Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 13

  “What are you talking about?” Mespa said, rising from the stone on which she’d been sitting.

  “Well . . . if anything were to happen to any of us . . .”

  “You mean to you,” Joephi said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You’ve been having bad dreams, haven’t you?”

  “A few,” Diamanda admitted. “Hopefully they don’t mean anything and we’ll all live to see what we planned all those years ago come to fruition. But if something should happen to one of us, I want us all to promise that we’ll let the girl make her own choices. Goodness knows she may not do exactly what we want her to do. She’s got a will of her own—”

  “More than one,” Mespa said dryly.

  “True.” The thought put the tiniest of smiles on Diamanda’s face. “That may be the saving of her, of course,” she said. “It may be the saving of us all.”

  She looked up at the sky over Odom’s Spire. It was a curious sight. Light and dark were inverted there, proof of the unique power of the Twenty-Fifth Hour. The stars were pinpoints of blackness against a pallid heaven. Diamanda studied the spectacle, looking for some further sign of what the future held. But apparently she found nothing.

  “I know we’d like to think that destiny holds the reins in all of this,” she said softly. “That somewhere fate has laid out a happy future. But, sisters, I think Candy will confound our expectations, whatever they may be, and however fondly we may hold them. We must let her be her own creature, for better or worse.”

  “Goddess forgive us for what we did,” Mespa murmured.

  “You regret it, don’t you?” Joephi said to Mespa. “You wish we’d never done it.”

  “We interfered with the natural order of things,” Mespa said. “I don’t believe that was wise.”

  “But it’s done,” Diamanda said forcefully. “And there’s no taking it back. There’s no trying to bend her to our will if we disagree with the choices she makes. She’s not our toy.”

  “She learned quickly,” Joephi said. “And there’s a lot of anger in her. Probably from the father. Perhaps if she forgave him—”

  “There, you see,” Diamanda said. “You still want to manipulate her.” She made a grim smile. “As if we could. Her, of all people.”

  “I’m only saying that the combination of rage and power makes for a dangerous force. And here’s you saying we shouldn’t try to control that force. Let her learn, you say. But what happens while she’s learning, Diamanda? Think of the damage she could do.”

  “Think of the good,” said the old lady. “Think of why we did this in the first place. What we wanted to preserve.”

  “Well, it’s a terrible risk we’re taking,” said Joephi. “I just hope we don’t live to regret it.”

  There was a little silence. Then Mespa said: “Can’t we at least give her a clue or two?”

  “Well . . . I don’t see how,” Diamanda replied. “Where would we begin?”

  “On that night. The rain. Her mother.”

  “Well, you see, there’s another thing, now that you mention it,” said Joephi. “The mother.”

  “What about her?” said Diamanda.

  “We gave her a piece of the mystery. She accepted it. She birthed it. She nursed it.”

  “So?”

  “So has it ever occurred to you that maybe she’d been touched by magic too?”

  Diamanda waved the troublesome notion away. “She was just a vessel. There’s no power in her.”

  “I’m just telling you, Diamanda, if we’re looking for the future to surprise us, we should look beyond the girl. Look to those she’s touched.”

  “And will touch,” Mespa said grimly. “Is touching even now. I think Joephi’s right. We must be vigilant. Look everywhere for signs.”

  As if to prove the point Mespa was making, one of the stars that trembled at the Spire’s zenith chose that moment to perish, exploding with the hushed grace of a dandelion disintegrating before a gust of wind.

  All the women looked up and watched as the dark flakes of star stuff fell and fell and were extinguished. The three were silent for a while after the show was over. But finally Mespa said: “And what did that signify, do you suppose?”

  Diamanda drained her brandy glass. “At a guess?” she said. “Nothing at all.”

