Chapter 25
Chapter 25
Fern watched the clock. Every minute was a needle slid slowly beneath her skin, until finally at four thirty on the dot the walls of Wellwood House rumbled as the bookmobile emerged from the tunnel of trees, did a slow loop around the live oak in the center of the drive, and parked with a hiss of air brakes. Fern watched from the Cong’s windows. Sunlight dappled its sides and made its psychedelic butterflies dance. Her guts contracted to the size of a single frozen pea.
“We’ll go at the end,” Zinnia said, standing beside her, and Fern nodded, grateful to put it off a little longer.
But eventually, a very pregnant Jasmine stepped carefully from the bookmobile and it was time to face the librarian. Zinnia, Holly, and Fern went out the side door of the Home and walked across the yard, the dark door of the bus getting larger with every step. Fern wished Mrs. Deckle was in her usual spot, but she was inside, enjoying the office A/C.
Ten minutes, Fern thought. All she had to do was get through the next ten minutes and it would all be over. She pulled herself up into the bookmobile with a grunt.
Orderly rows of books lined its main aisle, the light was stable and sane, and Miss Parcae stood beside her desk, putting something back into her card catalog, sliding it shut. She turned, taking off her half-moon glasses and letting them dangle on a silver chain. Her dress was pink frost today, and her hair was in its bun. Her makeup was perfectly applied. She didn’t look sick, or sweaty, or low. She looked cool and unruffled, and she gave them a hostess smile.
“Do you have books to return, girls?” she asked, and Fern’s heart gave a single hopeful beat.
“Yes, ma’am,” Zinnia said, holding out From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler .
Taking her cue, Holly held out The Old Man and the Sea and The Black Pearl . Fern held out nothing. Miss Parcae came down the bus and took them, went back to her desk, slid out their cards, and stamped them with their return dates. She stopped at The Old Man and the Sea .
“Another girl had this, didn’t she?”
“Rose went home,” Zinnia said. “We’re returning it for her.”
“How thoughtful,” Miss Parcae said. “Every book is precious and with you girls coming and going they sometimes get lost in the shuffle.”
She gave them a smile. “This is our last visit, girls. Enjoy the rest of your summer.”
“Thank you,” Zinnia said, and turned, her stomach knocking lightly into Holly’s.
Fern turned, too, feeling her skin unclench. That was it? She saw the door, right in front of her. Maybe they didn’t have to tell her they lost Groovy Witch after all.
A hook slipped from her lip and Fern wriggled free, stepping to the door.
“The weather has been so hot,” Miss Parcae said, mildly, from behind them. “I thought we were due some rain. Do you girls know anything about that?”
The hook sank in again and pulled Fern to a stop. She looked out the bookmobile door and saw the house waiting for her on the other side of the yard. It was right there. Fern could be gone in seconds, she could run back to the Home, and in a week she’d have gone to the hospital to have her baby. In two weeks she’d be back in Huntsville. But she couldn’t. Everything must be faced.
She turned back in to the bookmobile, squeezing between Holly and Zinnia.
“We tried,” she said to Miss Parcae, dropping her voice. “Holly really tried, but we couldn’t. It was too much.”
Miss Parcae’s smile froze in place. Fern saw her jaw tighten.
“It was,” she said, and put quotation marks around her next phrase, “?‘too much’?”
“I’m sorry,” Fern said.
“You certainly are,” Miss Parcae agreed. “And now your friend will pay the price.”
“Could you take me, anyway?” Holly asked. “Please? I’ll learn how.”
Miss Parcae didn’t take her eyes off Fern.
“Ask Fern,” she said. “But we must have our thirteen.”
“I’m sorry,” Fern repeated, speaking to both Miss Parcae and Holly now.
She dropped her gaze to the librarian’s clasped hands resting on her midriff, her fingers clenched around each other.
“Then you have another book for me,” Miss Parcae said. “If you’re no longer finding it of use, I need it returned immediately.”
Fern felt the way she had when her dad showed up at Aunt Peggy’s, her stolen paperbacks lying scattered across the kitchen table, with no lie big enough to explain them away. Her face went numb.
“I don’t have it,” she said, unable to feel her lips. She couldn’t say what had really happened. “I lost it. I’m sorry.”
“Pardon?” Miss Parcae asked, voice barely under control. “Do you know the value of that book? Do you know there is none other like it in the world? You wanted that book. I trusted you with that book, and you lost it?”
“I’m sor—” Fern started.
“No!” the librarian said, slicing her sentence in two.
The words fell dead at Fern’s feet.
