Mother of Crows

by David Rodriguez

  “I see your rotund friend let the boys off the leash for the day,” Charity said to the table, though she meant it for Sindy.

  Sindy didn’t bother to look at her. “Did she? I hadn’t noticed.” She pushed food around on her plate.

  “You know she’s not fat, Charity,” Delilah said. “That’s a baby inside her belly. She didn’t get that from eating carbs.”

  “Oh, of course, I know that… But that doesn’t change her dress size. It’s a shame that she got fat like that. She used to be so pretty.” Charity glanced over at Delilah. “No offense, sweetie.”

  Delilah was stone-faced. “Why would I take offense?”

  Charity looked around, as if one of the other kids might pipe up with the obvious answer.

  Ophelia rescued her. “Delilah, has Bryce Coffin been in contact with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, has he called you to ask you any questions. I’ve heard that he’s been harassing everyone, asking about their fathers. Just wondered if he’s been bothering you.”

  Delilah grinned. “Bryce Coffin calling me would never be a bother… to me. But I imagine you might have some feelings. I mean, since your engagement didn’t work out and everything.”

  Ophelia blushed. “He’s trash. The whole idea was a mistake.”

  Charity patted her hand. “Of course it was, dear. Don’t you worry. You’re too good for him anyway. You’ll find someone even better.”

  Sindy burst out laughing, then covered her mouth and turned it into a cough. The very idea that Ophelia could find someone “better” than even the fallen Bryce bordered on the absurd. Delilah caught her eye and grinned again, clearly enjoying the discomfort she was sowing. The Cutters were a rich family, but for some reason they had never been invited to join the Daughters. Sindy made a mental note to check into that sometime.

  “He’s sticking his nose into private family affairs and digging up painful histories. Someone needs to teach him a lesson about manners.” Ophelia folded her arms and glared in Sindy’s direction.

  “Simmer down there, you might tear a cuticle,” Delilah smirked. “What do you think you’re going to do?”

  Ophelia looked at Charity, then they both fixed their cold, viper eyes on Sindy.

  “I don’t know,” Charity said. “What do you think we should do, Sindy?”

  Sindy looked over at Bryce. She’d helped set him down the path he was on, and now Nate was going to suffer for it as well. Things were quickly spiraling out of her control.

  Still, she sat up straight and flipped her raven hair. The corner of her mouth turned up in a wicked smile. “We’ll take care of Bryce Coffin.”

  69

  Medium Rare

  The empty grave hadn’t left Abby’s mind for long since she had seen it in the wobbling beam of the flashlight. She thought now that Bryce’s hypothesis was right: the men must have been murdered. She didn’t know where their bodies had gone.

  There were too many mysteries-the ghosts of the town green, for one. There had to be a connection there, though Nate said they’d been killed by a mob, not the Daughters. Abby had seen the ghosts, just as she had seen through the disguises of the Crows.

  Then there was the powerful scent memory left behind by her grandmother at the Koon’s house… and of course, whatever had happened at the clinic.

  Something connected everything together, Abby felt sure of it-she just didn’t know what it was. She felt like she was on the verge of figuring it out. All of her most important insights so far had come from somewhere inside of her, like something had been awakened by her pregnancy. If she could just trigger that again… she’d understand everything.

  But how? She thought for a while. Pain, maybe…

  No. Not pain. The pain always came after.

  An idea struck her. She didn’t know if it would work, but she did know that it wasn’t a good idea to experiment on her own. She texted Nate and Bryce at the same time, so she would not lose her nerve. She asked Bryce to pick her up, and Nate agreed to bike over to Coffin Manor.

  “So what’s this about?” Bryce asked as they drove to his house.

  “We have to wait for Nate. I don’t think I can explain this twice.”

  Nate arrived about twenty minutes later. He walked around the side of the main building, guiding his bike by the handlebars. Abby and Bryce were outside on the patio, where Abby was soaking her feet in the warm water of the hot tub. Nate scowled as he turned the corner but as soon as he saw Abby watching him, his face fell into a neutral expression.

