The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  “Like I told you, I found your tracks and theirs leaving the drive, going down South Road.”

  “And then what? What happened to the girls’ tracks?” Then I remembered I’d nearly ripped his head off when he told me the first time. “Just tell me once more what you saw. Exactly. I promise I won’t blow a gasket.”

  He looked to the sky again, maybe for guidance. “At the edge of the tavern cellar hole, their tracks were … just gone. I can’t tell you anything more, and I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “There was no sign of them at all, after that?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

  “No. Sometimes a trail is disturbed. Or a sign is muddled by time or other tracks. But usually I can pick it up again after a bit. Not this time, though. Their tracks were clear as anything, then, well, they were gone.”

  “You’re saying that two girls and two horses just vanished, a mile from their home?”

  Jolon scuffed a tattered boot in the dirt. “I’m telling you what the tracks showed, no more, no less. I know it’s not what you want to hear.”

  “How could that be?”

  “I know it sounds unlikely.” His eyes sought mine. “Reve, I didn’t want to tell you, but this … this beats me. I honestly don’t know what happened. I can’t make any sense of it.”

  But I thought I could.

  2

  Caleigh grabbed her pumpkin bag for loot and was ready. She skipped to the SUV, bouncing in her excitement, getting so tangled in her wizard robes I had to unwind her twice before she could hoist herself in. Officer Bob followed in the Hawley police cruiser while Falcon Eddy drove us through the beauty of the day, the trees glowing in lemony afternoon light. It was like driving through a medieval church, with arches of maple rather than stone. Golden and airy. I half-expected bells to sound again in those cathedrals of the forest. But the only music was birdsong.

  As we passed the first houses in town and the sidewalks began, small witches and action heroes and princesses appeared. A vampire darted out of a green house, cape flaring behind him. All carried bags or pumpkin-shaped buckets for their gleanings, the candy bars and gum and marshmallow ghosts that would be waiting for them at each house. Caleigh whooped, “Let’s start here!” I wanted desperately to run to Nan’s first. But what if I was wrong? I didn’t want to ruin Caleigh’s Halloween for a fool’s errand. Doubt and hope warred in my brain while we jostled along in a phalanx of Iron Men and mermaids, ladybugs and werewolves. I escorted Caleigh down all the sidewalks in town, with Eddy a few paces behind, looking like he was in costume, too, with his bow, breeks, and quiver. If only I’d been smarter, Caleigh’s cool sisters would be slinking beside her, like an honor guard. Not her uncool mother, a guy wielding medieval weaponry, and the police cruiser that crawled along behind us.

  Finally we reached Nan’s house. The driveway was occupied by the Reverend John Steel’s Cadillac, and by a little ghost, a tiger with his tail dragging, a ballerina, and a Shrek. The air was still, charged with the sweet, faintly rotten scent of dying leaves. But even though I felt not the slightest hint of a breeze, the PHINEAS COBB sign creaked on the rusty chain it was suspended from. The curtains of the narrow windows lining the second story were drawn, giving the house an inward look, like it was contemplating something unpleasant.

  I struck the brass clapper, and the Reverend Steel answered the door, in shirtsleeves rather than the white suits that seemed like a costume he wore every day, the costume of a southern gentleman. Sweat was trickling down my neck, and I was wearing a tank top. It was hot. I don’t know how the kids in furry costumes or big hunks of plastic, or even Caleigh in her wizard robes, could bear it. No wonder the Reverend had shed his jacket.

  “Why, Miz Maskelyne!” His “Miz” was drawled, different in inflection than the clipped Yankee word. He looked startled, but I couldn’t tell if it was simply his rabbity eyes, or if he was not pleased to see me. “And young Caleigh!”

  “Where’s Nan? I need to see her,” I demanded.

  “She’s right in the parlor. She’ll be glad of some company. I have door duty, and it has been quite hectic. You’ve come at a rather busy time,” he admonished me, as if I had no right to bring Caleigh trick-or-treating to her own great-grandmother’s house. But then he seemed to remember his manners. “Do have a treat, both of you,” he said, and thrust a wicker basket at us, brimming with Reese’s and Almond Joy as well as moon pies and Goo Goo Clusters. “I particularly recommend the Goo Goo Clusters.” Caleigh stood on tiptoe to choose a moon pie, then dashed in to see Nan. Falcon Eddy followed her.

