Reseda cut Emily off, pressing one finger gently but firmly against her lips, silencing her. Then she took her hand and started leading Emily away from the house, walking her in the clean spring air into the meadow, where the grass was, suddenly, almost knee-high. There she told Emily of the dead who were with her husband and the dangers they posed for her daughters, and how she wanted to bring her husband to her own greenhouse that night to perform a depossession-and how she already had broached this idea with Chip and he had agreed. She told Emily that there was a second volume of recipes in their group’s canon, and it included a particular tincture that the herbalists wanted to make that also represented a danger to her children.
“What do they all want to do?” Emily asked, her voice facetious. “Graft some of their skin? Harvest a little blood?”
“Not a little,” Reseda said, and for the first time in her life she verbalized aloud what she had seen one night in Clary Hardin’s mind when she pressed for details about the death of Sawyer Dunmore.
T he twelve-year-old boy was drugged with a tincture that Anise had made from valerian, skullcap, and California poppy, his body resting flat on its back on the makeshift wooden altar in the communal greenhouse, his hands folded across his chest as if-and his mother had to have noticed this-he were a corpse. Anise was a decade and a half younger than the others, but every bit as committed. The child’s hair was the color of wheat, and it was damp from sweat, the perspiration a side effect of the tincture. His eyes were shut, and he breathed with the slowness of a seemingly sound, untroubled sleep. But he was not as sedated as everyone thought, the sleep not nearly as deep, and that would be a part of the problem and why everything went so horribly wrong. It was well into the night, and the greenhouse was lit entirely by candles-Sage had rounded up easily a hundred of them, tapers and blocks and votives from the church outside Boston where she and Peyton had been married one summer Saturday in 1932, and now the candles were lining the tables with the plants or ensconced in hurricane lamps on the ground-and the walls were alive with the shadows of the six herbalists. Outside the air was bracing and crisp, as late autumn rolled inexorably toward winter. Parnell had taken Hewitt hunting, and the father and son were with Parnell’s brother at a friend’s deer camp in Danville, Vermont, though there was no question that Parnell knew what his wife and her friends had planned for Sawyer. He had seen how well their tinctures worked-even the ones from the second volume-and, like Tansy, supposed this one would, too.
And so the herbalists surrounded the body in the greenhouse. They edged closer all the time, especially when Anise finally raised the child’s right arm from his chest and Clary held a cast-iron stewpot beneath it while Tansy-the boy’s own mother-took one of her own kitchen knives and made a single cut along the wrist. The boy flinched. Certainly Clary saw that. Probably Anise did, too, and she must have worried that she had either mixed the sedative improperly or-fearful of killing the child with an overdose-given him too little. But the boy did not awaken. At least not yet. Sawyer Dunmore awoke only after Anise and Sage had both observed aloud that the slice had been neither deep enough nor long enough and already the coagulants were starting to stem the tide. They needed far more than a few drops of blood; this wasn’t homeopathy, after all. They needed enough blood to reduce it like a sauce with the ashwagandha and eternium. And though Tansy paused with the knife at her side, summoning the courage and deciding whether she was indeed capable of cutting her own child a second time-and making this gash far more pronounced-she didn’t pause long. Had she been tranquilized, too? Clary didn’t know and so Reseda didn’t know. Clary had never been sure whether the stupor that initially had enveloped Tansy Dunmore like a shawl and made her eyes less animated than the rest of the herbalists-all of whom were electrified by the idea that finally they were preparing this particular tincture, the one that demanded the blood of a traumatized, prepubescent twin-was the result of massive doses of passionflower and schisandra or unease at the reality that she was slashing her own child’s wrist. Regardless, she raised the knife once more and this time made the cut deeper and longer and, intentionally or not, she ran the knife lengthwise along the ulnar artery, rather than across it, and blood geysered up into the air, a punctured hose with the spigot on full, and the boy awoke. He screamed and struggled to sit up, but Peyton Messner and John Hardin were there before he could, the two men pressing the boy’s