Four and Twenty Blackbirds E-Book

Cherie Priest

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 460

Beschreibung

Eden Moore was orphaned at birth and brought up by her mother's beautiful sister Lulu. Even as a child Eden was never alone, three ghostly sisters watched from the shadows, longing to tell her their story. Always kept in the dark about her past, as an adult Eden goes looking for answers, to what really happened to her mother, and to the terrifying secret that lurks at the heart of her family history. Soon she is in a desperate race to uncover the truth before a new and deadly enemy destroys what is left of her family..

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Cherie Priest

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

One: Eden

Two: Lulu

Three: Branches

Four: Interregnum

Five: Blood Tells

Six: Up the Road a Piece

Seven: The Right Tree

Eight: In Search of Lost Time

Nine: Unbearable Lightness

Ten: Gone South

Eleven: The Death of the Sisters

Twelve: Finis

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

ALSO BY CHERIE PRIEST AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

CHESHIRE RED REPORTS

Bloodshot

Hellbent

COMING SOON

EDEN MOORE

Wings to the Kingdom

Not Flesh Nor Feathers

FOUR AND TWENTY BLACKBIRDSPrint edition ISBN: 9780857687722E-book edition ISBN: 9780857687876

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: February 20121 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2© 2003, 2012 by Cherie Priest. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

This edition published by arrangement with Tor Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE KIDS IN MY LIFE—

MY LITTLE MORTALITY MARKERS,

ALEX AND CHELSEA.

NOW YOU TWO ARE GETTING OLD ENOUGH TO HEAR

MY REALLY GOOD SPOOKY STORIES.

ONE

EDEN

I

“Draw me a picture of someplace you’ve been that you liked very much,” Mrs. Patterson suggested, pronouncing each word with the firm, specific articulation peculiar to those who work with children. “It can be anyplace at all—an amusement park, a playground, a tree house, or your bedroom. Maybe you went on vacation once and visited the beach. You could draw the ocean with seagulls and shells. Or maybe you went camping on the mountain. You might have gone down to the waterfall for a picnic, or up to Sunset Rock. Pick a place special to you, and when you’re finished, we’ll put your pictures up on the bulletin board in the hallway.”

I cringed, staring down at the blank sheet of coarse cream paper. Before me was a plastic tub filled with fat, fruit-scented markers, ripe for the choosing. While the other kids at my table dove into a frenzy of scribbles I stalled for time, popping the lid off each color and sniffing for inspiration.

Red is for cherries. Purple is for grape. Green is for… I didn’t recognize the scent.

But green is for… yes, green is for water.

I jammed the lid onto the back of the marker and began to scrawl a wide pool across the bottom half of the sheet. Green is for water. And for alligators. I picked up the yellow marker (supposed to be lemons, but smelled like detergent) and drew two periscope eyeballs poking up through the swirls. Then I outlined them with black (licorice) and drew a long snout with two bumps for nostrils.

Brown. Brown was chocolate.

I sketched tall, thin trees that reached up past the top of the page. And snakes. Brown is for snakes. Wrapped around one trunk I placed a spiraled serpent with a wide open mouth. I gave him a strawberry pink tongue shaped like a Y.

But I was missing something. I chewed on my thumbnail and tapped the brown pen. A house. A brown house set on blocks for when the water rose too high, with a cherry red canoe tied to the front porch just in case. A brown chocolate house, made of flat boards with a sloping gray roof that let the fresh rainwater run into a barrel. Gray is for… A gray roof.

And gray is for…

Gray is for…

Mrs. Patterson’s hands fluttered into my vision. “My goodness, Eden. What a vivid picture you’ve made! Now, where is this?”

“Gray is for ghosts!” I blurted out.

For a moment the other kids were quiet, but then a few began to giggle. The giggle traveled halfway around the room, then died of shame under our teacher’s withering frown.

“Class,” she addressed it as a warning. “Eden has drawn us a very good green swamp with alligators and snakes, and a house.”

I sank down into my chair and repeated myself more softly. “And gray is for ghosts, Mrs. Patterson. I haven’t put the ghosts in yet.”

Mrs. Patterson understood. Small and frail, she was a shriveled and sweet black woman who’d emerged from retirement to figurehead my kindergarten class. She made cookies every night before she went to bed because she knew some of her kids didn’t get any breakfast before school. She crocheted all twenty of us little sweaters during the winter and took us to the city pool for free all summer. She was simply kind, but all the same, she terrified me.

Not on purpose, of course. She wouldn’t have scared me deliberately, but whenever I saw her tiny, wrinkled hands I thought of dead birds; and every time she breezed by my desk they were flapping their bony, naked wings.

I think my fear hurt her feelings, or perhaps she thought something terrible was going on at home for me to be so silent and frightened all the time; but all was normal in our household so far as normal goes. I was raised by my aunt Louise and uncle David. They had no children of their own, so it was just me and that was just fine.

Everything was fairly ordinary until I started school. Until then I’d never had much interest in doodling, finger painting, or any of the other sloppy activities of early childhood, but once I entered the hallowed halls of elementary school, people handed me crayons and watercolors at every turn. Suddenly there was construction paper, glitter glue, Popsicle sticks, yarn, and paste. We used ink to make thumbprint caterpillars and paper bags to make cartoon hand puppets. We had sidewalk chalk to make Van Gogh-esque night scenes on black paper or hopscotch squares on the four-square courts outside. Our educators wanted us to expand our brains, to think outside the box—to look inside our gray-matter nooks and bring forth art. Most of the time, it was fun.

