The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  “Reve!”

  I spun around. “Do you know how long it’s been, Jolon? I do. I know, I feel every moment!”

  I ran then, wrenched the door open, slammed it after me. I leaned against the hard wood, a solid enough barrier between Jolon and me. I felt like screaming. Instead I kicked the iron pig boot scraper in the mudroom, and the lurch of pain was a relief.

  I limped into the kitchen, where I found Caleigh, wide awake, sitting with Nathan and Falcon Eddy. She was working her string and listening to them debate the merits of wooden as opposed to carbon fiber arrows. Falcon Eddy pointed to a note on the table. “Your housekeeper, the redoubtable Mrs. Pike, says she left a casserole in the oven for later. Said she had to go make her granddaughters’ costumes for Halloween.”

  “Halloween?”

  “Day after tomorrow, Mom,” Caleigh reminded me, her eyes bright with anticipation. “What are we gonna do? Where are we going to trick-or-treat?”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t know. I just don’t.” I’d forgotten all about it.

  I went to the bathroom, peeled off my clothes and stepped into the warm spray of the shower, trying not to feel anything except the sharp bite of the nettle stings. After I dried off, I changed into jeans and a sweater. My clothes hung on me. I’d probably lost five pounds in the past few days, in spite of Mrs. Pike’s efforts. I had been living on tea and coffee, I realized. At least I was clean.

  I heard the ooga-ooga of the Packard’s horn, along with the first rumblings of thunder, and went downstairs.

  Caleigh came running out, hugged my mom. “I brought your Halloween costume, lovey.”

  “Ooh, my Harry Potter robes?”

  “You bet.”

  She grabbed them and ran. “I’m going to show Nathan and Falcon Eddy!” Caleigh’s absence gave me a chance I’d been waiting for.

  I led my parents inside, closed the door to the parlor.

  “I went to see Nan, just before all this. I meant to talk to you, to tell you both what she said, but …”

  “Oh, honey.” Mom led me to the sofa, sat me down. “What did Nan say?”

  I told them her story, how she’d lived in Hawley and thought she’d disappeared the town. And I told them how I’d seen the girls by the stream, how if Nan was right, maybe they were in the forest, still, but somehow hidden.

  “Didn’t Nan ever tell you this story? About her past in Hawley, the missing children, being spirited away, any of it?”

  “She didn’t tell me, or your aunts.” Mom shook her head, frowning.

  Dad pushed his glasses further up his nose, getting settled in for a professorial riff.

  My father’s field is comparative literature, his own special niche being folk and fairy tales, and their intersection with hedge magic. He made an academic name for himself when he traveled small European towns for five years after graduate school and compiled a collection of folktales that had been buried by time, handed down only orally, and unknown to scholars. Then he came to Williams to teach, met my mother. I always privately thought that it was the fairy-tale quality of my mother’s family stories that drew him to her. That, and the Dyer powers. He had his own personal witch. He never did join my uncles in their jokes over the family legends.

  “Well. There are many reputedly haunted villages scattered about New England, as well as France and Britain, of course. In Connecticut there’s Dudleytown, where something similar supposedly occurred. The town just vanishing. And then Glastenbury, Vermont, and what’s called the Bennington Triangle, where up to nine people disappeared in the 1940s and ’50s under quite mysterious circumstances. Only two were ever found, and they had no recollection of where they’d been. One man disappeared during a bus trip, not at a stop, but while the bus was en route. The passengers swore to it, as well as the bus driver. But since we’ve lived here, I’ve never heard any such local legends about Hawley, nor read anything about it. Have you asked anyone here?”

  “Carl Streeter told me about the auction, how the houses all were left with everything still in them. When I asked him more about it, he tried to change the subject. Then one of Nan’s contemporaries told me pretty much the same story in Pizza Earl’s. And you know I can’t get anyone local to work at the house. Except Mrs. Pike, who charges me double her normal rate. It does seem as if people are reluctant to go into the forest, especially near Five Corners. Or even to talk about it.”

