The Winter People

by Jennifer McMahon

  Ruthie’s mother nodded. “He came to the house after he’d found the cave—the map had led him right to it. He’d seen Gertie out there. Taken her picture. He knew everything. And he was absolutely determined that he was going to go home and pick up something of your son’s, then return and do the spell to bring him back. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I tried to explain to him what would happen—what a nightmare it would be. But he was determined. I begged him to talk it over with me some more. We went to lunch in town. I tried everything I could think of to dissuade him. I told him everything about Gertie. Hell, I even offered him money—not that I had any to give. But he’d made up his mind.”

  Katherine turned the ring on her finger, the one she wore above her gold wedding band. Auntie’s ring.

  Ruthie’s mother rubbed her eyes. “I followed him out of town that afternoon. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought maybe I could get him to pull over, that I’d find some way to get him to change his mind. I couldn’t let him go back to Boston with those photographs. If he told anyone, if word got out …”

  Mom hung her head, her whole body slumping forward, broken. Fawn looked from her mother to Ruthie, then over to Katherine, perplexed.

  “He was driving so fast. Maybe if I hadn’t been following so close …”

  “You … you saw him crash?” Katherine said, swaying a little in her chair as the weight of the words hit her. She put a hand on the table to steady herself.

  Ruthie’s mother nodded and looked down at her hands, lying flat on the table. “He was just ahead of me, going around a bend. He took the corner too fast and just lost control. It all happened so quickly; there was no stopping it.

  “I pulled over and ran to his car, but as soon as I got there, I knew there was nothing I could do. He was gone.”

  Katherine made a quiet sobbing sound and put her face in her hands.

  “His backpack was there, on the passenger seat, beside him. Before I could think about it too much, I reached in and took it.”

  Her mother lifted her head, looked right at Ruthie. Her blue eyes were full of tears, but behind them was a look of resolute determination. “I just couldn’t let anyone find the papers he had with him or see the pictures on his camera. I knew I had to hide the papers with the other things up in the cave, where no one would ever find them. You don’t understand what a sleeper is capable of. If word got out, if more were made …” Her mother shook her head. “Can you imagine what would happen?”

  Everyone turned and looked to Katherine, waiting. She sat stone-faced, staring straight ahead, into nothing, with dark, hollow eyes.

  “I guess,” Katherine said then, standing up, swaying a little, still terribly pale, “we all do what we think is best. Sometimes we make terrible mistakes, sometimes we do the right thing. Sometimes we never know. We just have to hope.” With this, she turned to leave the kitchen, but stopped instantly. “Can you tell me one more thing?” she asked.

  “Anything,” Ruthie’s mom said.

  “What did he order?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “At Lou Lou’s, when you had lunch. What did Gary have?”

  Ruthie’s mother looked puzzled, then answered. “A turkey club sandwich and a cup of coffee.”

  Katherine smiled. “Good,” she said. “That was always his favorite.”

  Ruthie

  Ruthie woke up to the familiar and comforting sounds of her mother making breakfast downstairs. There was the smell of coffee, bacon, and cinnamon rolls. She dragged herself out of bed and went down to the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” Mom said, voice chipper. Ruthie looked at her mother and around at the kitchen, and just then, for that one moment, she let herself imagine that everything that had happened these last few days had been a bad dream.

  Then her mother broke the spell.

  “Ruthie,” she said, “I know you’ve had a lot to take in, and I just want you to know that if you have any questions, if there’s anything you’d like me to explain further, I’m here.”

  “Thanks,” Ruthie said, helping herself to coffee.

  “You know, your father and I saw you as our greatest gift. We couldn’t have loved you more, and it never mattered that you weren’t our biological child.”

  Ruthie nodded, felt her face grow pink.

  “I’m sorry for keeping the truth from you. And even sorrier that you had to find out everything the way you did.”

  Ruthie wasn’t sure what to say.

