I go back to my desk to work, but after some time—fifteen minutes? an hour? I have no idea—something slams into my window so hard that the blow reverberates in my chest as if I had been struck. When I look up, I see the spread of wings against the glass and realize that some large bird, lost in the storm, has flown into my window. As I watch the bird slide off the glass and drop to the terrace below, I feel a sickening lurch in my stomach, as if I were in a plane that had suddenly lost altitude. I run downstairs and out onto the terrace in my slippers and kneel down in the snow over an indentation in a drift marked by a single white feather. I lean over to scoop up the bird, my arms sinking into the snow up to my shoulders, but then the snow beneath my hands begins to stir. It feels as if the snow itself had come to life, and once again I hear the words Corinth spoke at the séance: stone, water, wood. This is water—frozen—come to life.
It must be my screams that rouse David from the library. He comes out brandishing a fire poker, but when he sees, as I see now between slits in my fingers that I have raised to protect my face, that the snow demon is only a large, angry snow goose, he drops the poker and grabs the bird with his bare hands. The wings beat against his face, strike his chest, and then it’s gone in an upward spin of white down that merges with the falling snow.
He kneels down in front of me and tries to pull my hands away from my face, but his fingers on my wrists feel like burning brands searing into my flesh.
“Ellis,” he says. “Ellis, it’s okay, it’s gone. Let me see your face.”
I shake my head no, but he manages to peel away my hands from my face with the same gentle but firm motion I imagine he might use to peel a husk away from a seed. He cups handfuls of snow to wash my face and I see that the snow comes away red.
“Come on,” he says, holding my hands in his. His are trembling, but then, I notice, so are mine. “Let’s get you inside. I’ve got some bandages and antiseptic in my room.” I must look suspicious, because he shows me his own hands, which are scratched and scarred. “Occupational hazard,” he says, laughing. “I’m always getting scratched or nicked working outdoors. But I have to say, I’ve never gotten myself attacked by any of the waterfowl.”
Instead of laughing with him, I lay my hand on David’s chest. “You have now,” I say. He looks down and sees that the left side of his shirt has been ripped open to the skin, revealing a two-inch scratch just above his heart.
When we get to David’s room, I can still hear the beating of wings. I can hear them while he bandages my hands, and when I lay my hand over the scratch on his chest, I feel his heart beating to the same rhythm. The beating is loud enough to drown out the sound of my own heartbeat but not the sound of my fear.
“I can’t . . .” I begin, but then he lays his hand over mine and, lifting it to his mouth, kisses the underside of my wrist. I shiver and the beating in my head becomes a drumbeat. When he pulls me down onto the bed, the papers beneath us crackle like fire. David sweeps the blueprints and maps off the bed in one stroke of his arm, and the papers spin in slow, lazy spirals to the floor.
My bandaged hands are too clumsy to unbutton my own shirt, so he does it for me, deliberately and gently, his own hands shaking. Not being able to use my hands makes me feel clumsy, but he anticipates every movement I want to make until I feel that someone else is inhabiting my body, moving my limbs, producing the moans that issue from my throat.
I stretch out beneath him, reaching to wrap my hands around the bedposts, but he catches my hands and, cradling them in one of his, holds them above my head. For an instant I feel trapped, but then I’m soaring, as if I’ve broken free of my body at last. I can feel myself rising above the bed, watching myself making love to this man I hardly know. Outside the snow howls and something cracks, and I hear someone cry out. Me.
“It’s just the wind,” David murmurs, soothing me, “a branch breaking in the wind.”
But it wasn’t the sound that made me cry out—it was something sharp stabbing into my wrist. I wrench my hand out of David’s grasp and hold it up. Stuck half an inch into my flesh is a pearl-tipped pin. David pulls it out instantly.
“I have no idea how this got here . . .” he begins, but I’m already getting up, clutching my unbuttoned shirt over my breasts. I’m not listening. I’m looking over my shoulder at the headboard, where one of the eagle’s wings has cracked in half.
David follows me out into the hall, pleading with me. “Ellis, what’s wrong? Please tell me.”
