The Hawley Book of the Dead (6 page)

I was named, like the others, after the first Revelation in the New World. The great-granddaughter of Mary Dyer, who’d been hanged in Boston on the first day of June in 1660, for her Quaker proselytizing. Mary Dyer’s sons and daughters headed to Pennsylvania, where Quakers were better tolerated than in Puritan Massachusetts. That first Revelation’s grandparents were among them. But New England roots remained strong. Decades later, when Revelation herself was suspected in the Mount Holly,
Pennsylvania, witch scare of 1740, she fled with her family to Massachusetts. To the place that became Hawley Five Corners.

The first Revelation and her family were never seen again in Mount Holly. But Revelation’s sister Prophet received a letter the following year, in the spring of 1741. The letter said only, “Come to us. Travell the Massachusetts Western Highway and aske for the Hawley Five Corners as you go. You will finde us here, where we live in safety and peace.” Prophet never went, and died that year under mysterious circumstances. There were no other letters, but Revelation’s family almost certainly founded the town of Hawley Five Corners, “Hawley” an alternate spelling of their old Pennsylvania town. That is what we knew from the oral history of our family. Why the town had been abandoned didn’t figure in the family tales, only Revelation’s part in its founding, and the stories of her descendants.

My Nan still owned the houses at Hawley Five Corners, yet had never gone to live in them. But I was bound to Hawley in another way. When I was a young girl, Hawley Five Corners was my own secret town, mine and Jolon’s. Jolon Adair was my best friend, then my first love. Every Saturday my parents would drive me to the Adairs’ house in East Hawley, and we’d ride their ponies. From the time we were big enough to saddle the ponies ourselves and ride into the forest, the abandoned village at the intersection of five roads had been our dream town. In those years we were growing up, vagueness was acceptable; parents had been lulled into the complacency of believing nothing lurked in wait for their children. We never told where we rode, that we’d eat our picnic lunches in that forsaken place. We grazed our horses among the abandoned houses while we ate our sandwiches, and hawks drifted in lazy circles overhead.

When we were children we were quiet, almost reverent. Years later, we talked and laughed, smoked the cigarettes Jolon stole from his father’s pack of Chesterfields, and kissed among the lilies by the church, or on the steps of the white house with the tangled lilacs that would become
my
house. Then we’d ride to Pudding Hollow, or Bozrah Brook, or the long way round Hell’s Kitchen. We always ended up back at Hawley Five Corners, just at dusk, with only enough time to ride back and be home for supper.

I had always known the history of the Five Corners was entwined with my own family’s. By the time Jolon and I started riding in Hawley Forest, the old stories just seemed like other fairy tales. Over the years, I all but forgot them. All the years our horses loafed and crunched the tall grass, and we laughed too loudly, blowing smoke rings into the fairy air.

The stories came back to me, though, after Jolon was long gone, lost to me. On cool misty evenings when I’d trailered my horse to the forest, ridden too long and too late and arrived at the Five Corners alone. Even when I was cold and sweaty and chilled to the bone, a warmth would blanket me at the Corners. I never felt afraid in the forest. It was my refuge then, so it wasn’t really surprising to me that I ended up in Hawley, the place of all places I’d felt safest in. Things do happen for a reason. When Nan’s letter came to me, I remembered my childhood rides in the forest, and coming upon that abandoned landscape. I remembered Nan’s stories, too, and the satiny edge of the blanket I liked to clutch between my fingers while she told them, and the nightlight, with scenes from Sleeping Beauty revolving in a magic lantern.

Nan was right. I still felt safe at the Five Corners. But the feeling had no basis in solid fact, only old memories and older stories.

As I looked at my girls in the fading light of our first day in Hawley, I hoped I’d done the right thing, reverting to the past, to the Dyer name. Or was I just trading one kind of magic for another?

Magic is the oldest art. The first person who learned to control fire was the first magician. Perhaps it is its unimaginable age, its place at the beginning of human history, that ensures there is nothing new in it. Elements of the same tricks and illusions are performed in nearly every magic show, to greater or lesser perfection, with perhaps a new twist every hundred years or so. There is something a little tawdry about magic. It is the magician’s finest trick to rise above the dime-store tackiness that infuses our profession.

