Black Creek Crossing

by John Saul

  Slowly, knowing how strange and impossible the story sounded, Myra did her best to tell him exactly what had happened yesterday afternoon, sparing none of the details, not even how much Marty had been drinking. The priest listened in silence until she was finished, then frowned thoughtfully.

  “You’re absolutely sure there was a cut on your husband’s cheek?”

  “Blood was running down his face,” Myra replied. “If you don’t believe me, ask Angel—she saw it too. I’m not lying, Father!”

  “I’m not doubting that you think you saw exactly what you’ve told me,” Father Mulroney assured her. “But if the cut healed overnight—”

  “Not just healed,” Myra interrupted. “It’s as if it had never happened at all. It’s like—” She fell silent as she realized the word she’d been about to utter, but the priest picked up where she left off.

  “Like a miracle?”

  Myra shook her head. “It was more like a—” She’d been about to say “vision,” but stopped herself. She still hadn’t told Father Mulroney about the glimpses of the Holy Mother she’d had, and she didn’t want the priest to just pass her off as someone who sometimes “saw things.” She finally said, “I don’t know what it was like. I just don’t know.”

  “Then perhaps you should just try to forget it,” the priest told her. “Some things we can understand, and some things we can’t. You were upset yesterday, and so was your daughter. Our emotions can play tricks on us, and make us think all kinds of terrible things.” He began leading Myra out of the vestry and back up the aisle toward the door. When they were outside the church once again, in the bright morning sunlight, he placed a gentle hand on Myra’s shoulder. “Try not to worry,” he said. “I’m sure everything will be all right—the saints will look after us.”

  His eyes shifted to the crowd that had poured out of the Congregational church across the street, two or three of whom had been part of his own flock until recently. Even Angel Sullivan was over there, talking to Jane and Blake Baker’s son.

  “Of course it would be nice,” he sighed, “if the saints could not just look after us, but send a few more people our way, but I suppose we must be content with what we have.” He winked at Myra. “But if I were you, I’d keep my eye on Angel before Seth Baker corrupts her completely.” As a shocked look came into Myra’s eye, he quickly backtracked. “It was a joke, Myra,” he assured her. “Even if he doesn’t go to my church, Seth is still one of the nicest boys in town. So stop worrying so much—everything will work out.”

  But as Myra walked down the steps and started across the street to reclaim her daughter, Father Mulroney found his eyes wandering to the great tree in the cemetery across the street, which only the day before yesterday had twice been struck by lightning in a storm that came out of nowhere, then vanished as quickly as it had come.

  And yesterday, in the house at Black Creek Crossing, a little girl all dressed in black had appeared for an instant.

  A little girl, wielding a bloody knife.

  Crossing himself, Father Michael Mulroney retreated back into his tiny church and began to pray.

  The sun was just reaching its zenith as Angel and Seth climbed to the top of the shattered granite berm and looked down at the area of flat ground that fronted the single visible wall of the cabin. Neither of them was certain what to expect, but what they hadn’t expected was to find that nothing had changed.

  The flat stone marking the spot where they’d buried Houdini was exactly where they’d left it, but seemed to have sunk lower into the ground. Yet nowhere did the ground look as if it had been disturbed.

  For almost a full minute the two of them stood side by side, gazing down at the invisible grave below. Finally, Seth broke the silence.

  “M-Maybe it wasn’t Houdini,” he said so softly that Angel wasn’t certain that he knew he’d spoken out loud. “Maybe it was another cat—one that just looked like Houdini.”

  Angel shook her head. “It was Houdini. My dad saw him, and my mom saw him, and I think my mom saw . . .” She cut her words short, still not quite ready to tell him about the strange vision—if that’s what it was—that she’d had when the cat attacked her father yesterday.

