69

Leah

I thought the old lady was kooky at first. She answered her door in a faded blue bathrobe and looked so startled and confused that for a moment, I thought I might have had the wrong house. I glanced down at the slip of paper I’d scribbled her address on to make sure I was in the right place and I was just about to open my mouth to ask when she stepped out and said in a bright voice, “Forgive me, Leah, I’m just so surprised to see you. But I’m so glad you’ve come.”

She opened the door and invited me inside, but I asked if we could sit on the porch instead. I didn’t know what to expect and I felt more comfortable outside.

“I heard what you said the other day, when you came to our house,” I said. “That you know what happened. And I thought …” My voice wavered. “Well, I hoped, anyway, that you might be talking about my sister.”

The old woman just nodded and pulled her fingers through her white, frizzy hair and rocked back and forth in her chair, her eyes fixed on a faraway location. She then let out a calm sigh before going into a long, wild story. She had been a nurse, she told me, and had once met a terrified young girl who said she’d been held captive by a group of powerful men. She went into this girl’s history, her name, her background, and I was just about to interrupt her and stand to leave when she started telling me about the cemetery.

“They conduct their dark rituals out there, on Friday evenings,” she said, her eyes wide. “It’s out on Omen Road.” She then described, in vivid detail, the stretch of Omen Road that leads to the cemetery—you pass a church, then a red barn—and I knew all at once that she was describing the road Lucy kept showing me in my dreams.

My pulse was racing and I sat up and asked her to go on. At one point she stepped inside to make us tea, and when she came back out she had a crumpled map to the cemetery that she let me study as she pushed a tray of butterscotch candies across the table at me. It was strangely warm outside, the day drowsy with heat, and while I listened to her speak, I felt like I’d slipped into another time.

“I tried to tell the sheriff,” she said, her face darkening.

But no one had believed her. I knew how she felt.

She also told me that she had gone out to the cemetery herself and had seen the signs of the rituals that the girl had described to her. “They all thought she was crazy,” she said. “But I, I knew she wasn’t. And then,” she continued, “I lost her.”

She told me, with real terror in her eyes, that she had gone out to the cemetery once at night, looking for the girl, and that she had been threatened by men in hoods and robes—and that the men knew where she lived. And the whole time we talked she kept glancing around as if she were looking out for them.

I felt such gratefulness and warmth toward her that when I stood up to leave, tears misted my eyes and I hugged her neck tightly and thanked her.

Once I knew where Lucy was, I couldn’t wait around to convince someone to believe me; I had to go find her. I went straight home from Sylvia’s and began packing the car. I pitched my puffy black coat in the backseat, in case it turned cold, and set out my mint-green high-top Reeboks. I wanted to pack light, but I tossed a blanket in the trunk and had visions of wrapping Lucy in it and driving her home.

As Mom was leaving for work the next morning, I tried to act casual, but my heart fluttered and I almost faltered and told her my plans and begged her to go with me. But instead, I pulled her into me as hot tears flooded my eyes and gave her a good, hard hug, one last time.

I stood in the chilly entryway and watched as she drove away before stepping outside and locking the house. A cold front had blasted through and the sky was a dull gray, the sun hidden behind a patchwork of low, shifting clouds.

Sylvia had told me that the men gathered at the cemetery on Friday nights after sunset. I wanted to be in place long before then, so my plan was to get there earlier. I slipped away from school during last period, unnoticed—so many kids were already gone, the Friday before Christmas, that I knew my teacher wouldn’t question it—and drove across town to Sylvia’s before heading out. I pulled to the curb and quietly closed the car door behind me. I set my diary—which I’d wrapped neatly as a gift—on the top step of her front porch and rang the doorbell before leaving.

I wanted her to have it. I wanted someone to know what I’d been through, someone who would believe me. And I wanted some record left behind in case I went missing, too.

On the interstate, I had the heater up so high that I grew stuffy in my jacket so I cracked the windows and let in freezing gusts of air. The road was empty and a shudder rippled through me when I passed the city limits sign, the sides of the highway thickening with pine trees.

I unwrapped a Twix bar, half melted from the heat in the car, and ate it in three bites before crunching my way through a bag of Cheetos. I was licking the orange dust off my fingertips when I saw the exit for Starrville/Omen Road, and before I knew it I was driving down the exact same road, lifted from my dreams, driving toward Lucy.

The steering wheel became slick in my hands, my palms glazed with sweat, and soon I found the red dirt road leading to the cemetery. I slowed the car but drove a half mile past it and parked in a ditch. I wanted it to look like my car had broken down, not like I was out there snooping.

