Between the Spark and the Burn Read online

  “You were under his glow, Vi,” he said, the blush spilling off his face and spreading down his neck like it did sometimes right before he let his fists start swinging. “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “Wasn’t it?” I asked, but my voice barely rose above the cold breeze blowing down the mountains.

  Wasn’t it, River?

  ≈≈≈

  We found Inn’s End just as the sun started sinking into the horizon. We pulled over no less than eight times, asking farmers and postmen and kids playing in the snow for directions. It wasn’t on the maps, just as Wide-Eyed Theo had said.

  Everyone gave us directions willingly enough, though they looked at us strangely and seemed a bit unnerved at the question. Even the kids—a brother and sister on a small farm, wrapped up against the chill. They were no older than ten, with grave expressions, like old black-and-white pictures of towheaded Great Depression children I’d seen in National Geographic. They came up to Neely’s rolled-down car window and the green-eyed older brother peered over the top of the car door and told us where to go . . . down this road, up the next, very earnest, as if he were being graded on it. And when he was done he rubbed a calloused un-mittened hand over a small cut on his left temple.

  I wondered what work he’d been doing at his age, to get hands like that. I wondered how he’d gotten the cut on his face.

  The boy caught my eye and added, “You shouldn’t go there, though. Bad things happen in Inn’s End. It’s a bad place.” And his little sister pursed up her chapped red lips and nodded too, like it was the God-given truth, praise be to him.

  But it would take more than two wary little kids to make us turn back now, even if the directions were full of wrong turns and dead ends and misleads, as if people didn’t want us to find the town. Two hours it took us. Two hours of twisting roads and black trees and dark hollows. And then we turned down another unnamed, unpaved road, crossed a covered bridge, and there we were.

  The town sign was weathered and tilted at an angle, but we could still read it.

  Inn’s End.

  I guess I had built it up in my mind as a wild backwoods place with barefoot children and chickens running around squawking and rusted-out washtubs and weathered, beaten-down shacks. The reality was a windy, one-main-street town with a vague New England feel that reminded me of Echo, just like the rest of the Appalachian Mountains. The white wooden houses looked suspicious and tight-lipped, with their black shutters closed tight against the wind, but the outskirts of the town backed up into sloping meadows, which themselves backed up into endless rolling hills and trees, trees, trees. Beautiful.

  We parked the car next to the small, steepled, red-roofed church at the end of the main road. We got out. Stood still. Took the town in.

  The first thing I noticed was the quiet. The deep, deep, middle-of-the-forest quiet. After the quiet, I noticed the lack of Christmas decorations. No lights on trees, no greenery around door frames, no cheery red tinsel hung between streetlights. All the towns we’d passed recently had put up their own slightly shabby holiday trimmings, making the streets seem more cheerful and sweet than usual. But not Inn’s End.

  And then I noticed the birds.

  Black-feathered corpses. Everywhere. Piled up on steps, kicked into snow piles, dangling by their necks from lampposts and signs. There were eight nailed to the door of the dark, abandoned-looking Youngman’s Inn, and five hanging by their feet from the iron church gate.

  The four of us walked down the center of the road. Still and silent. I saw lights in windows, but there was no one in the street. Not a soul.

  The sun was just a sliver on the horizon now, like a small prayer said without much hope. The orange-pink light reflected off the snow and turned the world a strange, ominous color that put dark thoughts in my head.

  “What was it that Wide-Eyed Theo said?” Neely asked, quiet.

  “The devil-boy commands a flock of ravens,” Luke said, voice low.

  I shivered, a sick, hard shiver, like the ones you get when you have the flu.

  My wrists started hurting, sharp and cold at first, and then hot and full of sting. I tore my mittens off and turned my hands over, but all I saw was the same pink scars, looking like they always did.

  “I don’t like it here,” Luke said. His words fogged up in the cold air. His eyes were wide open, his arms straight down at his sides. “Vi, I have a bad feeling about this town. This—” He nodded his chin at the dead birds, their feathers ruffling in the chill wind. “I don’t like it, sister. We should leave. Now.”

