The Hawley Book of the Dead (25 page)

“I see you admire my room, young man,” Nan told Nathan, and I remembered he’d gone to run errands in town the last time we’d visited. He hadn’t yet seen her in her natural environment. “We eat our meals in here as well. The other rooms are so poky, and I like space around me. I apologize for the heat. The fire is necessary for my old bones. We have a fire most days. These old houses are always on the cool side. Ah, here’s our tea.”

Willy returned, triumphantly bearing a huge silver tea tray. She set the laden tray on a table near Nan, who hefted the big silver teapot with practiced ease and poured out. Nathan leapt up to help her, but she waved him away. “I’m a strong old bird, never fear, young man.” The owl puffed up and chipped at her. Nathan twitched, and his eyes widened with surprise, but otherwise he kept his composure. “Caleigh, I will ask you to hand the tea, and the cake.”

“Okay!” Caleigh carefully ferried the fragrant steaming cups, and the plates bearing slices of poppy-seed cake. We all concentrated on our tea, until Nan broke the silence.

“I’m pleased you’re here, Nathan,” Nan told him. “It must be comforting for our Revelation to have you with her.”

I cut her a look. “Yes, I’m grateful Nathan’s here. I need my family around me now.” I placed the emphasis on the word
family
. “So I don’t know if sending Falcon Eddy was really—”

“Are you girls finished?” Nan interrupted me. They had wolfed their tea and cake, and were busy with their hand puppet fights again, while Caleigh slapped at them with a tiny spatula. “Why don’t you all run out to the mews?”

Fai jumped up, nearly upsetting Nan’s big tray. “Can we take Gillie out?” Gillie was the Swainson’s hawk Nan used to start falconers.

“Sure, now,” her great-grandmother told her. “But use the gloves. And don’t forget her jesses!”

They were gone in a flash, headed for the mews, a long, barred enclosure surrounded by wire fencing where the hawks sunned themselves.

“Nathan, why don’t you go along with them?” Nan asked. Finally ready to talk, it was clear she wanted a tête-à-tête. But I wanted a witness.

“I’d like Nathan to stay. He knows … well, almost everything.”

Nan’s gaze flickered over me. Then she nodded. “Of course, you can’t be too careful.” Nan went on. “Not with a Fetch after you. After all, the evils of this world are great. But you need to be concerned with the worlds beyond, as well. I don’t think young Nathan knows as much about our … history?

“He knows enough,” I told her. He knew about the powers of the Dyer women. He’d grown up with my vanish, and Caleigh’s string magic.

Nan huffed. “More tea, I think, though. Nathan, would you be a love and pour us another cup?” He did. I took a sip, looked up, and Nathan was no longer sitting across from me. His fragile porcelain cup was balanced on the arm of his chair, but he was gone. I choked on my tea. Nan rose from her chair to pound me on the back.

“Wh … wh … what did you
do
with him?” I managed to stammer out.

“He’s perfectly safe. He’s just out back by the mews with the girls and Falcon Eddy, having a look at the hawks. He’ll come in after we’ve done, won’t remember how he got out there.” Nan seemed taller and more vibrant, more like herself.

I looked toward the mews, and Nathan
was
there. “What the hell is going on? How did you do that?”

“I think you know how, my dear.” Nan sat next to me on the sofa and put her arm around me. Her sharp lemon scent enveloped us. “Let’s slow down, shall we. Now. You found the Book, or it found you.” Could she be right? Could the book have found me with more deep magic? When she spoke of it, it was in the same way the Reverend had spoken of it, as if she thought it was the only book in the world.

“Yes,” I told her. “I found this.” I lifted
The Hawley Book of the Dead
out of my Petroglyph bag, and the meadowy wildflower fragrance swirled around us, competing with Nan’s bitter lemon scent. “I also found your prayer book in the Hawley Five Corners church. I never knew you lived in Hawley. Why didn’t you tell me? Did this book belong to you, too? The Reverend said so.”

Her eyes were fixed on the book. Some emotion I couldn’t read flickered in them. “It did, once. Now it belongs to you.”

I felt my anger building, and my confusion. “You don’t seem happy about it. If you wanted to keep it, why didn’t you? And why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

“It’s not that simple. I
didn’t
want to keep it, but I never meant for you to find it. I wanted to hide it so completely it would
never
be found again. But I should have known it would turn up, come to you, eventually.” She reached for my hand.

