The Hawley Book of the Dead
Page 32
Caleigh let out a fresh wail. “I want it! I want my string!” She kicked and flailed again at the mention of her string, nearly got away from me.
Nan rose, grabbed her from me like a struggling fish on a line, held her with a strength I couldn’t fathom. She took hold of Caleigh’s weeping face. “You can’t have it, do you hear? It’s too dangerous.”
Caleigh gulped, then stilled. “Can I still weave patterns?”
Nan looked to me. “Can she use other string?”
“I think so.”
“Leave her with me. We have to break the enchantment.” Caleigh’s head dropped to Nan’s shoulder. Her grip loosened, and Nan set her down on the sofa. She’d fallen into a deep sleep.
“She’ll be like this until I can disenchant her, now we’ve taken the string from her. She’ll need to stay with me.”
“But the Fetch—”
“She’ll be safer here. It’s really the Book he wants. And you. He wants one of your powers, surely. Simon Magus must have promised it to him in exchange for the Book. That’s how he retains his hold over a Fetch.”
“Rigel Voss knows I can use it to go to the past. To be with the dead. Maybe he thinks he can make me use the Book, so he can be with his wife again.”
“Maybe. But you don’t need the Book for that.”
“Of course I do!”
Nan shook her head. “Now I need to tell you the last remaining secret. You’ve always been able to go between the worlds, Book or no. When you disappear, Revelation, you slip between the worlds.”
“But I’m really just out of sight. It’s like I walk through a curtain, and I’m there, just behind it.”
“No. You stay close because we taught you to.”
I was even more baffled now.
“When you were a child, when you first began disappearing, you didn’t come back for hours, sometimes days. And when you did … well, you were not yourself. We almost lost you.” My mother had said the same thing. “So we had to teach you to stay with us, never to go deep into another world. It’s an uncommon sidhe gift, a very powerful one. It might be your ability to travel between worlds that Simon Magus promised to Rigel Voss, years before you had the Book in your possession. In any case, he doesn’t want this small fish herself.” She placed a hand on Caleigh’s flushed forehead. “He would only want her as bait for you.”
“All right.” I felt hopeless when I said it. I had no idea how I’d be able to leave my Caleigh, walk away. But I didn’t know how to break the spell. Nan did. Or said she did.
“I want to know what’s happening. Promise me! And don’t let the Reverend near her!”
“I can keep the Reverend in check. I’ve done it for more than twenty years now. The one thing that I’ll need from you is a description of the magician’s show.”
I nodded, then knelt by Caleigh, took her limp body in my arms, buried my face in her damp neck. I felt her breathe shallowly against me, felt her quick pulse. There was a cloying scent around her, like burning sugar. “The enchantment runs deep,” Nan said softly. “But I have ways to conquer it. We just need a little time.” She stroked my hair, then took me by the shoulders, lifted me up with her strong old hands.
“I’ll keep Caleigh safe, I promise you, child. Now you must go.” She kissed my cheek with cold lips. “Good luck, Revelation. Although luck is relative. Perhaps I should wish you on hlone.” I didn’t ask what on hlone was. I was probably better off not knowing.
The Reverend sat on the front steps, handing out candy. A mummy and a vampire stared at the Goo Goo Clusters in their hands. “Sweet!” said the mummy. “These are heavier than Chunkies.”
“Enjoy them, young gentlemen.”
“Yeah. We will.” And they sped off, never guessing that they’d taken candy from another kind of monster. I slipped by him, and fled with the pack of kids. The mummy slung his gauze bandages back, and the vampire shoved through a pack of younger children, girls who all seemed to be princesses or ballet dancers. One tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, and I grabbed her before she could fall. She was resplendent in a blue tutu and tiara, and had glitter dusted on her skin. “Are you a ballerina?” I asked.
“No. See the wings?” She pirouetted so I could see the transparent net wings she wore, also glittery. “I’m a fairy.” And she marched up to the door to claim her candy from the Reverend.
