The Cherished, page 13
“Sure, whatever.” Jo folds her arms, exuding boredom.
Her mom delivers a pronounced sigh, then shuffles out the door, groaning her way off the stone step and across the yard. Jo feels bad, but not that much. It’s good her mom’s gone. She shouldn’t be here, in this place.
She shouldn’t be here: that’s something else Gammy said. Was it the same day?
She yearns to dash outside, lock everything up again. But the sun’s shining, and all is silent. The door’s propped safely open. Nothing will happen, she insists to herself.
She circles the front room, looking for anything to explain her weird memory. There’s a giant hearth with a single iron pot on a coal rack. Against the wall is a bench, the only piece of furniture. There’s nothing hanging on the cracked plaster walls darkened from time, no sign that Josiah Ladd and his wife and three kids ever lived here. Everything must have been taken out when the new house was built. Jo runs her fingers across empty, dusty shelves, opens cupboards that turn out to be bare. It makes no sense. Why should this vacant, boring place be dangerous? And where had Gammy come from that day? She’d been inside, Jo’s sure of it. She wanders around once again, touching cracks in the wall, searching for a hidden door.
She becomes aware of a cool breeze on her feet. She’s near the hearth, so maybe it’s from the chimney. She crouches down, feeling at the floor. Cold seeps from between the slabs. There must be a cellar, she deduces, though why air would actually blow from it, she can’t say. If there is a well after all, then maybe air could come up from there. If it’s dry, and there’s a cave at the bottom, with more caves leading to the outside—what does she know about wells and caves? It seems plausible, though.
She hunts around and finds what she overlooked: the cupboard floor has a wooden trapdoor with an iron ring for a handle. She runs her hands along the edges, feeling the cold, then lifts the door a little to peek. Stone steps lead into complete darkness. Her heart speeds up, hurting her chest. She slowly pulls the trapdoor all the way open till it drops back against the shelves with a thud.
She digs out her phone and switches on the flashlight.
The steps lead down to an earth floor. She doesn’t want to go in. She wants to slam that door shut and leave. But then she’ll just have to come back, she reasons. There’s no way she’ll be able to just forget this.
The trapdoor will stay open. The front door is open. It’s daytime. There’s probably nothing down there, just the supposed well, and she’s hardly going to fall in.
She goes down one step at a time on her butt, shining the light this way and that. The cold deepens, damp and heavy feeling. On the last step, she climbs to her feet to shine the light all around the space.
The floor is earth and gravel. Some wooden barrels stand against one wall, empty shelves above them. Toward the back, the floor looks dug up. Maybe this is the well, she thinks confusedly, though it doesn’t jibe with the image she had of a tidy round brick structure.
There isn’t anything else here. It’s just an old root cellar, damp, unpleasant, and empty. Maybe Gammy hadn’t wanted her falling into the cellar. Maybe Jo misremembered the warning.
She steps forward with caution, aware of the dark pressing all around. There’s something off, something not right.
It’s the breeze. Cold wafting about her ankles, as if coming from somewhere deeper. And this upheaval of stone and earth is definitely not a well. It’s more like the detritus from an earthquake, with a huge stone slab forced up and lodged in place by scree. The breeze seeps from a narrow opening beneath the slab, no more than five or six inches wide.
She’s been here before.
The knowing floats to the surface, clear and indisputable. She can’t remember. But she knows.
Trembling, she lowers herself to her knees, creeps closer to the scree. She reaches out, touches the cold stone. Her hand runs across something sharp: a jagged piece of iron rebar. Next to it, more iron junk, strewn among the stones. The breeze wafts across her face, her lips. Dizziness causes her to teeter, and she gasps, propped on her elbows. The cool air smells rottingly sweet, like flowers and wet grass.
Like her dreams.
You likely fell in the grass that night, Dr. Coletti told her.
That’s how he explained the almost suffocating smells of earth and damp when she’d wake. His theory sounded stupid then, and even more so now.
It was this place. I was here.
