Monstrous Beauty (7 page)

Hester looked up and squeezed Annabelle tight to her chest. She saw a little girl in a plum-colored dress with a white sash.

“Shut up, you!” Hester said, knitting her eyebrows together.

“Oh!” Linnie said. “I didn’t think you would hear that!”

“I have ears, don’t I?”

“Well, of course you have, but no one ever pays attention to what I say!” Linnie smiled—her front teeth were still growing in—and called out, “Do you want to see my fort?”

“Sure,” Hester said, tossing her lunch bag and Annabelle on top of the retaining wall and shinnying up after them. The instant Annabelle fell to the ground, Linnie snatched her up.

“Hey! Give her back,” Hester said, wiping the dirt from her hands onto the back of her pants.

“I just want to see her,” Linnie said. She hugged Annabelle, as if trying her on. She closed her eyes and swung her torso gently from side to side.

Linnie opened her eyes and saw Hester staring. She looked down at Annabelle and finally held the doll out.

“Here,” she said.

“Thanks,” Hester said. “Her name’s Annabelle.”

“She’s not properly dressed.”

“What?”

“My doll Poppet has a violet dress with real lace, and a petticoat. And she has beautiful long hair and black satin ribbons.”

“I don’t care! Annabelle is comfy like this, and she loves me.”

Linnie looked wounded.

Hester said, “Where’s your doll, anyway?”

Tears pooled in Linnie’s lower lids. “I lost her. I brought her here with me, and I’ve searched everywhere.”

“Oh, gosh. I’m sorry.” Hester watched as the tears reached critical mass and spilled onto Linnie’s pillowy cheeks. “I can help you look for her…”

Linnie shook her head, as if it were hopeless. Her blond ringlets thumped lightly on her cheeks.

“Is that your fort?” Hester asked, trying to distract her.

Linnie sniffed and nodded. “Do you want to help me build it?”

“I can only stay for a few minutes. My name’s Hester.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Linnie said, like a grownup. “My name is Linnie.”

“Cool, I never knew anyone named Linnie before.”

“It’s the diminutive form of my Christian name, which I detest.”

Hester guessed that diminutive meant “short for.” She already knew that detest meant “hate.” She looked sideways at Linnie as they wandered together, collecting twigs and small branches.

Hester knelt to poke some of the stronger branches in the dirt, shoring up the fort’s walls, as Linnie wove the thinner, flexible twigs together to form a flat roof.

“Whoa, you’re good at that,” Hester said.

“I make a lot of forts.”

“I’ll snap off the tops of the twigs to make the walls straight for your roof.” Hester began whistling as she worked.

After a while Linnie said, “I can’t whistle because my teeth are late growing in.” She laid the roof on top of the walls of the fort. “But I have a scar. Do you want to see it?”

“I guess so,” Hester said, trying to think if she had any scars of her own she could show off.

Linnie turned around, parting the golden curls on the back of her head. And there was the biggest scar Hester had ever seen: a thick white rope of skin about four inches long.

“Wow, does that hurt?”

“No, silly. It’s all better.”

“I mean, did it hurt when you got it?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I just like having something to feel on the back of my head.”

“Cool,” Hester agreed.

*   *   *

Sam nudged her. It was time for Communion. Hester slid out and got in line with her family behind her. As she shuffled in a slow march toward the pastor, she was vaguely aware of stirrings among the parishioners. The man ahead of her accepted the host and turned right, to file back to the pews. Just as Pastor Marks laid the bread in Hester’s hand, she heard a cry and saw the man spit his partially chewed wad into a handkerchief. He looked over his shoulder at Hester and the pastor, shaking his head, with his eyes watering and his face contorted. Beyond him, several parishioners ran toward the vestibule in the direction of the water fountains. Pastor Marks lifted the chalice to his nose and winced.

Hester was curious, so she nibbled a tiny edge of the bread. Her stomach rose, and her throat spasmed in a stifled gag. The bread had the overwhelmingly musky, sour taste of rotten meat. Not
like
rotten meat, but actual, rancid flesh. She scraped the pasty crumbs off her tongue with her fingernails, but the taste lingered. The pastor held the chalice at arm’s length and hurried behind the wooden screen to the chancel. A cloud of stench wafted after him and rolled in a wave to the pews. Hester could hear the congregation around her buzzing.