I’d never been good at it. I still remember the magic show Jolon and I put on when we were ten. I was the magician, he was the assistant. Jolon was always too trusting, let me have my head like his favorite pony. I wore a long dress and a cape made from an old velvet bathrobe of my mother’s. I shuffled cards and dropped them, pulled my guinea pig out of the balaclava I’d stitched him into. I would have tried to saw Jolon in half, but for my grandmother who took the saw away from me. Altogether, I was a rotten magician, but I’d always had a soft spot for magic.

My magical inheritance was of another sort, although no less necessary to the success of the Amazing Maskelynes. It began with the Dyer women.

An artful conjurer can set her own body on fire with no visible damage, can cut off her arm without pain, can eat glass or razor blades. All are tricks that must be learned and practiced. But vanishing—and its necessary counterpoint, reappearing—is an art that relies not so much on tricks as on timing. The audience’s attention is directed away from the person disappearing. Even the visible vanish is not truly visible. Except in my case. Because my gift is that I really can disappear.

We all have them, all the women in my family, extraordinary gifts. Occasionally, a boy reveals a power, but not often, and none in my generation. One of our Dyer ancestors could play any musical instrument she picked up without benefit of lessons. Another could make a feast from a bit of bread and water. Yet another could summon rain. Sometimes these gifts take years to reveal themselves, and have varying degrees of usefulness. I knew from experience the talents of my living relatives. My Nan is able to tame animals, even the wildest—has had raccoons and flying squirrels for pets. Even a bear cub once. She is a falconer, and trains others to handle birds of prey.

My mother is a healer. She discovered her ability when she was in college and her roommate had a grand mal seizure, which my mother quelled with a touch of her finger. She volunteers at the local hospital, which for many years now has had the highest recovery rate of any in New England. My aunt Gwen will let you know where any lost or misplaced object is. Aunt Viv has a compass in her head, and can tell you right off how to travel to any place at all, even places she has never been. My Caleigh, as I’ve said, can affect her surroundings with her string games. The twins’
gifts have not yet been revealed to them, and I often worry over them. Will their gifts be simple and straightforward, or difficult and sometimes dangerous, like my own?

Disappearing
isn’t exactly the word for it. It’s as if I walk through a curtain, enter the passageway to another world. I sometimes feel that I could go further in, but I never do. I remain in the antechamber of that other world, while I can see, and even take part in, events around me in this world. I stay close, then I return, performing the perfect visible vanish and reappearance.

I moved to Las Vegas when I was twenty, worked as a change girl in a casino, and went to shows every night before my shift. I thought that with my gift, I could surely find a place in that world. I had no skills but my one turn, so I went to the smaller clubs and casinos, looking for someone on the rise. Someone who might be willing to hire me with no obvious experience. One evening I went to see a young magician perform. He asked for a volunteer and I was onstage before I knew it, choosing cards and cutting open lemons to reveal dollar bills with my name written on them. At the end of the show, I slipped out, too shy to approach him. But the next day I walked out the service door of the casino after my shift and there he was, sitting on the wall, making doves appear and releasing them into the bright air. He’d tracked me down.

I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought I’d have to do some fast talking to get signed on as a magician’s assistant. Not even my wildest imaginings featured a young, handsome magician with a Colin Firth accent falling in love with me. My boyfriends after Jolon had never lasted more than a few months. I wasn’t overly confident in the relationship department, but with Jeremy, everything seemed easy, right. So I quit my job and we formed the Amazing Maskelynes. In the beginning, I was relegated to the role of the Three Part Girl, the Girl Levitating. The magician’s assistant, the pretty girl in the skimpy costume.

I was still the magician’s assistant the first time I revealed my gift to Jeremy. He’d asked me to marry him, and I was stalling, uncertain how to break it to him. I felt it was wrong to conceal it from him before I accepted, and he was committed to my aberration forever.

But then it just happened, without any thought on my part at all. We
were working out a trick in which I was to disappear in a sheet of flames. It was a little frightening, although perfectly safe. I was always nervous just before he lit the flame. Fire had always frightened me.