She leans a little closer, breathing in the strange air wafting from the darkness, mingled with the cloying, earthy damp of the cellar. She lifts her phone, tilts the light into the crack: gravel and dirt and rocks disappear into pitch black.
There is something there.
She reaches hesitantly into the darkness until her fingers touch the thing, which is oddly rigid. She tugs and there’s a faint snap, and then it comes free in her hand.
She edges away, shaken. After a moment, she directs the light onto the object in her hand.
She can’t make out what it is. There’s a long bit like a straw, the part that broke, and attached to this are the frayed remains of something like cloth, or some kind of plant. Transparent, veined. Like a web, but with different patterns.
She reaches back in, groping for more of the thing. She tugs till it comes free, a much larger piece, about two feet long. The cloth part hangs limp, riven with tears and holes, and yet when she rubs it between her fingers, it doesn’t disintegrate. It’s strong, more like embroidery thread. It doesn’t resemble anything she’s ever seen. It was part of something even larger, that much she can tell.
She maneuvers onto her knees, wincing at the gravel digging into her skin, then clambers to her feet. Her toe strikes something hard, and she whimpers at the bright, sharp pain. The cone of light swings, searching for the obstacle.
It’s a manacle, connected to a chain that snakes away through the gravel to the stone wall, where it’s soldered to an iron ring.
Jo stares at this bizarre object. Its presence is inexplicable and terrifying.
No one would hear you scream.
She hurries to the stairs and climbs hand over foot, tumbles into the main room. Her legs give out and she sits heavily on the stone floor.
Her rushed escape has wrecked her find. Bits of the black netting drift to the floor. Understanding comes to her at last, like a bit of memory floating past and pricking her awake. It’s part of a wing. The complex pattern fits together with pictures she’s seen in biology class of cicadas, grasshoppers. The hard, almost plastic quality to the edge, it’s because it’s cartilage.
Except this wing, if she extrapolates from the bit she has, would be much bigger.
“What did you do?” a voice cries.
Shock sends Jo fumbling backward, trying to get up. Hattie stands frozen in the sunny doorway, Tom just behind. Her face stretches into a mask of panic. “You weren’t supposed to touch it!”
Jo looks where she’s pointing, the shredded bit of wing falling from her opened hand.
“Why?” she whispers, fear rising inside her, growing from somewhere as deep and dark as the opening itself.
“Because now they’ll come,” Hattie says, and bursts into tears.
Thirteen
Tom stands with his long ropy arms hanging and his head bent. He bears no expression, staring into the blackness of the cellar as if listening or waiting for something.
“She broke the ward,” he announces at last. “Door’s open.”
Jo gets slowly to her feet, the strange words muddling inside her head. Ward is from storybooks and fairy tales. Door could mean the trapdoor. But he means a different one, she knows. The one down below, where she found the raggedy bits of wing now scattered across the stone floor.
“Did you move the iron?” Hattie asks. She sounds frantic.
“I—I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
Hattie wipes her teary face with her forearm, then she clambers down the steps into the cellar. Tom stands aside, staring after her.
There is a door to another world, her daddy incanted in his storytelling voice. That was always the beginning, the words themselves a door to the magic closeness with him, to tales about fairies and children playing and singing and eating as much ice cream as they wanted. She used to imagine herself dancing into that world in a pretty dress, like the girl in Oz.
He never said it was that gash in the rocks, filled with blackness and cold.
Her mind isn’t working right. What she’s thinking is impossible. It has to be.
Hattie comes back up the steps. “It’s all there,” she says.
Jo feels dumbly relieved, as if she did something right. Tom nods, rubbing his jaw, then he nudges the trapdoor with his boot. For a moment it stands vertical, then it drops. Jo shrinks in anticipation of the bang, but instead the door lands on his other waiting boot. He releases the door with barely a thud. Hattie at once steps onto it and paces back and forth, making sure it’s fully closed. Tom watches her. When she’s finished, she looks at him with a pinched, scared expression. “It should’ve lasted longer.”
“She went poking around,” Tom says, as if Jo isn’t right there.