  Indeed, the more she’d thought about it, and tried to make sense of it, the harder it was to believe that she’d seen it at all. She’d barely been able to sleep at all last night, and whenever she had, her dreams had mingled with her memories, and the darkness was filled with strange images of her father reaching for her, and the cat leaping at him and tearing at his face, and the girl—the girl clad all in black with the white brooch on her chest—plunging a glittering silver knife deep into her father’s chest over and over again. But no matter how many times the knife struck deep into his chest—no matter how much blood gushed from his wounds—he kept looming over her, reaching for her, wanting to touch her, to press his body against her own, to—

  How many times had she awakened, her skin clammy with the sweat of pure terror, her whole body trembling in fear of the touch that had never quite come? And every time she’d awakened, the memory of the cat had risen in her mind, and then the cat had been transformed once more into the girl, except that in the blackness of the night all she saw of the cat was its glowing golden eyes and the white blaze on its chest, and all she ever saw of the girl was the pale skin of her face and the white of the ivory brooch on her breast. By the time dawn had finally broken, she was no longer sure what was real and what to believe, and as she now gazed down on the spot where they’d buried the cat two days ago, her confusion only grew worse.

  “You think your mother saw what?” she heard Seth ask.

  Instead of answering him, she scrambled down the face of the berm and pushed the large rock away from the top of the grave. Using her bare hands, she began digging, and when Seth brought the shovel from the cabin a moment later, she shook her head. “If we use the shovel, we won’t know,” she said.

  Seth cocked his head. “Know what?”

  “The flowers,” Angel said. “If we use the shovel, we won’t know if they’re still the way we put them.”

  Laying the shovel aside, Seth dropped to his knees next to Angel and set to work, scooping the soft earth from the grave and laying it aside, taking more care with each handful he removed. They had dug nearly a foot of earth from the hole when Angel stopped and looked at Seth. “I feel one of the stems.” Now they took even more care, slowly removing the earth bit by bit, until finally the first of the four flowers they’d buried with Houdini’s body lay exposed.

  It was a bright yellow aster, and as she gazed at it, Angel could remember laying it carefully on Houdini’s head to provide him with sunlight even in the darkness of his grave. The flower still lay at precisely the angle at which she’d placed it, and its petals hadn’t even begun to fade. But his head was not beneath it.

  She and Seth glanced at each other, then she picked up the flower, shook the dirt from its petals, and laid it carefully to one side.

  “He must still be here,” Seth whispered, speaking the words that Angel was thinking. “Even if he wasn’t dead when we buried him, there’s no way he could have gotten out without moving the flowers, and if somebody dug him up—”

  “Nobody dug him up,” Angel said. “If they had, wouldn’t something have gotten moved from the way it was?”

  “Maybe it did,” Seth said, “Maybe we just didn’t remember it exactly right.”

  Angel shook her head. “Who even knew we’d buried him? You were the one who said no one even knows this place is here.”

  But even though they knew what they were about to find, they kept digging anyway, taking out the rest of the flowers and removing handful after handful of the earth that hadn’t yet solidified since they’d dug into it the first time, certain that with each handful of earth they removed, they would reach Houdini’s corpse. And then, suddenly, it was over. All the loose dirt was out of the grave, and all that was left was an empty hole—a hole exactly as large and as dee
p as they both remembered having dug it to hold Houdini’s broken corpse.

  But the corpse was gone.

  They stared into the empty grave for almost a full minute before Seth finally spoke. “I was right,” he whispered. “You really did bring him back to life.”

  Though she heard the words, Angel tried to shut them out, tried to reject them, because to accept them was also to accept the rest of what Seth had said last night: Maybe you really are a witch. Her eyes still fixed on the empty grave, she shook her head. “I couldn’t have,” she whispered. “It isn’t—”

  There was a soft mewing then, and they both turned to see Houdini sitting in the open doorway of the tiny cabin. As they stared at him, he turned and disappeared inside.

