Chapter 41
If Malcolm had been at the wheel, he knew the Frazer would have been in a ditch or wrapped around a tree by now.
But Jennie had taken over the driver’s seat, uncannily calm and perfectly in control.
She tapped the brake and gently nudged the accelerator in rhythm with the turns of the road, rigid with purpose, driving as fast as she could.
Malcolm hoped it would be fast enough.
Violet sat in the passenger seat with Malcolm behind her and Benjy behind Jennie.
The boy’s hands were still cuffed, but he could have twisted and grabbed the door handle, thrown himself out of the car.
Malcolm knew this was what Violet feared, that she’d chosen to be responsible for the boy.
For his part, Benjy only smiled at them all, showing too much of his teeth.
Between them in the back seat, Maggie Wise curled onto her side—dead but talking. Dead but able to look out from the husk of her corpse at the man her youngest son had become.
“You … found it,” his mother said, a quivering rasp somewhere between Katharine Hepburn and the buzz from a wasp nest. Like there were things crawling inside her, and she spoke to him from a deep well.
He wanted to ask if it was really Maggie, but he knew. They all knew.
“What did I find?”
“The … régi t?z,” Maggie managed. “The old … the old fire.”
Her pupils were so tiny, yet he feared if he looked too closely, he might glimpse an endless void.
At the wheel, Jennie craned her neck to see the road ahead.
The wipers did their job, but she’d had to stop several times to clear snow that had built up.
Malcolm wondered how much his sister knew, how much more Maggie had told her that Jennie had not revealed to him.
The gloom of the Frazer’s interior shimmered in such a way that if not for the shush of the wipers and the rumble of the tires on the snowy road, he’d have thought Maggie had stopped time.
None of them spoke, as if each of them understood precisely what she meant by the old fire. Magic. Witchcraft. The thing she believed he had inherited from her, the legacy Jennie envied so much.
“You told Jennie everything, but never me. Why not me?”
Her expression never changed. Death did that. But her lips still moved. “I told Jennie when I knew … I knew she hadn’t the spark.… You … walked away from a slaughter … in Korea.… The old fire was with you. I’d suspected … but then I … knew it.”
“You could have taught me.”
“You will … learn. Jennie knows the books.… You will need … the advice you’ll have to …
seek. There is no … school for this … Malcolm.
No teacher.… There is the power of the old fire and the …
intention of the witch. The words may … change, but with …
purpose and passion, they will … suffice. You will be your own teacher.”
Her voice cracked and faltered. A kind of hiss came from her throat, as if some connection had been severed. She coughed once, lightly, and then her body jerked against the seat. A shrill keen burst from her lips, and her fingers curled inward, nails cutting her palms.
“Maggie?” Violet called. “God, Maggie, what is it?”
Violet twisted in her seat, reaching into the back. She tried to hold Maggie in place, but the seizure could not be stopped.
“Jennie!” Violet said. “Stop the car!”
“For what?” Jennie asked, jaw tight, eyes on the road.
The coldness of her reply brought Violet up short. She glanced at Jennie and then at Malcolm.
“Do something! She’s your mother!”
Malcolm almost surrendered to the same urge, almost pulled Maggie into his arms to hold her until the seizure passed. Almost.
“She’s dead, Violet,” he said. “The best thing we can do for her now is get her home.”
Violet stared at him. Malcolm watched as it sank in. The woman who’d been so good to her had just been speaking to them, was even now straining and moaning and crying out. Violet had let herself believe they could have Maggie back, that there was some way for her to truly live again.
“You saw what she is,” Jennie said.
Violet slumped. Slid back into the passenger seat. She remained twisted around so she could watch Maggie, could glance at Benjy’s frozen, unsettling grin, could search Malcolm’s eyes for answers. But Malcolm only had questions.
“Momma?” he said, when the seizure had softened to trembling.
Maggie’s eyes opened. “It hurts.”
Malcolm exhaled. “Of course it hurts. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To make them hurt so much they couldn’t hunt, couldn’t live? To force the monsters underground?”
She sank down into the footwell, curled in upon herself, twisted by the pain.
They were in New Hampshire, probably less than an hour from the Maine border.
