The flurries drifting from the empty patch of sky above the ruined chapel had burgeoned into full snow. Ben walked along the edge of the clearing until he came to the frightening carving that had been propped against the chapel’s sole remaining wall.
“What is this thing?” Ben asked. The creature had the eager claws and hungry jaws of a gargoyle but seemed somehow too human.
“That’s the wendigo.”
“Isn’t that Native American?” Ben asked. He vaguely remembered reading a story about it, years ago. “Some kind of a demon?”
“In a way,” Lisbeth said. “It’s a person so consumed by hunger and fear that it becomes the very terror it dreads.”
Ben expected her to continue, but she didn’t. “Funny thing to have in a church,” he said.
Still the woman said nothing.
“Storm’s supposed to hit soon,” Ben said. “You should be careful out here.”
“It’s a hard season.”
“I’m starting to understand that.”
“My own granny used to say that winter brings out the ghosts. The snow quiets the forest enough for us to hear voices from the world that was.”
The conversation was being carried out in a cipher that Ben didn’t understand. He imagined getting into bed and letting the world carry on without him.
“I think JoJo Tanner took my son,” Ben said. His voice came out in little more than a whisper, but Lisbeth heard him fine.
“Bill Stanton told me,” Lisbeth said. “I’m sorry.”
“I think Bub is still in the forest somewhere. I can’t leave here without him.” Ben felt his throat tightening, but he refused to give in. “After that, we’ll go back to the city.”
Lisbeth looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You would leave?”
He could not read the expression on her face.
“Ben, we’ve told you about our village,” she said. “Swannhaven is special. You see that, don’t you? How else could we have survived that terrible winter so long ago? Times can be hard here, but they can be good again, too. We need only survive the days that seem the darkest. It will be hard; it wouldn’t count for anything if it weren’t. A price has to be paid. Some need to pay more than others, it’s true. But we’re strong together. You’ve seen that from the meetings, haven’t you? How we all work together to put food on everyone’s table? I hoped that you would see that. It’s the same with every necessity. We do not live on bread alone. Sometimes we need more than eggs and corn and heat to make it to tomorrow. But if we stick together, everything will be all right. We tried so hard to help you understand,” she said. “Tell me that you do.”
“We don’t belong here,” Ben said. He shook his head. “This isn’t the place for us. I understand that much.”
Lisbeth studied him with sad eyes.
“That’s not it at all, sugar.” She shook her head and looked at the ground. When she finally raised it again, he saw little trace of the kindly woman who’d once cajoled him into eating two slices of pie. “You do belong here. You always have.”
45
The day crept toward dusk, and the wind whipped dark clouds through the sky. But even a blizzard wouldn’t get in the way of Ben looking for the man by the lake. He knew the likelihood of seeing him was slim, but it was all he had to hold on to.
Snow was falling heavily by the time Father Cal arrived. Ben answered the door with his coat in hand. The priest was a shock of black against a field of white.
“Could you help Charlie get packed?” Ben asked. He slid a hat over his head. “Just a few days’ worth of clothes. He can get whatever else he needs in the city.” He stepped outside, and it was all he could do to keep himself from sprinting from the Crofts for the lake. The man might be there right now.
“You’re leaving?”
“My brother will be here tomorrow, and he’ll drive Charlie back to the city. Caroline’s resting upstairs.” Ben had found her when he returned from his encounter with Lisbeth; she’d passed out on the stairs, utterly exhausted, the ax still in her hands. He’d carried her to their bedroom, where she slept like the dead. He’d tried to pull off her bloody gloves, but her torn hands had scabbed them fast to her skin.
“Caroline and I are leaving, too, but only for Exton.” He’d decided this on his walk back from the ruined chapel. This would be their last night here. “We can’t go back downstate until Bub is found, but we can’t stay here.”
“But, Ben, why would you leave the Crofts?” Cal asked.
He didn’t know how to explain his fears to Cal, because he couldn’t yet articulate them to himself.
