Legacy (13 page)

But at least it was a chance for me to get out of my dorm room, where I’d been going stir crazy. I’d been laid off at Hattie’s due to inclement weather, which was apparently the climatic condition for every day from mid-January to mid-March. I didn’t mind, though. It would have been hard to work with Peter every day. I kept my feelings in my heart, where the wound was still open, but bearable. I’d learned long ago that almost anything was bearable if you kept it secret enough.

“AHHHHHH!” Someone from the group in the labyrinth in front of us screamed. Instantly all my thoughts flew out of my head. Agnes pushed past me and ran up ahead. I followed her.

When we reached them the group was gathered around a dead crow on the path. Nearby, an elderly man had his arm around a distraught woman while some other people looked on with expressions of horror.

Agnes stopped in her tracks when she saw it. And Gram, when she finally caught up, nearly fainted.

“It’s . . . it’s a bird,” I said quietly. Agnes pinched me to be quiet.

“We should go,” Agnes said. Then she picked up the thing by its wings, and we walked out of the labyrinth the same way we’d come.

Once we were back home, Agnes and I buried it in the woods while Gram walked through the house with a bundle of burning sage. Call me callous, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to for a bird, especially one that wasn’t even anyone’s pet. Then when Jonathan showed up for work, Agnes made him go over to the Meadow to make sure there weren’t any other dead birds lying around.

“There’s bound to be talk as it is,” she said. “Quite a few people saw it.”

He sighed. “They’ll be calling it an omen, then,” he said. “But I’ll do what I can. Say my dog killed it or something.”

After he left I walked along beside Agnes back to the house. She looked thoughtful. “Dead birds have a special meaning for us here. They’re harbingers.”

I was trying to understand what she was saying. “Harbingers? Of, like . . . doom?”

“Of the Darkness,” she said. “For a witch, it is the worst thing there is. Once the Darkness comes, the whole world changes, and nothing is ever the same again.”

“What?” I said, coming to a standstill. Aunt Agnes wasn’t prone to exaggeration. “The whole
world
?”

She looked at me for a moment, assessing my ability to handle this kind of news, I guess. “The Black Death. The Great Depression. The San Francisco earthquake. The influenza epidemic of 1918. Those are just a few examples.”

I ventured a guess. “The Burning Times?”

Her head snapped sharply toward me. “You know about that?”

“It’s in every American history book,” I said.

“Oh. Of course. I suppose we’re ridiculously sensitive about that here.”

“Understandable,” I said. “I read somewhere that as many as nine million people were killed as witches.”

“Over the span of three hundred years throughout Europe and England and their colonies. There are no figures for the killings in Asia and Africa, although we are certain they occurred.”

“And you think the Darkness was responsible for that?”

She looked at me levelly. “We know this, Katy.”

“But . . . but how? The Darkness isn’t even a real thing, is it?”

“Oh, it’s real, all right. But it’s not a thing. It’s a force. It works through people.”

“Cowen, according to Gram,” I said.

“It starts there. Cowen are easy to influence. They don’t tolerate adversity well, and their wills are weak. It doesn’t take much to make them turn evil—lack of money, addiction, even a failed relationship is sometimes enough for them to turn their backs on decency and reason. And they almost never
recognize that they’re evil, so they can’t stop. They just keep blaming someone or something else for what’s happening, while their destructive impulses run rampant. And the whole time they have no clue that it’s the Darkness at work.”

“But witches aren’t like that?”

“Less so. But we’re human. We’re susceptible, too, especially if someone close to us has been infected. And if that happens . . .” She shook her head. “Well, it’s a terrible thing.”

“Is that why you don’t marry outside the twenty-seven families? Because you don’t want cowen to bring the Darkness into Old Town?”

“Exactly. We’ve learned this through experience. There have been incidents that we don’t want to repeat.”

“Like what?”

She was silent for a moment. “You’re not ready to learn about those things yet,” she said.

“That’s not fair, Agnes,” I countered.

She smiled. “You’re just is too young to be hearing that kind of history. But you ought to know the harbingers, if only so you understand why we’re scared silly by the sight of a dead bird.”

