Chapter Thirty-Eight Mini
THIRTY-EIGHT MINI
A squirrel chattered out a warning as Mini neared the top of the hill.
What are you doing here? Go back home, you silly little girl, it seemed to say.
And maybe the squirrel was right.
Mini had been walking for forty minutes now, ever since she’d run away from the motel and Jack St. James. She knew she should go home, should keep her promise to Lorelei, but she couldn’t. There was one more thing she had to do. One more place she had to search for answers.
She’d never been on the old trail up Saw Meadow Hill to the knackerman’s place. She knew every other path in town, every other patch of woods, but this hill had always been off-limits, a haunted place where no one dared to go.
Could she hear him now, the loud chugging of the knackerman’s breath, the clip-clop of hooves?
She swallowed down the hard knot in her throat.
“Be brave,” she told herself aloud, stopping to look behind her. The path was clear. The only things out here were the squirrels and birds. Maybe some deer or moose, even a fox or a bobcat—but nothing that would harm her.
Unless Jack St. James was just out of sight, the gold watch ticking in his pocket?
Keep your mouth shut, little girl.
She had no idea what she might find up there at the top of the hill—if the old house would still even be standing.
Go back, go back, the squirrel chattered, and a raven joined in with a harsh caurr-cauk!, chiding her for not listening.
But she pushed on up the steep, overgrown trail.
At last the path opened up. She’d reached the top of the hill and found herself in a large clearing. She stepped into it, looking around.
The rotting remains of a cabin stood toward the back of the property, the hand-hewn logs notched and linked together like the Lincoln Logs she’d played with when she was little.
The wood-shingled roof had fallen in, the windows shattered long ago. The fieldstone chimney was still mostly intact, as were the stone steps by the front door.
She walked up to the leaning doorway and peered in. The wooden floor was coated with years’ worth of rotted leaves and pine needles. An old cast-iron stove sat rusting in the corner.
“Hello?” she called hesitantly, knowing it was silly. There was no one at home except for the mice and sparrows that made their nests here. No human had lived here for a very, very long time. Almost a hundred years, which seemed like forever.
She knew people in town used to come up and fix the knackerman’s house, keep it repaired.
They treated it like a museum, a truly special place.
Her papa told stories sometimes, about how when he was a boy, the town would climb the hill twice a year, bring picnics, carry supplies up, and spend all day there, reshingling the roof, washing and mending curtains and bedding, putting new glass in broken windowpanes, sweeping out pine needles, chasing away the mice, polishing the old cast-iron stove.
The people of Boone’s Ferry stopped coming up to the knackerman’s place way back before Mini was born, before her parents were even married—that long ago.
And it showed. It seemed like nature was trying to take the house back: there was moss and grass growing on what was left of the roof, a skinny maple had sprouted up to a few feet tall from a pile of leaf litter in the center of the floor.
Weeds and trees and vines were growing up over the outside of the cabin, helping to camouflage it, making it look like it was being pulled back down into the earth.
There was a bed in the corner, quilts brown and rotted, the cotton batting pulled out by generations of rodents.
She squinted her eyes and tried to imagine what it had been like back then, when he actually lived there.
She could almost see him, the shadowy form of a big man getting up out of bed, making himself a cup of coffee, pulling on his coat before heading outside, walking right past her, leaving a cool breeze in his wake.
Mini shivered and turned, trying to catch sight of him, but he was gone.
She made her way to the collapsed barn: a great tumbled heap of faded red boards, hand-hewn timbers.
She passed the massive cast-iron cauldron that was big enough for her to crawl inside.
It rested on its side, quietly rusting, the mouth gaping, a thick layer of rotting leaves spilling out.
She didn’t want to touch it. She didn’t want to touch anything here.
She felt suffering all around her, even after all this time.
She knew that this was where he cut the animals up and boiled them in the big pot like an ogre in a fairy tale.
She felt it in her body and it made her cold deep down, made her throat feel tight. She could almost smell the blood that must be soaked into the old floorboards and the ground beneath them.