“I have to go.” Now that the priest was here, the idea of delaying his search for even one more moment made him want to tear his own face off.
“Will your brother be able to get up here tomorrow? We’re supposed to get two feet.”
“I don’t know.” Ben shook his head. He couldn’t consider that possibility right now. “But I have go. I shouldn’t be more than two hours.”
“Two hours? There’s no way you can stay out there that long. The storm will kill you.”
“I need to try everything I can think of.” Ben struck out in to the frozen world and he knew the priest wouldn’t try to stop him. Cal dealt in the coin of the human condition. Tragedies might be bursts of misery, but regret was forever.
—
Ben seemed to walk against the wind no matter which direction he moved, but he realized how cold it was only after he’d settled himself into Charlie’s blind. When he stopped moving, he felt the cold begin to creep past his clothes and into his skin. Soon it had dug into his bones. His toes became numb in his boots.
Ben flexed his muscles to keep his blood circulating. He kept his eyes on the lake and watched the storm unfurl around him. The great heads of clouds that had billowed over the horizon in the afternoon were lost in the blur of snow. He could see the near edge of the lake clearly, but there was no trace of the far shore. The footprints he’d left on his way to the tree line were already gone.
He knew that men who fell asleep in the snow did not wake up, but he was so tired. He let himself lay his head against his arm as he watched for the man. He could feel the beat of his heart in his ears. After a while, Ben began to feel like a tree or a rock or another immobile piece of the forest.
Through the snow, the trees swayed. The wind howled and the land turned indigo in the dying light. Eddies of snow swirled into faces against the lake’s frozen outline.
He strained to focus his attention. He tried to watch for the man, and he tried to catch what the wind was saying. He let himself close his eyes. He could hear the beat of his heart keep time with the wind as it sounded through the planks beneath him. He could hear it in his ears and feel it ebb into the tree where he lay and into the ground in which his tree was rooted and into the mountains against which the ground was nestled.
A hand tapped his leg, but he shook it off.
All right, now, Benjamin, his grandmother said. Time to shine.
Ben whirled around and saw nothing. The forest was dark, and there was only the wind in his ears. He groped his pocket to check the time on his phone and saw that two hours had come and gone. He pulled himself into a seated position.
He’d surely have died if he’d slept much longer. But he wasn’t dead. He was still alive, and Bub was still missing. He turned back to the lake, but it was too dark to see anything. If the man had come, then he’d missed him. He closed his eyes and caught a hint of the rose scent from his grandmother’s soap, but when he searched for it again, it was gone. He tried to remember his dreams but couldn’t. Something about the forests and the mountains. There had been the sense of something important ending.
Ben was so disgusted with himself that he almost rolled off the platform. He felt like falling through the icy air and landing on the frozen ground below. From this height, he thought, he might break his arm or at least dislocate a shoulder. Something like that would make him feel bette
r.
Instead, he reached for the rope ladder and lowered himself from the tree.
He made his way out of the clearing. Beyond the tree line, the wind was a muscular and serpentine thing. It worked its way around his arms and up his jacket, plying his spine with a frozen tongue. He had a flashlight, and he used it to search for footsteps along the shore of the lake. His own steps were whipped away by the wind as soon as he left them, but he looked anyway.
46
Hope sometimes came to Ben in the morning, but not today.
A twinge went up his back when he turned toward the window. He’d spent the night on a comforter in front of a love seat he’d pushed against his bedroom door. Murky light doused the room in shadows.
He stood to stretch. Charlie was still in bed next to Caroline. When Ben looked at him, his eyes were already open.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Did you sleep okay?” Ben asked.
“Yes. Did you?”
“Yes.” This morning they were both liars.
“When’s Uncle Ted coming?”
“Depends on how bad the roads are.” Ben checked his phone, but there were no messages. He pulled aside one of the window’s curtains. The snow had stopped, but the land and sky were a single gray color.
“Is there a lot of snow?” Charlie asked.
