Shadow Hills (21 page)

Lichen almost obscured the crude engraving, but I was able to make it out. This was Rebekah Sampson’s grave. Air whooshed out of my lungs as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I felt light-headed and nauseated. The edges of my vision went dark, like a storm cloud rolling in, obscuring my mind.

My arms crumpled, and a second later my head hit the tightly packed earth.

I was in an unfamiliar room, lit only by the sunshine leaking in around the heavy drapes that covered the windows. My eyes swept across the large glass-doored bookcases filled with leather-bound books. This looked like some old guy’s home office. In the middle of the room sat an imposing mahogany desk with two leather tub chairs in front of it and a traditional wing-back one behind it. I walked around the desk and sank into the buttery-soft armchair.

The air in the office was soft and thick, like I was submerged in invisible quicksand. I reached out and opened a drawer, my arm moving in slow motion. The drawer was full of files, and I flipped through them until I saw one labeled
BVA BANISHMENT DOCUMENTS
.
Like the Articles of Banishment I found in the secret archives room
.

Curiously, I lifted out the set of papers. The first page was
the same as the one I’d already seen: a list of people who had been banished from Shadow Hills. But the page behind it was the Brevis Vita Canon of Ethics, and stapled to it were notes on what rules each of the Banished had violated. I scanned the rest of the pages, attempting to concentrate. Something was wrenching my mind away, tearing at my thoughts. I gritted my teeth and tried harder to read, but my eyesight was swimming. All I could make out was a picture of a man with dark brown hair and a full beard. His face was gaunt, bony like a skeleton, and his eyes were the blackest eyes I had ever seen. Their darkness wasn’t a color; it was harshness and hatred, the very soullessness of evil. Those eyes filled me with terror and revulsion even as they pulled me in. Like I was falling into a pit, an endless well of despair.

And a moment later I was back. Lying in the graveyard, looking up into the branches of a tree, my head and foot both pulsing with pain. I was flat on my back six feet above Rebekah Sampson’s coffin.

I sat up, trying to clear my head. Had I actually been led here? I’d literally stumbled over Rebekah Sampson’s grave—could the stuff I’d read about Hekate guiding people be true?

As usual, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to learn from this vision. I’d never seen that room before, and the insanely creepy-looking guy wasn’t familiar either. And what was it about these Banished people? This was the third reference I’d found to them, but they hadn’t lived in Shadow Hills for more than forty years. Was I supposed to do something about the
Banished? The only thing I felt capable of doing right now was freaking out.

It seemed impossible that Rebekah Sampson could be buried here. I had gotten the impression from Sarah that Rebekah Sampson was away somewhere, not dead. I wished I could remember exactly what Sarah had said about her. Was it that she hadn’t been here for a while? That she was gone? Maybe I had interpreted her words wrong; perhaps she’d used some euphemism, like the way my grandmother would say a person had “passed” instead of died.

I was pretty sure, though, that Sarah had said that she’d known Rebekah Sampson. And while Sarah was obviously extremely old—much older looking, I realized as I thought about it, than any of the people I’d seen in the Shadow Hills nursing home—surely someone she knew would have died in the last half of the twentieth century, at least. So what was Rebekah Sampson’s grave doing in this ancient cemetery? All the other graves in the place were from 1736 and earlier.

I crept closer to the rough gravestone, leaning in to examine it carefully. I traced my fingers over the letters of her name. Like many of the other markers in this graveyard, the carving did not look professionally done. Some letters were deeper than others, some uneven. The engraving in the bottom right-hand corner had been all but obscured by the moss.

I picked up a twig from nearby and scratched gently at the growth. I couldn’t make out the month or date, but the year was legible: 1735.

I sat back with a thump:
1735?
That was before the epidemic struck Shadow Hills. Sarah had been given a book meant for me by someone who had died more than 250 years ago?

