Black Creek Crossing

Chapter 33

YRA SULLIVAN LAY AWAKE THROUGH MOST OF THE night, waiting for Marty to come upstairs and praying that he wouldn’t. When they’d come in at a little after nine, he was sprawled in his chair with the lights off, the droning television providing a dim glow, enough for her to see that the collection of empty beer bottles around his chair had almost doubled while she and Angel were at the country club, and a pint bottle of bourbon had been added to it. She wasn’t sure whether she was angry or relieved that he’d spent the hours she was gone drinking himself into a stupor. Part of her didn’t want to cope with him, or even talk about what had happened that afternoon when she’d seen something she couldn’t possibly have seen. But another part of her hoped he’d be sober enough when they got home that she could at least tell him he’d been right about the party at the country club — she and Angel shouldn’t have gone at all. She’d known it the minute she saw all those kids dressed in their preppy clothes, in contrast to Angel who looked foolish in her vampire costume.

Why had those girls Angel overheard in the dressing room done it? She knew that Angel had never done a thing to them.

Had it been up to Myra, they would have left right then, but before she could even say anything, Angel had dashed away, and when she found her daughter hiding in the ladies’ room, Angel had insisted she was all right. So Myra had gone back to the party, found Joni, and tried to make the best of it.

But the “best of it” turned out to be the forced smiles a few of Joni’s friends managed to come up with, while the rest of it was pretending she didn’t notice the disapproving stares most of the club members were giving her and the backs that were turned wherever she went. What kept her from finding Angel and leaving within the first hour was the knowledge that the only place they could have come was home, and she suspected that being home that evening would be even worse, not only for her, but for Angel too. So she’d stuck it out, and so had Angel, who at least had Jane Baker’s boy — Seth, that was his name — to keep her company. Not that she was certain that was a good thing — knowing what boys wanted from all girls.

Though the subject of sex had always made her uncomfortable, she’d tried to talk to Angel about it on the way home.

“Seth’s not like that,” Angel had insisted, shaking her head. “He’s not a boyfriend — he’s just a friend!”

“All boys want the same thing,” her mother had said darkly, and Angel had rolled her eyes. “Maybe you should talk to Father Mike,” Myra had suggested.

“Why?” Angel shot back. “It’s not like I have anything to confess!”

“Don’t take that tone, young lady,” Myra snapped, and that had been the end of the conversation.

They’d driven the rest of the way home in silence, and remained silent as Angel disappeared into her room without so much as a “Good night.”

Myra went to bed, but hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes, and every time she did, the strange spectral figure she’d seen in the living room that afternoon appeared in her dreams, the knife dripping blood held aloft, the empty eyes of the fleshless skull staring at her.

But of course it hadn’t happened — it had just been a cat, and the rest of it was simply her imagination.

Except that Myra had never had much of an imagination. Even as a child, she was never frightened by the fairy tales her father read her, because she always knew they were only stories and nothing in them was real.

And she’d never dreamed either — at least nothing she could ever remember.

Still, by the time dawn broke, she convinced herself that she couldn’t have seen the black-clad figure, and by the time she got downstairs to fix breakfast, she’d managed to dismiss the dreams as well.

Then she saw Marty.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, still wearing the same clothes he’d had on yesterday. His eyes were bloodshot, his complexion was pasty, and his jowls were covered with stubble.

And the wound — the terrible slash that had run from just beneath his right eye all the way down to his jaw — was gone. But that was impossible! It had to be there — she’d seen it! She’d helped him clean it up, washed the blood away, put iodine on it—

As if sensing her presence, Marty raised his head. “What are you staring at?” he growled.

“The — The cut,” Myra stammered. “Where the cat—”

Marty’s eyes darkened with anger. “Goddamned animal…” he began, raising his right hand to touch his cheek. As his fingers touched his flesh, his lips and his eyes widened. Frowning, he rose to his feet, swayed unsteadily as his hangover threatened to overwhelm him, then lurched toward the mirror that hung in the hall. A few seconds later he was back, leaning heavily against the door frame, his complexion ashen. “I saw it,” he whispered. “You saw it… ” His voice grew louder. “It happened, goddammit! We both saw it!”

All Myra could do was nod mutely.

Nod, cross herself, and whisper a nearly inaudible prayer.

Two hours later, as Father Mulroney began chanting the benediction, Myra uttered another silent prayer, this time begging forgiveness for having been unable to concentrate on the mass. Angel was fidgeting next to her, and as Father Mulroney’s voice died away and the rest of the congregation stood and began to exit, Myra laid a hand on her daughter’s arm to keep her in her place. Then, while the little church quickly emptied, Myra continued to pray.

Only when the last sounds of shuffling feet and murmuring voices were gone did she stand, move into the aisle, genuflect before the cross one last time, and lead Angel out into the morning sunlight. Just as she’d hoped, Father Mulroney was still on the steps of the church, bidding farewell to the last parishioner. He turned to Myra with his hand extended and a warm smile lighting his face, but seeing the expression in her eyes, his smile faded.

