by J. D. Horn
May slowed and softened her footfalls. The scent of smoke grew even stronger, and the sound of distant voices, their words indiscernible, reached her ears. Had the light led her to someone’s home? The spark moved again, passing just beyond the tree line, then faded away. May crept forward.
She stopped cold the instant she slid beyond the cover of the trees, and her heart very nearly stopped, too. There was a gathering of white-clad figures at the far end of the clearing, and the silver light of the moon was losing its battle with the darting flames licking at the cross standing in the center of the gathering.
May felt her pulse pounding in her neck and her temples. Surely, she’d been betrayed. This—this was where the magic had brought her. She took a cautious step back toward the trees, keeping her eyes fixed on the sight of the burning cross and the linen-draped monsters who paraded around it. She’d move carefully. Quietly. Draw no attention to herself, until she was safely within the cover of the trees. Another step back, and then she heard it. A baby’s cry. Jilo. It was impossible that it was her, and yet it was undeniable.
“Oh, Jesus,” the words came out as a shorthand prayer, as the world around her started to spin. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed to the earth.
The flames from the cross illuminated a scene she knew would remain forever burned into her vision. One of the men lifted a small and struggling burden over his head as the others burst into a raucous laughter. May had to rise. She had to go to them. Plead with these demons to return the baby to her. Beg them to simply let her and Jilo leave in peace.
But her body seemed frozen to the ground where she knelt.
The child cried out again, and the man who held her began walking toward the flaming cross. The light from that obscene blasphemy illuminated the goings-on all too clearly. The man was laying Jilo down on a table. No, May realized, an altar. Another man moved around the altar, blocking May’s view. Jilo shrieked, a high, anguished cry that pierced the night. Somehow May found the power to stand, and managed to take a few stumbling steps toward them. She lifted her voice to cry out to them. To call to Jilo. To tell her not to be afraid. Nana was coming. But her voice failed her as surely as if she’d been born mute.
She took another step forward, trying to shake the concrete from her limbs, but a hand descended on her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks. A small gasp escaped her at the touch. The hand released her, and a woman dressed all in black, her head and face obscured by a heavy veil, circled around in front of her. May could only make out the dimmest suggestion of features beneath the thick lace; race and age were inscrutable. The figure was a bit shorter than May herself, but ample, suggesting a healthy and mature woman rather than a waif.
May lifted a trembling hand and pointed in the direction of her granddaughter’s keening. She tried to speak, managing only a few unintelligible sounds. The woman held a finger up to the veil, near where May felt the lips should be. She wanted May to keep quiet, that much was clear. May nodded to show she understood. The woman turned and took a few steps toward the distant crowd, the hem of her long and old-fashioned gown trailing behind her. And then she fell away, her body disintegrating before May’s startled eyes, and transforming into a swarm of a thousand or more angry yellow jackets.
May watched in disbelief as the swarm advanced on the group. From the outer circle working in, the hooded figures’ casual milling about and occasional saluting turned to panicked gyrations and flailing arms. Their laughter and jeers turned to yelps and cowardly screams. The distance was too great for May to make out the individual insects with her naked eye, but she could guess that many had found their way up under the men’s robes to sting their bare flesh. The men began throwing off their pointed hoods, tugging the robes up over their heads. Others gave into panic and rushed away from the congregation. May heard car engines revving up, saw headlights coming to life and illuminating the ongoing riot of those who didn’t or couldn’t move quickly enough.
A pair of beams shot across the field, betraying her presence to anyone who wasn’t caught up in the chaos. May fell back into the shelter of darkness, but not before she felt hostile eyes graze her. She’d been too dazzled to notice whose eyes had picked her out from among the shadows. The light had illuminated her face for only an instant, but intuition told May that the person who’d spotted her had, in fact, been watching for her. Jilo had not been stolen at random. Someone had taken her to make sure May would come looking.
As May’s eyes recovered from the flash of the headlights, she realized that the swarm was returning toward her, coalescing at first into a dense yet frantic cloud of insects, and then the form of the woman. The creature, whatever she was, drew near, but she seemed to be almost dancing—like the cloud of wasps she had been—rather than walking.
The creature held Jilo in her now humanlike hands. The sight of the child caused May to forget all danger. She broke free of the tree line, hiking up her skirt, and raced toward her granddaughter, only to stop dead as the moonlight attempted to light up the creature’s features. Blurred though they were by her heavy veil, May could now see the moon wasn’t reflecting off the creature’s skin; rather it seemed to be swallowed whole by whatever lay behind her veil. Still, May could feel the creature’s eyes piercing the mesh of the veil, searing through it to take her full measure, inside and out.
The veiled apparition rocked Jilo until the toddler cooed with happiness, using such obvious care and gentleness May’s heart nearly broke at the sight. Then she transferred the child to May’s anxious and trembling hands.
“That will teach those filthy sons of bitches,” the creature said. Then she reached up and brushed back her veil, showing May the utter hollowness that lay behind it. The features May had imagined were nothing more than a trick suggested by the veil and her desire to make this creature into something she could someday understand. The emptiness within unwound to envelop the shell that had contained it, until the strange being was no more.