  “And now that you know the whole story, there’s something I need you to think about. I know how much going away to college means to you, and if your mind is set, we’ll find a way to make it happen. But I’m not getting any younger. And someone needs to look after Gertie when I’m not able to anymore. Honestly, I could even use some help with it now—it’s a big responsibility for just one person, and with your father gone, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to give her the attention she needs. She really likes to have someone with her. She gets … lonely.”

  Her mother turned back to the stove, flipped the bacon, opened the oven door to check the cinnamon rolls, then wiped her hands on her apron and went on.

  “Gertie has always had some kind of … affinity for that closet in my bedroom. When I didn’t come to the cave often enough for her liking, I would find her in the closet. I was so afraid that one of these days she was bound to encounter one of you girls. I finally sealed it shut. Just to discourage her. But that only made her angry.

  “When she came for me the other night, there was a rage, a desperation in her eyes that I had not seen before; she thought I had turned my back on her. I had to go with her—I had no choice. I was afraid of what she might do if I refused, afraid she might hurt you or your sister.”

  Alice took the coffeepot and moved to top up Ruthie’s coffee, but Ruthie hadn’t yet taken a sip. She refilled her own mug instead, stirred in plenty of milk and sugar.

  “But this time Gertie didn’t want to let me go. She kept me tied up to the chair, wanted me to tell her stories. She’s very … strong. And when she heard all of you enter the cave, she reinforced my bonds, and even gagged me so I couldn’t call out to warn you.” Her mother took a long, slow sip of coffee and looked out the window toward the hill.

  “So you do understand, don’t you? We’ve got to work hard, do our best to keep things like what happened with Willa Luce from happening again. What happened to Willa—it was because I failed to do my job. But if I had your help, things could be different.”

  Ruthie looked up at her mother, who gave her face a gentle, loving stroke.

  “Someone needs to keep the secrets of our hill safe; to keep everyone in town safe. I just want you to think about it, that’s all.”

  Fawn stumbled into the kitchen, wearing pink footed pajamas and carrying Mimi.

  “Now, who’s ready for cinnamon buns?” Mom asked cheerfully, opening the oven.

  After breakfast, the girls sneaked into their mom’s bedroom while she was downstairs doing the dishes.

  “Is it true?” Fawn asked once they were alone, crouching over the secret hole in the floor. “That we’re not really even sisters?” She looked down into the hiding place.

  Ruthie reached for Fawn, turned her face up so that their eyes were locked. “You are my sister, Fawn. You’ll always be my sister. Nothing can change that.”

  Fawn smiled, and Ruthie leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  They gathered all of the diary pages, Tom’s and Bridget’s wallets, and the gun. All of it went into Fawn’s backpack, to be carried out to the well.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Fawn asked again. “Mom is going to be really mad when she finds out we took all this.”

  Ruthie nodded. “It’ll be okay. It’s what we need to do. Mom wasn’t ever able to get rid of any of this—she felt too guilty or whatever, and I do understand that, but look at all the trouble it caused. As long as these papers are still around, then people will be willing to do crazy thi
ngs to get them. And as long as the instructions exist, sleepers can still be made.”

  Fawn gave Ruthie a puzzled look. “So the monsters are real.”

  Ruthie took in a breath. “Yeah,” she said. “But they can’t help what they are. The truth is, I feel bad for Gertie. She didn’t ask for any of this.”

  The woods were still as the girls walked up the hill to search for the old well. They made their way through the orchard, past the place where Ruthie had found their father clutching his ax. Up they climbed, the trail growing steeper as they approached the Devil’s Hand. Rocks poked out from under the fresh carpet of snow—some tall and jagged, some as smooth and round as giant eggs. Once they got to the top, they stopped beneath the five giant finger rocks. Ruthie looked for the opening to the cave, but the stone had been pulled back into place and was buried in a fresh drift of snow. There was no birdsong, no sign of life. Only the occasional sound of clumps of snow sliding off branches and hitting the ground.

