The Glory Hand (15 page)

'Everybody loves Abigail,''
Cassie remembered someone saying at dinner, and she could see why. The way Abigail smiled, it seemed she was reaching out to make her a special friend, and yet, from the rapt expressions on the faces of the girls beside her, she knew that each thought Abigail was speaking only to her.

Abigail nodded to Cassie, as if she would understand what was expected of her, and awkwardly, Cassie rose to her feet. She took the six candles Abigail held out to her and passed them out to her cabinmates. One by one, Abigail lit them with her own. 'Let your candles burn with your loyalty to Casmaran. As long as they burn bright, you'll be safe. But if they go out . . .' She paused. 'The woods are dark.'

Abigail lit Cassie's taper last, staring at her long and hard, as if there were some special bond between them that Cassie did not yet understand. Cassie followed the others to the door, the glow of her candle dancing in the glass eyes of the stuffed animal heads, like the spark of a sudden awareness.

* *
*
97

On the porch of the lodge, the night breeze threatened
to
extinguish the fragile flames, and Cassie cupped a hand
to
shield her candle. It glowed through her fingers like a trapped firefly. The lights in the cabins lining the lawn were out, and clouds obscured the stars. In the all-consuming shadows, the candles shed the only light.

Robin caught up with Cassie. 'If you ask me, this initiation stuff is a crock.'

Jo cracked her gum. 'That bit about loyalty to the Sisterhood . . . Do you think the seniors are a bunch of dykes or something?'

' "Consecration" . . . "vows," ' Melanie said. 'She talks like we're in a fucking convent.'

'Yeah,' Chelsea added. 'Iris must really get off on it.'

Iris' wrinkled brow said she was so nervous she hadn
't
fieard the dig. 'It's irresponsible of them to expect us to enter the forest after dark. We won't be able to see the poison ivy . . . or the poison oak . . .'

'I think that's the whole idea,' Robin said.

'And
snakes . . .'

'Would it kill them to let us take flashlights?' Melanie whined.

'It's all bull,' Jo said. 'Let's head back to Lakeside for some five-card stud.'

Cassie surprised herself by speaking out: 'If it's all such bull, Jo, then what are you afraid of?'

Jo flinched as though hot wax from her candle had dripped on her hand.

Melanie picked up on it. 'Since when are Lakeside girls chickenshit?'

'We gave our word,' Cassie said. To come to Casmaran and not experience what her mother' had experienced, especially something this important . . . No, she would have to go. And she had no intention of going alone.

'Sorry, but I just washed my hair.' Chelsea started down the steps, towards Lakeside.

'Better hurry:
Abigail appeared behind them on the porch of the lodge, pointing to a flickering trail of candles that led into the forest. 'Once they burn out, you'll never find your way back.' Cassie clattered down the steps onto the vast, dark lawn, and her bunkmates followed.

With nightfall, the balmy temperature had plummeted,
and
dew drenched Cassie's legs as she waded through the weeds beside the graveyard. She could hear something pursuing her through the darkness - was it the hum of Miss Grace's wheelchair? No, it was just a mosquito. Why hadn't she noticed any of them during the day? She slapped one on her neck, and felt the sticky moistness of her own blood. She glanced uncertainly back towards the porch.

Abigail was gone.

Details of the camp that Cassie might have ignored in daylight possessed an exaggerated significance at night. The archery targets on the lawn stared at her like hungry eyes, and the tumbled-over gravestones behind the lodge looked like the bones of some extinct creature too complex and puzzling to ever piece together into a logical form. She glanced down towards the lake, to the rocky promontory where she was sure the statue of Miss Grace's dog was crouched, but she could no longer detect it among the trees, as if nightfall had breathed it to life, freed it to set out on the hunt. Her body tried to overrule the thoughts, to sweat them out of her as she broke into a run towards the flickering trail of candles. But the green lump in her stomach wouldn't go away.

She stepped into the forest. Instead of the soft cushion of pine needles and dead leaves Cassie remembered from that afternoon, tonight the path was unyielding underfoot, as if at sunset a carapace of sharp rocks had thrust up through the earth's crust. A few candles had been nailed to boughs to make a sketchy trail, and as the girls passed the sputtering tapers one by one, their faces glowed eerily before sinking back into shadow.

it's dark as hell,' Melanie said.

'No kidding.'

Iris peered into the sky. it's a special night.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'
Robin said
it as though she didn't want to know.

The summer solstice ... the shortest night of the year.' Iris paused. The shortest, but the darkest.' She crossed herself.

Cassie caught her arm. 'Don't be such an old lady.' Iris
did
look like an old lady, her brow wrinkled into little furrows, her lips pinched. Iris crossed herself again.

The wildflowers were brittle in the candlelight, yellowed like the waxen ornaments on the funeral urns Cassie remembered from the cemetry where her mother was buried. The flowers in the forest seemed to have lost their scent at night, the perfume of forsythia and goldenrods transformed into a miasma of stagnant water and dead leaves.

'Shit,' Chelsea groaned as they trudged through the muck of a dry creek bed. 'I'm
destroying
my espadrilles.' Candles shimmered on the boughs of a towering pine up ahead, and she stopped. 'What's that?'

it looks like icicles,' Cassie said.

'Ice?

They stopped dead: glittering slivers dangled from the branches, hundreds of them, as sharp as splinters of glass.

'Impossible,' Iris said. 'For water to freeze it has to be below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and . . .'

'Are you brain damaged or what?' Chelsea cut her off. 'We know it can't be
real
ice.'