  I was about to slide by the doorkeeper, too, but something held me back. I realized I’d never seen the Reverend without his jacket before, or in full sunlight. His skin was luminous, like Nan’s when she held The Hawley Book of the Dead. And on his wrists curled blue tattoos of snakes.

  I staggered and he reached out to steady me, but I shrank from his touch. “You! You …” I faltered. His smallness, his white skin, the shape of his head—he had seemed creepily familiar to me all the time I’d known him. Now I finally knew why. Those same blue snakes had crawled through my nightmares.

  The Reverend was the electrified man I’d seen in the university lab, twenty-four years ago.

  I looked into his eyes, and they were as black as the bottom of a deep well.

  “Here’s Miz Maskelyne, come to visit again!” He pushed me forward into the parlor. Before he turned back to answer the door, I swear he hissed at me.

  “What a surprise!” Nan rose and brushed my cheek with her rough hands. She looked the same, her face composed, her braid neat, her red plaid shirt pressed. I couldn’t believe that she was living in the same house with such a creature as the Reverend. I scanned the room for Caleigh. She was trying to coax a reluctant goshawk onto her shoulder. Falcon Eddy was nowhere to be seen. Nan must have sent him out to the mews.

  “Reve, you look so pale!”

  “Nan, you have to tell me the absolute truth. I have to know everything, starting with him.” I pointed to the door. My hand trembled.

  The goshawk fled from Caleigh. The bird landed on Nan’s shoulder, its black barred chest ruffled in alarm, its rusty eye indignant. Caleigh shrugged, then busied herself counting and arranging her candy.

  “You mean the Reverend?” Nan’s eyes had become as searing as the bird’s.

  Could something so unnatural be a man of the cloth? “I saw him,” I whispered, although Caleigh would probably hear anyway. “Years ago. At Bay State. In the underground labs. I saw his tattoos. They were doing terrible things to him. Nan, what is he?”

  The goshawk flapped its wings. I jumped, and Nan shooed the bird off her. It let out a cry like a mad monkey and flew to its perch. “You were in the tunnels?” She fell back in her deep chair. Her face was pinched, pale.

  “What the hell was going on down there?”

  She quivered like one of her hawks readying itself for flight.

  “Nan … you have to tell me!”

  “All right!” she exclaimed. “You probably should have known years ago. The Reverend Steel is one of us. And not.”

  “What do you mean, one of us? What does that mean? I know you put some kind of spell on Mom, so she wouldn’t tell me. Did you disappear the twins, too? I was stupid not to think of it before. Just tell me where they are!”

  “I wish I knew.” I scanned her old, defeated face. She was telling the truth. “I’ve done only what was necessary to protect you all.”

  A sudden horrible idea smote me. “If you know they’re dead, you have to tell me!”

  She reached for me, a craggy hand open—a plea for absolution, maybe. “I don’t think they’re dead. I think they’re with the sidhe.”

  “Shee? What the hell is a Shee?”

  She raised up the hand that had entreated me a moment before. Suddenly imperious, she looked as regal as she did when hunting with her birds.

  “Hush.
One must be careful when speaking of the sidhe. There were reasons I didn’t tell you much, you or my daughters. I suppose I have only myself to blame for your ignorance. I wish I had chosen differently now, but I thought I was acting for the best. To answer your question, the sidhe are the descendants of the Tuatha De Danann. Us, in other words. The Dyers, and others.”

  “Others? How many are there?”

  “More than you might think.”

  A shiver started in my spine. “And you think Grace and Fai are where, exactly?”

  “The same place I went, in 1923. And which I returned from. It’s not precisely under the ground, or a mirror image of this world, but close enough. I think the twins might be there, with our ancestors.”

  “This place, it’s in the forest?”

  “There, but on a different plane. We call it Tir na nÓg.”

  “The ghosts of our ancestors are there?”

  “Not ghosts,” Nan said. “They are as real as you or I. Think of it as a kind of heaven. We go there when we die. Like the Rapture for the Christians, our bodies and all. Unless we are taken in, while we’re still alive. To protect us.”

