The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Well?” Maggie asked Tom as he climbed back into the driver’s seat of the cab. She was sitting in the middle of the front seat; Eddie sat quiet beside the window.

  Tom looked at her, wondering who she was, this utter stranger. He closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again and saw her just the way he had before: a girl, hugging herself, one shoulder hunched higher than the other, head bent toward the higher shoulder, her brows drawn together above her nose.

  He reached for the key, which was still in the ignition.

  “Please,” she said. “What did you do with him?”

  “I let him go.”

  Both her shoulders hunched higher. She stared out the front window as he started the car. He saw a single tear travel down her cheek, but she made no sound.

  They drove in silence for a while. “He said he rescued you from someone who was hurting you. What did he do to the guy he took you away from?” he asked presently.

  “He cast a most magnificent hurtful spell on him,” she whispered.

  He hesitated, then said gently, “Maggie, I’m not Carroll.”

  She relaxed, sagging back against the seat. “I know.” She touched his arm. “I know. That’s what’s good about you.”

  After another silence, he said, “But how could you know that when you said you’d take my protection?”

  “Watched you with your wife.”

  “What?”

  “You asked her questions, and listened to her answers. You don’t trust her yet, but you do listen.”

  He stared at her, then back at the road. An utter stranger, full of threat and promise, and she carried his mark in her hand.

  They bucketed up out of a dip in the dirt drive and came suddenly upon the patched asphalt of Lost Kettle Road. Tom turned right, then pulled over and glanced back. The lane leading to Chapel Hollow was almost invisible, a dirt trace between trees, underbrush dipping over its edges. “No mailbox,” he said.

  “They got a p.o. box in town. Mr. Dirk picks up the mail a couple times a week,” said Eddie. “He’s a lawyer. He makes sure none of the zoning or anything interferes with the Hollow.”

  “Huh,” said Tom, frowning. “Eddie, you were living in Arcadia when I got there. You remember hearing about these people before you ran into Gwen?”

  “Nothing real obvious. Pops used to say, ‘Beware the women.’ I just figured he got burned in his marriage, which he doesn’t talk about. Didn’t think it had anything to do with me.”

  “Nobody told me anything about them, although people seemed to expect me to leave when I had no plans to. Maybe they expected the people in the Hollow to take me. I heard some guarded comments that I didn’t understand. I never asked what they meant.” He put the car back in drive and they headed out. “So what are we going to tell them when we get back? I don’t want them to know that I’m—that I’m—” He bit his lower lip.

  “Related,” Maggie suggested.

  “Right,” he said, smiling at her. “I mean, I have friends in Arcadia. You get the feeling these Chapel Hollow people are enemies of the Arcadians? Or what?”

  “I talked to the other fetches,” Eddie said. “Delia’s been there the longest, and she sort of feels like they’re her family. She came there when she was about sixteen and watched a bunch of them grow up. She’s eighty now. Some of them are her pets, in a way. She talked about the Old Days a lot, how the Hollow people had real power then and used it to help townspeople. Chester came to Arcadia when he was a teenager and nobody clued him in that this could happen to him, that those Hollow people could come steal him. He could tell there was something weird between Hollow people and townspeople, but he didn’t know what it was. So when Miss Sarah started fetching him, he fell hard. Like I did with Miss Gwen, maybe. Aren’t they the foxiest women you’ve ever seen?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve seen those two.”

  “Trust me.” Eddie sucked in a breath. “And every bit as sexy as they look. And much, much meaner.”

  “Some of the Hollow people are nice,” Maggie said. “Jaimie. Meredith.”

  “Shoot, Maggie!” said Eddie, staring at her again. “I still can’t believe you can talk! How did you keep quiet all that time? You could have told us.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Knew if I had a secret it would keep me strong. Done that before, used a secret as my backbone. If it’s a good secret, if it’s my secret, it gives me power even when I don’t feel like I have any. If I told anybody, even Barney, some Ilmonishti could make them tell, and then I’d lose my power.”

  “So how come you stopped keeping it up now?” Eddie asked.