I keep going, my eyes blinded with tears, and so I don’t see what trips me before I land on the floor. It’s one of the white stones, lying in the middle of the hallway. I pick it up and notice that there’s another one a few feet away . . . and another at the foot of the attic stairs. David reaches me there, and we both look up the stairs to see a stone on every step. He follows me up to the attic, where we find an entire circle of the stones in the middle of the room. Two glass-eyed dolls, a carved bear, and a stuffed goose are sitting inside the circle.
“It’s some kind of joke,” David says. “Nat and Bethesda probably set this up.”
I don’t say anything because I’ve noticed that there’s another path of stones leading from the circle to a closet at the west end of the attic.
“Yeah,” he says, following me to the closet, “they’re probably hiding in there waiting to jump out and shout ‘Boo!’ Nat,” he calls, “Bethesda, we know you’re in there.”
A thunk comes from inside the closet that sounds exactly like a stone dropping on wood. He rattles the door and calls their names, but there’s no other sound. “I’m going to get something to pry this loose,” he says, shaking the padlock that secures the door as if he were angry with the thing itself. “The metal is so corroded it won’t be hard to break.”
As David brushes past me, I look down at the ancient iron padlock. A thick crust of vermilion rust has grown over it, distorting the original shape and welding the case to the shackle. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s touched this in decades,” I say, cupping the lock in my hand. The instant my flesh touches the iron I smell blood. I try to draw back my hand, but the lock sticks to my palm, the rust turning into a viscous paste that runs through my fingers and puddles on the floor by my feet until there’s nothing left in my hand but a wet, sticky stain. And then, the lock melted, the door creaks slowly open, letting in the cold white attic light, which touches a ladder-back chair and, like liquid glass poured into a mold, fills the chair with the shape of a little girl who lifts the glassy shimmer of her head up and looks straight at me out of two black holes where her eyes should be.
“El—” David has come to stand behind me, but he’s unable to finish even my name before the light drains out of the girl, leaving an empty husk that wavers for a second and then vanishes. I turn to David, afraid that he won’t have seen it, but when I see the color drained from his face, I realize it’s all the more horrifying that he has.
“Something horrible happened here,” I say, scanning the four narrow beds against the wall, afraid that the children’s bodies will swell into shape beneath the lumpy counterpanes. David doesn’t answer. He’s entered the storage room and knelt by the chair. He picks up a strand of rope that’s tied to the rungs of the chair back and holds up its frayed end for me to see. The rope, hacked at with a knife, is stained with blood.
David unties the bloodstained rope from the chair and holds it out to me, but I find I’m unable to touch it. Even several feet away I can smell the blood again. A wave of nausea passes over me, and I lurch toward the windows to get some air, but when I push one open, the air that comes in is sharp with ice particles that feel like needles on my face. I close it and am just turning away when a motion down in the garden catches my attention. It’s Bethesda making her way down the hill through the deep snow wearing only a cardigan, thermal leggings, and her green rubber boots. And then, some twenty feet behind her, is Nat, also underdressed in flannel shirt, jeans, and the moccasins he wears around the house as slippe
rs.
“We have to go after them,” I hear David say from behind me. “If they get disoriented out there, they could get hypothermia at these temperatures. Here”—David reaches into an open trunk and pulls out an old hunting jacket and a woolen cloak and two pairs of old hunting boots—“we don’t have time to get our things.” He heads down the steps, and I follow him, pausing only a moment to look over my shoulder at the door to the storage closet. It’s closed again, but whether it was David who closed it or not, I’m not sure.
When we step out onto the terrace, we’re assaulted by a fierce, icy wind. The snow is coming down heavier than before and the wind is sweeping it into drifts that come halfway up the balustrade.
“How are we ever going to find them?” I ask, looking at the deep snow from the terrace. “The wind has swept away their footprints.”
“All Bethesda talks about these days is the children’s cemetery,” David says. “She’s made diagrams of it and lists of the birth and death dates of all the children. I bet she found some discrepancy and decided to go down to check it out.”