  Sunshine turned around in a circle, saying nothing. So far she and Luke had flirted and kissed and been in love and acting like this trip was all good fun.

  But now I saw it in her eyes. Fear. Raw and rotten and deep as winter is cold.

  A door opened. One of the white houses at the far end of the street. It opened and then slammed closed again. The attached cluster of dead, black feathers swung back with it and hit the wood with a thud.

  A girl stood on the steps.

  She saw us just as we saw her. She jumped back a few inches, her mouth wide open.

  Two heartbeats.

  And then she started walking toward us, her eyes on Luke and his red-brown hair.

  “Who are you?” she asked, her voice small and hesitant like it was afraid to be heard. “Where did you come from? We don’t get strangers here.” She paused. “At least, we didn’t use to.”

  I thought she was about fourteen, but slight and small, which might be making her look younger. She had white-blond hair, straight down her back, no bangs. She wore a green dress, a bit old-fashioned in a home-sewn way, plain with a tight waist, thick black boots, and a gray homemade sweater—one thread was coming loose and had opened a quarter-sized hole on her shoulder. In her right arm she held a large white bowl of something. Something thick and red that had sloshed over the side and stained the front of her dress.

  She was looking at Luke but Neely answered her. “We heard about your town, about what was happening here. The devil-boy, with the ravens. We came to investigate.”

  “No, Neely, don’t tell her,” I whispered, too late. I’d read mysteries. I’d read Agatha Christie. You never tell people what you’re up to. It’s the golden rule. If people know you’re looking for answers, they clam up and refuse to talk.

  But Neely just winked at me, and then at her, as if we were all just a bunch of kids flirting with each other at the town carnival or something, our hands sticky from cotton candy and our hearts on our sleeves.

  How did he do that? Make a hidden mountain town full of dead birds feel like a Norman Rockwell painting?

  The girl nodded, as if what Neely said made sense and nothing could surprise her much anymore anyway.

  “What’s in the bowl?” Sunshine had a hand to her mouth, and suddenly I knew why. The winter wind lifted the copper smell to my nose.

  “Blood,” the girl said, simply. “For the churchyard. We killed the pig today.”

  Luke turned his head to look back at the church, then turned it forward again. “Why are you bringing pig’s blood to the church?”

  His voice got loud at the end, and it worried me. I wrapped my fingers around his arm and he leaned into me.

  The girl shrugged. “To pour on the gravestones.”

  “Why would you pour pig’s blood on the gravestones?” I didn’t really want to know the answer, and yet the question came out of my mouth anyway.

  The girl shifted her hip and put the bowl in her other arm, more of it spilling onto her dress in the process.

  A sound came from Sunshine’s opened lips. A . . . sigh. A soft sigh. Usually Sunshine shrieked loudly when she was scared, or pretending to be scared. But she was quiet now. Sighs, not screams.

  The girl looked at Sunshine, and then looked back at the blood staining her home-sewn dress. A flush started c
reeping over her cheeks, as if she hadn’t thought to be embarrassed about the spilled blood before now.

  “It’s an offering to our ancestors, to help capture the boy,” she said, in answer to my question. The girl paused, looked toward her house, quick, and then looked back at us again. “Some people are saying he’s the devil and has hooves for feet and fire coming out of his fingertips, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong. He . . . he just looks like a boy, just a boy like either of you.” She stopped and stared at Neely, and then at Luke. “I saw him when he came to me, in my bedroom. He sat on my stomach, light as air, and tried to steal my dreams, only I woke up. The other girls, they didn’t wake up in time, they didn’t see his face in the dark, but I struck a match. I saw.”

  Neely flinched when the girl said a boy, just a boy like either of you.

  The girl started blinking fast, and her eyes were pleading and wistful and kind of lonely. That look was familiar to me, in some deep, almost forgotten way.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “The other girls told, but I didn’t.”

