Darkness approached and she turned on the lights. A sense of placid normalcy reigned after her evening with Hideo; phantoms and hauntings were merely academic exercises as she sat on one of the couches and leafed through the Black List. Like Noah had said, all the news clippings and stories concerned disappearances. The time periods and circumstances varied and the locations were spread mostly across the United States. There were a few exceptions. A handful of stories reached into Canada, near the valley of the South Nahanni River, where prospectors moiling for gold had disappeared more than a century ago. But the bulk of the disappearances were on the East Coast.
The names and circumstances began to blend together after a while. Alice Corbett disappeared in 1925 from her residence hall at Smith College in Northampton. Dorothy Forstein vanished from her Philadelphia home in 1949. She’d left her purse, money, and keys behind. The front door of her house had been locked.
Most chilling, there was Joan Risch, a housewife from nearby Lincoln, who vanished in 1961 from her home, leaving a trail ofblood behind. A woman matching her description was spotted later walking down the highway, blood dripping down her legs. Risch had been researching missing persons cases before she herself vanished.
Not included in this narrative was Ginny, who had vanished during the month of December, long ago, yet her story remained in the blank spaces between the pages of the scrapbook, for this was ultimately a futile quest for a clue regarding her whereabouts. Now a question lingered in Minerva’s mind, this one about Santiago. They were linked, the two of them, but not as lovers. No, Minerva felt it was something else.
She turned from the scrapbook to the handwritten pages. She compared the handwriting to the photos she’d taken of Betty’s journal. Indeed, it wasn’t her penmanship. These letters were beautifully elaborate, while Betty wrote with a sloppier hand.
Despite the gorgeous penmanship it was difficult to make sense of the writing. There were sentence fragments and interrupted paragraphs.
One bit struck her as interesting:Beware. Beware. Place wards, lock windows, beware. This room is safe. They’re after you. They’re here—
A blotch of ink hid the rest of the words, and a slash ran down the bottom of the page, as if the pen had been pressed too firmly against the piece of paper. She pictured Virginia Somerset at her desk, madly scribbling, the ink staining her fingers.
A car was approaching, its bright headlights intruding on Minerva’s solitude. She raised her head, wondering who it might be. Then she realized the light was not the right color: it was a soft green.
Minerva brushed the scrapbook and the pages aside and went toward the window.
There was no car. Instead, a wispy mist drifted toward the house, wrapping it like the silk of a spiderweb tightens around a helpless fly. It glowed, and that glow seemed to intensify as the mist coalesced, became thicker, concentrated in one spot untilthere was a floating green sphere perched in the air, looming close to the window.
She held her breath. Her hand was frozen stiff upon the windowpane. The greenness pulsed and she had the thought to run, to simply get out of the house and run away. Normalcy had been annihilated. Now the uncanny pierced the night.
“No,” she said, and shook her head.
Slowly, she lifted her hand.
She closed the curtain and stepped away from it, looking around the room, counting the wards she’d placed in this section of the house: tiny scratches by the doorways, and others hidden under boards she’d carefully loosened. They ought to hold. Unless she was wrong about all of this and witch marks were useless. That might be the case, after all.
The phone in the library began to ring and she fumbled with the receiver, but the line was dead. She slammed the receiver down and it began to ring again, louder and louder, like discordant cymbals. It almost seemed to be shrieking at her. Minerva tugged at the cord, disconnecting the phone.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out the bird talisman. The light was growing steady now, its emerald glow spilling eerily under the curtains and across the floor.
She stepped back, avoiding the light, which slithered like long fingers that stretched into the room and threatened to grasp her ankles. She bumped into a couch and almost lost her footing.
Something knocked against the back door and knocked a second time, louder, until it wasn’t knocking, it was like the pounding of fists. Then it moved to the right, scratching under a window, scratching against another. Its nails slid upon glass, raked against shutters.
The noise changed again; it seemed to be moving all around the house. Above her, the wood squeaked and groaned, like the pipes sometimes groaned in the winter, rattling with the cold. The floor vibrated under her feet and then more strongly, as if this were an earthquake that was gaining in force, but she’d never felt a quakelike this before, and she’d grown up in Mexico City and weathered the big one in ’85.
She pressed herself against a doorway, grasping the doorjamb for support.
Dimly, she heard the tinkling of crystal: she realized it was the grand chandelier near the staircase, which now shivered like a tree touched by an icy wind. In the kitchen, the spoons and forks were rattling in their drawers, and pots clanged against one another.
The lights were flickering. On the shelves, her books slid to the side. Her alarm clock in the bedroom started beeping. One of the shadow boxes on the wall tumbled to the floor. Its glass shattered; minuscule bright shards spread onto a rug, the delicate bodies of butterflies and moths pinned a century before now lying upon the floorboards.
She clutched the talisman tighter. One of the pins scratched her hand, drawing blood.
The curtains fluttered and a chair toppled over, crashing violently against the floor, but then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the movement ceased and the house was still. The glow had receded.
She carefully made her way to the window and peeked outside. There was a green glow above Briar’s Commons, but it was quickly dissipating, and within two blinks of the eye it was gone. There was nothing but the summer night sky outside. She could have dreamed the whole incident.
Except she was wide awake and there was blood dripping down her left hand.
She sat on one of the couches for a few minutes, not knowing what to do next. Eventually she went to the bedroom and turned off the alarm that was still blaring. Then she washed her hands and looked for a bandage.
When she returned to the library she began picking up items from the floor. She grabbed the pages she’d been reading and stared at the words scrawled there:Beware. Beware. Place wards, lock windows, beware. This room is safe. They’re after you. They’re here—
1908: 11
