The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  I ran down the stairs to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, the cupboards. I closed them all again, not finding what I sought. Thinking it might be Jolon, I picked up the phone and called him.

  The snow had nearly stopped, but at least a foot had been dumped on the forest in the night. Jolon told me the wider search was off, at least for the time being. “I’ll still be going out, but the state boys will decide on calling in a snow-certified team. It’s drifted too deep in the woods. I’m sorry, but we’ll have to wait, for them or for a melt.”

  “You didn’t find anything last night? Any sign of Voss, or … anything?”

  He puffed out a breath. “No. Nothing.”

  “I guess that doesn’t surprise me.” I was desolate, heart heavy with the feeling that I’d never see Grace and Fai again. And I missed Caleigh fiercely.

  “Did you see the sky?” he asked.

  “The crows, you mean?”

  “Crows? I don’t know about crows, but you can see the storm coming.”

  I looked out and saw only trails and clumps of crows, straggling in flight, landing on the barn roof, the fences.

  “There’s a storm of birds here. Like Hitchcock. Who was that actress? Tippi Hedren? Was she ever in anything else?” My mind ran to non sequiturs. I didn’t want to think of what was happening. What had happened.

  “I’ll batten down the hatches here, then come to you. I should be there in an hour or so. The storm’s going to be bad, Reve. Bob’s still at Nan’s, so I can’t send him out to you, and even Mrs. Pike’s old guys probably aren’t out on their Ski-Doos.”

  “Wait, what? What about Mrs. Pike?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? She’s responsible for the crew of old guys following you around in the woods. She gives the rallying cry. Calls around and tells them where you’re riding.”

  “Mrs. Pike?”

  “Her husband’s the ringleader. Remy Pike.”

  “No!”

  “Mrs. Pike’s a deep one.”

  I contemplated this, and looked out again at the storm of crows. It was so much like The Birds. “But what about Tippi Hedren?”

  “I don’t think this will be a night for scary movies. Reality will be scary enough.”

  I called Nan, for the third time that day. “How’s Caleigh?”

  “She woke up for a bit, but she still won’t eat. Now she’s asleep again.”

  “That’s not like her.”

  “She misses her string, and no other will do. She’s still enchanted.”

  “Did you get the photos?”

  “Yes. They’re very … helpful. I think they’ll make all the difference.”

  “Are Mom and Dad still there?”

  “No, they’re headed back to you. But it’s icing here now.”

  “I’ll call them. Make sure Caleigh … just make sure she knows I called.”

  I tried my dad’s cell next, and got a network busy signal. I punched in their landline in Williamstown. My mom answered.

  “I’m so glad you made it home!”

  “We just got here. The roads are bad.… I don’t think we can get back to you.”

  I thought of Route 2, winding and treacherous between Williamstown and Hawley. “No, don’t even try. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. It hasn’t started here yet.”

  “Is Jolon with you?” Mom asked.

  “No, but he’s coming. And Falcon Eddy’s here, Nathan should be back soon. I’ll have plenty of company.” I heard the line crackle, cut out, then Mom saying, before their phone went out completely, “Stay safe, Reve. Stay inside.”

  But of course I couldn’t. I had the animals to consider. I pulled on a jacket, slogged through the snow to the barn, arms over my head to fend off crows. They were flying low, cawing so my ears seemed filled with their talk. The air smelled of ozone and sap. I bolted all the barn doors, gave Zar and Miss May their grain, topped up their water, gave them extra buckets. It was early to feed again, but it felt ominous enough that I thought it might be too difficult to get out later. The sky was slatey, the clouds rumpled like tossed bedsheets. The weather forecasters didn’t seem to know what the storm would bring—snow, hail, rain—it could be any or all of those, in any combination.

  I thought of Grace and Fai—could they still be out in this? One hundred and forty-four hours. Almost a week. Where could they be?

  The suggestion that they were being hidden by the Tuatha De Danann seemed laughable again. So I did laugh. The sound echoed in the barn, mocking me. There was no one to hear. Eddy was busy with the generator. I could feel the hundred-year storm inside me, no choice but to ride it out. The prickly feeling that someone was watching swept over me. I felt a human presence, almost breathing nearby. I froze.

