“She’s no good,” Maggie whispered to Debbie. “A girl like that, someone who would betray a friend, she’s no good.”
Debbie didn’t want to believe her. She resolved herself to go back to the bus station the following night, in case she’d gotten the date wrong, or Grace had misspoken. She resolved to go back every night if needs be; better still, she would go to Grace’s house that night to confirm that she hadn’t left yet.
Maggie talked her down, talked her into coming home as the sun was coming up. Debbie reluctantly let herself be led. Maggie was being remarkably kind to her, which was unusual in light of how truculent she usually was. Maggie lowered Debbie into the earthen tomb along the bottom of the stone hut they shared and pulled the shale slab over the opening so she might rest in the lone protected slot within the home they shared.
The stone hut was old, older than the state of Vermont, Maggie had claimed. The dug out hole in the deep clay ground was once a root cellar or pantry of some kind, Debbie had guessed, but seeing the shale slab, bigger than she was, being used as the cover for the hole in the cabin’s floor, Debbie began to doubt her original assumption. The darkness, the rich smell of earth, and the safety provided by the stone above her was all remarkably comforting. It should have felt like a tomb or a cage, but Debbie knew she could move the shale slab if needed, she was that strong now, and that dissolved any feelings of being trapped.
The hiding hole, the shallow grave that was the stone hut’s cellar, was safe. Maggie showed Debbie repeatedly upon her first arrival that it couldn’t even be seen once the slab was in place. Men could come during the day to burn them as witches, but if they were hidden in the cellar, they wouldn’t be able to find them. If the men were foolish enough to come with torches at night, they would kill them all, Maggie said with her demented grin. Debbie didn’t like the idea of being burned as a witch or killing men who came into the woods at night.
Reluctantly, Debbie found sleep, her heart aching with rejection and disappointment.
2.
The following night, Debbie slipped from the crypt beneath the stone cabin. The last scraps of light, broken by the naked trees of the forest, still trembled at the threshold of the cabin’s door-less doorway whenever a winter breeze would blow the limbs of the trees. She waited until the tiny golden shapes of light on the floor faded completely before emerging from the cabin.
Maggie was nowhere to be seen or felt. Beyond simply seeing or hearing Maggie, Debbie found she could get a general idea of where Maggie was or what she was doing simply by thinking about her. Most of the time Maggie was angry, hurt, scared, or doing something fairly unspeakable; Debbie began shutting out thoughts of Maggie as much as possible.
Debbie resolved to check Grace’s house first for her and then wait at the bus station if she wasn’t at home. She started off through the woods toward the northwest where the forest nearly came up to the edge of the Corker property. She didn’t make it far into the gloomy blackness of the ancient forest before she got the strange sensation she was being followed and not by Maggie.
Something small and frightened was following her from a respectful distance. She couldn’t see or hear her tiny stalker, but she could feel it on the edge of her perception like a vague premonition of danger. She whirled around and took several strides back in the direction she’d come. For a brief flash, she caught a glimpse of the shadow of a child among the trees. The existence of a shadow in the lightless forest didn’t make sense. She chased the shadow farther, dodging between trees, gaining ground on the tiny stalker until she saw that the shadow had no corresponding body to cast it. The shadow racing along the trunks of trees and snowy forest floor was acting independent of a child or source of light.
Debbie stopped in her tracks, her bare feet finally crunching down through the frozen top layer of snow. She heard a child’s voice giggle from behind her. She spun to find source, spotting another shadow of a child, and then another, and another. They were surrounding her but without apparent malevolent intent. They danced and played with one another, beckoning her with their ethereal hands to join them.
“Who are you?” Debbie whispered.
She didn’t know if they could answer or even hear her. She took several steps toward one of them, but they parted before her, racing out of range again. Rather than continue the chase, Debbie ducked behind a tree. She waited until the haunting children’s laughter came closer to her hiding spot. When she thought they were close enough, she jumped out. The little shadows screamed with childish glee and fled again.
Debbie knew the shadow children would frighten most people, but she actually thought they were kind of cute in a strange way. She smiled and waved to them. The little shadow children waved in reply. They spotted something else and fled. For the first time that evening, Debbie sensed Maggie. She turned away from the fleeing forms of the shadow children to find Maggie had indeed snuck up behind her.
“I thought you would be at Grace’s by now,” Maggie said.
“I was going there, but then I saw…nothing,” Debbie said. She didn’t think Maggie would believe her if she told her what she actually thought she saw.
“They’re the orphans,” Maggie said. “Scavenger spirits of dead Indian children mostly. Don’t worry about them—they’re afraid of us.”
Maggie’s assessment didn’t sit right with Debbie. The shadow children did seem to be afraid of Maggie, but seemed more curious when it came to Debbie. Scavengers stuck out to her though. “Why do you call them scavengers?”