I felt shaky, bereft of all my girls. I couldn’t stop thinking of Caleigh, the enchantment, Simon Magus eavesdropping on our lives for years. He’d even had the audacity to hire me to write a script, disguised as Setekh the Magnificent. But my fury was mixed with a feverish dread. I felt like a mouse with a hawk circling above.
One hundred and twenty-two hours.
This wasn’t the kind of magic I was used to. In my world, I was always the one in control of all the magic tricks.
3
Mrs. Pike had brought us bags of Halloween candy, left in bowls on the kitchen table. My mom and I were picking through them for Caleigh’s favorites. I knew there would be no trick-or-treaters at Hawley Five Corners. Their parents feared the real ghosts too much.
Jolon, when he arrived, was pale and drawn. Dark stubble shadowed his face.
“Sorry I didn’t get here earlier,” he said. “It’s been a long day. Where’s Caleigh?”
“She’s at Nan’s. We thought it would be safer. Officer Bob stayed to watch the house.”
“Good. Though it would have been nice if he’d called the station.”
“Can I pour you a drink?” Dad offered.
“Love a beer, but have to get back to file my report. Just stopped to confirm that at least two of the bodies are those of the lost children. Liza Sears and Lucy Bell. But I expect they’re all there.”
“How was it possible to ID them so quickly?”
“Dental records. Fortunately for us, there was a dentist in Hawley in the twenties, and he kept his records until he died in 1952. His daughter lives in the same house now, and the records have been in boxes in the attic the whole time. It didn’t take long to come up with all the kids’ records.”
Jolon paused, sucked in a breath.
“And we found out that the guy who was staying at Candy Cane Park had a fake ID. His story was a story. He probably was your Fetch, and possibly the guy I was tracking. I was tailing someone in the woods,” he told my parents. “I gave it up when a moose got involved. I put a raft of men on him, following the trajectory I thought he’d take from where he was headed, and they came up with squat. So. It’s time for me to say ‘mea culpa,’ Reve. At least we can be sure you have twenty-four-hour surveillance now, and the woods are crawling with searchers. We’re doing all we can do.
“The one thing that might bollix us up is the weather,” Jolon went on. “Supposed to snow tonight. It snows a little, an inch or two, it might help us out, as far as fresh tracks go. Anything more, though—and they’re saying it might be half a foot or more—the state will call off the search.”
“Why is that?” my father asked.
“We’d need to assess and bring in a team that’s been certified in snow and ice search and rescue. Regulations. You’d be surprised how much of a difference even a small amount of snow makes to a search. We can’t have volunteers out there getting stuck and needing to be rescued themselves.”
I remembered the mackerel clouds of the morning, and nodded. I knew he was doing his best, but it took the heart out of me to think after less than a week the state itself could give up on my girls.
“We’ll hope for fair weather, then,” my dad said. “Dinner in five. At least have some stew with us, Jolon.”
“Got to get back. Those reports, you know.”
“Take some away, then. Dad’s boeuf bourguignon is badass.” As the twins would have said.
Jolon smiled bleakly. “Well. Okay. Eat at my desk.”
Dad piled some of the stew, redolent of meat and caramelized onions, into a container. I put it in a shopping bag with a hunk of good bread. Jolo
n took it from me and, oddly, shook my hand.
“Thanks, Reve.” His hand lingered in mine just a heartbeat longer than a friendly handshake called for.
I called Henry, then went out to do night check, accompanied by Falcon Eddy. The temperature had dropped about forty degrees since the afternoon. There was a dampness in the air, and the clouds rolled over the nearly full moon. A few snowflakes drifted down. I could see them falling through the barn light, feel them on my upturned face.
Zar and Miss May were content and sleepy. She was lying on her side in the shavings at his feet. His head drooped over her, his eyes soft and dreamy. He woke with a snort as I opened the stall door to hand in his two flakes of hay. Miss May stretched and groaned, her chocolate sides heaving as she scrambled to her feet and twinkled her short tail at us.
