by Alex Gordon
It was a dank shell now. After he had discarded the furnishings and burned the artwork, Cateman had given the building over to his men for use as a break room, had even installed a sink, a toilet, a larger refrigerator. But after a few days, they had refused to set foot in the place. Voices, they said they heard. A man, singing.
So the place had sat, unused and unusable, until that summer, when James had gone poking around where he shouldn’t have, his Gideon nerves driving him like a hound on the scent.
Master, there’s something underneath the shed. He had run up the three flights to Cateman’s office, his face red, breath coming in gasps. Steps. Leading down. The words echoed in Cateman’s head, as clear as if the man who had spoken them stood before him now. Poor James, so eager to earn extra money for the holidays. So eager to help. And unlike his sister, Constance, so willing to believe whatever his Master told him, and to forget all that had happened thirty-seven years before.
So Cateman ordered Petersbury to board up the windows and fashion a trapdoor to cover the hole in the floor. The man had done a slapdash job, truth be told, but carpentry had never been the poor fool’s talent. That skill with wood had resided with another . . .
Leaf stood still for a time, lost in memories that wiser men would have long since buried. Then he stepped inside and pulled the door closed after him. Shut off the light so that no one in the house, especially Jorie, would see it and take it into their damned-fool head to investigate. The sudden darkness hampered him for a moment or two, but then he adjusted, his witch sense guiding him now that the other five could not. He walked to the trapdoor as if he strode across Gideon’s square in broad daylight, head high and step sure, pulled it open, then felt with his booted foot for the wooden steps that better hands than Petersbury’s had built all those years before.
Down one short flight, then another, the stairs altering from wood to packed earth, the passageway twisting down, down, growing narrower and narrower until Leaf’s shoulders brushed the dirt walls on either side. Lightbulbs swayed as his head knocked against the power cord strung overheard, throwing shadows that made it seem as though someone mounted the steps toward him, emerging from the depths of the deepest cellar in Gideon.
Leaf paused when he reached the foot of the stair. The air felt thick and wet as fog here, ventilation blocked by rubble and dirt. Once the place had been an open chamber, employed for baptisms and other rites. But the walls had collapsed after the Great Fire of 1871, and repeated attempts by his grandfather and father to reopen the chamber failed. Tools vanished. Supports toppled during the night. At one point, Grandfather Hiram ordered that a small child remain in the excavation at all times. That following morning, he found the walls once again fallen, the child curled safe asleep on the top step.
“Now’s not the time, son.” Leaf’s father, Amos, veined hand heavy on his shoulder, after yet another failed attempt. “There’s something down there that wants what’s buried to stay buried.” They never spoke the name, but they knew what it was. Mullin magic, thwarting them at every turn.
Leaf held his breath, stretched out his hands. Near a century and a half since the fire, and still he could feel the remnants of power, like kitten claws scratching his sore skin. But here and there, he sensed the weakening, like a warm touch. “Time is the enemy of us all, old girl.” He smiled. It wouldn’t be long now.
He crept down the final passage, this one so narrow that he needed to shuffle sideways to wedge through. He had never been a claustrophobe, had never dreaded the dark or the unknown or the creaking sounds in the night. Even as a boy, Leaf Cateman had been fearless.
But his heart pounded now. He had traveled this path countless times over the past month, had helped Petersbury shore up the walls and shift dirt, had sworn the man to silence and taken his wife of all people into his confidence.
Leaf edged forward. As he neared the end of the passage, he felt along the wall for a niche he had scooped out, removed the flashlight he had stashed there, and switched it on. Petersbury had strung a line of bulbs along the way, yes, but they didn’t always stay on. Some burned out. Others never lit at all. And others, they found on the floor, as though someone had walked along the passage and unscrewed them as they went.
This time, the bulbs remained on, so Leaf shut off the flashlight and tucked it in his pocket. Entered the tiny dirt-walled space, no more than two paces in any direction, and walked up to the waist-high bier set against the far wall.
Even with the lighting, the thing that lay atop the mound proved hard to distinguish. Leaf patted the dirt until he found the edge of the shroud, the cloth stiff with age and spotted with mold. Probed a little more, until he felt the hard length of a forearm.
“Just making sure you’re still here.” He stared at the form until his heart slowed. Then he peeled back the cloth and regarded the mummified face. “One hears stories.” He pondered the desiccated visage, the hollowed eye sockets, lips dried into a snarl that revealed blackened teeth. “I will never understand how you survived intact down here in the damp. You should be a mess of mold and rat-gnawed bone, and yet here you are.” He quieted, and listened for the odd noises that sometimes came to him in this place. A rustling like dried leaves. The crackle and spark like that of a fire. And finally, almost beyond hearing, a whisper.
Let me in . . . ne’er seek back . . . ne’er seek back again. . .
“Dear Constance, how can you know?” Leaf sighed. “Either Jim broke his vow of silence, or you’ve been having your feelings again.” Gideon nerves, she called them, the ever-present edginess that came with living where the barrier between worlds had grown thin and the wilderness and those who dwelled there ever so close. Everyone with even an iota of talent suffered from the condition to some degree, but compared to Constance Petersbury, they were all deaf and dumb and blind, their hands swaddled, their noses stopped, as senseless as posts.