I was in a large box made from metal poles, behind a piece of non-reflective glass. When the fire was lit, a trapdoor opened beneath me and I plummeted down under the stage, jumped up and raced to the back of the house, where I “reappeared.” The audience would be distracted by the flames, and we’d worked it out so that it took me only about fifteen seconds to reappear, to walk down the center aisle and rejoin Jeremy.

That day, instead of gritting my teeth, staying put, and dropping down as we’d rehearsed, I stepped away from the flame and right out of the box. I was about to apologize, but I saw that Jeremy was watching for me, timing me. When I looked toward a mirror we used in the next trick, I couldn’t see myself. I had disappeared. Jeremy whipped around, looking for me, worry growing in his eyes. I waited, my heart pounding, then reappeared right in front of him. He stared at me with his eyes all big and wild, like a spooked horse. I couldn’t help laughing.

“It isn’t funny,” he scolded me.

I quenched the still-burning flames with my cape, then sat down on the edge of the stage. Jeremy paced beside me.

“I was right here, and you know, I could swear you … well, vanished. How? Have you been practicing a bit without telling me?”

I reached for him. “It’s no bit, sweetheart. Just come here, and I’ll try to explain.”

He sat next to me and gazed into my eyes. “This should be interesting.”

“Well. I’ve always been able to do it.” And I did it again. He got the spooked horse look, and I reappeared.

“Bloody hell … Where
did
you go?”

“I don’t really go anywhere. It’s just that you can’t see me.”

“But how … I don’t … arrghh!” He slammed his forehead with the flat of his hand, then pointed an accusing finger at me. “Okay, wait just one minute, miss. Can you start at the beginning, please?”

I took his hand again and stroked it, to settle him. “I know I should
have told you before, but I was waiting for the right time. It’s kind of hard to understand if you don’t
see
it. It’s just that in my family, all the women have these … gifts. Mine is that I can disappear.”

“You can disappear.”

“You saw it.”

“I did. I
think
I did. But … you can’t be serious, can you? It’s a prank, right? Maybe I deserve it. I can be a wanker, I know.”

“Jeremy. Stand up.” He did, a little shakily. “Now look at me, and keep looking.” I disappeared again, and he startled. I reached for his hand.

He jumped back at my touch. “Bugger and blast!”

“Oh, come on, just walk around me.” I took his arm, guided him around. “See, no smoke and mirrors.” And I reappeared. He startled again, but was silent, his muscles tensed.

“Jeremy?” I was afraid I’d gone too far.

His eyes softened then. “Well, I would say you gave me a fright, just at first. But do you suppose you could do that again? Any time you like?”

“I know I can.”

“So you have a spectacular visible vanish, and we don’t need all the claptrap. Darling, why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I was afraid you’d think I was … I don’t know, some kind of monster. Do you still want to marry me, even if I’m a freak of nature?”

“I especially want to marry you, Revelation Dyer, if you’re a freak of nature with a perfect visible vanish. Oh, what a posh wife I’ll have. How rich we’ll be! It will be … magic!”

At midsummer, my dad walked me down the aisle of Exeter Cathedral, and I was married to my golden, shining Jeremy. On the same day I became a Maskelyne, I avoided some of the more dismal Maskelyne cousins by disappearing, big pouffy gown and all, in the middle of the garden party at the manor house that John Nevil built from the proceeds of the Original Levitating Girl. I found Jeremy talking to some old school friends, threaded my fingers through his. I led him to an unused guest room, shut the door, and reappeared. He took me in his arms and pulled me onto the bed. “This little trick of yours is useful in many circumstances.”

“You don’t know the half of it, buddy.” I laughed, while he tried to slip his hand into or under that dress, find skin.

“Now I know why they make these huge satin confections. It’s so the groom can’t get at the bride until they’ve actually tied the knot,” he grumbled.

His hands inched under the bones of the bodice, nearing my nipple, then just brushing it, teasing it until it was hard. I felt feverish under his fingers. “Mmm … that’s a lovely kind of torture,” I told him.

His eyes were so blue, I felt I was falling into the sea of them. He kissed me then, our first real married kiss, not in public, just ourselves alone, breathing together.