The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  My eyes scanned the gleaming gold of the boxes, the swags of velvet curtain, swept up to the catwalks. I gazed out at the audience, my audience. It might be the last time I ever stood before them, at the intersection of stage magic and real magic.

  “You have been …” My eyes filled again, and for a moment I couldn’t speak. The audience erupted, clapping and cheering, throwing their white roses at my feet. I picked one up, held it to my cheek, its petals cool against my burning skin. I signaled for quiet.

  “You have been so good to us. You didn’t just buy tickets to our shows. You gave us your attention, your wonder, your amazement. It is with a full heart that I say thank you, and good-bye. For we will not obey that cardinal rule of magic.” I raised the rose high above my head. “We will never be seen again, myself or my girls … until my husband’s killer is found!” I lowered the rose, and as I did, the images of the girls shimmered, then faded away.

  Instead of applauding, the audience held its collective breath, waiting for my next move. I saluted them with that one rose, one last time. I walked down the steps, up the center aisle, among them. They reached out to touch me, they called my name. When I could feel their fingers brush the fabric of my clothes, smell their perfume, their sweat, their belief, I performed my last and finest trick. I vanished.

  Hawley Five Corners—October 10, 2013

  1

  Our plane landed in Boston midday. The city was languid, hushed in the heat of Indian summer. The cabdriver’s pace was slow as a dream. The office workers walking to lunch downtown slung jackets over their shoulders, loosened ties. An old ivory haze hung over the city.

  We rested at the Park Plaza, our haunt from the days Jeremy and I played Boston, when my Maskelyne and I made orange trees grow before our audience, then picked the perfect golden fruit and tossed it to the crowd. An illusion of both production and of time control. I wished again that I had the gift of true time control, that I could travel back to those days before I smelled the lilacs in the desert, and keep us all safe somehow. Keep my husband alive, walking on the earth next to me.

  Time travel was not my forte, though.

  The girls were passed out on smooth, cool white sheets after three flights—from Las Vegas to New York to Iceland, then to Boston. The crazy flight pattern had been part of our escape. After the girls had gone through Harry Houdini’s trapdoor in the Bijoux, Dan had smuggled us out of the theater during all the uproar over my vanish. Nathan was waiting with a car to drive us all to the airport. I’d wanted to get the girls out of the country, hoping it was less likely the Fetch would follow. Not that I put much faith in airport security, but flying out of the country and back in added another hurdle, and I needed to put as many as I could between him and my girls.

  But at the hotel, I was restless. Nathan stayed in the suite with the girls while I went down to the restaurant in the Park Plaza lobby. Boston is not a city of magic, not like Las Vegas, where it reigns supreme, or even L.A. No one came up to my table to murmur, “Your Metamorphosis was the best illusion I’ve ever seen” while presenting me with a limp napkin to autograph. Although Jeremy and I had appeared on Leno and Letterman, had our own few television specials, performed nightly for months at a time to packed houses, we were not usually recognized outside Las Vegas.

  And now no one stared at me because they’d seen me splashed all over the nightly gossip shows and the tabloids after Jeremy died. No one remembered the face of the lady magician who had killed her husband. So I sipped my tea in peace, while a man with a crew cut played Cole Porter songs and sweated onto the piano keys. No one watched me, no one at all. What a difference three thousand miles makes. No police, no magic fans. And no Fetch. I just hoped it would last.

  We set out for our new home in the afternoon. Before we’d left, I bought an SUV online, had it delivered to the hotel. I drove it toward the westering sun. As the hours passed the trees became thicker, the air cooler, the houses fewer, the voices of my children more strident.

  “Oh, my God! Where are you taking us?” Grace whined when I turned onto the main street of a classic New England town. HAWLEY VILLAGE, a white sign with stark lettering told us, FOUNDED 1741. She flipped her red hair back. I could see it spark in the rearview mirror, bouncing like Slinkys released. The twins had my fierce curls. Their faces were identical, down to the constellations of freckles that spangled their delicate noses, but it was otherwise easy to tell them apart. Although both were just starting to come out of a Goth phase, Grace was still partial to ripped black jeans and black leather jackets, with black eye paint in swaths up to her eyebrows. Fai, less inclined to denim and makeup, wore long fringy things that made her look as if she’d stepped fresh-faced out of a fairy tale, a milkmaid in mourning. Because they always dressed in black, they’d wanted white for the funeral, white for mourning their father. Now each of them always wore something white, a scarf or a shirt. The black clothes were ceding to white, but their clothes still reflected their personalities, Grace’s sleek, Fai’s princess inspired.