He formed a cradle with his arms, imagined the tiny body that rested there so long ago. “What have you heard? What have you seen?” He closed his eyes and concentrated, tried to reach out into Gideon, find that bright bead of light that marked the prematurely aged woman sitting behind the wheel of an old pickup truck. But he sensed nothing. Constance had shielded herself, put up barriers not even he could breach.
Leaf let his arms fall to his sides and looked down at Nicholas Blaine. “My grandfather believed you would help him usher Gideon into a new age. Unfortunately, he tried to free you while Eliza Mullin lived, and, well, let us say that plan failed miserably and leave it at that. Luckily, he had no trouble laying the blame for the Great Fire at her feet. The fair citizenry were always prepared to believe the worst about her.” He pulled the shroud back over the desiccated face, while overhead, a lightbulb stuttered and hissed. “Unfortunately, while slander destroys reputations, it does nothing to weaken curses. But we will free you, and in return your knowledge and power will make us great.”
Leaf watched Blaine’s body as he backed out of the chamber. “James panicked. He was a fool, and he paid a fool’s price. Accept him as payment. But leave Constance alone. She’s a child in all this, whatever her age. I can reason with her. She’s no threat to you.” He pointed to the balky bulb, which flickered once, then shone bright and steady. “Leave her be or suffer the consequence. Always remember that I am Master here.” Even so, he continued to face the chamber as he sidled back down the passage, and kept the flashlight with him all the way to the top of the stairs.
After her visit to Leaf Cateman, Connie got the call from Petrie’s Funeral Home that they had Jim’s body and now plans for the service needed to be finalized. So she drove to Jim and Norma’s house, broke the seal left by the cleaning company, unlocked the door, and entered for the first time in weeks. Ignored the sense of death that overwhelmed her like a flood, made her way to Jim and Norma’s bedroom, and took Jim’s second-best suit from the closet. Turned, and found Jim standing in the bedroom doorway, blood dripping from his wounds onto the carpet.
Connie dropped off the clothes at the funeral home. She didn’t tell Saul Petrie about Leaf Cateman’s offer to speak at the service, however, because she knew Leaf had only said it to throw off Jorie. When she got home, she would write him a note, offer him an out. It was only fair, seeing as she had threatened him into helping her in the first place.
“Oh let me in this ae nicht.” Her shaky alto filled the cabin. “And I’ll ne’er seek back—” She stopped, then wiped away a tear. She could hear Jim’s baritone in her memory, singing the same words. He had taught her the song during the summer, before it went bad between them. It was a bawdy tune, about a man visiting a woman in the night, but for all that it reminded them both of the folk music that their mother had loved.
“Oh, let me in this ae nicht, and I’ll ne’er seek back again.” “The Laird o’ Windywa’s,” the title was. Jim said he had heard Leaf sing it around the Cateman place, or someone that sounded like Leaf. It’s not a nice song, Connie, he said after he taught it to her. Still, he had taken to singing it while he worked at the Cateman place, because it blotted out the other sounds. The ones he started hearing in the basement under the shed. The ones that came home with him, and got into his dreams.
He’s in the shed, Connie. In the ground below. Just like Matt said. It’s the Catemans’ secret.
“The Catemans have a lot of secrets.” Connie left Gideon proper and turned onto Old Orchard Road. “Probably buried one of their kin down there to save money on the funeral.” She drove past acre after acre of Cateman land, until she reached her poky tan ranch, the five-acre plot bordered on two sides by the bend of the River Ann. The scant remnants of the once-extensive Petersbury holdings.
“You here? You okay?” Before Connie got out of the truck, she checked the rearview for any sign of Jim. She didn’t see him, but still she paused before closing the door to give him time to exit, even though she doubted it mattered.
She didn’t sense her brother behind her. Didn’t feel him pass. Even so, she found him waiting for her in the backyard behind the house. He stood in the middle of the yard next to the bird feeder, hands at his sides. This time, he looked as he did in her dreams, his eyes slashed, blood and eyeball gunk smearing his cheeks, mouth hung open in an eternal howl. Suffering, he was—she could sense it in the very air. Oh, how it broke her heart, but what could she do? He had made his choice. The Lady’s price was his to pay.
“I saw a man the day it happened. The day you—” Connie shook her head. “I was here in the back trimming the crabapples, and saw him wandering through the trees out by the bend. Thought at first it might be Old Tom, but he never goes near the river.” She walked to the plastic chest by the back door and took out a bucket of birdseed and a scoop. As always, she found it easier to talk if she concentrated on something else. “I’ve seen him every day since. And if he’s up here walking around, he can’t be in the Cateman cellar, can he?” She hefted the bucket and walked to the feeder. “It’s him, isn’t it? Mr. Lumpy?” She winced as her brother’s stink found her, the dank smell of root cellar.
Do you want to meet him?
