The Year of the Witching(16)
Immanuelle read on, and as she did, the drawings became progressively more abstract. Some pages were just spattered with ink, others with a series of dashes inflicted so violently the marks ripped the pages to shreds. Of these final illustrations, if you could even call them that, there was only one that Immanuelle could distinguish. It, no, she—because, for some unfathomable reason, Immanuelle was sure it was a she—was a maelstrom. A mangle of teeth and eyes and rendered flesh. The tulip folds of what might have been the creature’s groin or perhaps an open mouth. Broken fingers and disembodied eyes with slits for pupils. Inexplicably, the ink still looked wet, and it rippled toward the edges of the paper as if threatening to spill onto the bed, soak the sheets black.
The final entry of the journal was unlike any of those that came before it. Every inch of those two pages was covered with the same four words: Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter . . .
On and on it went.
Just below the storm of those words, a scribbled footnote at the bottom of the journal’s final page: Father help them. Father help us all.
CHAPTER SIX
I first saw you by the riverside. There was sun on your cheeks and wind in your curls, and you sat with your feet in the water, smiling at me. I don’t think I’d felt real fear until that moment, but Father as my witness, I feared you.
—FROM THE FINAL LETTERS OF DANIEL WARD
EIGHT DAYS PASSED without event. In the mornings, Immanuelle sent the sheep to pasture. Sometimes she walked the children to school. She sold her wool at the market and avoided the temptations of the book tent and the woods. On the Sabbath, she went to the cathedral and laid her sins at the feet of the Prophet. She closed her eyes in prayer and did not open them. She sang her hymns with so much vigor she went hoarse halfway through the service and had to whisper her way through the remaining hours of worship. At home, she did not disobey Martha or bicker with Glory.
She kept to the creeds and commandments.
But in the nights, after the rest of the Moores had retired to their bedrooms and the children were asleep, Immanuelle slipped her mother’s journal from beneath her pillow and read it with reverence, the way Martha pored over the pages of the Prophet’s Holy Scriptures.
In her dreams, she saw the women of the woods. Their tangled legs and grasping fingers. The dead gazes that stared, unseeing, into the black of the forest’s corridors, their lips split apart as if they’d been caught in the midst of a kiss. And in the morning, when Immanuelle woke from those wretched dreams—sweating cold, her legs tangled in her sheets—she thought only of the Darkwood and her growing desire to return to it once more.
* * *
THE MORNING OF Leah’s cutting and her binding to the Prophet, Immanuelle woke with her mother’s journal beneath her cheek. She sat up with a start, smoothing the pages before she snapped it shut and slipped it under her mattress.
After forcing her feet into her muck boots, she trudged downstairs and out the back door, crossing through the farmyard and down into the paddock to let the sheep out to pasture. Then, in preparation for the buggy ride to the cathedral, she took the old mule from his shack and brushed him down, then fed and bridled him.
Across the fields and pastures was the black of the woods, the trees cast into shadow by the light of the rising sun. Immanuelle found herself looking for faces among the branches, the Lovers she’d seen in the woods that night, the figures sketched in her mother’s journal.
But she saw nothing. The distant woods were still.
By the time Immanuelle returned to the farmhouse, the Moore daughters were eating breakfast in the dining room. Honor sat at the table, spooning up the last of her gruel, and Glory studied her reflection in the bottom of a polished pot, tugging at her braids and frowning.
Anna wore her Sabbath best. Her hair was heaped atop her head and adorned with wildflowers. She was beaming; she always beamed on cutting days.
“To think it’s Leah who drew the Prophet’s eye,” she said, almost singing the words.
Martha rounded the corner of the kitchen, bringing Abram with her. He leaned heavily on her shoulder, his mangled foot sliding across the floorboards. Martha stared at Immanuelle pointedly, a frown creasing the seal between her brows. “It speaks to her virtue.”
Immanuelle’s cheeks burned with shame at the subtle slight. “That it does.”
With that, she dismissed herself to the washroom, tripping on the hem of her nightdress as she went. She set about the task of readying herself. There was little she could do but wash the dirt off her hands and wet her curls in a sad attempt to tame them. She tried to pile her hair atop her head the way Anna did, but her ringlets tangled, devouring pins and snaring the teeth of her comb.
So she let her hair hang long, the thick curls sweeping the base of her neck. She pinched her cheeks to give them color, bit her lips and wet them.
She frowned at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. The longer she stared into her own eyes, the more her face warped and changed. Her skin paled. Her eyes gaped wider. Her mouth twisted into a sneer.
All at once, it was not her face in the mirror at all, but that of one of the Lovers. The same ghoul that had given her the journal. Her lips twisted apart. A strange and warbling voice echoed through her mind: “Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter.”