Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

“I’m not sure exactly what I did.”

  “You were working around our field on the other side of the wood. I recognized the path of water. I hope you’re not upset with me. It was easier this way than trying to explain.”

  “Do you always do it this way?” My voice shook a little. “What would have happened if I’d thought you were all lunatics—including the principal’s wife—and went out and told everyone about it?”

  “No,” Gram said calmly. “We wait and watch for a long time, usually, before we invite. And we are very certain about people before we let them in.”

  “Did you invite my mother?”

  “No.”

  I felt my heart pound at the word. “Why not?”

  “Because Morgana couldn’t sit still to save her life, and she was happier nailing shingles to a roof than knitting. Even when you proved to us that it was safe to ask her, none of us suggested it.”

  “How?” I asked dazedly. “How did I prove that my father wasn’t—wasn’t one of Them? How would you recognize Them if you saw one?”

  “Some are better at recognizing than others. Your great-great-great-grandmother, Rois Melior, for instance. Others have written about encounters, glimpses, descriptions—that helps us know what we’re dealing with. They run cold, in that Otherworld—cold-blooded, cold-hearted. They can be very cruel. At their best, they break your heart; at their worst, they kill. As teenagers, they usually don’t wear glasses and chase after fireflies to catch one in a jar for their younger cousin. You were a kind child, Sylvia, and your heart was always in the right place. So we figured that’s where Morgana’s must have been, too, whomever she loved to get you.”

  She moved toward the table. I stared wordlessly after her, stunned by all she thought she knew, and all I didn’t know she knew.

  “Gram—” I caught up with her. “How did you keep this secret from me?”

  “You were no more interested in needle and thread than your mother was. I said ‘sewing circle,’ and your eyes glazed over. The guild didn’t meet here, the years we were unsure of you, and when we finally were, you were old enough to make sure you had somewhere else to be, those nights.”

  “Then why now? I still can’t sew.”

  “We need you to know all there is to know about Lynn Hall before I die. Whatever you decide to do with it, you must take this into account.”

  She left me reeling again, got a couple of plates from the sideboard, and handed me one.

  “Don’t worry,” Penelope Starr told me cheerfully. “Anything you can manage will be useful. You’ll get better, the more you do. It’s ongoing, you know; we can’t just do it once a month when we meet. Things require attention constantly. Isn’t that right, Genevieve?”

  The bartender nodded, bending her willowy body as she bit into celery to keep veggie dip from skidding down her sweater. “For sure,” she said, after she swallowed. “I’m working on my ninth pair of baby booties. My sister thinks I’m nuts.” She grinned. “I crochet when the bar is slow. There’s an underground lake under it that I keep an eye on. Still water is the most dangerous kind.”

  “Why?”

  “It runs deep,” Gram said simply, and dropped a mushroom turnover on my plate.

  I added a few more goodies, wandered around dazedly, looking at various projects, making normal noises most of the time, until someone explained an edging in the context of a cow pasture, or a sequence of embroidery stitches as a bridge across the river. Then a world would superimpose itself over the one I knew: a nameless, vague, darkly powerful realm, rarely seen, but strangely recognizable when you came across it in a tale, between the lines of poetry, in your life.

  Finally, plates and cups started making their way to the kitchen. Visiting platters were stowed; sewing bags closed. Car keys began to rattle. Cheeks touched; dates for meetings of various kinds were fixed. There was a tidal shift of noise and movement down the hall. Hurley appeared at the bottom of the attic stairs to watch us, smiling vaguely, as though we might be hallucinations, but then again maybe not.

  The front door closed; the final car started. Gram and I went back down the hall to put the kitchen in order. Hurley followed us to snare the last of Charlotte’s meatballs.

  “She has absolutely no sense of humor,” Gram said, piling plates beside the sink. “But she works magic with those.” She turned the water on, then off again, to look at Hurley, who had spoken. “What, Hurley?”

  “She’s there in the wood again tonight,” Hurley said, licking sauce off his thumb.

