House of Echoes: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  We returned to the burned remains of the village to see that the Iroquois had gone. Our valley was restored to us by the grace of God and our mighty faith in him. In praise of him, the Winter Families formed a covenant. Swannhaven would ever be God’s country. No matter what hardships he asked us to endure, we would endure them happily.

  Our ancestors pledged on behalf of their progeny to carry out God’s will if called upon. We have been promised to keep up the light. A sacrifice, if demanded, was to come from the Swann family, for it is right for the greatest of us to offer the most. They pledged forevermore their eldest son. A most worthy offering. Something for which they would suffer greatly—but if they did not, it would not count for anything.

  And tested again we were. Do you remember the pictures in my cellar, Ben? This was what I tried to tell you. James Swann’s portrait hangs there to be remembered forever for his sacrifice during the Winter Siege. Recession and fire were the enemy’s next weapons. You know of the Great Fire of 1878, and you’ve seen Philip Swann’s portrait next to James’s. It was dear Philip who delivered us from ruins of the Great Fire.

  You’ve seen how the Swannhaven Trust administers to the village. During a year in which we are tested, the heads of the Winter Families fast through December. Each day we eat a cup of rough wheat flour and no more. Our ancestors’ suffering and hunger brought them close to God, close enough to hear his voice. And so it is for us. Your wife’s cooking smelled of heaven’s own banquet table, but it was another of the beast’s temptations. We are used to them. Their seduction is swept aside as easily as food into a pocketed napkin.

  It was once a rare thing for God to demand a great sacrifice, but the pace has quickened with the foulness of the world around us. We have grown so much more important to him. We must be ever ready to do his will.

  James was first, and Philip was second. They were good boys, their sacrifices given gladly and accepted gratefully. Yes, Mark Swann would have been an offering, too. Mark would have saved us all from the fuel shortages and the sickness that plagued our herds. But that big foolish boy ruined it. Our offering could not be made after Mark was killed in the fire that JoJo set. JoJo had meant to take him away from us, but he only succeeded in killing both Mark and his brother in the blaze. We believed then that the line of Swanns had finally come to an end and that our village was doomed.

  And yet some of us continued in our faith. And have we not been mightily rewarded for it?

  But I must tell the story right. That was my mistake with you in the first place, and for that I am sorry.

  Our third trial was during the Depression, when we were again tested by hunger and also by the Black Water. So many of us had died. Perhaps no test was more difficult than the Winter Siege itself, but this time the Swann family had no male heir to offer. But God does not offer a problem that faith cannot solve. A daughter of the Swanns had married into one of the families in the valley. A Winter Family itself, as providence would have it. You shake your head, but you already know what I’m going to say. You’ve seen his portrait in my cellar with all the other brave boys who gave their lives for our village, for this one flame of light in all the darkness of this bleak earth.

  Your great-grandmother was Emily Swann before she was Emily Lowell. Her son, your great-uncle, Owen, was given unto the Lord in 1933. You’re as much a Swann as you are a Lowell, Ben.

  I told you before that names are nice, but it’s the blood that matters.

  51

  The forest shifted in the night. The moonlight wove shadows of skeletal branches onto the icy ground.

  In front of Caroline, Charlie disappeared in a puff of snow. She hoisted him out of the drift by his waistband, and they continued their silent escape through the frozen trees.

  Charlie had not had the words to explain, but he hadn’t needed them. Her son was not a liar, and the look on his face told Caroline what she needed to know. In a strange way, this wasn’t news so much as it was confirmation. Their strange religion, their self-contained valley, their intractable attachment to their grim history, the unsettled feeling she’d get in her gut when one of their stares lingered upon her: Caroline had known for a while that something was wrong with the people of Swannhaven. What exactly it was, she didn’t know, and at present it didn’t much matter. What she knew was that Charlie and she had to get away from the Crofts.

  They’d taken the steps down from the north tower. Once outside, they’d ducked along the rear veranda to hide themselves from anyone watching from the windows. It had not been the perfect escape: She’d forgotten her phone and wallet, but she did have her car keys.

  Not that they would help her. When she and Charlie got to the cars, Caroline saw that the villagers’ vehicles had boxed her Escape in. This was not an accident, she realized. Maybe there were no accidents here between the mountains.

  There were villagers in the woods, she knew. They had been there to find JoJo, but now she was sure that they hunted Charlie and her, as well. What they needed to do was get to the county road and stop Ben before he returned to the Crofts. Once in the car, they’d be fine, they just—

  An arm stretched from a tree trunk and caught Caroline in the throat. This slammed her flat on her back into the snow, her vision shifting from land to sky in a swift and shocking dislocation.

  “Dangerous to be out in the snow, Mrs. Tierney.”

  Caroline blinked the tears from her eyes to see a stout man step from between the trees.

  “Run, Charlie!” she cried as she tried to bolt to her feet, but the fall had rattled her brain and the man was on her in a moment. She gasped as he caught her from behind in a sleeper hold.

  “Time to head back to the Crofts now,” the man told Charlie.

  The boy stood a few yards away, still as if frozen, eyes as bright as the moon.