  Chapter 19

  Life and Death in Chickentown

  IN A WORLD VERY remote from the place where Joephi, Mespa and Diamanda were exchanging their thoughts and fears—in Chickentown, Minnesota—life went on very much as it always had. Which was not to say that Candy Quackenbush’s disappearance had not caused a good deal of gossip around town. It had. Especially because there had been some bizarre details attached to the story.

  According to one rumor, for instance, the Quackenbush girl had been seen the day that she’d disappeared by old Mrs. Lavinia White (aka the Widow White), who lived on Lincoln Street, at the very edge of town. In an interview with a reporter from the Chickentown Courier, the Widow White claimed she had seen Candy walking in the direction of the open prairie, and she had been staring up at the sky.

  “Had there been anything to stare at?” the Widow White had been asked.

  “Just a few clouds,” the widow replied. “But later on . . .”

  “What happened later?” the reporter had asked.

  “It was strange . . .” Lavinia said. “About half an hour after she’d passed by, my bedroom window began to rattle.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I opened the window up.”

  “Did it stop rattling?”

  The Widow White had given the man a look of profound contempt, as though she could not imagine why he would ask such a thing when there was so much more to be talked about.

  “I could smell the sea,” she told the reporter. “I know how crazy that sounds, but I did. I swear. I smelled the ocean. All salty and cold.”

  “That’s impossible,” the reporter had replied.

  “Are you trying to imply that I’m crazy?”

  “No . . .”

  “Because I’m not. I may be old, but I’m not crazy. I smelled seawater, I’m telling you.”

  Not wishing to offend the old lady, the journalist had gently asked Lavinia when exactly she’d last been near the ocean.

  “On my honeymoon,” the Widow White had replied. “Seventy-two years ago.”

  “Is it possible that perhaps your memory is a little shaky?” the reporter had mildly suggested.

  Lavinia had fixed the poor man with a gaze whose sharpness had not been blunted by the passage of years. “Are you suggesting that I don’t remember what happened on my own honeymoon?” she said.

  Her outrage did her no good. When the report appeared in the Courier, it was accompanied by the observation that “Lavinia White’s claims that she smelled the sea that day are a sad comment on the frailty of old age.”

  The reporter (along with the editor of the newspaper) quickly came to regret voicing an opinion on the matter. There were two hundred and eleven calls to the Courier that day, all from people in town who said that they too had smelled the ocean on the day that the Widow White had smelled it. Maybe it was some freak wind condition, some suggested, but it wasn’t the Widow White’s imagination.

  As a result of these complaints the editor dispatched a photographer and another reporter to comb the area where the Quackenbush girl had disappeared. There was some kind of broken-down tower out there, according to the police, but that was about all.

  This soon turned out to be only part of the truth. The Courier photographer did indeed get pictures of the tower, which looked like a lighthouse on the prairie, but he also found and photographed the rotted remains of a long wooden jetty. This was strange, the Courier commented. Who would have built a jetty out there in the middle of nowhere when there was no water for miles?

  And once the area was examined more closely, it turned out that there were still stranger phenomena to report. In the waist-high grass around the jetty, the
photographer came upon a bizarre array of objects. So many, in fact, that the editor of the Courier demanded, in print, that the police make a search of the location. Pleading a lack of manpower, the police brought in the Chickentown Boy Scouts, issued them forensic gloves and three sizes of plastic garbage bags, instructed them to collect all the “evidence” from the vicinity and sent them on their way to pick it up.

  They found all kinds of oddities. The desiccated remains of hundreds of fishes that had certainly never swum in any Minnesota lake; a number of dead birds, also of unknown species; innumerable shells; a glass eye (green); a leather tail (blue); a wooden instrument carved in the shape of a snake that when blown produced a single note of eerie beauty; seven shoes, none of them making a pair; and several more bags of stuff that had been so corrupted by its time in the water as to be unrecognizable.

  There was also a single living survivor of whatever body of water had been here. Under a large rock beneath the jetty, two of the boys found a creature that looked not unlike an enormous turquoise lobster. The creature wriggled so violently that it loosened itself from its old barnacle-encrusted armor. The tender-shelled beast then fled away through the long grass, and was gone.