“Myra?” he said uncertainly. “Is anything wrong?”

Myra shook her head so slightly the gesture was almost invisible. But she’d already made up her mind that she had to tell the priest what had happened yesterday, and she wasn’t about to turn back now. “Can I talk to you for a few moments?” she said softly. Her eyes flicked toward Angel so briefly that the priest almost missed it, but then he too nodded.

“Of course. Why don’t we go into the vestry?” Without waiting for a reply, he led Myra back into the church, down the aisle, then around the altar to the cramped room that served as office, vestry, sacristy, and storeroom. “What is it?” he asked, doing his best to ignore the look of disapproval from Myra as he shed his clerical robes in favor of the comfort of his favorite corduroy jacket.

Slowly, knowing how strange and impossible the story sounded, Myra did her best to tell him exactly what had happened yesterday afternoon, sparing none of the details, not even how much Marty had been drinking. The priest listened in silence until she was finished, then frowned thoughtfully.

“You’re absolutely sure there was a cut on your husband’s cheek?”

“Blood was running down his face,” Myra replied. “If you don’t believe me, ask Angel — she saw it too. I’m not lying, Father!”

“I’m not doubting that you think you saw exactly what you’ve told me,” Father Mulroney assured her. “But if the cut healed overnight—”

“Not just healed,” Myra interrupted. “It’s as if it had never happened at all. It’s like—” She fell silent as she realized the word she’d been about to utter, but the priest picked up where she left off.

“Like a miracle?”

Myra shook her head. “It was more like a—” She’d been about to say “vision,” but stopped herself. She still hadn’t told Father Mulroney about the glimpses of the Holy Mother she’d had, and she didn’t want the priest to just pass her off as someone who sometimes “saw things.” She finally said, “I don’t know what it was like. I just don’t know.”

“Then perhaps you should just try to forget it,” the priest told her. “Some things we can understand, and some things we can’t. You were upset yesterday, and so was your daughter. Our emotions can play tricks on us, and make us think all kinds of terrible things.” He began leading Myra out of the vestry and back up the aisle toward the door. When they were outside the church once again, in the bright morning sunlight, he placed a gentle hand on Myra’s shoulder. “Try not to worry,” he said. “I’m sure everything will be all right — the saints will look after us.”

His eyes shifted to the crowd that had poured out of the Congregational church across the street, two or three of whom had been part of his own flock until recently. Even Angel Sullivan was over there, talking to Jane and Blake Baker’s son.

“Of course it would be nice,” he sighed, “if the saints could not just look after us, but send a few more people our way, but I suppose we must be content with what we have.” He winked at Myra. “But if I were you, I’d keep my eye on Angel before Seth Baker corrupts her completely.” As a shocked look came into Myra’s eye, he quickly backtracked. “It was a joke, Myra,” he assured her. “Even if he doesn’t go to my church, Seth is still one of the nicest boys in town. So stop worrying so much — everything will work out.”

But as Myra walked down the steps and started across the street to reclaim her daughter, Father Mulroney found his eyes wandering to the great tree in the cemetery across the street, which only the day before yesterday had twice been struck by lightning in a storm that came out of nowhere, then vanished as quickly as it had come.

And yesterday, in the house at Black Creek Crossing, a little girl all dressed in black had appeared for an instant.

A little girl, wielding a bloody knife.

Crossing himself, Father Michael Mulroney retreated back into his tiny church and began to pray.

The sun was just reaching its zenith as Angel and Seth climbed to the top of the shattered granite berm and looked down at the area of flat ground that fronted the single visible wall of the cabin. Neither of them was certain what to expect, but what they hadn’t expected was to find that nothing had changed.

The flat stone marking the spot where they’d buried Houdini was exactly where they’d left it, but seemed to have sunk lower into the ground. Yet nowhere did the ground look as if it had been disturbed.

For almost a full minute the two of them stood side by side, gazing down at the invisible grave below. Finally, Seth broke the silence.

“M-Maybe it wasn’t Houdini,” he said so softly that Angel wasn’t certain that he knew he’d spoken out loud. “Maybe it was another cat — one that just looked like Houdini.”

Angel shook her head. “It was Houdini. My dad saw him, and my mom saw him, and I think my mom saw…” She cut her words short, still not quite ready to tell him about the strange vision — if that’s what it was — that she’d had when the cat attacked her father yesterday.

Indeed, the more she’d thought about it, and tried to make sense of it, the harder it was to believe that she’d seen it at all. She’d barely been able to sleep at all last night, and whenever she had, her dreams had mingled with her memories, and the darkness was filled with strange images of her father reaching for her, and the cat leaping at him and tearing at his face, and the girl — the girl clad all in black with the white brooch on her chest — plunging a glittering silver knife deep into her father’s chest over and over again. But no matter how many times the knife struck deep into his chest — no matter how much blood gushed from his wounds — he kept looming over her, reaching for her, wanting to touch her, to press his body against her own, to—

How many times had she awakened, her skin clammy with the sweat of pure terror, her whole body trembling in fear of the touch that had never quite come? And every time she’d awakened, the memory of the cat had risen in her mind, and then the cat had been transformed once more into the girl, except that in the blackness of the night all she saw of the cat was its glowing golden eyes and the white blaze on its chest, and all she ever saw of the girl was the pale skin of her face and the white of the ivory brooch on her breast. By the time dawn had finally broken, she was no longer sure what was real and what to believe, and as she now gazed down on the spot where they’d buried the cat two days ago, her confusion only grew worse.