So although I was deathly afraid of Mrs. Patterson and her skinny, swift-moving hands, I sought her approval, and I wanted to fit in. I crafted the standard benign animals out of modeling clay and rainbow scenery from felts, and I usually got gold foil star stickers or smiley faces on these uniform endeavors. But anytime we had free-thought art projects things got iffy. Any time I had to delve too deeply into my imagination I found myself confused and unnerved. The “someplace special” project was no exception.

When I was finally done, Mrs. Patterson dutifully tacked it up on our bulletin board with the rest, though she discreetly sent it to the lower left corner.

When the classroom emptied for gym or for recess, I don’t remember which, I lingered behind and stared at my creation with a morbid intrigue. My elderly teacher sent the class ahead with one of her colleagues and she stayed behind, letting the door quietly close us into privacy.

“Who are they?” she asked. “Who are the three gray ghosts looking through the trees? You didn’t give them any faces.”

I concentrated—tried hard to focus. I could hear their voices, singsong and sad, but sometimes fierce. Sometimes demanding. Always close.

“Do you know who they are?” she asked again, the same non-threatening tone she always used on me, like I was a stray cat on the verge of fleeing before she could slip me some cream.

“They’re…” The memory flitted fast, and was gone. “They’re sisters who died. He killed them.”

“That’s very sad.”

“No, it’s very angry—they’re angry he did that to them. They loved him and he killed them.” The words fell across my lips, dropping down into a pile at my feet and accumulating there before I could make sense of them. “Now they stay in the swamp, because he cut them up and threw them into the water for the gators and the birds to pick apart. And their blood turned the green water black, but I didn’t do that part because I don’t like licorice.”

“You don’t like… oh. I see. The markers.”

“Yes. The markers.” My whisper trailed away to something less audible, and I realized how foolish I sounded. With a flash of paranoia I turned to her and almost took one of her scary bird hands, then changed my mind at the last moment and folded mine together, praying to her instead. “But you can’t say anything to anyone. If you do, they’ll send me to the pine trees, like they sent my mother, and you won’t let them do that to me, will you, Mrs. Patterson?”

“No, Eden,” she assured me after a perplexed pause. A quick light brightened her face for a moment, but then her forehead wrinkled again. “No one’s going to send you to the pine trees. No one’s going to send you away.”

Mrs. Patterson tried hard to understand, but how could she have known? I didn’t know either, back then, that you’re not supposed to remember those things at all, those traces of the lives you’ve had before; but I’ve carried them with me as long as I can recall. Sometimes they rise out to meet me in subtle ways—in the gentle fears and convictions that old ghosts bring when they haunt you from the inside out. But sometimes they manifest in visions, in nightmares, or in kindergarten art projects.

I went back to drawing bubblegum butterflies and marshmallow puppies. Mrs. Patterson invited the social services people to come and observe me, but I put on a good show. I could give them what they wanted. Eventually she gave up trying to corner me and seemed to accept the undercurrent of madness that ran beneath my crayon creations.

But once in a while the three ghost women would cry, and I’d find myself inserting their six searching eyes into plastic-wrap windows, or cotton-ball clouds, or watercolor trees.

I wanted to make sure they could see me.

II

Here’s another one.

Later that same year. I’d not yet turned six.

I lived on Signal Mountain, one of a chain that surrounds Chattanooga like the rim of a bowl, split down the middle by the river. Signal is populated by rich white people on one side and poor white trash on the other, which made my family’s ethnic ambiguity something of an oddity. But I was a social creature, and the mountain was a safe playground for everyone. My cronies and I had free run of the tree-covered ridges, and we spent more time carousing through the woods than we did in our bedrooms.

Sometimes it was hide-and-seek, or tag, or—before I knew any better—blue versus gray. We wandered briskly in cutoff shorts and sneakers that let our legs get shredded by the brambles, and in long-sleeved shirts that caught on low branches and trapped pinecone seeds and needles. We stomped through streams and climbed up rocks. We chased one another senseless every day after the big yellow bus dropped us off at our neighborhood’s entrance. And most of the time, it was good.

Most of the time I ran with my friends until my lungs burst, alternately stalking them and being stalked, hiding behind wide round trunks and under piles of mulching leaves in shallow ravines. Most of the time I didn’t have to worry about anything more profound than spiders or ticks.

But then the women, no longer content to lie quiet and filtered, became dissatisfied.

One day, they began to speak.

I was behind a tree, squatting in a pile of leaves lest I be discovered—so I guess it was autumn. Yes, because come to think of it, I was wearing a chunky blue sweater over my shirt. When I saw the first woman she was standing still. A few dead leaves dropped from overhead, wafting back and forth until they settled at her feet. The mountain was dying its yearly death, and rot was in the air. Even the dirt between my sneaker treads smelled of compost. But until I saw them there that afternoon, what did I know of decay?

With the corner of my eye I caught a long flash of palest gray, almost white. I thought of an old dress, dangling on a wire hanger from a tree branch. I stood and turned to see better, not yet aware enough to be afraid, and even when I saw her more clearly I was only surprised. It took me a minute to remember I was not asleep.

She held there motionless, tugged only by the faint gusts that rustled the trees. The wind made her dress barely billow around her legs, so she must have been there, real in one way or another. Her face was as pallid and indeterminately hued as her dress, and her eyes were more of the same.

“Hey,” I said, not to greet her but to get her attention. “Hey.”

Her eyes rolled to meet mine.

