by Kali Wallace
Sorrow crept forward to approach the door from the side. Her mouth was dry and her heart was racing so fast she could feel it in her throat. She had to say something. She wasn’t a baby. She was eight years old, and she was a Lovegood. She wasn’t going to let an Abrams scare her away.
She leaned into the open doorway. “Hello?”
Her voice echoed dully. It was so dark inside it took her eyes several seconds to adjust.
“Hello! Who’s in there?”
All she could hear was the wind and the rattle of icy snow on naked branches. She eased one boot forward, stretching over the slick of ice to step inside. The floor creaked and she held her breath, trying to make herself as light as possible. There were piles of apple crates in the corners, stacks of orchard ladders against the wall, barrels and buckets and all kinds of junk, but no person that Sorrow could see. Long ago the old cider press had smashed through the rotten floorboards to the muddy cellar below, leaving a gaping hole in the floor.
Sorrow leaned forward to peer into the cellar. It was so dark it could have been a bottomless pit. There was no ladder; if somebody fell through the floor, they wouldn’t have any way to get out.
“Are you down there?” Her voice, now, little more than a whisper. “Hello?”
“I didn’t even know you could talk.”
Sorrow spun around, her heart jumping.
Cassie Abrams stood in the doorway. She cocked her head to one side, considering Sorrow with an unimpressed expression. “I thought you were mute like your grandma.”
Cassie’s blond hair curled in pigtails beneath her red knit hat, and her round cheeks were pink with cold. Her coat was red too, a deep crimson velvet with shiny silver buttons marching down the front, and her puffy snow boots were bright pink.
“Or can you only talk to empty rooms, not people?” Cassie said.
“I can talk,” Sorrow said, bewildered. She blushed when Cassie laughed.
“I bet my friend Madison I could make you talk,” Cassie said. “Now she has to kiss Jemma’s brother Hunter on the playground tomorrow. Maybe she won’t believe me but I’m going to make her anyway. You can talk like a normal person, can’t you? Say something else.”
Sorrow didn’t know Madison or Jemma or Hunter. She barely even knew Cassie. She and Patience weren’t allowed to talk to the Abramses or make friends with their daughters. Mom said that making friends with an Abrams would only lead to heartache.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Cassie kicked a clump of icy snow; it slid past Sorrow’s boots and dropped into the cellar. “Nothing. I was bored.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I thought this building would be cooler on the inside, but it’s just a bunch of junk. My playhouse is way better.” Cassie pointed across the snow-covered field toward her house. “It’s in the barn. I get to have the whole hayloft just for myself, and it’s not gross and dirty like this.”
Sorrow bristled, even though Cassie was right. “If you think it’s gross, maybe you should leave.”
“Maybe I don’t want to,” Cassie said.
“You have to. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Says who?”
“Says my mom, and your mom, and your dad,” Sorrow said. “The sheriff said we have to stay on our side of the fence so everybody stops bothering him.” Those had been his exact words, in fact, and Mom hadn’t been at all pleased to hear it.
Cassie snorted. “I don’t care what the dumb old sheriff says. Let’s do something fun. Can we climb that big tree on the hill? I’ve always wanted to climb it.”
Sorrow stared. It was a trick. It had to be a trick. No Abrams would invite her to play for no reason.
Even so, a part of her wanted to say yes. This lonely gray day would be more interesting if she could stomp through the orchard and climb the black oak with Cassie, breaking the rules their parents had set.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t risk Mom finding out, not when she was having a bad day. Patience had already pushed Mom too far by asking about school. Getting caught playing with Cassie Abrams would be so much worse.
“I don’t want to play with you,” Sorrow said. “I want you to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“You have to,” Sorrow said, her worry turning into a desperate kind of fear. “You have to. You have to go before somebody sees you.”
Cassie’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll just tell them you made me come over here. I’ll tell them it’s all your fault.”
Something hot and angry was building in Sorrow’s chest, a bright painful ember pushing out into the cold. “That’s not true.”
