Mother of Crows

by David Rodriguez

  “Because it’s dark, Nate! And you know… spiders.”

  “Sure. Let’s go.”

  “Nathan. You are not hearing me. Spiders!”

  Nate ignored her and headed out of the room. Abby sighed. There was only one way Nate was going to get this out of his head and that was to go along with him. At least this would help put her betrayal behind them.

  The basement stairs were behind a door in the kitchen, concealed in an alcove by the pantry. Abby opened the door and gestured to the stairs descending into the dark. “There you go. The basement.”

  Nate stood at the top of the staircase, peering down. She thought he might be afraid, but he took a step inside and reached out to pull a cord. An old yellow lightbulb flickered on.

  Before Abby could reply, Nate was already headed down. She took a deep breath and followed him, watching out for spiders at every step. Soon, Nate would discover that there was not a giant, underground chamber in the basement. She was positive that there had to be a perfectly normal, rational explanation for everything. One that includes croatan, she reminded herself.

  She lingered at the bottom of the stairs while Nate explored the basement. It was spacious. The walls were lined with tools, cleaning supplies, and everything else an army of servants might need to run a house like Harwich Hall. On the far side of the room were some ancient-looking wooden barrels. Everything seemed normal to Abby. The only basements she’d seen were on TV, though once she’d been into the one at Nate’s house. TV basements were always shrouded in spider webs and filled with creepy old toys. Nate’s was stacked floor-to-ceiling with cardboard boxes.

  “It’s pretty clean,” Nate said. “Cleaner than most basements.”

  “You’ve met my mother, right?”

  “Yeah, but there’s like, no dust. None at all.”

  Nate looked at the ceiling, furrowing his brow. He pointed, then pivoted to look in the opposite direction, right at the antique barrels. He grinned and went over toward them to poke around.

  “That’s it? That’s your secret door?” Abby asked him, unimpressed.

  “Nope,” Nate said. He reached under one of the barrels and hit something. “This is.”

  38

  Into the Dark

  The wall moved away in a section which turned aside to reveal a stone tunnel. The dim light of the basement revealed a sconce holding a torch-a torch, Abby’s mind babbled-on the wall.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “A secret passage.”

  “I know! But what’s it doing in my house?”

  Nate turned. His glasses threw skeletal shadows over his face. “Only one way to find out.”

  He reached into his pocket and removed a small but powerful flashlight. He clicked it on, sending the beam down the passageway. It dripped with moisture. Some sort of fuzzy mold grew along the brick that lined the walls. Just like the mold on the dollhouse, Abby thought. The passage was throat-like, and Abby could swear the dim, windy sound traveling through it had distinct inhales and exhales.

  Nate began to walk down the passageway, lighting his way with the flashlight. Abby hesitated, and then jogged to catch up with him. She stuck close to him. They walked for a long time, so long that Abby supposed they might be beneath the small hills out beyond the Thorndike property.

  The passage was not perfectly straight. It wound back and forth just enough so that neither side was visible from the other. They passed more sconces. The bricks above them were stained with soot, and every ten feet or so, wooden supports rose from the floor to bolster the tunnel.

  Finally, light appeared ahead. Nate clicked off the flashlight. The dank air started to dry out, though it was just as cold as ever. The exit appeared as a postage-stamp-sized square on the horizon. As they got closer, Abby could see the trees of the Arkham forest and hear the comforting sounds of reality, where houses didn’t have strange secret passages.

  They paused at the lip, and Abby saw that the exit of the tunnel was partly concealed by rocks and a thicket. Nate looked back into the darkness.

  “How far do you think we walked?” Abby asked him.

  “I don’t know. A mile? Maybe more?” He turned and scanned the ground, smiling again. “There’s a trail here.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “There were no real trails behind your house. This one’s way too big for a game trail, and everything’s been pounded flat.”

  “So?”

  “You could walk around here if you were wearing high heels and an evening gown.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “This is what I was looking for, and I’ve found it.”

  Abby felt her equilibrium slipping away. “Why does my mother use a secret passage?”

  Nate recognized her stress. “I’m sorry, Abby. It’s probably nothing. I mean, the Daughters of Arkham are a secret society, like the Masons or the Elks or whatever. A secret passage doesn’t necessarily mean anything illegal is happening.”

  He knew he didn’t sound convincing, and so he stopped trying to explain away the situation. Instead, he followed the path. The forest was thick here, but the path was strangely clear. Golden light filtered in through the trees. Abby had the strange but unmistakable feeling that she was not welcome here. She wondered if Nate felt the same way, but the closeness of the air strangled the question in her throat. She could only follow along with the hair along the back of her neck standing on end.

  Something was watching them. She was certain. It was out there, its attention as heavy as the sun on a cloudless summer day. Something was waiting for them out there in the golden forest.

  Nate kept moving down the twisting forest path. There were other trails leading off into the trees, but Abby couldn’t have gone that way even if she wanted to. Pure instinct kept her from straying off the path, something primal from the time that humanity lived in caves.