  She leaned forward, elbow on knee, chin in hand. “Don’t know, just had to,” she said. “The time came. Now I got to find another one. Here’s one. It’s a secret Tom can do stuff like the Ilmonish.”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “I don’t know how people in town feel about the Hollow people, but if half of what Laura told me about how normal people get treated out there is true, I imagine they’re not too happy. I mean, Fred was scared of Laura when she came into the bar. If he found out about me, I don’t know if he’d even let me in there again, and that’s where I spend a lot of my time.”

  Eddie stroked his chin. “Tommy, I’m starting to remember something. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. Mr. Hal came into Fred’s bar one day. This was before I knew who he was. You were there, too; we were arguing about movies. We rented The Hidden on video the night before, remember? Or was it The Terminator? Anyway we were talking and all of a sudden nobody else was, and you turned around and looked at the door, and shushed me, and this guy had walked in. We turned around and there he was, a red-headed guy with a mustache, nothing much, walks to the bar, smiles at Fred, and out comes a glass of Fred’s private reserve, no questions asked. Remember?”

  Tom frowned. The moment came back to him, the sudden cessation of everybody else’s speech, the change in atmosphere he had learned to be alert for, the arrival of the undistinguished man. He remembered surveying the faces of the others in the bar for clues, information about what made this event distinct from others. Raising of eyebrows, thinning lips, shuttering of faces, blanking of expressions: the air whispered “threat.” Tom had gestured to shut Eddie up, and Eddie responded even though he wasn’t usually sensitive to undercurrents. The man smiled, a kind of wry, don’t-take-me-seriously smile, walked to the bar, and said, “Hi, Fred. I was just in town checking about the new seed. Got anything for a dry throat?”

  Fred, silent, got out the bottle, poured a shot. The mild man drank it, glancing around the bar, smiling. Heads turned away, eyes not meeting his. Tom ducked his head too when the stranger’s gaze came his way. Protective coloration.

  “Thanks,” said the man after he finished his drink. “Is it…thanks, Fred.” He had walked out without paying.

  “Yeah,” Tom said to Eddie, coming out of the memory. He tried superimposing the mild man’s face over the face of his new father-in-law, got a match. “I sure don’t want it to turn into something like that.”

  “We’re going to have to tell ’em something, though,” Eddie said. “I don’t think people ever get away from the Hollow.”

  “If anybody asks me,” said Maggie, “don’t think I remember much, except catching a ride with you when you were running away from them.”

  Tom grinned at her. “That’s a version I can live with.”

  “Just come out of the wilderness like idiots?” Eddie said, widening his eyes and letting his face go slack. “I could probably handle that,” he added.

  “Let’s try it, anyway. Maggie, where do you go from here?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Home?”

  “Not while my dad’s alive,” she said in a tight voice.

  “Oh.” They went a ways, made a left turn onto Rivenrock Road, finally a road with decent pavement. “How old are you?” Tom asked.

  “Be sixteen sometime soon. Sort of lost track of time.”

 
; “So you should be in school?”

  She laughed. It grated, edging toward a sob, but not getting there. “Have to play catch-up. Haven’t been to school since seventh grade. Not sure I want to go back.”

  “What do you want to do? Where do you want to live?”

  She looked down at the silver mark in her left palm, then up at him. “Take me,” she said, holding out her brand. “I’m yours.” She gave him the smile of a much older woman.

  Chilled, he said, “Stop it.”

  She relaxed against the seat back, leaving her palm open, its silver mark still visible. She gave him a young smile. “Give me crash space. Can find some kind of job, dish-washing, waitressing. Don’t feel up to long-range planning right now.”

  “Uh—”

  “He doesn’t have crash space,” Eddie said. “He lives in this little tiny room over the taxi garage. You can stay with me, Mag. I got a fold-down bed in the living room in my trailer.”

  “All right,” she said, but the smudges under her eyes darkened.

  Tom glanced at her. A big pothole jarred the steering wheel out of his hands. For a little while he concentrated on driving. At length he glanced at her again. “Maggie?”

  “What.”

  “Why is Eddie scarier than I am?”

  She turned away, staring out through the windshield, shrugged. “Not scared. Just tired.”

  “Tired of what?”

  She frowned and muttered something.