  “Then how will I ever get them back?” I sucked in a sob. In another moment I’d be weeping with frustration.

  “Hush, now, girl. Don’t let your feelings stop up your ears!” She clutched me by the shoulders. “The story is a long and involved one. I have to figure how to tell it, and you have to figure how to understand. Now listen to me closely. The story does begin, in a way, with the Reverend. He is an immortal, and that fact was … discovered. They were performing tests on him in that lab. But he escaped. The Reverend survived the testing, and much worse. I was charged with keeping him safe, after what happened in the tunnels.”

  All the pieces seemed to fall together, like one of our family jigsaw puzzles. “They were trying to create immortals?”

  “Some think they more than tried. But the beginning of this story is long in the past, hundreds of years it was. The Tuatha De Danann had four treasures. The Sword, the Spear, the Cauldron, and the Stone. The Reverend stole them, and they were scattered ever after. He was directed in this theft by a magician named Simon Magus. For their crime, they were made immortal.”

  My head was spinning. “All right,” I said. “Let’s rewind. What happened to the treasures?”

  “We don’t really know.”

  “Who exactly makes up the we you’re talking about?”

  “The sidhe that are left. They found me, after the incident in Hawley. They taught me what they could. Though the deepest secrets had always been kept by the Dyer women, and those secrets died with my mother. But there’s a network, of sorts, of the scattered sidhe. You know some of them.”

  “Falcon Eddy?” I guessed.

  “Yes. And your Wesley.”

  “Wesley Knowles?” She nodded. The 113-year-old caretaker of the Bijoux.

  “Las Vegas has been the home of many sidhe families. Because of the stage magic, they can hide in plain sight.”

  “Families?”

  “Yes. Like the Dyers. There are places in which the fabric that separates the worlds is thin. Those are the places we feel most at home. Hawley is only one such place. I’m in contact with many of the families, though I kept most of it from your mother, and all of it from you. So you could live in this world well. Better than I could. So you wouldn’t be burdened with it all. The Book, the treasures, any of it. I tried to pretend it was all in the past, a set of legends. I can see now I was wrong.”

  “But these treasures—”

  “The treasures themselves carried many protective spells. If anyone attempted to use them for gain, that person would be punished with immortality, and the treasures would be scattered. The Reverend knew all this. Now he suffers. To pay for his sins he must always remain in this world, never move on. Simon Magus, as well. And the treasures? They’ve never surfaced since the Reverend stole them. All we really know is that they’re not together.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “If they were together, things would be different.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “No one knows that either, anymore. But the link between the worlds, the human and the sidhe, is strained now. More fragile, unbalanced.”

  “But, Nan,” Caleigh chimed in. I’d forgotten about Caleigh. “Everybody wants to be immortal. It’s cool.” While I hoped she was transfixed by her candy, she’d listened in on everything.

  “It’s just as well she knows,” Nan told me. “I needn’t make the same mistake again.” She turned to Caleigh, beckoned her. Caleigh came and sprawled on the wide arm of Nan’s chair, sucking disgusting blue liquid out of a wax bottle. Nan placed an arm around her. “It is more painful than you can imagine to outlive your friends, your loves. It has gotten the Reverend into more scrapes than you can imagine, child. I’ve lasted nine decades, and believe me, I’m ready to move on. And don’t forget, we know we do move on, to another kind of life.”

  “All right. Let’s suppose the twins are in this … parallel world. What can I do to bring them back?”

  “The danger to them must be gone. Simon Magus and his Fetch must be defeated.”

  “But how do we do that?”

  “Simon’s a web weaver. That’s how he works his magic. You have to find a way to destroy his web.”

  “Hey, Mom, you know what?” Caleigh piped up, her face eager, her lips blue from the waxy syrup she’d been sipping. “You know Setekh the Magnificent? He’s a web weaver, too.”

  “What about this Setekh?” Nan’s voice was taut with suspicion.

  “He’s a magician in Las Vegas,” Caleigh informed her. “Mom knows him.”

  Setekh. Before Henry got me the gig writing for him, I’d never had anything to do with him. It was true he made my skin crawl, but how was it possible Setekh the Magnificent could be behind all this?

