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The privy door squeaked when she pulled it open. She hadn’t even been hoping as she done it, because she knew Julian wasn’t in there. Before she got out of the bed, she knew he wasn’t in the privy house. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.
And she was right.
She was sometimes right about such feelings. Julian said she was daft to think she had some mind power to know things, like the old woman what lived back in the hills and came down when she knew something and thought she ought to tell folks of it.
But sometimes, Nora did know things. She’d known Julian wasn’t in the privy.
Worse, she knew where he was.
She didn’t know how she knew, no more than she knew how she knew he wasn’t in the privy. But she knew, and the knowing had her shaking something fierce. She only looked in the privy because she hoped she was wrong, and because she didn’t want to look where she knew he was.
But now she had to go look.
Nora held the lamp out, trying to see down the path. She couldn’t see far. She turned as she tramped along, looking back at the house. She could make out the window, because the fire was going good. The birch logs had caught, and the fire was throwing off good light.
The feeling of terrible wickedness felt like it was grinning at her from the black night between her and the house. Clutching her shawl tight, Nora held the lamp out to the path again. She didn’t like leaving the children. Not when she had her feelings.
Something, though, was pulling her onward, down the path.
“Please, dear spirits, let me be a foolish woman, with foolish woman ways. Please, dear spirits, let Julian be safe. We all needs him. Dear spirits, we needs him.”
She was sobbing as she made her way down the hill, sobbing because she feared so much to find out. Her hand holding the lamp shook, making the flame jitter.
At last, she heard the sound of the creek, and was glad for it because then the night wasn’t so dead quiet and frightfully empty. With the sound of the water, she felt better, because there was something out there, something familiar. She began to feel foolish for thinking there was no world beyond the lamplight, like she was on the brink of the underworld. She was just as likely wrong about the rest of it, too. Julian would roll his eyes, in that way of his, when she told him she was afraid because she thought the world was empty beyond the light.
She tried to whistle, like her Julian whistled, so as to make herself feel better, but her lips were as dry as stale toast. She wished she could whistle, so Julian could hear her, but no good whistling sound would come out. She could just call out to him, but she feared to do it. Feared to get no answer. She’d rather just come on him and find him there, and then get cursed for her foolish crying over nothing.
A gentle breeze lapped the water against the edge of the lake, so she could hear it before she could see it. She hoped to see Julian sitting there on his stump, tending a line, waiting to catch them a carp. She hoped to see him look up and curse her for scaring his fish.
The stump was empty. The line was slack.
Nora, her whole arm trembling, held up the lamp, to see what she came to see. Tears stung at her eyes so she had to blink to see better. She had to sniffle to get her breath.
She held the lamp higher as she walked out into the water till it poured over the tops of her boots. She took another step, till the water soaked the bottom of her nightdress and shift and dragged the dead weight back and forth with the movement of her steps and the waves.
When the water was up to her knees, she saw him.
He was floating there, facedown in the water, his arms limp out to his sides, his legs parted slightly. The little breeze-borne waves slopped over the back of his head, making his hair move as if it were some of the lake weed. He bobbed gently there in the water, like a dead fish floating on the surface.
Nora had feared to find him there, like that. It was just what she feared, and because she feared it so, she wasn’t even shocked when she saw it. She stood there, water to her knees, Julian floating like a dead bloated carp twenty feet out in the lake. The water was too deep to wade out to get him. Out where he was it would be over her head.
She didn’t know what to do. Julian always did the stuff she couldn’t do. How was she going to get her husband in to shore?
How was she going to live? How was she going to feed herself and her children without Julian? Julian did the hard stuff. He knew the things she didn’t know. He provided for them.
She felt numb, dead, stunned, like she did when she’d just come awake. It didn’t seem possible.
Julian couldn’t be dead. He was Julian. He couldn’t die. Not Julian.
A sound made her spin around. A thump to the air. A howl, like wind on a blizzard night. A wail and a whoosh lifted into the night air.
From their house up on the hill, Nora could see sparks shooting up out the chimney. Sparks flew up in wild swirls, spiraling high up into the darkness. Thunderstruck, Nora stood in frozen terror.
A scream ripped the quiet night. The awful sound rose, like the sparks, screeching into the night air with horror such as she had never heard. It was such a brutal cry she didn’t think it could be human.
But she knew it was. She knew it was Bruce’s scream.
With a wail of wild terror of her own, she suddenly dropped the lamp in the water and ran for the house. Her screams answered his, feeding on his, shattering the silence with his.
Her babies were in the house.
Evil was in the house.
And she had left them to it.
She wailed in feral fright at what she had done, leaving her babies alone. She screamed to the good spirits to help her. She squalled for her children. She choked on her sobbing panic as she stumbled through the brush in the dark.
Huckleberry bushes snagged and tore her clothes. Branches slashed her arms as she ran with wild abandon. A hole in the ground caught and twisted her foot, but she stayed up and kept running toward her house, toward her babies.
Bruce’s piercing scream went on without end, lifting the hair at the back of her neck. She didn’t hear Bethany, just Bruce, little Bruce, screaming his lungs out, like he was having his eyes stabbed out.
Nora stumbled. Her face slammed the ground. She scrambled to her feet. Blood gushed from her nose. Stunning pain staggered her. She gagged on blood and dirt as she gasped for breath, crying, screaming, praying, panting, choking all at the same time. With desperate effort, Nora raced to the house, to the screams.
She crashed through the door. Chickens flew out around her. Bruce had his back plastered to the wall beside the door. He was in the grip of savage terror, out of his mind, shrieking like a the Keeper had him by the toes.
Bruce saw her, and made to throw his arm around her, but flung himself back against the wall when her saw her bloody face, saw strings of blood dripping from her chin.
She seized his shoulder. “It’s Mama! I just fell and hit my nose, that’s all!”
&nbs
p; He threw himself at her, his arms clutching her hips, his fingers snatching at her clothes. Nora twisted around, but even with the bright firelight, she didn’t see her daughter.
“Bruce! Where’s Bethany?”
His arm lifted, shaking so much she feared it would come undone. She wheeled to see where he pointed.
Nora screeched. She threw her hands up to cover her face, but couldn’t, her fingers quaking violently before her mouth as she screamed with Bruce.
Bethany was standing in the hearth, engulfed in flames.
The fire roared around her, swirling in tumbling eddies as it consumed her little body. Her arms were lifted out into the angry white heat, the way you lifted your arms into the warm spring afternoon sunlight after a swim.
The stink of bubbling burning flesh suddenly wormed into Nora’s bleeding nose, gagging her until she choked on the smell and taste and couldn’t get another breath. She couldn’t seem to look away from Bethany, look away from her daughter being burned up alive. It didn’t seem real. She couldn’t make her mind understand it.
Nora lunged a step toward the flames, to snatch her daughter out of the fire. Something inside, some last scrap of sense, told her it was far too late. Told her to get away with Bruce before it had them, too.
The tips of Bethany’s fingers were all gone. Her face was nothing but yellow-orange whorls of flame. The fire burned with wild, roused, determined fury. The heat sucked Nora’s breath from her lungs.
A shrill scream suddenly rose from the girl, as if her soul itself had finally caught fire. It made the very marrow in Nora’s bones ache.
Bethany collapsed in a heap. Flames shot up around the crumbled form, tumbling out around the stone, licking briefly up over the mantel. Sparks splashed out into the room, bouncing and rolling across the floor. Several hissed out against the wet hem of Nora’s dress.
Nora snatched at Bruce, clutching his nightshirt in a death grip, and ran with him from the house as evil consumed what was left of her daughter.
