Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  Lightning flashed. The ground rumbled and shook with a blast of energy that pushed Barrie off her feet and sent Obadiah flying backward, thrown up and away by an unseen force from below the ground. Cassie fell to her knees.

  Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been any kind of traditional explosion. The ground wasn’t split open. There was no fire. But above them, the night sky turned to daylight blue, and the moon became a sun alternately hidden and revealed by clouds racing as quickly as a stop-motion video.

  A flicker behind Barrie made her turn. On the foundations of the old mansion, a white-gabled house sprang to life. Three stories rose to form the central wing, and the eight columns in the portico matched exactly the ruined columns of Colesworth Place. Apart from an opalescent shimmer, the image was perfect in every detail, from brick to glass to mortar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Barrie sprang to her feet and took a step toward Obadiah. Only it wasn’t him lying where she had seen him fall. Whoever lay there was ancient, a leathered husk of a man, his face shrunken, his cheeks gaunt, and his eyes hollow and sunken so deep his appearance was nearly skeletal. Before Barrie had taken a second step or processed what she was seeing, the mansion in front of her shimmered again, winked in and out of existence like a lightbulb deciding whether or not to die.

  The front door opened.

  Three abreast, soldiers clad in Union blue slouched down the steps, their half-derelict uniforms unbuttoned. Two more men dragged a dazed, stumbling woman and two girls behind them. One of the girls was white and blond, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. The other girl was black and younger, probably a slave child, judging by her cheaper dress. The soldiers shoved all three out into the yard, where the woman stumbled to her knees with her wide hoopskirt belled around her. The soldiers pushed the girls down, too, and kicked the black child until the other girl crawled over and pulled her away.

  Barrie had already started running forward, shouting, “Stop it!”

  No one looked up.

  She reached the two girls, but they crab-walked backward through her, leaving Barrie between them and the soldiers as if she weren’t even there. As if she were the ghost and they were real. Except they weren’t real; they couldn’t have been.

  Clinging to each other, the two girls huddled beside the woman, who didn’t seem to even be trying to get up. Her eyes were fixed on the house, where more soldiers filed out the door, carrying chests and clanking bundles of looted candlesticks, plates, and silver wrapped in tablecloths and sheets. Two soldiers angled a life-size painting of a young debutante in a pale blue dress through the front door, and put it into a cart drawn up to the base of the steps.

  Beside the cart, another man, an officer with gold epaulettes on his shoulders, opened the bundles and looked inside, his frown nearly hidden by a thick mustache and heavy sideburns. Banging his fist on the side of the cart so hard that the horses twitched in their traces, he barked an order at two men trudging up the steps. The men broke into a jog and disappeared through the door.

  Hand on the hilt of his sword, the officer marched to the woman and stopped in front of her. She shrank away and pulled her daughter closer.

  Barrie couldn’t help remembering Twila Beaufort’s ghost, who had been stuck in Emmett’s bedroom, repeating the last moments of her life on an inescapable loop. Were these ghosts reliving the night they died? Or was this something else? Something that had to do with whatever ceremony Obadiah had performed?

  The place where the husk of Obadiah had lain on the ground was now empty. Obadiah himself had disappeared.

  The ghosts continued to move around Barrie—but were they ghosts? Could a house become a ghost? More likely she was seeing a scene from the past, an echo of some kind. An alternate reality? Maybe she was the one who had been transported somewhere else.

  Barrie rubbed her aching head. None of it made sense.

  Wherever she was, past or present, Cassie was there as well, standing a few steps back, still clutching a fistful of raven’s feathers. And beneath the trees along the road toward the church, the bulb of a lamp glowed yellow beside the front door of the small house where Cassie and her family lived.

  The sight grounded Barrie, assured her the mansion wasn’t real, wasn’t now. But a few feet from where she stood, the officer abruptly pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the woman, shouting words that Barrie couldn’t hear. The woman shook her head and shouted back at him equally soundlessly. He asked again. Again the woman shook her head, and he aimed the gun and pulled back the hammer.