“It did seem like kind of an overreaction,” I admitted. “Are you afraid of all dead birds?” I asked. “Even if they die of old age?”

She laughed. “No. But this one was dead in the labyrinth. That will be taken as a sign. Now everyone will be waiting for the second harbinger.”

“Which is?”

“Sinkholes,” Agnes said.

“What?” I couldn’t help smiling. “But they’re everywhere, aren’t they?”

“So are birds.”

She had me there.

“Do you see? It’s hard to tell fact from baseless fear. That’s why people here panic so easily.”

We’d arrived back at the house. I wiped my feet on the mat outside the kitchen door. “But witches should be able to tell the difference, shouldn’t they?” I asked.

“Some can. We’re all different. Serenity Ainsworth was the first to notice the progression. First the birds, then the sinkholes. So when the sinkholes don’t appear, the panic usually subsides. Unless . . .”

“Oh!” It was Gram, sounding as if someone had put a whoopee cushion on her pew in church. Shocked, distressed, disgusted.

Agnes pushed me aside. “Unless what?” I insisted, but she ignored me.

“What is it, Grandmother?” she asked.

Gram was holding a copy of the
Whitfield Sentinel
. “This,” she said with supreme disdain. She rotated the newspaper so that the front page faced us. The banner headline across the top read:

Beneath it was a picture of a man identified as Jeremiah Shaw, who greatly resembled the mummified remains of Pharaoh Ramses II. With him was—who else? Madison Mimson, spokesperson for Wonderland USA.

That day—the school didn’t close for witch holidays—Ainsworth Prep was buzzing with the news about Wonderland, clearly separating the cowen from the witches. Hence: “My mom’s already been offered a job in the legal department,” versus: “Grandma says that without the Meadow, we might as well all move to Boston.”

It was the central discussion in social studies. We talked about the rise of corporations in American history. Naturally, Wonderland was the day’s topic in Existentialism in Fiction.

All I knew was that Mad Madam Mim was coming to Whitfield. I got an email from her:

Can’t wait to see you, Kathy. Be sure to tell all your friends about Wonderland’s fabulous spring fashions! Coupons attached, good at all participating outlets. Print and clip!

Very personal. Not to mention the fact that, hello, this was February in Massachusetts, with weather more suited to mukluks than spring fashions.

And speaking of muck, that was almost certainly going to be the composition of my world once Madison Lee Mimson moved into it. I didn’t want her going to my father with any juicy tidbits about me. Like that I was way thick with his in-laws, whom he thought were out of my life forever and, incidentally, were also card-carrying witches.

Oh, and BTW, Dad, I myself am telekinetic, pick up on the thoughts of dead people, and work for the high priestess of the village.

Yeah, that would go over great.

So far Imbolc hadn’t turned out to be the funfest it was cracked up to be, but there was one more ritual before the day ended, and I was looking forward to it.

Before I left the relatives to go to school, they gave me a funny-looking cross made of intricately woven stalks of wheat. “This is a Cross of Brigid, named for the ancient goddess of fire,” Gram said. “Sleep with this under your pillow tonight, and you’ll dream of the man you’re to marry.”

So I was ready. Not that I believed in things like that. But I wanted to dream about someone besides Peter, for a change. I needed to stop thinking about him. I needed to move on. It would have been better for me to just cut ties. Spare my heart. The problem was, I just didn’t know how to live without loving him.

So of course I dreamed about Peter.

He was sitting backward on a wooden-backed chair, naked from the waist up. His lean, well-muscled chest glistened with sweat, but the skin of his back was striped with a series of long, bleeding cuts, as if he’d been whipped.

His arms lay crossed along the top of the chair, and on them he rested his head. Impossibly fatigued, his smoky eyes were narrowed to slits beneath the fall of his sweat-matted hair, and his lips were bruised and swollen.

“Please stop,” he begged, barely able to speak.

I didn’t see anyone else in the room with him, but there must have been someone, because Peter appeared to be scared to death.