She opened her mouth but did not yet speak. Instead it seemed every sound in the forest was pulled inside her gasping lungs and I was standing in the vacuum. I knew my friends were only yards away but I did not hear their small, fast feet shuffling through the undergrowth. No birds sang and no squirrels knocked winter nuts down into empty trees. Even the shadows stopped crawling across the rocks as the sky held the clouds above in place.

My breath snagged in my throat and refused to leave my chest.

Tears came to the woman’s eyes and dripped to the forest floor unchecked. Her head swiveled slowly, looking past her left shoulder and then her right. Her choked, thin voice cried out to the others.

Willa, Luanna—she’s over here.

Two other women appeared, one on either side of her. They had the same vaguely African features as the first, with hair bound into submission by scarves tied in loose knots. Their faces might have been round once, but their skin was drawn back and their wide cheekbones made shelves that shadowed their hollow jaws. Their teeth were exaggerated by fleshy lips robbed of their firmness, and when they spoke to one another it was a terrible sight.

There she is, his darling one. His pretty one.

Oh, Mae, she’s returned to you. She’s returned to us.

Mae crouched low to examine me with her enormous, brimming eyes. My baby, she said, reaching one scrawny arm to my face. My baby. Miabella.

But when the back of her hand brushed my cheek, the horror of her dusty, dead breath broke the spell and my screams split the supernatural quiet that had descended over the mountainside. I howled until my cries went hoarse, and the women withdrew. Mae left me last, turning with a slow, miserable sob and vanishing into the crowded trees. The last thing I saw before I shrieked myself unconscious was her retreating back, slashed and stained with long, dark streaks that could have been nothing but blood.

III

It should come as no surprise that I ended up a regular patron of the school counselor’s office. Mr. Schumann was short and wide, with red hair that grew shorter every year. His ears protruded north past the narrowing fringe, straining to listen even when his round blue eyes appeared impassive. He always watched me with squinty concentration, like the face a cat makes while trying to figure out a bathroom faucet.

“Why don’t you tell me about some of these pictures you’ve made?” he began our last session together. “Mrs. Patterson thinks they’re very good, but she wants to know what they’re about.”

I stared at my shoes. “I already told her. They’re about the sisters.”

“Yes, the women who died. You said someone killed them.”

“Uh-huh.”

His brown office chair squealed as he shifted his weight. He leaned forward and pressed his palms together. “That’s a scary story to tell someone, don’t you think?”

“It’s for real. It’s a for-real story. I didn’t make it up.”

“Where did you hear it? Did you see it on TV or in a movie?”

I shook my head, aggravated because I couldn’t make him understand. “I didn’t hear it anywhere. I just know it. It’s in my head.”

“But stories like that have to get into your head from somewhere. Where did you pick them up?”

“Nowhere. I came that way. I was born with the story. It happened to me before I was born.”

He tapped the tips of his index fingers against each other, then reached for a pad of paper and a pen. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you tell me the whole thing, then—from start to finish.”

“I don’t know the whole thing,” I sulked. He still didn’t believe me.

“Then tell me the parts you do know. I’d like to hear them.”

I closed my eyes and saw flashes, frames of action disconnected and surreal. A house like the one I’d sketched for Mrs. Patterson, surrounded by swirling green-black water. The slick jerking motion of an alligator sliding off a bank into a fetid pool of stagnant backwater.

One.

Two.

Three women. Me in their arms, passed from one to another.

“My mother and her two sisters,” I said, eyes still shut.

Mr. Schumann rifled through a folder before pausing to read something. I heard his asthmatic breath aimed down at the desk, blowing against his loose papers. He scratched his head with his pen. “Eden, it’s my understanding that your mother died when she had you. I know you live with an aunt and uncle; is there another sister too?”

“Yes, but that’s not who I mean.”

“But you said—”

I balled my hands into tight little fists, squeezing the story out like toothpaste from a tube. “Not my mother now. My mother then. When I was his prettiest one. It was a long time ago. Whole lives ago since he killed them.”

Mr. Schumann held still for a minute. He thumped his wrist down on the desk and used his scritchy little pen to jot notes across his pad of lined paper. “Who is this ‘he’ you mentioned?” he finally asked.

I always saw the women so clearly, it seemed strange that I couldn’t conjure his face. I felt his arms, broad and muscular when they picked me up to sit on his shoulders. I recalled the sweat and musk and tobacco smoke I smelled when I pressed my cheek against the crook of his neck. But these were only photographs.

I needed a scene. I cracked my eyes open enough to peek over at Mr. Schumann’s fidgeting hands. They fumbled, disassembling the pen into pieces and placing them in precise east-west alignment with a granite paperweight and a letter opener shaped like a sword. Such anxious hands. Not like my father’s at all. Not like the long, dark fingers so lean and strong and always sure.

My father’s fingers held glass vials filled with funny liquids and powders, and he poured them one into another, another into a greater one, and another onto a small burner. One more bottle. Three drops of brown, smelly stuff on top of it all. When all was done simmering, he removed it from the heat with a padded glove and poured it into a Mason jar that might have otherwise held peach preserves.

His sleek back stretched a damp undershirt to its breaking point. He was at a rough desk, reading something from a book beside the vials. He leaned his head backwards over the chair and gripped his hair with both hands. Tight black wool.

He was frustrated, angry. Something was missing.

“Papa?”

“What are you doing in here? Get yourself away now.”

“But Papa, I wanted to know where—”

“I said, get yourself away now.”

“Papa?”