“They clean up what we don’t eat unless we mark them as ours,” Maggie said cryptically.
“Mark them?”
“With totems and straw dolls,” Maggie explained. “I know you’ve seen them. Why do you ask so many questions?”
Debbie indeed had seen the strange pagan totems and straw dolls Maggie made and placed throughout the woods. She hadn’t really asked what they were for or why Maggie kept making them—they were such bizarre little things that Debbie simply suspected they were part of Maggie’s madness.
Debbie could sense she was starting to get on Maggie’s nerves as she usually did, but she had to ask one more question. “Why are they afraid of straw dolls?”
“Because they’re the foolish spirits of foolish children,” Maggie snarled. “They were lured to their deaths by the promise of dolls and other trinkets.”
“Lured by you?”
“I would never kill a child,” Maggie growled. Her face was beginning to take on the trappings of the monster within. The angrier she became the less human she looked. “Go on your worthless errand to pine after a girl who wouldn’t even say goodbye before abandoning you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you—that girl is no good.”
Maggie vanished as quickly as she’d arrived, leaving Debbie alone and raw from the verbal lashing. She didn’t want to think Maggie was right about Grace, but the small part of her still hurting from Grace’s rejection of her initial advances agreed with Maggie and this small part was finding its voice. She suppressed the growing doubts with the ultimately ungrateful part of her that wanted to leave Maggie. Of course Maggie didn’t want Grace to be any good—it would mean Debbie would leave. Debbie ran through the woods as fast as her feet would carry her; if she found Grace, left for New Haven, she could prove Maggie wrong and be free.
3.
Grace’s house was dark when Debbie arrived. She was reticent to even come to the yard at first, but eventually forced herself to stand in the same holes in the snow she’d made before. She stared up at Grace’s window on the second floor, willing her to come to it. She next checked around the sides of the house, unsure of what she thought she would find. It was all pretext and she knew it. Her real goal would be to see inside Grace’s room, to see for sure if she was in there or if it was empty and unlived in. Debbie scaled the beams supporting the roof over the porch and snuck along the narrow bit of awning to Grace’s window.
The contents of her room said nothing definitive. S
ome things were packed and some things weren’t packed yet. It didn’t look definitively lived in or vacated. Debbie dug her nails into the white paint of the wooden frame and tried to pry the window up, but it was locked. She tapped lightly on the glass with her fingernails, but nothing stirred inside the room. The bed was made and empty, the door into the hallway left slightly ajar. Debbie was out of ideas.
She slid down from the roof and wandered back toward the woods. There wouldn’t be any point in going to the bus stop. Grace’s luggage was still in her room but Grace wasn’t. None of it made any sense.
4.
Maggie began giving Debbie space, only seeing her before the coming dawn to slide the slab over her cellar tomb and then occasionally to remind Debbie how lousy of a thing it was for Grace to leave without at least saying goodbye. Maggie almost always caught up with Debbie on her way to Grace’s house to remind her.
Debbie peered into Grace’s window again and again without ever seeing even the slightest change in the contents. She’d catalogued the things throughout the room, their exact positions, and their arrangement until she was certain she would know if even one sock was placed differently. But none of it ever was. It was as though Grace’s room was as frozen in time as the stone cabin in the woods.
Debbie’s heart hurt with longing and a deep depression, far deeper than any sadness she’d felt since her death. It built in her like heavy, wet snow falling every night. It was after New Years Day; Debbie knew that much from the courthouse bell being rung on midnight, something that only ever happened after the countdown to the New Year. She snuck back to Grace’s house for her nightly visit, but this time, she let herself in through the unlocked backdoor. She snuck up the darkened stairs letting out only the tiniest creaks along the way, down the hall past Grace’s parent’s room where they both snored softly, and slipped into Grace’s room. It was so foolish, so dangerous, and so pointless to be there, but Debbie didn’t care about any of that anymore.
She took up Grace’s old cheer sweater, which was sitting on the top of one of the boxes nearest the closet, and crawled onto the made bed, curling around the soft sweater, holding it to her nose to inhale the lingering scents Grace left behind.
Debbie didn’t know how long she’d stayed, and she hadn’t even realized she’d fallen asleep until someone was shaking her awake. For a panicked moment, she forgot where she was, thinking someone had crawled into her crypt beneath the stone cabin to attack her. As her mind awoke, she came to the even scarier realization of where she had fallen asleep. She nearly screamed instinctively, but a hand clamped over her mouth before she could.
Maggie’s angry eyes flashed at her, narrowed and insistent. “We have to get out of here,” she hissed. “It’s almost morning.”
