The cellar door was in the back hall, under the stairs, a place (Lilah now realized) that she had been avoiding, completely unconsciously, for weeks. The house was full of twilight around them, and the thing in Lilah’s peripheral vision was more than a cloud. When she turned her head, it wasn’t entirely gone, although that might just have been the shadows.
“Butch,” she said, and now her voice was trembling. “I really don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Don’t be such a scaredy-cat. This the door?”
Before she could say yes, no, or maybe, he’d opened it. That smell of rotting that she had noticed in Jonathan’s room was here as well, and, though still faint, it was distinctly stronger.
“Something’s down there,” Butch said with satisfaction. “They got lights?”
“Yeah, there’s a bulb,” Lilah said, “but, Butch, don’t—”
Butch found the cord, yanked it. For Lilah, the light made everything worse. It was harder than the dark, uglier, and anything it showed her would be true beyond any possible hope of redemption. Butch, oblivious, started down the stairs. It was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, but Lilah moved into the doorway to watch his progress.
“It sure does stink,” Butch called up. “I think he’s really down here, Lilah. I ain’t kidding.”
Oh, I believe you, Butch, she thought. That cloudy thing that she couldn’t quite see was down at the foot of the stairs now. She said, “Butch, come on up and we’ll call Sheriff Patterson. I don’t think he needs a warrant if we call him in.”
“Just wait a minute, Lilah. It’ll be better if I can find him first.”
“Come on, Butch.” Without wanting to, she started down the stairs, as slowly as she had walked across the floor in Jonathan’s room. She did not love Butch Collier—didn’t even like him much—but she knew her duty toward him, and her duty right now said she had to get him out of the cellar before something horrible happened. “Let’s just go call the sheriff, huh?”
“My Christ, Lilah, what’re you scared of? The boogeyman?”
“ ’Course not,” Lilah said. Butch and that cloudy shape, small and white, were converging on the same patch of floor. “But I don’t think it’s safe. The Starks come back and find us in their cellar . . . we might disappear next, Butch. I ain’t kidding.”
Butch knelt, putting his face on a level with that small, white, cloudy presence; Lilah reached the bottom of the stairs and froze there. She told herself she was being silly, that Jonathan Stark had been a meek, mild, sweet-tempered little boy, and that even if his spirit was vengeful, those who had not killed him should have nothing to fear. But she’d lived with that watcher for over two months, felt it in every room, felt its strength increase from hour to hour as the day waned. Whatever her rational mind said, she was afraid. She clutched the bannister, licked her lips, said, “Butch—?”
Butch said, “Holy Christ, he’s right here!” She saw the dirt swept aside by his broad, grimy hand, saw, unmistakably, the shapes of small fingers being uncovered.
Then, several things happened at once; Lilah was never able, no matter how carefully she thought them through, to put the pieces together in order. She knew that the front door slammed open; she knew that Butch, looking up, seemed finally to see the small, white watcher. She did not know what he saw—she never, first to last, saw the watcher’s face—but she saw Butch’s face change, saw his death before he could have fully known it was on him.
Butch Collier screamed.
Lilah, watching helplessly, sagged sideways off the stairs, ending up on her knees, still clutching the bannister as if it could save her. She heard footsteps along the hall, heard Cranmer Stark say, “Go upstairs, Sidonia! I’ll deal with it.” Then he appeared in the doorway.
“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded, in a roar like that of a beast, set his foot on the first step, and started down.
At the same moment that Lilah realized the white, watching presence was no longer beside Butch, she saw it, as clearly as she ever did, on the cellar stairs just below Cranmer Stark. Its back was to her, but she saw its child shape, saw the tilt of its head. It was looking at Cranmer Stark.
She didn’t think he saw it fully. He saw something; he shouted wordlessly, tried (she thought) to dodge it, and pitched headfirst down the stairs. She was close enough to hear the crack when his neck broke.
Lilah, who only realized later that she was screaming, flung herself up the basement stairs, slammed and bolted the door behind her, and half-scrambled, half-fell into the kitchen to call Sheriff Patterson.