“Now!” He shouted it, rising out of the chair with enough force to throw it towards me. His elbow struck the book and knocked it fluttering to the floor. The pages flipped from beginning to end with a shuffling flap. Another flash: the shuffling of cards in my mother’s hands before she laid them out in a cross-shaped pattern on a purple silk scarf. No. My father. His book.

I was fascinated by the yellowed, dirty pages as they waved back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth until the thick cover clattered still. And before my father could whisk the book closed and throw it back up on the table, I saw what was mounted inside.

Dry and nasty, shrunken and crooked, a black, mummified hand with a gold ring on each finger was fixed against the inside back cover of my father’s book. Not a picture but a real one, with stick-fingers splayed open and lacquered shiny.

I screeched and popped out of my chair in Mr. Schumann’s office, forgetting for a moment where I was. I only wanted to step on the hand, to squash it, to kill it, to destroy it somehow. But my father was gone, and his book was gone, and the only hands I saw were the counselor’s confused ones that were putting his pen together again.

And his letter opener, conveniently shaped like a sword, was lying close to me. So close that I barely had to reach out to grab it, and it took less than a second to slam it down through his pasty white palm.

It took him almost a full second more to realize what had happened enough to join me in my screaming. Not until the blood spurted through both sides of the wound and sprayed his notepad and the pen fragments with sticky crimson did he find his voice enough to call out, and by then I was well on my way to running the mile and a half home.

Lulu was waiting for me at the door.

TWO

LULU

Aunt Louise is a goddess. She’s nearly six feet tall, with huge, melon-firm breasts and a tiny waist. From my very earliest inklings of sexual aesthetics, I wanted to look like Lulu. I wanted her black, spiral curls, her olive skin, and her deep brown eyes. I wanted men to fall over themselves for me the way they did for her. She was my mother’s older sister, but only nineteen when she came to care for me. As Mr. Schumann said, my mother died when I was born and I was passed down along the maternal family members.

Back when I was a baby, we all lived with my grandmother and my mother’s younger sister, Michelle. Lulu assumed most of the responsibility for my upbringing, and she took me almost everywhere. By the time I was two I’d been to concerts, coffeehouses, and poetry readings enough to scar me for life. But if Lulu had been a homebody, she would have never met Dave, and then where would we be?

Dave, shortly to become my uncle David, found me wandering away from Lulu while she investigated the meager Dashiell Hammett selection at a used bookstore. I’d found a display offering free fudge samples, and although I could not yet read, I understood enough to help myself. Dave worked at the store part-time, and when he finally peeled me away from the fudge plate, I was smeared with enough chocolate to frost a cake. But he didn’t scold me, or demand to speak to my guardian. Instead, he propped me up on a pile of discarded books and left to get his camera.

Eventually Lulu noticed I was missing. She found me atop the pile, opening random volumes and pretending to read while Dave took pictures. What can I say? I was a doll. I did have Lulu’s curls and her skin, and I was probably the cutest thing the bored clerk had seen all day.

Of course, then he saw Lulu. And both of them promptly forgot about me.

So now a word on Dave.

Dave is roughly the color of the fudge I bathed in that day at the store. Back then his head sprouted long, erratic dreadlocks knotted with beads and hemp thread, and he wore clothes spattered with political slogans like “Free Tibet” and “Stop Animal Testing.” He asked Lulu if he could borrow me sometime to take pictures. He was working on his portfolio, and the folks at the Urban Art Institute were going to apprentice him out as soon as it was complete. For that matter, perhaps Lulu wouldn’t mind posing for him sometime.

We three have been a unit ever since.

Four weeks after meeting Dave in the bookstore, Lulu took me and moved in to Dave’s apartment, which he had turned into a makeshift studio. We went through countless rolls of film in those first months. The shutter flicked incessantly, like Lulu’s cigarette lighter when she sat on the balcony in her underwear after photos or sex.

Lulu started telling people what everyone already assumed, that I was their daughter, and Dave adjusted our bodies into exquisite, astounding compositions of intimacy and danger. He laid us out in silks, in drapes, in only skin.

Once he sat me on a shelf draped with black velvet and placed two giant wings behind me. He said they were turkey wings; I can’t imagine where he got them. Although they were mottled shades of autumn leaves, when photographed in black and white they were dark enough to be the limbs of giant ravens. I leaned back and raised my head, cocking it against one wing as though I were utterly exhausted, worn out from carrying all those dead souls back and forth from the underworld.

He pressed a button.

Click. I was in a contest. Then on the cover of a magazine. Then a calendar of my more endearing toddler poses, the less morbid ones that the unwashed masses might purchase as Christmas gifts for teenage girls or middle-aged housewives with nail polish that matched their kitchen curtains.

But the pictures of Lulu were the ones that made us both stars. Lulu is a goddess to more than just me, you see, and Dave’s pictures brought the world to attention. Suddenly, we were rich. We moved up to the mountain with the rest of the rich people, and I started school.

And I started seeing the dead women.

And I stabbed my counselor with his own dull knife.

And I ran away from his office, all the way home, where Lulu was waiting for me.

She was holding the door open with one hand and the telephone with her other. The phone’s pigtail-curled cord barely stretched from the kitchen, where the machine was mounted on the wall. She’d already gotten the call from the principal.

She stepped aside and let me run past her. I was panting and gasping for air, unable to dash another yard but unwilling to quit trying. In the living room, I did laps around the coffee table while she closed the door and placed the phone back on the receiver. She joined me by standing in the way of my loop, forcing me to stop or run into her.