“Looks like it,” Ben said. He decided that if Ted couldn’t get here today, then all three of them would move to an inn in Exton.
Charlie picked through a bundle of bedsheets to look for Caroline’s face.
“Just leave her be,” Ben told him.
He shoved the love seat away from the door and peered into the hallway.
Ben had locked all the doors that connected the stairs to this floor and propped water glasses on top of the knobs. It was something he’d seen in a movie, but he’d tested it and it had worked. If someone tried to get through a door, the glass would fall to the ground. Ben checked the glasses, and they were all just as he’d left them.
When he got to the kitchen, Ben shoveled coffee into the machine. He turned to find Father Cal in the doorway. By the time Ben had finally returned to the Crofts from the blind, the roads were so bad that Cal had to stay the night. While Ben warmed himself by a space heater, he tried to explain to the priest what he’d learned about JoJo Tanner.
“I don’t think you’re going to make it to school today,” Ben said.
“We’re closed. You should be getting a text and an e-mail any moment now,” Cal said. “To be honest, I always thought it was a bit cruel to be open at all on Christmas week. May I help with breakfast?”
Ben had forgotten about breakfast. “Charlie should eat fruit. Would you mind slicing up a banana? Where did he go?”
“He scampered past me on the stairs. He said he was going to get his book. How’s Caroline this morning?”
“I’m going to let her sleep as long as she can.”
“They’re both lucky to have you.”
Ben looked out the window and saw the husk of the elder tree. Its black skeleton marred the vast white space.
“Cal, did you know that the mosaic Joseph Swann created for the priory was based on the view from this house?” The sight of the elder tree had reminded Ben of this. It looked like a withered hand clawing its way out of the field of endless rolling white, as if a giant beast waited underfoot.
“I thought it was of our valley.”
“The dragon is perched right on the edge of the Drop. The tree in your mosaic is now a blackened wreck on my lawn,” Ben said. “You said Joseph stayed at St. Michael’s after his brother died, around the time of the Great Fire and the railroad collapse. There’s a photo of Joseph Swann’s brother, Philip, on display in Lisbeth’s cellar. She had other photos and paintings of young people who’d died here in Swannhaven. It was strange.”
“Sounds a bit ghoulish,” Cal said. He handed the plate of sliced bananas to Ben. “By the way, I hope you don’t mind, I took your Bible to bed with me.” The priest had brought the dragon-skin Bible down with him. “I can’t remember the last time I saw such an old Bible.”
“They say Aldrich Swann brought it over from England,” Ben said. “His grandson, Henry, was a pastor during the Winter Siege. I assume he’s the one who wrote the notes in the margins.”
“Yes, the notations were what attracted my attention. Very much of the ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ variety, especially in the books of the Old Testament. For instance, here in Job, he writes, True faith thrives when tested by ailments of body and spirit. No torture is undeserved. No torture cannot be survived if he wills it. And here, in Genesis in the story of Abraham…” Cal flipped the pages of the Bible. “All that he demands must be surrendered, as all is his to claim. Nothing is truly lost, as heaven possesses every necessity for body and spirit. We shall see him again. We shall see them all again,” Cal read.
“As a rule, religious fundamentalism sort of terrifies me,” Ben said.
“Still, it gives a fascinating sense of the zeitgeist. Think how dangerous this country was back then. A poor harvest, a hard winter, angry natives, the frontier, war. Any one thing could have spelled disaster for them. Rich soil for the hellfire-and-damnation religious movements that thrived up here. It’s no wonder their faith was so strong. It might well have been the only thing they could depend upon.”
“Faith,” Ben said. “Bad times are worse up here.” Someone had told him that once. He looked through the window, searching for something more than the charred tree and the interminable blanket of white.
“Bub is all right, Ben,” Cal said.
“Isn’t that risky for you to say? Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’? Or ‘Hard things happen to people with hard lives because the Lord knows they can take it’? Isn’t that the line? It’s what everyone else up here says.”