“You stupid child,” Miss Parcae said as molten anger erupted out of her. “You knew it was no normal book. You knew it was unique. And yet you lost it the way you might lose a pencil. The way you lost your virginity. Careless. Thoughtless. Selfish.”
“I—” Fern tried.
“No!” The librarian slashed her words in two again.
Fern felt her insides turn to water. Maybe if she told the truth it would keep the librarian away?
“Hagar burned it,” she said, and it sounded as bad as she’d thought it would.
“Who?” Miss Parcae asked.
“Hagar?” Fern said, her voice small. “Who works at the Home?”
Miss Parcae raised her chin slightly and sniffed the air. A tone of wonder filled her voice.
“In the kitchen?” Her eyes went wide and focused on Fern. “The cook? You let the cook burn my book?”
Fern flinched. She hated adults being angry with her.
“We don’t do witchcraft anymore,” Zinnia said from behind Fern, her voice firm. “We’re no longer interested in what you have to offer. We’re sorry about your book, and we’d be happy to pay a fine.”
Miss Parcae turned her attention fully on Zinnia.
“A fine?” she asked. “You think I want a few dollars? Do you understand what you’ve done?”
Miss Parcae’s mouth clamped shut and her face tightened in pain. She bowed her head, one hand flying to her stomach, the other to the shelf beside her for support. Her attention switched away from them. She blew out a mouthful of air. After a moment, she spoke.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and looked up, face sweaty, perfect makeup starting to blur. “I’m sorry I lost my temper, but without the book I have no other options. Fern, I now find I truly need you.”
Fern felt pathetically grateful that Miss Parcae wasn’t angry at her anymore.
“I’ll do anything I can to make it up,” she said.
“Fern…” Zinnia warned.
“I told you I was ill,” Miss Parcae said. “I have less time than I thought. Weeks and months, not months and years. I need you.”
“For what?” Fern asked.
Miss Parcae pushed herself off the shelf and stepped closer, eyebrows raised, voice soft, eyes wide and pleading.
“Come with me,” she said. “Bring Holly if you wish. But be prepared to leave immediately.”
“Leave where?” Fern asked. “Leave here?”
Miss Parcae gripped Fern’s sweaty hands in her cold ones.
“We’re bound to each other by your vow,” she said. “You are young and strong, and I am old and tired, and it’s time. It’s time for me to pass my fire on. To you. It’s time you became the next in the line of Hecate.”
“I’m not the right person,” Fern said in a panic, trying to step backward, but Zinnia and Holly were in the way. “We just met. I don’t think I can.”
“I know,” Miss Parcae said. “And if there were another candidate, I would take them. If I could keep looking, I would. But how can I without the book? You have so much potential, Fern. We need to make this work.”
She reached up and touched Fern’s cheek, appealing to her, begging for her help, and Fern understood. If she said yes her life would be the campers now, and she thought about those strange women taking her away, never seeing her parents again, never going home, having this woman enter her mind, having her mind no longer belong to herself, changing into someone new, living as this new person for the rest of her life, leaving her old self behind, her head full of the babbling voices and jostling memories of strangers.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t.”
Miss Parcae’s eyebrows lowered and her eyes searched Fern’s face in confusion.
“You made a vow,” she said.
“I know,” Fern said. “And I’m sorry. What about Holly?”
“You read the book,” Miss Parcae said. “You’re the one who’s ready. I need you now.”
Fern looked into her eyes for a long moment and felt like a disappointment to everyone. But she couldn’t walk away from her entire life.
“I can’t,” she barely whispered.
“Not even for Holly?” Miss Parcae asked.
“We don’t need your help with Holly,” Zinnia said from behind Fern. “We’ll help Holly.”
“I seem to remember four girls dancing skyclad and calling down the moon,” Miss Parcae said. “Claiming they would do anything to help their friend. Swearing they’d do anything for power.”
“We didn’t know what it meant,” Zinnia said.
“Everything has a price,” Miss Parcae said, stepping closer to Fern. “And every price must be paid. You wanted something and I gave it to you, and this is the price.”
Zinnia stood up straighter. She was taller than Miss Parcae and she squared her body to the bookmobile aisle, her pregnant belly filling the space.
“We made a couple of people sick,” she said. “We don’t owe you anything for that.”
Miss Parcae smiled at Zinnia. It wasn’t nice.
“I’m not to blame that you wasted what I gave.” She turned back to Fern. “It’s too late to find someone else without the book, Fern. I want your permission. I want you to accept this willingly, but I don’t need it. We can force you to honor your vow. It isn’t what I want, but it can be done. That’s how it was for Mags. That’s why she’s broken.”
