Speak Through the Wind
Page 35
Before Phoebe could argue, my cousin Ida—just a month younger than I—stepped forward, holding out her candle stub. “I’ll go.”
“Very well,” Phoebe said, squaring herself in front of Ida. “But remember, you must follow the instructions exactly.”.
Ida nodded.
“First, light your candle.” Ida touched the black wick of her tallow stub to the flame. “You must stand on the top step, with your back to the cellar, and say, ‘I descend into the darkness to see the face of my true love.’”
We all shivered at the word darkness.
“Then,” Phoebe continued, “you walk down the steps, backwards, to symbolize that you are able to trust yourself. You mustn’t try to steady your steps by clinging to the wall, or else you will never fall in love. Hold the candle and mirror in front of you. Do not look down, or your husband will find an early grave. Do not look into the flame, or your true love’s eyes will burn for another. You must look only into your own eyes, the reflection you see by the light of the candle. In this way, you are looking into your very soul.”
By the time she finished speaking, her voice was a mere whisper, and we all might have stood there in our little semicircle until dawn if Augustine, the littlest one of all, hadn’t piped up to ask, “Then what?”
“Then,” Phoebe continued, her voice even deeper, “when you know you are on the cellar floor, without taking your eyes off your reflection, blow the candle out!”
We gasped.
“In that split second, before everything goes completely dark, you will see the face of your true love reflected in the glass.”
All of us, Phoebe included, burst into nervous giggles. When we had sufficiently hushed ourselves, Phoebe asked Ida if she was ready to take her journey down the steps.
“Yes,” Ida whispered. She held her lit candle in front of her and walked toward the cellar door. It was closed but not locked, and there was an unspoken understanding that I was the one who should pull it open. Our candles illuminated only the top two steps; after that it was a dark, gaping maw
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” I told Ida, looking into her wide, staring eyes.
“We all promised we would,” Phoebe said in that bossy tone nobody ever seemed to have the will to fight against.
“I’m fine,” Ida said. She positioned herself at the edge of the top step against a canvas of black and took a deep breath. “I descend into the darkness to see the face of my true love.”
Step by careful step, she drew away from us. We all gathered at the doorway, so close we could each feel the heartbeat of another. Nobody said a word, and Ida’s gaze never left its target. She grew smaller and smaller, the darkness seeming to crowd around her, then finally she stopped. We heard the sharp intake of her breath, and at once the tiny flame that revealed her to us was gone, and Ida was consumed.
Silence, and then a voice from the abyss. “I saw him!”
The girls nearly threw themselves down the stairs, exhaling the common breath we all held. For the briefest moment, I doubted my own disbelief, wondering if there might be something to this voodoo folderol that my cousin Phoebe had roped us all into. I made my way to the front of the crowd, cupped my hand to my mouth and said, “Who’d you see?”
“Michael Foster!”
Phoebe caught my eye and sent me a look of smug confirmation, but I was nowhere near convinced. Cousin Ida had been talking about Michael Foster in her letters to me for at least three years. His father owned a textile mill, which Michael would surely inherit. I met him once when we went up to visit; his hair stood on end like porcupine spikes and his hands were softer than mine, but Ida had her heart and mind set on marrying him. I would have been more surprised if she hadn’t seen his face in the glass.
Ida’s supernatural success infused all the girls with anticipation—except Augustine, who, being not quite eight years old, insisted she was too little to have a true love.
The honor went to Lillian, who had just turned thirteen, but had the face and figure of a much older girl. She and her family lived twenty miles away, and Mother often said she was glad, because Lillian had all the earmarks of a girl who would grow up too fast, and a girl like that could ruin the reputation of an entire family.
As Lillian poised herself at the top of the stairs, saying, “I descend into the darkness to see the face of my true love,” Phoebe elbowed me in the ribs and muttered something about being certain Lillian had descended into darkness before, causing me to giggle and draw a reproachful glare from the other girls waiting their turn. When her little light extinguished below, we once again leaned forward, waiting.
“I definitely saw someone,” Lillian said, “but I couldn’t make out the face clearly. He had curly hair, though.”
“Maybe it’s someone you haven’t met yet,” Ida’s voice chimed in from the darkness.
“Maybe there’s just too many for the fates to choose from,” Phoebe said, and all of us upstairs laughed.
Next were the twins—first Violet, then Virginia—twelve years old and identical with the exception of the scars each one sported after an agreed-upon wounding to establish separate identities. Violet swore she saw a distinct face in the glass, but refused to divulge a name until Virginia had descended. Nobody was surprised to learn that both girls saw the same face—some boy named Virgil who worked as a day laborer on a neighboring farm. The ensuing squabble might have lasted until dawn if a mysterious scuffle hadn’t brought it to an abrupt halt.
Then came Rachel, eleven, a levelheaded girl who must have shared my skepticism about the night’s events. When she delivered her line about descending into the darkness, she did so in a warbled falsetto, dragging out the word “loooooove” for at least the first three steps. When she hit the bottom and doused her candle, she swore she’d seen the face of Thomas Jefferson.
That left only Phoebe, me, and little Augustine at the top of the cellar steps, and when Phoebe tried to maneuver the girl into her starting position, she was met with a swift kick in the shin.
“I said I didn’t want to!” Augustine stamped her little foot and settled her face in a determined pout.
