by Noreen Doyle
* * *
Samuel and Prudence moved as quickly as they could without spilling their baskets of cranberries. By the time they came out of the woods it was afternoon, and the shortening September light was casting severe shadows. The Hayford house awaited, shingled and unadorned, surrounded on all sides by a horizon of jagged spruce trees. Wood smoke streamed from the big center chimney and pleasantly scented the air. The children panted up to the rear door and rushed in, calling to their mother, even before they saw her.
When they did see her, they were breathless and words of the strange and frightful emergence they had witnessed began to fly from their mouths. But then they fell silent. The pretty woman in her dark mourning clothes looked up and smiled, though her cheeks were wet with tears. She was sitting by the fire in the cozy family parlor with a child on her lap. It was a small pale girl with sodden blond hair, wrapped like a baby in Susanna’s red riding cloak.
“Our Betsy has come back,” Susanna said softly. “God has returned her to us.”
The youngest of the Hayford children turned her head and gazed impassively at her siblings. She was healthy looking, but for her pallor. There was nothing to suggest that her breathing, blinking body had ever been decaying under earth, let alone for half a year. While the girl’s hair was light like her father’s had been, she had her mother’s dark eyes, though there was something curious about them now. In each pupil there was a thread of moonlight loosely wound in a spiral. They glistened like periwinkles kissed by a sea.
There was little to distinguish the village of Newcomb from the expansive wilderness around it. No central cluster of shops and offices, no streets crowded with homes. The buildings were scattered, set apart from one another, divided by farmland and the undulating, heavily forested terrain that appeared as if it could swallow this humble attempt at civilization with a modicum of effort. The meetinghouse stood alone, as did the blacksmith’s shop and the mills and the tavern. Some of the farms, which comprised the bulk of the buildings, were not even within view of neighbors.
One such farm belonged to Abner Tilden’s widow, Mary. She didn’t have the strength to finish sweeping her kitchen, so she sat down in the bow-back Windsor chair her spouse had been fond of and started to weep. Not a week had passed since she’d put Abner in the ground, and she still found herself expecting him to walk in at any time. When something tapped on the window, she turned to see her husband’s pale, puffy face, with its beard like a clump of dark foam, gawking in at her through one of the small panes.
Another farm, belonging to Tolford Bird, dominated a rise that offered expansive views of bleeding maples and mountains. The property was encroached on its western side by wild-armed pines and an army of somber spruce trees. The farmer’s orchard took up a good deal of the area at the bottom of the incline, close to a stream where he kept moose snares. This is where he and his five surviving children had spent the last hour, picking apples. Two sons, Henry and Owen, had died of “lung fever” the previous winter.
The youngest boy, Seth, who was seven, picked his way up and over a rise and now worked apart from the others. His small size allowed him to reach areas under gnarly branches where his father and older brothers would not have been able to fit. He was about to sample an apple when he lost his grip and it dropped at his feet. There was enough of a slant to allow the fruit to roll and Seth bent, grabbing as he chased after it, but the wayward fruit eluded him until it came to rest between two bony un-shod feet. Seth lifted his head, his eyes passing over bare legs and an un-clothed torso, on up to the gaunt, staring face of his dead brother Owen.
A group of men were bunching Indian-corn stalks into raggedy shocks when they noticed a nude old fellow with long white hair emerging from shady woods at the edge of the field. One of the men recognized the figure as his grandfather, Braddock Gliven.
Benjamin Fisher and his hired man Jeremiah were unloading a cart-load of pumpkins and squash to put up for winter when they saw the landowner’s young daughter Polly, her body uncovered and damp, walking slowly toward them through a yellow rain of twirling birch leaves. Polly, who died two years before, four days after falling off a ledge onto the rocks of Dunning’s Point, moved numbly through complaining chickens in the dooryard, passing her stunned father and his worker as if they weren’t there. She stopped at the entry of the simple one-story house and rapped with her small, faded fist.
By the time the sun lowered behind dark spruce hills, there was hardly a house in the village of Newcomb that went unvisited by the naked, sea-dripping dead.