Connie dropped the filled scoop as Jim’s voice filled her head; it hit the ground, seed scattering. “Not really, if it’s all the same to you.” She dug a piece of cardboard out of the chest, used it to sweep the seed into piles and push it onto the scoop. “I need to tell Virginia I seen him. She’s going to yell at me for waiting this long, but I wanted to get you home first. If I told her while you were still at the morgue, she’d have done something to get Leaf mad, and he would’ve fixed it so I’d never get you back. You need to be here, Jim. Alive or not, we’re going to need you. It’s just the four of us, you and me and Virginia and Lolly. We need to stick together however we can.”
But I’ve told him about you. Jim’s mouth moved now, but it was out of sync with his words, like one of those old dubbed Japanese monster movies. He said you know him.
“That’s not true. I only know what Matt told us.” Connie dropped the seed bucket and backed away as Jim circled the feeder and moved toward her. “That he was bad. Anyone who saw him would know he was bad—nobody good looks like that.”
He looks like that because we hurt him.
“I had nothing to do with hurting him. Besides, Matt said that was just a story made up by the Catemans. We’re supposed to think he’s a good guy, but he’s not. He’s bad. If we release him, he’ll kill us all.”
Matt lied to us.
“He left us.” Connie finished cleaning up the seed, then carried the bucket to the feeder. “Doesn’t mean he lied. Just means he left.”
“He’s dead.”
Connie stumbled back, caught hold of the deck railing just in time to keep from falling. Turned, and spotted a girl standing at the edge of the yard where grass merged with weeds. A young girl, age eight or nine, dressed for summer in denim shorts and a sleeveless red top, shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle and gathered into pigtails. She couldn’t see what shoes the girl wore, but knew they would be white sandals with red ladybugs embroidered on the straps because they’d been her favorites and she had worn them rain or shine. “No. No, you can’t be—”
Unlike Jim, the girl seemed alive—the breeze ruffled her hair and she cast a shadow that shifted as she moved. “He’s back. Give him what he wants. Let him in, and he’ll never seek back again.”
“You can’t be real.” Connie pointed to herself. “You’re me and I grew up and I’m here now. You can’t be real.”
“I’m more real than you.” The girl that Connie Petersbury had been stuck out her tongue, then turned and darted through the shrubbery and vanished into the trees, now heavy with leaves in all shades of green.
Connie felt the heat on her skin, the humid weight of summer air. She looked back toward the yard to find Jim gone and the spilled seed vanished and a ceramic birdbath standing where the feeder had been. “Jim broke you.” Her voice shook. “He got drunk with Ginny and Lolly and Johnny Hoard, and he tried to sneak in through the back and fell over you and you broke and Daddy made him wear a big piece of you on his head like a hat for a week.”
She looked at the house, saw the kitchen curtains flutter through the open window. Yellow gingham, just like the ones her mother had made from the bolt of cloth Emma Cateman had given her just before she disappeared.
Run. But where? She had set her wards like a good witch, but not against her brother. Not against herself. “You bastard.” She looked toward the woods, where thirty-seven years before she had seen a man. A man with a lumpy face.
Run. If she could make it out to the road, she would be free. She only had to get past the house—except that now it looked as it had when she was little, chalk white with dark blue trim. And she knew that her Chevy truck would be gone from the driveway, replaced by her father’s old green Ford. Knew if she made it to the front yard, she would see her father there, and he would ask her—
“Why didn’t you stop him, girl? He was your brother.”
“I tried, Mama.” Connie walked to the kitchen window, where her late mother stood framed by yellow gingham. Deborah Petersbury looked as she had when she and Emma used to pal around, brown hair gathered in a braid draped over one shoulder, white peasant blouse embroidered in red. “But he stopped listening to me years ago.
”
“You didn’t try hard enough.” Deborah Petersbury’s face receded into the dark. “But it’s all right. He still wants to meet you.”
“Well, I don’t want to meet him.” Connie drew closer to the house, tried to look in the window. “Mama—”
The scream shredded the air, a young girl’s cry. Connie took one last look toward the road, toward freedom. Safety. Then she wheeled and ran through the weeds and into the woods toward the sound. Branches slapped her face—she felt their sting, the trickles of blood where they slashed her. She left the path and ran toward the place where she’d played as a girl, the clearing near the river bend where she had first seen the lumpy-faced man.
“I’m coming!” Thorns ripped at Connie’s coat and tore her hands as she pushed through a thicket of old rosebushes and into the clearing. Saw the girl she had been standing there, face screwed up and mouth agape, ready to scream again.
“You can stop now.”
Young Connie shut her mouth, then looked up at her older self with a sly smile.
“I told you she’d come.” A young boy stepped out from behind a rosebush. “They always come when you cry out. You can count on it.”
Connie tried to place the boy, but Gideon had few children of any age and he wasn’t one of them. She would have remembered. His clothes were simple, a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. But his face was something from a painting or statue, molded bone and skin like ivory touched with rose, framed by a head of glossy black hair. She stared and some deep part of her stirred and she wondered at the man he would become, what the skin and hair would feel like even now to touch. Then she saw the flicker in the boy’s eyes, the dark blue of deep water and so much older than the rest of him, and knew that he read her thoughts, and what was worse, understood them.