  “Maybe the town itself wants to remain unknown.”

  I didn’t laugh. It didn’t seem funny.

  Dad went on. “One thing I’ve come to believe in after all my work on legend and folklore is the spirit of place. Some places on earth, and a surprising number of them, have been centers of evil or of good. They’re powerful. Because of events that happened there, or ley lines, or some unknown presence, whether mineral or spiritual. They attract certain happenings, and not just one, but layers of them. In England, Avalon is supposed to be located somewhere near Glastonbury, as Stonehenge is. Many other places that have to do with Grail legend are certainly layered in that way. Temple Church in London, for one. And then certain places are good for certain disciplines. Writing, for instance. In Cummington, just over the hill from Hawley, the same ridge has been home to three national poet laureates over the course of a century, seemingly by pure chance. So the Dyer influence may be particularly strong in Hawley. That could be why Nan thought you’d be safe from the Fetch here.”

  “But he was here. I know he was. And I’m certain he killed Maggie. He wants revenge. For something, something he’s convinced is my fault. And, well … I saw it all in this book.” I pulled out The Hawley Book of the Dead. I opened it.

  “Even though the pages are blank now, yesterday they weren’t. Mom, have you ever seen this?”

  She looked stricken. Her eyes were fixed on the Book.

  “Mom?”

  She rose, her hands clenched so hard her knuckles were white. “I need some water,” she said, her voice hoarse. She started toward the kitchen sink, but halfway there, she stopped, and her body shuddered. My dad rushed to her, sat her down again. I remembered the strange kind of fit she’d had at the Hawley fair, when she seemed to be choking. I got a glass and filled it with water for her.

  “Here, Mom.” She clutched at the glass, drank deeply. Beads of sweat trickled down her face. She opened her lips, but no sound came.

  I turned to my father, frantic. “Dad, what’s wrong with her?”

  He shook his head, but she fixed her golden eyes on him, her expression pleading.

  “P-p-p-p …” she stammered, and her hand swiped at his shirt pocket. He pulled a pen from it, took the cap off, and she grasped it. Her eyes raked the room. I ran for the pad of paper near the phone.

  She held the pen with both hands and scribbled out the words tell, tell, tell.

  “Okay, honey,” Dad said. “I’ll tell what I can.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Nodded once.

  My father took the Book from my hands, tried to prize its covers open. It wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s a grimoire, I think,” he told me. “Grimoires hold instructions in how to perform magic, sometimes also records of how they’ve been used, who has used them. Where did you find it?”

  “It was hidden in the wall beneath the portrait in my office. Nan said she hid it in Hawley after what happened in 1924. My visions of Voss came from the Book.”

  I told them how I’d seen Rigel Voss’s departure, and his time at Pizza Earl’s, as well as the strange vision of the magician. Dad got up and paced while I talked.

  “Nan mentioned the Tuatha De Danann. Does that mean anything to you?”

  My mom gave a strangled cry. Tell her, tell her, she wrote.

  Dad gave my mother a quizzical look. “I thought she should know all along, Morgan. Right from the beginning.” My mother glared at him. He sighed, turned to me. “Nan never wanted you to know any of this. She made sure your mother wouldn’t be able to tell this part of the family history, ever. You ca
n see the result. It’s the same with your aunts. Only the approved tales can pass their lips.”

  Mom slapped the table with her hand, scribbled just TELL IT!!!

  Dad reached over and stopped her hands. “All of it?”

  My mother nodded frantically, made another stifled sound.

  “All right.” He turned back to me. “You remember Nan’s Tuatha De Danann stories from when you were little?”

  “They were like fairy tales, bedtime stories. I don’t remember much about them.”

  “Well.” He took a breath and plunged on. “Many women in the Dyer family—Mary Dyer, some of the Revelations, and now it seems even your grandmother—have been accused of being witches. It wasn’t uncommon in New England, into the last century. Maybe even now, in some places. It’s why we don’t broadcast this story, why your Nan made it impossible for her daughters to speak of it at all. Why court trouble? The Dyer women have had enough of that over the centuries.