  When they finally discovered the old well, to the north of the Devil’s Hand, they were both out of breath, but pleased to have found it at last.

  “This is where Gertie died?” Fawn asked, her breath coming out in cloudy puffs. Mimi the doll was clutched tight in her arms.

  Ruthie nodded and looked down into the well—a circle of field-stone surrounding a big dark hole that seemed to go down forever.

  She tried to imagine falling down it, looking up at the bright circle of daylight, seeing it get farther and farther away, until it was like some distant moon.

  The girls stood, bundled in winter coats, snowshoes strapped to their feet. The sun had just come up over the hill, and they could see its hazy glow through the trees. The forest around them was blanketed in white, absolutely still. Not even the wind stirred. It felt as if the whole world were sleeping and they were the only two awake.

  “Then this seems right,” Fawn said. She slipped off the small backpack she’d been carrying, opened it up, pulled out the journal pages, and handed them over. “I think you should be the one to do it,” she said, seeming suddenly like a much older girl, a wise old lady trapped in a child’s body. “You’re related to her.”

  Ruthie took the pages in her hands; the ink was faded, the paper stained and wrinkled, splattered with Candace’s blood. There, in slanted cursive, were her distant aunt’s words. The instructions for creating sleepers she’d copied from Auntie’s letter.

  She traced the sentences with her finger, thinking that her own birth parents, Tom and Bridget, once held these in their hands, believing they were going to change the world, get rich, make a better life for their daughter.

  Then there were the pages Gary found: Auntie’s letter to Sara, the map she had drawn, more notes from Sara.

  It was all there—Sara’s story, Auntie’s story. Ruthie’s own story, even.

  The story of a little girl named Gertie who died.

  Whose mother loved her too much to let her go.

  So she brought her back.

  Only the world she came back to wasn’t the same.

  She wasn’t the same.

  Ruthie dropped the papers into the well one at a time, watching them flutter like pale, broken butterflies, like snowflakes, down, down, down, until she couldn’t see them anymore.

  “This means no more can be made, right?” Fawn asked.

  “Yeah,” Ruthie said, watching the last page fall. She knew, in that moment, what she would do. She would stay in West Hall and help her mother as guardian of the hill, keeper of its secrets. She smiled as she thought of it, how it seemed so simple really, like something that was meant to be; like destiny, after all.

  Then, sensing movement, Ruthie turned just in time to catch a glimpse of a little girl in ragged clothes with a pale face peeking out from behind a tree.

  She smiled at them, then slipped back into the shadows.

  Katherine

  Once awakened, a sleeper will walk for seven days. After that, they are gone from this world forever.

  Katherine stared at the words on her computer screen. She had the memory card from Gary’s Nikon plugged in and was studying Gary’s photos of the missing diary pages, Auntie’s letter, and the map.

  How bizarre it would all seem to someone looking at it for the first time, someone who hadn’t been to the caves, who hadn’t seen what Katherine had seen.

  Losing these pages forever seemed criminal, a terrible waste. At the very least, they were of historical significance. She had a friend, a sociology professor at BU, who might enjoy having a look at them. And wouldn’t the man she’d met at the bookstore in town love to get his hands on a copy?

  With a few keystrokes, she shrank the map showing the way to the cave entrance at the Devil’s Hand to postage-stamp size and pushed PRINT. While the laser jet did its work, she glanced down at her own hand, at the bone ring on her third finger: Auntie’s ring. Auntie the sorceress. Auntie, who could bring back the dead.

  The ring had been Gary’s last gift to her.

  To new beginnings.

  She stood up, stretched. The day had flown by, as time often did when she was lost in her work. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and she hadn’t eaten either lunch or supper.

  The page printed, she carried it over to the art table and cut out the tiny copy of the map. She’d been finishing up the newest assemblage box since she got back to the apartment in the wee hours of the morning. The outside was painted to look like bricks; there was a door in the middle, and a neat sign above that said LOU LOU’S CAFÉ. To the left of the door, a large window made of thin Plexiglas. Katherine pulled open the door and could almost imagine the smells inside: coffee, freshly baked rolls, apple pie. There, sitting at a table in the center of the café, was the tiny Alice doll. Across from her sat Gary in miniature, wearing the good black pants and white shirt he’d left home in that morning.

