Black Creek Crossing

hand on Myra’s shoulder. “Try not to worry,” he said. “I’m sure everything will be all right — the saints will look after us.”

His eyes shifted to the crowd that had poured out of the Congregational church across the street, two or three of whom had been part of his own flock until recently. Even Angel Sullivan was over there, talking to Jane and Blake Baker’s son.

“Of course it would be nice,” he sighed, “if the saints could not just look after us, but send a few more people our way, but I suppose we must be content with what we have.” He winked at Myra. “But if I were you, I’d keep my eye on Angel before Seth Baker corrupts her completely.” As a shocked look came into Myra’s eye, he quickly backtracked. “It was a joke, Myra,” he assured her. “Even if he doesn’t go to my church, Seth is still one of the nicest boys in town. So stop worrying so much — everything will work out.”

But as Myra walked down the steps and started across the street to reclaim her daughter, Father Mulroney found his eyes wandering to the great tree in the cemetery across the street, which only the day before yesterday had twice been struck by lightning in a storm that came out of nowhere, then vanished as quickly as it had come.

And yesterday, in the house at Black Creek Crossing, a little girl all dressed in black had appeared for an instant.

A little girl, wielding a bloody knife.

Crossing himself, Father Michael Mulroney retreated back into his tiny church and began to pray.

The sun was just reaching its zenith as Angel and Seth climbed to the top of the shattered granite berm and looked down at the area of flat ground that fronted the single visible wall of the cabin. Neither of them was certain what to expect, but what they hadn’t expected was to find that nothing had changed.

The flat stone marking the spot where they’d buried Houdini was exactly where they’d left it, but seemed to have sunk lower into the ground. Yet nowhere did the ground look as if it had been disturbed.

For almost a full minute the two of them stood side by side, gazing down at the invisible grave below. Finally, Seth broke the silence.

“M-Maybe it wasn’t Houdini,” he said so softly that Angel wasn’t certain that he knew he’d spoken out loud. “Maybe it was another cat — one that just looked like Houdini.”

Angel shook her head. “It was Houdini. My dad saw him, and my mom saw him, and I think my mom saw…” She cut her words short, still not quite ready to tell him about the strange vision — if that’s what it was — that she’d had when the cat attacked her father yesterday.

Indeed, the more she’d thought about it, and tried to make sense of it, the harder it was to believe that she’d seen it at all. She’d barely been able to sleep at all last night, and whenever she had, her dreams had mingled with her memories, and the darkness was filled with strange images of her father reaching for her, and the cat leaping at him and tearing at his face, and the girl — the girl clad all in black with the white brooch on her chest — plunging a glittering silver knife deep into her father’s chest over and over again. But no matter how many times the knife struck deep into his chest — no matter how much blood gushed from his wounds — he kept looming over her, reaching for her, wanting to touch her, to press his body against her own, to—

How many times had she awakened, her skin clammy with the sweat of pure terror, her whole body trembling in fear of the touch that had never quite come? And every time she’d awakened, the memory of the cat had risen in her mind, and then the cat had been transformed once more into the girl, except that in the blackness of the night all she saw of the cat was its glowing golden eyes and the white blaze on its chest, and all she ever saw of the girl was the pale skin of her face and the white of the ivory brooch on her breast. By the time dawn had finally broken, she was no longer sure what was real and what to believe, and as she now gazed down on the spot where they’d buried the cat two days ago, her confusion only grew worse.

“You think your mother saw what?” she heard Seth ask.

Instead of answering him, she scrambled down the face of the berm and pushed the large rock away from the top of the grave. Using her bare hands, she began digging, and when Seth brought the shovel from the cabin a moment later, she shook her head. “If we use the shovel, we won’t know,” she said.

Seth cocked his head. “Know what?”

“The flowers,” Angel said. “If we use the shovel, we won’t know if they’re still the way we put them.”

Laying the shovel aside, Seth dropped to his knees next to Angel and set to work, scooping the soft earth from the grave and laying it aside, taking more care with each handful he removed. They had dug nearly a foot of earth from the hole when Angel stopped and looked at Seth. “I feel one of the stems.” Now they took even more care, slowly removing the earth bit by bit, until finally the first of the four flowers they’d buried with Houdini’s body lay exposed.

It was a bright yellow aster, and as she gazed at it, Angel could remember laying it carefully on Houdini’s head to provide him with sunlight even in the darkness of his grave. The flower still lay at precisely the angle at which she’d placed it, and its petals hadn’t even begun to fade. But his head was not beneath it.

She and Seth glanced at each other, then she picked up the flower, shook the dirt from its petals, and laid it carefully to one side.

“He must still be here,” Seth whispered, speaking the words that Angel was thinking. “Even if he wasn’t dead when we buried him, there’s no way he could have gotten out without moving the flowers, and if somebody dug him up—”

“Nobody dug him up,” Angel said. “If they had, wouldn’t something have gotten moved from the way it was?”

“Maybe it did,” Seth said, “Maybe we just didn’t remember it exactly right.”

Angel shook her head. “Who even knew we’d buried him? You were the one who said no one even knows this place is here.”

But even though they knew what they were about to find, they kept digging anyway, taking out the rest of the flowers and removing handful after handful of the earth that hadn’t yet solidified since they’d dug into it the first time, certain that with each handful of earth they removed, they would reach Houdini’s corpse. And then, suddenly, it was over. All the loose dirt was out of the grave, and all that was left was an empty hole — a hole exactly as large and as deep as they both remembered having dug it to hold Houdini’s broken corpse.

But the corpse was gone.

They stared into the empty grave for almost a full minute before Seth finally spoke. “I was right,” he whispered. “You really did bring him back to life.”

Though she heard the words, Angel tried to shut them out, tried to reject them, because to accept them was also to accept the rest of what Seth had said last night: Maybe you really are a witch. Her eyes still fixed on the empty grave, she shook her head. “I couldn’t have,” she whispered. “It isn’t—”

There was a soft mewing then, and they both turned to see Houdini sitting in the open doorway of the tiny cabin. As they stared at him, he turned and disappeared inside.

Neither of them speaking, Angel and Seth stood up and followed the cat into the tiny room hidden in the cleft. The cat was sniffing anxiously at the niche in which the book was hidden, and when they retrieved it from its hiding place and put it on the table, it seemed to fall naturally open to the same strange verse they’d read the first day they’d discovered the book:

They read it through three times, then Angel turned to Seth. “Do you know what it means? I mean, what it’s supposed to do?”

Seth shrugged helplessly and his eyes shifted to Houdini, who was now sitting on the counter near the huge water catchment basin, his tail twitching nervously as he watched them. “But I think we ought to try it, and see what happens.” As soon as he uttered the words, Houdini appeared to relax, stretching out on the counter, curling up, and going to sleep.

Angel looked doubtfully at the page. “ ‘Thrice haired with hog,’ ” she read. “Where are we supposed to get hairs from a hog?”

“There’s a farm about half a mile farther out the road,” Seth replied.