Unseaming (15 page)

* * *

I’m still amazed I made it up that hill, carrying that child. My mind reeling the whole way.

The pieces fit now, at least as well as I would ever understand them. The man who I had…
slashed
…was something like yet unlike the Crabbes, a self-made monster who had turned Angel’s Leap into his stalking grounds. He had stolen Tommy into shadow with the worst of intentions, but his quarry had escaped. A terrified boy, snatched out of the world, but still resourceful enough to stay out of this demon’s clutches for what time he had left to him.

I was both chilled and completely unsurprised when the Crabbes arrived at the shop without their captive in tow. They made no mention of him, and I chose not to ask as to his whereabouts. They had retrieved my gear from the shelter, though. I thanked them. Gertrude Crabbe fussed over Tommy while Herman readied the Jeep. He indicated I should follow him.

As the engine warmed up, he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned close, so that I was staring right at his crooked teeth, ghoulishly lit by the Jeep’s headlights. His acrid breath assaulted me as he spoke.

“We’re going to drop you off a block down from the dispatch center. You go in, tell them you found the boy wandering in the woods. Don’t mention us, and don’t mention anyone else. Tommy won’t remember anything different than what you say. Gertrude’s made sure of that.”

Given everything I had been through that day, I had no problem swallowing the idea that Gertrude Crabbe could hoodoo a boy’s memory.

A question burned in the back of my mind and it escaped before I could stop it. “Why didn’t you stop this? You could have ended all these terrible things a long time ago.”

He stared at me, his face a horror mask. “You know that ain’t our nature. We don’t seek. We wait.” He shuffled closer, raised his hand with the malformed fingers to make a pinching gesture. “A little lasts us a long time.”

Then he patted me on the shoulder. “The old blood’s gotten thinned out, but it still shows itself in all sorts of strange ways. Some of us know from the moment we come out of the womb, what we’ve got, what it means.” His too wide eyes caught mine, as he grinned in a manner that I can only describe as mischievous. “Some of us have to learn all that the hard way.”

* * *

All four of us rode down the logging trail, Herman driving, me in the passenger seat, Gertrude in the back with Tommy, who, amazingly, was asleep. Herman’s eyes never left the patch of light cut out of the darkness by the jeep’s headlamps, but when he spoke it was as if he was looking at me, his bulbous eyes staring into mine.

“You know, tiger,” Mr. Crabbe said, “you’re all right. When you come back down the this way, feel free to stop in. We’d love to have you by, for a bit of supper.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said with a shudder. Of course I had no plans to take the Crabbes up on their offer.

But I did keep my word. I followed instructions and kept my mouth shut. I didn’t stay around to witness Tommy’s reunion with his family. The accolades that could have been mine, plaques, newspaper stories, television crews, would have drawn too much attention. I wanted nothing to do with that.

By the afternoon of the next day, I’d abandoned my hike. Showered, shaved, gotten a haircut. I was nestled uncomfortably in the back of a bus, heading Pennsylvania way, intending to drop in on my friends a little sooner than expected—but maybe not
too
soon. From there, I didn’t know. I just knew, I still didn’t want to go home.

As the road rumbled past and the world rolled into night, I saw things moving in the twilight, and in the dark. Creatures in the fields, or clinging to branches or sheer rock walls, lumbering or scuttling through the midnight streets of the scattered towns that clung for their lives to the highway.

But I didn’t pay near enough attention as I should, because I peered at them through the memory of my grandmother’s eyes, the night she jerked me by the collar of my pajama top from the haunted cabin that she allowed to linger on in the woods above her farm. I still didn’t know what was in there, what shades she lived with in that lonely valley.

But now I could remember: how I turned at the sound of whimpers between the rotted wooden slats, and she took my chin in her hand, and made me look at her, at her dark face and her startling blue eyes that practically glowed in the moonlight. The shadows formed a shape about her, something massive and terrifying and full of flowing, feline grace.

You leave those ghosts alone, little cub,
she said.
You come away. You’ve hurt them enough.

But for a flat tire, no one would have ever known that Old Hag Bremen was dead.

Her forebears, like other settlers from Germany, staked out plots in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains even before the white colonies declared themselves a nation. Throughout the rolling hills, where houses regard each other across wide vales, and narrow roads still ford streams with wooden bridges held together by iron spikes, the Anglicized names speak from rusting mailboxes: Anselm. Flohr. Krone. Newman. Schrader.

Yet even in this place of isolation, with cornfields blanketing the land for miles before giving way to defiant oaks on ancient mountain, the Bremens stayed a world apart. They sent no sons to fight in the War of Northern Aggression. They did not come to the whitewashed A-frame churches. They did not grow crops, or ask for work in others’ cattle farms or dairies or tobacco fields. Those few who knew the business of the Bremen family left them to it, and spoke of it at most in late-night whispers that by morning seemed like half-forgotten dreams.

By the time the single-lane dirt ruts finally gave way to asphalt, only one Bremen remained, a sad, solitary heir rattling alone inside a rambling home more than three hundred years old: still with an outhouse, still with a kitchen standing separate from the building where she made her bed. Only the squirrels and wasps that took shelter in the walls kept her company.