  Gram and I consulted one another silently. “Judith Coyle?” I guessed.

  “The older one.” He took a chocolate chip cookie. “I thought you’d want to know. She comes out when your sewing circle gets together. I see her through the telescope when it’s early enough, or the moon is full. Only way I’ve ever seen her.” He bit into the cookie; we stared at him silently, waiting for him to swallow. “Look at her with my eyes: nothing. You have to look at her like a star you only see if you don’t look straight… And the boy is with her.”

  “Tyler?” I said incredulously.

  “The other one. Thought you’d want to know,” he said again, and took a handful of cookies on his way out, leaving us spellbound behind him.

  Gram went out the back door. I ran up to the attic, swung Hurley’s telescopic eye all over the moonlit night. But all I saw was Tyler and the Coyle girl going separate directions very quickly when Gram called Tyler’s name.

  8

  Tyler

  I went out the back door when all the women started coming in. I could have stayed in my room with the laptop and all my CDs, or in the den, where I could sneak into the kitchen when I got hungry. But I saw Undine in the wood. She was watching the women get out of their cars, talking, waving at each other. She didn’t let them see her. The sun was balanced on a hilltop, making long, long shadows across the shining grass. I was watching it, thinking: that must be what they mean by magic, because in that light, the end of daylight, it didn’t look like the same world. That’s when I saw Undine’s shadow, stretching across the lawn.

  So I went down.

  She had her arm around one of those thin white trees; their shadows merged, as if she was growing out of the tree, or turning into it. She smiled when she saw me. Her hand told me to hurry, hurry, so no one would see me and call me back. Uncle Hurley saw, though. I saw his telescope lens flash in the attic window when I turned back to see if anyone had noticed me. But that was okay; he wouldn’t care.

  She wasn’t wearing her white dress, just ordinary jeans and a weird stained vest with all kinds of pockets in it that was way too big for her. There was something lace under that; I saw it through the armholes. She saw me looking and flipped open a pocket.

  “My dad’s old fishing vest. It’s great for collecting things.” She poked around, pulled out an acorn cap, a blue feather, a little red mushroom with white freckles on the cap. It looked like something out of a cartoon fairy tale.

  “Amanita muscaria,” she said mysteriously. “It’s poisonous. I found a whole ring of them in Owen Avery’s trees. He has a tree farm up the hill over there.” She pointed across Gram’s field. She added, putting her findings back in the vest, “His daughter Dorian comes to your Gram’s meetings, too.”

  I grunted. “Sewing circle. That’s what Gram said. Why are you watching them? You must have seen them all your life.”

  “Because they’re witches.”

  I blinked at her. “Gram? Come on—”

  She nodded. “All of them. I listen under the window. To the first part of the meeting, anyway; after that they stop talking and all they do is sew. Even the principal’s wife, Mrs. Henley, is one of them. She’s the one with the short blond hair.”

  She pointed again. I glanced toward the drive, not buying any of it. My eyes got pulled up short by a tall thin girl with long blond hair. Her jeans started at a pair of high-heeled clogs and went on forever; her sweater stopped just short of her belly button, which flas
hed red as she hoisted a bag over her shoulder. I blinked again.

  “That’s Genevieve Macintosh. She’s the bartender at the Village Grill.” Undine was grinning at me. I felt my zits prickle and knew I was blushing. “The other blonde just getting out of her car—that’s Mrs. Henley.”

  I could believe she was a witch; she looked like her face had been frozen in one expression since she was born. “She’s scary.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that doesn’t mean she’s a witch.”

  “They’re all witches,” Undine said calmly, watching them through the windows now. “Not the kind I want to be. But they know things. They’re like guardians. They keep the Otherworld from spilling into this one.”

  “The Otherworld.”

  “You remember—I told you about it last time.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “They raise walls, keep doors shut, with their sewing—”

  She lost me. I couldn’t see it. I let her wander on without me. Syl was in there with them, my cuz from the city with her hot red car, and her shiny black boots, and her hair like pirates’ gold. No way she’d sit around pretending to be a country witch.