His remote, indifferent demeanor is somehow worse than Hattie’s panic. “I’m sorry,” Jo whispers. They look at her, so she blurts, by way of an excuse, “We had to come in—we have to get the house ready to show!”
She shouldn’t have said that. Of course she shouldn’t have. Tom’s face hardens. His gaze travels the tattered, dark wing pieces strewn across the floor, his mouth twisted and bitter.
“That may be,” he says. “Door’s still open till it gets closed.”
“What does that mean?”
He ignores her, prods Hattie toward the outside. “We’ve got market to get to.”
Jo stumbles behind them. She almost falls, her body weak as jelly. Outside in the hot sun, Tom slams the door and bars it and claps the padlock shut. “Won’t make a difference but a small delay,” he says, turning around and handing her the key. “Your mama should leave.”
The words don’t register for a long, hot, sunbaked minute. Jo takes in his brown, angled face, the thinness of his lips. His lashes are unusually long and dark. “Why?”
“They’ll sniff her out like ants to sugar.”
“Who will?”
Tom mutters annoyance. Hattie looks at him, then says, “The little ones.”
A weakness plummets through Jo’s body, like she might faint.
You have to hide, Jo-Jo.
Her mouth is so dry, she can barely speak. “Who are they?”
Hattie furrows her brow. She sneaks a glance at Tom, but he’s staring off at the gardens, likely worrying about the market. “You still don’t know?”
As if she’s supposed to.
Hush, Jo-Jo, or the little ones will find you.
Jo can’t believe she’s asking this. She forces the words out in a stammer. “Are you talking about—fairies?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Hattie says with obvious relief. “Not the old ones, the little ones. They’re the children the fairies give wings to so they change. They come here when the door opens. You’ll need to put out the candy.” She counts on her fingers: “A bowl at the kitchen door, a bowl at the sunroom door, and one on the inside, and then at the front, which isn’t really the front ’cause we don’t use it.”
Jo looks at her in confusion. “Candy?”
“So they leave the house alone. They make awful messes. You really don’t know anything?”
Jo’s head feels thick, heavy with anxiety. “No.”
“Your dad never told you?”
Jo hesitates. “He told me stories.”
Hattie looks perplexed. “And?”
“It was make-believe. Bedtime stories, that kind of thing.”
“It wasn’t make-believe,” Hattie says. “There are children get turned into little ones. If the door’s open, they come. They steal others to take back.”
“Those were delusions,” Jo argues, though it sounds weak, pathetic even as she says it.
Tom is fed up. “Little’uns are real and they’ll come, could already be here. The market won’t wait. Come, Hattie.”
Jo grabs his arm. “But what about my mom? What did you mean?”
He stares at her hand until she lets go, embarrassed. He says, “They’ll want to get close with a baby on the way.”
“But will they hurt her?” Jo’s voice rises, panicked.
“Not my business what they do or don’t. We can’t be late.”
“But—”
He turns on his heel and strides off. Hattie casts an apologetic look before following him at a trot.
Jo stands there, the sun baking her in place. Then she forces herself to walk to the sunroom, and she latches the door, because now that she’s alone and now that all is silent but for the birds and the rustling leaves, she feels afraid.
She makes her way to the wicker love seat near the door going into the house. A path to escape. Her eyes fix on the Old House with its dark walls and opaque windows and weeds growing up all around. She opens her sweaty hand. The key has dug pits into her skin, she’s been gripping it so tightly. An urge to check the padlock sweeps over her. But it doesn’t really matter. It makes no difference. She understands now. The lock and bar aren’t meant to keep anything in; they’re for keeping people out.
A small delay.
She can’t fathom what that means. What sort of creature might find a barred, padlocked, fortresslike door merely a delay? He said they might already be out. Her skin prickles with fear. There’s nothing here. The room is silent and empty but for her, sitting rigidly on the edge of the cushion.