  “Gang’s all here,” Bryce said from his place on the side of the hot tub. He was lying on the rim, staring up at the stars.

  “Come on up, Nate.”

  Nate joined them, though Abby could see how uncomfortable he was. He sat cross-legged on one of the corners of the tub and did not put his feet in the water.

  “Okay, so, what’s this big thing you had to tell us?” Bryce asked.

  “You know how I can see the real faces of the monsters?”

  “Yeah,” Nate said.

  Bryce didn’t respond.

  “Well, that plus seeing the ghosts on the green makes me think we need to take a different tactic.

  “What do you mean?” Nate asked.

  “I’m trying to say that it’s pretty clear we’ve hit a dead end. Anyone who knows anything is with the Daughters of Arkham, and they’re not going to talk to us. So if the living are tapped out as a resource, then why not the dead?”

  Nate blinked. “You’re serious?”

  “You want to try to talk to ghosts?” Bryce said. “I’m going to repeat that again so you can hear it out loud and realize you’ve completely lost your mind. You want to try to talk to ghosts.”

  Abby glared at him. “I’m telling you, I think I might be able to do something with this. Besides, it’s not like you two have anything new. Do you?”

  Nate glanced at Bryce, who just shrugged and sat up.

  “Fine. But please don’t make me stake you. Or whatever you do to possessed people.” He looked at Nate. “What exactly do you do to possessed people?”

  “You run from them.”

  70

  Communion

  Under Abby’s direction, the boys filled a large, unused room in Coffin Manor with lit candles, then shut the lights off. The glow of the candles did not do much to beat back the shadows, and the room’s large window served only to provide the still reflection of a pond. They gathered around a table they had dragged inside.

  “All right. What do we do now?” Bryce asked. “Get out the Ouija board?”

  Abby settled into one of the chairs. “I have an idea, but I need both of you to be quiet. And hold hands.”

  Bryce and Nate looked at each other again, sharing a can you believe this-type look, then they both sat down to do as Abby asked.

  Abby wasn’t sure how she felt about the boys bonding like this, but at least they were sort of friends now. It helped soothe the pain of losing Sindy again. She reached into her pocket to pull out a tiny object wrapped in a handkerchief. She set it at the center of the table and unwrapped it.

  It was the symbol at the heart of all of their mysteries, the ship’s wheel surrounded by serpentine coils. Abby had stolen her grandmother’s Daughters of Arkham pin. Nate and Bryce involuntarily recoiled at the sight of it.

  Abby took their hands in hers and drew strength from them.

  She focused on the pin, tracing the intertwined coils with her eyes, watching the light from the candles lick across its raised scales. The play of shadows made it appear as if the coils were moving, tightening and constricting around the wheel. She blinked… they were moving. The pin was alive. The heads of the snakes unwrapped from their undulating prison. She gripped her friends’ hands tight as the metallic serpent heads turned slowly to face her and blink.

  The snakes lunged forward, sinking their fangs into her flesh. The spasm of pain was immediate-a blazing path down her belly, strai
ght to the heart of her. She contracted; her groan turned into a low, keening wail as the fangs dug deeper into her body. More coils erupted from the pin and lashed around her body. Abby repressed the urge to struggle. The pain would not be for nothing. She yielded to the serpents as they strangled and choked her and then dragged her forward.

  She had the sense that she was watching herself from a distance, that she was not imagining it. Nate and Bryce were standing now, no longer holding hands with one another. They were next to her, trying to rouse her from the locked in place she was, her eyes shut, her face contorted. Abby felt like she was hovering over the table and looking at the three of them, frozen in that place.

  The agony from the fangs slammed into her again, and she watched herself squirm in the chair. She allowed the white light of agony to caress her. It passed over her face-once, twice, and she could see shapes within the light. She willed herself to move toward it and found that she could.