  “There’s Dorian Avery,” Undine said. I watched a tall, pretty woman with long curly hair hurry out of her car. “She’s always the last one.” The sun finally lost its balance and went sliding down the other side ot the hill from Owen Avery’s tree farm. Inside, the noise was dying. The windows along the room were all open, thin white curtains drifting in and out of them like little ghosts. “I’m going to listen. Come with?”

  “I’ll wait,” I said, and sat down under the tree. Undine snuck across the lawn, parked herself beneath a window. I poked around in the dead leaves, trying to find something special, magic-looking for her. All I scared up was a beer bottle cap, some ants, and a big black beetle that fell on its back trying to scramble out of the leaves away from me. It waved its legs helplessly while I stared at it, wondering if it would bite. Finally, I flipped it over with a twig, and it crawled away.

  The sun disappeared. A star burned a hole in the deep blue above the hill where the sun had gone down. Planet, I remembered. Not star. I was trying to think which one it might be when Undine scuttled back across the grass, into the shadows.

  “Your cousin’s a witch now.”

  Oh, yeah.

  She took my hand suddenly, tugged to make me get up. Her hands were small and warm; I felt my face tingle again. But she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were on the darkening hill beneath the star.

  “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  We ran across the broad field beside the wood that went from the road near Gram’s house all the way to the dirt road going past Owen Avery’s farm and up around the hill. It was Gram’s field; she grew grass on it to make hay that people bought for their cows. The long grass tangled in our steps and smelled the way I remembered the world smelling when I was little. The star danced as we ran. Other stars pushed out of the sky overhead; dark chased us across the field. But we could see the dirt road when we reached the end of the field. Across it, tiny pyramids of baby trees covered the hillside. Above it, overlooking them and the field and Gram’s wood, was a big farmhouse. The porch ran all the way around it. Little curlicues and diddleybobs decorated the house under its peaks, above the windows and doors, along the porch posts. Even its roof was decorated with weather vanes and fat chimneys. A big barn stood on one side of it, a garage on the other. I could see greenhouses in the back, and a pond beyond them, with a rowboat floating on its dark reflection in the still water.

  All the lights on the bottom floor of the house were on, and somebody was playing a fiddle.

  “It’s Owen,” Undine whispered. “As long as we hear him play, we’re safe.”

  We were close to his porch by now. Peering around a bush, we could see him standing in one of the big rooms downstairs, a chandelier made out of what looked like deer horns blazing over his head. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I remembered him from the funeral. He wore a plain white shirt with its sleeves rolled up; he was sawing away at the fiddle. I could see the muscles shift under his shirt. There was a music stand with some music on it in front of him, but nothing was open. I didn’t know what he was playing. It sounded fierce and eerie; it made me wonder who he played it for.

  “Witches,” Undine whispered, giving me a double shock, because she had read my mind, and because her lips were so close to my ear I could feel her warm breath form every letter. I nearly fell in the bush.

  But she was already on the move, heading toward the back of the house.

  She ducked into one of the greenhouses, where she studied the little plants in their pots and read the labels. Now and then her voice pounced on one; she would read it to me— mandrake root, or hellebore—as if it proved something. I didn’t know what. I could still hear the wild music from the house as the sky got darker. It went on and on without a break, as though Owen never got tired, never forgot the next note, or couldn’t decide what to play next. The fiddle might have been playing itself.

  “Vervain,” Undine whispered, trailing her fingers across some pink clusters of small flowers. “It protects.”

  “From what?”

  “Other witches.” She sucked in her breath suddenly. “Look at this. Circaea quadrisulcata,” she read carefully on the little plastic card tucked into the pot of what looked like a gangly weed. “Enchanter’s Nightshade. Circe used it.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who turned sailors into pigs. In The Odyssey.”

  I got lost again. “So?”

  “Owen is a witch.”

