone interfering with your grace or your rituals.”
It was sort of comforting to have the chief lecturing me again; telling me that I lacked grace, scolding me for not holding séances. But I decided it was best not to continue our little talk. Joanne was listening carefully to what we were saying, and she didn’t seem too pleased by it. She burrowed down next to me, as though she were trying to get as far away from Chief Rudd as possible. When we got to my car, I started to wish the chief a merry Christmas, but the world “merry” didn’t seem too appropriate, so I just thanked him for the sleigh ride.
As I was driving away I noticed that not only was the town’s police car parked across the main road to Childgrave, but a wooden barrier had been put in place as well. On the barrier was a sign reading:
POLICE ORDER—
DO NOT ENTER
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
The sign affected me the way it would affect almost any normally inquisitive person: it made me want to enter. But it seemed more important to get Joanne back to the city. My daughter hadn’t shown much enthusiasm for the holiday and she hadn’t developed her Christmas list beyond a request for a trip to Childgrave. I hadn’t worked up much interest in the season either. And even though I had visited a toy store and had bought enough things for her to fill one of our closets, I immediately forgot what it was that I had bought.
On our trip back from Childgrave, Joanne and I didn’t do much talking. It wasn’t until we were parking in front of the apartment that Joanne decided to dumbfound me. “The shoes were warm,” she said.
“Your shoes are warm?”
“No. Her shoes.”
“Who is ‘her’?”
“Miss Coleridge.”
“Mrs. Coleridge?”
“No. Miss Coleridge. My new mommy.”
“Sara?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, her shoes were warm?”
“When I was playing in her room, I put my hands in them. They were warm.”
“Today?”
Joanne nodded.
Several of the circuits in my brain were announcing that they were temporarily out of order, but there were still enough connections to let me get things straight. “Sweetie,” I said, “when you say the shoes were warm, do you mean they were snuggy for your feet, or do you mean they gave off heat like a piece of toast?”
“Like toast. Only not very hot toast.”
“Like someone had been wearing the shoes and had taken them off?”
Another nod.
The thought of shoes—or anything else—warmed by Sara’s body was enough to brighten my holiday. “Did you see your new mommy there?”
Joanne shook her head.
My hands began to shake.
After dinner, I put my daughter to bed. I dressed for cross-country hiking, picked up a battery-powered lantern, and once again drove to Childgrave.
As I stood on the hill above the village the muscles at the back of my neck contracted, and I began to shiver in little spasms that seemed to result from emotions as much as from the cold. I didn’t know what I would find in Childgrave, but I was resolved that I wouldn’t let it drive me away. It seemed that in returning to the town this time I had officially transferred my allegiance away from Manhattan. Apparently it was not only Sara that I had been seeking.
The night was cloudless, and the almost-full moon was directly overhead. After I had stood for three or four minutes I could easily see the outlines of the trees against the snow. But no lights were visible below. Whatever the villagers did on Christmas Eve, it didn’t require a lot of illumination. I scouted around a bit to be sure that Delbert Rudd wasn’t waiting to greet me, and then I walked cautiously but without any difficulty down into the silent night of Childgrave.
As I passed the first scattered houses they seemed to be totally dark. But then I noticed that there were traces of white smoke rising from their chimneys, and some of the downstairs windows showed a faint glow that probably came from logs burning slowly in fireplaces. I stopped and spent a little time just listening. I couldn’t hear anything.
By the time I reached the Coleridge house I still hadn’t seen or heard anything that indicated there were any people around but Jonathan Brewster. I took a few discreet peeks through windows, and, as I expected, I saw smoldering fireplaces, but no one who might throw another log on the fire. So, the villagers had been in their homes recently but had found something better to do. That meant the Meeting Hall, most likely, so I headed in that direction. And as I approached it I could see flickering lights in its windows. I found a place in the shadows across from the entrance to the hall, and I stood and waited.
Gradually I became aware of a muted, distant voice. It was a man’s voice, and it obviously came from inside the Meeting Hall. The tone of the voice wasn’t conversational, but I didn’t get the impression that anyone was trying to entertain anyone or to persuade them of anything. I looked at my wristwatch and, after some squinting, figured out that it was midnight.
Then things began to happen.
First, I heard a puzzling sound in the distance: a sort of thumping and creaking. It wasn’t until I heard some snorting and whinnying that I realized I was hearing the approach of a horse. Actually, it was two horses—familiar white horses pulling a familiar white sleigh containing a familiar person. I moved farther back into the shadows and tried to figure out exactly what the newest emotion was that had begun to take charge of me. It took me a few moments to identify it, because it wasn’t an emotion I had very often: awe.
The horses weren’t the kind you see at the track. They were bred for something more serious than speed. As they came down the slope of Golightly Street, straining to hold back the weight of the heavy old sleigh, their nostrils sending out puffs of condensing breath, and the muscles of their shoulders and haunches twitching, I got the feeling I was watching something heroic and mythological. Chief Rudd, on his driver’s perch, and dressed in black, didn’t exactly conjure up names like Zeus, Elysium, or Apollo, but I began to recall schoolday references to Hades, Styx, and Charon. And I had a little better idea of why we’re taught to respect the vision of the ancient Greeks.
Delbert Rudd guided the sleigh
to the curb in front of the Meeting Hall and stopped the horses. I could see his clothes more clearly now. He was wearing a black cape like the one Mrs. Coleridge had lent me, and he accented his ensemble with a high-crowned, flat-brimmed black hat. It was the same kind of costume I had seen on the man in the cemetery during my first visit to Childgrave. Rudd jumped down from the sleigh and walked to the double doors of the Meeting Hall. He stood before them for a moment and then threw them both open. As he walked quickly through the doorway I could see that the hall was filled with people, who turned to face him as he entered. They all held lighted white candles, and they all wore black, floor-length capes. That is, all but one person wore black. The exception was a small girl who was wearing a white dress. She was standing at the rear of the building, facing me along an aisle that separated the crowd into two groups. For a moment, the only movement came from the doors, which swung slightly on their hinges.
Then the girl began to walk slowly toward the doorway. I assumed she was Gwendolyn Hopkins, although I couldn’t see her face clearly enough to be certain. I looked for someone else I might recognize, but despite all the candlepower, the faces were distorted by the unsettling shadows that resulted from a low frontlight. And since all the women were wearing black bonnets, and the men were wearing the same kind of hats that Delbert Rudd was wearing, it would have been hard to identify anyone even at noon.
The girl seemed to slow up and to hesitate occasionally as she walked down the aisle. The other people in the hall weren’t watching her but were looking ahead to the doorway. Just before the girl reached the doorway, she stopped, looked to the side, and held her arms out. A hand reached out and took hers. It was the hand of Delbert Rudd. He moved to the girl’s side, and they walked out of the Meeting Hall. When they reached the sleigh, Chief Rudd lifted the girl to the back seat and draped the red blanket around her. Then he climbed onto the driver’s platform.
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