7

THE FIRST THING I NOTICED when we entered that lowermost part of the fairgrounds was the lack of sound. The fair we had left behind on the other side of the huge trucks suddenly sounded muffled, like a thick curtain had been drawn between two worlds. The air around us felt ancient and full. Almost all the carnies were working the fair, so the Darkness was empty too, like a ghost town.

But there was a sound, the kind of sound that grows on you in the silence, the kind of sound that’s always been there but you haven’t noticed before. As we snuck farther in, I realized it was the sound of classical music playing on an old record player. After about a minute, the record got stuck, always at the same exact sequence of notes, and those notes would scratch and repeat and scratch and repeat for as long as it took the listener to walk over and put the needle back at the edge of the record. The music started up again, loud and moving, headed inevitably for the scratch that would knock the needle into repeat.

“Shh,” Abra said, raising her finger to her mouth, listening. “Which way?”

I pointed down the hill to the right. Abra nodded and walked ahead. I followed her. Because grass covered the ground in that part, it was possible to walk without making any sound. It was possible to creep around corners and stand quietly in shadows while strangers walked by, muttering or crunching up beer cans in their hands and throwing them under the trailers. The air seemed to grow warmer and heavier as we descended. High up above us, the moon shone through that hazy July night.

I wasn’t even sure why we were there. What did those three old women have that I wanted so badly? Why did those words that I read, etched into the table in the back room of the antique store, mean so much to me?

“Look . . . at . . . this,” a shattered voice said, the three words coming slow and spaced apart and filled with wonder at some unexpected gift. We turned. The voice belonged to a man. He wore a white tank top, jeans, and unlaced, heavy work boots perfect for stomping on things. When he took another step closer, the boots flopped around, loose on his feet. Black hair covered his arms and the backs of his hands and sprouted out of the edges where his tank top ended. He had a beard that tangled its way down his chest, and his eyes were hidden in deep shadows. He held a leash in his hand that restrained a medium-size, powerful-looking dog that growled when he spoke.

Abra and I leaned closer to each other. I felt her grip on my arm.

“Now what on God’s green earth are two pretty little children doing . . . back . . . here?” he asked, and his smile was all blackened teeth and cracking lips.

“We’re looking for three old women,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?” he said, smiling bigger and letting his dog drag him one step closer. “I can’t hear you, kid. You scared or something? Your voice is all shaker-y.”

I don’t know if he was just trying to scare us or if he would have done something terrible, maybe cut us up into little pieces and feed us to his dog. I had visions of my bones lining whatever hole he kept that animal in. I imagined his canine going back days later and gnawing on my femur.

“We’re looking for three old women,” I said louder.

“You don’t want to find them,” he said, still mean and aggressive, but the mention of the three old women had changed something in him.

“Why not?” Abra asked. She was always asking why. Always.

The man loosened his grip on the leash, and the dog jumped at us, only to be jerked backward when it reached its new limit.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “My dog’s hungry. And little children shouldn’t be wandering around back here behind the scenes.”

Then he stopped and pulled the dog closer. The change that came over him was almost comical. He went from leering and confident to skittish and uncertain. The dog crept backward and hid behind the man’s legs, the hair on its back standing up.

The three old women came out of the shadows. I hadn’t even noticed them until Abra tightened her grip on my arm. I glanced at her, and her wide eyes stared off to the side, into the trees. At first I thought the women were floating. They walked with light steps, and the remaining parts of their fragile bodies stayed very still. Instead of those gypsy scarves they had worn in the antique store, they were donned in cloaks with hoods pulled up, casting shadows over their faces.

“Aw, no, that’s not, it’s not, you know . . .” His voice went on and on, making no sense, explaining himself even though no questions had been asked of him.

The three women got closer. The one in the front held a stick. The second woman held a large bowl in her hands. The third woman hung back. She stopped and crossed her arms, her bony wrists vanishing in the thick folds of her cloak.

The man kept talking, but his voice was now a whisper. The woman with the bowl walked over and held it out to him. She didn’t say a word, but somehow I knew that she wanted him to take it.

“You hexin’ me?” he asked in a frightened, belligerent voice. “You know you ain’t allowed to be hexin’ us. You know that, not if you wanna keep traveling. They won’t let you stay, you know that.”

The woman sighed but didn’t say a word, just pushed the bowl closer to him. He took it from her, and it must have been very heavy because he nearly dropped it, and when he walked away he had to keep balancing it on his legs or his hips to get another grip on it. Sometimes he set it down and stretched, as if his arm muscles were tired, but he always picked it back up again. He walked away into the shadows, finally crouching and disappearing inside a green tent that had a bright blue tarp as a door.

“Remember,” she called after him, the single word carrying more meaning in it than an entire book of stories. Her voice surprised me. It sounded young and beautiful.

I was relieved. As far as my imagination was concerned, the dog’s teeth had come all too close to ripping the flesh from my bones. I wanted to say thank you. I looked over at Abra and smiled, overjoyed at our unlikely salvation. I expected her to return my relieved glance, but the look on her face sent a jolt of uncertainty through me. She didn’t look relieved at all. She looked horrified.

The three women walked toward us, but somehow they looked completely different than before, when I had seen them in the antique store. All three of them had their mouths open, as if gasping for air that never came. Their eyes formed hollow, dark caves, and the whites were barely visible. Their cloaks weren’t black or brown or gray but shadow colored—which didn’t make sense to me at first, but I don’t know how else to explain it—and around the edges of the hoods I thought I saw thin worms crawling all around their heads. I realized it must be hair, silver and wiry and somehow moving on its own.