  Everyone in the entire village was a witch, it seemed. “So who’s not?” I asked; she ignored me.

  “Only I’m not sure what kind he is. Look. Marigolds. You use them in a potion to see them.”

  “Who?”

  She did that thing to my ear again, breathing into it, “Fairies.”

  “Undine—” My voice wobbled.

  “Shh—” she said sharply, her head turned away. I heard it too then: the silence.

  We made it out of one end of the greenhouse just as Owen came through the other. He didn’t waste time going through the plants; he backed out the way he came in and charged outside, where he could see us. Or where he might have if we’d still been running. But Undine had jerked me toward the pond, her fingers locked around my wrist. The moon was just beginning to rise over the other side of Gram’s field, so my eyes actually picked out a few lines of the row-boat on the black water before we tumbled into it, and I didn’t yell.

  We made a thump, maybe a little splash as the boat wallowed under us. It drifted to the end of its rope. I felt the tug. I couldn’t hear Owen. Neither of us moved; I don’t think we breathed.

  My foot, trapped between Undine and an oar, went to sleep. The moon drifted up, a huge white balloon; anybody could have seen us then. I heard night noises: something creeping through the bushes, a bird complaining about the moonlight, some unidentified flying bug whirring past my cheek.

  Then we heard the fiddle again, and Undine started to untangle herself from me. Her head popped up above the bow. I pulled myself into the stern, sat looking at all the stars in the black pond above our heads. I tried to see them in the water. Undine put her hand down in a trail of moonlight, stirred it up; needles of light darted like moon-minnows away from her fingers.

  She whispered, “We’d better go before he hears us again.”

  “How could he have heard us? We weren’t making any noise; he was in the house wailing on the fiddle and we were in the greenhouse whispering.”

  “He sensed us.”

  She stood up carefully, caught the rope, and pulled us to the bank. I got a breath of pond water then, all dank with mud and weeds, tadpoles, turtles. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to float there all night on the water, watch bats flit across the face of the moon, wonder what was creeping around us while we were safe between worlds. I felt the boat di
p, then rise a little as Undine stepped out. She stood waiting for me, her face pale, her hair all frosty with moonlight, the snaps on the fishing vest pockets glittering, the rest of her gradually disappearing into her dark jeans and the weedy bank.

  I started to pull myself up. Then the boat was moving, its bow turning away from Undine. I lost sight of her, saw the moon above the distant line of hills, huge, white as an ice cube. The bow swung again, and I saw Gram’s house, a scatter of lit windows beyond the wood. Then dark, and stars, and the boat was floating toward them.

  Somebody was pulling it. Undine, I thought, excited. She must have changed her mind about leaving and slipped into the water to tug the boat out farther. She would have taken the fishing vest off, I thought. I’d see what that lacy thing under it was.

  I saw her head rise out of the water in front of the boat, her wild hair all smooth now, wet and glistening. She turned in the water like a seal; I saw her pale, moon-blurred face, her hands rising above water, the rope coiled around her fingers, taut and dripping water as she pulled me after her.

  Then I heard a deep voice shout behind me, “Tyler!”

  I jumped. The sleek head in front of the boat went under. I stared at where it disappeared, and felt the boat glide more quickly, the bow dipping a little, as though she pulled the rope from down deep.

  “Row!” It sounded like Undine’s voice behind me, and I went stiff with surprise. “Tyler, row!”

  Now I was confused—was Undine ahead of me in the water, or behind me on the shore? I didn’t know whether I should row back into trouble, or jump over the side of the boat and swim to the far shore with Undine. While I was trying to make up my mind, my hands were moving. They decided for me. They got the oars into the water without dropping them, and paddled backward with more strength than I thought I had. I heard a gurgle of water or a laugh.

  Undine? Water splashed under my oar, rippled and coiled around the swimmer ahead of me as she surfaced again. I dipped into moonlight, tried to heave the boat backward. That’s when I realized I was hearing familiar night noises— water, crickets, peepers—in the quiet night. No fiddle.