“And I said you have to. Otherwise, you’ll be left up here all alone in the kitchen. Is that what you want? To be the only one in here when Uncle Robert comes down to see what all the ruckus is?”
Phoebe’s Uncle Robert was my father, and the thoughts of facing him in a dark kitchen in the middle of the night with a bevy of would-be witches tucked away in the cellar was not a soothing one. It was some kind of miracle that he hadn’t heard us at all—yet.
“What if we let Augustine go down face forward?” I nudged Phoebe. “Just let her keep her candle lit, walk down the stairs holding on to the wall, and join everybody else at the bottom.”
“Yeah,” Augustine said. “I don’t want no true love anyway. Boys stink.”
Phoebe rolled her eyes at the grand concession. “Just go.”
I watched little Augustine make her way down the stairs, feeling guilty for having brought her into this mess. I also knew there was no way that little girl would be able to keep this a secret for long, and I was glad to know that I would be deep into the Great Plains before she cracked.
“All right, Belinda,” Phoebe said, holding out her candle to me. “Now it’s your turn.”
“Ah, Phoebe, you know I don’t believe any of this. It’s … it’s evil, it’s witchcraft.”
“It’s not witchcraft,” Phoebe said, her voice full of disdain. “It’s just, it’s—”
“Wrong. It’s just wrong. It’s sinful.”
“So you’re perfectly fine with letting the rest of us sin, but you’re too good?”
“You’re welcome to do what you want, but I can’t.”
“You promised.”
“I didn’t know what it would be like. I thought it would just be like the apple peels.” That was another of Phoebe’s favorites: peeling off a strip of apple skin and seeing what letter it
formed when dropped into a dish of sugar. Mine was always a J; hers a C.
“This isn’t any different,” Phoebe said. “Besides, if you don’t believe, it won’t even work for you. It will just be a walk down some stairs.”
Compliance seemed to be the only way to bring this wretched night to a close, so comply I did. I tipped my wick into Phoebe’s flame and stood at the mouth of the cellar. “Idescendintothedarknesstoseethefaceofmytruelove.”
I could have cheated, could have stumbled into the wall and used it to guide me down, could have cast my eyes down to follow my feet, but once I saw my reflection, illuminated by that small flame, I had an overwhelming desire to know if what the other girls experienced was real. The piece of glass I held was almost a perfect triangle, curved slightly along its longest side, and it afforded me a full view of just one eye obscured by a few strands of long, loose hair. I kept my focus on that eye, seeing not my soul, but something completely detached. A tiny flame dancing in a deep, dark orb.
The cellar steps were rough and cool beneath my bare feet—a marked change from the soft carpets of the house and the smooth finish of the kitchen floor. I put one foot gingerly down behind me, fought for balance, then brought down the other. I told myself I was just playing a game, appeasing my cousins, participating in a ritual as harmless as tossing spilled salt over my shoulder.
The whispers petered into silence, and one final toe-reaching behind me confirmed that I was on solid ground. Never taking my gaze away from my piece of the mirror, I took a deep breath, puckered my lips, and extinguished the flame.
And, nothing. Nothing but the darkness wrapped close around me. I kept my eye trained toward the shard of mirror until the glowing tip of my candle’s wick was swallowed by black.
“Well?” The girls gathered around me spoke as a chorus.
“I told you this was a bunch of nonsense,” I said, not allowing a drop of disappointment to come through.
“Or maybe you’re just never going to have a true love,” Phoebe taunted from the top of the stairs.
“Or maybe God knows the plans He has for me and He’s not going to reveal them through some childish, evil game.”
“Aw, save your Scriptures for Sunday school.” Phoebe positioned herself at the top of the stairs and intoned the fateful phrase with more conviction than any of us had mustered.
I felt my cousins gather around me, and Augustine’s small hand slipped into mine. My failure to see an image hadn’t shaken their faith; with the exception of the good-humored Rachel, they were believers.
Phoebe came down the final step, and we took a collective step back. I heard her sharp intake of breath, then a puff into darkness. Nobody broke into the silence that followed, but Augustine did squeeze my hand a little tighter, and I felt her shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“Thank You, God,” Phoebe whispered.
“You leave God out of this,” I said. “There’s nothing of God in this. It’s just, just—”
“You know who I saw, don’t you?”
“You didn’t see anybody. None of us did.”
“Who was it?” The eager voices of my cousins overrode my singular voice of reason.
“Chester,” Phoebe said in triumph.
“Cousin Chester?” Rachel voiced everybody’s concern, but none of the girls could possibly have the same sick, seething stomach that I had.
“Not by blood,” Phoebe said, reminding all of us of her adopted status—the very factor that gave her such mysterious appeal and power. “Now all of you get back upstairs before we all get in a world of hurt.”
There was a shuffle as the girls found their way back to the stairs, and excited whispers as they made their ascent. I made my way to join them, but was detained by a grip on my sleeve.
“Now do you see?”
“This doesn’t mean anything.”
“It changes everything.” She jerked me hard against her and stood so close I could feel her lips moving against my ear. “Talk to your father again. Tell him I have to go with you.”
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SPEAK THROUGH THE WIND
published by Multnomah Books
A division of Random House, Inc.
© 2007 by Allison Pittman
Multnomah is a trademark of Multnomah Publishers,
and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The colophon is a trademark of Multnomah Publishers.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56191-6
v3.0