They were in some kind of a trance, and the one with the stick nudged us apart and began drawing a circle around Abra.

“No!” I said, pulling Abra toward me.

The old woman looked at me, and I could tell she was annoyed. She tried again, pushing her stick between us and plunging it into the earth.

“No, I won’t let you do it,” I said, suddenly aware that the faraway recording of classical music was stuck and repeating itself.

The other two hovered over to us, and the three of them stood there for a long time, staring. They looked disgusting, like rotted corpses somehow moving, somehow alive. A kind of reluctance moved around them like a cloud, and they turned to go.

Off in the distance I heard the record scratch and start over again.

“Who were you talking to in the antique store?” I asked, my voice loud and out of place.

They stopped, and one of them answered, or all three of them answered, but we couldn’t tell who was talking because they never faced us.

“Jinn,” I thought I heard them say.

“Jinn?” I asked. “You mean my neighbor?”

But they didn’t give an answer.

“What’s he got to do with anything?”

“His story, not yours,” one of them said in a weary voice.

“Well, what’s it got to do with me?” I asked, feeling bolder with each question answered.

“There is a certain kind of death that leads to life,” they said, and in that moment I remembered my mom, and it made me tired and sad and homesick. I didn’t care so much anymore about this great mystery. I wanted to go home and find my dad and sit with him. But all the questions I had, all the things I wondered about, fought through my sadness.

“Why did you write ‘Find the Tree of Life’ on the table?”

“Because the Tree is here. Now.”

Their answers frustrated me, but even more than that, my questions frustrated me. I’d had this idea that if I asked the women the right questions, they would tell me everything. But the right ones eluded me.

“The Tree of Life? What is it? Where is it?”

They took a few more steps away.

“Why’d you draw a circle around me?” I asked.

“For protection,” they said, still drifting away.

“Protection? Protection from what?”

“Protection from what lives in the shadows,” they said.

They were almost gone, off into the shadows.

“What if I need to find you again?” I blurted out.

They turned a corner, one after the other, still walking slowly, still hunched over. In the silence around us I could hear the gentle thud of the first woman’s stick against the ground.

“What is coming?” I shouted after them. When they didn’t say anything, I moved to chase after them, but Abra grabbed my arm.

“No. We’re out of time. We have to go.”

“I don’t know what you were thinking, young lady,” Mrs. Miller said from the front seat for at least the tenth time. Abra and I were both in the back. Her mom had been talking nonstop since we had found her walking up and down the sidewalk along the road. She had looked frantic, pacing and craning her head to look into the fairgrounds.

We knew the best defense in that case was not to say anything, so we sat quietly. Eventually Mrs. Miller’s voice faded in my mind as I thought about everything I had seen and heard the previous few days. What had happened to the small town I knew and loved? Why were all of these strange things happening?

“Answer me, you two!”

I looked up. Abra looked at me. She must have stopped paying attention about the same time I had.

“Um . . . what’s the question again?” she asked.

“What! You haven’t even been listening! Young lady, you just wait until I speak with your father. The question was, ‘What will you do next time?’”

“Come straight to the car.”

“That’s right. Straight to the car. No dillydallying.”

We had to look away from each other so we wouldn’t start laughing, but as I stared out into the night, a seriousness settled over me. Something very big was going on in Deen. Something important.

We cruised north into the valley, leaving the blinking fair lights behind us and drifting into the open space of farm country. But it was such a different darkness there than the Darkness at the bottom of the hill at the fair. The darkness in the country was warm, welcoming. It was punctuated by stars and fireflies, and when we stopped at the unnecessary stop sign I could hear the distant rushing of the river as it drifted south, nearly overflowing its banks. It was at that age that I learned there is darkness and there is Darkness, and the difference between the two is day and night.

Mrs. Miller turned left at the church, drove up my lane, and stopped, not turning off the car. Between the lane and the house was the yard, and in the yard was the tree. The lightning tree. I tried not to look at it.

“Thanks, Mrs. Miller,” I said, feeling sheepish after the scolding she had given us.

“Good night, Samuel,” she said, sounding stern, but when I glanced up at her there was a softness in her eyes. I guess she was remembering that I had just lost my mother, and as the sadness gathered and tugged at her face I wanted to reassure her, tell her not to worry. I was going to bring my mother back—she would see. The three old women would help me, and I would go wherever I had to go, do whatever I had to do.

But I didn’t say anything. I only nodded at her.

“See ya, Abra.”

“See ya, Sam.”

I climbed out and walked through the darkness to the farmhouse. I went inside and the screen door slammed behind me. I left the main door open because it was warm inside, and outside the cool night air had started to settle. It felt more like the end of September than the beginning of July.

My dad was on the sofa watching a baseball game. There were no other lights on in the house, so the light from the television flashed and swam all around him. His face was blank, and when I got close to him I could see the white square of light from the television reflecting in his eyes. For a moment I realized what he had lost, or came as close to understanding as a child can come.

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

No response.

“Had a good time at the fair tonight,” I said, shuffling my feet, kicking at the worn carpet. “Crazy stuff going on over there.”

He still didn’t move, just sat there staring at the game, unblinking. I backed away slowly, wishing I had gone straight up to my room without speaking. At least then I wouldn’t have had to endure him not saying anything.

“’Night, Dad.” I walked up the steps, each stair creaking under the weight of my sadness.