Page 46 of Stay Buried

The cardinal was just ahead of her, calling in the trees:Hurry, hurry!

They passed Pigeon Pond, where Mini sometimes sat to watch the perch and bass or to catch frogs just so she could say hello. She continued on, following the bird, going by the old house site on the right, nothing but a cellar hole now. The old folks in town called it the Ayers place, said it was haunted back when it stood, so it was a good thing that it had fallen down. No one had ever rebuilt there. People swore that if you went at night, you could hear a woman crying. Some said they could hear two girls whispering to each other. Mini never heard anything, but she always felt like she wasn’t alone there. Like the place held memories, little pieces even, of the people who’d once inhabited it back when it was standing. Mini went sometimes to poke around, to find treasures in the rubble where the house once stood: an old glass canning jar, a doorknob, a rusty cast-iron frying pan. She liked the way the house was disappearing into themeadow; nature taking it back. Soon the brambles, grass, saplings, and vines would destroy any evidence that people had ever lived here. Sometimes Mini tried to imagine what the whole world might look like without people in it anymore: buildings empty, parking lots cracked open and sprouting trees and grasses. The birds and the chipmunks and the bees would all be singing so joyfully, bears would walk right down the street. No cars, no talking, no bells at the factory, no jet engines flying overhead, no train whistles. She imagined the earth itself breathing a sigh of relief.

The path narrowed, the woods growing darker; the trees, even with their diminishing leaves, were so close together that they let very little light in. Then the woods opened up again and she could see where she had been led. The cardinal had taken her to the back side of the Hollands’ pasture. It sat there waiting for her on the old cedar split-rail fence, calling out,Here, little Mini, look here.

She moved from the cool darkness of the woods up to the fence and leaned against it, as the cardinal took off, disappearing into the hills behind her. Mini looked out into the pasture, saw three horses: Old Lou, who was chestnut brown, the dappled mare called Susie, and the white horse named Stella—the one that Finn had drawn a picture of and left for the knackerman. She thought of the drawing, ruined in the yard this morning, rejected, tossed in rage after he had seen her.

The horse he had been riding was so similar to the one in Finn’s drawing that she wondered if her brother had spied sometime too. She looked at Stella now, clucked her tongue, and the horse trotted over, perhaps thinking that Mini had a treat: an apple or a sugar cube, which she often did.

“I’m sorry, girl,” she said to the horse as it came and nosed her with its soft muzzle. She stroked the creature’s velvety coat, looked into her large eyes. The horse was all white and had beautiful shiny black eyes that seemed to see everything all at once, even things Mini couldn’t see. Mini reached down, picked some clover, and held it up. Stella gently nibbled it. Something caught Mini’s eye on the horse’sleft rear flank.

“Are you hurt?”

There was a streak of red blood on her coat.

Had she scratched herself on a barbed-wire fence?

Mini moved down to inspect the injury, her fingers gently touching the wound, which wasn’t a wound at all.

Tick tick tickwent the watch in her pocket, Mini’s mind turning just like the gears inside it.

TWENTY-ONEFRANKIE

March 13, 1919

Benjamin Stoddard’s face was gouged. It looked as if it had been done by a farming implement, but Benjamin insisted it was only his wife’s fingernails.

Claws, I thought.

The woman had grownclaws.

I pushed the thought out of my head, holding a lantern close to Benjamin’s face while my uncle gently examined his ruined eye, the white sclera so red with blood it was difficult to make out the iris and pupil. His pupil was no longer round, but teardrop-shaped, the black seeming to bleed into the murky blue of his iris.

I doubted Benjamin would ever see out of it properly again.

The lantern sputtered, the flame jumped. Benjamin’s shadow on the wall beside us seemed large and monstrous, a thing of its own looming and watching.

Benjamin was breathing fast and hard, his pulse racing. He was obviously in a great deal of pain but had refused my uncle’s offer of morphine.

“Globe rupture,” Uncle Thomas said to me. “See the extrusion of vitreous?”

I nodded, seeing the drop of thick gel that leaked from the tiny rip in the surface of Benjamin’s eye.

Benjamin squirmed beneath my uncle’s touch and spoke rapidly through gritted teeth. “Just patch me up so I can get back out there, Tom. I’ve got to find Clarice.”

“Hold still, Benjamin,” Uncle Thomas instructed as he continued to examine the eye.

Uncle Thomas packed bandages gently against Benjamin’s eye, wrapped everything in place with a roll of gauze.

I assisted my uncle with cleaning and bandaging the scratches, the small bite on Benjamin’s forearm.

Pearl watched us from the edge of the room, rocking slightly, her arms wrapped around herself. Her eyes were glassy, her face as pale as I had ever seen it. I longed to go to Pearl, envelop her in my arms, but all I could do was cast furtive glances her way.

“Did Clarice speak?” Thomas asked. “Was she lucid?”

“She spoke but she was not lucid,” Benjamin told him. “It was like she was sleepwalking. She kept insisting she heard someone outside calling her name, saying she had to go. I took her hand, tried to talk to her, to keep her in bed, but it was as if she wasn’t really there. Like she was… possessed.”

Pearl seemed to jump a little, made a small, barely discernible squeaking sound like a captured mouse.