“You think your mother saw what?” she heard Seth ask.

Instead of answering him, she scrambled down the face of the berm and pushed the large rock away from the top of the grave. Using her bare hands, she began digging, and when Seth brought the shovel from the cabin a moment later, she shook her head. “If we use the shovel, we won’t know,” she said.

Seth cocked his head. “Know what?”

“The flowers,” Angel said. “If we use the shovel, we won’t know if they’re still the way we put them.”

Laying the shovel aside, Seth dropped to his knees next to Angel and set to work, scooping the soft earth from the grave and laying it aside, taking more care with each handful he removed. They had dug nearly a foot of earth from the hole when Angel stopped and looked at Seth. “I feel one of the stems.” Now they took even more care, slowly removing the earth bit by bit, until finally the first of the four flowers they’d buried with Houdini’s body lay exposed.

It was a bright yellow aster, and as she gazed at it, Angel could remember laying it carefully on Houdini’s head to provide him with sunlight even in the darkness of his grave. The flower still lay at precisely the angle at which she’d placed it, and its petals hadn’t even begun to fade. But his head was not beneath it.

She and Seth glanced at each other, then she picked up the flower, shook the dirt from its petals, and laid it carefully to one side.

“He must still be here,” Seth whispered, speaking the words that Angel was thinking. “Even if he wasn’t dead when we buried him, there’s no way he could have gotten out without moving the flowers, and if somebody dug him up—”

“Nobody dug him up,” Angel said. “If they had, wouldn’t something have gotten moved from the way it was?”

“Maybe it did,” Seth said, “Maybe we just didn’t remember it exactly right.”

Angel shook her head. “Who even knew we’d buried him? You were the one who said no one even knows this place is here.”

But even though they knew what they were about to find, they kept digging anyway, taking out the rest of the flowers and removing handful after handful of the earth that hadn’t yet solidified since they’d dug into it the first time, certain that with each handful of earth they removed, they would reach Houdini’s corpse. And then, suddenly, it was over. All the loose dirt was out of the grave, and all that was left was an empty hole — a hole exactly as large and as deep as they both remembered having dug it to hold Houdini’s broken corpse.

But the corpse was gone.

They stared into the empty grave for almost a full minute before Seth finally spoke. “I was right,” he whispered. “You really did bring him back to life.”

Though she heard the words, Angel tried to shut them out, tried to reject them, because to accept them was also to accept the rest of what Seth had said last night: Maybe you really are a witch. Her eyes still fixed on the empty grave, she shook her head. “I couldn’t have,” she whispered. “It isn’t—”

There was a soft mewing then, and they both turned to see Houdini sitting in the open doorway of the tiny cabin. As they stared at him, he turned and disappeared inside.

Neither of them speaking, Angel and Seth stood up and followed the cat into the tiny room hidden in the cleft. The cat was sniffing anxiously at the niche in which the book was hidden, and when they retrieved it from its hiding place and put it on the table, it seemed to fall naturally open to the same strange verse they’d read the first day they’d discovered the book:

They read it through three times, then Angel turned to Seth. “Do you know what it means? I mean, what it’s supposed to do?”

Seth shrugged helplessly and his eyes shifted to Houdini, who was now sitting on the counter near the huge water catchment basin, his tail twitching nervously as he watched them. “But I think we ought to try it, and see what happens.” As soon as he uttered the words, Houdini appeared to relax, stretching out on the counter, curling up, and going to sleep.

Angel looked doubtfully at the page. “ ‘Thrice haired with hog,’ ” she read. “Where are we supposed to get hairs from a hog?”

“There’s a farm about half a mile farther out the road,” Seth replied.

An hour later they were back in the tiny cabin, carrying half a dozen long hairs they’d found in the mud of the pigsty on the farm down the road, and a variety of mosses from under fallen logs in the woods. As they entered the cabin chamber, Houdini woke up, bounded off the counter, and came over to stretch up and sniff at Angel’s hand.

While Seth built a fire, Angel took the kettle from the pothook, filled it half full with water, replaced it on the hook and swung it over the quickly growing fire.

As the water began to heat, there was a sudden flash of lightning, followed a few seconds later by a clap of thunder.

As first Seth, then Angel, cut their fingers and squeezed a few drops of blood into the kettle, a gentle rain began to fall.

As they added the rest of the ingredients they’d collected, the shower built into a downpour.

With Houdini curled up beside them, Angel and Seth watched the flames.