  “Eddy?” I whispered. But my voice was lost in a deafening crack of thunder. I flinched when the scent of lilacs swirled around me. I ran. Overhead, the sky was purple. The crows had fled. The snow had begun again, huge wet flakes big as half-dollars. I ran for the house as marble-sized rounds of ice began pelting me.

  I went to the lean-to near the kitchen that housed the generator. Eddy was bent over it. He’d stripped his shirt off in spite of the cold. He was swearing as well as sweating. He looked up when I shoved the door open.

  “Oh. Sorry for the language, dearie. I can’t get this thing to turn over.”

  “Good thing Nathan is bringing batteries for the flashlights, then. And water.” No water in the house without power to run the pump, unless Falcon Eddy had some success with the generator. “If he makes it back at all.” At least we had enough wood to last through the winter, big storm or no. We’d have heat courtesy of the woodstoves and fireplaces.

  “I’ll get this going if it kills me.” He gave the side of the generator a gentle kick. The reverberation of boot on metal was echoed by another peal of thunder.

  “Eddy, you’ve been out here for a while?”

  “Wish I hadn’t been. Why?”

  “I just thought … Never mind. It’s starting to snow. And hail. I’ll just be in the kitchen, okay?”

  “And I suppose I’ll be out here.”

  “I’m making a big pot of beef stew for us all, in case the power goes. We can heat it on the woodstove.”

  “It wouldn’t have Guinness in it, now?”

  “It could.”

  “That’s fine!” I could see in his face the boy he’d been.

  “I just hope Nathan and Jolon make it.”

  “If they don’t, then more for us.”

  That was one way of looking at it. I closed the door against the cold, glad at least that I could brighten Eddy up with thoughts of stew.

  I started chopping onions and listened for Nathan and the SUV, the whine of Jolon’s sled, the thump and roar of the generator starting up. Any sign that soon a door would open and one of the men would rescue me from the fear that tingled up my spine, lodged in my brain like a prehistoric animal. I chopped and braised and poured and stirred, all the time pushing back the panic. I resisted the urge to go for the Book. I didn’t need it anymore. I knew, had known since the not-quite-silent barn. No matter what the Book told me, I knew it was Voss, my Fetch, coming for me.

  3

  The darkness fell early. In spite of the storm, the power still held. Snow fell thick and fast outside the window. I never did hear the whump of the generator, and just before the murky gloaming sank to full blackness outside, Eddy stuck his head in the door.

  “Can’t get the wretched thing going. It wouldn’t hurt to rustle up all the candles and flashlights.”

  “Already did. What we have is on the kitchen table. But I’m still hoping for Nathan.”

  He looked out at the purple sky, voiced my fear. “Be a small miracle if Nathan can get up the hill in this. Even with the four-wheel drive. Snow’s coming down hard. As much as a foot an hour, now.”

  “At least Jolon should be here any minute.”

  “Hope so. Haven’t heard a sled, though. Only some big, cracking sounds. Like the trees
being yanked up by the roots.” He looked worried. I remembered he lived in the desert, wasn’t used to this kind of storm. I’d heard the cracking sounds, too, as if cannons were being set off in Hawley Forest.

  “This house has stood up to big storms before this. Two hundred years of them. But … Eddy?”

  He turned back to me.

  “You don’t think anyone could be out there, do you?”

  “In this?”

  “When I was out in the barn, I thought maybe someone was there.”

  “Did you see something?”

  I shook my head. “Just had a feeling.”

  He smiled, patted the quiver full of bristling arrows at his side. “Nothing I can’t take care of, dearie. I’ll have a look, though, before the storm gets any worse. Just so you won’t worry yourself.” He grabbed his coat off a hook, shrugged into it, slipped the quiver back into place.

  “Back soon.”

  I hoped he would be.

  Caleigh woke with a start. She could feel him in the string she held, the man who was coming for her mother. Not her good white string, blue instead. But she wove the pattern called “The Star” with it. And she saw him clear.

