by John Saul
Allayne looked up just as the hawk, screaming once again, burst through the budding branches of the oaks and chestnuts that circled the picnic table. Her eyes widened in shock as she realized what was happening, and she snatched Jennifer off the table. “Run!” she shouted as she lowered the child to the ground. “Put your arms over your head and run!” Jennifer, a shriek of fright escaping her lips, obeyed instantly, but Lisa Chambers, too surprised by what had happened to move, was frozen to the spot, staring mutely at the attacking bird.
Only at the last instant did she manage to throw up an arm to fend off the hawk’s extended claws. A searing flash of pain shot through her forearm as its talons sliced through her skin and tore at her flesh, then she finally came to life as Allayne grabbed her other arm. Screaming with fear and agony, she stumbled after Allayne.
The attack was over as quickly as it began. The hawk rose once more into the air, caught the wind, and soared skyward without so much as a beat of its wings.
Cassie watched it all. She saw the bird dive, saw Allayne send Jennifer running from the park, saw the hawk slash viciously at Lisa’s arm then burst back out of the trees. But as Lisa and Allayne stumbled away, the hawk screamed once more. Cassie looked up into the sky.
This time the hawk was coming toward her.
Cassie felt herself begin to tremble, and her skin turned clammy with a cold sweat as the bird flew over the marsh, gained altitude, then hovered over the pines for a moment.
Then it closed its wings and dived.
Cassie couldn’t move. She remained where she was, paralyzed with fear. She closed her eyes and waited for the bird to strike.
At the last moment she heard a fluttering of feathers, then felt a weight on her shoulder. A moment later, something brushed her cheek, and when she finally managed to open her eyes again, the hawk was perched on her shoulder.
Sumi sat at her feet, his tail wrapped around her leg.
From the front porch of the cabin Miranda beckoned. “They are your friends,” she said softly. “They’ll always be your friends.”
Then, reaching her hand out to Cassie, the woman in black drew her inside the cabin.
Chapter 10
“Why the hell would Cassie want to go out and see Miranda?” Keith asked. Though his tone was light, Rosemary knew by the expression on his face that he was really wondering why she’d wasted a whole night worrying about the words of an old woman the whole town knew was half crazy.
“I don’t know,” Rosemary repeated for the third time. Her lack of sleep was catching up with her, and she felt herself growing angry with Keith. Why was he insisting that she should have simply dismissed whatever Miranda had said to her? Wasn’t he even interested? “All I’m telling you is what happened yesterday, and that I think you ought to go out to the marsh and see if she’s there. Probably you’re right—she’s down at the beach with Jen and there’s nothing at all the matter. But I just wish you’d take a look. Is that so horrible of me, that I’m worried about your daughter?”
Keith’s eyes narrowed. “My daughter,” he repeated. “Is that what this is all about? She’s my daughter, and you don’t really have anything to do with her?”
Rosemary’s eyes brimmed with tears. “You know that’s not true,” she said, her voice quavering. “And I’d go myself, but it seems as though every time I try to talk to her, I say something wrong. If I go, she’ll think I’m … well, she’ll think I’m spying on her.”
“Which is what you want me to do, isn’t it?” Keith asked. “I have a lot to do today,” he went on, “and I’ll be damned if I’ll waste my time poking around in the marsh just because Miranda was babbling to you yesterday. And if I were you—”
Before he could finish, the back door slammed open and Jennifer plunged into the kitchen, her frightened face stained with tears. Behind her, sobbing uncontrollably, was Lisa Chambers, her right arm bound up with a bloody scarf. At her side was Allayne Garvey. Keith froze in mid-sentence as Jennifer threw herself into his arms. While Lisa continued to sob hysterically, Allayne tried to explain what had happened in the park. Rosemary—her anger at Keith momentarily banished from her mind—carefully unwound the scarf from Lisa’s arm and gently rinsed the wound at the kitchen sink.
