Fitcher's Brides
Page 33
When she wasn’t busy with some task, she thought about Amy. She was terribly worried about her sister, especially after her last visit to Harbinger. Amy had behaved so strangely, and told such unlikely stories, that Kate couldn’t help but think she’d lost her senses. Amy had always been so inclined to believe in her own damnation, very little effort would have been required to send her spiraling into millennarian frenzy.
So, on her seventeenth birthday, Kate asked her father if she could go to Harbinger to hear a sermon. It meant that he had to give up his daily visit to the tent preachers in town, but he willingly acceded, and let her take the buckboard and drive there—his gift to her.
She found the road dotted with small encampments, tents and people who were now living beneath their wagons, who had not come back after being denied entry. What they were eating, how they were subsisting, she didn’t know, but she supposed they must be dodging the pike and going into town for supplies. The number of campfires concerned her, but the cooler weather had brought with it storms, and the forest would be wet enough not to ignite easily.
It occurred to Kate as her wagon rumbled across the gorge that she might not be allowed in, either. However, the two men at the gate knew her—or at least knew that her father was in charge of the pike and that her sister had married the reverend. They couldn’t tell her where her sister was but they let her pass.
Harbinger looked more like a displaced temple than the last time she’d seen it. Previously, the front lawn had been devoid of people. Now it teemed with life. People were camped everywhere on the grounds, all the way to the fence. Children ran around the clusters of barrels, boxes, and tents, squealing the way playing children invariably did when they were running away from a harmless threat. She thought that more trees had been cut down outside the fence than the last time she’d been here—and that only a month or so back.
She left the buckboard in front of the house, tying the reins to a hitching post even as a boy came down off the portico and said he would watch it for her. She thanked him and went up the steps and inside the house.
She could hear the noise of the crowd before she even opened the door.
The foyer was packed with people. Half were pressing toward the door of the refectory, the rest pushing into the doorway to the Hall of Worship. Kate joined the latter group. She had come here to see Amy, but she felt some obligation to attend a sermon. And Amy might be there, too.
The pews were filled. Some of those in attendance appeared to have converted their space into a temporary residence. Blankets were draped over the backs of some pews, and clothing. People jostled one another. She witnessed anger and what might have been drunkenness. In the center of this tumult, Reverend Flavy upon the pulpit waved his arms like a little mad doll to which no one gave their attention. He was shouting but his words didn’t reach the back of the hall. On the altar below him, the translucent skull absorbed the color of the drapery below it, seeming to burn red in furious judgment of these so-called Christians.
Finally the noise subsided enough that Flavy could be heard. The audience turned and observed him, an army of ants diverted by a leaf that had settled in their path.
“Please, dear friends, we must begin the sermon,” he cried. “Settle yourselves.”
A few catcalls answered, but mostly people took their seats or else stood still, waiting to hear the rest.
“I’ve taken for my text today the words ‘Who knows the power of God’s anger?’ Many of us here today think we know this power, think we’ve met it. We’ve all had tribulations with our triumphs. You have. I have. But is that the power of God’s anger? Can any of us here say we’ve ever felt that fearsome power?” He made the mistake of looking at them all, of saying nothing long enough for someone to think of a response: “I can. He’s put me in here to listen to you!”
The crowd roared.
Flavy, although he might have a solid text prepared, lacked the skill to command. Fitcher spoke and people stopped breathing. Even when he was out of the pulpit, there was something in his manner, his speech, that held attention rapt. Poor Flavy might have answered the same call but not with any particular gifts.
Now as he clung to the sides of the pulpit people came in from behind it to drag him down. He cried out to them, “Don’t cast yourselves down by this act. You defy the voice of God!” Few seemed to think so. He was pulled from his perch, and immediately another man climbed into his place and held up a Bible to silence them.
The moment the noise subsided, he asked, “‘What benefits a man to gain the world and lose his soul?’” Wisely he filled in his own answer. “No one here should have to know this, for we’ve rejected the world and kept our souls. We have chosen salvation over iniquity because we are here.” The new preacher, though he looked to Kate as if he’d slept many days in his clothes, and not in a bed, had enough sense to make his case more softly, forcing people to pay attention, drawing them to a more intimate position, where they would have to listen too hard to ridicule. He knew what he was doing.
Meanwhile, Flavy was hauled to the side, where he wrestled himself free of his captors and marched past the stained-glass portals. Kate withdrew from the hall ahead of him, then waited in the foyer. Some of the crowd there had dispersed, although people occupied every bench, and a few sat on the bottom stairs.
When Flavy pushed through the door, she called his name. She said, “I hope you’ll remember me, Reverend. You married my sister.”
He looked confounded.
“You married her to Reverend Fitcher?”
“Ah, yes, of course.” He nodded vigorously. “You’re—”
“Katherine Charter.”
“Katherine. Miss Charter.” He ran a finger inside his soiled collar. “What might I do for you, child?”
“I was hoping to find my sister here, but no one can tell me her whereabouts.”