I pulled away from her. “Nan, why did you want us to come to Hawley? I need to know anything that might help us. You need to tell me what’s going on!”

Nan got up, poked the fire, took the book from me, stroked its soft cover. She sat across from me again, with the book in her lap. “Now this has happened, now you’ve found the Book, it
is
time for you to know. I wish you could have avoided it, passed through your life without this knowledge.”

“Nan, you’re scaring me.”

She nodded slowly. “You should be scared.” Her gaze fell to
The Hawley Book of the Dead
. She gripped it tightly now, and the blue veins in her weathered hands looked as if they’d burst through the skin. “It’s a Book of instruction in magical powers. It also possesses magical powers itself. Very compelling magical powers. It decides when, and how, its owner may use it.”

“But how can it belong to
me
? I didn’t even know it existed!”

“It can only be possessed by a Revelation. And you’re the next.”

“But you said it was yours. You’re not a Revelation.”

Could I be imagining that her silver hair had darkened to pewter, that her hands, holding the book, were no longer clenched with arthritis?

“It’s a long story. One that I hoped never to have to tell. I wished to forget all about it. What do you know about Hawley?”

“The only thing
I
know is that the first Revelation is supposed to have lived there. You lived there, too, but in all the stories, all my life, you never mentioned it. I had to be told by some old farmer.
And
I find out that children disappeared from the Five Corners. Young girls! Everyone’s saying that they hope ‘it’ hasn’t started again! What the hell does that mean? The locals are convinced the town is haunted. You insisted we move there because it was safe. Sorry, but it doesn’t seem very safe, after all.”

“And you need to seek safety, after your encounters with the Fetch.”

“How did you
know
about him?”

“That hardly matters.”

“But it does, Nan. Everything matters now! The Fetch sent me an e-mail. He killed my friend Maggie. And I had …” I hesitated over my
dream or vision of the Fetch in the desert. “Anyway, he’s looking for us. He won’t give up. He’ll find us here, too! And what the hell does he
want
anyway?”

“Don’t get overwrought now, that won’t help.”

“You sent the Reverend for me, so I assumed you knew the most about that book, about everything. That you’d just for once
tell
me!” I glared at her.

She reached for me then. She touched my cheek, while keeping one hand on the book. She seemed different. More like the Nan I remembered, the powerful, frustratingly independent yet kind woman I grew up with. And her hair
was
darker, dark red mixed with gray, as it had been when I was a child. Is that why I felt like a child again?

“Nan, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. You should know, if anyone does. What am I supposed to
do
? How can I keep my girls safe? You have to tell me …” I felt the sting of tears building again.

She looked at me penetratingly, with eyes that now shone bright. “I understand your torment, more than you think, my dear.” She glanced down at the book, then went on. “It is because of Hawley Forest that I’m alive to tell you this, Revelation. Once, like you, I loved nothing better than being in the woods. We’d play out there, my friends and I, the day long. Childhood was good then. Until young girls began disappearing.” Nan’s hair had darkened more in the late afternoon light, a pure auburn, not a thread of silver. I wasn’t imagining it. She was getting younger.

“It began in Pudding Hollow, at the Bell farm. Lucy—Lucy Bell—disappeared. Just after she’d turned twelve, in September. We’d had a rain and Lucy’s mother sent her out to the woods to look for mushrooms. She never returned. Her family searched through the night, her father and mother and brothers. By dawn, they sent for the police. They brought in searchers from as far as Worcester. But Lucy Bell was never found. In the strange and blistering heat of that fall, every few weeks another girl went missing. All from Hawley Five Corners, and the farms around. Until there were six gone. Then, it just stopped. No more children disappeared. The town was scarred, though. It still is.” An ember leapt from the crackling fire, but she didn’t move.

“But in 1923, you were there …”

“In 1923, I was eight years old. I lived in the Sears house at Hawley Five Corners. Your own house, now. I lived with my aunt and uncle. My parents were dead, from what we called the Spanish flu. Influenza. It claimed many lives, the great epidemic of 1918. So I was an orphan, an only child. Went to live with my Sears kin. Then, after they’d disappeared in the church that day with all the others, I stayed with a friend for a time, then went to the relatives here in Bennington. To this house.”