  All of this was duly reported in the pages of the Courier, under the headline “Weird Sights Seen Close to Town Limits.”

  If that had been the end of the weirdnesses, the folks of Chickentown might have decided to forget the reports and get on with their commonplace lives.

  But it was not the end. It was just the beginning.

  In the middle of town, at the Comfort Tree Hotel, Norma Lipnik (who had given Candy a tour of the hotel just before the girl’s disappearance) had some oddities of her own to deal with; events she was determined to keep out of the pages of the Courier for purely commercial reasons (she didn’t want to scare away customers) but which were soon going to become public knowledge anyway.

  The Comfort Tree Hotel had a ghost. Most of the time this was of no great concern. In fact, when Candy had been here, Norma had taken her up to the old section of the hotel—to Room Nineteen—where this phantom was reported to reside, and had proudly given her a history of his sad life. His name was Henry Murkitt, and according to hotel legend he had committed suicide in Room Nineteen one melancholy Christmas many years ago. He’d had his reasons. Norma knew two of them. His beloved wife, Diamanda, had walked out on him, the story went, leaving for unknown destinations. That was the first reason. And the second? The city council had decided in December of 1947 to change the name of the town (which had until that time been called Murkitt, in honor of Henry’s ancestors, who’d founded the community eighty years before) to Chickentown.

  Henry had taken these blows very hard. So hard indeed that he had simply decided that his life wasn’t worth living. He’d locked himself up with a gun and a whiskey bottle and said good-bye to life. But according to many of the hotel staff, poor Henry had never quite been able to let go of the world that had caused him so much pain. He still haunted the stale air of Room Nineteen. He was an entirely benign presence. He’d never attempted to frighten any of the Comfort Tree’s staff; nor had he done anything destructive to the fabric of the hotel.

  Until now, that is.

  Now Norma was standing in the doorway of Room Nineteen, staring at the opposite wall. On it, somebody had scrawled two words.

  HIGHER GROUND

  Norma didn’t like having to accept that this was the handiwork of a deceased man, but she had little option. Her staff were all honest, hardworking folks; none of them would have played a trick like this.

  Which left only one person, Norma reasoned. The graffiti was the work of Henry Murkitt. But what did it mean? That was the question Norma tussled with as she stared at the two words scrawled into the plaster. Had the ghost in Room Nineteen simply gone a little crazy over the years, or was he attempting to communicate something?

  She went over to the wall and tentatively ran her fingers over the letters. The gouged plaster was cold, unnaturally so. She quickly withdrew her hand, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck prickling. Was he there in the room with her right now? She snatched a furtive, frightened glance over her shoulder. Then, taking a deep breath, she said: “Are . . . you in here, Henry?”

  At first there was no response. No sound, not the merest scratching. Nothing to signify that there was any presence here at all. Norma began to turn back toward the door. But as she did so, she caught sight of movement from the corner of her eye. She froze, not really wanting to look. But her curiosity was stronger than her fear, and she slowly turned to look back in the direction of the movement.

  It was just the drape!

  She expelled the rest of her breath, shaking her head at the foolishness of all this. Just a moth-eaten drape caught in the breeze, that was—

  Wait now. Breeze? What breeze? The window was closed and locked, and yet the gray curtain was billowing as though a gust had caught it from behind.

  “Oh my Lord . . .” Norma said.

  As she spoke, the lamp that hung in the middle of the room, its shade yellowed with age and nicotine, began to swing.

  And by its giddying light she saw the filthy fabric of the drape suddenly twitch, as though it had been caught by an invisible hand, and in its folds she saw a face, no doubt of that; its features were simplified by the fabric: just two pits for eyes, a vague lump for a nose and a wide-open mouth.