There was a second barn beside it, an old horse stable, maybe, but there was only one wall standing now, the rest in ruins.
There was a rustle behind her. She spun, and spotted the rabbit watching from the edge of the clearing. A cottontail with black eyes, who knew better than to come any closer. It could smell the suffering and old blood too, she thought. It hopped off into the woods.
Mini had had enough.
There was nothing here. No clues. It was stupid to have come, to have believed there might actually be something to find here after all this time.
She moved away from the rubble of the barn and stable and was making her way back to the path she had followed up the hill when a sound broke the silence. Not a scream or a moan or a whisper, but a single high-pitched chirp.
The chirp of a late-season cricket. Another warning.
She told herself to get out of there, to run back down the hill, sneak back into her house.
Still, she found herself moving toward the sound of the cricket.
Maybe, if she was lucky, she could find it, see it, say hello to it, ask it what it knew.
Crickets weren’t like spiders, with their eight legs and biting fangs, their sticky webs.
Lots of people said a cricket in the house was good luck.
A cricket played music, a song that called out: This way, Mini. This way.
She moved around the left edge of the ruined barn, listening, searching. That was when she saw it: not the cricket, but a door made from wide planks of rough-hewn wood set into the ground, hung on heavy iron hinges gone orange with rust.
She walked slowly over to it.
The clearing was now totally quiet. No birdsong. Even the cricket had gone mute.
A chill ran through her whole body, creeping up from the ground, working its way through her toes, up her legs and spine, all the way to the back of her neck—a warning.
She put her hand on the old corroded handle of the door.
She could feel him there behind it.
She knew he was there, waiting. Listening. Knowing she was out there. Little Mini Fitzpatrick who had broken the rules.
Her heart hammered. Her mouth went dry.
She counted to three and yanked the door open.
The smell of damp earth hit her. She wished she’d brought a flashlight.
“Hello?” she called, voice creaky and strange.
There were narrow stone steps that led down to an earthen floor.
She crept down them, the sunlight coming through the doorway giving things a dim glow.
She was in a dark little room with shelves on all sides.
She found an oil lamp on a shelf, gave it a good shake—plenty of fuel left inside.
There was a pack of matches beside it; she lit one and set the flame against the wick, filling the room with a warm glow.
It was a root cellar. Her best friend, Bea, had one.
The cellar at Bea’s house was full of big jugs of hard cider, bushels of apples, potatoes, turnips, squash, and carrots.
This one was different.
Mini stared at the shelves, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. But was there another sound behind it?
The faintest of hoofbeats? She held still and listened.
Was that a snapping twig, somewhere in the distance?
She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed—that something was out there.
Lantern in hand, she quickly crept up the stone steps and eased the heavy door shut.
Feeling just the slightest bit safer, she began to study the contents of the cellar.
Shelves lined the walls, and Mini studied the objects on them: coins, five- and ten- and twenty-dollar bills in stacks, bottles of rum and whiskey, jars of jam, packs of cigarettes, pretty stones, notes written in faded ink.
She held the lamp up to the shelves and spotted a familiar object: the little clay horse she’d made in school and left for the knackerman last spring.
She picked it up, barely believing it. But when she turned it over, there were her initials, scratched into the clay: MF.
These were gifts people had left him. Hundreds, thousands of objects and notes and treasures left for him over the years.
A leather saddlebag hung off the end of one of the shelves. She reached into it, pulled out a glass jar half-full of dark red paint and an old wooden-handled paintbrush.
Mini felt eyes on her and looked up, let out a little squeak like a mouse about to be eaten, swooped down on by a hawk.
The knackerman’s face was looking down at her, a white horse skull with two dark hollow eyes.
But it was empty, only a mask lying on the top shelf beside his patched leather coat.
She was reaching for the yellow-white bone mask, trying to get up the nerve to actually touch it, when she froze.
She heard something.
And it wasn’t an animal this time.
All the animals were quiet now, holding very still, as frightened as she was.
There were footsteps up above.
Someone was coming.
Him, she knew. It was him.