I can’t help but wonder when David has seen these diagrams and lists, but I don’t say anything. Instead I step off the terrace and sink to my knees in snow.
“We probably should have snowshoes,” David says, “but there’s no time. Can you still find that path you took us down that day? There might be less snow under the trees.”
Although I haven’t been on the path since the day Zalman broke his leg, I have no trouble finding it. Maybe because I follow it every night in my dreams. David is right—there is less snow under the ilexes. In fact, it almost seems as if a path has been shoveled through the snow. The thick hedges muffle the wind as well, letting in only playful gusts that stir the powdery snow, swirling it into patterns beneath my feet.
“I bet you can’t wait to get to all of this with your clippers,” I say to David, who’s walking so close behind me that I can hear his breath at my ear.
“I don’t know,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I really love how a garden looks when it’s overgrown like this. Of course, don’t tell the Garden Conservancy I said that.”
I remember sensing back in the fall that David felt this way, but I had forgotten about it.
“This garden especially,” he goes on. “I have this feeling like it should be overgrown—that nature should be allowed to claim it back. Maybe it’s because of how it was hewn out of the woods and the money for it came from Latham’s lumber business. I can’t help but picture all the trees that were cut down to make it. I know that might sound sentimental—”
“No,” I say, “I know exactly what you mean. It’s something else, too. It’s what Aurora built it for—as a shrine to the memory of her dead children—such an elaborate shrine, it’s as if their spirits are trapped in it.” I picture the girl tied to the chair in the attic room, her hollow eyes, and the girl I saw crouched beneath the hedge in the maze . . . and then I see, about ten feet ahead of us, a crumpled form under a light dusting of snow. David rushes forward and I follow him, arriving in time to see Nat’s face as David turns him over. There’s a gash on his forehead and a circle of blood spreading out beneath his head on the snow.
I hear someone muttering, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” in a childish voice, over and over again. At first I think the words are in my head, but when David picks up his head and listens, I realize they’re coming from farther up the path. There, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the path, is Bethesda. She’s been sitting there long enough for snow to drift over her legs. “I was only playing. It was only a snowball I threw.” She holds up a snowball to show us, but as I walk toward her, I see it’s not a snowball but one of the white rocks.
“Explain again why you were going down to the children’s cemetery,” David asks that night in the library after dinner. He’s standing in front of the fireplace, his elbow on the mantel, with a glass of scotch in one hand, still wearing the checked hunting jacket he found in the attic, which fits him as if it were made for him. Nat, his head copiously bandaged, watches enviously every time David lifts the glass to his lips. The doctor at the emergency room (“You writers are pretty accident-prone up there,” he commented to us while stitching Nat’s head) said absolutely no alcohol for forty-eight hours.
Bethesda, who is sitting on the footstool of Nat’s chair, takes a deep breath and goes through her story once again. “I was working at my desk when a gust of wind struck my window so hard it broke the glass. Then the wind blew the drapes up and all my papers came unpinned. I was chasing them around the room when I noticed one was stuck to the glass, just above where it was broken. I was afraid it would fly out the window, so I went over to get it . . .” Bethesda pauses, and I realize that she’s paused every time she’s gotten to this part of the story.
“You saw something at the window, didn’t you?” I ask.
“It was nothing,” she says. “It was just my reflection. But I thought . . .”
“You thought it was a face,” I say.
Bethesda nods and takes a large gulp of her scotch, glancing at Nat guiltily as she does. “Yes, it looked like a face etched in frost. It scared the hell out of me. Then I took down the paper and looked at it—”
“Good old Bethesda,” Nat says, “you wouldn’t let a little ghost sighting get in the way of your research.” There’s a note of bitterness in Nat’s voice that I haven’t heard him use before toward Bethesda. Maybe it’s from being given a concussion and a gash requiring five stitches.
“Well, it turned out to be important,” Bethesda says, pulling a sheet of paper from her pocket. “See, it’s a death certificate for Alice Latham dated April ninth, 1883.”