There were deep slashes in the girl’s forearm, each of them almost an inch long, so clean that they might have been made by a razor blade. The skin had shrunk back from them, exposing the torn muscle beneath. Wincing with sympathetic pain as she soaped the cuts, Rosemary tried to follow what Allayne was saying while still keeping half an ear on Keith’s hurried call to Paul Samuels, the village’s only doctor.
“We’d better take her in,” he said after he’d hung up. “Paul says if the cuts are as deep as I told him, she’ll need stitches. I’ll call Fred Chambers and tell him to meet us at the clinic.” Leaving Rosemary to take care of Jennifer, he half carried Lisa out to the car, then, with Allayne tending to Lisa, he drove toward the twelve-bed emergency hospital a few blocks away.
“Lisa said Cassie did it,” Jennifer told her mother when she was finally calmed down enough to make sense. Her eyes were wide and her jaw set stubbornly. “All the way home she kept yelling that Cassie did it.” Her fear was quickly giving way to anger now. “But that’s dumb, isn’t it? Cassie wouldn’t do something like that! Only a mean person would, and Cassie’s not mean! I don’t care what Lisa Chambers says. She’s a big liar, anyway.”
“Slow down, darling,” Rosemary protested. “Slow down, and just try to tell me what happened. Everything, from the moment you left the house with Cassie this morning.”
Jennifer’s face screwed up into an expression of intense concentration as she began telling the story, her eyes fixed anxiously on her mother. “I tried to stop her,” she finished. “I told her she shouldn’t go in the marsh by herself, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“But where is she now?” Rosemary asked when Jennifer was finally done. Even before Jennifer spoke, she was already certain she knew the answer to her question.
“She went into Miranda’s house,” Jennifer breathed, her voice trembling with awe. “Allayne saw it. She said the bird just came down and perched on Cassie’s shoulder for a minute, and then Cassie followed Miranda into her house.”
Twenty minutes later Keith was back, his face flushed with anger. “You want to hear something really wonderful?” he asked tightly. “Fred Chambers says if there’s so much as a single mark on Lisa’s arm, he’s going to sue us. Can you believe that?”
“Sue us?” Rosemary echoed. “What on earth for?”
Keith’s voice hardened. “He seems to think he’s got lots of grounds. For starters, there’s Lisa’s cockamamie story about Cassie making the hawk attack her. But it gets worse. There’s also the fact you took the scarf off Lisa’s arm and tried to clean up the cuts. That, he claims, could be construed as practicing medicine without a license.”
Rosemary’s eyes flashed indignantly. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Of course it is,” Keith agreed. “But ridiculous has never stopped Fred Chambers before. Even if he loses, he can make life miserable for us.” Shaking his head with barely contained anger, he began shrugging into his pea coat. “I’d better go out there and find Cassie. Maybe she knows what really happened.”
But as he left the house, Rosemary noticed that he’d said nothing about the fact that apparently she had been right all along. For whatever reasons, Cassie had, indeed, gone out to see Miranda Sikes.
Just as Miranda had said she would.
Eric Cavanaugh was walking aimlessly over the dunes. The chill wind whipped around him, slowly cooling the anger that still burned inside him. He’d been walking for more than an hour, not really aware of where he was going, and not caring. But now, looking up, he realized he was halfway out Cranberry Point. He paused, breathing deeply of the salt air and enjoying the cool sting of spindrift against his skin. As far as he could see, whitecaps glistened brightly in the sun and the thundering surf had s
crubbed the beach clean of every trace of seaweed. The last of his fury seemed to drain into the roiling sea, and when he at last turned away to gaze out over the wetlands on the leeward side of the point, he felt the beginnings of the peacefulness he always found here begin to wash gently over him.
In strange contrast to the churning ocean, there was a placidity about the marsh now. The wind, rushing freely over the open expanse of the Atlantic, had been unable to vent its full strength on the protected marsh, and the reeds were merely swaying in the breeze. Here and there open expanses of black and brackish water rippled gently, reflecting the crystal blue of the sky in a rainbow of hues. A redwing blackbird, its beak filled with a tuft of grass, was industriously pulling reeds together in the first stages of its nest building. Far in the distance Eric could make out the familiar shape of Miranda Sikes’s cabin, the ubiquitous white hawk perched on the peak of the roof.