shoulders back against the altar. But Sawyer fought hard for his life, and his cries pulled Tansy from the somnambulance that had allowed her to forget for a period who she was and what she was doing to her own son. She lashed out at Peyton and John, and managed to tear the sleeve from John’s robe, but Clary dropped the heavy pot-spilling the little blood they had collected onto the dirt floor of the greenhouse, where it disappeared into the earth-and she and Anise together clenched Tansy’s arm and pushed her away from her son and then onto the ground. But Tansy heard Sawyer crying as he bled out (and he really did bleed out very, very quickly), and she wailed his name over and over. The adults might have saved the boy’s life if they hadn’t been working at cross- purposes: Peyton was hoping to stop the bleeding, trying to press the cloth from the cuff of his robe against the deep gash, but Anise and John were squeezing the child’s forearm, trying to keep the vein open. Moreover, at some point someone had toppled one of the candles and set Anise’s long sleeve on fire, badly burning her arm before she was able to smother it. She seemed oblivious to the pain, but the small blaze only added to the distraction. Still, Clary eventually managed to right the cauldron and capture Sawyer Dunmore’s blood as it flowed and flowed, puddling in the bottom of the cast-iron pot and saturating John’s and Anise’s robes.
Meanwhile the boy cried out for his mother until he grew too weak and the mother screamed for her son and their pleas were unbearable.
When the boy was dead and the adults saw what they had done, they brought him home and placed him in a bathtub and allowed the world to believe his death was a suicide. The blood, they forever insisted, had turned the water salmon pink and then disappeared when they opened the drain.
Chapter Nineteen
Y ou know that Emily has doubts that the dead from 1611 have attached themselves to you, but she has convinced herself that because you believe this is the case, perhaps Reseda’s little New Age ritual (and, in her mind, there is nothing sillier than a little New Age ritual) will help you. In her opinion, it can’t possibly make your mental illness any worse. You, however, have absolutely no doubts that you are-to use Reseda’s word-possessed. And, because you have faith in Reseda, you agree to the depossession, confident that this is indeed more than a little New Age ritual, in terms of both the likelihood of its effectiveness and the upheaval it will cause in your soul. Your (and this is a new word for you in this context) aura. Reseda has made the depossession sound troubling for a great many reasons, but largely because she has warned you that while under hypnosis you may relive the crash.
“Can we make the outcome a little more promising?” you ask, hoping to lighten the moment, but she answers that the end will be every bit as terrifying.
“I was never terrified,” you correct her.
“Then you won’t be now,” she says. “Your passengers, however, might be. The outcome will be the same, because it’s all you know of the experience and it’s all they know of the experience. It’s what happened.”
“How long will I be hypnotized?”
“Until everyone inside you has left.”
Emily rubs at her upper arms as if she is cold. “And there’s no danger?” she asks again.
“The spirits represent a danger to others while they have access to your husband-and they may represent a danger to him. But I think the element of the actual depossession that is most dangerous will be the effect on your husband of experiencing the crash once again. But he says he’ll be fine,” Reseda explains, and then she turns her gaze upon you, gauging your reaction. You shrug. Yes, you’ll be fine.
And so tonight when the girls are asleep you will go to Reseda’s. There, in the midst of the statuary and the plants in her greenhouse, a small world where, she insists, she is strongest and most persuasive, she will attempt to drive out the dead. Or, as she puts it, drive them home. It may all be over in an hour, but it may also take all night. When the Santa Fe shaman performed the depossession on her, liberating her twin sister, it had taken no more than forty-five minutes (though at the time, Reseda says, it felt as if it were taking all night). Twice before when Reseda herself has performed depossessions, once on a firefighter who was saddled with the dead from a house fire-an angry teen boy and his father, a man who had placed the very space heater in his son’s bedroom that would cause the electrical blaze-and once on Holly, who was coping with the dead from a car accident she had witnessed, it had taken hours. Reseda suggested this was because there had been multiple spirits trying to cohabit with the living. But she will take whatever time is needed.