Abigail's voice rang out from among the trees.

'The ice men came when winter raged And left the first spring rain. They stole the ice to turn to gold But they paid the price in pain ..."

A dozen feet ahead, a waterfall shimmered in the candlelight. Cassie found the sight reassuring until she was close enough to see . . .

it's red,' she said. 'The water's
red:

it must be dye.' Iris knelt beside the stream, as though to test it with her hand, but seemed to think better of it. it's much too bright to be real
... It can't be real. . .'

No one said the word 'blood' aloud.

Again Abigail's voice from the dark, ringing so clear and strong, the rush of the red-stained water couldn't drown it

out.

'In the final blizzard many ice men died And when spring came, only two remained. Their fingers were lost in the killing frost Their eyes were wild and their legs were lame.'

The girls rounded a bend in the trail and faced a sight that froze them in disgust: ice picks impaled squirming rats and lizards against a tree trunk, the blood of the animals mingling as it trickled down the bark.

'Through bitter months the ice men ached,

Suffering hunger's sting.

Until the June when camp began

With many a sweet young thing.

Then the hunger of the ice men took its bloody toll:

Hunger of the body

Hunger of the soul!'

A light flickered on, and Iris screamed.

The severed head of a long-haired girl lay in the middle of the trail, her face ghostly white like Abigail's; her tongue lolling from the side of her mouth.

The light flashed off.

'What the hell was that?' Robin whispered.

Cassie felt Iris grab her sleeve, and it was as if the timidity of the others emboldened her. 'Come on!' Cassie said. 'Don't let them get to you. Can't you see that's what they want? It was just one of the seniors, sitting in a hole.'

They pushed deeper into the dense thicket, but Abigail's voice followed them:

'The ice men violated hallowed ground

Ravaging innocent daughters.

They brought down a curse upon the land:

Soring against winter. Woman against man.

Let no man harm a child of Casmaran!'

A sudden gust of wind blew out all their candles.

'We're screwed,' Robin whispered, her voice magnified by the total darkness.

'No shitV

'We can't be more than half a mile from camp,' Iris murmured hesitantly. 'If we can spot the North Star, then we can calculate our bearings, and . . .'

'Oh shut up!'

'Keep together,' Cassie said.

They moved towards each other in the darkness, their feet crunching across the dead leaves until their hands touched, all of them as slippery with sweat as Cassie's own. They formed a chain, with Cassie taking the lead, feeling her way, as if wading through a deep, murky pool. She picked her way over tree stumps, her legs scratched by prickly bushes that she hoped weren't poison oak. Then the path flattened out, and she led them gingerly along smooth trail.

Suddenly Iris whimpered, as if she had been struck

'LookV

Cassie strained to make out the silhouettes before them two hulking human forms, hanging by ropes from an enormous tree, creaking as they swung in the wind. Bodies heavy with a weight that only came when you were . . . She felt something wet on her face and looked up - something was dripping from the bodies.

'Blood!' Iris screamed.

This time when Abigail's voice rang out of the forest, i was strident, vengeful:

'The vow was kept

The death sentence sealed

The threat to Casmaran forever repealed.

Begin the Women's hour. Begin!

All hail to Casmaran's power!'

Flashlights flicked on, aimed by seniors crouching on the
enormous
branches of the oak.
The
beams transfixed the
bodies
dangling from the hangman's ropes - the 'corpses' were only crude effigies of straw.

'Begin the Women's hour. Begin!'

Abigail straddled the bough above the effigies, drenching them with liquid from a rusty can. The odor smarted in Cassie's nostrils.

'Gasoline!'

Abigail pressed her other hand between her thighs. 'This is the fertile crescent where all life begins . . .' She rocked back and forth on the branch, moving her hand up to caress her breasts, and the seniors echoed her words.

'When men defile the Sisters When men defile the land When men invade to plunder They must pay Casmaran!'

When the straw effigies were soaking with gasoline, Abigail threw the empty jerry can away and lit a wood match.

Then she dropped it.

The moment the fire caught, the straw arms and legs of the figures jerked and flailed, the straw bodies bobbing in a macabre dance, as if they had been cursed with a moment of life, cursed with life just long enough for it to be snuffed out. Then, flaring in a purple orchid of igniting gasoline, the flames engulfed the straw men, and Cassie pulled the others away from the shower of sparks.

'Men, Men, Men . .
.' Abigail chanted, rubbing the spot between her legs, and the seniors in the branches joined in:

'Men, Men, Men,

Their time will not return again.

Men, Men, Men

Their time has come and been!'

As suddenly as it had flared, the flaming straw died, the effigies reduced to charred, smoking husks. For an instant in the orange afterglow, Cassie could make out her cabin-mates gaping upward, the last flicker of the fire trapped in their eyes. When the seniors repeated the chant, her friends joined in. Even Cassie found her lips moving:

'Men, Men, Men!

Their time will not return again.

Men, Men, Men!

The Sisterhood will win!'

The embers faded, and the vengeful voice softened to a soothing whisper. 'Be annointed now in their ashes. Be welcomed into the fold!'

From high up in the tree a flurry of soot descended on Cassie and the others. They coughed as they inhaled it. Like black snow, it tainted their hair with its foul smell, stained their clothes, smarted their eyes with cinders.

'The ice men died But be forewarned Their spirits live! Each night they watch Each night they wait To seek revenge!'

The flashlights in the trees switched off.

'Be quick! Be wise!

Escape!'