Jacob cried out, and Hannah saw Sarah Anne lashing her nails over his ruined skin. He backed away but still held firmly to one of her arms. His features, what remained of them, were steeped in surprise. “Sarah,” he whispered, just as the fire began to lick him.
Hannah pressed her mouth against her arm and tried to stifle her gasping breaths. Jacob was thrashing his body, dancing like a crazed marionette, to escape the fire. But then it crowned his head, spread over his face in an avalanche.
Hannah was paralyzed by the sight. It took Sarah Anne’s piercing screams for her to realize that Jacob was still clutching the girl’s arm. She watched the flames tiptoe across Sarah Anne’s beautiful, porcelain arm as if it were a dream. Hannah heard Jacob beat his fist or head against something, and heard him roar as Sarah Anne shook free. She saw Sarah Anne’s pleading look as she cradled her bubbling flesh, and the only urgency she felt flashed as a single word in her mind. Run.
So she did.
The baby’s kicking woke Hannah, and she was surprised to find herself in bed. She vaguely remembered Callum leading her upstairs the night before. At first light, she’d walked the perimeter of the house, expecting shattered skulls from the birds’ suicides the night before, but the grass held only the desiccated remnants of fallen cicadas. Their bodies would crunch underfoot for weeks to come.
“Martha gave me a talking-to,” Callum admitted as he presented her with a tray of English muffins aglow with honey. “She said I’m being, and I quote, a proper jackass. That I’m not to leave your side until we hear that baby screaming.”
Hannah finger-painted a child’s sun with the runoff honey, searching herself for any hint of appetite. There was none. Still, she forced herself to take a bite, telling herself it was for the baby.
“To that end,” Callum continued, “I’ve taken an official leave of absence from the boat. I plan to be at your beck and call for the next month.”
“It’d be nice to focus on fixing the house for a while. If an alligator decided to set his sights on us, he could just wiggle through any old hole in the foundation.” Hannah looked away as she thought of something else that could worm its way in, something white skinned and clawed. Maybe something was already inside.
“I was thinking we could put a moratorium on the repairs for now. It might be smart to start thinking about the move instead.” His voice sounded casual, but Hannah knew the words were calculated.
“We’d need to fix it up before trying to sell it anyways, wouldn’t we?”
Callum sighed at her question and Hannah patted his hand.
“Never mind. We’ll talk about it later.” She was afraid to leave. She was afraid to stay.
In the afternoons, when Callum’s increasingly discordant notes sounded from upstairs, she sometimes sunk to the floor in the kitchen with a knife squeezed between her hands, watching the back door and the holes in the walls, her tired eyes almost tricking her into believing that something was about to burst in from the other side. She collected sun-dried rocks and pebbles and arranged them in a circle beneath their bed.
In the evenings, as they lay twisted together like pretzels on the couch, she watched Callum. Tracking his weight loss from day to day, and watching the shaking of his hands.
At night, she listened, creating an inventory of sounds. Itemizing rustles. Each unexplained sound was the shape of her fear climbing the stairs, its muscled, scaled tail strong enough to hold down a grown man. Its jaw big enough to close around her belly and squeeze as though popping a grape.
Eventually, the power of Martha’s admonishments faded, and Callum took to the water again. At first, she studied the unfinished recipes, scrawls in books that she’d found in a slender wooden box behind the fridge. One word, one name, was repeated and invoked: Elegba. Hannah wondered if it was a spice, or the name of a dish, but Mae had jotted down what seemed like pleas in which she called it the owner of the crossroads. The remover of obstacles.
Beside the incantations that bore his name, Mae had sketched two lines crossing in an X. At first, Hannah mistook it for a cross, but then remembered James’s words. “The house is a crossroads,” she whispered to herself. Then, with a trembling hand, she lifted her dress and looked with horror at the lines that still remained on her belly. Could it be that her mother had meant to protect her? Then came a more troubling thought. Maybe she herself was the crossroads. Maybe she had been all along.