When they unearthed Jonathan Stark’s body, they found his toy bunny clutched under one arm.
Lilah was in Sheriff Patterson’s car again. He’d taken her statement, tried to talk to the hysterically weeping Sidonia Stark, got his deputies started on the basement. Then he’d come back to the kitchen and said, “Mrs. Collier, would you care to come with me?”
“Am I under arrest?” she asked when he opened the door for her.
“Nope.” He got in the car, started it, said, “I believe you. I busted up enough fights with Butch Collier somewhere near the middle to know what he was like. And I was in that house today. I believe it happened just like you said.” He turned left at the end of the Starks’ street, away from the middle of town. “But, and I hate to say this, there’s a bunch of folks in Hyperion who ain’t gonna see it like I do. They’re gonna see one woman and two men in a cellar, and only the woman comes out, and they’re gonna say, we don’t know nothing about who put that little boy down there, but we know what two men end up dead over when there’s a woman in the room. They’re gonna like it better than the truth. Now, those folks can’t make me arrest you, but I can’t keep them from lynching you, neither. You understand?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Lilah. “I hear you, sheriff.”
“So I was thinking—I got your testimony, and I think when Sidonia calms down some, she maybe is gonna tell us the truth. And the man who needed prosecuting is dead, besides. So if you was to just . . . vanish, people could think what they liked and nobody’d get hurt. And I can’t believe you’ll be sorry to see the last of this town.”
“I’ll be grateful,” Lilah said. “I mean, it’s a nice town and all, but . . . ”
“I know,” he said as they passed the city limits sign. “You’d always be thinking about whether you had to go past the Stark house on your way home.”
“Yeah.”
They drove in silence for a long time. He said at last, “Near as I can make Sidonia out, Cranmer was carrying on with Miss Baldwin. She says she knew it and didn’t care, and whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But the way I figure it, the little boy got out of bed and saw something he shouldn’t’ve—or said something he shouldn’t’ve, maybe—and his daddy . . . ”
“Made him be quiet,” Lilah said. “That’s about all I ever heard the man say to the little boy. ‘Be quiet.’ ”
“He might not’ve meant to,” the sheriff offered after a cold moment.
“Maybe. But he still must’ve meant to hurt him.”
“So,” said the sheriff. “I hear you, Mrs. Collier. And the rest of it, he planned out like a snake. Buried the little boy in the basement, worked up that lie for his wife to tell, bullied her into telling it—I can tell you one thing, Sidonia was scared clean out of her mind by her husband. And it was a good lie. There wasn’t nothing we could check, nothing to say it wasn’t true. They didn’t go to the Magnolia Tree—I got that nailed down this afternoon—but that ain’t a crime, just like it ain’t a crime for a woman to use her own kitchen or a man to go in and work on a Saturday morning. That’s where he was. In his office, and the secretary he dragged in with him to testify to his whereabouts. He had it all worked out.”
“Yeah.” Lilah thought of Cranmer Stark on the cellar stairs, thought of the thing he maybe hadn’t seen—but maybe had. She said, “If I was you, I’d tell Mrs. Stark to sell that house. Or burn it, maybe. If
it was mine, I’d burn it.”
“Me, too. Sidonia claimed she hadn’t noticed anything funny . . . but she was looking over her shoulder the whole time. I was, too.”
“I don’t think it can hurt people ’cept in the cellar, and maybe only after dark. I mean, it had two months to get me or Mrs. Stark—or Mr. Stark—and it didn’t.” She shivered. “But it wanted to.”
“I never saw the boy but twice. Was he . . . was he a mean little boy?”
“No. That’s the worst thing. He wasn’t mean at all.” She gulped, feeling her eyes start to prickle with tears. “He just wanted his daddy to love him. And his daddy didn’t love him, and his mama didn’t love him, and I didn’t love him, neither. Didn’t nobody love him, and maybe that’s enough to make anybody mad.” She got a handkerchief out of her purse and cried. Sheriff Patterson drove and didn’t say anything.
