Debbie searched the ground, the grisly totems, the human bones gnawed clean by scavengers both natural and otherworldly. She didn’t know what there would be to find until she saw the tilted straw doll, impaled upon several sharpened sticks. Around its neck, glinting in a lone shaft of moonlight, was a familiar locket. Debbie raced across the clearing, stumbling to a stop on her hands and knees before the straw doll. She tore the totem from the ground and pulled the locket free of the doll, destroying the hastily made toy in the process. She opened the locket to find the familiar picture of herself with a corresponding picture of Grace on the other side.
Debbie clutched the locket to her chest and cried. She hated Maggie with an intense purity unlike anything she’d ever felt in her life. She couldn’t kill Maggie, not yet, she didn’t know if she could kill anyone, but she thought the willpower might come to her one day and wanted to remember that moment if the time ever came.
Debbie returned to their shared home, the stone cabin built in a time before the modern world could even be seen on the horizon. The orphans and spirits followed her, closer than they’d ever dared come before. They surrounded her like her own children, seeking her approval yet striving to protect her. She waited in the midst of the shadowy spirits, locket in hand, blocking the doorway of the cabin she’d shared with Maggie for months.
The choice would be Maggie’s to tell the truth or be banished. Debbie didn’t have to wait as long as she thought before Maggie emerged from the woods, still limping and ragged, but far more whole than she’d been when she first fled past Debbie after being hit by the car.
“Debbie?” Maggie asked, her voice small and hurt.
“Did you kill Grace?” Debbie asked.
“I told you,” Maggie said, “a girl like that…”
“I know what you told me, but…you killed Grace.” Debbie pulled the locket from behind her back and held it out for the gathered spirits and Maggie to see, letting it shimmer in the fading light of the moon like a dying candle. “You took her from me and lied to me when she was gone.” A crawling realization came over Debbie—Maggie was a liar. She couldn’t even imagine how many times Maggie must have lied to her over the years. She mixed truth and lies so liberally, probably believing them both equally herself, until Debbie couldn’t be certain of anything Maggie had told her.
“We’re not safe in that world!” Maggie shrieked. “You don’t understand what they would have done to you if you’d gone with her. Ruin, she would have brought ruin on you both. Men, wicked, hurtful men with their pawing hands and filthy minds destroy beautiful women like you, like us, and the loves we share with each other. They’ll do it just to prove their strength, or have you forgotten the night I saved you?”
“No,” Debbie said, “I remember Phil and what you did to him.” Debbie clutched the locket closer to her chest. “But I’m not like you. I don’t want to be like you. Please, leave me alone.”
Debbie turned her back on Maggie, turned her back on the woman that was her savior and her abuser all in one, and walked into the darkness of the stone cabin. The spirits, the orphans, the shades of those who died in the woods thickened, blocking Maggie from following. Debbie could feel them, feel their hatred and their protectiveness of her. She was of them and they would keep her safe now.
9.
Henry skipped the newspaper the following morning and every morning after. He spoke with his wife instead while they both ate. He drove past a farm on the way home from work, spotting a sign he’d ignored for weeks that advertised a littler of puppies. He drove home that day with a new Border Collie.
Pastor Gunderson’s disappearance was unremarkable news. His home was found in a state of partial packing and all the murmurs of his possible involvement in the commitment to an insane asylum of many local teenagers began to grow louder. Fled in disgrace was the final word on what became of the pastor, and while Henry didn’t much care for speaking ill of the dead, he thought it was about as fitting of an epitaph as the man deserved.
Debbie’s words haunted him though. She chose the monster over her own parents, over the town that had turns its back on her. She would have gladly taken death over Vigil’s Rest. Adding to this the shabby treatment his own daughter had received at the hands of the townspeople, Henry couldn’t reconcile staying.
He sold his property to the dairy company he was a partial owner in. Construction on a new state of the art pasteurization and bottling plant would begin that summer in the place of his former home. Standing in the late spring sun beside his Cadillac that still bore the scars of his failed battle against the witch of Vigil’s Wood, Henry was glad for the new direction of his life. His son was giving them their first grandchild, a daughter he’d promised to name Grace.
Henry pulled out of his old driveway, leading out the moving truck, heading down to Rhode Island to be closer to his son and granddaughter.
Part 5: Angel of Solemnity
Autumn 1982 – Daphne
1.
Daphne loved history and stories, but not in the same way her older sister did. While Ruth liked the facts of the past, Daphne much preferred the fantasies. Her favorites were the ghost stories and local legends about Vigil’s Woods. Someday, she thought she might write some of her own.