“So? They’ll believe me more than you. Everybody knows you’re just as crazy as your mom.”
Sorrow lunged forward and shoved Cassie backward through the door. “Shut up!” she shouted. “You shut up about my mom!”
Cassie stumbled in the deep snow and fell. She struggled to her feet, and her cheeks were even pinker now. There was snow stuck all over her mittens and red coat. “I knew you were crazy. Your whole family is crazy.”
“Shut up!” Sorrow stepped toward Cassie again, but her boot slipped on the ice just inside the door. She grabbed for the doorframe to catch herself.
Cassie slammed into her before she was steady on her feet, and Sorrow’s feet skidded out from under her. She fell, hard, right onto her back. The jolt knocked the breath out of her, made her vision blur, and everything went dark with a thunderous thump. There was another thump—the walls shook—and a noisy clatter.
Cassie had shut the door.
“Hey!” Sorrow yelled. “Hey, what are you doing!”
She climbed to her feet and tumbled against the door, but it didn’t budge. Cassie had barred it from the outside.
“Let me out!” Sorrow hit the door hard enough to make the whole wall shake. “What are you doing? Let me out!”
“No,” Cassie said. Her voice was muffled through the door. “No way. No way. You’re crazy. You’ll kill me or something. Your whole family is insane.”
Her footsteps crunched through the snow.
“Cassie! Wait! Come back! Please come back!”
The footsteps paused.
“Please come back,” Sorrow said, more quietly. “Let me out. Please?”
Cassie started moving again, but now she was running. Her footsteps faded, and faded, and there was silence.
Sorrow turned in a slow circle, trying to breathe normally. All she could see was the faint gray light around the edges of the door. Everything else was darkness. Tears stung her eyes and scalded her cheeks. She scrubbed at her face; her mittens were cold and rough and dirty. She was trapped. She didn’t know what to do. Her breath was shallow, her heart racing so fast she felt it in her ears. She couldn’t get enough air. She couldn’t see. She was between the door and the hole in the floor, but she couldn’t see it, and what if she was closer to the hole than she thought? If she moved the wrong way she would tumble into the cellar and break her arms or legs or even her neck.
“Help!” Sorrow shouted, her voice choked with tears. “Help me! Can anybody hear me?”
She could scream all day and all night and nobody would hear. She was too far from the house. It might be dinnertime, or even bedtime, before Patience or Mom or Grandma noticed she wasn’t in the house. They might not find her until morning, and by then she would be frozen solid.
“Cassie!” She slammed her hands into the door, rattling it against the bar. “Cassie, please, let me out!”
It was no use. Cassie wasn’t there. Nobody was there.
Sorrow let out a choked sob, swallowed it back quickly. She wasn’t going to panic. Panicking was what Mom did, and Sorrow and Patience were the ones who soothed her. They calmed her down and they worked around whatever problem she had, even if it seemed to them more imaginary than real. That was what they did. Mom said they were good at it. They were her rock, she said, for when everything else was unst
eady.
This wasn’t an imaginary problem. Maybe Sorrow was alone, without her older sister to help her, but she could still be the person who fixed things, who made something scary into something manageable. She could do that. She put her mittened hand over her mouth to keep the cries inside, pushed down deep until they didn’t matter anymore, and she made herself think.
The door was blocked from the outside. She had to find a way to unblock it. She had to do it in the dark. She had to do it without falling into the cellar, which she couldn’t even see, which could be right next to her, it could be that shadow right there, and she was all confused again, confused about which way to turn, terrified of taking the wrong step, making a wrong move, and the cold was so sharp it felt like a living thing clawing its way into her skin—
Cold with teeth. That was what Patience called it, and she would bare her teeth and raise her hands like claws and pretend to be a winter monster chasing Sorrow all over the house. She used to, anyway, but it felt like a long time since Patience had played with her. Now when Sorrow suggested a game Patience would roll her eyes and say she was busy. She didn’t want to play Pioneers anymore, or Explorers, or even Traitors and Spies, which used to be her favorite. Patience had always made Sorrow be the nasty old preacher Clement Abrams so she could be their ancestor Rejoice Lovegood, who had been locked up after the townspeople accused her of being a witch. But she had broken out of their makeshift jail, not using magic as the men later claimed, but only a whalebone stay she tore from her corset.