Fern saw the old lady, spit slicking her hairy chin, eyes empty, muttering nonsense to herself. Miss Parcae stepped close to Fern, her painted face growing larger, filling Fern’s vision, and the air in the bus seemed to thicken and dim.
“No!” burst from Fern’s mouth.
Suddenly, Miss Parcae was a monster, a spider waiting for her in its web, and Fern backed away from her, sickened. It had all been a trick, luring her forward, bringing her to this moment.
“ No! ” she repeated, and felt all the strength draining from her legs.
She didn’t care if it was rude, or if she broke her promise, or that she’d burned the book—she wanted to go home. She had school and parents and friends and she was young, she wanted to live, she wanted to stay herself.
“No!” she said again.
Zinnia caught her by the shoulders and helped her stay upright.
“She wants to be inside my mind,” Fern babbled in a panic. “She wants to live inside me, she’ll steal who I am and replace it with herself, herself and all the witches who came before her.”
Zinnia stepped back, taking Fern with her. Miss Parcae stepped into the light from the skylight and her smile looked fixed and her eyes looked desperate. She kept coming toward them.
“I gave you power,” she said. “Now you pay the price. Willingly or no.”
“Leave us alone, leave us alone, leave us alone,” Fern chanted, tears prickling the corners of her eyes.
“We can do this the easy way,” Miss Parcae said. “Or the hard. But you will do this. There is no ‘too much.’ Everything is at stake. There are hundreds of women who must survive, an entire line, three thousand years of life. You will not be their end.”
Fern felt like she was in a fairy tale. Not a cartoon like Sleeping Beauty but a mean one that tricked her and trapped her, a fairy tale that kept drawing her deeper into its twisting guts until she couldn’t get out. One that smelled like wet straw and virgin’s blood.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Fern chanted. “I’m sorry I changed my mind. Please! Leave me alone!”
Then Zinnia stepped down and she had Fern and they were outside the bus, standing in the sunlight.
“You have to leave her alone,” Zinnia said.
Fern almost sobbed when her foot touched solid dirt. She felt acorns and sticks through the soles of her sandals. Miss Parcae stood in the door of the bookmobile.
“This is no time to act like a child,” she said. “You wanted power over your bodies and over others, and I gave it to you. What you did with it was your business. But now you must honor our bargain and pay the price. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will hold you to your word.”
Then the three girls were practically running across the front yard and into the shadow of the Home. From the bookmobile, Miss Parcae watched them go.
***
Fern pulled away from Holly and Zinnia and hauled herself up the Pepto-Bismol waterfall, legs pumping, and she didn’t stop until she was in their room. She started to push the warm painted wood of the door closed, then stopped when she saw Holly and Zinnia coming down the hall. She sat on her bed, bouncing on the squeaky springs, watching Zinnia latch the door. She wished they could lock it.
“That stupid book,” Zinnia spat, so worked up she couldn’t sit.
The stifling room felt like a trap.
“What did you promise her?” Zinnia asked. “Tell me exactly.”
And so Fern told them, laying it all out, everything she knew. How Miss Parcae had liver cancer, how she’d said that the memories and souls of the witches who lived before her existed in her mind, how they had given her the book as a test to see if they could use her, how Fern had passed, and now Miss Parcae wanted to put all those witches inside Fern and take her mind away. How she wanted to turn Fern into someone else.
As Fern talked, Zinnia stopped pacing and slowly sat on the edge of her bed. She pulled Holly to her and when Fern finally ran out of words, Zinnia just stared off, chewing her bottom lip, eyes far away, thinking.
After a moment Holly asked, “You can’t do it? For me?”
Shame overwhelmed Fern.
“I’m sorry,” she said, barely audible.
“I wish I could do it,” Holly said. “I wish I was stronger so they’d let me come.”
“No,” Zinnia said, her mind back in the room. “It’s not about being stronger. She’s wanted Fern from the beginning. Everything else has been a trick. She lies to get what she wants, and she wants to use Fern to live forever.”
“Do you really think she can?” Fern asked, because it sounded so impossible.
“I don’t know what to think,” Zinnia said. “But I know one thing.”
“What?” Fern asked.
“We have to tell Hagar.”
***
They waited until after dinner. Mrs. Deckle hated staying late because she had to cook for Mr. Deckle when she got home, so she picked at a plate of ham salad and sipped sweet tea until her watch showed six thirty.
“Good night, girls,” she said, already on her feet, purse on her arm, headed for the front door.