She did not raise her voice.

“What’d you do that for?” she asked. “Why’d you hurt Mr. Schumann’s hand?”

I shivered and shook, though it was warm where I stood, in the patch of sun cast through the huge picture windows. “It was moving. And he wasn’t—it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his hand. It wasn’t his hand I wanted to stick!” I hollered. “It wasn’t his hand I saw! It was a different one. A little wrinkly one. The one in the book.”

Her eyebrows perked. “What book?”

“The book I saw. It was old, with old pages all yellow and dusty. And when it fell open, there was the hand stuck to the back cover. It was moving.”

“Moving, huh?”

“Yeah. And then when I opened my eyes Mr. Schumann was there, with his fat wiggly hands all moving in front of me—and I don’t know. I don’t know why I did it. I’m really really sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt him. He’s a big dumb dork, but I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“Come here.” She picked me up and sat on the couch, wrapping her strong arms around me, letting my head sink against her breasts like one of the most popular pictures of us together. She leaned her mouth close to my ear and whispered the rest.

“You see so much you shouldn’t, poor baby. Just know this: know that the sisters would not hurt you, and they would help you if they could. They’re looking for something they lost, years and years ago, they’re not looking to harm you at all. They would never harm you, even if they could—and I figure that they probably can’t.”

“But there’s this book, Lu. Are they looking for the book?”

“Good Lord, no, or at least I don’t think so. Don’t you think any more about that book. Maybe one day you’ll outgrow the sight, and you won’t see them anymore, but this is our blood, baby. Someday I’ll tell you who the women are, and why they follow you with their pleading eyes and reaching hands. You should think of them as your guardian angels, and don’t be so afraid. They love you, and so do I. But don’t you ever expect anyone else to understand it.

“Tomorrow the police will come and a social worker will want to see you, but that’s all right. You tell them you’re sorry about Mr. Schumann’s hand, and that it was an accident. You tell them that you closed your eyes, you fell asleep, and you had a nightmare. That’s close enough to true for now.”

Something awful occurred to me—something more awful than the thought of any school suspension. I sniffled and wiped my nose on her blouse, not even sure how I should broach my fear. “And they won’t send me to the pine trees?”

“To the what?”

“To the pine trees?”

She continued to stroke my hair, but didn’t respond right away. “What do you mean about the pine trees, darling? Where’d you hear that?” she asked quietly.

“I dunno.” I’d picked it up in some conversation held above my head when I was too young to recall the specifics. It was one of those things I’d heard in passing, not really understanding either the meaning or the context. I had only a dim impression that you got sent to the pine trees if you did bad, crazy things. And if you were especially bad and crazy, you never came back from the pine trees. They swallowed you whole.

Lu snuggled her chin down against the top of my head and kissed me there, where the hair parts. “Okay,” she said. “So you’ve heard just enough to be afraid. I’m sorry for that, and that’s just one more thing that I’ll have to tell you more about someday. But don’t worry about that for now, either. There’s no such place anymore. Not the pine trees you’re thinking of. No one will ever send you there, or anyplace like it. And any time you find yourself frightened of the pine trees, you remember what I said about those three sisters and you can stop being afraid. They won’t let anyone take you off to the pine trees, and neither will I.”

“Never?”

“Not so long as I live.”

THREE

BRANCHES

I

I took Lulu’s words to heart. I envisioned the ghosts as visitors, not malicious boogies, and I began to look for them, though I’d not seen them outside my dreams since that time in the woods. I even started to wander the mountainside seeking them.

Occasionally I’d feel the eyes on me and I’d stop my play to look around. I might have invited them to come out to me if I’d known how. But no, the women kept their distance. I could have forgotten them altogether except for their passing smell of old clothes, drifting sometimes by. Mothballs and cedar. I felt nothing of them except ephemeral words of curiosity, and once of caution. Only one other time in my childhood did they raise their voices, and then they saved my life.

I was alone under the trees that day. It was the year I turned ten, or maybe eleven. The bottom and fringes of my jeans were wet. It had been raining for several days on the mountain, as it often does in early summer.

Bored to death with cabin fever, I’d watched eagerly as the clouds began to crack and steamy beams of light fell through. Then I grabbed my rubber shoes and dashed out of the house before Lulu or Dave could stop me. I took my bicycle and rode over to the neighborhood playground, which was old but in a good state of repair. If any of my friends had managed to escape their own houses, they’d surely join me soon.

I was disappointed but not surprised to find it deserted. The merry-go-round creaked forlornly when I shoved it, spraying water in a big, lazy circle that soaked my pant legs even more. The puddle at the bottom of the slide would have only done worse if I’d splashed through it, and the monkey bars were slick with dangling drops of dew. Sighing, I wiped the water off a swing and sat down to wait.

The scent of musty fabric wafted by. I raised my head. The odor returned, stronger in my nostrils. Scarves and sweaters too long in a drawer. Lingerie washed and neatly folded, put up in a chest.

“Hello? Are you there?”

Get away from here. You get yourself gone.

She was standing beside the spring-mounted animals that had handles on either sides of their cartoonish heads. She wrung her hands together as she spoke.

“Mmm… Mae?” I asked. I tightened my grip on the rusty chains that held the swing, but I did not jump or run.

Get away from here. He’s coming for you.

“What are you talking about?”

He’s coming for you!

“Who?”