Finally, calm again, Lilah said, “Where’re you taking me, sheriff? You planning to drive all night?”
“It’s another fifteen minutes to the state line. That should give you as much head start as you need on any trouble I can’t box up.”
“Well,” Lilah said with a sigh, “Arkansas can’t be any worse’n Mississippi.”
The state line was marked by a sign so weather-beaten that only the letters “ARKA” were legible. Sheriff Patterson pulled over. He said abruptly, “What do you think killed Butch? Do you think it was just fright?”
“I dunno,” Lilah said. “I told you, he hadn’t seen it, and he didn’t feel it. I mean, you felt it—not right away maybe, but you felt it.”
“Yeah,” said the sheriff. “I felt it all right.”
“Butch didn’t. He didn’t feel it at all until he looked up from . . . from the body. And if I got to guess, I think it was like it was too sudden. Like, my brothers knew a boy who died of jumping in a lake, because it was so cold and he went in all at once, and his heart just stopped. I think it was like that.”
“You don’t think . . . you don’t think the little boy could have done it?”
“No,” Lilah said.
“That’s good,” said the sheriff. “That’s good to hear.”
Lilah got out of the car, slung her purse on her shoulder. She started toward Arkansas, then suddenly turned and ran back to the car. The sheriff looked up at her.
“Burn the house,” Lilah said. “Do it yourself. Do it tonight.”
Sheriff Patterson looked at her a moment, silently; they both knew what had killed Butch Collier, and it hadn’t been fright. Butch had seen the watcher’s face.
The sheriff touched the brim of his hat, said, “Ma’am, you’re a smart woman.” He shifted into first, pulled the car in a long, slow loop just shy of the Arkansas state line, and started back for Hyperion.
Lilah watched until his tail-lights were no more than dim red sparks in the distance. Then she turned, squared her shoulders, and—sixteen years old and six hours a widow—walked out of Mississippi forever.
The Half-Sister
I was cleaning the lamps when the stranger knocked.
I knew it was a stranger, right off, because whoever it was didn’t know about the postern door that’s the only thing in the front wall that opens. They’d knocked at the ceremonial gate that hasn’t been used since Father reached his majority and won’t be again until Gunther comes of age in another twenty years—if Father hasn’t quarreled irrevocably with Gertrude before then and disinherited the whole pack of them.
I stayed where I was, up to my elbows in lamp-oil and dirt, while Nanna creaked her way slowly across the hall. Nanna’s terrible arthritis does not change the fact that she is the ranking woman in the household. Gertrude hates that, but she loses the argument every time she starts it. Lane outranked Nanna, but it didn’t matter, with Lane lying there like a dead thing in her bedroom, without even the strength to turn her face to the wall.
Nanna wrestled the door open, and stuck her head out to shout at whoever it was. I could hear a mutter of explanations and apologies, but all of the greeting formulas got carried away by the wind, so I was completely unprepared for the man who stepped into the hall at Nanna’s gesture of invitation.
He screamed Southerner from head to foot, from his braided hair and long mustaches to the expensive but completely inadequate boots on his feet. They were soaked right through. I suppose he was handsome, if you go in for that sort of thing, though there was too much cheekbone for my taste—too much crag. Craggy-faced men always think far better of themselves than they need to.
He said to Nanna, slowly and distinctly, as if she were some kind of idiot, “May I see Madalane, please?”
I knew who he was. My hands—big, lumpy-knuckled hands, short-nailed and filthy—clenched so hard that the rag twisted between them tore. Nanna and the stranger both turned to stare at me; from the way his head jerked around, he hadn’t even realized I was there.
I stood up, conscious of my shabby dress, the strands of hair escaping from my hairpins. “You should not be here.”
“You must be Karlin,” he said, as if I’d said something normal and polite. “Madalane told me a great deal about you.”
If he thought that would make me like him, he could have spared his breath. “And you’re Gerard. Lane hasn’t said a word about you.”
His face darkened in hurt and anger. But I continued before he could find words: “Leave. Please. Leave Lane alone.”