  Neither of them speaking, Angel and Seth stood up and followed the cat into the tiny room hidden in the cleft. The cat was sniffing anxiously at the niche in which the book was hidden, and when they retrieved it from its hiding place and put it on the table, it seemed to fall naturally open to the same strange verse they’d read the first day they’d discovered the book:

  They read it through three times, then Angel turned to Seth. “Do you know what it means? I mean, what it’s supposed to do?”

  Seth shrugged helplessly and his eyes shifted to Houdini, who was now sitting on the counter near the huge water catchment basin, his tail twitching nervously as he watched them. “But I think we ought to try it, and see what happens.” As soon as he uttered the words, Houdini appeared to relax, stretching out on the counter, curling up, and going to sleep.

  Angel looked doubtfully at the page. “ ‘Thrice haired with hog,’ ” she read. “Where are we supposed to get hairs from a hog?”

  “There’s a farm about half a mile farther out the road,” Seth replied.

  An hour later they were back in the tiny cabin, carrying half a dozen long hairs they’d found in the mud of the pigsty on the farm down the road, and a variety of mosses from under fallen logs in the woods. As they entered the cabin chamber, Houdini woke up, bounded off the counter, and came over to stretch up and sniff at Angel’s hand.

  While Seth built a fire, Angel took the kettle from the pothook, filled it half full with water, replaced it on the hook and swung it over the quickly growing fire.

  As the water began to heat, there was a sudden flash of lightning, followed a few seconds later by a clap of thunder.

  As first Seth, then Angel, cut their fingers and squeezed a few drops of blood into the kettle, a gentle rain began to fall.

  As they added the rest of the ingredients they’d collected, the shower built into a downpour.

  With Houdini curled up beside them, Angel and Seth watched the flames.

  Chapter 34

  TARTLED BY THE FLASH OF LIGHTNING, FATHER Michael Mulroney’s whispered prayers died on his lips, and as the thunderclap that instantly followed on the heels of the lightning bolt rattled the windows of the church, he got to his feet and hurried up the aisle to the door. The first drops of rain were just beginning to fall, but the storm that had suddenly blackened the sky had not yet unleashed enough water to drown the wisp of smoke rising from the enormous tree that stood in the old graveyard across the street. As he stood in the shelter of the tiny church foyer and the rain began coming down harder, Father Mike felt a chill pass over him—a chill far colder than the slight drop in the temperature could account for.

  A second bolt of lightning struck, slashing out of the sky, reaching down to the tree like giant fingers intent on gripping the mighty oak, ripping it from the ground, and tossing it aside as if it were no more than a weed. In an instant the lightning had vanished and the deafening roar of its accompanying thunder once again shook the structure of Father Mike’s church to its foundations. As the thunderclap rolled away and the skies seemed to open—as they must have at the beginning of the Flood, the priest reflected—he backed deeper into the church, closing the doors as if to shut out not only the storm, but the fear that was congealing deep within his soul.

  Abandoning his prayers, he retreated to the small room behind the altar and sat down at his desk. Unlocking the bottom drawer on the left hand side, he took out a worn book that had been left in the desk by his predecessor, or perhaps even by someone who had served Roundtree’s small Catholic congregation several centuries ago. When he’d first come upon the book nearly twenty years ago, he’d thought it little more than a curiosity, for what possible relevance could seventeenth century speculations on witchcraft have to his parish? He’d glanced through it, more amused than anything else by the obvious terror the author felt for everything he discussed in his short essay on how the town had tried to rid itself of two women—or, rather, a woman and her teenage daughter—who had been accused of “Vile Majyk”—as it had been called in the book—nearly a century before the Revolutionary War. His first impulse had been to give the book to the local library, where it properly belonged, but for some reason—a reason he’d never quite understood—he put it back in the drawer, where it had remained locked away for almost two decades.