  It was more than Norma wanted to see. She let out a short shriek, which she muted with her fingers, and retreated to the door. She was afraid the thing was going to come toward her, but it didn’t move. It just stayed there in the fabric while the lamp flickered overhead. Suddenly the lamp brightened and burned out. That was Norma’s cue. She turned and pulled open the door, slamming it hard behind her.

  It took her a few minutes, and six fumbled cigarettes, to calm herself down. But when she did, she quickly came to realize the ghost in Room Nineteen had probably meant no harm with its appearance. After all, she’d called it, hadn’t she? All the ghost of Henry Murkitt had done was answer her call, probably the only way he could. So now the question: what should she do about it? She decided that she was too flustered to disguise the fact that something had happened from her staff. They knew her too well. So she assembled everyone in the kitchen and explained as best she could what she’d seen on the wall, and in the drapes, of Room Nineteen.

  “He’s trying to send a message of some kind,” Ethel Bloch, who was in charge of the housekeeping, said.

  “All right,” Norma said testily. “Suppose he is. What then?”

  “You should tell people. About what you saw. And the words.”

  “Ha! People will think you’re crazy,” Ed Farrow, who looked after the hotel kitchen, warned. “Nobody will ever come to this hotel again. I’m tellin’ you, folks are weird about this stuff. Remember that suicide over at McEnroe’s Motel? Ol’ Mick McEnroe thought he was going to get more business out of that than he could deal with. He had them darn-fool hats made ’n’ all. And what happened? Place closed down in two months. Nobody wants to be reminded of death when they’re out havin’ a good time.”

  The staff generally seemed to agree with Ed Farrow, and the meeting finished with everyone agreeing to keep all this under wraps, at least until Norma could make some enquiries about what Henry Murkitt and his message on the wall was really about.

  Unfortunately, somebody in that assembly couldn’t keep his or her mouth shut. Word of what Norma had witnessed soon spread through town, and by the early evening there was a small group of townspeople standing outside the hotel, apparently trying to work out which of the windows belonged to Room Nineteen. Norma didn’t waste time accusing anybody. What was done was done. She decided in the middle of the evening that she would go out and talk to the assembled crowd. It turned out that three people already possessed blurred but perfectly decipherable photographs of the scrawlings in Room Nineteen, though they refused to name the person who’d let them into the hotel to take them
. Finally Norma had decided simply to own up to what she’d seen. If she’d been hoping that this would bring an end to the matter, she was sadly mistaken. The crowd instead grew larger as news about “the words on the wall” spread through town. By the end of the day there were three hundred people in the street outside the hotel. Norma felt as though she were in a state of siege. Just after midnight a couple of the rowdier members of the crowd decided that they wanted to get into the hotel and see what Henry Murkitt had written on the wall for themselves. They attempted to force an entrance. Norma had had enough. She called the police. Five minutes later there were three squad cars outside, and the crowd was being gently dispersed.

  At the edge of the prairie, the Widow White sat by her window and listened to the sirens drifting through the streets from the middle of town. She’d heard from her daughter-in-law Vivien about what was going on down at the Comfort Tree Hotel, and it made her curse her old age with especial vehemence. She wanted to be down there, mingling with the crowd, finding out what was happening.

  Something of significance was in the air, that she didn’t doubt. She heard the wind gusting against the window and the glass creaking as the gusts came against it. She wheeled herself over to the window and made a frustrated attempt to open it. The wood had warped during the winter freeze, and now her arthritic fingers had difficulty getting the darn thing open.

  But she struggled on, defying the pain in her finger joints, determined to have a sniff of that wind. At last the latch succumbed to her efforts, and she pushed the window open. The sweet scent of prairie grass came to meet her from the darkness.

  She thought of the report she’d read in the Courier, about what they’d found out there on the prairie: the tower, the garbage and the dead fish littered in the grass as though at a high-water mark.

  A high-water mark!

  “Oh, saints in heaven preserve us,” she said softly, and she stared out into the night.