  Her Nan was by her. “Is the man there now?”

  “He’s in the barn.”

  “All right, love, it’s time to begin.” Nan took the blue string from Caleigh’s fingers, replaced it with her good white string. Caleigh sighed with pleasure to hold her own string again. Her fingers started working it, without her thinking. Her Nan started the same pattern in blue.

  In a theater on the Las Vegas Strip, a matinee performance was about to begin. The audience rustled and sighed, flipped through their programs to read about the magic show called Web of Darkness.

  The stew was bubbling fragrant on the stove. I washed and tore lettuce for a salad. I’d made enough food for three men and one woman with no appetite to live on for days if need be. If any of them made it back. I picked up the phone to call Jolon, but heard only flat silence from the receiver. The landline was out. I unplugged my cell phone from its charger, thinking there would at least be a cell signal. But when the display lit up, there was not even one bar. I walked all over the house, checking for a signal. Nothing in the parlor or on the second floor. I heard the blasts of wind howling round the house. On the third-floor landing, I made out one faint bar, punched Jolon’s number, but got only a network busy notice. I tried Nathan’s number with the same result.

  I was about to head back down when I stopped. I’d set up a reading nook on the landing, an armchair and a lamp under the one round window, now ink blue in the failing light. Caleigh’s At the Back of the North Wind was sprawled open beneath the chair; a piece of blue string was coiled near it. I picked the string up, tucked it in my pocket.

  The landing was usually one of the warmest spots in the house, heat rising as it does. Today it had an icy chill. The door of my office was open a crack, and as I moved toward it, I felt more cold air pouring through the gap. I opened it wider and saw the French doors gaping, the curtains flapping lazily like wet ghosts, saturated with the weight of melted snow and ice. The smell of lilacs was almost overwhelming. I turned on the lights, and they flickered, but that was all. Only the faint light of stormy dusk filled the room.

  I ran to the widow’s walk, looking for some sign, a reason the doors might be open. They had been locked, and no one had cause to be up on the third floor at all. The darkness was nearly impenetrable. The widow’s walk was buried in knee-deep snow, not one indentation to suggest a footstep. But my heart pounded anyway. I looked out over what I could still see of Hawley Five Corners. The pitched silhouette of the church steeple, the gables of the barn. No figures in the fast-falling snow. No Falcon Eddy. The wind seemed to be tearing at the trees, rending them, but the house was strangely still around me. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

  I stepped back to close the storm out, and just then I heard a pop. It was a sound I knew intimately, one that had nothing to do with the storm. The sound I’d heard a hundred times, every time Jeremy and I performed Defying the Bullets, his final trick on this earth. The pop of a gun being fired.

  Time seemed to hold me in its rough grip. I tried to hurry, to race down the stairs, leap into my boots, grab a flashlight, but every motion was as slow and ungainly as nightmare flight. The truth was, I didn’t really want to know the particulars of that gunshot. I hoped it was my imagination, a cracking tree limb, a branch bowed and snapped by the weight of snow, deceiving me. But the place around my heart that had been hollowed out by the shot that killed Jeremy, that place knew. Even before I got to the barn, snow pelting my face, sinking into the downy stuff up to my thighs. Before I saw the open door, the trail of dark liquid. Before smelling not the iron scent of blood, but the heavy purple one of lilacs, before I saw Eddy’s bulk lying in the aisle. I knew I was alone with the man who’d killed Maggie and Jeremy. The man who wanted to kill my daughters.

  I fell to my knees, grabbed Eddy’s wrist to check for his pulse. Nothing. I remembered something I’d seen on TV, licked my palm and held it to his open lips. No breath cooled it. He would go to Tir na nÓg. If it existed.

  Then I saw the yellow square of a Post-it note stuck to his parka. On it was scrawled a smiley face. Below the smiley face were the words Courtesy of Rigel Voss in looping copperplate. When I saw that, the fear that had been kicking behind my ribs for hours subsided. A weltering sadness swept over me instead. I’d resisted Falcon Eddy, tried to dislike him. But here he’d given his life to try to protect me. I’d miss him calling me “dearie.” I’d miss his big presence in our lives. Another thing for Rigel Voss to answer for.

