The Devil Dances (7 page)

e were five miles outside Zion when we saw our first buggy.
Vivian pointed out the man on the buckboard and his bay mare and squealed like a delighted little girl. “He’s eating Ranch Doritos!”

I bit back a smile. “They do that, Viv. Jacob was a sucker for a big bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. We could have paid him in chips for doing the ceiling.”

I watched her turn in her seat and stare out the rearview window at the slower-moving buggy as we passed, the jingling reins and lanterns rattling. “It’s like crossing over into another era, you know?”

“I take it you didn’t see many Amish in White Haven?” Vivian’s hometown, an upper middle class town ten miles east of Blackwater, was where Vivian and her adopted brother, Josh had grown up, though she’d actually been born to a teen mother originally from Philadelphia. Vivian’s parents had adopted her when it was discovered that Mr. Summers and his second wife couldn’t have any children of their own.

“You’ve seen White Haven, Nick. It’s all developments and condos. It’s not even as interesting as Blackwater.”

We hit weekend traffic as we reached Lancaster County, cars and tourist buses clotting the roads. Ahead was a welcome sign for Zion, one of the “Last Remaining Old Order Amish Communities in Pennsylvania,” and beside that, a buggy warning sign—not that I thought this crowd of New Yorkers, Jerseyites, and other out-of-state tourists would actually watch their driving. They never did. In Blackwater, it was almost like the sight of a buggy drove townies into a driving frenzy as they attempted to weave haphazardly around the vehicle in their way. Things got a lot worse when the horses got spooked, which they often did. Over the years, we’ve had our fair number of buggy fatalities in town, usually due to some idiot motorist who couldn’t control himself.

I got a few more squeals of surprise and delight out of Vivian as we entered Zion, which looked to be about as huge a tourist trap as Blackwater, only for an entirely different reason. In Blackwater, we had ski resorts, mountain climbing, camping, and whitewater rafting. And, of course, the magick shop. Around Halloween, people came from all over to watch the various covens and witches marching down the streets of Old Town. But here in Zion, the tourists came to gawk at the Swartzcopf Amish, one of the most secluded Ordnungs in the eastern United States.

We passed produce stands manned by young Swartzcopf men in their easily recognizable suits and black hats, and quilting and trinket tables behind which huddled young Plain women in dark shawls and black caps. The Swartzcopf—or “black hats”—had broken away from the main arm of Plain People who’d settled in this area about three hundred years ago, at least according to Jacob. They had become increasingly insular over the decades, and had remained so up until about ten years ago, when a series of droughts over central and eastern Pennsylvania had forced them off their farms and peddling what they could to tourists just to scratch out a decent living.

I knew from experience that they were excellent craftsmen and crocheters. Morgana and I had filled the upstairs loft with a number of their beautiful, finely-made Shaker-style furnishings, and Morgana’s favorite shawls were all Swartzcopf-made. They still farmed, of course, but nowadays, they spent the off-season selling furniture, surplus crops, quilts, clothes, and all manner of confections on the side of the road all over Lancaster County. Some of the young men even joined local construction crews when there was work to be had—much like Jacob had hired himself out as a handyman to feed his family. He said the Swartzcopf weren’t proud of how low they had needed to stoop to eke out a living among the English, but they were also fiercely protective of their families and wanted to provide. I could dig that. I knew what desperation did to a man.

“Look, Nick!” Vivian said, pointing at a huge white banner stretched across the length of the street, from one telephone pole to another, advertizing the 13TH ANNUAL ZION QUILTING FESTIVAL. “That looks like fun!”

“And it might be a good place to start looking for Caleb’s family.”

She pouted. “I hope you’re not going to spend the whole week just chasing down leads. I mean, this is our almost-honeymoon.” As we crawled along, she craned her neck to look at a table full of small wooden figurines that the tourists were picking over.

“Almost-honeymoon?”

“Yeah. For our almost-marriage. We have to have an almost-honeymoon, silly. And an almost-honeymoon night.” She grinned at me mischievously and squeezed my arm.

I smirked back, then lost it. A fat man in a loud Hawaiian shirt with two screaming, misbehaving children snapped a picture of the Plain woman manning the table of wooden trinkets. The woman immediately turned away, shielding her face. There was a sign clearly posted that told tourists not to photograph the Swartzcopf. It never ceased to amaze me how bad the English could act, how embarrassing they could be.

I pulled over to the table and rolled down my window. I pointed out the sign as the asshole tried, unsuccessfully, to wrangle his two brats. “They don’t like it when you take their picture.”

“What are you, the Amish police?” the man growled at me.

I narrowed my eyes, and his disposable vacation camera sputtered and immediately caught on fire. He yelped and dropped it, stomping it under his tennis shoes while his kids ran in random figure-8’s around him.

I hoped the woman at the table might look just a little bit vindicated, but when I glanced at her, she was watching me morbidly from the shadowy depths of her black bonnet. Slowly, she raised her hand and made the medieval sign of exorcism, her ring and middle fingers down, her pinky and pointer up. It was an ancient sign meant to ward off evil spirits. Essentially, the Evil Eye.
Get thee down
, she mouthed, and I quickly pulled away.

“What was
that
about?” Vivian said, alarmed.

I shrugged off a bad feeling. “Some folks have the Sight. They can ‘see’ daemons like us. I guess we register differently to them than normal people.”