  Caleigh inherited my russet coloring but Jeremy’s stick-straight hair, was solid where her sisters were lean as greyhounds. She played her usual never-ending string game, her hands busy leaping from her warm-up patterns—“Cat’s Cradle” to “Cup and Saucer”—then to the patterns of her own devising. Her patterns were now called things like “Falling Leaves” and “Maple Candy.” “Missing Dad” was still in the rotation, but she wove it a little less frequently. Maybe it was a sign this move was good for us all, even though my heart hurt when I thought how Caleigh was getting used to a world without Jeremy, how we all were.

  “Hey, look, a fair!” In spite of her concentration on the string, Caleigh didn’t miss much.

  A large wooden cutout of a pumpkin proclaimed HARVEST FESTIVAL, OCTOBER 19, 20—FOOD, FUN, MUSIC.

  “Hey, it’s next weekend! Can we go?” Caleigh was a lover of caramel apples and fried dough, like most ten-year-olds. “Mom, will you take us?”

  “I don’t want to go to some raggedy-ass fair,” Grace sniped.

  “Language, Grace.” Although I knew that far worse words than raggedy ass could, and did, come flying from their mouths.

  “Yeah, you didn’t hear her language at the hotel.”

  I sighed. “And I’d rather not hear it now, Faith.”

  “Don’t call me that. You know I hate the thh. It makes people spit.”

  I was almost grateful for some grumbling and crankiness, the times my daughters reminded me of their old unguarded selves. We had all been trying too hard, and I could see that Grace and Fai felt the strain of it. Fifteen is a vexing age. All fifteen-year-olds want to grow up faster than they have a right to. Without their father to brace them up, I was afraid for the twins, balanced on that cusp where a child can become a woman overnight. I wished I could wave my magic wand and make everything better. But the magic was gone from our lives, along with Jeremy.

  In a strange and horrible way, the Fetch had made us closer. My daughters could have turned away from me after Jeremy died, blamed me as I blamed myself. But now it was all of us against the Fetch, against their father’s killer. The sad truth was that not one of us was the same person we had been. Maybe fighting this battle together would get us through to some other side, where we were scarred but still ourselves, still there for each other, still a family. I could hope for that, cling to it while everything in our lives was changing, shifting in the wind like drifts of fallen leaves in the yards of Hawley Village.

  I turned off Main Street, past the church, the row of stores that included Pizza by Earl, the Suds & Stuff Laundromat, a drugstore, and Elmer’s, the tiny grocery that proclaimed FRESH CURED BACON, DAVE’S EGGS, LAST OF THE SILVER QUEEN from a blackboard on the sidewalk.

  “Dad would love this place,” Fai said. “It would crack him up.”

  I had a flash of longing for Jeremy. He would laugh, Fai was right. The town was a caricature of New England quaintness, a caricature of itself. But in a moment
we were beyond houses, beyond sidewalks and stores. The sharp light caught and flamed in the saffron-colored leaves of maple trees.

  I nearly passed the road, had to screech onto it. The girls screamed.

  “Mom, it can’t be here!”

  “What, we have to live on a dirt road? No, we can’t, I’ll be mortified.”

  “Aren’t there even streetlights?”

  “You saw the pictures,” Nathan reminded them. Carl Streeter had sent photos, so we knew what we were getting into.

  “Yeah, but nobody told us we were gonna be hicks.” I felt her kick the back of my seat.

  Nathan turned and gave her one of his burning looks. “Save it, Gracie. And if you don’t want to be a hick, don’t act like one.” I just went on driving down the road, which was smooth as a board in spite of the lack of paving. The road dipped down, dappled with sunlight and floating leaves.

