by Lara Parker
“Why?” Feeble panic flickered in his body.
“Fate plays its tricks. The cure was successful. You became human at last, whereas I—”
He could smell the lilies, their pungent perfume. He was desperate to keep her away. “But the workman became—?”
“Jackie’s doing, not mine. She pulled him out of the leaves and made him her slave. But that is all over now.” Her eyes blazed, coral, then vermilion, flames flickering in the irises. “I have been waiting for you.” Her copper hair flared from her head as she raised her arm and swept the chamber. “I have made the preparations for our wedding.”
He closed his eyes. “It’s too late. You warned me—and you were right. And now . . . I’m . . . Julia, I’m old . . . and I’m dying.”
She sank beside him and he was dazzled by her smile, her eager expression, her flaming eyes, which were hypnotizing him now, and a cruelty in her curled lips that he could never have imagined in his gentle Julia.
“I can make you young again,” she said.
She placed one hand on his shoulder and another on his forehead and pushed him down, twisting his body, arching his neck. Her teeth gleamed and her eyes were glowing coils as she whispered, “I have a new cure.
He floundered and heaved up, but he was helpless under her grip. She lowered, and too soon he felt the exquisite pain when she pierced his neck, hovered there for a moment, then lowered her body to his, enveloping him in her embrace. He moaned as she began to drink. Many times he had imagined his victims’ terror, but never had he dreamed it would be like this: the utter helplessness, the limbs like water, the paralyzed will. This is the fate I deserve, he thought, as his mind dimmed: to die as I have lived. The swirling lights in his brain faded slowly like pale flames until extinguished by a breath. He reached his arms around her and abandoned himself to her power.
Darkness fell over his thoughts. He was tossed into black waters, caught by a wave, swung back, then dashed against a reef, seized in eddies and swirling sea grass, until he was plucked up again, sucked out to sea then smashed on the rocks. He died, and died again, each time picked up and swept out to sea, then flung against some unforgiving beach, his heart shuddering, as what blood he had wound its way through his veins, and she—Julia!—drained him until he was an empty shell. His heart beat its last muffled drumming, once, twice, and then silence.
He would have smiled had his face been more than a lifeless mask. He had always wondered if, when death finally came, he would be there to see it. Whether he would show courage or cowardice. But now it no longer mattered. He floated on a sea tide of darkness, drifted against a soft shore, and lay still, abandoned and alone. Then something reached for him and drew him onto the sand.
He opened his eyes and, through glazed vision, saw Julia on her knees beside him. She smiled and spoke low. “This, finally, is our wedding night.” Reaching up to her own neck, her nails like knives, she sliced her throat. Blood oozed, and she whispered, “Come fly with me,” and came down in a rush, falling lightly against him, and he found her and drank in a swoon, thinking he must be dreaming after death, that this, too, was death’s cruel trick, until slowly, warmth returned; his long channels filled, as a dry riverbed in a rain shower, and his heart began to beat once again.
DAVID AND JACQUELINE had spent the day exploring the eighteenth-century buildings at Mystic Seaport. Flushed with excitement, they burst into the sitting room of the old Randall’s Ordinary.
“Barnabas you missed it!” cried David. “Where have you been all day?”
“I’ve been here with Julia,” he answered. She reached for his hand and smiled.
“We saw a neat-o sailmaking loft with huge pieces of canvas and old awls and needles,” said David. “I tried to sew with one of the needles and I could barely push it through the cloth!”
“Really?”
“And we saw a rope-twisting demonstration,” said Jackie. “They stood a block away from each other and twisted four strands into a rope, just like magic.”
“There’s a machine shop with enormous gears and huge leather pulleys to drive the saws and lathes.”
“And Ye Old Apothecary with soaps and herbs!”
“You have had fun,” said Julia.
“And beautiful schooners! Square-rigged sailing vessels. You have to come and see them.”
Julia smiled at the two teenagers brimming with merriment, and Barnabas noticed how handsome she looked this evening. Her clear skin shone and her eyes were lustrous. She was all of a coppery auburn color.
“Will you come with us to see the boats?” said David to Barnabas. “I know you will love them.”
“Of course. Is it nearly dark outside?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jackie. “Somehow they are even more mysterious when you can pretend they are only in port for one night.”
“One of them is called the Joseph Conrad,” said David. “He wrote a book called Heart of Darkness, and I have even read it.”
Jackie smacked him on the arm. “You are such a nerd. Always studying.” And she laughed, her minnow eyes dancing.
As the four walked along the docks in the moonlight, David and Jacqueline argued about the Joseph Conrad, whether it was a brigantine or a barque, and which sail was the top gallant. Barnabas and Julia walked hand in hand, their bodies elegant and powerful. The trail of the moon played on the water, and the masts of the fine old schooner rose against the sky and tipped slowly back and forth. Her heavy sails were gathered under her spars, and her decks were cluttered with the tools of seafaring. It was possible to imagine she was a working square-rigger with her vats for rending whale oil, her great black anchor, and its rope the thickness of a man’s arm. The heavy lines squeaked as they pulled against belaying pins thrust deep in the pinrails, and the ship shuddered and creaked as though it longed for the sea.