  Nan narrowed her clouded eyes at Caleigh. “Tell us more about this magician, child.”

  She pulled out her string, shining white in the gloaming. “He gave me this. He taught me to use it.”

  “Caleigh! You never told me!”

  She glared at me. “You never asked.”

  “I thought you’d gotten it at school. You know you’re not supposed to take things from strangers!” I was yelling. The idea that my Caleigh had anything to do with the oily magician made me feel sick.

  “He wasn’t a stranger! He was nice!”

  Nan whipped the string out of Caleigh’s hand, started a pattern, then dropped it like a thread of fire.

  “Just as I thought. It’s enchanted.”

  “My string!” Caleigh dove after it.

  “Don’t touch that!” Nan pulled Caleigh away, threw her toward me. I held her while she cried for her string. Nan reached for her falconer’s glove, drew it on, picked up the string. “He can sense us through it, so you mustn’t touch it. This Setekh is Simon Magus. The magician commands your Fetch.

  “It was Simon Magus who gave the Reverend up to the government. But it’s really the Book he wants. He’s been searching for it for many years. You see, there’s an ancient connection between the Book and the treasures. With the Book, one may summon them. Simon Magus must have discovered years ago that you were the next Keeper. But you escaped his Fetch, without even knowing you did so. He’s sent the Fetch again for you now. For you, and the Book.”

  I thought of all we’d been through. Everything for a lump of paper and disappearing ink. “Why can’t I just give it to him? This could all be over.”

  She shook her head. “No one but a Revelation can command the Book. And the legend is that only a Revelation can use the Book to summon the treasures in times of great trouble. He needs you, too.”

  “So that’s what Simon Magus wants? That’s why he sent Voss after me? So I would summon the treasures?”

  “Yes. Where is the Book?”

  I shifted Caleigh, lax and weak from crying, to one arm, plunged the other into t
he Petroglyph bag. “It’s here.” I lifted it out, warm and fragrant as always.

  “You haven’t used it!” The panic in Nan’s voice shocked me.

  “Well …”

  “Revelation, I told you not to. All my own troubles started when I tried to use the Book, without knowing how to. He could sense it, its power, held by hands that couldn’t shield it.”

  I remembered how it had felt each time I used the Book. I remembered how I’d seen a magician in it. Simon Magus, Setekh, whatever he called himself. It was him, I knew it now.

  “Nan, I think I have been shielding it, even if I didn’t know it. Every time I’ve opened it, I’ve disappeared. I think the disappearing shields it and me. If he knew who I was at Bay State, how did I escape? It must have been because of the disappearing. And he knew about me before I even found the Book. He must have known all the years we were in Las Vegas. It’s why he was there in the first place. It’s why he gave Caleigh the string.” My hand stroked Caleigh’s hair. Her sobs had subsided to whimpers. “I think the Book itself has been teaching me how to use it. Nan, I’ve seen him in it.”

  “When you’ve seen him, where is he?”

  “In the mountains near Las Vegas. But, Nan, if he knew who I was all this time, why didn’t he try again to send me for the Book, long before this?”

  “I suppose he was waiting until you had the most to lose. Don’t forget, he’s immortal. He has all the time in the world.”

  “He has all the time in the world … but he can’t use the Book without me.” When Jeremy and I started our act in Las Vegas, the magician Setekh showed up on the Strip around the same time. He’d waited nine years. As Nan said, he could afford to bide his time. Until what? Until I was married, had children. Had everything to lose. Then he killed Jeremy. To create my time of great trouble.

  But something else occurred to me. “Why hasn’t he gotten it before this? Way before?” I thought of all the women in my dreams who had hidden the Book, all the Revelations. Then I had a flash of understanding. “It doesn’t do any good to just keep hiding the Book. I need to learn to use it. That’s the only way to fight him, to keep it from him. That’s why he couldn’t get it before. All the Revelations in an unbroken chain knew how to use this Book.” I held it as close as I held Caleigh. “It’s ignorance that we can’t afford. He found out everything about us because I didn’t know how to keep him from it. That’s why he was able to enchant Caleigh with the string.”