  “But I did some research into the origins of the family. Mary Dyer’s mother, who was really the first of the Revelations I can trace, was born not in England, but in Ireland. She came from Drogheda, in County Meath.”

  “Where Newgrange is?” Jeremy and I had gone to Ireland for our honeymoon, and stayed in the Kilcoole house. Newgrange was one of our day trips, to see the underground fortress, the megalithic goddess cult carvings.

  “Yes, exactly. Revelation Cullen was her name, but she took the name of Dyer when she immigrated to England and joined the Puritan sect. You see, Cuilleann means the holly tree, sacred to the Tuatha De Danann. So the place names, Mt. Holly and Hawley, go back to that, they must. But Dyer, well, Dyer was the name for anyone who could change the color of their skin or cloth or hair. Usually with the help of plant-based dyes. But in this case, maybe she didn’t need them.”

  My mother shot him an impatient glance. “I know, I know. I’m getting ahead of the story. Or behind it.” He paused to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose again. “But, yes, my premise is that the girl, Revelation Cullen, descended from the Tuatha De Danann and was a shape-shifter. Her name change might have reflected that power, while hiding her Tuatha De ancestry.”

  “But weren’t the Tuatha De Danann just, well, fairies?” I said with a laugh. Witches, I could just about believe. Shape-shifters and fairies stretched credulity.

  “No. That’s incorrect. Not fairies,” my father insisted. “The Tuatha De Danann were considered an actual historical people until the seventeenth century. They were human, but it was thought that they had supernatural powers. The seventeenth century was a time of witch trials and the war of Protestant and Catholic beliefs. But I think both were really signifiers of the final battle in the war against the goddess cults. The Tuatha De Danann were goddess worshippers. They had blended and intermarried with the Milesians, the first of the modern Irish peoples. Then they were forced further underground, so to speak, to avoid the persecution of those who were different, perhaps those who had powers that seemed superhuman. It’s quite possible that Revelation Cullen left Ireland because of persecution by the Catholic Church. That she’d been an accused witch, or was about to be accused.”

  “So she hid with the Puritans? That doesn’t seem very safe, considering.”

  “It might have been the lesser of two evils at the time. The facts are that a girl named Cullen left County Meath in 1632 and was accepted as a member of a Leicester Puritan congregation, where she was known as Revelation Dyer. She later gave birth to a daughter, Mary Dyer, who immigrated to Boston.”

  “So you’re saying that we’re not only witches, but have fairy blood, too.”

  “Tuatha De Danann blood. They were thought of as fairies. But not fairies as we’ve come to portray them, tiny winged people. They were humans with some strange powers. Like witches. It really all came down to the fact that these women had unusual talents. Passed on through the generations. Right down to you both. To Caleigh. And to Grace and Fai.”

  “They don’t have their powers yet.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  It was true. “No. I guess we don’t.” I supposed it was possible, just, that Grace and Fai had come into their powers, whatever they were, then had a hard time controlling them. Whether that was true, or whether Rigel Voss had them, would I ever see them again?

  My father continued, “I know that you all, descended from Tuatha De Danann as you very well may be, have powers outside the norm. That certain places or situations attract and strengthen those powers, because of your history. The history of your people.”

  “Places like Hawley Five Corners.”

  “Certainly Hawley Five Corners. Maybe any place where five roads come together. Crossroads have always been considered magical places, and five roads converging the most mystical. Perhaps Revelation Dyer chose Five Corners as a place to settle because of the convergence.”

  “Why five? Why not three?”

  “Well, three is the number of Christianity. The Holy Trinity. Five has always been considered an especially spiritual number as well. But not in Christian myth. For the Jews there’s the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, then in many non-Christian faiths the five-pointed star, or pentagram, is significant; the fact that goddess-worshipping cultures had a five-season calendar, the perfect fifth on which all Western harmonies are based is also …”

  “Okay, Dad. I get it. So the power might still be here is what you’re saying? To be called upon when needed.”