  I wanted to ask her more, and so did Neely, behind me. His mouth was parted and I could almost see his questions, sitting on the edge of his tongue . . .

  But I felt so bad for her suddenly, with her red-rimmed eyes and her skinny shoulders all hunched up and the blood on her dress. I didn’t care about anything, right then. Not the devil-boy, not the dead birds, not Brodie. There was just this girl.

  I pulled myself away from Luke, and stepped forward. “Let’s go to the cemetery and get this done, okay?” I nodded at the bowl, and then I reached for her free hand. It was small and calloused, like the boy who gave us directions. I took it in mine, and squeezed.

  We all walked back down the road, past all the white houses with the tight black shutters and the dead birds on the doors, to the church. I opened the black iron gate, careful not to touch the birds, not to look into their black eyes, and pulled the girl in behind me.

  “My name is Pine,” she said as we climbed up to the tiny cemetery off to the left of the church. “Like the trees. My mother likes the way they smell. And how they never die, even in winter.”

  “I’m Violet,” I said. “And that’s Luke, my twin brother, and our next-door neighbor Sunshine, and our friend Neely.”

  She looked at them in turn, and nodded. The cemetery was on a small hill, the gravestones leaning and crouching and huddled together. I glanced down the horizon. From up here the mountains seemed to be nestling the whole town in the crook of its arm.

  Pine stepped up to the nearest gravestone, the sky behind her a dusky blue, edged in a scorching red-orange. She lifted the bowl and poured about a quarter cup of the blood right over the top. “And thou shalt slay the swine, and thou shalt take its blood, and sprinkle it on the stones,” she said, soft and slow, like a prayer.

  It was getting dark, fast, but I could still see the stains of previous offerings, turning the worn, crooked stone an unsettling color, flaking off onto the ground like shavings of rust.

  “Why do you do this?” I asked, moving with her over to the next stone, a tall one. I helped her lift the lip of the bowl and dribble the blood over the letters, GRIEVE, until they were coated. There were no other words carved on it, just Grieve.

  She shrugged again, a tight moving up and down of her shoulders. “Because we always have. Whenever someone has a baby that’s sick, or an Elderly that needs to move on, or a kid gone missing in the woods, we make a blood offering to our ancestors.”

  We moved on down the line. Neely and Luke and Sunshine stood about fifteen yards away, watching from the edge of the cemetery at the base of the hill, not talking. Both Luke and Sunshine clutched the iron gate in their fists, like they couldn’t wait to leave.

  Three days ago we were singing Christmas songs in Citizen Kane, and now I was helping a sad girl in a dead-bird town pour blood in a churchyard. Life was . . . strange.

  It was the last headstone, number nineteen, and we were down to the drops. I vaguely wished in the back of my mind for a spatula, something to scrape the last bits out of the bowl, like Freddie had done when we made Dutch Coffee Chocolate Cake.

  And then I shivered. Shivered at the absurdity of scraping pig’s blood from a bowl like cake batter. My shivering arms splattered the last red beads on the ground instead of the stone, and they made small, melted dents in the snow. Four little black holes.

  This town was too quiet.

  Too . . . bizarre.

  Something was wrong. Off. Something worse than dead birds and blood.

  I could feel the bowl in my hands, see the dead birds, hear the sound of my feet crunching on snow. It was real.

  Wasn’t it?

  River, am I being glowed?

  Or sparked?

  Are we all?

  I shook my head. Blinked.

  River’s glow felt good.

  And Brodie’s spark hurt like hell.

  I would know. I felt sure I would know.

  Pine took the bowl from me and set it on the ground. She stood up, and shuddered as the cold wind hit her small body. I took the scarf from around my neck, my new striped one, and wrapped it around her, moving her white-blond hair as I did it. “Keep this,” I said. “I’ve got another back home.”

  “People will ask where it came from,” she said, not taking her eyes from the pretty white and black stripes.

  “Just tell them you found it in the forest,” I replied.

  She looked up at me. “Thank you.”