I climbed out and hiked along Omen Road, the tree tops shifting above me, their wispy branches shaking in the wind, the cold stinging my lungs. I prayed that a car wouldn’t pass, and when one did, I kept my head down, pulling my jacket up around me.

I checked my watch—I still had about thirty minutes of daylight left. By the time I reached the red dirt road, though, night was falling fast so I started walking even faster. The road climbed up a sharp hill and when I reached the top, the wind battered me from all sides.

In the distance, I could see the wrought-iron gates to the cemetery and as I approached I didn’t feel fear like I thought I might. I felt a yearning so vast to see Lucy again I thought my chest might rip in two.

I stepped into the cemetery. It was shrouded in tall pines and only fingers of light filtered across the crumbling graves. The giant circle of stones and the fire pit were there, just as Sylvia had described, and I zipped up my jacket and shivered. On the back edge of the cemetery I found a huge chunk of iron ore and positioned myself behind it, so that I could peer around the edge of it, unnoticed. The clouds had scattered and the night was clear. It was so dark out there that the stars hung from the sky like lit chandeliers.

Two hours passed and my body ached from crouching behind the rock, so I got up and moved around, my breath making smoke circles in the cold air. I was pacing back and forth, trying to warm up, when I heard the engine of a truck approaching and saw a beam of headlights slice through the trees. I ran and crouched back behind the rock.

It was a black Blazer, and two men in white hoods and robes hopped out and opened the back door and dragged a woman out by her wrists. It was hard to make the figures out, but when they dragged her in front of the truck, I could see in the headlights that the woman was wearing handcuffs. She was naked from the waist up and her hair was long and wild. Bloody scratches covered her chest and arms and she was screaming and kicking at the men.

I watched as the taller man took out a pistol and whipped it across her mouth before throwing her to the ground.

The two men circled around to the back of the truck and started unloading firewood. While one man built the fire, the taller man tied the woman to one of the stones facing the fire. Blood drained from her mouth and her head just hung there limp, like a ragdoll’s.

It was so cold I couldn’t stop shaking. I worried the men were going to hear my teeth chattering.

The bonfire crackled to life and I slipped back behind the rock, afraid they’d see me. I heard the creak of a car door and then heavy metal music that sounded like Metallica, blaring through the open windows of the truck.

I peered around the rock once more and gasped as I saw the taller man raping the woman. The ropes crisscrossed her breasts and it looked like they were cutting into her chest, making her bleed from there, too. I had to look away, so I turned my back flat against the rock and stared into the dark, tangled forest, my stomach hardening into a knot as the scent of the fire drifted to me.

Then I saw another pair of headlights bounce over the trees beyond the clearing. I peeked around the stone and saw a white van bump over the pitted road. A man in a white robe jumped out of the van and before he pulled the hood over his head, I could see that he had thick, black hair that was smoothed over to one side like someone from the fifties. He slid the side door of the van open and led two children out by a rope. My heart seized in my chest. He had fastened the rope around their waists and at first I thought the girl might be Lucy, but as he led them closer to the campfire, I could tell it wasn’t her. This girl had stringy red hair and she looked younger than Lucy, maybe six. The other child was a blond-headed boy, maybe five years old, who couldn’t stop shaking. This seemed to make the man angry so he gave them a shove toward the fire and I watched as the light from the flames licked their frightened little faces.

As the man walked back to the van, I was holding my breath, hoping that he would lead Lucy out next, but he just slammed the door and spit into the ground. It hit me then that Lucy was probably already dead, that he’d already killed her, and I was suddenly filled with such a white-hot lightning rage that before I knew what I was doing I stood and was running to the campfire, screaming, “What have you done with my sister?” my voice sounding primitive and strange to my ears.

The taller man spun around from the unmoving woman tied to the stone and marched over to me, his robe falling to cover his undone pants. He pulled out his pistol. “You got no business bein’ here,” he said.

I couldn’t be sure, but I felt like I’d hear his voice before, and dread crept over me when I placed it: he sounded exactly like the sheriff from Starrville, Sheriff Meeks. He stopped right in front of me and started waving the gun in front of my face.

“STOP!” the man from the van shouted at him. “It’s okay.” He walked over and stood between us until the taller man retreated. He then turned to me and pulled off his hood. He had chalk-white skin and dark freckles. His lips were full and looked red as if stained by cherries.

“You must be Leah,” he said. My stomach flipped. “We’ve been waiting for you; we knew you would come,” he said, his mouth spreading in a wide smile that showed a row of crooked buck teeth.

I stared at him with seething hate. “Where is Lucy?” I asked through clenched teeth again, prepared to fight him to my death.

He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my small chest. I felt like I was going to be ill. “Come with me,” he said. “I will take you to her.”

I thought he was full of shit, but I followed him to the van anyway.