“And the Amish have the Sight?”

“No more or less than the English,” I explained. “But I guess she did.”

“Do you think others will see us?” Suddenly, Vivian looked nervous.

“Time will tell.” I set a hand on her knee to reassure her.

We had finally reached the festival grounds, which was about the size of two football fields side by side. Maybe a hundred long cafeteria tables were set up under makeshift tents like an outside flea market, with a remarkable number of well-crafted items on them. There were Plain folk selling quilts, toys, tools, livestock, household items, clothing, pies and cakes wrapped in cellophane. I saw countless other trinkets and items. There were even collections of Plain men standing together, advertizing their building services on big, hand-written billboards. Several hundred English tourists moved in small, slow herds between the tents and stalls, looking things over with either cynicism or wide-eyed surprise, as if they couldn’t believe this type of world existed outside their own.

“Oh, look at the baby goats!” Vivian squealed after we’d parked and gotten out. “They’re so cute!” Having forgotten the strange Amish woman who’d given us the Evil Eye, she rushed up to the pen and leaned over to pet their noses while two Swartzcopf children looked on, wordlessly and a little fearfully. “Maybe we should get a goat, Nick.”

“A goat? What would we do with a goat?” I was showing the hand drawn picture of Caleb No Last Name to the older Amish men trying to sell their services as handymen and woodworkers, but their attention was being pulled away by a pair of tourists who kept asking questions. I finally gave up and turned back to Vivian. She looked so cute when she was delighted by something. I wrapped my arms around her waist and breathed in the scent of her hair, which smelled delightfully like her herbal shampoo. “Goats smell, you know.”

“Aren’t they traditionally Satanic or something?”

“Pagan, actually,” I corrected her.

“They’re not afraid. Look.” She trickled her fingers gently over their soft, velvety noses while they nibbled at her fingertips. “We could get a goat to go with our new house, gas-efficient hybrid, and white-picket fence, and I could milk it every day.”

“I’d rather you milk me,” I whispered in her ear, letting my hand wander discreetly into the neckline of her dress.

She laughed and slapped playfully at my hand. “Be good.”

“No. I don’t know how.”

“Nick!”

I kissed her hair. “If you want a goat, I’ll get you a goat, but only after we get our own place. I don’t think Morgana would appreciate a goat walking around the shop.”

She was grinning as we moved to the next stall, where she was immediately drawn to a number of schnitz and mincemeat pies. While she looked over the selection, I heard a muffled cry from behind us. I looked back over at the other stall and saw the two Plain children sitting with their two little goats. One was still standing, but the other one—the one Vivian had touched—was lying on its side, breathing harshly as it spasmed and began to die.

I felt my heart catch somewhere up near my throat. Even
I
had never experienced anything like that before, and I wasn’t exactly a paragon of goodness.

Vivian couldn’t seem to decide what she wanted, but since a group of Swartzcopf men were gathering around the goat pen to figure out what had happened, I decided not to say anything and instead hurried her along toward the quilting tables.

With all the bustle and excitement, she never noticed the upset, much to my relief. She did notice a number of gorgeous quilts at the next stall and immediately started asking the Plain women selling them different questions—how they were made, what the different patterns meant. The two older women, master crocheters, mustn’t have had the Sight, because they answered her pleasantly enough in their singsongy accents, nodding and smiling graciously, though I noticed they kept their distance from her and their hands off the table where Vivian was touching it.

While Vivian haggled a price on one of the quilts, I turned to a group of young men selling a pair of massive draft horses and showed them the picture of Caleb that I’d been carrying with me everywhere. But even after consulting each other, they wound up shaking their heads sadly. They said they were fresh down from the Swartzcopf community in northern Ohio and had never seen the young man before.

Someone plowed into me.

I turned, ready to glare at some clumsy tourist, and then realized it was a young Amish man, tall, rangy-strong, and beardless. He was just a little older than Caleb, but not yet old enough to marry, early twenties by my estimation. He had the type of build that would bulk up with time, and a farmer’s tan that darkened his face and reddened the back of his neck. His dirty blond hair fell in a thick comma over his forehead from beneath his black hat—which he was just replacing, having knocked it off when he collided with me. He wore a plain, dark blue shirt under an open vest, with the sleeves rolled up to reveal sinewy, work-hardened forearms, and his brown eyes were bright and clear. He wore slim, round, silver glasses and was just handsome enough in that horsey, Germanic way to steal my attention for the moment.

He gave me a look that was all business, then handed me a flyer for the fair we were all presently attending. I didn’t question his actions. There was something too much like fear in his eyes.

He nodded at me once, then disappeared seamlessly into the crowd.

“Look, Nick, a wedding ring pattern!” Vivian was saying, grinning and showing me the quilt she liked best by holding it up against her chest. It was white, with various shades of blue and grey in it, not too girly, which is how Vivian liked her things.

“It’s beautiful, Viv,” I told her, forcing a smile. “Let’s buy it for our almost wedding night.”

Vivian cheered excitedly as she turned back to pay the Plain women.

I looked down at the flyer in my hand. It was advertizing the quilting festival and GOOD FOOD AND FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! I turned it over and found the back was far more interesting than the font.

It had a name scribbled on it.

Caleb Knapp.

To borrow a Sherlock Holmes-ism: The game, as it were, was afoot.