“But isn’t Alice the little girl who disappeared in 1893 and was never found?” David asks.
“This could be a different Alice,” I say. “There were several duplicate names in the children’s cemetery.”
“But no ‘Alice,’ ” Bethesda says. “I’m sure of it—or almost sure. That’s why I wanted to go down to the cemetery and look. Then I got lost on the path and when I heard someone behind me I thought . . . I don’t know . . . I thought I heard someone laughing and a snowball hit my ear.”
“I did not throw a snowball at you,” Nat says, “and I wasn’t laughing. I was half frozen because when I saw you from my window heading into the garden without a coat, I ran down to follow you without my coat.”
“I’m just telling you what I thought was happening,” Bethesda says. “I had this feeling . . . I know it was stupid . . . but I had this feeling it was the snow doing it.”
“So David and Ellis were led up to the attic by a trail of stones, and Nat and Bethesda were led into the garden by a trail of ice,” Zalman, who’s sitting on the couch with his injured leg stretched out, says.
“What next?” David asks, looking down at the group. “Bread crumbs?”
“I heard wings today,” I say. “And then . . .” I look up at David and blush.
“Uh . . . something happened in my room,” he says. “The carved eagle on my bed split in two.”
Nat looks at David and then at me, and then he leans forward and, before she can stop him, takes Bethesda’s glass from her and swallows the last of her scotch.
“So we’ve got rocks, ice, and wings,” Zalman says, ticking off each item on his fingers as if collecting supplies for a picnic.
“No,” I say. “Stone, water, and wood.” As I say the words, a log shifts in the fireplace and a spark jumps out onto the carpet, which David promptly grounds out under his boot. “I was writing the scene of the second séance today,” I explain, “and what I wrote . . . I imagined what Corinth Blackwell might have done if she didn’t really want to conjure the spirits of the Latham children.”
“But why wouldn’t she want to conjure the children?” Bethesda asks.
“Think of all those children in the cemetery,” I say, “some who lived only a few hours. Would you want to come face-to-face with
those?”
When no one answers, I go on. “So, what I had her do is think of something else while she said the children’s names, and I picked inanimate things that seemed to have no personality.”
“Stone, water, wood,” Zalman says.
“Yes, that’s what she said . . . or I mean, that’s what I had her say. Only it doesn’t work. The children come anyway, but they come . . .” I stop, too horrified to finish what I’d been about to say.
“They come,” Zalman says, finishing for me, “as stone, water, and wood.”
Chapter Twenty
Corinth knows as she walks through the garden on the way back to the house that something is wrong. At first it’s just a sense that everything’s more alive. The polished ilex leaves quiver in the moonlight like phosphorescence in a Mediterranean sea. The hedges rustle as she walks by, pulsing in and out with each step she takes. The statues, soaked in moonlight, are draped with leaf shadows that rise and fall across their breasts like patterned gauze stirred by their breath. It reminds Corinth of walking through the woods with her mother, how every plant and animal and stone and even the wind that stirred the leaves had a name. Only the spirits animating this garden do not seem benign to her. When she reaches the top terrace and turns to look back, she sees that the water in the fountain allée, whose murmur has accompanied her from the grotto, is flowing uphill.
She turns toward the house and crosses the terrace as quickly as she can, pushed by a wind that tugs at her skirts. The French doors to the library open easily, but she has to struggle against the wind to close them, the glass rattling in the wooden frames so hard that she thinks they will break. When she finally gets them closed she sees, on the glass pane below the knob, the imprint of a small hand. She turns away, relieved to see a fire in the fireplace and the calm solidity of the Morris chairs on the hearth, relieved to be inside and alone—but then she hears a rustle in the alcove and catches a scent that brings to mind the bog behind the cabin on the Sacandaga. No, Corinth thinks, closing her eyes, not that, but when she opens her eyes, she sees Mrs. Ramsdale step out of the shadows, a small sherry glass in one hand and a crystal decanter in the other. Mrs. Ramsdale pours a thimbleful of the amber-colored liquor and drinks it all down.