“They seem peaceful, so,” Eddy said.
“Sometimes I wish I was one of my animals.” I leaned against the stall wall, listened to the horse and goat munch their hay, noses nearly touching. “Eddy? Do you think he knows where they are?” I stroked Zar’s coarse mane. “If he did, I think he’d try to take me to them, somehow.”
“But, dearie, the horse did take you as far as he could, where our fella Jolon said they disappeared. The tavern cellar hole.”
I studied his craggy face. I realized he was right. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and under earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”
Eddy laughed. “Yeah, as poor bloody Hamlet says.”
“You continually surprise me, Eddy.”
“Hamlet would have been one of my kinfolk, and yours as well. Tuatha De Danann. Of the Danes.”
How did he know Nan had told me? Maybe they communicated with the hawks, like homing pigeons. “Sometime I’d like to know more about the history of the Danann.”
“The Tuatha De, as they’re more properly called. When we are less fraught, dearie, I’ll be happy to tell you. And that time will come, even though it doesn’t seem so to you now.”
I could hear the wind picking up, roaring through the trees. “We should go back.” I turned my collar up, and we plunged out the door into the bracing chill. The few random flakes had multiplied, were falling fast.
I checked my e-mail before bed. What I’d asked Henry to provide was there. A detailed description of Setekh’s show. Or Simon Magus, as I was beginning to think of him. Henry had attached photos and video clips of the show, which was called Web of Darkness. They made his connection to Caleigh seem scarily real.
Next I took up The Hawley Book of the Dead. It was warm from its meadow. The pages wouldn’t be blank this time. I was getting to know when the Book had something to tell me.
I made sure I was firmly in the chair in case I was overtaken. When I opened the Book, what I saw first was narrow blue-black writing, which then swirled to a leaden sky blackened by splotches. Dark dots on the horizon shifted closer, until I could see what caused the blackness. Crows. Hundreds of them. Then my vision cleared, and the knowing came.
It was 1862. The height of the Civil War. Just after Antietam, where more than three thousand men and boys had died on the blood-soaked ground. Revelation trudged in the ankle-deep mud, her boots seeping liquid, water mixed with blood. She shivered, tried not to think of it. Hundreds of crows picked at the bodies. She tried to shoo them away, but they just flapped a few feet to another pile of stinking flesh and blood and bone.
It was hot. Maryland in September. She longed for the cool of Hawley Forest. Her skin itched in the wool uniform she’d exchanged for her skirts months before. She’d come south, searching for the Book, and now she’d found it. Her brother Ezra had taken it, tucked in his sack with his Bible, by mistake or design, when he’d run away to join the Union army. She’d found him just before the battle, in a dirty tent in the woods nearby. He was shocked to see her, his dainty sister, in faded Union blue, her face brown from the sun, her hair cut short and uneven with a knife. He’d been loath to give up the Book; he thought it kept him safe, and maybe it had.
“I’ve killed men to get to that Book, Ez. Don’t make me do you harm.”
He’d handed it over, just as they were called to arms at dawn. She’d fought alongside Ezra; she saw him fall from the bridge over Antietam Creek. Now, the day after the battle, she’d found all the Hawley boys, broken, dead, already decomposing in the sun. Her own brother’s body bloated with creek water. She sat finally on a rock, her sword by her side. She held the Book close, took in its scent of faraway meadows, and cried until she had no tears left in her. She did not see a man in a tattered shirt creep up behind her, pull his knife, ready himself to plunge it into her back. Suddenly the smell of lilacs swirled heavy around them. It made the man pause to sniff the air, and in that moment Revelation rose and swung her sword. It hit the man’s thigh, cut deep. She pulled it away, bloody, then drove it into his chest.
