the sharp gravel and beds of stickers in the back yard. And he didn’t have to persuade her that, no matter how dark the moonless night, one doesn’t cut out paper flowers and set them to blooming like little candies around the comers of the rooms. Nils had been to the county seat that weekend. I don’t know where she was from, but this was a New World to her and whatever one she was native to, I had no memory of reading about or of seeing on a globe.
When Marnie started taking classes in Mr. Wardlow’s one-room school, she finally began to make friends with the few children her age in Margin. Guessing at her age, she seemed to be somewhere in her teens. Among her friends were Kenny, the son of the mine foreman, and Loolie, the daughter of the boardinghouse cook. The three of them ranged the hills together, and Marnie picked up a large vocabulary from them and became a little wiser in the ways of behaving unexceptionally. She startled them a time or two by doing impossible things, but they reacted with anger and withdrawal which she had to wait out more or less patiently before being accepted back into their companionship. One doesn’t forget again very quickly under such circumstances.
During this time, her hair grew and she grew, too, so much so that she finally had to give up the undergarment she had worn when we found her. She sighed as she laid it aside, tucking it into the bottom dresser drawer. “At Home,” she said, “there would be a ceremony and a pledging. All of us girls would know that our adult responsibilities were almost upon us-” Somehow, she seemed less different, less, well I suppose, alien, after that day.
It wasn’t very long after this that Marnie began to stop suddenly in the middle of a sentence and listen intently, or clatter down the plates she was patterning on the supper table and hurry to the window. I watched her anxiously for a while, wondering if she was sickening for something, then, one night, after I blew out the lamp, I thought I heard something moving in the other room. I went in barefootedly quiet. Marnie was at the window.
“Marnie?” Her shadowy figure turned to me. “What’s troubling you?” I stood close beside her and looked out at the moonlight-flooded emptiness of hills around the house.
“Something is out there,” she said. “Something scared and bad-frightened and evil-” She took the more adult words from my mind. I was pleased that being conscious of her doing this didn’t frighten me any more the way it did the first few times. “It goes around the house and around the house and is afraid to come.”
“Perhaps an animal,” I suggested.
“Perhaps,” she conceded, turning away from the window.
“I don’t know your world. An animal who walks upright and sobs, ‘God have mercy!’”
Which incident was startling in itself, but doubly so when Nils said casually next day as he helped himself to mashed potatoes at the dinner table, “Guess who I saw today. They say he’s been around a week or so.” He flooded his plate with brown meat gravy. “Our friend of the double mind.”
“Double mind?” I blinked uncomprehendingly.
“Yes.” Nils reached for a slice of bread. “To burn or not to burn, that is the question-“
“Oh!” I felt a quiver up my arms. “You mean the man at Grafton’s Vow. What was his name anyway?”
“He never said, did he?” Nils’s fork paused in mid-air as the thought caught him.
“Derwent,” said Marnie shortly, her lips pressing to a narrow line. “Caleb Derwent, God have mercy.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “Did he tell you?”
“No,” she said, “I took it from him to remember him with gratitude.” She pushed away from the table, her eyes widening. “That’s it-that’s the frightened evil that walks around the house at night! And passes by during the day! But he saved me from the fire! Why does he come now?”
“She’s been feeling that something evil is lurking outside,” I explained to Nils’s questioning look.
“Hmm,” he said, “the two minds. Marnie, if ever he-“
“May I go?” Marnie stood up. “I’m sorry. I can’t eat when I think of someone repenting of good.” And she was gone, the kitchen door clicking behind her.
“And she’s right,” said Nils, resuming his dinner. “He slithered around a stack of nail kegs at the store and muttered to me about still compromising with evil, harboring a known witch. I sort of pinned him in the corner until he told me he had finally-after all this time-confessed his sin of omission to his superiors at Grafton’s Vow and they’ve excommunicated him until he redeems himself-” Nils stared at me, listening to his own words. “Gail! You don’t suppose he has any mad idea about taking her back to Grafton’s Vow, do you!”
“Or killing her!” I cried, clattering my chair back from the table. “Marnie!” Then I subsided with an attempt at a smile.
“But she’s witch enough to sense his being around,” I said.
“He won’t be able to take her by surprise.”
“Sensing or not,” Nils said, eating hastily, “next time I get within reach of this Derwent person, I’m going to persuade him that he’ll be healthier elsewhere.”
In the days that followed, we got used to seeing half of Derwent’s face peering around a building, or a pale slice of his face appearing through bushes or branches, but he seemed to take out his hostility in watching Marnie from a safe distance, and we decided to let things ride-watchfully.
Then one evening Marnie shot through the back door and, shutting it, leaned against it, panting.
“Marnie,” I chided. “I didn’t hear your steps on the porch. You must remember-“
“I-I’m sorry, Aunt Gail,” she said, “but I had to hurry. Aunt Gail, I have a trouble!” She was actually shaking.
“What have you done now to upset Kenny and Loolie?” I asked, smiling.
“Not-not that,” she said. “Oh, Aunt Gail! He’s down in the shaft and I can’t get him up. I know the inanimate lift, but he’s not inanimate-“
“Marnie, sit down,” I said, sobering. “Calm down and tell me what’s wrong.”
