The Winter People(35)
She nodded and looked at me a long time with her coal-black eyes. “Would you like to see her one more time?” Auntie asked. “Would you like a chance to say goodbye?”
“Yes,” I said, sobbing. “Just one moment with her. I would give anything.”
“Then you are ready. Do you hear me, Sara Harrison? You are ready.”
The bed came floating back down to the floor. The room brightened. Auntie turned and walked back into the closet, shutting the door behind her. I closed my eyes, opened them. I was awake. The room smelled like the air after a lightning storm. Judging by the light, it was still morning. Martin hadn’t been gone long.
I lay there a minute, thinking of the dream—of the deer and of Auntie. Remembering what she told me that long-ago afternoon when I first asked her about sleepers:
I will write it all down, everything I know about sleepers. I will fold up the papers, put them in an envelope, and seal it with wax. You will hide it away, and one day, when you are ready, you will open it up.
I leapt from my bed and ran down the hall to Gertie’s room, which was my own bedroom when I was growing up. I was weak. My body felt as light and floaty as a bit of dandelion fluff, but was humming with a new, strange energy, a drive such as I had never known before.
I hadn’t been in her room since that terrible day, and I hesitated for a second before pulling the door open. Everything was just as she’d left it: the unmade bed, the tangled covers we’d hidden under together on that last morning. Her nightgown was thrown on top of the bed; her closet door was open, and one dress was missing—the dress she put on to follow her father out into the yard and woods.
Look out, Papa. Here comes the biggest cat in the jungle.
The dress she had chosen was her favorite, blue with tiny white flowers. We had made it together when school first started, out of material she’d picked out at the store. She helped cut the pieces and even did some of the sewing herself, pumping the treadle and guiding the fabric through the machine.
It is the dress we buried her in.
Over on the right side of her room, there were shelves that contained a few toys and books and little treasures she’d collected: pretty rocks, the beautiful magnifying glass Amelia had given her, a few funny little animal sculptures she’d made out of clay from the river, a ball and jacks I’d bought her at the general store. (Martin had asked me not to spend money on such things, but how could I help it?)
It took my breath away, being in her room. I could smell her, taste her in the air around me. It was almost too much to bear. Then I remembered what I’d come for.
I pushed the heavy, wood-framed bed aside, found the loose floorboard where the left rear foot of the bed had rested. I dug my fingers into the crack so deeply that I tore a fingernail, but soon I was able to work the board free.
There was Auntie’s envelope, right where I had hidden it when I was nine years old, the wax seal unbroken.
I tucked the envelope into my nightgown, pushed back the bed, then returned to my own room. I made a tent of the covers, as Gertie and I used to do, and opened the envelope, hidden. Inside were several pages carefully folded. I had to hold up one side of the blanket to let in enough light to read by.
There was Auntie’s familiar scrawl. It sent a wave of memories through me. Auntie teaching me how to write my letters, how to tell a poisonous mushroom from one that was good to eat. I felt her beside me once more, smelled her pine-tree, leather, and tobacco smell; I heard her voice, soft and musical, as she breathed life’s lessons into my ear.
My Dearest Sara,
I have promised to tell you everything I know about sleepers. But before you go on, you must understand that this is powerful magic. Only do it if you are sure. Once it is done, there can be no going back.
The sleeper will awaken and return to you. The time this takes is unsure. Sometimes they return in hours, other times, days.
Once awakened, a sleeper will walk for seven days. After that, they are gone from this world forever.
Seven days, I thought to myself, as sinister wheels began to turn. What I wouldn’t give to have my Gertie back for seven whole days!
Martin
January 25, 1908
The noise woke him sometime after midnight—a scratching, a scuttling. His eyes shot open, and he lay in the dark, listening.
Pale moonlight came in through the bedroom’s frost-covered window, giving everything a bluish glow. He stared up at the plaster ceiling, listening. The fire had died down, and the room was cold. He inhaled, then exhaled, feeling as if the room were breathing with him.
There it was again. The scratching. Nails against wood. He held his breath and listened.
Mice? No. Too big for mice. It sounded like something large trying to claw its way out of the walls. Behind the scrabbling, he heard what sounded like the rustle of flapping wings.
He thought of the chicken he’d found in the woods this morning—another one of their hens taken. Only this time it didn’t seem like the work of a fox. He found the carcass up near the rocks. The chicken’s neck had been broken, and its chest had been opened up, the heart removed. He didn’t know of any animal that would do a thing like that. He’d buried the body in rocks, tried to put it out of his mind.
His own heart thudding now, he felt the bed beside him, expecting to find Sara’s warm body, but the bed was cold. Had she gone into Gertie’s room again? Were the two of them hidden under the covers, giggling?