I came up from the vision gasping. Even with a face dirty and swollen with tears and grief and rage, it was plain to see that this Revelation was the woman in the portrait. And the sword was the very sword from the Perpetual Tag Sale. Its jewels had flashed dazzling, even through the muck and blood. I stayed in the present long enough to take in that knowledge, then sank into the Book, into the past again.
In Hawley, a boy walked down a road. Jordan Sears walked down North Road with a mission. Sent by his father to drive home two cows bought from Martin Klausen. But Jordan, sixteen and willful, wasn’t planning on going to Klausen’s farm, or on driving cows at all from then on. Or going home, for that matter. He was all aflame with war fever, had made a plan with Luke Miller and Del Hanson to meet on the road and walk to Pittsfield to join the militia. March south to the battlefields with a company of men. Wear the Northern blue. Carry a rifle on his shoulder. Come back a man himself.
He was walking past the charred remains of Joy Tavern, which had burned the year before. He saw smoke, a big plume of it, rising from the place. It transfixed him. The smoke had a womanly shape, soft in the right places, streaming hair, and white arms beckoning him. He walked toward the smoke woman. He could not help it. Walked straight into those shifting, misty arms. He put his head on her breast and knew no more until he awoke in the same spot.
He rose and splashed his face with water from the stream. He walked to meet Luke and Del, thinking he’d been asleep for an hour or so. But they were not at the crossroads. He walked to Luke’s farm. Luke’s mother saw him from her window, ran to him, held him to her, asked for news of Luke. Was he on the road home, too?
“But I came to find Luke.”
She looked at him as if he were addled, placed a hand on his brow. “Honey, Luke’s in Virginia, last we heard, near six months ago. Your mama is worried sick. Three years gone and no word! Shame on you, boy!”
“But … Luke went without us?” How could Luke get there since they’d made their plan yesterday? How could he himself have slept for three years?
Mrs. Miller gave him another worried glance. “Luke signed up in 1862. Ran away with Del Hanson, and we thought you went with them. The war’s over, now. Where have you been?” But he didn’t know, couldn’t say.
Luke never did come home to Hawley, nor did Del. Two years later, Jordan married Loreen Wilton. They prospered, but had no children. In 1869, Loreen died after a short illness. In 1871, Jordan married Revelation Dyer, his own cousin and an old maid at thirty-five, although a great beauty still. Revelation was eight years his senior. She kept her own name. It was whispered that she’d fought in the war, dressed as a man. It was also whispered she’d bewitched Jordan. She bore him a child before he died in a sawmill accident, a girl, who bore in due time another girl. That girl’s parents died in the Spanish influenza epidemic that carried so many away. Her name was changed to her mother’s, to Hannah, when she went to live with her Sears cousins. But she’d been christened Revelation, after her brave grandmother.
Hawley Five Corners—November 1, 2013
The Day of the Dead
1
The sky was clear, the driveway was plowed. My dad told me of all the changes that had occurred while I slept. “They say we’ll either have a nor’easter with lashings of rain, a fierce ice storm, or more snow today. Nathan’s gone to town for water and batteries. Jolon said we might be trapped if the storm’s as bad as they say.”
I hadn’t planned on more bad weather. “Dad, do you think you and Mom could go to Nan’s, check on Caleigh? Make sure they’re okay? Falcon Eddy can stay with me. And bring Nan this.” I gave him the envelope with Henry’s photos.
“Sure. We can be back before the storm hits.”
But they couldn’t. It turned out no one could. Not in time.
2
The birds flew all morning and into the afternoon, darkening the sky just as they had in my vision. Crows black as the bottoms of cast-iron pots, looking greasy as if they’d been basted and half-cooked. Their squawks and screeches sounded like children arguing, like old men watching sports on TV, grumbling and murching. I felt the birds, heard them all around the house, like a plague.
Nathan called to tell me he was heading to Northampton, since all the water and batteries in Elmer’s had been bought up on Halloween. A brooding restlessness came over me. I was unsettled by the mobs of birds swooping by the windows. Or the coming storm. I wasn’t sure which.