  “There are so many trees,” Fai grumbled.

  “Yeah, too many.” Grace resumed her complaining. “I don’t see why—”

  “Here we are.” I cut her off, mid-gripe. Drove down another sweep of road, through a tall gate in a high fence, a gate that swung open after some unseen device read the bar code I’d fixed to the windshield. Past the line of huge old sugar maples, past what had once been an active Congregational church, white and imposing, in spite of needing a fresh coat of paint. Past two houses, also white, also peeling paint, old New England farmhouses, one with a rambling porch. Briars and weeds grew up around them all.

  The girls just sat for a moment, awed.

  “This is it? We’re gonna live here? It’s almost a whole town.”

  “Well, it was a town once. A very small town,” I amended.

  “Does the fence go all the way around?”

  I considered the tall fence, the electric wire strung above it, and a luxurious calm washed over me, unknotted muscles I didn’t know were clenched. “It sure does.”

  “Mom,” Fai said, “don’t you think it’s overkill?”

  I looked back at my daughters, their fledgling faces. They waited for an answer, unaware of their loveliness, or their fragility in the world. Losing their father had tempered them, but hadn’t made them feel any less the invincibility of youth. They believed they would live forever. Always a bad assumption.

  “No. I don’t think it’s overkill.”

  “It makes me feel like what’s-her-name. Snow White.” Grace was staring at the cluster of old houses. “Wasn’t she the one in the castle with the thorns all around?”

  “That was Sleeping Beauty. Snow White had the glass coffin.” Caleigh, closer to the years of bedtime stories, corrected her.

  “Yeah, her, Sleeping Beauty.”

  I recalled the story, the spell cast. If only our problem was a fairy with a grudge.

  “Is this where they lived?” Caleigh asked. “The ladies that had your name?”

  “Our great-great-great-whatevers,” Grace clarified.

  I pulled into the drive of the farthest house, the largest, the loveliest. The paint was peeling, like the others. But the grass was mowed, the weeds subdued. And the fanlight over the massive front door was glowing, welcoming us, so at least there was electricity. The windows of the plain, vast Federal house shone bluely in the last of the afternoon light. We were home, in the land I grew up in. The land of the Revelations.

  “Yes,” I told my daughters. “This is where they lived.”

  2

  The townspeople in Hawley Village knew me as only Reve Dyer, a widow with three girls. Not as the Great Revelation, one half of the Amazing Maskelynes.

  I’d used my maiden name for everything, bank accounts, contracts, in my conversations with Carl Streeter; I drilled the girls that they must, too. I doubted that any of the locals were true magic fans. Even if they’d been to Las Vegas, even if they remembered the tragic death of a well-known magician, they probably wouldn’t guess who I was. They didn’t know why I’d moved to Hawley. And they wouldn’t know about my connection to the forest, to the Five Corners. None of them would remember me as a girl. I’d grown up in Williamstown, fifteen miles and a different world away. Only Jolon would remember, and he was long gone.

  I might have been the first Dyer woman in over two hundred years to use my husband’s name, but I’m also the last in a series of women with the name “Revelation” twining through a few hundred years of the Dyer family. I’d heard tales of them and their magic from the time I could understand speech.

  Thanksgiving was a harrowing time for my mother’s family, the time of year when the dark settled in and they contemplated the past, sowed it in the fertile ground of their children’s imaginations. Hearing the first murmured tales, my uncles and boy cousins would leave the table laughing at their witchy wives and mothers. But not me. I wanted to hear those stories. They were my birthright: I was a Revelation, after all.

  I was named, like the others, after the first Revelation in the New World. The great-granddaughter of Mary Dyer, who’d been hanged in Boston on the first day of June in 1660, for her Quaker proselytizing. Mary Dyer’s sons and daughters headed to Pennsylvania, where Quakers were better tolerated than in Puritan Massachusetts. That first Revelation’s grandparents were among them. But New England roots remained strong. Decades later, when Revelation herself was suspected in the Mount Holly, Pennsylvania, witch scare of 1740, she fled with her family to Massachusetts. To the place that became Hawley Five Corners.