Dusk fell and the low-ceilinged family parlor of the Hayford house was as homey as it could be, with a vigorous hardwood fire burning, and candle glow, and the woodwork of the mantel and doors and wainscoting a rich blue-gray that seemed to soak in the shadows. Susanna would not be torn away from her Betsy, and so Prudence prepared a meal using the chicken that the woman had plucked earlier.
The youngest child had been dressed in one of her own frocks, with which Susanna had not been able to part. The family, reunited, ate in that same room, safe from the September chill that floated an icy freckling of stars. Outside the innumerable trees had merged into a single darkness, a wall around the farm, the tops of evergreens like flaked-stone arrowheads against the indigo sky.
“Will you not speak?” Susanna said, with an ache in her voice.
She was in the dim second-best room, kneeling in front of Betsy, who regarded her mother with a blank stare, the silvery spirals in her eyes taking on a luminosity in the glow of the fireplace. The child had not spoken a word, nor had she reacted to the embraces and kisses her mother had delivered in quantity. The poor little thing was still mystified by her experience, Susanna reasoned, hoping that Betsy would come back to herself in time. For now it was enough that the girl was there in the flesh . . . breathing, tangible proof of a merciful God. Betsy’s return, as far as Susanna was concerned, was a miracle.
“Did you see your father where you were, my dear?” Susanna asked.
The girl blinked, unresponsive, her face smooth and white as a doll’s.
“Have you been in heaven for this time, Betsy?”
No answer was given. Leaning close to her daughter, Susanna thought that the silver spirals in the child’s dark eyes had become more distinct than they had been earlier.
* * *
Samuel and Prudence were upstairs in their room, huddled over a candle. They had been banished from the back parlor when their mother tired of them emphatically recounting what they found on Little Sorrow, and the dead that rose from the water of the cove. It wasn’t that she disbelieved what they had to say about the mass resurrection, for Betsy was corporeal proof; it was more that she was mesmerized by her little miracle, and everything else was a distraction, an annoyance.
“Betsy does not speak,” Prudence whispered glumly to her brother, her shadow a long wobbling thing on the slanted ceiling.
“She is like to be afflicted yet, for being dead as she was,” Samuel offered, “and she is cold something terrible to the touch. Her eyes are queer—did you not see?”
Prudence nodded. “Do you expect she will be well, Samuel?”
“I suppose she may, if God desire it.”
“Let us pray so,” the girl said.
“Yes.”
Once their prayers were sent off into the night, the candle was put out and the children settled into bed. Sleep proved elusive, for their minds were full and busy with the events of the day, the confusion and terror of witnessing dead people coming up out of the sea, then the immeasurable joy of having their dear sister returned. The great excitement, though, eventually turned into exhaustion and sleep came on.
Susanna took Betsy by the hand and led her from the family parlor, up the back staircase, a modest chamberstick lighting the way. Their shadows formed a restless mural, lurching and twisting along the wall. A fire was waiting in the austere chamber on the west side of the house. Susanna had told Samuel to ready it before he retired. She
added some pieces of quick-burning birch to rouse the flames, placing a heavier log of oak on top. The room retained its heat fairly well, but Betsy’s skin felt clammy, like an autumn mushroom, and Susanna could not stand the thought of her becoming sick and dying again. She determined to stay awake and feed the fire all night if need be.
“Here, love, let’s have you good and warm,” Susanna said, tucking the child in bed.
Betsy looked up with a vacant expression, her small mouth closed tightly, her pretty little face framed by the waves of golden hair that spilled out the sides of her white cap. Susanna touched her cheek. It felt damp, and cooler than a child’s face ought to feel. She leaned over the bed and hugged Betsy.
“Please be well, my dear,” Susanna pleaded. “Do not leave me again.”
So as not to tempt sleep by laying down, the woman pulled a chair up by the bed and sat holding her daughter’s hand. She had to keep the fire high. Betsy closed her eyes at last, and was breathing softly. This is how the hours passed, with the worried mother sitting there in her white bed gown, praying, watching over her sleeping daughter, hearing the intermittent crackling of firewood, and the cricket under the bed, singing to the moon.