Hannah’s practiced, blissful smile ushered Callum out the door. She waited until the sound of his motor faded before wrapping her sweater around her ever-growing body. Then, almost as an afterthought, she grabbed a knife. Hannah wondered if a prayer would be appropriate, but those she’d learned in Sunday school seemed to belong to a world that no longer applied to her. “Protect me,” she said instead, with a conviction that seemed to rise from a part of her she didn’t know existed. “Father of the crossroads.”
She walked carefully up the hill, trying to stick to known paths. When she arrived at the road, she sped up. She hoped that Callum wouldn’t return early. She hoped that the feeling surging through her, whether courage or desperation, wouldn’t fail her.
She heard a car up the street and she moved to the side of the road, trying not to step too far into the shadows of the trees. The car slowed and pulled up beside her. The door opened and a man’s emotionless voice said, “Get in.”
Hannah smiled tightly and clutched the cloth bag that housed the knife. “I’m alright, thank you.” She risked a glance at the shadowed face behind the wheel.
“She sent me.”
Hannah wasn’t surprised. She searched the trees, weighing her options, then slid into the front seat.
The man gunned the engine and she reclined against the headrest, watching the road pass by in a blur, grateful for the stern silence of Christobelle’s man.
Hannah was led past the barn to a squat, single-floor structure with small windows. The man stood to the side when they reached the front door and nodded his head. Inside, the house looked like little more than an oppressive single room. Dark red wallpaper seemed to peel before Hannah’s eyes to show the cracked plaster underneath. Candles were lined up at the base of the wall and along the narrow shelves of polished-wood bookcases.
Christobelle sat on a cushion in the center, her legs crossed. Her arms were bare, her skirts hoisted high over her thighs. She gripped a fat red candle between her legs. The wax dripped and thickened on her arm, a growing sore.
“She comes again,” Christobelle said.
Hannah lowered herself slowly into a rickety Queen Anne chair. “What is this place?”
“This is my home. Modest, I know, but more than enough. It’s the living that matter, not the dead wood below their feet.” Christobelle opened her eyes. “You’re hurt,” she said, her eyes lingering on Hannah’s right wrist, then smiling slightly as she took in the bag that held the knife. “And perhaps you intend to cause hurt?”
“It’s nothing. An accident,” Hannah said, ignoring the question. The baby had started squirming as soon as she’d entered the room. It was paddling frantically now, sending out uncoordinated frog kicks. She breathed through the pain and tried to prepare her words. There was a block inside her, even now that she’d come. “I need your help.”
Christobelle ran her thumb over the flickering candle. “Callum,” she said simply.
“What’s happening to him?” Hannah asked. Her voice was tinny, pleading.
The gaunt hollows of Christobelle’s body shifted in the candlelight. “If he’s ill, he should consult a doctor,” Christobelle answered. “It would seem that you’re immune to my brand of medicine.”
“What did you give me that day?” Hannah asked, prompted by only the weakest curiosity. She no longer needed an answer.
“A solution, child. And also a test.”
“You tried to abort my baby.” It was the first time she�
�d voiced her thoughts, and they startled her. “What kind of solution is that? What kind of test?”
Christobelle licked her finger and snuffed the flame. “Those are harsh words. Some would say that it is not a life yet. You are. There is a hierarchy of need that you, in your current state, are blind to. As for the test … mother and child are well, as I suspected.” Hannah noticed a cherubic young man sitting in a crushed velvet armchair behind her, slack jawed. He seemed to be sleeping although his fingers flexed desperately over the chair’s arms. “That’s Timothy. He’s new to our flock.”
“I can tell.” His body was taut with the youth that would leave him soon enough.
“You look tired, child. I can have someone cook something for you.”
As Christobelle spoke, Hannah felt herself sway, her whole body growing heavier. There was a rhythm running through the room. “Don’t trouble yourself. I know poison can’t come cheaply.”
Christobelle’s mouth tightened.