  “It’s a theory. There’s one more thing. The Danann possibility may mean more than you think. You see, it most often seems to kick in when there’s danger. When Nan was … well, wherever she was for those months, there was a real threat. Children were being kidnapped. She returned only after the danger was past. No more children disappeared after her return, did they?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Then since the girls haven’t returned, the danger’s still present. Still out there.”

  “You mean because Voss is still around?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  I thought on that for a moment.

  “You know Voss means to do them harm, whether he has them now or finds them before we can. And the Book didn’t tell you how far he’s gone.” My father had a point. “Either way, the girls won’t return until the threat is past.”

  My mother gasped, and her hand flew to her throat. Her breath was ragged. “If something … if something does happen … remember what your father’s told you. You should remember it, remember who you are.”

  “You mean the Danann blood?” I was still skeptical. “That didn’t do Mary Dyer much good. She was hanged, after all.”

  “She escaped once, went back to England,” Dad told us. “She didn’t have to return. She chose it. To die for her beliefs.”

  Mom trembled. She took my face, turned it toward her own. Panic flared in her eyes. “You don’t have to die for this. If something happens. Mary Dyer wasn’t a Revelation.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “The Revelations have the strongest powers of the Dyers.”

  “Why did you name me Revelation?”

  “Nan knew,” Mom told me. “She said we should give you the name. It means you have more ability than most to tap into your powers. Powers you may not even know you have until they’re needed. Just remember that. Remember if ever you … well, if you’re in trouble. Use whatever gifts you have to protect yourself.” Her voice was urgent.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll remember.” How could I forget? She was still inspecting my eyes, as if she was trying to read my future in them.

  One thing still puzzled me. “Why can you tell me all this, Dad? Why didn’t Nan put a … a spell on you?”

  “That I couldn’t say. Maybe she needed a repository of knowledge. For this day.”

  Mom clutched my hand until it hurt. The golden depths of her eyes held an old terror. “Reve, please, please be careful.” Her voice was wrought, uneven. “Whe
n you first started … disappearing … you were only two years old. I’d be playing with you, or bathing you, and you would just suddenly be gone. We were frantic, searching everywhere. We knew what it was, knew that it was your power. But we didn’t know where you were, or how to find you. We couldn’t exactly call the police.” She laughed, a throttled sound. “We could do nothing but keep looking, hoping you’d return. Our greatest fear was that you’d be trapped there somehow, never come back to us. Then we would find you. In a closet or curled under your bed.

  “You came back in terrible shape. With raging fevers, infected wounds. Sometimes you had been … beaten. You were just a baby!” My mother broke down then, clasping me to her so tightly my breath came in little gasps. “If I hadn’t been able to heal you, you would have died. I thought I’d die, from panic and grief, and not knowing, every time. We began teaching you to curb your power then, but … oh, Reve, we came so close to losing you!” She sobbed quietly then, and I held her. It was strangely like comforting myself.

  Cemetery Road—October 30, 2013

  1

  I just wanted my daughters back. I wanted them with me. I wanted their high clear laughter, their quick litheness on horseback, even the maddening teenage slumping they reverted to as soon as their feet hit the ground. I wanted to yell at them for their bad posture, threaten them with yoga classes, as much as I wanted to hold them close. I just wanted another normal day with them.

  I tried to stay focused, to keep despair from overtaking me, but when my thoughts turned to ancient races with godlike powers in a land under the ground, that made me feel hopeless, too. Why we no longer want to believe in magic in our real lives is a puzzle, but we don’t. The possibility frightens us, makes us retreat into the turtle shells that our rational minds are. We don’t like to be spooked, except perhaps on Halloween, which was fast approaching. The night all the evils beyond the rational world are given full reign.