“An owl?” her mother asked.
“No, although it was noisy as one. It glowed. It burned.”
They looked out the window. There was no wind to make the branches of the tree shiver, no whisper from the treetops. Themoon lay hidden behind clouds. It was so dark outside that even if someone had been holding a lantern it might have been difficult to glimpse the trees.
“You’ve had a nightmare,” her mother said.
“It was real. It’s a witch. It’s taunting us,” Alba said, breathless, the words a jumble.
Her mother sighed. “Alba, I told you not to speak nonsense. If the servants or the children should hear you—”
“But there’s something out there,” Alba insisted. “It took Tadeo.”
“Tadeo was probably kidnapped by bandits.”
“What bandits? They’d have returned him by now. A witch killed him and ate his heart.”
“Hush,” her mother said sternly, and she drew the curtains closed tight with a harsh motion of her wrist. “You had a dream.”
“It’s true. It could break through a window tonight and take one of the little ones, it could—”
“Stop it,” her mother ordered. Her eyes were narrowed in steely fury.
Alba stared at her mother. The light of the candle, held up with her steady hand, deepened the hollows and lines of her high-boned face.
“Do you think it is easy living like this, Alba? I am a widow. I’ve lost a son. I must take care of my younger children and be both mother and father to them on a farm that is beset with debts and misfortunes. By God, Alba, there are mornings when I can barely summon the strength to rise from my bed.
“You don’t help me. You’re an indolent child who shirks her responsibilities and spends her time daydreaming. Do you think I can afford to think of ghosts and witches? Maybe you can. You run out of the kitchen so you can fret with your hair and your dresses. I can’t!”
Alba shook her head and looked down. She’d have no sympathy, no answers, from her mother. Her uncle could not provide any solace, either. They did not believe in curses or sorcerers. They could not see what she saw, shielded by their mundanity.
Her mother sighed. She pressed a hand against Alba’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Alba. We’re all exhausted. Go to sleep.”
Alba kept her eyes on the floor. She heard the soft groan of the door as it closed. Slowly she slipped back into bed. She turned toward the window, which was a black rectangle, a void.
1998: 8
Stepping into the factorywas like slipping into the belly of a dead whale and roaming through its carcass, for this place had once been alive and now was nothing but a lonesome shell of itself.
They peeked inside workrooms where circular knitting machines lay covered under a fine layer of dust. The green walls of the building were peeling, and tools resting on benches had rusted. There were shelves piled with wooden boxes containing brightly colored threads that contrasted with the gray grimness of the surroundings. A pile of dyed fibers, left behind in a corner to be spun, was an orgiastic shade of red.
She’d woken up with a funny feeling that morning, that old itch in the back of her skull that her great-grandmother used to call a portent. The sight of the red fibers made her want to recoil; something in the color triggered a sense of revulsion she could not explain.
“Did you really play here when you were a kid?” she asked, looking at Noah instead of the corner.
“I did.”
“It doesn’t look very safe,” she said, glancing dubiously at the ceiling. “You say it closed in the eighties?”
“It’s always been pretty run-down, even when it was still open. The good years of the business were probably the 1940s. They manufactured uniforms for the war. It brought the factory back from the dead, but it was downhill after that. For a while Carolyn had dreams that my father or my uncles would turn it all around, that they’d resurrect it.”
She imagined the factory filled with the clanging and churning of hulking, well-oiled machinery, the rhythmic snapping and rattling of the looms, and the voices of the workers as they gathered for their lunch break.
She glanced once again at the red fibers, and she had the unpleasant sensation that she was being watched. What the hell was wrong with her these days?
She slipped out of that room, walking quickly. Noah followed at a more leisurely pace.
“My dad didn’t have the knack for it. My great-grandfather, the beloved Wesley Noah Wingrave, he was a shark. But his sons and grandkids didn’t cut it. My uncle Roy, he’s a womanizer and an alcoholic who knows how to draw a monthly allowance and nothing more. Uncle Timothy is a nervous mess and even more incompetent. Dad, he had the smarts but hated the business. For a few months in the sixties, he became a hippie, joined a commune.”