“Something’s wrong with him. With Callum. It’s like he’s fading a bit more each day. Mother,” Hannah said, her voice breaking. The smoke from the candles was viscous in her lungs, coiling in a veil over her eyes. “Tell me.”
“We make choices,” Christobelle whispered. From his chair, Timothy gasped, rolled his head, and burped like a child. “There is always a price.”
“What price? What choice? We’re just living our lives.”
Christobelle sighed, the sound whistling from her. “Everything costs, and life most of all.” She rose like a praying mantis, unfolding her limbs. Timothy shuffled in his sleep as she stood over him, the shadow of her hand traversing his body. “They always misunderstood me. The business owners and apron wearers mistake this for a church.” A crackling, throaty laugh. “They pray to their God for protection against me. It would surprise them to hear that I, too, pray, and our prayers are not that different. But God is just one element of what this world, and the next, contains, and I am little more than a vessel.” Her mother was speaking in low prosodic tones. Hannah gripped the chair so hard her knuckles cracked.
“In truth, it’s closer to meditation. We part the veil, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we’re granted a peek beyond it. Or, more accurately, I am the one who parts it, and they are the ones who see. They speak to the ones they’ve lost.”
Timothy’s body seized slightly as she ran her finger over his closed eyelids. “But every parting costs them. It’s why I prefer to deal with the sick. They have an easier time of it at first. In the end, however, they all see the same thing. A world unbearable with the crowing of the dead.”
Hannah let out a choked sound. She thought of the wide-eyed woman in the woods, her knowing words: See how she parts the veil. What husband, brother, or father had followed Christobelle into the darkness and withered there?
Christobelle’s eyes softened as she smoothed the boy’s eyebrows. His mouth was wide open, his tongue lapping at air. “Don’t look at me that way, child. I do not seek them out. But when they come to me,” Christobelle paused, and leaned over his mouth. “Can you imagine a world where you can only breathe what others expel? Where your only strength is that which you strip from others? I am their channel, and it costs me most of all.”
“You’re still alive,” Hannah whispered.
“Am I?” Christobelle said, sounding genuinely surprised. “The dead have turned me into an ant farm. I am burrowed through and through. How old do you think I am? Can you even guess? There can be no vanity among the dead, or the dying.”
“Why be a channel at all, then?” Hannah asked.
Christobelle opened her mouth to say something, then seemed to change her mind. “That, too, is a price.”
“For what?”
“You think I’m a monster.” She offered a sickly smile. “Maybe I am, but do you think that the bringer of loss has not experienced it herself?” Christobelle asked. “I had you when I was twenty, the age that you are now. The universe appreciates symmetry, it seems. Now, age is no longer of consequence. I have been a conduit for drowned children and those who made it nearly to one hundred alike.”
She turned her face away and stroked her cheek as if looking into a mirror. Hannah scanned the walls. There were no reflective surfaces anywhere in the room, and Hannah wondered if her mother feared whose faces would peer back at her.
“They’ve each lost someone close to them,” she mused, looking back at Timothy. “The cost is small for them, compared to seeing their loved ones again.”
“And what are they giving you in return?”
“Timothy lost his mother,” Christobelle continued. “Pancreatic cancer. She was diagnosed eight months ago, and passed away a few weeks back. He looks like her,” Christobelle breathed. Timothy was whimpering. “The same lips, the same curled hair. Their people are Greek, somewhere in the annals of that tree.”
Hannah noticed a body half-hidden behind a curtain. She blinked against the smoke. “They’re grieving and vulnerable, and you use them.”
“We’re all vulnerable. Months later or years later, it makes no difference. Grief is a scar that cannot heal. It is not corporeal. It carries over.”
The body moved in and out of focus. It watched her with crinkled brown eyes. Hannah mouthed a single word. Mae.