NINE
May was walking north on Ogeechee Road the next morning as the sun’s first rays reached her, a warm and comforting caress that brought to mind the sense of serenity that had descended on her when her own hand brushed that of the odd veiled woman the night before. Her touch had felt like that of an old friend, someone May had never known but had missed her entire life.
No. May knew the creature who’d saved Jilo was not a woman at all. She had seen the illusion of her humanity fall away before her own eyes. If anything, she was a demon. One sent to tempt her into using magic, into breaking the vow she’d made so long ago.
Only once before had she been truly tempted by magic. On that long-ago night, she had gone crawling to her mama’s door, banging on the wood and begging her mama to come out and do something, anything to heal Reuben. The memory still tugged at her.
Her mama had met her at the door. Tried to bring her in. Knelt beside her. Pulled her close to her bosom. But she didn’t waver in her refusal.
“No, baby. You don’t know what you askin’. You don’t know,” she said as she tried to rock May in her arms.
May pushed herself up and shoved her mama away. And as her mama stood, May did something she had never thought she could do. She reached out and struck her own mama. But Mama didn’t fight back. No. She took May’s hand and pressed it to her lips.
“It’s all right,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s all right. But Mama cannot do this thing for you . . . she loves you too much. She loves your Reuben too much.”
With that, she gently pushed May back over her threshold, turning her away. “You go on. You get back to your husband.”
Her trembling hand pressed between May’s shoulders, but as May started to stumble away, her mama’s hand reached out and snatched hers, causing her to look back. “You leave what’s gonna happen up to God,” she said, pointing to the heavens. “You trust God to do what’s right for our Reuben, whether it breaks our hearts or not. Magic, it ain’t what you think, baby. Least n
ot the kind I got. Don’t you ever let it tempt you to force your own will on things.”
May had done as her mama told her. She’d gone home to Reuben; she’d listened to the rattling coughs and gasping breaths that would eventually carry him from this world. Years later, she had buried her mama in the earth, too. Then that white boy had been found before the sun could set on her mama’s grave. May knew her mama had hastened her own death to try and put an end to whoever or whatever had been taking the children. If her mama had succeeded, it would have been almost worthwhile, but it was so hard to bear the knowledge that her mama had died in defeat.
But May didn’t have a choice. She had to bear it. Exhausted from her sleepless night, May barely had enough strength left to put one foot before the other. In the years since May had lost Reuben, she’d nearly worn a groove in this road from making the trek between her home and the Pinnacle Hotel morning and night, six days a week. Tired going, even more tired coming back.
May knew her life was a God-given gift, and she tried to be grateful for each day, but lately she’d found herself talking to her departed Reuben more often, wondering out loud how many more times she’d have to walk this path until she could join him in glory. Well, that reunion would have to wait now. She was burdened by no illusions that Betty would be coming back for those girls.
May trudged down the road toward the cemetery, her heavy steps rousing a black rooster. The bird’s invective startled her, causing her to stop short and catch her breath.
“All right, Lester, all right,” she addressed the bird. “Whole darned world done heard you now.” May shook her head. The thing had shown up around the time of her mama’s death, and it almost seemed like a friend by now. Some folk might think she was crazy, but she always greeted the rooster whenever she passed his home. Not doing so today would only add to the sense of strangeness she seemed incapable of shaking.
May might have believed the whole episode was a dream had she managed to close her eyes for even a wink, but no, she’d had no sleep. There was no choice but to accept that she had witnessed the impossible made real. “See you later, Lester,” she said, still hoping familiar habits could erase the sense of oddity the night had sown in the pit of her stomach.
Last night, she’d picked her way home from the clearing more by instinct than by landmark, Jilo asleep in her arms as they made their way through the night forest. Once home, she had slipped the baby in bed next to Opal, who—despite her worry—had drifted off to sleep with Poppy cuddled in her arms. May herself never even considered trying to sleep. Instead, she stoked the kitchen stove and boiled up some chicory that went cold without her even lifting cup to lip. Then she spent the night bent over her Bible, though the words seemed to dance on the page, imparting none of their usual wisdom or comfort.
Even now, as she passed beneath the steeple of Tremont Nondenominational House of Prayer, the prayer she yearned to offer up—one that combined a supplication for forgiveness for having used magic and a request for guidance—remained inchoate in her breast. She hated it, but anger against God Almighty simmered in her soul. Magic had saved Jilo, not prayer. It terrified her that one of those evil men had managed to slip silently into her home, as if by witchcraft, and steal her grandbaby right out of her bed. A man who could keep his cool as those around him gave in to panic. A man who would arrange the abduction of a tiny child just to lure May out into the night.
May stopped dead in her tracks as another thought struck her. What if those men hadn’t taken Jilo? What if it had instead been the creature who’d presented itself as a friend? The creature could have set up the whole adventure to fool May into believing it was acting as her protector.