He looked toward the ceiling as if the answer might be written there, but shook his head. “I’m not sure I can help. The community is in terrible shape. Just look at it—ruffians, scabrous jackals, all pouring in, and not half of them deserving of anything like salvation. We’ve had robbery, a murder, and two rapes here in the past week alone. Here, on the holiest of grounds.
“It’s an abomination, which is why we’re turning ’em all away now. We caught the murderer and hung him, naturally, but I expect he won’t be the last the way it’s going. People think because they’ve got inside the fence, onto the plot of land, that they’re automatically worth saving. I tell you, when Fitcher gets back, I’m going to hand him a list of people who need to be tossed outen here. People who’d lay hands upon a man of the cloth.”
“It does not sound anything like God’s estate, sir. All the more reason for me to be concerned that my sister is here in the midst of it, because she did not accompany her husband on his crusade.”
He scratched the stubble on his chin. “Well, that’s peculiar, isn’t it? She should have. I can’t see why he would have refused her. Or else should have put her in charge—Lord, someone oughta be. An abomination,” he repeated. “If she’s here, she could well be down to the village. I think she made the candles, didn’t she? Like the one before her. I think so. You could look there. Someone might tell you something.”
“She had a friend who was close to Reverend Fitcher, who also did not go on this crusade. His name was Notaro, I believe.”
Flavy winced at the name. “Oh. Horrible thing. Impaled trying to scale the fence out in the woods.” He closed his eyes and made a little shake with his head. “And that was before it got bad. People used to talk about the Angel of Death taking lives in here. Talked of it like something evil lived in among us good, God-fearin’ folk and singled out the sinners at its discretion. Some here attributed Notaro’s death to it. I tell you, if that annihilating angel is about, it’s not doing its job anymore.”
Kate could think of nothing more to say to Flavy. She thanked him and headed out the back doors to the rear porch.
Against the dormitory wing on her right a row of little shacks and cages stood—feather-strewn coops for chickens that even now scratched and strutted around and under the porch. Feathers floated on the breeze.
She overlooked Harbinger’s converts and thought, No promised afterlife was ever shaped or stank like this.
To get to the village, Kate had to make her way through the camp. Nothing had been erected to any plan, no straight lines, just tents any old where. She zigged and zagged through them, climbing over bundles, logs, tin pots, and the occasional sleeping Fitcherite. Dogs wandered past her, people glanced up, some so filthy that by comparison Kate was a fairy-tale princess in their midst. One man made a rude, grasping overture to her as she passed by, but was too drunk to stand and pursue her. She realized that anything could happen here, and in broad daylight. No one would stop it.
She passed into the orchard. The trees were heavy with apples, and there were people on ladders picking them, as there were people in the fields. The corn had been harvested and the stalks bundled up or cut down. Elsewhere, people were gathering squashes and pumpkins. Even in the face of chaos, she thought, there remained people who didn’t let their lives unravel.
She remembered the chandler’s shop. Fitcher had pointed it out to them the day the family first toured Harbinger. The door of it was open and the smell of melted spermaceti leaked from within. She called her sister’s name even as she entered.
Three men looked up. One wore an apron. All three made their slight bows and said, “Welcome,” the way everyone had done on the first morning she’d visited. She answered in kind, then asked if they had seen her sister—that she understood Amy had been put in charge of making candles for the community.
“True, she was,” said the man with the apron, who identified himself as John Marsden. “And we’d have been fine if it weren’t for all the new ones here. So we been making more of them. Lots of people knowed how. I thought your sister’d gone with the good reverend out to spread the word.”
“No, she stayed behind.”
“If ’n’ that’s so, I can’t recollect as I’ve seen her in a while. You fellas?”
The other two shook their heads. Kate had the impression the other two wouldn’t have recognized her. She thanked them, then turned to go. She saw a small framed picture on the wall behind the candle rods. It was a silhouette cutout of two people in profile—a man and a woman. She wasn’t sure at first what was familiar about them. John Marsden said, “We found that lying on the floor under the table. Looked like it’d fallen down, so we hung it up. I seem to recall it’s a couple what used to be the chandlers way back a year or two.”
“They died,” said one of the other men. “Angel o’ Death took ’em.”
“Aw, Harley, you an’ your Angel of Death. Sorry, Miss Charter, but—”
“That’s quite all right. I’ve already heard about the angel.” As she left the shop, she muttered beneath her breath, “I believe, in fact, we’ve spoken.” She couldn’t be absolutely sure, but she thought the silhouettes in the picture resembled the young man Pulaski and his runaway bride. If so, it answered the mystery of where they’d gone if not what had become of them. Where Amy had gone, however, remained a mystery she did not solve.
Twenty-eight
TWO NIGHTS AFTER HER FAILED attempt to find Amy, the spirit of Samuel Verity began appearing to Kate. She was not entirely surprised that he did.
