The Hunger(71)

Tanau Mogop nodded and ran the edge of his knife hard against a whetstone. “They do many shameful things, this group. They will choose a man among them to offer up to the na’it, to satiate the evil spirit. But this is wrong. This is what feeds the evil spirit, what gives it strength.”

Bryant could understand this notion, why certain parts of their tribe might have been moved to sacrifice their own people to cannibals, perhaps to keep other cannibalistic men—or monsters, really—at bay.

Tanau Mogop had said the Anawai had begun actively worshiping the na’it—had begun making sacrifices to the na’it—five or six years ago. It seemed abundantly clear to him that the resurgence in perceived na’it activity all began around that time—around the same time that Bridger claimed the lost prospectors had disappeared. He pictured the spooky camp, the disturbing signs of cannibalism.

The vanished white prospectors might not have been victims of the disease at all.

They were its originators.





CHAPTER THIRTY




December 1831


Through the window of his grandfather’s Victorian—one of the more prominent homes in the area—Stanton could see the wide white swath of frozen river that cut through the middle of town. School was closed and children, shrieking with delight, skated close to the banks.

But it was farther down, at a bend that opened up into a wider pond abutting the woods, where he’d promised to meet Lydia. For today was the day they had planned to run away.

When he first arrived, at the very spot where they’d spoken yesterday, he was convinced she hadn’t come at all, had changed her mind or been delayed or too scared.

He heard the gong of the church bell.

Then he saw her. All by herself, this tiny dark figure inching farther and farther out onto the frozen pond, where the ice thinned.

“Lydia!” he called out. “Lydia!” She paused for a second, but she did not turn.

It took him a moment to understand that she had heard him. A second more to realize she wore no overcoat, no hat or scarf. In fact, she appeared to be dressed in her nightgown even though it was midafternoon. He felt frozen in confusion. The blood began to pump furiously in his veins, and he cleared his throat, calling to her again.

She did turn, at last, but from that distance, he couldn’t see the expression in her dark eyes. The only noise she made was when the ice broke underneath her.

In an instant she disappeared.

Stanton snapped out of the trance that had briefly held him—he was dashing through the biting cold before he knew it, the scenery passing in a blur, panic making his ears ring. He must have been screaming, because suddenly there were many footsteps in the snow, shouts echoing off the trees. He ran until two men grabbed hold of him to keep him from following her.

By then, the body had been pulled out of the water. Someone else had gotten there first. Icy water ran off her hair and face in rivulets, the nightgown plastered to her pale blue skin.

For one cruel moment, he thought he saw her eyelids flutter—thought there was still a chance, somehow, that she had lived.

And then, like the surface of the pond itself, the truth finally cracked open, and he plummeted.



* * *



? ? ?

THEY’D GROWN UP almost next door to each other. Stanton’s father was a surveyor and was away often, so he left Stanton and his mother with his father, a prominent minister. It was a strange childhood. Stanton’s grandfather, the Reverend Resolved Elias Stanton, was impossible to please and it seemed he was doubly so with his grandson. Perhaps this was why Stanton became close to Lydia; her house provided an escape. At least, this was his reason in the beginning. As they got older, he fell hard for the girl, who had always struck him as mysterious, even as a child, despite how close they lived.

There was something dark about her soul, something remote and flickering, like a flame in wind, and Stanton, well . . . he was young—too young to understand what had made her that way.

Lydia’s mother had died when she was very young and she lived alone with her father in their big house, bustling with servants. She could be high-handed and people blamed this on her father spoiling her. It was true. She expected to have her way and she exasperated adults to no end, though the person she bedeviled the most was Stanton. It was because she knew he was in love with her—that had to be it.

There had been nothing between them, other than a few frantic kisses stolen in the hallway, or in Lydia’s attic, or behind the house, at the place where the boxwoods grew tallest.

The Lord knows Stanton wanted to do much more than that, but he hadn’t had the opportunity, and, truth be told, might not have known what to do with it if he had. His grandfather and mother had made sure to keep him sheltered from the realities of what occurred between men and women in the dark.

He’d always imagined he would do everything the right way. He would make a man of himself in the world, and would earn Lydia’s love properly. He’d ask her to marry him, and then the fantasies that had begun to bubble within him would become reality. There was a confident ease with which he believed that all of this would come to pass—he trusted his love for Lydia the way his grandfather trusted the firm hand of God.

But when Stanton first told her of this dream, she started acting coldly. It was sheer torture. He became sick with worry, thinking he’d disappointed her or overstepped the bounds of their friendship. Or worse: that she’d found someone else.