Their parents’ divorce placed them firmly between two coldly warring factions within the town. Her father was something of a local hero, having played on the high school basketball team that had won the state championship while her mother was a well-respected local business woman who ran a successful real estate agency. Both parents still had family in the area and both families politely blamed the other for the dissolution of such an obviously important marriage in Vigil’s Rest. While Ruth was the type to side firmly with her mother, agreeing fully that their father was a dimming star who had peaked too soon and now faded into unimportance begrudgingly, Daphne loved her irresponsible father for his imperfections. She saw in him something of a romantically tragic figure destined for something bigger, but with the door for greatness long since closed, never to be opened again.
Daphne waited on the curb outside her house in the predawn hours of the morning. Her father would be by to take her fishing and camping before six. They had to leave so early so they could sneak up on the fish—even Daphne knew that. She waited and waited until the sky pinked with the dawn, and waited on even after the sun was fully up and the sky had turned a pale blue. She knew her mother was checking the window from time to time behind her, but Daphne never turned around to see. It was how her mother coped with her own loss: making it all about how badly and how often he disappointed his daughters. At least, that’s what Daphne suspected.
Finally, her father’s beat up old gray Chevy pickup pulled around the corner and up to the curb. Her father opened the passenger door with a metallic creak and Daphne hopped into the cigarette tainted interior.
2.
They drove along through Vigil’s Rest with her father smoking Winston 100s from a soft pack and asking Daphne questions about school. She answered as animatedly as she could, hoping to catch her father’s flagging attention, but he always seemed more interested in fiddling with the radio or lighting another cigarette than he did in her answers.
They turned south to drive through the rolling hills and farmland leading into Vigil’s Woods. The morning sun began beating down on the interior of the truck. Daphne, having awoken several hours too early after a night in which she was too excited to sleep much, began dozing off in the warmth of the morning sun shining through the cracked windshield. Her father clamped his cigarette between his lips, steered with one hand, and tickled her with the other to wake her up whenever she dozed off. She looked to him expectantly each time he interrupted her dozing, but he never had anything he wanted to say. When the truck began bouncing along rutted dirt roads off the main highway and the autumn trees obscured the sun with leaves just beginning to turn shades of gold and orange, Daphne abandoned any further plans of sleep.
Her father’s
fishing spot was secreted away and required specific knowledge of how to get there along with the awareness of exactly when to turn. Daphne always marveled at this since she never saw the turn off for the trail until her father was already in the process of turning off. The old truck crept along the abandoned cow trail, barely dodging between trunks of trees, leaving a trail of blue, burned oil exhaust in its wake whenever her father gunned the big V8 from to get over a newly exposed rock.
The small clearing next to Lewis Creek practically felt like a second home to the ten-year-old Daphne who had spent most summer weekends there for as many years as she could remember. September trips were rare though, and it was only because her father had found work operating a gravel loader in Massachusetts over the summer that their camping trip had been pushed to the first weekend of fall.
The creek was low, having long since spent its summer runoff in the dog days of August. Rocks that were normally well beneath the water now poked up into the middle, forcing the swift moving creek to bubble and gurgle around them. Daphne crept down to the edge, looking for a few choice rocks to hurl in, but then thought better of it knowing her father would chide her for scaring off the fish.
“Daffy, why don’t you see about finding us some bait while I unload the truck,” her father shouted from the far edge of the clearing.
Daphne gave him a non-fish-frightening thumb up and began her bug hunt. During their summer trips, grasshoppers were fat, slow, and easy to catch. By September though, apparently they were non-existent. She searched in vain for the entire time her father was erecting the tent and unpacking their gear. When he was done and her hands were empty, he produced a trowel and told her to get digging.
She followed the guidance he’d offered long ago, looking for the dead leaves and soft ground worms liked, and after another hour of the muddy work, she’d produced an old bean can’s worth of worms, wriggling in the rich, dark Vermont soil she’d poured over them to keep them alive.
Her father produced a couple of chicken salad sandwiches from a cooler and they ate in silence, sitting on their usual rocks, facing the creek. Daphne was beginning to get a bit big for her smaller sitting rock, and her knees poked up too high to use her legs effectively as a table anymore. She struggled through the sandwich, as the wax paper it was wrapped in kept sliding off her tented knees. She didn’t want to eat the sandwich anyway. She was hungry, but she knew who had really made the lunch. Her father couldn’t cook anywhere but a campfire, and even something as basic as chicken salad between two pieces of white bread was well beyond him. Nina had made the sandwiches. Nina of the blue turquoise eye shadow, big blond hair, who worked out at the weigh station, and referred to Daphne’s father as ‘her man.’ Oh how Daphne hated Nina. She wrapped up the quickly crumbling remains of the sandwich in the wax paper and set it beside her sitting rock. She would eat a fish she caught herself—she didn’t need Nina’s stupid sandwich.