  “Don’t want your mama to get hurt, do you? No, you’re a good boy. You’ll come back to the Crofts with me, won’t you?” Spots swam across Caroline’s vision. Though his face was behind her, she now placed the man’s beady eyes and florid complexion. Seward, she thought, the man who lived next to Grams’s old farmhouse.

  “No,” Charlie said. The word was only a whisper, but it sparked with defiance. Even with the breath being choked from her, Caroline felt pride. Her little man was strong. He got so much from his father, but he got this from her. This had always been true, even if lately it had become easy to forget.

  “Come on, now, you’re a good boy, aren’t you?” Seward asked again, his hot, rank breath on her neck.

  He was a good boy, Caroline thought. The best sort: the kind that might not give a parent what they wanted but always what they needed.

  Caroline shifted her center of gravity, slammed her heel down hard onto Seward’s foot, and delivered a blow to the bridge of his nose with the back of her hand. It had been years since she’d taken a self-defense class, but still the movements were rote. Seward’s hold broke and his screams were muffled slightly by the hands he’d reflexively pressed over his face. Caroline spun around to knee him in the groin. The man groaned and bent over. As Seward vomited into the snow, Caroline kicked him in the ribs and face until he went down.

  Caroline stopped when the man made no further move to stand. She turned to Charlie, and the boy nodded.

  But there was no time for self-congratulation: Seward’s first scream had echoed through the forest’s icy corridors. The rest of the villagers would be coming for them now. They had to move faster than ever.

  52

  As he ran, Charlie tried to see which shadows swayed with the wind and which moved on their own.

  It was hard to run for long in the thin, cold air. Beside him, Mom was out of breath, too, her face bright red above her scarf. He didn’t know if the man had hurt her badly, but even if he had, Mom had hurt him worse. She had broken him like she’d broken the house, and it made Charlie proud. But the fight had made her tired, and the hunters were close.

  The man’s scream would have told the
others where they were as clear as the North Star on a cloudless night. But Charlie knew what to do from The Book of Secrets. He had quickly broken two wide limbs from a red spruce. Dragging these behind them through the cold, dry snow had helped hide their trail through the night. It would not stop the hunters, but it might slow them.

  There was a noise, and Charlie turned around to see a flutter of snow fall from a disturbed branch. The villagers would be upon them soon, but he’d finally found what he’d been looking for: an old oak with a hollow large enough to fit a grown man.

  “Hurry,” Charlie whispered to Mom.

  Once they’d both squeezed into the hollow, he propped the spruce branches in front of the tree’s opening. They could still see through the frosted needles, but they were hidden from the ones who chased them. They had been lucky that Charlie knew this tree, but, then, no one knew the forest as well as he did.

  Almost no one.

  Mom hugged her arms around his chest as they waited in the close space. The clouds of their breath burst and faded in the weak light.

  A branch snapped to the right of their tree, a beat out of rhythm with the sounds of the overhead branches. A moment later, a boot crunched into cold snow to their left. Charlie watched as shadows separated from shadows. Mom’s grip on him tightened.

  Three men stood in front of them. Charlie could not be sure who they were. Two of them searched the snow with flashlights, while the third sniffed the air. They spoke to one another in low voices that Charlie couldn’t hear.

  Their beams of light crossed over the branches and burned across the white ground. Not long now before they were found, Charlie thought. He wondered if they wanted only him or if they would hurt his mom as the other man had. He began to consider giving himself up. Maybe if he did that, they wouldn’t search the hollow for Mom. Maybe she could get away and bring back help.

  But he knew Mom would never let the men take him without a fight. She was a very good mom. If Charlie showed himself, though, it might give them some time. Light from the flashlights gleamed through the tree’s rotted bark as the men examined its trunk. Charlie realized that their luck had run out.

  He squeezed his mother’s hand and was about to move aside the pine boughs when the rattling of a stick against a tree sounded through the forest. The beams of light turned toward it, and the two men holding the flashlights ran toward the noise. The third man looked in the same direction and sniffed at the air again. It was this third man who scared Charlie. He seemed human in shape only. He tested the air and moved with the care of a predator. The man took one last look at the trees before following the others. He slid through the night like a fish speeding through water.

  Charlie waited a few minutes, until he could no longer hear the men’s movements through the wood. The cold had soaked into his joints and stiffened his legs. He was grateful to move again.

  He helped his mom up, and they moved in the opposite direction from where the men had gone. Charlie knew that they had to leave this valley tonight, but they now had to go back up the Drop, farther from the road. He did not think that Mom and he could survive the cold night, but he knew that, even if they did, the villagers would find them in the light of morning. He wondered what Hickory Heck would do. Dad would also know what to do. Charlie wished he were here.

  As they slowly made their way upslope, Charlie wondered about the noise from the forest that had sent the men scrambling. He had heard it before, during his long afternoons in the woods.

  Charlie was thinking about this when he walked right into a man who stood as still and as tall as a tree. Charlie looked up and saw the one who knew the forest best: the one who moved through the trees like the wind and made a noise only when he wanted to be heard.

  53

  Simms and Harp stagger through the dark with their flashlights, but I see better by the light of the moon. They trample the undergrowth and clutch at the frozen trees, but I pick my way through without a falter or a sound. I am a forest creature.