  The trees fell behind them as the path opened up. It led up a short hill, only to end at a colonial church. Abby had never heard of any buildings out in the woods, but it looked like it had been there for years. A section of the roof had caved in and the other side was being mangled by a tree, but the structure looked sound. There was no mistaking that the path led right to the door. There were other paths leading off into the woods, but they narrowed, and she could see the differences Nate had talked about. Those were game paths. The trail they were on was intended for humans.

  But not you, girl.

  She didn’t hear it as a voice. She felt it in her bones. She wanted to turn away. She wanted to run back down the passage, return home, and pretend she never found the secret door in the basement. She couldn’t. She was tethered to Nate by some invisible force, as ensnared by the mystery as he was.

  Nate began to circle the old church. It was a good size, enough for two stories, but the top contained only rafters and whatever birds had come inside to roost. The walls would have been white if not for dirt and age. The gnarled tree looked just like the ones in the yard of Harwich Hall and the central garden at Dr. Collins’ clinic. They must have all come from a singular source. She’d thought that both of those trees had come from a tree on the green that had been cut down, but maybe she was wrong. The Mother Tree, wherever it was, had true power.

  Nate paused at the rent that the tree had torn in the wall. He peered inside, shining his flashlight through. There was some kind of furniture in there, probably pews, but Abby couldn’t get a clean look.

  “It’s in good repair,” Nate said. “Someone’s keeping it up. They’d have to, with that hole in the ceiling.”

  “What is it?”

  “I dunno. Maybe a meeting house. I bet you anything the Daughters of Arkham came here on Halloween night.”

  She shivered. She couldn’t imagine Constance and the other society women coming out to this place, and yet it made perfect sense. They hadn’t been at the house, but they had definitely struck out from there; first passing through that weird, throat-like tunnel, then into thes
e primeval woods, and finally into this place that might be older than Harwich Hall itself.

  What had they been doing?

  Nate paused. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.

  She was about to ask, ‘Hear what?’ but then she heard it, too.

  Breathing.

  The sound was woven in with the wind. The creature was smart enough to time its breaths to mask them amongst the ambient noise. And whatever it was, it was large.

  She felt its attention on them again. She knew now why she felt unwelcome here. These woods, these wild places, belonged to that thing. She and Nate were interlopers, and the oppressive and heavy hunger of the creature’s gaze was measuring them. Judging them.

  Every one of Abby’s instincts screamed at her to flee, but she forced the impulse down. Fear was weakness, and weakness was certain death. If they ran, they would be chased. The creature-though it was difficult to think of it as a creature; it felt too big, too old, to be constrained by so mortal a word-was making its decision. Food or not food?

  “Nate,” she whispered. “Follow me. Move quickly. But don’t run. We need to get back to the tunnel. Don’t run. Do you understand me? Do not run.”

  Nate nodded. Abby turned and began to stroll back down the path, and Nate waited the eternity of five Mississippis before he, too, started to move. Just like that, the power between them changed hands and it was Nate tethered to Abby, following her every move.

  Abby measured her steps carefully and kept her eyes on the thicket that would funnel them into the passage. She could smell something on the wind, like the fleshy stink of a butcher shop on a hot day mixed with the pungent tang of an animal’s cage. It was subtle enough that she could almost deny its existence. She could almost convince herself that it just a part of the forest that she was smelling, but she knew it was more than that. It was the creature’s odor. She had picked up the Watcher’s scent.

  Again she fought the urge to run. The passage was so close, and even though it didn’t seem safe, she knew for a fact that it would be. The woods belonged to the Watcher, but the tunnel had been shaped by human hands. It was a civilized place. The stone marked the border of the domain where the Watcher ruled. Abby counted to herself between steps, keeping her tread steady. She could hear Nate’s shallow, panicked breathing behind her, obscenely interwoven with the creature’s heavier breath.

  The path twisted once, and then twice, and she saw the entryway, partly hidden behind a few rocks. It was close now. She knew if she turned she would see it, looming and towering over Nate. Her imagination gave it many arms, long and thin with curved claws tipped in jaundiced yellow. Its eyes were red and multiplied over a deformed skull, like a spider. As long as she kept from turning around, it would stay where it was.

  Its breath tickled her neck. She wanted to flinch, to hunch her shoulders. She couldn’t understand how it was looming over both her and Nate, but it was. It was shadowing the both of them.

  The passage was only a few feet ahead. She wanted to sprint the last miniscule distance, but she couldn’t. It would kill Nate as soon as she did, and it would catch her anyway. Nothing could beat this thing in a race. She had to play by its strange rules-the rules of childhood monsters. The rules of carpets made of lava. It abided by those rules. Abby felt certain of it.

  She stepped into the cool darkness, and as the shadow closed over her, she felt the creature vanish. It was still out there, but it was off her shoulders, and its breath no longer wheezed in her ear. Nate stepped up next to her and let out a shaky breath. She closed his hand in hers and felt him shaking. He might have been crying, but she didn’t shame him by asking. Without thinking, she stepped close to him and pulled him into an embrace. He clutched at her, burying his face in her neck and taking choking breaths. He shuddered and drew strength from her as she stroked his hair and murmured nonsense.

  “What was that?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know, Nate.”

  She didn’t let him go. Not yet.