  I stared into her light blue-gray eyes. “Pine, are all your ancestors buried here, in this graveyard? It’s so small . . .”

  She nodded. “A group of them came over from Scotland, way, way back when. Married each other. We . . . keep to ourselves.” She tilted her chin up, like she was ready for my scorn. “We used to go to a real school down the mountain, but Pastor Walker Rose stopped that. Now we go to school in the church right there, three days a week. Duncan Begg and his daughter Prudence teach us, ever since Widow McGregor died. It’s mostly knitting and carving and carpentry, but they do reading and math too.”

  “Pine, what do all the dead birds on the signs and doors mean? Does this have something to do with the devil-boy?”

  She looked up at me, again. I wasn’t that tall, but she was still a good six inches smaller. “The Droods, they caught the boy in their daughter’s room. They tried to stop him, get him off Charlotte, but a flock of ravens swept in through the window and started pecking at their eyes and face and head and hands. They still have the sores. The herb woman says they’re not healing clean.” She paused. “And then there’s all the people, mostly older but some children too, who say they’ve seen him in the woods, dressed all in black, with a dark cloud of ravens flying above him, following him wherever he goes.”

  I could picture him, clear as day. Brodie. Red hair. Midnight-blue sky. White snow. Black ravens.

  Neely had joined me by this time, stepping up beside me, listening quietly. Luke and Sunshine still hovered by the iron gate, whispering to each other.

  “So these Droods still have the sores?” Neely. “Then the birds aren’t an illusion. It means he’s controlling animals now too. That can’t be good.” The grin was back on Neely’s face like it was nothing, like it was just a bit of juicy gossip, like it was, For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn.

  “They think killing the birds will anger him,” Pine added. “Make him come out into the open so we can catch him. But he’s gone. I know he is. I can feel it, in my insides, somehow. A . . . lessening. Ma made me bring the blood out here, to ask our ancestors for help. But I know he’s already gone.”

  Neely’s eyes had that up-to-no-good glint that I’d seen in River’s so many times. And that’s when I knew we were going to stay.

  And maybe part of me was scared, but th
e other part, the louder part . . . the Freddie part . . . was licking its lips in anticipation.

  “Pine, do you know somewhere we can spend the night?” I looked up and down the small rows of houses that led off the main street, and her gaze followed mine. “A campground, maybe? Or a hotel?”

  Pine shook her head, snuggling her chin into the scarf. “We had an inn once, a long, long time ago. A road ran through Inn’s End, and a train too. We were the last stop before the big forest. But then Pastor Walker Rose started preaching against strangers. Soon the train disappeared and then no more inn either.” She was quiet for a moment. “You could stay at the Lashleys’, I suppose. Their place is on the other edge of town. It’s the biggest house in Inn’s End—the one with the rope swing in front.”

  “Do they rent out rooms?” I asked, with no enthusiasm. I liked Pine on sight, but the thought of sleeping in one of the houses in Inn’s End, with the dead birds hanging on the door . . .

  But Pine shook her head. “No one rents out rooms here. Not since Walker Rose. The Lashleys . . . they had a little boy. He was really pretty, great brown curls, fat rosy cheeks. Everyone loved him. And then one morning he wandered into the woods and didn’t come back. They found him three days later, smashed to pieces at the bottom of a gorge. Little Hamish Lashley’s ma threw herself off old Witch William’s bridge. They told Ian not to marry an outsider, and a city girl at that, despite the money. But he would have her. He ran off then too. Who knows where, anywhere that’s not here, I guess. No one lives there now. It’s empty.”

  A raven cawed from overhead. I looked up. It was perched on the steeple roof, sitting with its chest puffed out as if to say I’m not dead like the others. Not yet.

  “That will work for the night,” I said to Pine. “Thank you. Will people mind, though?” I added, as I saw an old bent woman step out of a small, dark shop with three dead birds on the door and no sign. She shuffled down the street and disappeared into the night, never turning her head, not seeing us.