Zinnia convinced Laurel and Iris to let them clear the table. At first Hagar didn’t notice them coming through the kitchen door carrying dirty plates until Holly put the water glasses in the sink. Hagar turned around.
“No,” she said. “Nuh-uh. Y’all aren’t my cleaners. Get out of my kitchen and get the others.”
“She came back,” Fern said. “The witch, the one who gave us the book.”
Hagar looked like she was going to tell them to get out again, then her forehead went smooth. She looked exhausted.
“What have you done?” she asked.
They told her. Zinnia did the talking and when she finished, Hagar stood and went to the freezer, took out an ice cube, and rubbed it against her temples.
“Y’all are more trouble than you’re worth,” she said into the cold, then closed the freezer door and faced them. “Clear up quick. The sun goes down in an hour.”
They cleared up fast, sometimes looking at each other to ask a question, then stopping because they knew none of them had an answer. Finally the table was wiped and the dishes were drying and Hagar turned off the sink. Miriam had come into the kitchen and she and Hagar stood beside each other, like reflections.
“A thing like that,” Hagar said, and Fern realized she was referring to Miss Parcae, “she needs to be locked out until she’s worn out. Come on. Sister and me aren’t doing all your work for you again.”
Miriam had some things wrapped in a dishcloth, and she took Holly and Zinnia to the front of the Home. Hagar told Fern to come with her. They went into the dining room and Hagar walked to the silver cabinet and pulled its bottom doors open with a grunt.
“Get that other chest,” she said, lifting out a small, polished mahogany trunk and setting it on the dining room table.
It was so heavy Fern barely managed to hoist it onto the table. Hagar lifted both lids to reveal rows of gleaming silverware against dark purple velvet.
“Take sixteen pieces,” she said, grabbing fistfuls of silverware in her enormous hands.
“Which ones?” Fern asked.
“If it mattered I would have told you,” Hagar snapped.
They took the silver, and the shovel leaning against the kitchen door, and buried four pieces of silverware in each of the four corners of the front and backyards.
“Silver’s clean metal,” Hagar said as they walked back around the house. “Witches can’t cross it. Come on, let’s seal up the back doors.”
Hagar had her hold a kitchen chair while she nailed up a horseshoe over the back door and then they did the side door, too. Everyone was in the Cong watching TV, so no one noticed the quiet hammering. When they were done they went around front to see Miriam’s handiwork. Her horseshoe was nailed up under the Juliet balcony, so close that at first Fern thought it was a piece of the metalwork.
“The silver will keep them out of the yard,” Hagar said. “And the horseshoes will keep them away from the doors. Their kind doesn’t like the smell of raw iron.”
“How do you know it’ll work?” Fern asked.
“I know a little about this and a little about that,” Hagar said. “And I know about things like that book woman. She’s toying with y’all right now but if we lock her out long enough, she’ll get bored the way a cat gets bored playing with a mouse. Sooner or later, she’ll run out of patience and leave. Like I wish I could.”
The last traces of sunlight slipped into the trees, leaving the sky dark and the air murky. The girls hustled upstairs. Silver or no, they didn’t want to be outside after nightfall.
***
Holly slept in Fern’s bed and, as hot and sticky as she was, Fern was g rateful .
“I wish there was room for you,” she said to Zinnia.
“I don’t want to be anywhere near that window,” Zinnia replied.
They listened to the house grow quiet around them, and soon the only sound was the fan rattling away on the chair. The lava lamp slid its silent shadows over the walls and ceiling. A wind picked up outside and they could hear it pressing against the house, rattling windows in their frames. In the woods, tree branches lashed one another, like waves hitting the beach.
“Do you think Hagar can keep her out?” Fern asked in the dark.
“I don’t know,” Zinnia said.
The wind gave the Home a long, hard push, and they heard its empty halls creak and its beams pop in the empty attic.
“Fern,” Holly whispered.
Holly was staring out the window and Fern sat up quickly and looked. Dark trees thrashed wildly and all she could see were moving shadows—then she saw one, standing in a treetop, clinging to its branches. She couldn’t tell who it was, but they held on to the swaying treetop, skyclad, arms and legs braced, outlined against the night, bouncing up and down, riding the branch, watching the Home.
Fern shrank from the window, but now that she’d seen one of them, she saw them all. The trees were crawling with them—witches, holding on to the wind-tossed branches, surrounding the Home.
At the edge of the yard something moved. Decima trotted out of the woods. She slowed, sniffed the ground, and stopped at the edge of the grass, then sat. After a moment, she raised her head and stared up at the Home. But she didn’t cross the silver.