Cal took off his glasses and rubbed the sides of his nose.
“Dark thoughts lead to dark paths,” he said. “Don’t let that happen, Ben.”
“Keep up the light,” Ben said.
“Yes.” Cal nodded.
Ben closed his eyes and then willed them open again. He pulled his coat from its hook.
“Aren’t you eating anything?” Cal asked.
“I have to do something first.”
—
Outside, Ben looked for the gravel drive but could not find it. The Drop was an uninterrupted field of white.
He made for the south woods.
Trekking across the open was difficult. The storm had left the snow in drifts. In some places it reached his waist; in others it barely covered his knees. But it wasn’t as cold as it had been. The wind had dropped off. When he reached the forest, the woods were quiet. Only the very tops of the trees rattled.
The snow had taken him off course, and he looked back to the Crofts to find his bearings. Against the snow, the house was a dark hulk.
A nice home for a young family. A place where good work is both undertaken and rewarded. His sons, happy and thriving. Can you see it? It seemed harder with every step. Ben had wanted a house with a story, but this one had too many of them. The place was too big and too old. Ben didn’t know what they’d been thinking, moving here. Everything about it had been wrong from the start.
He walked south through the woods until he thought he was well beyond the old chapel. The fresh snow should have covered the bouquet of flowers that Lisbeth had left at the stone angel yesterday, but if it hadn’t, he knew the sight of snow stained red would be more than he could bear. He turned east, into a steep slope. Soon he was on the very edge of the Drop, nearly on the side of the mountain. He had to brace himself against roots and rocks to keep from slipping. When he looked up, he saw the spiderweb silhouettes of naked trees against the sky.
Finally, the land leveled out and Ben saw the cemetery. He hadn’t been here since the summer. Its stones weren’t buried as deeply as he thought they’d be.
Thinking of poor Philip Swann and
the other dead boys on Lisbeth’s wall made Ben realize that this was a village where children died long before their time. Even Ben’s great-uncle Owen had died here. He tried not to imagine an image of Bub hanging alongside theirs in Lisbeth’s cellar.
The gravestones were organized chronologically, with the newest ones on the west side of the clearing. Miranda and Eleanor Swann’s headstones might have been carved yesterday, and Mark and Liam’s did not look much older.
Ben began at the back, where the stones were too worn to read. The first had been rubbed to a thickness of only an inch. He walked the lines until he reached one with an inscription he could make out. The stone was for Ruth Swann, who’d died in 1852. He found Philip Swann’s marker not far from there. There was a prominent death’s head at the top of the stone, and Ben had to clear away the snow to read the inscription.
MEMENTO MORI
In memory of Mr. Philip Jackson Swann, son of Carter Allen Swann, who departed this life on A.D. December 21, 1878 and died with hope of happy immortality.
Ben noticed that the date was the same as today’s. The Great Fire of 1878 had been earlier that year.
He found himself back among the newest of the stones. Mark and Liam Swann were buried next to their father and mother, Carlisle and Sara Swann. According to the parents’ tablet, they’d died in 1974. Their marker had a more modern style than Philip Swann’s, but they had retained the inscription of memento mori. Remember death.
Ben knew that Mark Swann had been fifteen when he died, but he couldn’t remember Liam’s age. He went to check the dates on his gravestone. The boy’s date of birth had been 1971, but it was reading his date of death that made Ben feel as if someone had reached into his chest and squeezed his heart.
Mark and Liam Swann had also died on December 21. Today.
He’d read the articles about the fire, but the date of it hadn’t stuck in his head.
“What does it mean?” he whispered into the cold air. He backed away from the grave markers and nearly fell into a drift. “It doesn’t matter.” He shook his head. Maybe it meant something and maybe it didn’t. All he knew was that he had to find Bub. When Charlie had gone missing, the FBI told him that the first seventy-two hours were essential. He had to find him today.
House of Echoes: A Novel Page 28