The four climbed on the deck. Julia stood against the stays, her slender body taut and graceful, and gazed out at the water. Barnabas leaned into the binnacle, fascinated by the compass still floating under the glass. David climbed the rigging to the crow’s nest and waved to those below, his bare arms silvered by the moon. Jacqueline walked to the bow and leaned over the bowsprit. Her hand gently grazed the carved figurehead of a woman whose flowing robes and tumbling hair suggested that she was flying into the wind. Her face was serene and, folded among her billowing garments, were the wings of an angel.
EPILOGUE
THE DAY BENAJAH COLLINS took up residence in the house built by Miranda’s father, the forest stood one hundred yards beyond the beaver pond. Later that evening, he and his wife and his children, six in number, failed to notice the patient cedars lined up along the bank. Little Peter, rising early and eager to investigate his new swimming hole, was ankle deep in mud before he saw black snakes wriggling around his toes. He ran to tell his mother, but she paid him no heed, as she was preparing the noonday meal, and had her hands in flour. She found, however, almost all her kindling was spent and the fire in the grate gone to ashes. She called to her oldest son Edward, a strapping lad of fourteen, to fetch some firewood. Gathering up her colicky baby, she went to the window to look out.
The trees, which had stood at a reasonable distance the night before, seemed much closer this morning, but she told herself, as she soothed the whimpering child, and scolded another whining at her skirts, that she must have been mistaken; what with the difficulty of unloading all her possessions from the cart, she had not been observant. She chastised herself for this fault.
She was at her sink washing the baby’s soiled rags when she looked out and saw the trees on the other side of the yard, but once again she simply shrugged, and, irritated at what she perceived to be sinful laziness, went to wake her husband, who had fallen asleep in his chair. After dinner, to which no Edward returned, leaving her more annoyed than worried, she gathered the bowls in the sink. She was scrubbing the bread pan when the room grew dark, and this time she knew something had changed. The trees were at her window, blotting out the sun
, and branches were scraping and clawing at the opposite side of the glass.
Some said later the Naumkeag had cut the trees and hidden behind their trunks. Others wrote, years afterwards, in scientific journals, explanations of how the trees themselves had attacked the hapless family. Physicists expounded their truths with mathematical formulae, and preachers invoked the Biblical Wonders of an Invisible World. Stories, as is so often true in these cases, varied as well, in their description of what was found. Some said an odd piece of clothing or a child’s wooden toy. But the usual report was nothing.
METACOMET TOOK MIRANDA to the lake beyond the great valley, a place she had longed to visit ever since she was a child. He launched his birch bark canoe and they paddled until they reached the center, where they drifted. The still surface of the water was like a bolt of silk stretched on a giant loom. She could see to the bottom—a dark world.
Around the edge of the lake the trees made one unbroken line. Snow lay scattered in the shadows along the shore. The branches were bare but shone with a rosy aurora. She knew if she were to look at any twig, she would see the new growth, and the red buds ready to uncurl.
“Metacomet, look. The trees are rose-colored as the dawn.”
He smiled at her and nodded. “Death is only a season,” he said.
As the canoe slid forward, she trailed her hand in the water, and it left a shining path.
“We will all live again?”
“And again. Perhaps, the next time, you will be born of water.”
“I remember the raid on our village when I was a child, all the deaths.”
He looked a little sad and pursed his lips.
“I remember when you pulled us up on your horse, my mother and me, and carried us off to the Wampanoag settlement. It was you, wasn’t it? I saw your bear claw necklace.”
“That was the second time your mother was there with us.”
“When was the first?”
“She came once, before you were born, searching for the Black Man.”
“Why?”
“She was wanting a child and had waited many years. She thought he might grant her wish.”
“Where did she find the courage to wander into the forest?”
“I don’t know, but she found our camp.”
“Did she find the Black Man?”
“She found me.”
Miranda turned to Metacomet. “You have always called me daughter, but I thought—is this true?”
“To the best of my memory.”
She was silent.
The lake stretched on forever, the trees on either side, until the water met the sky.
“Oh, your stories of creation,” she said at last, lying back in the canoe to look up at the clouds. “Tell me of the Great Spirit.”
Metacomet looked ahead and pulled one time with his paddle—dip, dip and swing. His face was lined like dried leaves, and the tracks of his two scars were his long tears.
“Cautantowwit made a man and a woman of stone, but he didn’t like it, so he broke it into many pieces and made another man and woman of a tree. Of the core and the bark that clings to it. This he did. The trees therefore are the fountains of mankind. The souls of all our ancestors live in the trees. When you fly, Sisika, you fly among the souls.”
She thought for a long time. “You are only saying that to make me happy.”
“It is a good story.”
The canoe drifted until it was a spot far off on the water.
About the Author
LARA PARKER, whose real name is Lamar Rickey Hawkins, played the role of Angelique on Dark Shadows. She grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, attended Vassar College, majored in drama at the University of Iowa, and received her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University at Los Angeles. She lives in Topanga Canyon, California, with her husband and daughter.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Epilogue
About the Author