  The woman was crying, her shoulders trembling, her head shaking no, no, no, and her mouth seeming to repeat words over and over, too. The blond girl stood and dusted herself off, then stepped between her mother and the gun.

  “God, no. Please!” Hands to her mouth, Barrie backed away. “Please don’t.”

  She couldn’t bear to see another person die, much less a child. It didn’t matter how long ago the death might have happened—didn’t the fact that she was seeing the echo at all mean someone had died? Were all these people trapped in someone’s final moments?

  The officer turned the gun on the blond girl and repeated whatever question he’d been asking. The girl answered calmly. Her mother gave another silent scream, but continued to shake her head.

  Gesturing with the gun, the officer waved a soldier over and pointed to the other girl. The soldier’s eyes widened, and he said something, but the officer snapped another order. Seizing the black child by the arm, the soldier threw her back down on the ground, then yanked on the cord that held up his blue-gray trousers.

  The slave girl couldn’t have been more than eight or ten. Her eyes were wide and rimmed in white, and now she was screaming, too, her mouth open and her throat working, but no sound spilled into the freakishly silent night.

  Barrie’s blood stopped—everything stopped—the world stopped—it should have stopped.

  She launched herself at the soldier who was pulling down his trousers, but she connected with nothing.

  Nothing was there, nothing and everything that was wrong with the world. Everything that was warped and awful.

  She fell through the ghostly body and landed on her knees. Beside her, the blond girl grabbed for the officer’s gun, and he hit her, knocking her away so that she fell sideways and landed only a few feet from the child. Both girls were close enough to Barrie that the desperation on their faces burned into her memory.

  The officer turned the gun back on the woman. Grasping her face between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand, he forced her to look. The child lay on her back, panic-stricken and screaming at the soldier who stood with his boot on her stomach to hold her down. The woman tried to pull away, but the officer pointed at the blond girl in what was clearly a threat. The mother sagged, shaking her head, pleading instead of screaming:

  Please, no. I don’t know anything. I don’t know.

  The words were clear, mouthed over and over. Barrie needed no sound to hear them.

  The officer reached forward and yanked the woman to her feet. She kicked to break free, crying, cursing unheard curses, clawing at his arm. Finally, she spit on him, and he cuffed her across the cheek hard enough for her head to snap aside. She would have fallen, but he jerked her up.

  The pain, the injustice, the fury ripped Barrie apart like shards of glass scraping at her stomach, at her chest. And there was nothing she could do.

  These were the men who’d been meant to fight against slavery. That’s what she’d been taught. These were the saviors. If they weren’t, then who was? Because they were raping children. Hitting women. Stealing. Extorting.

  Barrie wasn’t naïve enough to believe there was good in war on either side, but this . . . How did anyone justify this?

  The blond girl looked at the officer and screamed something, her lips moving too fast for Barrie to read them. Pants halfway to his knees, the soldier stopped to see what was going on. The officer shifted his grasp from the woman’s face t
o her shoulder and asked the blonde a question. She answered, but her mother sagged, shouting, “No!”

  Shoulders hunched and heaving, the woman sobbed, and her daughter looked confused.

  The officer studied them both, then snapped something to the soldier who loomed over the slave girl. Pulling up his trousers, the soldier returned to the house, taking several other soldiers with him. They disappeared inside.

  Barrie slumped in relief, but she had no breath. She dropped to the ground and hugged her knees. But only minutes later, the soldiers came back out of the house and shook their heads.

  Without releasing the woman, the officer barked an order across his shoulder. The woman wrenched away. The officer slammed his fist into her cheek. She fell to her knees, crawled to where the black girl lay curled in a heaving ball, and gathered the child to her. Looking up at the man almost calmly, she rocked the girl in her lap, trying to offer comfort while her own tears streamed.

  The officer studied her, then turned away. The blond girl had snuck over, too, and sat beside her mother, stroking the black child’s head. All three were crying. The officer turned his back as if they didn’t matter and moved toward the loaded cart.