  The light expanded, and she could see for the first time that it was not a light. There was no source. It was a shimmering pane, at once a barrier and a portal. The images through it were diffuse, warped by the incandescent surface. She willed herself into it.

  The agony increased. She wanted to recoil, to roll into a ball around the burning pain, to cradle herself and cry until it was over. She would not let herself. She would not give in. She knew there was something through this. Her grandmother’s pin had borne witness to decades of secrets and horrors. This was a tool that would help her. She willed herself ever deeper.

  She heard herself crying out. She felt a tearing, fresh rips of white-hot agony boiling through her body, mind, and soul. Still she forced herself farther and farther in. The pane of shimmering light had expanded around her, stretching over whatever her body was in this twilight place. It pulled taut. In places, it had torn away. As more tears opened up, as the pain truly became unbearable, as her mind degenerated only into these blazing points, the last resistance stopped.

  She ripped through—

  And was somewhere else.

  Abby was in the hallway of Coffin Manor, but it was not finished. The hallway where she stood had bare beams and walls that were little more than plastic sheeting blowing in a spectral wind. The bare wood should have been bright and yellow, but everything looked to be coated in a thin sheen of soot. When she touched it, her fingers came away gray, though there was no evidence that she had smudged much of anything.

  She found her way out of the house as it had the same floorplan that it did in reality. As she got closer to the center of the house, to the places that had stood for a while, the sense of everything as brand new faded. The rooms were finished there; there were pictures on the walls; there was furniture on the floors. All of it was dyed the same, sooty gray. All of it looked dead.

  She could see the center of Arkham. It looked rotten. She could only get vague impressions at this distance, but what she saw was a crumbling village where every other house looked ready to collapse.

  Abby weighed her options. She was looking for ghosts. The cemetery seemed like the most natural place for something like that. Then again, the town green was a place she had actually seen ghosts… She looked back and forth, and tried not to be influenced by the fact that every tree looked like a skeletal hand clawing at a low sky. She put her hand over her belly, and felt her daughter moving.

  Her daughter? When had she realized it was a girl? She was certain of it now. Was her daughter responsible for what was happening?

  Her perception shifted, and she was standing on the town green. She had not walked it, yet her mind created the vague sense that she had, a queasy melding of forgetfulness and memory.

  The gallows was out. It had looked rickety and ethereal the first time she’d seen it, but here, every beam was thick and sturdy. It glowed from a distance. As she got closer to it, she saw that the wood itself was bleeding. The bodies of the three men hung there, swaying like broken wind-chimes.

  They were not dead. Not here. In the real world, they had been executed two hundred years before, but in this place, they were trapped for eternity. They would hear her.

  Abby called to them. “Josiah Baxter.” She wasn’t certain who was who. Burlap bags hid their features, which were probably horribly distended after their brutal execution.

  The center figure stirred. It was not a human motion. There was no twitch of the fingers, no kick of the toes. It was the rope itself, possessed with the power of the dead, which began to move.

  “Josiah Baxter,” she said again.

  A wind she could not feel shook the body. Now its hands and feet were moving with a stuttering, unearthly shifting that her eyes struggled to track. Then, the body clawed its way up through the trapdoor, which closed behind it. The burlap bag disintegrated from the man’s head and faded.

  Josiah Baxter looked like Nate. Not exactly, but there were enough genetic markers that survived to the present day. He had Nate’s moon face and his dark, hooded eyes. Josiah blinked and found Abby at the foot of the gallows.

  “You dare speak my name, Thorndike?”

  “I’m a Thorndike who is your friend,” she said.

  “There is no such creature.”

  “My name is Abigail and I am a friend to the Baxters. I came here because I need you to help me. Who did this to you? “

  “Our own hubris did us in. That’s what happens when mortals meddle in the affairs of gods. The Daughters of Arkham do not take kindly to those that might challenge their precious Mother.” The rope came off the crossbeam. It reared up like a serpent. The end of it regarded her. “You are with child.”