  Then, almost two years ago, he was awakened in the middle of the night by a sudden storm that whipped up out of nowhere. The first crash of thunder woke him, and the second flash of lightning was so bright that he went to the window to make certain it hadn’t struck the church next door. A moment later the third bolt struck, lashing down out of the sky into the great round tree in the middle of the cemetery. For almost half an hour he stood at the window watching as bolt after bolt of lightning struck the tree and deafening thunder crashed against his ears, shaking the tiny parsonage. In less than an hour the storm died away as suddenly as it began, and he went back to bed. But as he rose at dawn the next morning and looked out the window, instead of seeing the shattered and scarred remains of a tree, as he’d expected, the immense old oak stood as it always had, its canopy forming an almost perfect sphere, none of its branches showing any signs of the violence to which it had been subjected only a few hours earlier.

  Then, late that afternoon, he’d heard the first rumors of violence that had taken place in the house at Black Creek Crossing the night before.

  And something clicked in his mind.

  He’d gone to his desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, taken out the book and thumbed through it until he found the passage that had suddenly risen out of the depths of his memory:

  . . . it being known that Storms struck out of empty Skyes when they practiced the Evil Majyk and three Witnesses swearing that they saw ye Round Tree struck by lightning but never Burned, they were thus Bound to that Tree, there to be Burned themselves . . .

  Father Mulroney read the passage three times before turning the page to read the rest of the story of what had happened when Margaret and Forbearance Wynton had been burned:

  . . . and when ye Flames did finally Die and ye Smoke blewe away on the great Winde that rose up, naught was left of ye Witches nor the Rope that Bound them, yet ye Great Tree still stood.

  The priest locked the book up once again and went to his prayers, certain that the Holy Mother would guide him. He’d followed the trial of Nate Rogers, and once or twice wondered if perhaps he should talk to the man’s lawyer, perhaps show him the book he’d found locked in his desk. But in the end he kept silent, saying nothing about the strange passages he’d read in the old book, knowing that whatever had been written in it couldn’t possibly have any bearing whatsoever on the case of Nate Rogers, who had never been able to give any explanation at all for what he’d done.

  “There was a voice,” was all he’d ever said. “It told me to do what I wanted to do.”

  Besides, Father Mulroney had reasoned, if he said anything, people would only have thought he was as crazy as Nate Rogers had been found to be.

  Then, on the day that Marty and Myra Sullivan and their daughter moved into the old house at Black Creek Crossing, thunderheads had churned up in a clear blue sky, and an electrical storm as violent as the one on the night when Nate Rogers murdered his wife and dau
ghter had lashed out at the village for almost three hours before vanishing as suddenly as it had arrived.

  The sky had once more been crystalline blue, and within minutes of the cessation of the rain, thunder, and lightning, no trace of the clouds remained.

  Another had struck only two days ago.

  And now a third had struck.

  For the third time, Father Mulroney opened the old book and tried to make sense of the strange and impossible things described within its covers.

  As the fire under the cast-iron kettle died away, so also did the storm that had been raging outside. Once again neither Angel nor Seth was certain how long they had sat staring into the flames. But when they looked outside, the sun was just above the trees; soon dusk would begin to fall, and the darkness would gather quickly.

  Seth swung the kettle out of the fireplace, and together they peered into its depths. Just as before, most of the water had boiled away, and what was left seemed utterly devoid of either color or aroma. And when they breathed in the steam still rising from the surface of the broth, neither one of them felt anything unusual.

  “How much of it do you think we should drink?” Angel asked.

  Seth shrugged. “All of it, I guess.”

  Angel peered uncertainly into the kettle, which was far fuller today than it had been when the fire burned out the day before yesterday. “But what’s it going to do?”

  “How should I know?” Seth asked. Fetching the ladle and lifting it to his lips, he blew on it, then tipped his head back and poured the contents into his mouth.

  Far from burning his tongue, which he’d feared, the liquid seemed cool in his mouth, and he felt the same cool sensation as it moved though his esophagus and down into his stomach.