  “I don’t know.”

  39

  The Suspect

  Abby found the story in the same place as the last one: hidden, as though the town might have already forgotten the murders at the clinic. As the crime receded into the past, the rumors grew more and more lurid. Abby heard many of them at school and she would have laughed if she could find anything funny in the deaths of three women. The details that people imagined just weren’t grisly enough.

  The Arkham Police Department had made an arrest. A drifter named Duncan Koons had been caught with the murder weapon and identifications belonging to all three victims. According to the article, the case was open and shut, and the police were confident that Koons would be convicted after a perfunctory trial.

  There was one problem: Abby had never seen this man before in her life.

  Abby stared at the picture of Koons in the paper. He was a pudgy man with a bald head and a baby face. His thinning hair hung around his head in a wispy cloud. Though the picture was only from the neck up, Abby could imagine the rest of him: an Army surplus jacket, or even better, a tweed blazer gone filthy from life on the street; a gut hanging over his belt from eating cheap junk food; stubby legs in pants gone ragged at the cuffs. If he had shoes, they would be sneakers repaired with newspaper, cardboard, and tape.

  She tried to conjure him in the clinic. If she studied his face long enough, he might suddenly appear there in her memory. He’d be clutching an axe-these sorts of men invariably had axes-and there would be a spray of blood over that lumpy, shapeless face of his. He might even be smiling, but his teeth would be destroyed by meth and liquor.

  No matter how much she concentrated, he did not appear in her memories. Duncan Koons was a stranger, and she had no doubt he was innocent. She thought of Chief Stone and Stephanie Hill at Thanksgiving dinner, and her mother’s date with Chief Stone.

  She snatched up her laptop and stormed out of her bedroom. She found her mother sitting in the lounge with a James Patterson hardback open on her lap. That made Abby even angrier. How could she be reading when she’d just condemned a man to die?

  “What’s this?” Abby said. She set her laptop down, just shy of a slam, and pointed one quivering finger at the screen.

  “What’s what, dear?” Constance said.

  “This. Him!”

  Constance turned to the computer as though she was seeing it for the first time. She squinted just a bit at the screen, and Abby took savage joy in her perfect mother showing the first signs of her age. “That is the man who committed the murders at the clinic.”

  “No, he didn’t!”

  “The police say he did. They say they have all the evidence they need for a conviction.”

  “You sure know a lot about that.”

  Here, Constance paused. Abby felt the tension drawing out between them like a taut line, ready to be cut in two. “What exactly are you saying, Abigail?”

  On another day, Abby might have quailed and ceded the fight to her mother. Not today. “You know exactly what I’m saying, Mother. The police are framing this poor man for something he didn’t do!”

  “Poor man?” Constance laughed. It was a brittle, almost hysterical sound. “Do you even know who this man is? He is a criminal. A petty criminal doing what he can to hurt the people of Arkham.”

  “But he didn’t kill Dr. Collins! He didn’t do any of this!”

  “He’s a thief. He’s been to prison.” Constance stage-whispered the last word as though prison were contagious.

  “He didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Do you know that? For certain? The police say he did it. They have all the evidence they need.”

  “Maybe I should go talk to Stephanie Hill. Or I could email CNN or something.”

  Constance set the book aside, and the thread between them thrummed, vibrating a frosty chill into Abby’s body. She had never before felt as though she were in actual physical danger from her mother until that moment. Constance’s face might as well have
been a porcelain mask as she stood.

  “You will speak to no one, Abigail. Let’s not forget why you were in that clinic to begin with.” She paused, letting that sink in. Then: “This man committed the crime, and we have no way of knowing any different because you and I were not there.”

  Constance watched her daughter. Abby withered under her gaze, feeling disappointment and anger radiating from her mother in tangible waves. Finally, Constance left the room.

  Abby stayed there, shaking, though whether from rage or fear she didn’t know. Probably both. She did know one thing: Duncan Koons was innocent, and she was going to prove it.

  40

  Cake

  Eleazar Grant was only important in the abstract. Sindy liked him. At times, she even told herself she might consider loving him, but she knew that feeling was only temporary. No one ever married their high school boyfriend. Or, at least, she was not going to be one of those people. She planned to have fun with him until she lost interest and then she’d move along.

  And then Hester Thorndike had given her the recipe for devotion. Try as she might, Sindy could not get the old woman’s words out of her head. Whenever she closed her eyes, she could see Hester’s clear green eyes boring into her as she told her the secret. A single drop of blood. As time went on, the phrase took on the quality of a prayer.

  She didn’t want devotion from Eleazar, but she had to know if she could get it. The promise of that kind of power was mesmerizing.

  As the days passed and her blood hummed with the phrase, she knew she had to do it. She didn’t worry that it might be a bad idea. In fact, her only concern was that it might not work.

  A week before Christmas, she looked up a recipe for gingerbread cupcakes and added all the ingredients to the household shopping list. The next afternoon, she found everything in the cupboards. She didn’t know which of the servants had gone to the store, or which one had lugged the bags into the house, or which one had reorganized the spice rack. It didn’t matter. As far as she was concerned, groceries always appeared in the house like magic.