“… a haunting!”

“It happens—remember the silverfish?”

“Ten years ago—”

“I saw it myself. Never been explained.”

“But there’s been worse, much worse,” the most elderly parishioner, Sylvie Atwood, was saying. “Something terrible happened in the crypt…”

Hester felt Sam drape his bulky arm over her shoulder.

“I didn’t get to taste it!” he complained in her ear.

“Believe me, you were lucky.” She held up the bread on her hand for him to sniff. The smell made her feel sick again.

He recoiled and then instantly brightened. “Do you think everyone will get food poisoning? Maybe church will be canceled next week.”

Hester’s stepmom, Nancy, said in a low voice to Malcolm, “It’s true that bread usually just stales—it doesn’t go rancid.”

Malcolm replied, “Maybe the host has a cooking oil in it, and the oil went bad. It’s a manufacturing error. These people who are talking about ghosts are medieval idiots.”

Nancy had another thought. “Then why wouldn’t Pastor Marks have smelled it while he was consecrating it?”

Hester excused herself and ran to the ladies’ room in the hall, where—along with a handful of other women—she rinsed the host out of her mouth and washed it off her hands. She splashed water on her face and headed back to the sanctuary, trying to recall if she had ever tasted rancid oil. The host just wasn’t the same as any spoiled food she had ever eaten.

She ducked into the crowded vestibule to search for Sylvie Atwood. Mrs. Atwood knew more about the supposed hauntings in the church than anyone, and in her dotage was eager for receptive ears. She had started to lecture Hester many times before, back when the Goodwins were a churchgoing family. But Hester had been too little to care and had always slipped away to play with baby Sam in the nursery.

Hester found her with Nancy and Sam in the vestibule. Mrs. Atwood had once been an important voice in the town, as the aggressive director of Pilgrim Hall Museum for nearly half a century. Now she had blue-white hair and crepe-paper skin, and she was hunched from bone loss. Time had robbed her of so much, Hester thought, leaving her with only this crooked body and the self-assurance to announce, “You’ll be glad to know I told Pastor Marks to have an exorcism performed.”

It was a good thing Malcolm wasn’t there to hear that, or he’d blow his top, Hester thought. Nancy only smiled politely and nodded.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Atwood, isn’t exorcism a Catholic rite?” Hester asked. “Would Pastor Marks know how to do that?”

Mrs. Atwood pointed a knobby finger at her and said, “They can borrow a priest from St. Peter’s for all I care, because it needs doing. And it has needed doing for over a century, since that dreadful tragedy in the church.”

“Yes,” Hester said quickly, “what happened back then?”

“My grandmother told me all about it,” Mrs. Atwood said, her eyes gleaming. “A few people from the town died, including a pastor.”

Hester said, “The church burned down about a hundred years ago, didn’t it? Did they die in the fire?”

“Oh, no. The big fire was later, in 1892. No, as I remember, these deaths were unexplained, and violent.”

Sam’s interest was finally piqued. “You mean they were
murdered
?”

“Or perhaps it was what we’d call a murder-suicide nowadays? My grandmother told me the story when I was a young girl. She no doubt spared me the frightening aspects.” She grinned, showing too-white dentures that were straight as piano keys. “Being a girl with an active imagination, I believe I supplied the details myself, and I convinced myself that a forbidden romance was involved.”

A forbidden romance. A murder-suicide. In a church, of all places. Hester thought the story was just dramatic enough to have inspired over a century of haunting legends.

“Do you remember the names of the victims?” Hester asked. “I’d like to research it.”

“It’s fascinating, overlooked local history, isn’t it?” Mrs. Atwood nodded. “But I’m afraid I never knew the names.”

“What year did it occur, do you remember?”

“Oh, my feeble old brain,” Mrs. Atwood said cheerfully. “I used to have such a knack for facts—names, dates, phone numbers. Now I’m lucky if I can remember my own grandchildren’s names. But it was before the fire, dear. I’m sure of that.”

Nancy offered Mrs. Atwood the crook of her arm and began walking her to the door.

“Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Atwood said. “I’m the last of my generation, and there’s no one else to ask.”

