Chapter Thirty-Three Mini #3
“It’s full of herbs and stuff,” Mini explained. “Miss Josephine says it’s an old recipe handed down from a woman who was a healer back during the flu. It’s supposed to keep him away.”
“Him?”
“The knackerman.”
“But the knackerman is long gone, Mini.”
“He cursed the town,” Mini said. She took in a breath and recited the facts she’d been taught her whole life. “He vowed to come back, to make everyone pay. And four times a year, on the full moon, he comes. The whole town leaves gifts for him.”
“Come back? Like a ghost?” Ashley said.
“We’ve got to leave him gifts. Not just any gifts, but good gifts. If we don’t, if they’re not good enough, he’ll ruin the corn crops, make winter last extra long, make people sick even. He can make bad things happen.”
“So everyone in town believes in this?” Ashley’s eyes were wide.
“Sure. We learn all about him in school. And Reverend Quinn does a special service for the knackerman every fall. It’s during the harvest festival. Miss Josephine always gets up and tells a story. She knows all the knackerman stories.”
“She does, huh?”
Mini nodded. “She says it’s important that none of us ever forget them. That they’re part of our history.”
“And every family in town leaves these gifts?”
“Oh yes. On the Wolf Moon, Pink Moon, Buck Moon, and Hunter’s Moon. We leave food. Special cakes. Coins. Beer and liquor. Tobacco. Drawings and notes of thanks. If you don’t leave things, or if you break the rules—you get the mark.”
“What are the rules?” Ashley asked.
“Well, you have to always give generously. Then you go inside, lock your door, and close the shades. You can’t ever try to see the knackerman.
” Here her voice got quiet, regretful. She swallowed hard.
“The other big rule is that you never, ever tell an outsider about the knackerman. You never share the secrets of our town. Because he’s always listening.
He always knows.” She pursed her lips, looked around the cemetery, eyes darting, searching the shadows for one of his spies.
“And if you mess up at all, you get the horse painted on your door?” Ashley asked.
Mini nodded. “Then everyone in town can see. Can see that you broke the rules. That you betrayed the knackerman. Not just him, but your own family, the whole town.” She bit her lip.
“What happens then?” Ashley asked. “What does the mark mean?”
“If you get the mark, something terrible happens.”
“Something terrible? Like what?”
Mini shrugged her shoulders, stayed hunched up, like she was trying to shrink up into herself, like a turtle hiding in an invisible shell.
“It’s different each time. Sometimes there’s a fire.
Sometimes a sickness. But mostly, the person who messed up just…
isn’t around anymore.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He takes them.”
Ashley blew out a long, slow breath.
“Mini, do you remember when the town hall burned down? It was about two years ago.”
Mini swallowed the lump in her throat. “Of course I do. That was how Sad Willy got to be Sad Willy.”
“Sad Willy? I’m pretty sure we saw him at Loon’s Call yesterday—why do they call him that?”
“Ever since the fire, he drinks a lot. He wears dirty clothes and sleeps under the bridge. I’m not supposed to talk to him, but I sometimes do. I think he’s nice. Most kids, they’re mean to him. Throw rocks at him and stuff.”
“That’s awful,” said Ashley, and Mini could tell she meant it.
Mini went on, “See, Willy was married to a lady named Anna O’Brien.
They got the mark on their door. The knackerman, he set that fire at the town hall the next day, ’cause that’s where Anna worked.
Willy tried to save her, ran into the fire and everything.
People say he fought the knackerman, but that the knackerman let him live.
He has a fake foot now, but I don’t think it’s a good one because he limps really bad. ”
Ashley’s face had gone white as a sheet. “Wh-where…” she stammered, “… where can I find this Willy?”
“He’s down by the river mostly. Under the bridge near the factory.”
Ashley nodded, licked her lips. She reached into her purse, pulled out a photo.
“Mini, do you remember a woman, a stranger, who came to town two years ago, around the time the town hall burned?” She held out the photo for Mini to see.
Mini glanced at the photo and, for the first time, made the connection. The strange woman from two years ago looked a lot like Ashley. She nodded.
“Did she get the mark also?” Ashley asked in a small voice that made it sound like she might not really want to hear the answer.
Or maybe it was that she already knew the answer.
Mini nodded. “Right on her door at the Deer Run Motel. Just… just like you did, Miss Ashley.”
Ashley looked really scared now, but Mini could tell she was trying to sound brave. “Do you know what happened to her?”
Mini wasn’t sure what to say. She never saw the outsider lady who looked like Ashley again, after the fire. At last she ventured, “I’m not real sure. Maybe she left town? Went home?”
But she could tell that Ashley didn’t believe that any more than Mini herself believed it.