  Abby put a protective hand over her belly.

  “I would never harm a lady who is expecting,” Josiah said. “Tell me, young Thorndike, what do you want from this hanged man?”

  Abby readied herself to ask what he had discovered that had made the Daughters kill him, who was this “Mother” he spoke of, when, suddenly, she was in the woods. She blinked, casting about for the hanged men, but they were gone. She put the town green in her mind, to force the travel once again, but she did not budge. She could feel the old colonial church from where she stood. She knew she was supposed to go there. She obeyed the summons.

  She was not truly walking, though she felt the dim, phantom ache of her feet bleeding up into her. She was gliding, like a ghost. She could feel herself just fine, down to the shape of her daughter’s hands and feet pushing against the skin of her belly. Yet she knew she did not properly have a body.

  Dread filled her. It was the same sensation she felt occasionally in dark hallways, when she rationally knew there could be nothing behind her but felt too frightened to turn to confirm it.

  She followed the path as it wound out of sight. Movement flickered through the bare, gray trunks of trees. She could never see precisely what it was, but it was too low, too quick to be human. No humans here, she reminded herself. No telling what death did to someone. Josiah had seemed reasonable, but she could not quite trust that.

  The pain that had summoned her here was still present, though subdued. It was a halo around her. She felt that if she did look at herself, she would be surrounded by white flame set away from her body, and yet close enough to singe her.

  She took a phantom step and found herself going farther. Another step carried her two steps worth of distance. She was being moved deeper into the forest, under her own power and yet not. Each subsequent movement drew her farther and farther along.

  The woods were unfamiliar right up to the point when they suddenly, horribly, were. She was in the dead place around the church, only in this place there was no church. There was a buzzing blackness, as though a swatch of reality had been torn away. Just looking at the juxtaposition made her head pound and tried to draw a scream out between her teeth.

  The stench of peat filled the ghostly air. She could taste burnt cinnamon on her tongue.

  Abby had stopped moving now, at the edge of the clearing. She wanted to look away fr
om the void where the church should have been, but found she could not. It pulled her attention as sure as whatever force had pulled her to this place.

  She gazed at the hideous wound in reality. No-not reality-in this place where everything was dead, somehow the church managed to be more dead. So dead that in this place, it was utterly gone, erasing everything around it. Briefly, she wondered what the wound looked like around its ragged edges, but her mind itched with invisible spiders crawling behind her eyes.

  This was the place she had been drawn to. There was some great truth here.

  Then, the void blinked.

  Abby screamed. She saw nothing else; no flash; no darkness. There was no stab of pain or spiral of euphoria.

  The next sensation she felt was her hurting hands. She opened her eyes and Bryce and Nate less than a foot from her face. They were terrified.

  “Abby? Abby!” Nate said

  “I’m… I’m okay.”

  “What happened? You were talking to yourself.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you find the ghosts?” Bryce asked, doubts erased.

  “I think I found something worse.”

  71

  Unlikely Allies

  when he thought about it, Bryce knew he really hadn’t seen anything at all. He didn’t know why the séance-if it could even be called that-stuck with him. Maybe it was the atmosphere, the heavy air in that unfinished room, the candlelight burnishing everything around them. Abby had gone into some kind of a trance, and then she had squeezed their hands, groaning in obvious pain. He thought for sure she had gone into labor.

  Instead, she had begun to thrash her head around. Bryce wanted to stop it, to shake Abby awake, but Nate had stopped him. They’d promised Abby they would try it her way and Nate held them to that. She needed to find out what she could, even if it was nothing.

  It hadn’t looked like nothing to Bryce. Abby had seen something terrible, but none of them completely understood what it was.

  His phone buzzed, jolting him out of his reverie. He pulled it out and checked the caller ID. It was Delilah Cutter. That was odd. He hadn’t spoken to her in weeks.