Sorrow didn’t have whalebone stays beneath her dress. She had to find something else. It was too dark. She couldn’t see anything. She needed to see.
She lowered herself to the floor. She took off her mittens and began to search the space around her. When her fingers curled over the end of a broken board, she snatched her hand back.
That was the hole in the floor. She could feel the cellar breathing. In her mind the broken floorboards took on the shape of a great mouth rimmed with jagged wooden fangs.
Sorrow squeezed her eyes shut. She had to stay calm. She was good at that. Mrs. Roche from down the road said she was eerily calm. Sorrow hadn’t known what that meant, so she’d asked Patience, and Patience had said Mrs. Roche was only admiring how Sorrow didn’t throw tantrums or make a fuss like other kids her age.
She wasn’t making a fuss. There were sobs trapped in her throat and her breath was rasping and fast, but she was okay. She was okay. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t. She wasn’t. She just needed to see. She searched the area around her, and when she didn’t find anything she crawled a few feet and kept searching. Her fingers brushed over a curve of metal—the iron ring on the bottom of a barrel. Sorrow tugged at it, but she couldn’t break it free. She moved on, still searching. The metal head of a shovel. A couple of bottles that rolled and clinked when she touched them. More barrels. A scattering of short metal nails. A crusty chunk of something that Sorrow hoped was mud but knew was probably the dried-up remains of some unfortunate mouse or bird.
She brushed her hand on her coat, and she reached out again, walking her fingers along a gap between the floorboards until they touched something hard and cold.
It felt like metal, but not the gritty iron of old farm tools and cider press parts. She tugged, rocking the object back and forth until it came free. She turned it over in her hands. It was a rectangle about the size of a matchbox, mostly smooth, with a small bump on one side—a hinge, she realized, and her heart jumped in excitement. She flipped it open and ran her fingers over the inside, feeling for the small, ridged wheel. She knew what it was.
It was a lighter, an old-fashioned one like Mr. Roche used for his pipe. One evening last summer he and Mrs. Roche had come over to drop off some mail that had gone to the wrong house, and Mom had been in a rare good mood, bright and bubbly and cheerful, so she had invited them to stay awhile and drink cider on the back porch. Sorrow had been fascinated by how Mr. Roche had packed the tobacco into his pipe, the careful way he held the flame to the bowl and puffed and puffed. He had caught her staring and handed her the lighter, showed her how to use it, and he had chuckled when Mrs. Roche scolded him for teaching a child to play with fire. Mom had laughed too and told Mrs. Roche not to worry.
Sorrow struck the lighter once, twice. Nothing happened. A third try, and nothing. The cold felt even deeper, the darkness more complete, than it had a moment ago. She shook the lighter near her ear, but she couldn’t tell if there was any fuel inside.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, please, come on.”
Finally: a spark.
Sorrow was so surprised she nearly dropped the lighter. When she clicked it again, she got a small flame. It wasn’t very bright, but it was enough to push the darkness back, if only a bit. Finally she could see.
She scrambled to her feet and went to the door. She studied the small gap between the door and the frame. It wasn’t wide, barely big enough for her to stick her little finger in. She held the light out and looked around, searching through the junk and piles of discarded tools, until the flame burned her thumb and she had to let it go out. She stuck her thumb in her mouth to cool it before trying again. It took a few strikes to get the flame back.
The first thing she found, a long metal nail, was too fat. The second, a drill bit, was skinny enough to fit in the gap but not long enough to reach the two-by-six on the other side. She let the flame go out again, shook her hand and the lighter to cool them. The next time the flame caught on the first try.