Then, as he watched, someone emerged from the cabin. At first, as the figure hesitated on the porch, he was certain it was Miranda, but a second later he knew it was someone else, for the person bolted off the porch and began running down the slope of the hill.
Cassie. It had to be Cassie.
As she disappeared into the tall grasses, a shout drifted over the marsh, then another. A movement off to the right, near the park, caught Eric’s eye, and then he recognized Keith Winslow running along the strip of grass that edged the marsh. As Eric watched, Keith shouted once more, then veered off into the marsh itself.
A moment later the hawk on the roof of Miranda Sikes’s cabin came to life, rising off its perch with a single beat of its powerful wings. A second later Eric lost sight of it as its ghostly image disappeared into the brightness of the morning sunlight.
Cassie reappeared for a moment, then was gone again, lost somewhere in the reeds. But even in the split second she’d been visible, Eric knew she was running toward him rather than her father. He hesitated, wondering what could have happened. Had she really gone to Miranda’s house alone? But how had she done it? How had she threaded her way through the maze of trails and paths, most of which led nowhere but simply petered out into boggy morasses of peat and treacherous expanses of quicksand?
And what had made her father come looking for her?
And then, over the pounding surf and Keith Winslow’s shouts, Eric heard a high-pitched scream. The hawk, no more than a tiny speck high above the marsh, was preparing to dive.
Cassie had no idea of where she was—on both sides of her the reeds seemed to be closing in, reaching out, grasping at her. The pounding of her heart thundered in her ears, but above the throbbing she could hear the cries of the birds in a howling cacophony.
And then her foot slipped and she plunged headlong off the path and into the marsh itself. Screaming, she flailed in the muck and tried to grab at a clump of reeds. The reeds came loose in her hand and she only rolled over, the foul waters of the marsh oozing through her clothes. Struggling to her hands and knees, she looked wildly around, but the path seemed to have disappeared.
“Help!” she yelled. “Somebody help me!”
Staggering to her feet, she took a single step, then tripped again, plunging face first into the mire. The screams of the marsh birds were even louder now, and she imagined she could hear the beat of the hawk’s wings as well. She looked up, and at first saw nothing. Then, high above her, she found the pale shape of the hawk, floating on the wind. As she watched, it seemed to discover her, and folding its wings against its body, dropped into a plunging dive.
It couldn’t be coming after her—it couldn’t! It was her friend, and it wouldn’t turn against her. And yet with every second it was swooping closer.
Keith dodged to the right, then to the left. Almost there—just a few more yards. He shouted to Cassie again, but she didn’t seem to hear him. She just kept plunging onward, stumbling through the mud.
Why didn’t she stop? Why couldn’t she hear him?
Her screams were muffled now, but the white hawk was clearly visible, streaking out of the sky. From its open beak a high-pitched scream of attack rent the air, and its feet were extended, the talons glittering in the sun like deadly jewels. Still running, Keith ripped his pea coat off, preparing to throw it over Cassie.
Only at the last minute did he realize that the hawk was not attacking Cassie at all.
He himself was the target.
He froze, caught in a nightmare as the hawk loomed larger and larger above him. He could see its eyes now—bloodred spots bored into the white mask of its face. Suddenly its wings spread out as it braked in midair, and the creature’s talons seemed to spread wide.
At the last instant Keith’s arm jerked reflexively upward. The bird’s talons closed, but instead of sinking into his own flesh, they tore only into the thick wool of the jacket.
Instantly the hawk’s mighty wings spread wide as it tried to launch itself back into the sky with its prize clutched in its claws, but Keith jerked hard on the jacket, and the bird plunged into the reeds, thrashing wildly. Screaming in furious confusion, it rolled over, then found its balance and hurled itself into the air for a second attack.
Keith plunged through the reeds and found Cassie, half mired in the mud, struggling to free herself from the entangling reeds. Grasping her arm, he pulled her to her feet, then shielded his head with his free arm as he prepared for the hawk’s next attack.