  “What?” said Tom.

  “Screwing around.”

  “Did I ever hurt you, Maggie?” Eddie said, pain in his voice.

  “No, not really.”

  “You came to my bed. You never said no. I thought we were comforting each other.”

  “You were warm. Carroll was cold even when he was in me. You were nice, and he hadn’t been nice to me in a long time. But a hug would have been enough.”

  “You never told me.”

  She closed her eyes. “Secret was more important,” she said in a weary voice.

  “Eddie, can I stay with you?” Tom asked. “Maggie can have my room.”

  “All right,” said Eddie.

  Maggie put her hand on Tom’s arm. “Don’t want to be alone,” she said. Her eyes were wide and miserable.

  “All right,” Tom said. “We can work something out.”

  They came to the highway, and drove north in silence. When they reached the outskirts of town, Tom looked at Eddie. “Where to?”

  “Is my trailer still set up in back of Pops’s garage?”

  “I think so,” Tom said.

  “I—I feel—”

  “What?”

  “Real people—what’s it like to talk to real people? I can’t remember.”

  “Guess we could find out sooner instead of later,” said Tom, and he drove to the Dew-Drop Inn. After he parked and turned off the engine, he and Eddie and Maggie looked at each other a minute, and that was when people came out of the bar and pulled open the cab doors.

  Chapter 10

  Judging from the number of people around the taxi, the bar must be pretty crowded for an early Friday afternoon, Tom thought. Maybe it was lunchtime, or maybe they were having some kind of special meeting. Sam Carson, the city marshal, was present, though he was out of uniform. Bert Noone, Tom’s boss, was the first to pull a taxi door open. Young Dr. Alton (as opposed to Old Doc Hardesty); Trailer Court Hank; Ruth the librarian, who only opened the library three days a week; Gus, the guy who manned the desk at the bus station for the few hours a day it was relevant; some guys from Diggers Dumpers Delvers Sand & Gravel; two men from the volunteer fire department; and a few assorted others, including the midday regulars, were present. People came to the Dew-Drop on their lunch breaks; Fred’s wife Tizzy was a wizard at making sandwiches and nachos. She whipped up a mean guacamole.

  Everybody present was excited.

  Bert patted Tom’s shoulder. He was grinning.

  “Tom! Tom? How’d you—what’s that you’re wearing?”

  “Eddie, you okay?”

  “Did you come from the Hollow? How’d you get away?”

  “We could use a drink,” said Tom as he, Maggie, and Eddie climbed out of the taxi.

  “Just a darn minute,” said Sam, the city marshal, “how old’s the girl? She looks like a minor.”

  Maggie clung to Tom’s arm and stared at Sam.

  “Shut up, Sam,” said Fred. “You’re off duty now. What’ll you have, Miss?” He held the door open. Tom, Eddie, and Maggie went into the welcome smoky darkness, and everyone else followed.

  Fred slipped through the crowd and went behind the bar, where he turned off the television. Tom helped Maggie onto a stool, then sat beside her. Eddie took the stool to Tom’s left.

  “Drinks on the house, Miss. What’s your preference?” Fred asked Maggie.

  Her grip on Tom’s arm hadn’t loosened. She looked up at Tom’s face.

  “How about a root beer?” Tom suggested, and she nodded. He added, “I’ll take a shot of whatever works fastest.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Bud,” said Eddie. “Oh, God. Choice. Oh, God.”

  Fred poured Maggie’s root beer from a can into a beer glass, drew Eddie a beer from the tap, poured Tom a shot of whiskey. “Talk. Please, talk to us, people.”

  Tom tossed back his shot, coughed, and wiped his mouth on his impossibly white sleeve. Warmth spread through him, thawing some of the stage fright he had been feeling. Here on what he had considered solid ground, he felt unnerved by being the center of attention. In the Hollow it hadn’t bothered him that much; somehow he had never convinced himself that the Hollow was real.

  “Not used to talking anymore,” said Eddie. He held his hands out, palms up, and looked at them. “These are mine, you know? For a long time they weren’t.”

  “You were at Chapel Hollow?” asked somebody.

  Eddie drank beer. “Yeah,” he said.