The sound of footsteps stirred Susanna from her sleep. Her body ached from her day’s work, from containing storms of emotion, from having dozed in a stiff wooden chair with her head hanging over her bosom. The fire had burnt low and the room was cool and nearly dark. She looked immediately to the bed, which was empty.
“Betsy?”
A slight movement caught the woman’s eye and she looked to see a small half-silhouetted figure on the opposite side of the room. Betsy was naked, standing at the window, peering up at the cold white moon. The girl’s bed gown was a rumpled puddle at her feet and her cap was off, freeing her hair.
“Betsy?”
The girl turned slowly at the sound of her mother’s voice, eyes like silver coins gleaming in her shadowy face. She took a step and her mother rushed to meet her, grabbing her up. The girl felt like ice.
“Tell, dearest, what troubles you?”
Susanna hastily put the child back under the covers and hurried to stir the fire. She revived the flames, then sat on the edge of the bed. Betsy was on her back, staring upward, her pale face beaded with moisture. Her lips twisted as if some horrible indecisive gravity were trying to sculpt her a new mouth, and when she wheezed, her breath was like a winter wind rasping through dark Maine woods.
Susanna rushed into the next room and shook her son awake.
“Samuel, you must get up and go quickly to fetch Reverend Goodwin. Betsy is sick!”
The boy was out of bed in an instant and within moments had stockings and breeches and shirt on and was heading downstairs to grab his coat. Prudence followed her mother across the upper floor of the house, into the dim chamber where a small figure lay still on the bed. She did not appear to be breathing.
“No!” Susanna gasped.
Her hands flew up to muffle a sob and she fell to her knees by the bed. Betsy’s eyes were shut, her small mouth closed.
“Dearest! Betsy, my dearest!”
The little blond girl drew a quiet breath and opened her eyes. She sat up stiffly and swiveled her head to face her mother, who, with trembling lips, smiled in relief.
The horse echoed the pounding of Samuel’s heart as it galloped along the moonlit road. Pines and spruce made an amorphous tunnel around boy and beast, and here and there leaves tumbled moth-like in the cool air. The weight of the pink granite heart in his coat pocket bounced against Samuel’s thigh as he bounced in the saddle. The stone felt colder than the air.
Trees gave way to open farmland. A neighbor’s house stood off in the distance, small and vulnerable looking with the expansive sky above and the night fields surrounding. The lighted windows were dimmer than stars and the screams that came from the place had largely faded before reaching Samuel’s ears.
The boy reined the mare to a stop and turned to look out at Benjamin Fisher’s house. Were those people running outside, a number of figures heading away from the main building with another chasing after? While the half-moon provided a fair amount of light, the distance was too great, and Samuel could not be sure just what he was seeing. Whatever the case, his sister’s health was more pressing to him than any troubles the Fishers might be experiencing, and so he urged the horse forward along the track.
He passed craggy blueberry barrens, and chalky slashes of birch, and a pond that might have been a great hole for all its darkness. Musket shots sounded off in the dark somewhere, and more screams shrilled through the crisp air.
The sight of the parsonage brought Samuel a feeling of relief. There was no formal doctor in Newcomb, but Rev. Goodwin was knowledgeable about many medical problems, and had helped deliver babies on a number of occasions. Besides his skill and intellect, he was a reliable and trusted friend of Susanna Hayford, and one of the few men in the vicinity who had not tried to “solace” her after the loss of her husband. If anyone could help Betsy, it was him.
The shingled Goodwin house loomed pale in the moonlight—one of the few two-story houses in the settlement. The windows gleamed strangely and a ghostly stream of wood smoke was illuminated as it left the big center chimney and dissipated in the air. Samuel tied his mare to the front gate and approached the door.
Samuel heard shouts coming from upstairs. He stepped back and looked to a second-floor window where silhouetted figures reeled past. A man’s voice boomed, the voice of Rev. Goodwin.
“No, Jed!”