Malcolm had the idea that the closer they traveled to Shediak, the worse the pain would be.
That was where Maggie had wrought this curse, and he suspected it radiated out from there. The idea felt right.
Instinct had always served him. Now he wondered how much of that had been the old fire, and how much he could trust it. Don’t get cocky, he told himself. That’s an easy way to get dead.
But he knew this. It felt true in the same way it had when he realized he had to sing to drive down the evil that had woken inside her.
Violet had one hand on the dashboard, bracing herself as if they might crash. There were no other cars on the road, nobody stupid enough to be out in the middle of the night except for the occasional plow.
“Did you know she had this inside her?” she asked.
Jennie shook her head. Her cheeks were flushed. Malcolm wondered if it was from the cold, from anger, or from embarrassment at the things her mother had decided not to tell her.
“Maggie told me a story,” Jennie said. “A lot of stories. I wanted the old fire so badly that I think she told me a lot more than she ever planned, just so I would feel included. That we had secrets between us, mother and daughter.”
Malcolm almost felt sorry for her. He wished he could give her the thing snaking inside of him, this old fire he’d inherited, because he sure as hell didn’t want it.
“Meanwhile,” Violet said, “she was keeping secrets from you.”
“No more secrets.” Malcolm watched the back of his sister’s head. She wouldn’t look at him. “She lied to you, Jennie. Tell the story.”
Jennie finally glanced in the rearview mirror. Even now, she didn’t want to let go of the things she alone had shared with their mother. When she spoke, it was with regret.
“By the time she died, Maggie was something like three hundred and seventy years old. ‘Believe what you will,’ she always told me, but I believe that, and probably you should, too. Her father was a Hungarian explorer and historian who landed in Newfoundland in the late sixteenth century. Her mother was a native of the Wawenock tribe, who lived in the area of what is now Shediak. She was born Margit Paizsos, and she inherited the old fire from her father, and his mother before him, back across generations. They’d been hunting Morák for a thousand years.
Her father knew that European explorers would lead to settlers and that settlers would eventually mean the Morák would find their way to North America.
He was determined to prevent it, but he hadn’t imagined one of them could fly across the ocean.
Only the very oldest had wings to begin with, and it was so far. There would be no way to avoid the sun.
“But of course he was wrong. A flying thing made puppets of members of the crew, who built it a nest to sleep in during the day, and it traveled with his own expedition, and arrived in Newfoundland along with him.
So by the time Margit grew from a child to a woman, there were hundreds of them.
Her father taught her as much as he could about the old fire, but as she told you, there is no school.
Every witch must discover it anew. And discover it she did.
Others were frightened of her, but her father was proud.
“Then the Morák killed him. They tried to kill her. Margit called up the old fire and threw a curse meant to drive them off the continent. It caused them horrible pain, agony that would cripple even monsters. The curse lived in her, made her a kind of living ward that should have driven them away. Instead, it hurt them so badly that most didn’t have the strength to leave.
You know the rest. They burrowed, they dug themselves deep underground and fell into a kind of hibernation.
“The way Maggie had woven this curse, the place she’d spoken the words was the crux of it.
She didn’t realize it would trap her there, but since the monsters were only sleeping, every time she tried to leave Shediak, they would start to stir.
More than once, she made it a short way and had to turn back when one of the things dug itself up out of the ground and tried to kill her.
Eventually, she found a way around it. If she kept the soil of Shediak with her, remained connected, the curse would keep them buried.
Keep their torment too great for them to regain consciousness.
When she traveled, she kept her home soil in her pockets, sprinkled it into her shoes and beneath beds where she slept.
When she finally moved to Elkhart, on the first day of the twentieth century, she spread the soil of Shediak in the basement of her house.
“She’d escaped, and made a life. Tying herself to the curse had given her a very long life, but once she settled permanently so far from where that bit of witchcraft had been done, the years began to touch her.
By the time she realized she would grow old, that eventually she would die and the curse would unravel, she was in love.
She’d become a wife and a mother, and she decided the life she’d made was enough, that she’d sacrificed, and deserved happiness, and who could blame her?
“She began to make plans for the time when her life would run out, and those plans relied on having a child whose blood would carry the old fire.”