Chapter 10

1872

E
ZRA HAD LONG
since kicked his shoes off, but he was losing the energy to tread water. He heard clappers strike a bell somewhere nearby, and he searched the horizon for the navigation buoy he knew caused the sound. He could just make out its black silhouette against the starlit sky, and he struggled to reach it. As he moved, the water circulated through his clothes, cooling his skin. When he reached the buoy, he realized that it was much larger than it appeared from the vantage of a boat. The iron base, studded with rivets, was rounded below the water. The circular platform, although large enough to hold a man fully stretched out, floated so high out of the water that he couldn’t climb up it. He could only hook his hands onto the edge of the base, with his body dangling in the water.

Overcome with the urge to sleep, he let his chin dip toward his chest. His face dropped into the water, a few fingers slipped. If he took a breath, he thought hazily, it would be over. A hand came from somewhere below him and lifted his chin. Over the next few minutes, in this dreamlike state, he imagined he felt Syrenka’s hands tentatively propping him up—his leg now, then his buttocks, his back, another leg. But it was many hands—too many hands—all of them cool and strong like Syrenka’s. He was hallucinating, he knew. He would die if he didn’t get his body out of the water.

He groped his way around the base of the buoy to a spot below one of the three upright supports that triangulated to form the cage of the bell. His muscles would hardly obey. His arms had been raised above his head for too long, and the blood had drained from his hands. He waited. The wind was light, but when the buoy tipped slightly in his direction he lunged with his right hand to grab the support, knowing he had only the energy to try once. His hand touched, slipped, and then tightened around the support, and as the buoy swayed slowly upright, he was lifted out of the water to his waist. He grabbed the support with his left hand now, too, and pushed the ball of his foot against the rounded base of the buoy underwater to try to climb aboard. Instantly he felt barnacles slit the bare skin of his sole. He heard himself scream. He hauled his body the rest of the way using just the strength of his arms, and collapsed on the base. He was far from shore—too far to swim—and his sodden clothes were ice cold in the breeze. He shook uncontrollably. The raw gashes that Syrenka’s fins had cut on his hands were still bleeding, and his foot was now bleeding as well.

Meanwhile a lone fisherman in a dinghy lowered his nets south of the bay. Eventually he realized that he was drifting, despite being anchored. He was drifting
against
the current, into deeper water. He lifted his anchor and tried to row against the drift, but, burly as he was, he made no headway. He heard occasional thumps on the bottom of the dinghy that raised the hair on his scalp. He prayed out loud to the Virgin Mary for safety. His heartbeat quickened: it was possible that he could become lost at sea. He caught sight of a shadow of a vessel—a dark patch on the horizon. His dinghy was being carried toward it. Salvation! He turned and began to row again, this time working with the mysterious drift.

As he approached the boat, he saw to his dismay that it was no bigger than his own. Closer still, and it appeared to be empty. The force that was guiding him suddenly disappeared. He breathed deeply in relief. He rowed the rest of the way on his own power until he pulled up alongside the abandoned boat. There was nothing inside but a jacket, a book, and an extinguished lantern. He used a rope to attach the second boat to his own. He peered into the darkness of the water, wondering if there was a survivor.

“Hullooo,” he called out. He listened for the sound of splashing, or a cry of distress.

Then he heard a bell in the distance—the bell of a buoy. The sea was calm, yet the bell rang urgently. He rowed in the direction of the sound and discovered a young man, no more than twenty, draped on the buoy, near death. How had the poor fellow rung the bell so vigorously before he fell unconscious? And how had he spied the dinghy at such a distance in the darkness?

The fisherman pushed his questions aside. He stood in his boat, moored it to the upright support of the buoy, and struggled to drag Ezra from the platform, easing his limp body onto the floor of the dinghy. He crossed Ezra’s arms so that his hands were wedged under his armpits for warmth and reached into Ezra’s boat for the jacket, tucking it around his torso. And then he examined him under the lamplight: the young man’s lips were blue-purple, his breath was shallow, and his skin was cool to the touch. The fisherman took off his own coat and tucked it around Ezra’s legs and bare feet. He reached in the pocket of the coat and took out a knitted cap, which he pulled over Ezra’s head. He unfastened his dinghy from the buoy and rowed steadily toward land, towing the spare boat behind them.