Creepers (11 page)

I looked down the street for Margaret and spotted her on the library's little bulge of a hill in front of the community board pillared into the ground. I noticed she was careful to avoid the yellow chrysanthemums that shone like tiny suns around the bases of the sign's two posts. Two girls, in halter tops and jeans with summer reading books in their hands, were talking practically a foot away from Margaret.They didn't even sneak a look at her or pause to check out the notice that she was pinning to the board. It was positively abnormal. Girls
always
scrutinize a strange girl in their midst.

I found myself running toward her, my stack of flyers flapping in the wind as I dodged moms with baby strollers, little kids with bikes, and mobs of teenagers hanging out on the front steps of the stores or leaning against parking meters. One year in track, I ran the hurdles, but they were never the human variety. People were giving me dirty looks or yanking little kids aside when I
almost
jostled them. A Volkswagen Beetle sounded its horn as I jaywalked across the street, but I knew they could see me.

Margaret was on the corner now, standing next to the traffic light, where a family in polo shirts stood pushing the button to change the light. She smiled at me.

“Courtney, what are you doing? You ran down that block as if you were practicing the hurdles! You didn't tell me you wanted to go out for track, too.” Was I really that easy to read? Her eyes were bright and she was truly enjoying herself. I didn't want to crush her good spirits, but I had to know. I grabbed her by the wrist, pressing hard to feel her bones.

“Ouch,” she blurted out, pulling back. “Courtney?” she then asked, her green eyes saucered with alarm as I held tight to her wrist.

“The people here . . . they don't seem to see you,” I stuttered.

She glanced at the people passing us on both sides of the sidewalk, as if she had just noticed that indeed there were people here.

“Of course they see us,” she replied, her no-nonsense demeanor kicking right in. “They're just used to seeing Dad and me with our cemetery flyers. Let me show you,” she said, prying my fingers from her wrist.

Before I could reach out to grab her again, she suddenly stepped off the curb and stood in the path of a red SUV that slowed to round the corner.The car screeched dramatically to a halt. People everywhere stopped to stare at
me.

“See?” She smiled, vindicated. She didn't even look at the car whose fender was poised only twenty inches from
her knees. Over her head, I could see Mr. Geyer standing on the opposite corner, clutching his flyers to his chest.

“Are you crazy?!” I yelled. “You didn't have to do that!”

“But I did,” she replied, earnest again. “I don't want to lose your friendship, Courtney. Most friends don't have a good time posting cemetery flyers.” She lifted her chin as if daring me to refute that.

As she stepped back onto the sidewalk, I heard the driver of the SUV, a guy about my dad's age, swear as he mumbled, “I didn't get a good look at the person. He was just a blur.”

THE JITNEY RIDE HOME HAD BEEN QUIET, AS IF THE earlier enthusiasm and joy we had felt was thwarted by what seemed a new worry in each of us. I thought about Margaret and Mr. Geyer.
Why wouldn't the people in town look at them?
Sure, they may have posted lots of flyers over the past year, and people got used to seeing them, like Mr. Geyer said. Even so, people glance at someone when they enter a room or walk down a sidewalk, out of simple curiosity.

And Margaret! She could have been killed when she stepped into the street.Yet she did not appear the least bit troubled. She was sitting across from me, in front of Mr. Geyer. Her eyes were closed against the sunlight as she rested her head on the back of the seat.

Mr. Geyer had stared out the window most of the way home looking pale and drained. At one point, I had leaned over and touched him on the shoulder, to make sure he
was okay. He had given me a weary smile and shook his head as if he couldn't imagine what he would have done if he had lost her.Yet the strangest part of the day occurred when we got to our stop. I thought about Margaret and the big smile she had given to the jitney driver as we exited. The driver was an old guy with thick eyebrows and a hunched back. He winked at her as she called good-bye. Why was he able to see her, when people in town had not?

I kept replaying yesterday in my mind as I sat at the kitchen table, staring vacantly at my cemetery poster propped in the kitchen bay window. It was almost noontime. Dad was at work. Mom was running a bunch of errands.We were all supposed to be practicing for the event tomorrow, but I was having trouble concentrating. I was anxious about the cemetery tour. I was nervous about yesterday. Come to think of it, I had been consistently edgy ever since I met Margaret and Mr. Geyer. Not because of them, of course, but because of the things that had been happening to me since I had met them. Yet at the same time, I felt alive. I never remembered my life being so full of adventure. I sipped at my glass of ice water and hoped the cold sliding
down my throat would jolt me into action.

Margaret and Mr. Geyer were prepping at their house, and were to come over tonight so that we could practice our routine in front of Mom and Dad. Mr. Geyer had sketched out tomorrow's event. Margaret and I were to stand by our posters after Mr. Geyer completed his brief cemetery tour, ready to explain the history and meaning behind the photos we chose. I looked at my poster. It seemed out of place against the pastel blue sky, although the ivy hanging outside the window made an appropriate frame for it. I had to make sure that I knew each photograph as if the people remembered were my own family. Only then, Mr. Geyer had said, would I be able to stir something in other people's hearts. I did not dare let Margaret and Mr. Geyer down.

I studied the black-and-white photos. I had carefully captioned each in large black letters so that someone in the back of the crowd could read them. Margaret had said the lettering looked Gothic and then did the same with her poster.

The photo in the top left corner was the grave of the Fletcher children. At first, all one saw was the huge slab of stone, shaped like the A frame of a house. But once you peered at it, you could not help but recoil from the sneering skeleton head on top, his wings huddled possessively
around the carved names beneath them. Each name was crowned with its own small symbol. John, six years, had the crossbones, while Sarah, three years, had an hourglass. Ann, nine weeks, had an angel, not as angry looking as most I had seen in the cemetery.

