The Hallowed Ones

“On Rumspringa. We went to one of the nearby towns, a large group of boys and girls. He met her at the bowling alley. I think some of the other boys had a taste for English, and they egged him on.”

I swallowed. “How did . . . how did you deal with that?”

She smiled into her reflection in a glass. “There is only one way to a man’s heart. Through gentleness. Not by getting angry or jealous.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand.” Maybe I didn’t want to.

“Elijah still cares for you. Else, he wouldn’t come around.”

“I think he just wants to control me.”

“He just wants to know that he has a place in your life, now that things have changed.”

My fingers wrapped around the neck of a jar in the sink, hidden by the suds. “He has chosen to change things. I was happy with the way things were.”

“You need to grow up. Things change. Once you accept that, you’ll be happier.”

I felt the jar collapse soundlessly in my hands, the glass bite into my palms. I lifted my hands from the water, speckling the suds pink.

“Oh no.” My mother wrapped the dishtowel around my hands, pressing them together. The red soaked through the cloth, and she called for my father to get some bandages.

I passively watched my mother bind my hands, clucking under her breath. My father looked on anxiously, the worry mark between his brows deepening.

I looked from one to the other. I could not now imagine Elijah and I having what they did.

I began to cry. My mother held me, thinking it was from the pain of the cuts.

I let her, too exhausted to resist.

* * *

Night called me.

I lay in bed, listening to the soft settling noises of the house, to Ginger’s snores, to the sound of the breath whistling through the gap in my little sister’s front teeth. I could hear the crickets and the sound of the breeze through the trees.

Beyond that . . . I heard something more.

I wrapped the pillow around my head, muffling the night sounds so that I could hear my pulse thumping in my ears. But I still heard it, that strange sound in the darkness I’d never heard before. It was eerie. Seductive.

One of my classmates who’d gone on Rumspringa last year had brought back a shell. He’d gone as far as the ocean. He said that I could hear the sound of the ocean in the shell. Swallowing my jealousy, I pressed the shell to my ear, heard that soft roar. I closed my eyes, listening to that sound that was not unlike blowing across the lip of a bottle, that distant hiss of ocean captured in a pink whisper. I listened to the shell for an hour, imagining what that vastness must be like in person. I wondered what that broad blue horizon would smell like, how the sand would feel between my toes.

This was like that, that soft summoning. I could hear it in my bones, no matter how hard I tried to muffle it.

I rolled out of bed, padded across the floor. I shook Ginger’s shoulder to wake her, to ask her if she heard it too. But she was deep in slumber and just mumbled and turned over.

I went to the window, slid it open. Cool dark air washed over me. The moon above had burned through the clouds, sketching out the landscape in black and white. I saw no sign of anyone in the yard below, only a rabbit hopping out of my sister’s pumpkin patch.

I closed my eyes. I could still hear it, but louder. I shivered as it slid over my shoulders, tickled the hem of my nightdress. It sounded ethereal, soothing. My thoughts buzzed and felt fuzzy, much the way they did the time I got into hard cider at a party. The moon swam at the edge of my vision, and I clutched at the window sash.

Something was out there.

Something siren-soft, seductive. Beautiful.

For a moment, I wondered if it might be God.

* * *

As if in a trance, I put on my dress from yesterday and slipped down the stairs and out the kitchen door, not even bothering to put on my shoes.

The breeze played with the edges of my dress, teased a strand of hair free from my bonnet. I let the wind take it, pull it back, slide its hands through my skirts. I half closed my eyes, smelling honeysuckle and hearing the siren call of the night so loudly that it moved in my veins, the way the tides echoed in the back of that shell.

I stepped outside, closing the door behind me. The rabbit from the pumpkin patch peered up at me, chewing clover. Everything was serene, beautiful in the soft wash of moonlight. It was as if I were in a dream, moving in air that seemed thick and supportive of my limbs. My fingers splayed, feeling the movement of it, capturing a shred of that call I felt with every fiber of my being.

Dully fearless, I began to walk. I walked past the pumpkin patch, into the pitch-black beyond the house, where the field grass tickled the palms of my hands. The whole meadow was alive, seething with life. Deer grazed peacefully yards away from me, a doe and two fawns beginning to lose their spots. I stared at them dreamily, wondering if they’d seen the white horse.

The doe lifted her head, flicked her ears. Her head turned, her nostrils flared. She blinked, then bounded away with a flash of white tail. The fawns followed in their mother’s wake.

The string of that call snapped, and the spell broke. It left me standing alone in the field, barefoot, shivering as a sudden awareness of danger slapped me in the face like a bucket of water.

I sucked in my breath, wheeled back to the distant light of the house.

Too late.

Something roiled in the grass. I could see it moving toward me, at terrible speed, zigzagging violently through the stalks. It kept low as it rushed toward me, but I spied a glimmer of red, like the eyes of the terrible creatures in the Laundromat, sliding through the shadows.

I ran.

It plowed into me, knocking me down from behind. My face pressed into the ground, and I tasted dirt. I felt something heavy on me, ripping at the skirt of my dress. Claws sank into my arm, and I shrieked.

The creature hissed like steam in a kettle, recoiled. It was then that I dimly realized that I was wearing yesterday’s clothes. And the Himmelsbrief was still in my pocket.

I dug into my pocket with my free hand and grabbed the envelope in my fist. The creature released me, howling. The weight on my back vanished.

That was all I needed to run—run like the very dogs of hell were on my heels. I gave no thought to direction, just away. I plunged headlong into the field, my breath rattling in my mouth. The landscape bobbed around me, sharp grass slashing my bare arms, the wind whistling in my ears, tearing my bonnet off my head.

I saw the dim, shadowed hulk of the kennel ahead of me, the hex sign peeling away. I slammed up against the door, tried to work the latch, whimpering as my hands shook.

The door slid open suddenly, and I pitched forward into a pair of waiting arms.

I fought against them, kicking and snarling as they wrestled me back into the darkness. I was flung to the floor. The door reeled back, blotting out the night.

I scuttled blindly on the floor with straw in my fingers. A light came on, the yellow beam of a flashlight. I blinked stupidly.

“Alex?”

The light showed his outline in the pitch-black. I saw that he was holding a shovel in his right hand like a weapon, the flashlight in his left. I could not see his face.

“Show me your teeth,” I demanded.

The idea had crossed my mind, but I had shied away from it. I didn’t want to consider that I may have been the one to bring this evil upon our community. That it was me who had let the Hexenmeister’s Darkness in. Perhaps Alex was a vampire, and my stupid sympathy, my flouting of God’s will, would kill us all.

The shadow remained still. Bile rose in the back of my mouth.