Christobelle sighed deeply. “I hoped it wouldn’t pass to you, but always knew it might. It’s why I gave you to Mae, hoping to keep you safe. She buttressed you in that place, that house, and found a way to close the doors against you.” Christobelle raised her head, studied the walls around her. “You see a house here, but it is not a house. It is a clearing. That’s the thing about a crossroads. It is the safest place, and the most dangerous. The greatest hope and the greatest horrors coexist where all things are possible.”
“Mae was a …” Hannah tripped over her words, “a channeler, as well?”
“Of a sort. She was pushed to grow very quickly under the circumstances.”
Hannah cocked an eyebrow.
“Because of me. And you, child.”
Hannah’s breath caught. “Me?”
“Mae’s gift was life. Though we dealt with similar materials, she knew how to create. Mae could nurse depressives back to health with a spoonful of her gumbo. She’d cleared a child’s pneumonia by flooding the mother’s kitchen with spiced fumes.”
The shape behind the curtain coalesced into a woman, smiling sadly.
“I’d heard about her even before she came to me, after her husband passed. He was her great love, and she was lucky to have had her time with him.”
“Mae came to you?”
“She came to me, I came to her. This is how friendships are forged, how deals are struck. You could say we were brought together by forces bigger than either of us. The limits of the world extend further than anyone can possibly imagine. There is darkness so impenetrable, just as there is light. There are orishas, just as there are demons. And perhaps angels as well.” Christobelle surveyed the room and lowered her voice. “The orishas value ability. Healers or simple channelers are sometimes granted small favors. But those of us who wield more power fascinate them. They linger near us, aiding and complicating.”
Something nudged Hannah’s memory. “Mae used to leave peeled oranges and cracked eggs on white plates. She’d light candles in the night. They were offerings?”
Christobelle nodded.
“For who?”
“For whoever was hungry. Elegba favored her most, and without him, nothing else would have been possible. He holds the keys to all doors, to all possible roads. A powerful being, but one with the heart of a trickster.” Christobelle inclined her head. When she spoke again, her voice was grinding, like a scratched record caught and slowed down. “She called on Oshun, as well. Her domain is charity and fertility. Mae was an excellent cook. Her power was in her food, and Oshun recognized that. She’s always dea
lt with the stomach.” Christobelle’s face turned wistful. “The day I gave birth, there was a terrible storm. Mae opened all the doors and all the windows, and water and wind battered the house, but we were granted favor by Elegba. The dead crowded around us, but they could only sniff the air. She’d already hidden you, and in giving birth to you, I had a moment of perfect peace. Their eyes passed over me as well.” Christobelle looked pointedly at the area directly above Hannah’s right shoulder. “It was a brief respite.”
Hannah shook her head and lifted herself out of the chair. The smell of dying roses filled the air with a funereal stench, and peonies withered in their planters. Trinkets covered wooden ledges, white bone combs and faded coral necklaces.
Looking closer, Hannah saw that figures were carved into the wood. Slender, mean-faced men and wide-hipped women. “What are these figures?”
Christobelle waved her hand. “It’s all the something behind the veil. It’s been here long before I was born and will remain long after you’re gone. The veil is thinner here, though, which is why the orishas’ power is so clearly manifest. And, unfortunately, that of other malignant spirits. They linger when they should have passed.” The last word was stressed and came out of her lips with a pop. She looked shrunken as she stroked her hands together, over and over as if washing them.
Hannah followed a deep crack in the wall, up to the ceiling. The ceiling was veined with cracks, its moulding sanded away by years. “Is it me?” she whispered to the whorl of plaster above her. “Am I making him sick?”
“If it helps,” her mother began, gently, “it’s not you. Not exactly. Your presence draws them, and they draw from him.”
“Why?”
“It’s the price you pay for what grows inside you. It’s the price I paid, and the price I pay still.” Christobelle’s eyes shone. “There are so many spirits in this swamp, souls of the dead, lingering out of vengeance or love. Some of them are older, sprung from the fabric of the other world. Sometimes it’s the will of the spirit that possesses, or else the living invite them in, without knowing they do so. The child is a flame, and they’re all just moths to it.”
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