She vanished. And behind the spot where she’d stood I saw a man. He wasn’t much older than a boy—he might have been a teenager still. He was tall but hunkered over, and terrifically thin. He held his arms close to his torso, as if they were plastered there by his soaking wet shirt. He must have been outside a long time to be so wet. He must have been waiting for me.

His hands were tucked under his armpits and his feet were bound in soggy black boots with laces that trailed off into the grass. At first he held so immobile I thought he might have been another apparition, but when he spoke his voice was mortal enough.

“There you are.”

I didn’t move. We faced each other across the playground like it was the O.K. Corral. His eyes were partially obscured by his sloppy wet hair, but even at that twenty-yard distance I could see blue and madness in them. I did not know how or if I should reply.

I let him speak again.

“This will be hard. You’re not what I expected.” His hands began a slow release, creeping down the sides of his rib cage. “You’re just a pretty little girl now. That old devil, though. He’ll package anything up all pretty.”

I tried to match his stare, moment for moment. All around me I could hear the women whispering their warnings, but this man kept me in something like a thrall. I didn’t want to flee yet. I wanted to hear him talk some more, in his slow, strong drawl—southern twanged, but not so clipped as the way people in the valley spoke.

He took a small step forward.

“Oh yes, anything at all. Even that ugly ol’ soul you’ve got behind those tiny little-girl ribs. That old devil, he’s something else. He thinks if he hides Avery someplace sweet and pretty, that I might think I’ve made a mistake. He wants me to think you’re just a precious innocent. But I know better. I know who you are. I know they brought you back, Avery. I know you’ll keep coming back until I find that book, but I’m sworn to do what I can.”

He took another muddy step and I found my voice when he said that bit about the book. “What are you talking about?”

He laughed. “Your baby-doll voice won’t fool me. You’ve heard the three sisters too—I know you have. I’ve heard about it. You can’t escape them, Avery. They’re God’s own furies, chasing you down. They’ve led me to you.”

“Nuh-uh,” I argued. “They warned me about you. They said you were coming to get me.”

“Then… then it’s because they’re a portent of your death. They wish to witness your destruction.”

“You’re crazy.” I said it deadpan, with a creeping hint of ice. “You’re some crazy stranger, and I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. You go away before my friends get here.”

No, my baby. I heard her, but I couldn’t see her.

No, my baby. Don’t you bother talking. He’s as mad as the moon, and you’ll only make him angry. You’ve got to run. You’ve got to start now. You have to outrun him.

One of his hands slid free of his side and in it I saw the black glint of metal. He’d been hiding a handgun, shiny and damp and heavy enough to make his wrist droop. Before he could lift it enough to aim, I finally followed the ghost’s advice. I turned and dashed, parting the slender trees with my flailing arms.

Bang.

The first bullet blasted out of the barrel and split a tree trunk to my right.

Water dumped down from the shaken leaves to drench me, but it did not slow me. He was on my heels, but he was not so quick as I was. I knew my way through the ravines that crisscrossed the woods and scarred the hills. This was my world, and I was the wisest scout of all. Even my own friends—kids who knew the wooded gullies as well as I did—couldn’t keep up when I started running.

Bang.

Another shot, even farther off base than the first.

Even in my breathless, choking fear I found myself calculating, aiming my flight through the densest clots of trees and down the sharpest, rockiest cuts of earth. I leaped across rain-flushed streams in one fast skip.

He tumbled behind me, gradually losing seconds from his clumsy pursuit. He didn’t know which rocks were steady enough to jump from and which would tumble into the water at the slightest touch. He didn’t know which piles of leaves masked solid ground and which concealed slime and sharp sticks. Not like I did.

Bang.

I was moving roughly in the direction of home. Going about it the long way, of course—no sense in bolting for the main road where he’d have an open shot at a straight-moving target. Home. It wasn’t far. I could make it. I could make it with room to spare.

But what if I wasn’t enough ahead of him? My lead was growing, but behind me he was still staggering doggedly through the forest. What if he caught up before Lulu had time to get a gun? What if he came inside? What if he hurt my Lulu? The thought nearly paralyzed me. I stumbled, but recovered. A new plan, then. One that wouldn’t bring him so close to my aunt. I shifted my course.

My legs were tiring, but my resolve was fresh. I would draw him away from my beloved goddess. I would shake him on my own. I believed in Lulu, she was unstoppable and unbreakable, but if he caught her by surprise—and if he got off a bullet or two before she had time to know what was happening… I couldn’t stand the thought of it. So I kept running farther from her, away and up the mountain, farther from help.

I did this even though I didn’t know the area farther up the mountain behind the house.

The rule of thumb in my neighborhood was always, “go down, not up.” The playground was down; the safest woods were down. The convenience stores and gas stations were down. The roads that went up headed to either the government parks or to undeveloped real estate.

Naturally, childhood apocrypha had turned the hinterlands into a realm pocked with monsters and malevolent Civil War ghosts; but regardless of what the uncharted lands held in store, I was less afraid of those possibilities than of the skinny man with the gun who would certainly kill me if he caught me. And he might even kill Lulu if he caught her, too, so I had to keep my two-pronged goal in sight: I had to keep him away from home, and keep him away from me.

Bang.

Up and over. Into new territory. I was comforted to see that it didn’t look much different from what I usually played in. Nothing but dripping wet trees too thick to let me see far ahead. I dived and weaved, wondering how much longer I could keep it up. Adults marvel at the energy of children, but though it is vast, it is not infinite. I didn’t dare glance over my shoulder, lest I run into one of the innumerable trunks. I heard him thrashing and charging, but he was falling behind. I kept my eyes open for a good hiding place, but saw nothing except trees and big rocks in every direction. Maybe on the other side of that precipice…

Not that way!