Debbie nodded her understanding and Maggie removed her hand from her mouth. Debbie made for the door, but Maggie snagged her by the arm. “Not that way,” she whispered. “I can hear her mom waking up.”
They slipped from the window, first Debbie, and then Maggie, pushing it down into place behind them, but not locking it. Clear of the house and down the hill, across the street from the yard, and well on their way to the forest, Debbie realized the unlocked window might be a sign someone had been there if Grace’s mom had catalogued the state of the room the way Debbie had, and she couldn’t think of a reason why she wouldn’t have.
“We didn’t lock the window,” Debbie said. “I’ll have to come back tomorrow night and fix it.”
“No! You’re not coming back here ever again,” Maggie snapped. “I’ll fix the window, but it’s clearly too dangerous for you.”
“What? Why?” Debbie argued.
“Her father is a man, a man with a gun and a temper,” Maggie said, roughly shoving Debbie in the direction of the forest. “He’s dangerous, like all men. If he caught you, he’d kill you or worse.”
Debbie didn’t need to know what the ‘or worse’ was in Maggie’s mind. She could feel the deep seated hatred and fear in her and knew its source even if Maggie never said. Again, Maggie had saved her, and Debbie felt duty bound to be grateful, at the very least grateful enough to listen when Maggie said there was danger.
She didn’t return to the room. She still came up to the edge of the yard to stare longingly at the darkened window of Grace’s bedroom, but always from a safe distance and never for very long.
5.
The waning days of winter brought a strange warmth to Maggie. She and Debbie began actually walking through the woods together, seldom talking much, but spending more time around one another than normal. Debbie couldn’t say for sure if she was attracted to Maggie. They were together in the sense that they were the same in what they were and were similarly alone. From what little Debbie did know about Maggie broke her heart—she’d lived a tragic, tortured, lonely existence and Debbie wished there was something kind she could do.
On the nights Maggie didn’t want to walk with Debbie, the nights Maggie wanted to go into town, which Debbie was strictly forbidden from doing anymore, Debbie walked through the woods alone, accompanied by the orphan spirits who kept their distance, but she hoped this was more out of respect for her comfort than fear of what she was.
The orphans whispered secrets to her if she knelt by a tree and beckoned them close enough to be heard. They knew things, things she hadn’t been told, and they were willing to tell her secrets if she asked. Most of what they told her made no sense, and Debbie guessed it was information so old that even Maggie wouldn’t know what they were talking about. The hunters and woodsmen must travel in pairs, they told her. The Hessian’s corn will rot if you steal it, one orphan said. The creek can drown of its own accord. And so on. One secret, and one that was told to her more than once, meant something and never failed to make Debbie shiver: the other eats the hearts of the men she kills. Debbie didn’t need to ask who the other was that they were referring to.
6.
On a rare night, with Maggie and the orphans conspicuously absent, Debbie strolled along the dwindling creek, still frozen in patches, to see what the orphans might have meant about the water drowning of its own accord. She could sense old bones beneath the creek bed, down among the blackened rocks that the occasional flooding brought down from the mountains. The creek contained long lost bodies of children and adults, of that Debbie was certain in feeling the lingering spirits that could never escape the water, but she imagined this was probably true of most bodies of water that people lived around for any serious amount of time. She couldn’t puzzle together why the orphans thought the creek was a malicious entity in the forest.
She heard scuffling feet in the snow on the opposite side of the river. She ducked in behind an elm trunk to hide. A brief glance out from around the frosted bark found a young man, a boy really, sitting on a felled log on the opposite bank, working a rope in his hands.
Debbie could imagine the boy was freezing in his thin farm clothes. More than that, she worried what Maggie would do to him if she found him in her forest. The orphans’ secret echoed in her mind. Debbie did know what Maggie would do, what she had done in the past to men in the woods, and in that moment Debbie resolved to rob Maggie of as many victims as she could. She wasn’t sure how yet, but she needed to get the boy out of the forest.
She crept closer, slipping down the creek bank, stepping carefully along the rocks and ice patches to cross as not to be heard. The boy was busy in his task though, and Debbie was able to sneak up almost close enough to touch him. He’d finished his work on the rope, finally holding it up in front of him for inspection. Debbie’s heart leapt into her throat when she realized he’d been tying a noose into the old tattered length of homespun rope.
“Don’t!” Debbie shouted, bursting from her hiding place as the boy was setting to hang the rope from a low branch.
She expected to frighten the boy out of his course, maybe to startle him away from the rope long enough for her to tear it down, but the boy didn’t seem to be taken by surprise at all. He whi
rled around with angry, dead eyes, and roared an inhuman shriek at her.
“You’re a monster!” he bellowed in a hollow, angry voice far too deep for his frail frame. “The devil is in your heart and you shall burn!”
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 8