The fairies her dad told her about were magical creatures that could make themselves any size they chose, and turn invisible, too. They were golden, or green, or many colors, and they had splendid wings that could snap open in a heartbeat, so huge they blotted out the sun. The fairies played with the children, swimming in the river and eating ice cream and candy, and no one ever had to go to the dentist. Jo-Jo had loved that part. Sometimes they made other fairies, he’d called them little ones, and she’d imagined littler fairies. He never said they were made from the children themselves. Or did he? In her head, they were all the same. They snuck through and Jo-Jo had to be careful, because even if it was fun over there in the fairy world, did Jo-Jo really want to be stolen away from her daddy? No, she did not.
Hush, Jo-Jo, or they’ll hear!
It was a game until they came here, and then it became frightening because her daddy was so distraught. The little ones were creeping into this world through the dark gash in the earth, down in the silence of the cellar. That’s why they fled this place. That’s what he was scared of when he hid her at the seaside motel.
She blindly makes her way to the kitchen, scrubs her face at the sink, drinks the cold water with deep gulps.
Get out! Gammy hollered.
Jo freezes, her surroundings obliterated by the violence of remembering. The night roiled with terror. Her daddy ran toward her, mouth open, crying hoarsely, Jo-Jo! Jo-Jo, run!
He was too late.
He was too late.
The odor of grass and river and earth fills her mouth, then blackness: Nothing. Gone.
She leans over the sink, gasping.
Your nightmares are your father’s delusions playing out in your subconscious, Dr. Coletti chides from his armchair, somewhere far back in her mind.
He was so wrong. They were never nightmares. They were memories.
She was in her room. In bed. She remembers now. The moonlight across the bare floor. The darkness beyond.
Something else was in the room.
Get out! Get out! Gammy hollered. Then her daddy was there calling her name. But he was too late.
It touched her.
There’s nothing else after that. Just the odor gagging her throat, and the profound sensation of falling, falling, far away through a vast empty space.
She breathes over the stained porcelain sink, watching the water swirl down the drain. Listening.
She suddenly wonders if her mom’s awake. She’s desperate to be with her. Abigail will know what to do. She always does.
She hurries down the hall, sliding into near paralysis when she glimpses the Old House through the window. Her breaths fill the silent air as she climbs the steps, fighting the urge to look back over her shoulder. She edges the bedroom door open ever so slightly.
Her mom’s passed out on the bed, mouth wide open, the fan blowing across her balloon form. The sight of her sinks Jo’s heart. There’s no way she can tell her mom what’s going on. She’ll think Jo’s crazy, just like everyone thought her dad was. Jo can’t tell her anything, not one bit of it.
As quietly as possible, she closes the door again and backs away.
She digs the candy bags out of the garbage and piles them on the table. She finds four big bowls and cuts slits in the bags, pours them out. They’re children, that must be the reason for the candy. Children living in a fairyland with fairy wings. Flitting here unseen, maybe already in the house.
Her hands are shaking. She mixes the candy in batches. Kids want variety, after all. Five sorts in each bowl is how it ends up. Fairy children probably can’t figure out the candy’s expired, or maybe it’s just Gammy as usual unwilling to throw away food despite the date, and the little ones better make do like the rest of the household.
She carries every bowl to the designated doorways, sets it in the middle of every step so it can’t be missed. The action brings some comfort, as if she’s taking charge, as if she’s got this under control. The bowls fit in with the iron junk, which must also serve to ward them off. She imagines Gammy out there adding a piece here, a piece there, over the years. It’s heartening. Gammy knew what she was doing, clearly, and all Jo has to do is the same.
She sets the last bowl down at the wide-open front door, the one next to the TV room. The weedy stone steps lead into a riotous expanse of daisies and uncut grass. The laundry hangs in a pretty row across the line. The sun pours across the green, and wind blows through the beeches at the edge of the yard, shivering their pretty leaves so they sparkle. The wind is picking up, she notes. There are storms on the way, the heat will break soon. She looks down at her feet, planted solidly on the worn wood floor. They’re striped with flip-flop tan marks. She never paints her nails; maybe she should. She should go for a swim, actually. Or a hike, then a swim.