  The first Revelation and her family were never seen again in Mount Holly. But Revelation’s sister Prophet received a letter the following year, in the spring of 1741. The letter said only, “Come to us. Travell the Massachusetts Western Highway and aske for the Hawley Five Corners as you go. You will finde us here, where we live in safety and peace.” Prophet never went, and died that year under mysterious circumstances. There were no other letters, but Revelation’s family almost certainly founded the town of Hawley Five Corners, “Hawley” an alternate spelling of their old Pennsylvania town. That is what we knew from the oral history of our family. Why the town had been abandoned didn’t figure in the family tales, only Revelation’s part in its founding, and the stories of her descendants.

  My Nan still owned the houses at Hawley Five Corners, yet had never gone to live in them. But I was bound to Hawley in another way. When I was a young girl, Hawley Five Corners was my own secret town, mine and Jolon’s. Jolon Adair was my best friend, then my first love. Every Saturday my parents would drive me to the Adairs’ house in East Hawley, and we’d ride their ponies. From the time we were big enough to saddle the ponies ourselves and ride into the forest, the abandoned village at the intersection of five roads had been our dream town. In those years we were growing up, vagueness was acceptable; parents had been lulled into the complacency of believing nothing lurked in wait for their children. We never told where we rode, that we’d eat our picnic lunches in that forsaken place. We grazed our horses among the abandoned houses while we ate our sandwiches, and hawks drifted in lazy circles overhead.

  When we were children we were quiet, almost reverent. Years later, we talked and laughed, smoked the cigarettes Jolon stole from his father’s pack of Chesterfields, and kissed among the lilies by the church, or on the steps of the white house with the tangled lilacs that would become my house. Then we’d ride to Pudding Hollow, or Bozrah Brook, or the long way round Hell’s Kitchen. We always ended up back at Hawley Five Corners, just at dusk, with only enough time to ride back and be home for supper.

  I had always known the history of the Five Corners was entwined with my own family’s. By the time Jolon and I started riding in Hawley Forest, the old stories just seemed like other fairy tales. Over the years, I all but forgot them. All the years our horses loafed and crunched the tall grass, and we laughed too loudly, blowing smoke rings into the fairy air.

  The stories came back to me, though, after Jolon was long gone, lost to me. On cool misty evenings when I’d trailered my horse to the forest, ridden too long an
d too late and arrived at the Five Corners alone. Even when I was cold and sweaty and chilled to the bone, a warmth would blanket me at the Corners. I never felt afraid in the forest. It was my refuge then, so it wasn’t really surprising to me that I ended up in Hawley, the place of all places I’d felt safest in. Things do happen for a reason. When Nan’s letter came to me, I remembered my childhood rides in the forest, and coming upon that abandoned landscape. I remembered Nan’s stories, too, and the satiny edge of the blanket I liked to clutch between my fingers while she told them, and the nightlight, with scenes from Sleeping Beauty revolving in a magic lantern.

  Nan was right. I still felt safe at the Five Corners. But the feeling had no basis in solid fact, only old memories and older stories.

  As I looked at my girls in the fading light of our first day in Hawley, I hoped I’d done the right thing, reverting to the past, to the Dyer name. Or was I just trading one kind of magic for another?

  3

  Magic is the oldest art. The first person who learned to control fire was the first magician. Perhaps it is its unimaginable age, its place at the beginning of human history, that ensures there is nothing new in it. Elements of the same tricks and illusions are performed in nearly every magic show, to greater or lesser perfection, with perhaps a new twist every hundred years or so. There is something a little tawdry about magic. It is the magician’s finest trick to rise above the dime-store tackiness that infuses our profession.

  I’d never been good at it. I still remember the magic show Jolon and I put on when we were ten. I was the magician, he was the assistant. Jolon was always too trusting, let me have my head like his favorite pony. I wore a long dress and a cape made from an old velvet bathrobe of my mother’s. I shuffled cards and dropped them, pulled my guinea pig out of the balaclava I’d stitched him into. I would have tried to saw Jolon in half, but for my grandmother who took the saw away from me. Altogether, I was a rotten magician, but I’d always had a soft spot for magic.