Mae’s warning was too late.

I reached for a handhold to throw myself across a rock about as big as I was. I grabbed it, and launched myself half over, half around it. I landed on a pile of leaves and sticks that gave way beneath my weight.

I fell, sliding heels over head down a sloping hole.

At the bottom I lay still, my wind knocked thoroughly out, and I stared up at the vaguely circular patch of sky maybe fifteen feet above. Damp dirt rained down after me. My shoulder hurt. When I lifted it up and looked crooked-necked at the back of my shirt, it was only to notice with encroaching panic that I was bleeding. I’d landed on something hard, sticking up out of the ground. I poked my fingers into the dirt around it and unearthed the head of a shovel. I had brief hopes that I might be able to dig it out and use it for a weapon, but the handle rotted away when I pulled it loose from the ground.

Somewhere above, the crashing feet of my pursuer slowed near the spot where I’d disappeared. I tried not to move, not even to breathe.

An inch at a time his wet head peered over the edge of the hole. “You cannot,” he puffed the words laboriously, “outrun justice. You can’t. God has promised it.” His hand reached over and pointed the gun down at my head. I desperately rolled myself towards what I thought was the edge of the hole.

Bang.

I didn’t stop against a wall of dirt. I kept on rolling, down a little farther. My turn took me beyond the friendly skylight and all was dark. I felt wildly around for anything substantial, grasping at dangling tree roots and squeezing handfuls of mud. I dragged my knees up off the spongy ground and forced them to ratchet me into an upright position.

I was more than a little surprised to learn that I could stand without impediment, and finally I wandered a couple of steps farther to lean on a thick square timber. I pressed my wounded back against it and tried not to wonder how much blood I might be leaking.

Overhead I heard the scrambling scuffle that signaled I was still being pursued. The boy yelped when his legs surrendered their balance and he tumbled down after me, landing exactly where I had.

He was wheezing. “There’s nowhere for you to go now. You can’t stay in this… well, or cistern, or whatever, forever… it won’t hide you long.”

It’s a mine shaft. Hold your ground. He’s blind. Let him pass you.

I dug my back hard into the tunnel wall. Small, squirming things wriggled wetly against me. I jammed my eyes shut, which made almost no difference in the underground dark. Something with many slight legs worked its way up my neck. I pressed my lips together and willed my ears shut too. The bug worked its way up my cheek and across my scrunched eyelid before heading on past my forehead and over my hair.

The boy tread into the blackness with halting legs. “Give yourself up. I’ll do it quick.”

He stopped no more than a foot in front of me. I could smell his breath, stinky with corn chips, ranch dip, and cola. I felt the swish of air parting for his waving arms, groping ahead. I unsealed my lips and exhaled as quietly as I could, then slowly sucked in more moldy air through my wide open mouth.

Breathe in. Mustn’t make a sound. Breathe out.

He kept moving, another step. Then another. Deeper back, farther from me.

Push the beam, child.

I didn’t understand. She said it again.

Push on that beam. Shove your good shoulder against it.

Still afraid to move too much, I leaned a little weight on it and heard a creak.

He heard it too. His footsteps stopped.

No, do it hard. All at once. Then get out of the way. Go back the way you came.

No time to argue. He was turning, his shoes squishing an about-face in the muck.

I lunged, heaving with all my might. The timber groaned and cracked, then collapsed. I darted past it and back towards the patch of sunlight just in time to hear the walls falling in. My pursuer called out but his cries were stifled by the falling wood and mud. Hand over aching hand, knee over scraped knee, I crawled up out of the hole and left him there.

Back topside the rain was falling again, or maybe it was only the wind bothering the trees. It was lovely.

I tumbled back down the side of the mountain until I reached the road to my house, gripping my stinging shoulder as hard as I could, almost crying with relief.

Lulu, keeper of the hearth, was waiting at the door.

II

They made me go to court.

Lulu was wearing a fitted blue dress that stopped at her knees, and a pair of high heels that made her calves discreetly convex. Dave wore a black T-shirt and jeans. I was trussed up in a green skirt and blouse with cuffs that clenched at my wrists. Since we weren’t regular churchgoing folks, it wasn’t every day I was forced to present myself in such a manner. The clothes made me uncomfortable even more than the dozens of appraising eyes, all of which were pointed at me.

“And then he what?” the lawyer pressed.

My eyes lurched around the room and caught Dave, who flashed me a wink and a lopsided grin of sympathy. I sat up straighter. “Then he lifted up the gun and he started shooting at me.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, mister—I ran like the devil knew my name.”

The defense attorney also asked me a round of questions about my early “episodes” in school, trying to convince the jury that I might have provoked the assault, or even imagined it. But my family’s lawyer had bullets dug out of trees and rocks waiting in a sealed plastic bag, and the other guy couldn’t much argue with those.

I indignantly related the rest of my testimony while the defendant, Malachi Dufresne, sat dourly silent with his hands twisted into a pair of knobby fists. He never looked at me once. He never raised his eyes, not even when his great-aunt took the stand to tell the courtroom what a nice boy he was.

She said it in a mellow accent that sounded like his.

“He’s such a good boy. Always has been. Ever since he was a small thing and his parents used to leave him at my home for the summers. He was always so kind to the horses. He’s nothing but gentle. I’m sure there’s some good reason he came after that child, or at least he thought he had a good reason. My poor nephew needs a doctor, not a prison. If y’all would just let me have him I could get him the best money can buy.”