The rotten roof of the family barn, which only ever held what animals the family needed for themselves, had partially collapsed under a heavy snow around the time of the Korean War. She had never tried to have it fixed, and no one had ever offered to fix it for her.

No one was even certain of her name, but the children who on dares spied through her windows called her “Old Hag” and that seemed fitting enough.

Folks in the nearest semblance of a town, about five miles away, rarely saw her, and on the few occasions she ventured in to buy simple things like bread or grapefruit juice, she never spoke. The fact is, the cashiers who found this pale, smelly, shriveled woman with grey eyes and long unkempt hair staring at them from across the counter were grateful for her silence.

Only the children had any inkling how Old Hag Bremen spent her hours, and those inklings came from short, frightened glimpses after dark. They returned whispering of how she lurked in deep shadow through what was once one of her ancestors’ bedrooms, tinkering with tubes spouting strange colored flames and glassware filled with bubbling fluid.

Those whispers protected her as well as any fence, until things began to change in the county where she lived. The people there elected a new prosecutor, an aggressive, agitated young man from the North named Edward Jacobs. Echoes of those whispers reached his ears, and he took the scene they described to mean something rather different from what the native folk believed.

The sheriff, a tall, lean, leathery man born and bred in those hills, argued to Jacobs that he should leave well enough alone, that the old lady hurt no one, but at last deferred to the prosecutor’s wishes, as the law required, and sent two men in the dead of night to spy. They came back talking of a laboratory, and chemicals, and Old Hag Bremen downing the liquids brewed in her beakers. The next night, six more men went, with rifles and a search warrant. They brought the old woman back to the jail, seized her glass equipment and destroyed it.

She spent a month in the city jail to the south, as the county jail had no place to house women. But after that month, she was free, as the state’s lab tests found no evidence a crime. No chemical that she had kept in her possession, nothing she had brewed, was against the law.

An innocent passerby, a stout laborer from a neighboring county, discovered her death a mere three months after her return to her family’s farm. He’d spent a day sawing down trees on the slopes adjoining her property, and as he drove his pickup down the unpaved logging trail he blew a tire. Discovering his spare was no good, he hiked to the sprawling old house he could see through the trees in hopes of using a phone.

The second thing he noticed when he neared the old log house was the smell: the overpowering stench of a decayed body. The third thing he noticed, the flies swarming on the inside of the windows.

He had first noticed something else: a thin strain of music, tinny notes that conformed to no melody but still made him catch his breath and strain to hear, as if someone were singing and he couldn’t quite make out the words. But the second and third things made him forget the music, made him run down the overgrown path from the house to the nearest paved road and frantically wave down a logging truck as it groaned around a curve.

The volunteer ambulance workers found the old woman in an indescribable state. Her pale, shriveled hands clutched a music box, an ancient heirloom from the Old Country, so tarnished and corroded that whatever song it held must have been silent for centuries.

* * *

When Jacobs learned of the old woman’s death, he felt a trickle of sadness, a fleeting twinge of guilt, but no regret, no lasting sorrow. Mostly what moved behind his close-set brown eyes was a sense of relief. He didn’t celebrate her death, but her passing, to his mind, made the world a simpler, safer place.

He did experience a different kind of regret, as proving this reviled woman a criminal would certainly have boosted his standing, politically and socially, in this community where he otherwise might always remain an outsider. He believed that if he had had a close watch kept on her, that opportunity would have come sure as sunrise. His one meeting with Old Hag Bremen (whose real name, he knew, was Adelia) convinced him of it. A week after her release from jail, she had come to his office to demand compensation for the destruction of her lab.

No one who lived in the county seat, nearly thirty miles from her land, had ever seen her there before. Jacobs’ elderly secretary, inherited from the previous top lawman, cut short a scream when she saw the hag sitting in the lobby in a tattered dress the color of ash, her brittle cobweb hair draped past her waist. Her pale face peered from between the tangles of her locks, grey eyes cold and unblinking as she stared at the quailing woman and rasped two words: “Edward Jacobs.”

Jacobs had seen many unpleasant things, even in his short career, but he grew queasy at the sight of this nightmare woman, terrible and pathetic at once, sitting across the desk from him, utterly out of place amidst the crisp law books on the shelves, degrees and paintings of sailing ships on the walls, the photographs of smiling wife and baby that watched over his drumming fingertips. He had held the leathery visitor’s chair for her, then taken his seat and waited for her to speak.

When she did, it was like ice cracking. “You owe me.”

Poker-faced, Jacobs replied, “I don’t think so.”

“You destroyed my dignity,” she said. “How can I ever get that back? The least you can do is give me the money to replace the physical things you destroyed.”

“I don’t think so,” Jacobs replied.

She stood, slammed both hands on his desk, and he flinched despite himself. “You ruined any chance I had to restore my family’s fortune!”

Jacobs cocked his head, folded his arms and smirked.

“So much of what my ancestors had is gone. What they owned. What they knew. There was still one way I could bring back glory to my family’s name, and you took it from me!”