  The woman paid him no more attention. It wasn’t until smoke rose from the burning mansion—Barrie could smell it—actually smell it—that the woman’s head snapped up.

  Three soldiers ran, crouching, out of the house with flaming torches, which they threw up onto the portico roof. Smoke billowed from inside the open door. Faster than Barrie could have imagined, fire licked the walls and paint peeled off the bricks. The glass in one of the downstairs windows shattered.

  The woman bolted toward the house. A soldier snatched at her skirt, but she twisted free and raced up the mansion steps. She darted inside as the portico ceiling caught fire and flames bit through the wood in a shower of sparks.

  “Go after her!” Barrie screamed, running herself even though part of her knew it wouldn’t do any good. None of this was real.

  She couldn’t stop it.

  The scene all played out in slow motion, as if time had slipped from its moorings and cast her out of the universe she knew. Barrie’s rational mind kept telling her none of this was happening. It had already happened, so it couldn’t be happening now—again. Yet it was.

  Barrie passed the cart and reached the steps. The soldiers ignored her. Reacting to something behind Barrie, they whipped around in unison to face the woods by the slave cabins. The officer snatched a rifle from the cart.

  A big man in a long black coat and burgundy waistcoat raced toward the house. The officer raised the gun and fired.

  A bullet hit the man in the shoulder. He jerked. Stumbled. Kept running. Racing past as the officer was reloading, the man swerved to avoid three soldiers who sprinted to intercept him. He passed the steps as other men snatched up their guns. With blood spreading across his shirt and coat, he made it ten more feet before another shot hit him in the back. He fell. Got up. Ran on.

  Off to the side of the house, where Obadiah had drawn the circle and the raven feathers had disappeared into the ground, the man in the waistcoat collapsed to his knees. Another bullet hit him, and then another. He dragged himself forward, bare fingers digging into the dirt, scrabbling at the ground as if he had something buried there he had to reach. Another bullet hit him, in the neck this time.

  Windows exploded around the mansion, ceilings collapsed, floors buckled.

  The two girls clutched each other, their eyes clinging to the door where the woman had disappeared.

  The second floor caved, throwing up a fresh burst of flames and sparks. The officer walked to the man, who was still furiously clawing at the dirt. Placing the pistol to the man’s head, the officer pulled the trigger.

  Then nothing.

  Nothing at all except the ringing in Barrie’s ears and the cold—the bitter, biting cold that made her shake so hard that her stomach heaved and heaved, long after there was anything in it. Finally, she let go of her hair and braced her forehead on her knees. She felt empty, as if seeing the horror or its echo had stripped her of some portion of her own humanity and left her diminished.

  How could people do that to one another? Threaten a child with rape and watch a woman burn?

  The rape of a child was the ultimate act of selfishness, the mark of a person who had divorced himself completely from the empathy that bound humanity. Had these soldiers not had children? Sisters? Mothers? Was there some convenient door in their minds they could slam shut on their ability to put themselves in another’s shoes?

  Barrie wiped the cold sweat that had beaded on her forehead. Around her, the mansion had vanished. The flames were gone—no, they were different. The air filled with the sweet scent of burning sage and the fire on the river crackled magical and blue.

  Across the river and barely visible, the Fire Carrier stood thigh deep in the water. Barrie couldn’t tell where he was looking, whether he was aware of her, whether he had seen or felt the events playing out or felt the explosion that had sent Obadiah flying backward.

  Obadiah.

  Barrie spun, wary and confused. Furious. But he was still nowhere. Not lying on the ground, not standing nearby. Maybe he had escaped the vision, the ghost house, the horror. Maybe it hadn’t happened.

  “Did you see it?” Barrie moved back to Cassie, her voice a whisper.

  Cassie didn’t answer. She lay curled in a ball, hands wrapped around her knees, shivering so hard that her teeth rattled. Her breath was shallow and ragged, and her eyes stared, glassy and unseeing.

  If this was a flashback, if it was real, then it was worse than the one in the cemetery. And if it wasn’t real—why would Cassie bother? There was no one around to be impressed by her performance. Even Cassie wouldn’t—couldn’t—fake this.