“They disappeared in the church? How?”

Nan’s eyes fell to the book she still held in her lap. Her fingers, smooth and strong now, gripped it fiercely, as if she wanted to tear it, rend it. Her voice, when it came, dipped and pitched with emotion. “I was with my friend, Vienna Warriner. She lived in Hawley Village, not at the Five Corners. She used to come to play with her cousins in the Warriner house, and that’s how we met. We were best friends. It was March, and it had been her birthday the day before. March sixth. Her parents, as a treat, took us down to Springfield, to the circus. It was a big trip, even in Vienna’s father’s new Ford car. We stayed overnight, in a hotel. Red velvet and gold tassels everywhere. We were as excited as magpies, Vienna and I.

“They brought me home the next day, the seventh of March.” Was I imagining it, or did her voice tremble? “But no one was there. Not one person was to be found at any of the houses.” She looked into my eyes, and hers were filled with tears. But her face was smooth and fresh as Caleigh’s. I was stunned, too shocked to exclaim.

“It was late afternoon.” She spoke again in her new young voice. “But no one was preparing a meal, no children were playing. Not even the newest Sears baby, my cousin Luke, was in his cradle for his afternoon nap. Things had been left half done. In the Warriner house, we found a roast in the oven that Vienna’s aunt Ruth had put in before church. Burnt to a crisp, the cookstove cold as could be. In the church itself, we found hats and coats in the pews, the minister’s Bible open on the pulpit. But no people, none at all. Then we drove to the Pooles’, which was the nearest farmhouse to Hawley Five Corners. No one there, another burnt roast in the oven. All that afternoon we drove, found not one soul in those houses and farms. And no one ever did.”

Her small supple fingers traced the gold letters that spelled
The Hawley
Book of the Dead
. “You asked how it could have happened. It’s what everyone wanted to know. How a town could just disappear. It was like one of those fairy tales that makes you shiver in your bed at night, thinking and thinking on it.”

“Nan, I need to know,” I said quietly. “And I think you want to tell me.”

She stared at me, her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy as a girl’s in the slanted light. Then she nodded.

“All hope of their return died as the year went on, but no one ever stepped forward and put in a claim for the houses, not one relative. No one wanted those houses. No one even came to take any of the furniture, the tools, the farm equipment, the books, the clothing. Feared it might be enchanted, I suppose. That’s how it all came to me, the only survivor. Years later, I auctioned off the contents of the houses at the Five Corners, and the state took over the surrounding land, knocked down the houses to make the state forest. Then it seemed everyone became skittish even talking about it. It was something children were
told
not to talk about. Most everyone in Hawley Village had lost family members. My own aunt. Her husband. My cousins. All of them gone. It was a great blow. From that day, very few would go into the forest alone, or near the houses. And it’s continued up to the very present. But it began with the girls disappearing in the fall. First Lucy Bell, then Aggie Green. My cousin, Liza Sears. Maria Hall, then Anna Sewall. That was it. All within a few months. By December it seemed to be over. But it wasn’t.”

There were holes in her story, and I had to know more.

“Wait. I need you to tell me the truth. At Pizza by Earl last night some guy named Hank insisted that he knew you then, that
you
disappeared, too. And you said
six
children disappeared. Nan, you have to tell me what really happened.”

“I was getting to that.” Once again she reached for my hand. I looked down and suppressed a gasp. Her hand was smooth, unwrinkled. “Hank was right. I was the sixth.”

“Where did you go? Were you kidnapped?”

“I don’t
know
, truly. I didn’t remember, even then. I disappeared in October. It was December when I returned.”

“Where did you
think
you’d been?” I didn’t believe her. It probably showed.

She shook her head, bemused. “It had been a warm fall. No, it was more than that—hot, unnatural. So warm we were still in our cotton dresses. But the day I came out of the woods was frigid. I was wearing the same blue cotton dress. Not a stain on it. And the berries in my basket were still fresh and warm. I went home to the Sears house, dragging my feet, afraid I’d be scolded. After Lucy’s disappearance, we were supposed to stay close to home. I didn’t understand the fuss made over me, or why my aunt refused to make a pie with those berries. I hadn’t the slightest suspicion I’d been gone for two months. As far as I knew, I’d just been picking berries all afternoon.”