  I sat back on my heels, swept the beam of the flashlight around the barn. No sign of another human presence. I felt alone but for the animals. I heard the swish of Zar’s tail, the bump of Miss May scratching her head against the doorjamb, Zar’s nervous hooves pacing the stall. I switched on the lights, flooding the barn with a nearly miraculous brightness. I couldn’t care less whether I was tipping Voss off to my location. Just knowing he was here for me, finally, filled me with power, and a kind of righteousness. This was my house, my barn, my town, my home. My life. He’d taken enough from me. I was damned if he was going to take more. He’d never have the Book. He’d never have me.

  I slid Zar’s stall door open, stepped in. Gave him a hug round the solid muscle of his neck, patted Miss May’s head. “I’m sorry, kids. There’s nothing I can do about Eddy right now. You’ll have to be okay. I have to leave you, but I’ll be back soon.” I kissed Zar’s nose, remembering those were the last words Eddy had said to me: “Back soon.” I leaned into Zar’s neck, smelled his good horse smell. “If I don’t come back, someone will find you. They’ll be here after the storm. If I don’t come back …” I kissed him again and looked into his kind eyes. I threw him three more flakes of hay, and left it at that.

  I slogged back into the snow, bolted the big slider, trudged back to the house. It was warmer now than when I’d come out. The snow had stopped, and flashes of what looked like lightning lit the sky to the west. For all I knew, Voss had a gun pointed at me, or was lying in wait for me inside the house. But I didn’t think so. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to play out, and somehow I knew it. It all became clear to me in that moment, what I needed to do to keep myself alive, to end the craziness, to get my daughters safely back.

  He hadn’t been in the barn. He wasn’t in my home. I didn’t need the absence of tracks in the snow to tell me. I didn’t need the Book. I felt for him with my mind. He wasn’t in the Warriner house. That left the church. He would wait until I was beside myself with fear, and then he would come for me. I knew that because I could feel his thoughts now, too. But I kept my own from him as I played the waiting game. Let him think I was terrified.

  The lightning flashed again, and rolling thunder followed. I counted. The best I could tell, the lightning strikes were about five miles off. The kitchen lights flickered, went out. I was
weary from sporadic, nightmare-laced sleep for days on end. It suddenly seemed like years instead of days since I’d slept soundly.

  I needed to stay awake, in control. The barrage of storms, first the heavy snow, now the sudden warming, the lashing rain and lightning, had been blasting Hawley for hours. No phone, lights sporadic, if I was lucky. But I couldn’t think of any of it. I had to stay alert for the coming man. It wasn’t so bad knowing he would come, and that I’d have to kill him or be killed. But at that moment I hated having to stay awake for it.

  I drew all the shades in the house. I scooped coffee, poured water I’d collected in all the vases in the house when it seemed certain the power would go. I heated water on the stove and thanked God for the miracle of propane. I didn’t think about anything beyond the steps for making coffee. I went through the motions. I didn’t think about Voss. When the coffee was ready, I poured some and took it like medicine, leaning against the counter in the dark. Listening to the storm howl, I felt more alone than ever in my life. I reached for the Book, near me as always. I opened it and fell toward Jeremy.

  This time, instead of the Sea Road, I landed on the catwalk of the Bijoux, far above the stage. Jeremy was below me. He didn’t wear his mackintosh this time, but the elegant white jacket that meant we were performing the show I liked the least, Restoration. Jeremy played the great magician Robert-Houdin, while I was the mystery woman, his muse. The show itself was fine. The only problem with it, from my point of view, was the last illusion, the trick called Without a Net. The illusion that Jeremy thought was my finest, but which terrified me all the same. And here I was again, at the top of the catwalk, without even the harness our prop master Dan used to control my leap, my flight, while I controlled the disappearing and the stunning restoration the show was named for. Not only was I without the harness, when I looked back, I found I was standing on a tiny square of the catwalk that seemed to have disengaged from the rest. A platform hanging in air, with no way down. My heart nearly stopped from fear.