  “What’s it like inside that damned house?”

  “How many still alive out there?”

  “How the hell did you get away? Never heard of that happening before.”

  “What in tarnation are you wearing, Tom?” asked Bert.

  “These were the only clothes I could find.”

  “They get you naked out there? What were you doing?”

  Somebody wolf-whistled.

  “Well, I never thought it of Miss Laura,” said Fred. “Miss Gwen or Miss Sarah, even Miss Nerissa or Miss Elspeth, but not Miss Laura.”

  “It’s not what you think,” said Tom. He wondered how much Arcadians really knew about Hollow people. “When they turn you into something else, your clothes don’t—” He listened to his own voice, his own words, and sighed, wondering what any sane person would make of his remark.

  Everyone fell into a meditative silence. Maggie sipped root beer.

  “They turn people into things, huh,” said a voice, but it didn’t sound disbelieving, just resigned.

  “But you already knew that, didn’t you?” Tom said, trying to locate the speaker.

  “Heard of it happening,” said Ruth. “My little sister said she saw something like that once.”

  “What’d they turn you into?” asked someone else.

  Tom felt heat in his face, which surprised him. “I’d rather not say.”

  “We need information,” Sam said.

  “Ask other questions, then,” said Tom.

  “Did you see my brother Chester?” asked Rums, one of the firemen.

  “He’s alive,” said Eddie, “but he’s in pretty bad shape. If you let it get to you, you go crazy. I saw that happen to one girl—her name was Moira—she got so upset she was screaming and crying, and finally the Family took her off somewhere. I don’t know what happened to her, but I didn’t see her again. Chester’s pretty close to that edge, I think.”

  “Sam, when are you going out there and make them give us back our relatives? They’re not supposed to take relatives.”

  Tom re
membered Cleo the grocer’s sad look as she watched him work, her expectation that he would be gone soon. He thought of all the relatives he had in the world—seemed like there were a lot of them, but since Aunt Rosemary’s death, nobody who cared where he was. He had come here looking like a loner.

  “I’m not going out there to their home ground and get turned into a cow chip,” said Sam. He rubbed his hand over his bristly flattop. “Seems to me that would incapacitate me for my job.”

  “But it’s getting worse. Somebody’s got to stop it. They took two guys in one year. That’s way over the allotment. And they took Chester, and he was almost a native.”

  “Well,” said Sam, “here we are—we got three of ’em back.” He swallowed. “How’d you get away? Did you find a weak spot in their defenses?”

  Eddie stared at Tom, and Tom squinted back. Eddie lowered his eyes, drank beer in silence while everyone waited for answers. “It was Miss Laura,” said Eddie. “Her coming changed things enough so we could run off. I don’t think it’ll happen again.”

  “She’s leaving the Hollow tomorrow,” said Tom.

  “Maybe we could ask her—” Sam said.

  “It must be a fluke,” said Fred. “Blood’s thicker than water. Miss Laura may not like what they do, but she won’t turn against her own kin.”

  “You people just go on living here knowing those Chapel Hollow folks steal people and turn them into slaves?” Tom asked. He looked around. Most people refused to meet his eyes.

  “They have rules about that,” said someone in a low voice.

  “They do things for us,” said Syd Loftus, a retired man who spent hours in the Dew-Drop every day. “‘Least, they used to. Way back in settlement days, in 1852, they rescued a lost wagon train, cured the folks who had cholera, helped people build, and that’s how Arcadia started. In the bad flu years in the First World War, Miz Kerensa came into town and conjured the fever out of people; she was a fine healer and a great lady. In the Depression they made the land fruitful so we didn’t suffer too much, and they still do that in trouble years if we go out and ask right. During the floods of ’48 and ’62 they held the water away from the town; some towns disappeared right off the map in those floods, but we’re still here. Last twenty-thirty years, things have been changing. The young ones are growing up meaner, and they started taking folks. They didn’t used to do that. Except—can’t remember. Something—no. It didn’t used to be scary to live here, more like we had angels over the hill. Spring Pageant used to have real miracles in it, and around Christmas they’d come in and we would gift each other and have a big feast. But lately…”