  The air is clean between the mountains. Clean and pure as my fasting soul. That is what happens when you do not eat. The excess of this ugly world burns away and takes with it all of its doubt and distractions. You reach a place, beyond the hunger, where everything is clear. You see the Lord’s language everywhere. You can read it in the flutter of a crow’s wing. You smell it in hints left by the cold east wind. He is everywhere, and he sees our every weakness.

  The boy is ahead. I can smell his mother, and he would keep her close. He’s a good boy. They all were.

  Simms says something smart, and I grip his neck in a move fast enough to make his eyes bulge. The boy is too close for us to risk making any noise. I show my teeth and know that Simms can feel the low growl building in my chest. He remembers what I did to the Bishop boy.

  The elders doubt that the youth of this village possess the strength to do what must be done. Will they be able to carry our burdens once we have gone? I wonder if my own grandpappy had such worries. Still, the blame for their weaknesses is not theirs alone. Our young people were not raised the way we were. They do not yet understand the importance of this village to his plan. They have not yet seen how we are tested in this in-between place, this cold valley between heaven and hell.

  But they will.

  Time was that every Sunday sermon would be of the Winter Siege and of the sacrifices of the Swann family, but that fell away when Mark and Liam died in the fire. We thought the line of Swann to be at an end, and we despaired and believed we had failed him. We believed that the unredeemed world had grown too corrupt to save. In our anguish, some of our old ways fell aside. Our village withered like an unwatered field. Some families died, others moved away. We did not teach our children all of the things they should have known. But our greatest failure was to doubt him. Through his providence, the line of Swann has been restored, and so has our chance at redemption. We will not fail him again, and we will again teach our children the ways of our forefathers.

  When the time comes, I will have my June tighten the chain around the boy’s bare chest. I will let him fix his tearstained face upon hers to beg for his life. I will have her watch as the cold slowly takes its grip. In the morning, I will have her help unclench his frozen fingers from the unyielding iron and carry his rigid body to the cemetery of his ancestors. Then she may truly understand and one day teach her own children.

  The boy is close now. The mother’s scent lingers in the cold, thin air. Simms and Harp shine their lights over the wood. They mutter to each other and look at me from the shadows of their faces. I watch the branches sway and wait for the wind to whisper me its secrets. A pain surges from my stomach. This suffering builds my determination. The pain makes me stronger.

  And you will be rewarded, says the wind. I smile at the darkness. Through the forest, a noise rings out: a rattling among the trees. Simms and Harp chase after it. Perhaps this is the reward the wind has promised. Harp has fasted, and so has Simms, but not the way that I have. My line has ever heard his word with great clarity. Perhaps the boy is deeper in the woods, or perhaps he lingers here with the scent of his mother.

  The road to salvation is not straight. It is broken with trials and stained with blood. Perhaps the time for the boy to be found has not yet come. Perhaps it is God’s will that we follow this noise in the dark.

  What have we poor men ever been but wanderers in the dark?

  Moving through the trees, I soon catch up to old Harp. He pants like a broken plow horse. I feel the flush of his face through the sharp air. He has misused his body, and now it takes little for it to fail him. He smells of cigarettes and liquor, though they are forbidden in this season. He turns around, disoriented in the dark because he does not hear the Lord’s voice. How could he, with a mind so weak and a body so corrupted? A disgrace to his family.

  Harp stops and tears the scarf off his neck, gasping for air. The artery beneath his chins throbs in the moonlight. It would not be a hard thing to take his life from him. His jo
wls are weak; my teeth are strong. It would be a mercy. Not all of the old ways have survived, but perhaps they should live again. It is not strictly true that our ancestors survived their terrible winter by wheat flour alone.

  If I close my eyes, I can already taste the metal notes of his blood. I can feel the slick of it as it overspills my mouth to drench my chest.

  Simms stumbles over a root ahead of us, and I remember our task. I shake my head free of this latest temptation. Perhaps there will be time for Harp later, after we find the boy. Perhaps he will be the reward the wind promised. Perhaps he will be how I break my fast.

  54

  Ben stared at Lisbeth in the silence that followed her declaration. In the gleam of the fire, he saw only hunger and madness in her eyes.

  He bolted from the room. Roger Armfield stood in the doorway, his arms outstretched as if to stop him. But Ben did not slow. As he ran down the hallway, he registered Armfield’s lanky form crashing to the floor behind him.

  If you’re trying to figure out this strange little village of ours, that one hard winter is all you need to know.

  He had to find Caroline and Charlie.

  Images flashed through his mind. Mrs. White, who had looked so hungry because she had been fed nothing more than a cup of flour. When she’d seen him, she whispered, “Swann.” He hadn’t understood that she had been naming him. Perhaps her naming him had been all that the other Winter Families needed.

  Ben remembered his great-uncle Owen’s photograph in Lisbeth’s basement. He should have recalled that image when he saw the same one in the Swannhaven Dispatch article about him being lost in the forest. That story must have been a cover for the true horror of what had happened, for the real reason the Lowells had abandoned their farm and so many of their meager possessions.