  I’ve got a wedding to shoot in Cambridge. I should be home in time for dinner.

  And in front of him, his last meal. A turkey club sandwich and cup of coffee. Not an exciting meal, but she knew it was Gary’s favorite—his standard order at diners and truck stops—and it pleased her to be reminded that the Gary who sat in Lou Lou’s that day was the same Gary she’d known all along.

  Using a superfine paintbrush, she applied a dab of glue to the back side of the tiny map, and reached in with a pair of long tweezers to stick it onto the table, beside Gary. The map he’d followed to get to West Hall, to the hill, and to the Devil’s Hand, where he’d photographed a little girl who’d been dead over one hundred years.

  As she smoothed the Gary doll’s white shirt, she imagined that last conversation: Alice begged him to forget everything he’d discovered, to let it go. And Gary, who had been walking around for the past two years dazed and furious and full of pain over the seemingly impossible loss of his son, thought only of Austin—that if there was the slightest chance to have him back, even if only for seven days, he’d give anything for that.

  How bright and full of wonder and magic the world must have seemed to Gary on that last day as he sat in Lou Lou’s Café. That he lived in a world where it was possible for the dead to awaken and walk again—what a miraculous discovery! What hope he must have felt, glowing all warm inside him.

  And had he thought of Katherine, of what her face might look like if he brought their son home to her once more? How pleased she’d be. How amazed.

  “I understand,” Katherine said out loud, stroking the little doll’s head. “I understand why you did what you did. I’m just sorry you didn’t tell me any of it.” And then, because she needed to say them, needed to say the words out loud and feel their weight leave her once and for all, she added, “I forgive you.”

  She closed the door of the café, leaving them to circle through that conversation again and again: Alice trying to convince Gary to forget the whole thing, Gary telling her he just couldn’t.

  Behind Katherine, a small sound.

  A scratching at the front
door to the apartment, as if a dog or cat wanted to be let in.

  She rose from the stool, floated across the room, and paused for a moment, her hand on the doorknob.

  Her heart sang.

  Gary.

  Sara

  July 4, 1939

  Independence Day

  The midnight trips to town have grown more difficult. My eyesight is failing. My bones and joints ache all the time. The other day, I caught sight of my own reflection in the stream and did not recognize the thin old woman who looked back at me. When did my hair become so gray? My face so heavily lined with wrinkles?

  It pains me to think of what will happen to my beloved Gertie when I am gone. She will go on living forever. My time in this world is limited.

  And, as old as she may get in years, she is still only a child and makes a child’s plans and choices.

  Who will be here to keep her company, to help her control her impulses, once I am gone?

  “Are there others?” she wrote into my hand one night not long ago. “Others like me?”

  I was not sure how to answer. I had reflected on the question before, and decided that surely, in all the years people had been making sleepers, she could not have been the only one to spill blood. “There might be,” I told her. “But if there are, they are well hidden.”

  Secretly, I pray she is the only one.

  It seems that she needs to feed every few months. She grows angry and withdrawn, then weak, and we must venture out in search of food. I have brought her squirrels, fish, even a deer on occasion. (How ironic that the hunting and trapping skills taught to me so long ago by Auntie are the very skills that have enabled us to survive.) I leave the offerings outside the cave and go take a long walk while she feeds. She does not wish me to watch (nor am I able to stomach it). The truth of it is, the animals I bring do not satiate her. What she longs for most (how I shudder to write it!) is human blood.

  I have brought her this, too.

  I shall not share the details of my crimes here—they are too horrific to mention. Suffice it to say that if there is a Hell, the Hell Reverend Ayers always warned us of in his sermons, that is where I belong, where they will find me in the end.