As is often the case in dreams, she and the spirit seemed to be in her house, but at the same time she was aware that the dream interior wasn’t her house, that the doors lining the walls were nothing like her doors, the halls were all wrong, and that she trailed the spirit through endless, winding corridors that would have required a castle or a fortress to contain them.
She’d never seen the ghost before. Vern had described him to her once as a dark-haired man who had no mouth, but the man who led Kate through the labyrinth had both mouth and a beard. He was dressed elegantly, as if for a gala event, and he held her hands, which she saw were gloved. She must be attending the event with him. Music played somewhere. A waltz.
He smiled and said, “Your turn is coming.”
“My turn upon the floor?” she asked.
“Upon the stage of the world.”
“But the world is ending.”
He shook his head. “Yours is about to begin. You are next to be courted, next to be asked.”
“No,” she argued, “there’s no one for me. My sisters had suitors, both of them, and even so they married someone else.”
“You will be asked before the end time arrives. You will wed.”
The news troubled her. She almost answered that she didn’t wish to wed, but that wasn’t entirely true. She had convinced herself it couldn’t happen with time so short. She had accepted that life would not offer her anyone. She didn’t want just a mate. She wanted a kindred, and was realistic enough to know that few people ever met their kindred, even without the final grains of sand pouring out of the world’s hourglass.
She couldn’t hope. It was too ridiculous, and she might have disagreed with him, except that he chose that moment to vanish completely, leaving her in the strange corridors alone, lost in a maze. She wandered along, calling out, receiving no answer, hearing now and then little scrapes and shuffles as if something trailed her just out of sight; but there were no shadows that could hide anyone, no hidden recesses. Finally, she simply tried one of the many doors. Opened it, and woke up.
She sat up and looked around herself. The two stripped beds across the room were holes torn in the fabric of her existence. Mr. Charter was all that remained of her family—even Lavinia was absent. She thought of the dream, of the promises being made. “It’s nonsense, my girl,” she told herself.
The wall sounded with two sharp raps. Kate stared at it, wanting to say “No, you aren’t real,” but holding her tongue and thinking, beneath her fear, that this was part of the pattern—she ought to have expected it. The focus bore upon her now. Her sisters had run the pattern and disappeared. Now she was the fox, with the hound close upon her heels.
Dressing, she was careful to make no other comment to attract the wall.
No further dreams of the strange house and the ghost troubled her—at least none she remembered—until the night before the crusade made its triumphant return. Only three nights remained until the world’s end. The crowded road had been in an uproar all day. People had begun to fear that Fitcher wasn’t going to return, that he’d abandoned them and they were doomed, damned, or otherwise cast adrift. It had been late in the night before they’d quieted down and dispersed to their respective encampments. Kate might have been more anxious of the end time’s approach herself, if dealing with them hadn’t exhausted her utterly.
Deep in the bowels of the night she awoke to find herself standing in the parlor. Her nightdress was gone and she was wandering naked through her house. The chill in the air raised goose bumps on her skin immediately she awoke. She could recall no dream, only the vaguest impression of a voice, a presence—something that had spoken to her, told her things she could not hear when awake. Apparently, it had undressed her as well.
Outside, the night was pitch-dark. There should have been a half-moon shining down, so the sky must have been overcast. She rubbed her arms. Something was leading her into the same trap where Amy and Vern had gone before her. She was terrified, maybe even more than she might have been if this hadn’t happened to them first; but she was also furious at the ease with which this force manipulated her. She checked her thighs for blood, but found none.
She started to leave the parlor, but stopped in the door
way. A gray figure was descending the stairs. Noises came from it—murmured breathy words. For a few moments she stood paralyzed as the figure approached. Then through her fright she realized it was her father. She stepped back to hide herself from him.
Mr. Charter still wore his nightshirt and a cap upon his head. He muttered as though in conversation with someone, “Yes, I understand, I’ll honor my promise. She’s to…to wed, and shall be. Certainly she shall be.” He walked past the parlor, threw open the front door, and strode out into the night as if he could see perfectly. Kate dashed back up the stairs. She found her gown in the hallway and put it on before chasing after him.
From the front door, she tried to see anything. If he was out there, he’d wandered too far away for her to make him out. She was about to go back for a lamp, when she heard the dull thock of the pole across the road bouncing against its support. A few moments later the sound came again. Kate crept across the yard. She stepped cautiously to avoid the blanket of acorns.
Soon she could perceive the shape of the sentry box and the white of Mr. Charter’s gown. He was raising the pike as if to let a wagon pass under, then tilting his head as if following its progress up the road. As soon as the phantom wagon had passed, he released the pole and let it drop, which he would normally not have done; and the pole loudly struck the stump across the way. Then he began again. He reached out as if collecting a fee, and proceeded to raise the pole. She was surprised no one else had come to see what the noise meant. Perhaps they were too scared.
Kate came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Papa,” she said. “Papa, wake up.”
He let go of the pole and it hit with a loud whack. He jumped at the sound, looked about himself, then turned around, facing his daughter. “What am I—”