Samuel remembered seeing the minister’s son, Jedediah, coming out of the ocean earlier that day.
A man’s horrible cry followed, and then came a shrieking chorus of young Goodwins, accompanied by the reverend’s wife. Samuel shuddered and found himself backing away from the house. He was close enough to hear something stepping heavily down the front stairs, and then the sound of the door latch lifting. The boy did not remain to see what came through the door; he was back on his horse and off for home.
The road took Samuel alongside the sea, but a tract of forested land stood between him and the water. He could hear the hiss of the tide as it slid in upon the granite shore. He could smell the tide, too, the saltiness blending with the damp vegetative scent of an autumn night.
He felt exhausted, though the horse was doing the work, galloping through moonlight and falling leaves and dust from the road. The landscape was hilly and the closer Samuel got to home the closer the trees closed on either side. It was the darkness of the trees that made Abner Tilden’s naked flesh stand out so starkly, that and the moonlight. The great bearded man shambled out from the tree cover and walked numbly across the track, some yards ahead of Samuel’s horse. The animal came to an abrupt stop and snorted.
Tilden, who had died the week before, was a bulky mass of white but for streaks and patches of dark, glistening liquid. He was carrying something in one hand, something that might have been mistaken for an apple.
Samuel gasped. He sat frozen in his saddle as others emerged from the murky wall of trees. An old bony man, nude and stained with wet ribbons, young Polly Fisher, her mouth a great red smear under silvery eyes, Tolford Bird’s son Owen, unclothed and darkly splashed. They were all oblivious to their witness, or all sated, and not interested in troubling themselves with him. Up ahead, in the distance, more figures crossed the road, all carrying apples in hand, all passing to the other side, where the woods sloped down to the Atlantic. One of these was a small girl with blood in her mussed blond hair.
When the last had gone by, Samuel spurred the horse forward to a clearing in the trees through which he could see the dead descending slowly, purposefully back into the swallowing moon-glazed sea.
The boy rode on, his heart now faster than the hooves beating beneath him. He saw his own house in the distance, the windows dark but for the restless flickers of a fireplace in the upper gable-end windows of his mother’s chamber. The horse had barely stopped before he di
smounted and ran around to the door that led into the kitchen.
Samuel heard weeping coming from above and fumbled his way to the back stairs. He felt a sticky wetness on the banister as he pulled himself up. A shuddery light reached weakly to the top of the stairs, seeping out through the storage area from the doorway of his mother’s room. Samuel followed the mournful sobbing, going to the humble room where the ceiling conformed to the slant of the roof. His sister Prudence met him at the door, looking up with watery eyes.
“She . . .”
Samuel could see a figure sprawled across the bed in the dim room behind his sister.
“She took Mother’s heart.”
* * *
Frost had come in the night. It left odd patterns on the windows of houses, whorls and shapes like fish skeletons and blurry ferns. It faded the crimson of maple leaves and mellowed the yellowing foliage of birches. It sat on the fields like moonlight that forgot that it was day.
The survivors came together, sharing their tears and terrible stories about the recent hours, the events that would change and haunt them forever. There were dead to bury and mourning clothes to be prepared. There was a quiet that seemed to radiate like a mist from the dense woods that surrounded Newcomb.
Some had the presence of mind to speculate on the horror that had been visited upon them. It was suggested that the murderous returnees had not in fact been their loved ones, but emanations of an evil that spied into the villagers’ hearts so as to shape monsters in the guise of their familiar dead. This theory was furthered by accounts of those who had fought against the things, a man who shot one, and several who hacked into the attackers with bladed tools, claiming that the “dead” harbored eels and sticks and mud and damp leaves inside, instead of organs, muscle, bones and blood. Most feared the creatures would return, and quite a few villagers would eventually move away.
Samuel and Prudence Hayford were taken to live with Susanna’s cousin Jennet in Machias. But before leaving Newcomb, Samuel, acting on an impulse that was more intuitive than conceptual, and his sister, rowed out to Little Sorrow where the cranberries were on their bushes like petrified drops of blood and the wind hissed a briny song in the tall sentinel spruce.