The next photo was of a little boy's tombstone. Mr. Geyer had told me about the stonecutter who had carved this stone. He had been an acquaintance of Christian's. In most of the stones this man carved, the Death head symbol was always wide-eyed and calm, looking fairly untroubled to people passing by the grave site. Mr. Geyer said that the art on this tombstone gave a person the sense that death was not something to dread—until it came for this stonecutter's own son. Little Joshua's Death head had an angry expression, its eyes near slits, its forehead shortened, and its teeth scrupulously cut. I remembered Mr. Geyer telling me that Christian never carved another stone after Prudence's death, although Joshua's father apparently did nothing else but crank out angry angel after angry angel. Each man handled his burdens quite differently, he noted without irony.

I stared at the other tombstones captured in our photographs, amazed that I felt a real sorrow for them, even though the people they remembered had been gone from this world for more than two hundred years. There was
Ebenezer, the shipwrecked sailor. Patience, the young mother of four and the reverend's wife. The most heartbreaking of all was the baby's stone. The name had been maliciously scratched out because the infant had been born out of wedlock.

Skeletons, angels, urns, fountains, Death heads, suns, and moons, and everything with wings—they were all mesmerizing, but not scary. It made me sad to think of the long-lost lives, yet happy that their memories had been so preciously preserved.When I had told this to Mr. Geyer, he smiled and said that that was precisely what I should say to people. I must make them feel a kinship, he said, as if those people remembered by stones could be our own family and friends.

I must have been practicing for at least an hour. My throat felt scratchy from talking out loud like Mr. Geyer had instructed, but I was feeling a little more confident because I could now just look at one of the photos and talk about it without memorizing a word-for-word summary. I was ready for our practice run tonight as I went to the window to move the poster to a safe place. I inhaled in surprise when I saw them.

Cats. A small mob of them in the backyard, milling around on the lawn between the patio and the shed. I tried counting the tabbies, oranges, calicos, and the one black
cat. They were circling one another with their tails in the air and meowing as if they were having a meeting. I tallied ten in all.What were they doing here? I had never seen cats in our yard.Were they the feral cats that Margaret and Mr. Geyer fed?

I slipped out the back door to stand on our patio to stare at them. I felt the laser-like heat of the sun on the back of my neck, tasted the dry tinge of pine in the air, smelled the sweetness of the dry grass, and heard the calls of the blackbirds that gathered in the woods. I watched the cats suddenly stop their circling to raise their heads simultaneously, as if they were listening to something. As a group, they began to walk, slowly at first with that confident, measured gait that only cats seem capable of, to the border of the woods along the back of our yard.They continued until they reached the thick growth of pine trees and then disappeared.

I squinted at their point of entry and could make out what looked like a row of small rocks. I had not noticed the rocks there two days ago when I did the weeding.
Go over and look at them,
I chanted before I left the safety of the patio. All the while I listened for the sound the cats had heard coming from the woods.All I could hear was the birds.

The rocks glinted in the sun as I approached, despite the snarl of weeds that partially covered them. I kicked at
one of them cautiously. They were not rocks but opened cat food tins, just like the ones that were lined up along Margaret and Mr. Geyer's house. Mom and Dad would never have put these here. They hardly had the time to hang around out back. Would Margaret or Mr. Geyer be leaving cat food all over the edge of the woods? My heart revved up a notch.

I peered nervously into the labyrinth of trees. There were no paths that led to our yard, at least there were no
clear
paths. When I focused really hard, I could just barely make out the remnants of a path pitching toward the center of the woods, where the branches of the pine trees and scrub interlaced. I squinted into the forest shade. It was early afternoon and the sun was blazing.Yet the thickness of the woods muffled the light. I took a few tentative steps and listened to the scratching of the cicadas and the call of some lonely bird.

And then I saw her—her face—pale as the moon in a black sky. She was kneeling by a cluster of trees two hundred yards away. I held my breath as I watched her dig. Her shoulders trembled as she cut at the earth. I was rooted to the spot. She stood and placed something in the pocket of her cloak, then turned and headed deeper into the woods.

My heart was pounding so ferociously that all I could
hear now was my own pulse. Could I follow her without her knowing it? Didn't witches have extra-keen senses?

I crouched automatically as I began to work my way through the tangle of branches and vines, trying hard not to snap twigs or rustle dead leaves.
Walk like an Indian,
I kept telling myself, although I did not have a clue as to how Indians learned to be so silent on their feet.

I had gone too far to turn back. My eyes stung from my sweat and I had a random thought about ticks in the woods, but within moments I froze.There was the witch in a small clearing surrounding a cluster of trees less than a hundred yards away. I held my breath.

The witch was laying something on the ground beneath a tree whose trunk must have been three feet in diameter. Its roots bulged from the ground like giant worms, and its branches thrust in all directions like thick, gnarled arms. The tree must have stood at least one hundred feet high.

I watched the witch pull something from her pocket and sprinkle it onto the earth. She began to hum and then to chant in a singsong voice. She raised her arms to the sky, like she was begging or demanding something. In a moment, her arms dropped back to her sides. She turned and disappeared deeper into the woods.

I must have stood in that spot for at least a half hour. I dared not move to the tree until I was sure that the witch
would not return. Finally I thought I was safe and took a few silent steps to the spot where the witch had been reciting a spell.