She finally found what she was looking for in a long sliver of wood she peeled from the cracked leg of an orchard ladder. One end was thick, but the other tapered to a point, and that point was narrow enough to jam into the gap between the door and the frame. She had to let the lighter go dark and slip it into her coat pocket to get a good grip on her wooden wedge, but she didn’t need to see now. She worked the wedge upward, wood scraping on wood, until it bumped into the two-by-six on the other side. She held it tight with both hands and pushed it up and up and up. The bar on the other side moved a little. It was heavier than she expected, and holding the wood hurt her hands, but inch by inch the bar rose. When she was sure she had lifted it high enough to clear the bracket, she leaned on the door.
One end of the bar fell to the ground, and the door swung open. Sorrow tumbled out of the cider house.
It was colder now, the light grimmer, the wind more bitter. She ran back to the house as fast as she could, slipping and sliding through the snow. She couldn’t wait to tell Patience and Mom how she had escaped the pitch-black cider house using Rejoice Lovegood’s trick, and she had done it with the help of the first favor of the year. She had desperately wished for a light, and the orchard had given her one, and that meant the land was waking from its long winter hibernation.
Her excitement lasted right up until she burst through the door to find the kitchen empty. The soup pot was still on the stove, the bowls still in the sink. The only sound Sorrow could hear was the gentle chug-chug of Grandma’s sewing machine in the living room.
She shut the door. The sewing machine fell quiet, and Grandma appeared in the doorway. She tilted her head to the side in question.
“I was only taking a walk,” Sorrow said.
Grandma looked at her for a long moment, then nodded and went back to her sewing.
Sorrow was left alone in the kitchen. The lighter was a hard lump in her pocket.
Nobody had even noticed she was gone. She had been trapped in the cider house and she might have been trapped there forever, but nobody had noticed.
34
THE LONG WHITE whalebone stay was in her hand.
Sorrow knew what it was, even though she had never seen one before.
She had stopped walking. Before her the dirt road curved to the right, to the north, to skirt the base of the hill before dropping down to the cider house meadow. To her left was the path to the cemetery where she had chased after Patience on that winter day eight ye
ars ago. The orchard was growing dark as the sun sank lower and lower. The rows of trees were more shadow than light now, murky and indistinct at the edges of her vision. A breeze turned and brought with it a breath of air cold enough to raise goose bumps on her skin. Leaves crackled and rustled. Sorrow suppressed a shiver.
The stay wasn’t a curve of bone at all, not like she had always imagined. It was more pliable than rigid, a thin, bendable finger of fiber. It was hard to imagine how it could have been used in a jailbreak, but maybe Rejoice had been even more clever than the men had given her credit for. She would have been calm, unimpressed by her predicament. She wouldn’t have cried and screamed for help. She wouldn’t have felt the numbing deep cold of panic settle over her, not the way Sorrow had in the cider house.
Her breath was coming fast now, remembering, fast and shallow like she was eight years old again, and in the gloaming she could hear the creak of weakened boards beneath her feet, and she could see her breath misting in opaque puffs, and she was trapped again, she was trapped, she wasn’t going to get out, she was trapped and she was—
She was cold.
Sorrow gripped the stay so tight the edges bit into her fingers. The temperature had dropped. She wasn’t imagining it, the mist of her breath, she was seeing it right there in front of her face. Her arms were covered with goose bumps, her nose stinging, her ears beginning to ache. She was so cold it felt as though the blood had slowed in her veins, and her mind was creaking and groaning through an impossible crackle of ice. Frost crept over the green leaves as she watched.
It was July. This couldn’t be happening again. It couldn’t. Not now. If the cold was back that would mean Cassie was gone, and she couldn’t be. She couldn’t be. Sorrow was going to find her.
She closed her eyes and shook her head, and there was a voice echoing no, no, no, but it didn’t sound like her voice, it didn’t sound like a voice at all but rather footsteps rustling through dry autumn leaves, and they were her own footsteps. She had chosen the left path. As she walked the leaves frosted and crisped around her, and when she passed they thawed and steamed, and droplets of water pattered to the ground.