Dave leaned over and whispered in Lulu’s ear, mimicking the old woman’s scratchy southern voice. “I’m filthy rich. Don’t you dare send him to jail.”

Lulu nudged him in the ribs and whispered angrily, or maybe fearfully, back. “You stop that. She’s got money enough to see it done.” And she was right. When the end finally came a few weeks later, the man in charge of jurors’ row announced that Malachi should go to a hospital to be evaluated.

Dave shot to his feet, nearly jerking my arm off as he rose. “That’s not enough!”

The judge clapped his gavel down and pointed it at Dave’s head. “Contain yourself, sir. It is my ruling that Malachi Dufresne be remanded to the Moccasin Bend mental health facility for psychological evaluation, and then he will be returned to court for sentencing in sixty days’ time.” He dropped the gavel again and stood.

The rest of us rose too, and people began to mill about the courtroom, draining gradually through the exits like a congregation slipping out of church after services. A bailiff came to escort my assailant back into state custody. Lulu put an arm around my shoulder and guided me towards the aisle. “They’ll keep him,” she told me, squeezing me quickly. “They won’t let him go for a long time. Don’t worry.”

Just then the white-topped aunt came thrusting her elbows forward through the crowd. She knocked aside a middle-aged man talking to a boy about my age and did not even turn to acknowledge them. Instead she turned sideways to pass us by, glowering over her shoulder with chilly blue eyes. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but Lulu cut her off.

“Keep on walking, Tatie.”

“I was just going to say—”

“I said, keep on walking, Tatie Eliza. You will leave this child alone.”

The crone could not disregard the giantess Lulu, but she was not afraid of her. “Blood will tell,” she said, her voice reeking with contempt. “That’s all I was going to say.”

“And now you’ve said it, so you keep on moving.”

But the little old lady blocked our escape. She dropped her gaze from Lulu to me. Lulu tried to push me back behind her, but I wouldn’t go. I wanted to look at this ancient matriarch who refused to stand aside.

She wanted to look at me too. “They haven’t told you, have they girl? Not half the truth, I bet they haven’t.”

I shifted to dislodge myself from Lulu’s sheltering grasp, but she wouldn’t have it, so I stayed put whether I liked it or not. I craned my neck around her waist and inquired across the aisle. “What… what are you—stop it, Lulu, I want to—”

A small head was in the way. It was the boy she’d pushed apart from the man I supposed was his father. The boy stared at me, or through me, as if he could see something inside that I wanted to keep hidden. I tried to lean around him, but his sharp nose demanded my attention. I reached for him to push him away, but his father grabbed him first—like he didn’t want me to touch his kid. He drew the child away from me as if I was contaminated.

I glared at them both and he continued to stare blankly over his shoulder, his eyes not leaving mine and his expression not changing. They left through the main doors and I was glad to see them gone.

“Hey, old lady,” I said once they were out of the way. I think I was almost loud enough to embarrass Lulu.

“Go on, now, Tatie,” she said over my head. “You and I can talk later if you want, but you leave her be.” I couldn’t believe it. Lulu was actually pleading with the dwarfish, crooked woman in expensive makeup.

Tatie fired her question at me again. “Do you know who I am, girl?”

“You’re the crazy guy’s aunt.”

“And you know who else?” she prompted, shimmying closer.

“Some screwy old lady?”

All the wrinkles in her face sank down to the brim of her nose. She looked positively wicked. She was Snow White’s stepmother in a designer dress. “You come here, you mixed-breed brat.”

“You leave her alone!” Lulu almost shouted it, forcing me towards Dave.

One of the bailiffs raised an eyebrow and exchanged a glance with the judge, who hesitated at his bench but made no move to intervene. Lulu rotated me a full one hundred and eighty degrees, trying to force me out the other way. But I turned my head and shook it, answering Eliza well enough.

“I,” she raised a gnarled finger and repeated the pronoun, “I am your aunt! Hers too—that hussy who’d close your ears if she could. How you like that, girl? An’ how do you like that, hussy?”

Lulu was behind me then, pushing me with her knees along the pewlike bench and shoving me towards the door. “Devil take you, Eliza. You and your maniac boy both.”

“Maybe he will,” she called back. “But I said it already—blood will tell. And that girl will follow him soon enough. You hear me, girl? You’ll join him soon, like your mother before you. They’ll take you off to Pine Breeze too!”

And we were clear.

Lulu dragged me down the steps and out into the parking lot before I could hear more. My dress shoes clacked and scraped on the asphalt as I hurried to match her long strides towards the car.

“Is that right?” I demanded, squirming my arm free and nearly sprinting by her side. “Is she our aunt?”

When we got to the car, Dave unlocked the door and hustled us into the front seat. “Yeah, is she?” he asked. Together we ganged up to stare down a sullen Lulu. I was surprised by the alliance, and by the fact that there was something about me and Lulu that he didn’t know.

My aunt drew her shoulders back, pretending that the seat belt chafed. Without looking over at either of us, she grumbled her unhappy response. “Yes. She’s distant kin. Don’t make more of it than needs to be said.”

“Wow,” Dave said.

“Wow,” I echoed. Out the back window I saw two policemen guiding my cousin, Malachi Dufresne, into a van with iron mesh bars on the windows. He paused and scanned the crowd, one foot poised midair.

One of the cops pushed him forward, and he disappeared into the vehicle.

* * *