“Please,” he begged again. “Just leave me alone. Leave me . . .”

Then his back arched and his head snapped back. A scream began in his throat, but he cut it off with a tremendous effort of will. His beautiful face was contorted in agony. He bit his lip until it bled, nearly crazy with the need to keep silent through the pain.

This time I heard his skin tearing.

“No!” I shouted, lurching bolt upright in my bed. I blinked. My heart was pounding, my throat dry with panic. My breathing was wild and shallow, like a trapped animal.

I looked out the window of my room. Outside, a full moon shone on the lake, reflecting beautiful colors on the ice.

It’s okay
, I told myself.
Just a bad dream.

I turned on the light, put on headphones, and loaded my “favorites” playlist to clear my head. Then I remembered the Cross of Brigid under my pillow, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Stupid superstition.

I looked around, as if to reassure myself that I was really awake, because I didn’t ever want to go back into that dream. This was my room, check, fully real. My wicker nightstand with my mother’s photograph in a white ceramic frame. And on the walls, a series of Eric’s amazing drawings of birds in flight.

Once again I sat up with a jolt, this time tearing the headphones off. The music sounded tinny, spilling out onto my bed. Then slowly, my hands shaking, I walked over to Eric’s latest drawing and took it off the wall. There was something there, something I hadn’t noticed before. I held it under my study lamp to be sure.

Oh, God,
I thought. In the corner, beneath the swirling pattern of the flying birds, was a stationary object.

How had I missed it? There was so much
motion
in the drawing. Each bird was moving, its muscles flexed, its wings riding the wind, a part of the flock that also moved as if it were another creature in itself, swooping, whirling, soaring . . .

Except for the one in the corner, inert, still, in such sharp contrast to all the life in the rest of the picture.

A dead bird.

It was hard for me to ask Peter to meet me, but I had to know what he thought about the drawings, since he knew Eric better than anyone.

As it turned out, he hadn’t seen the dead birds either, until we went over all of the drawings with a magnifying glass. There were dead birds in all of them, including the one he’d given me on my first day of work. Some were falling out of the sky. Others were lying on the surface of a lake or stream, or were folded up like rags on the side of a hill.

“Did he always draw birds?” I asked.

“No. That’s just been the past few months. He used to draw whatever he saw. Me. Hattie. The bars of his crib. The drawings were always good, but not like the birds. It was as if something was freed inside him when he started drawing them.”

I took a deep breath. “Could he have been trying to warn us?”

Peter ran his hands through his hair. “But how is that even
possible?” he whispered, almost to himself. “I don’t know how he can draw the way he does. He’s never seen a bird up close, except for the chicken carcasses Hattie cooks.”

Peter had been getting thinner lately, and so pale that his lips seemed to be nearly red in contrast to his fair skin. I wanted to ask him if he felt all right, but things were still awkward between us.

“Are there more?” I asked. “Recent ones, that is.”

“Yes. A lot.” He brought another bunch of them into the kitchen and we went over them, too. It was the same, dead birds everywhere.

There was one difference, though. In the newer drawings, another feature appeared on the terrain beneath the birds. There were indentations on the land, almost like the dimples left in rising dough when you poked your fingers into it. Each one was exquisitely shaded, so that you could almost feel the texture of those pockmarked hills.

“Could those be sinkholes?” I asked. “The second harbinger?”

He blinked. “So you know about that.”

“A little. Agnes told me about the birds. I kind of thought she was kidding about the sinkholes, though. I mean, it seems almost silly.”

“It’s not silly if your house collapses into one,” Peter said.

“I know, you’re right. But why sinkholes?” I thought about it a moment. “Why birds, for that matter?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because the one is above the earth and the other beneath it. Magic is all about the earth and the seasons and the elements.”

“The elements? Like hydrogen?”

He chuckled. “No, like earth, air, fire, and water,” he said. “It’s strange to be with someone who wasn’t raised by witches.”

He put his hand over mine. I was so shocked that I just stared at it as if it were an alien creature crawling over my metacarpals. The next second he pulled it away.

Again, as if nothing had ever happened.