The questions made her heart heavy, but pondering them made the remainder of her trek to work short. Before she knew it, she had arrived at the rear of Pinnacle. A concrete sidewalk ran behind the hotel, and May stepped onto it carefully so as not to trip where the roots of an ancient oak had pushed up from beneath the pavement and forced it up. Without giving it a thought, she passed by the entrance used by the white staff, heading to the far side of the building to the door labeled “Colored.” Humidity and warping caused the door to stick; each day it took a bit more out of May to tug it open and step through it. The door’s handle vibrated in her hand as the resistant wood finally yielded to her. She stepped into the side of the kitchen where the sinks would soon be full of dishes from the guests’ breakfasts.
But the dishes weren’t May’s concern, and she had enough work of her own to handle without taking on more. The hotel had sixty-eight rooms and only three maids. May and the two much younger women did the laundry and cleaned the guest rooms, halls, and great rooms. The younger women worked quicker, but May always did the best job—she didn’t miss spots or take shortcuts like her companions often did. The longtime guests, the folk who’d been coming here for years, knew to ask for her to service their rooms, and May felt justified in taking a touch of pride in that. Of course, it did nothing to prevent Mr. Porter, her buckra manager, from telling her she’d be out of a job if she didn’t step it up.
“Good morning, Mrs. Wills,” said Henry Cook, looking up from the wingtips he had been polishing. The small boy shined guests’ shoes and ran odd errands for management.
“Good morning, Henry,” May said, letting her hand brush the boy’s cheek. “How’s yo’ mama doing? Getting over her ailment, I hope.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Henry replied, turning back to his work. May could tell from his expression that he wasn’t telling the truth. His mama was still poorly. Sighing to herself, May opened the closet where the cleaning implements were stored. She reached up to take her apron from its hook, saying a silent prayer that the youngster’s lie might soon be made true.
The thought hit her that perhaps her magic could be the answer to that same prayer.
No.
She shook her head, forcing the temptation from her mind, and slipped on the apron. Once her uniform was neatly in place, she grasped the handles of the zinc mop bucket in her right hand and the mop in her left. The hotel had an elevator for guests, but not for staff. She planned to tote the cleaning supplies up the back stairs to the top floor and work her way down, meeting the other maids on their way up.
But May’s hand cramped, forcing her to set the bucket and mop back down. Following its usual course, the aching in her joints came as a sharp jab, then settled into a repeating throb. She closed her eyes and rubbed her swelling knuckles. It’ll pass. It’ll pass. May took a few breaths, willing the pain to subside.
One eye popped open in surprise. It’d never happened before, but this time the ache had eased. Instantly, at the very moment she’d formed the thought. With both eyes open, she stepped away from the closet, and held her hand up beneath the overhead light. There was no swelling. There was no pain.
Physical relief gave way to concern. Maybe she no longer had a choice about using magic. Maybe once the door had been opened, even a crack, it was open for good.
A door on the far side of the kitchen swung open. “May,” Mr. Porter snapped without even stepping into the room. “Follow me.”
“Something need cleaning, sir?” May asked, starting to bend over to pick up the bucket and mop. Her eyes fixed on the spots of dried calamine lotion that dotted Porter’s thin, gray face and bald pate.
“Leave those and come with me,” Porter said. May hurried across the kitchen to join him. Rather than hold the weighted door for her, Porter let it swing shut behind him, closing it right in May’s face.
May leaned back to escape being struck, then eased the door open enough to slip through. Porter had carried on without her, leaving her to scurry to catch up to him as he crossed the lobby and entered the dining room.
May only rarely ventured into the ornate room, except to sweep its deep red—Venetian red, she had once overheard a guest say—carpet, or to clean up a spill. The entrance was adorned by pillars, similar to those at the Greek church south of the Forsyth, but not qui
te so busy-looking at the top. She moved between those columns with trepidation.
The hotel was nearly full, and it had gotten late enough in the morning that May had expected to see guests at most of the tables, but other than the two men sitting at the table near the back wall, the room was deserted. May stopped dead in her tracks, a feeling of dread falling on her. Even from across the room, May had no difficulty recognizing Fletcher Maguire, the elder of the two visitors; she’d seen his picture in the Gazette more than once. But she recognized him not from his thick head of gray hair, piercing blue eyes, or prominent chin, but from the wooden wheelchair in which he was sitting. May remembered hearing he’d suffered a stroke around the time of her mama’s death. Word was, he’d been in that wheelchair ever since.
Despite his advancing age and declining health, Maguire was still one of the most powerful men in Georgia. He could’ve been governor or senator if he’d wanted, but he wasn’t the kind of man who ran for public office; he was the kind of man who chose those who did. May had read enough of the official news and heard enough whispers to know that what Maguire didn’t outright own, he damned sure felt no qualms about stealing.
The younger man could only be his son, Sterling. Sterling was a tall fellow, pink and lean, with hair as light as corn silk. She’d only laid eyes on him once before, and then it had been from a distance. Up close, she could see he was a good-looking boy for his type, but something about him was off. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, the words came to May’s mind. Sterling had inherited his father’s sharp cold eyes. Something about the way those eyes took her in reminded her of last night, when those bright beams had illuminated her at the edge of the woods. May began to tremble.