  “Cassie.” Barrie shook her gently, then pulled back when Cassie flinched. “Look at me. Listen to me. You’re all right.”

  Remembering what Berg had done, she kept talking even though Cassie didn’t seem to register the words. She had no idea what she was even saying, though. Her mind kept skittering off to think of other things: the house, the girls, the thing—Obadiah?—she had seen lying on the ground that might have been Obadiah, a mummy of a man shrunken so that he was dwarfed by Obadiah’s black silk suit.

  She thought back to what Obadiah had said about how once he had been like her. How long ago had that been? How old was he? But none of those questions mattered as much as where he had gone and what had happened. What was it that Barrie had seen, and what had Obadiah done to the curse?

  Across on the other bank of the river, the Fire Carrier was moving back to the woods, the orange reflection off the water fading as he retreated, and it finally hit Barrie what that meant. It had been eleven thirty when Obadiah had rowed her to the Colesworth dock. The Fire Carrier always came at midnight.

  Whatever had happened had the weight of an hour, at least an hour, but it had taken place in the span of minutes, as if ghost time ran at a different pace.

  What else had changed in that time? Anything?

  The pull of lostness still called to Barrie from beneath the ground. Whatever had happened with the curse, that hadn’t changed. If anything, it seemed worse. More alive, more raw. Deeper slashes of darkness marked the spot where the man had died. Torn grass and gouges in the dirt exposed fresh chunks of blackened bricks, the damage far more extensive than anything Obadiah had done. The chalk cross and circles had all but disappeared.

  A flash of light, a flashlight, from down near the river in the woods between Colesworth Place and Beaufort Hall pulled Barrie around, her heart kicking in her chest like a drowning swimmer at the memory of Ernesto and Wyatt . . . at the thought of facing anyone who was wandering around at midnight.

  “Cassie. Get up. We have to go.” She tried to shake her cousin out of the stupor, but Cassie flailed at her touch, rolling away and scrambling backward with her eyes wide and panicked. Cassie’s mouth opened as if to scream, thoug
h no sound came out, just sobs and whimpers. She was still shaking, and sweat had beaded at her temple and on the tip of her nose.

  Barrie wasn’t calm. She didn’t want to be calm.

  She wanted to run. Her own heart was beating a retreat, the rhythm so fast that she could barely breathe, but she couldn’t leave Cassie. Searching for a weapon, she scooped up a fist-size piece of brick that had been gouged out by the murdered ghost. She forced herself to look back toward the woods.

  The light was bobbing closer, weaving in between the trees like a weaker, bleached-out version of the glow from the Fire Carrier’s flames. Whoever was carrying it was moving fast.

  “Cassie. Get up!” Barrie reached for Cassie again, then thought better of it, and instead of grasping her, slapped her, not gently, but not hard, either. “You’re safe, Cassie, but you won’t be unless you get up. Come on. You have to go home.”

  Cassie blinked. Shook her head. Shook herself and looked back at Barrie with dead, flat eyes. “D-did you just h-hit me?” she stuttered, climbing to her feet.

  “There’s someone coming up from the river through the woods with a flashlight. It’s after midnight. There can’t be any good reason for that. We have to leave.”

  She reached for Cassie to pull her along, but Cassie had wrapped her arms around herself and stood shivering, the tears spilling even more freely and the words so full of snot and water that they were barely recognizable. “Shit. Did you see? They were going to— She was a little girl. A k-k-kid . . .”

  She broke down sobbing, taking deep gulps of air. Barrie wanted to throw up all over again. “I know.”

  “Men are pigs. You think you know them—you think you can trust them. You can’t. None of them.” Cassie turned her face toward Barrie’s, and her knees buckled so that Barrie had to reach out and hold her up. “What was that? Did that really happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Barrie said, her throat filling with tears at Cassie’s words, and her heart breaking even more at the sudden cold suspicion that her cousin’s opinion of men had as much, if not more, to do with Cassie’s own experience as with what she and Barrie had just witnessed.