“Hang on,” he shouted. “Just hang on, Cassie!”
Half carrying and half dragging her, his feet sinking into the peat with every step, Keith slogged through the marsh until he found a path. Then, still clutching Cassie’s hand, he ran toward the beach.
The hawk, beating against the wind, kept pace with them. As they neared the edge of the wetlands, it spiraled high until it was once again only a shimmering speck against the blue backdrop of the sky. As they reached the dunes and the beach beyond, Keith braced himself for another attack.
But it never came. As he watched, the hawk turned away, then sailed back out over the marsh in a graceful loop, settling once more on the peak of Miranda Sikes’s cabin. Only then did Keith finally turn to face his daughter.
Her clothes were black with the reeking waters of the marsh, and her face was smeared with mud. Slimy grasses had tangled themselves in her hair, and her hands were covered with a network of tiny cuts where the sharp edges of swamp plants had slashed her skin. Beneath the mud her face was pale, and her entire body was trembling.
Releasing her father’s hand, she sank down onto the beach and choked back a sob.
“What is it, baby?” Keith breathed, dropping to his knees beside her. “What happened out there?”
Cassie looked at him with haunted eyes and shook her head mutely, still overcome by the churning of her emotions and the thoughts reeling through her mind. It was real. It was true. Miranda Sikes was the woman of the dream, the woman in black. And Cassie knew now that she was Miranda’s. She belonged to Miranda, and it was to her that Miranda would reveal her incredible powers. But at the same time as she knew this, Cassie also had a terrifying foreboding that something was about to happen. Something terrible. To Miranda. And to her.
Keith stared helplessly at his anguished daughter for a few seconds. She was sobbing uncontrollably now. “She’s going to die,” Cassie gasped. “I know it.”
“Who is, baby? Who’s going to die?” Keith whispered, but he got no response. Cassie’s hysteria was abating now as she struggled to regain control of herself. At last, Keith drew her to her feet, his arm around her, supporting her. “Come on, baby,” he said soothingly. “It’s all right. I’m taking you home. I’m taking you home now.” Slowly, with Cassie still sobbing against his chest, he led her away.
Only when Cassie and her father were gone from the beach did Eric Cavanaugh stand up in the patch of dune grass where he’d lain hidden. He looked out into the marsh. It was quiet now—its placid calm restored as if the chaotic scene of a few minutes before had never happened.
He
stood still for a few minutes, Cassie’s words echoing in his mind. Then, moving slowly and deliberately, he started out into the marsh, following the familiar twists and turns that would lead him out to the low hill on which Miranda’s cabin stood.
He hadn’t really believed Cassie would go out there. No one went out there, no one at all, except …
He made up his mind.
It was time for him to go see Miranda.
By the time Keith got Cassie home, her crying had stopped, but she had fallen into a silence that neither Keith nor Rosemary could penetrate. She offered no explanations about why she’d gone out to Miranda’s house, no explanations for her strange words. Instead she simply retreated to her room, where she spent the rest of the day alone, with the door closed.
Around noon there was a scratching at the back door, and Rosemary let Sumi in. The cat, ignoring its bowl of food, streaked up the stairs, and a moment later Cassie let it into her room.
As the day wore on, there was still only silence from the second floor. Rosemary went upstairs several times and tapped softly at Cassie’s door, but when there was no response, she turned away and went back downstairs, shaking her head at Keith’s inquiring glance.
“We should try to make her talk about it,” Rosemary finally said when dinner was over and Cassie had still not been seen. “Whatever happened out there obviously terrified her.”
Once again Keith shook his head. “She’ll talk about it when she’s ready to,” he said, though remembering the stricken look on his daughter’s face and her hysterical sobs, he was more worried than he cared to admit.
Rather than precipitate another fight, Rosemary reluctantly agreed to let it go—at least until morning.
Cassie jerked awake, her skin clammy and her heart pounding. In the dream she’d been in the marsh, but the grass had been higher than it really was. It had towered over her head almost like a bamboo forest, and the stems of the cattails and reeds had seemed almost like the trunks of trees.