“Lane can make her own choices, Karlin,” Nanna said, her pale eyes sharp for once. “You will not make them for her.” She turned and hobbled slowly out of the hall.
I stepped out from behind the table where I had been seated and approached Gerard. Prince Gerard of Hylfeneth, he was, and by Southern reckoning, Lane was his wife, although I wasn’t sure whether their marriage was binding under Northern laws. It was one of the many things Lane wouldn’t tell me.
“Please,” I said, though the word was dry and bitter in my mouth. “Just go.”
“I can’t,” he said, spreading his hands as if he expected me to understand.
“Haven’t you hurt her enough?”
“Hurt her?”
“If she dies,” I said, “it will be because you have killed her.”
For a minute, I thought he was going to hit me, and so did he. But he changed his mind, and ran his hand over his face instead. “Karlin,” he said at last, and if I could have liked him, I might have pitied the weariness in his voice, “I don’t know why you hate me, but I don’t think you have any idea of why Madalane left Hylfeneth.”
“Don’t I?”
“You don’t know what we went through.”
“You haven’t sat with her every night for a month of nightmares. You weren’t here when she came riding up the pass like something that had been dead for a week and was just too brute obstinate to admit it. You haven’t argued with her over ever single bite of food she eats—and had to give the half of her meals to the pigs anyway. I have. So don’t tell me what I don’t know.”
He looked as if each word was a separate nail being pounded into his flesh, and maybe he would have left then, maybe he would have gone and left Lane alone, except that a voice said, thin and shaky, “Gerard?”
We both turned. It was her.
I don’t know how she did it. She hadn’t been able to leave her room for weeks, even to escape from Father, but there she was, leaning in the doorway—white as a ghost but fully dressed.
“Lane,” I said. “Lane, you oughtn’t—”
“Gerard?” she said again, and then they were clinging together in the doorway, talking and laughing and crying all together in a horrible tangle, and I knew that she was going back. Going back to Hylfeneth, going back to him, going back to the life I’d thought and hoped and even prayed she’d renounced. I’d thought she’d begun to see me again, the way she’d seen me before some fool traveling peddler had infected her with dreams of Hylfeneth and she’d stopped seeing anything but the blood-red minarets and lace-spun bridges of the stories. I’d thou
ght, when she came back, that the reality had cured her of the mindless dreams, that if we could just wait out the last throes of the fever, Lane would be back, my Lane who’d never laughed at me for being raw-boned and ugly and dark, who’d never called me goblin, who had shared with me things that this handsome hero would never understand. He didn’t know the Lane I did. I’d thought Lane had realized that, too, but the radiance on her face told me I was wrong.
They were deciding to leave as I watched them. I could see it on their faces. They would go riding off into the clouds together, and Lane wouldn’t have to face Father or explain herself to Gertrude or confront any of the remnants of a life she didn’t want. She didn’t even see me when she said goodbye, only her faithful half-sister—every heroine has one.
I don’t know if there was something I could have said, some way I could have reached her. I lie awake nights, wondering. But there was nothing I could have told her that she didn’t already know, and if what she knew was not enough to keep her here, then what use would any words of mine be?
She strode out ahead of Gerard, eager for the next adventure I suppose, and I caught his cloak and said, “When she dies, don’t bring her body here.”
I don’t think he understood me, not really, but he understood something, because he nodded and said, a little awkwardly, as if he wasn’t used to it, “Karlin, I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “She’s made her choice.”
He left then, following her as he would follow her anywhere, and I stayed behind, as I had stayed behind the first time she left. Stayed behind to keep the lamps clean and lit, to keep the household running, to keep carrying the responsibilities Lane had let fall.
I’m no heroine. I don’t have a story. And Lane’s story is not mine to tell, except for this: she made her choice.
Ashes, Ashes
Snow fell from the gray sky like ashes.
I stood at the window, defying the weather to affect my mood. After months of restoration and renovation, we were finally moving into the house where my husband had spent his childhood summers, the house of the grandmother he loved, who had died when he was fifteen. The house had been standing vacant ever since, and for a time we had despaired of rendering it liveable at all.