“We don’t waste food,” her father grumbled.
“You don’t even like chicken salad,” Daphne argued even while she was picking up the crumbling remains of her sandwich.
“Sure I do,” her father replied, still grimacing his way through his own lunch.
She glared at her father from the safety of just outside his peripheral vision. He had dressing all through his thick red moustache and his naturally squinty eyes were even more squinted with how little he liked chicken salad with grapes, and apparently Nina used a lot of grapes. Reluctantly, Daphne choked down the last of her sandwich, crumpled the wax paper, and threw it into the woods as hard as she could.
3.
They fished in silence for most of the afternoon. Her father had offered to put the worm on her hook for her, but Daphne insisted she could do it herself. She’d tried several times, losing four worms before she successfully baited her own hook—the quick-moving creek water immediately un-baited it for her.
She became frustrated and angry about the whole thing and her father suggested she go take a walk in the woods to cool off before she scared the fish away. Daphne tromped off, not really caring anymore if they even caught fish. She wandered through the woods, up along the creek bank, until she was certain she was well out of earshot of her father. Once she was alone with the sound of the babbling creek and the wind through the leaves, she began pulling up the biggest rocks she could carry with two hands and started hurling them into the creek with great, satisfying splashes. There would be no fish and her father would have to eat Nina’s terrible chicken salad all weekend—that’d teach him.
She was about to hurl the last rock into the creek when she saw someone moving on the other side. Backlit by the fading light of late afternoon and obscured by the trunks of a few elm trees, it was difficult to tell what the boy was doing, but he was clearly about an important task having to do with a low-hanging branch. Daphne strained and squinted to get a better look at the boy. He looked to be a few years older than her, cute in a sort of country way, dressed in strange looking overalls with a mop of unkempt sandy blond hair atop his head. He was doing something with a rope. Daphne assumed making a rope swing, but he was too far from the water, hanging it too low, and the creek wouldn’t be any good to swim in at that point anyway.
“Hey,” Daphne shouted, “you’re going to kill yourself on those rocks if you try to swing into the creek.”
The boy didn’t pay her shouts any mind. He’d about finished his task of securing the rope, checking its load-bearing capacity by dangling from the end by his arms a few times. Daphne was about to open her mouth to shout again, seeing as it was clear to her that he would go bouncing off a dozen tree trunks if he tried swinging from the rope where he’d hung it. Before she could even fill her lungs enough to get off a good shout, the boy slipped the loop of the rope around his neck, and leapt off the fallen log he’d climbed atop to go swinging out into the forest. His legs jerked in strange, gut-wrenching ways as he swung between the tree trunks, hitting every one Daphne thought he would.
She screamed rather than shouted and slid down the creek bank into the water, trying desperately to wade across in time to save the boy. The scream, combined with the little girl splash into the water caught her father’s attention, and soon he was storming up the bank, crashing through the underbrush, moving with speed and purpose she didn’t know he possessed anymore. The strong, swift-moving water caught her legs before she was even a few feet from the bank, knocking her down onto the slippery rocks below the surface, and she found herself tumbling along the creek toward her shouting father. He reached in with a sure hand and scooped her out by the arm, hauling her from the frigid water to deposit her on the bank.
“Jesus Christ, Daffy, what were you doing?” her father shouted at her. His voice sounded scared and angry all at once.
“There’s a boy,” Daphne protested through chattering teeth, “he hung himself from a tree on the other side. You have to help him.”
Her father scanned the other side of the creek and shook his head. “I don’t see any boy.”
“He’s right there!” Daphne pointed to where she thought she’d seen him but the woods were empty. She scanned up and down the bank, but still didn’t see anyone. She scrambled to her feet, dried leaves clinging to her soaked clothes, and ran back up the creek bank searching for the boy. She spotted the exact fallen log he’d used to hang himself from, but there was no boy and no rope.
“There’s no boy,” her father said, chasing her down. He scooped her up and hauled her back toward the camp, clutching her desperately to his chest.
With her ear pressed against his flannel shirt, she could hear his heart pounding in his chest. She’d scared him—she felt terrible about it.
4.
They sat around the campfire after the sun had gone down. Daphne was still cold even in her dry change of clothes and with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her father had asked if she wanted to go home early, but she’d flatly refused. She was cold, but she wasn’t a quitter.
They
didn’t talk about the boy in the tree. She thought her father would accuse her of telling lies, but he didn’t seem interested in the matter. They ate their second chicken salad sandwiches of the day in silence, listening to the crackling of the fire and the gurgling of the creek. The only conversation that took place after sunset was her father asking if she wanted to toast marshmallows and her replying that she didn’t feel like it.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 11