On the weekend, the buses ran into town every two hours, presumably so that the students would have a chance to spend some time off campus. I checked my cell; I had twenty minutes before the next bus left. I managed to make it home, grab my purse, sign out at Ms. Moore’s door, and run over to the Admin Building just in time to catch it.

During the ride over, I tried to organize my thoughts, but by the time I got off at the square, I had so many questions and frustrations bubbling up inside of me that I felt like a shook-up soda bottle. I marched up the block to Sarah’s Boutique, pulling the door open with a force that threatened to knock the bell off its perch.

Sarah, behind the counter as usual, glanced up, startled by my entrance. I was struck again by the realization of how much older she looked than any of the people in this town. She was dried and gnarled, with wrinkles upon wrinkles, and her hair was perfectly white. Was she not a native of Shadow Hills? Had her ancestors not been among the survivors of the epidemic? Or was she an anomaly, a BV who had managed to outlive all the others?

“How can I help you, dear?” she asked. Either Sarah didn’t sense the anger rising off my body like steam, or she was pretending not to notice.

“You could start by telling me the truth. Like who is Rebekah Sampson? Why did you tell me that she gave you that book? Why am I having these dreams—these visions?” I spit out my questions rapid fire, not really caring if she could keep up.

“I told you the truth. I gave you Rebekah’s book to help you on your path.”

I snorted. “You gave me a book I couldn’t read! It’s not even written in a foreign language. It’s written in code!”

“I cannot read it. But you will be able to understand it,” she replied. “When the time is right.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay,
Yoda
. You could have at least told me. I lugged that stupid thing over to the Greek teacher, thinking it was something she could translate.”

Sarah just nodded.

“Do you understand what’s going on?” I asked her, irritated. “I keep having these dreams, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what they mean. I’ve dreamed of Rebekah’s grave. Only sometimes it’s my grave. Sometimes my sister is there, and I feel like I need to do something for her. And then this other woman appears. And she looks a lot like my sister, only she isn’t.”

Sarah continued to nod, as if what I was saying made some kind of sense. She smiled a little tremulously, and I would have sworn that there was the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “That is Rebekah. She comes to help you.”

“I wish she’d be a little clearer about it.” My voice was sharp with bitterness.

“It is hard for us to understand their ways. But you must
trust. You must open yourself to her guidance. That is how you will find your destiny. You are a daughter of Hekate, just as Rebekah was. Your power is already immense, maybe even greater than Rebekah’s. But understanding it, learning to control it, takes longer.”

“What does that mean—a daughter of Hekate? You’re talking about a mythological figure.”

“I am talking about the Goddess. The queen of the underworld.”

“I know, I know.” I held up a hand to halt a recital of all the names I had read the other night. “But it doesn’t make any sense. How do you know I’m one of these daughters? How do you know I’m supposed to have this book? And what in the world am I supposed to do with it?”

“I know because Rebekah told me.”

I stared at her. After a moment, I said carefully, “You mean you see her in dreams, too?”

“Now and then I have done so,” Sarah said, smiling that odd little smile again. “Especially in the beginning, not long after she died. But she told me before that, too. When she was still alive.”

I stared at her. “But she died over two hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But that’s not possible.” I wasn’t sure who was crazier—Sarah, for what she seemed to be suggesting, or me, for trying to get answers from this woman who thought she’d been alive for almost three centuries.

“It shouldn’t be possible, should it?” Sarah’s smile was watery and thin. “Sometimes I wish it wasn’t. But here I stay, slowly aging, falling apart piece by piece, but never dying.”

“I … I need to sit down.” My head was spinning.

Sarah motioned to her chair, offering it to me. I may have been shook up, but I wasn’t stealing a seat from someone with a bum leg who claimed to be more than 250 years old.

“Okay. Let’s say I choose to believe you.” It was getting to the point where I couldn’t just assume someone was lying because things didn’t make sense, not when I was having visions and growing mystical symbols on my body. “How did this happen? Why are you still alive?”

“Back in 1735, Rebekah sensed the darkness coming to Shadow Hills. She told me to leave, to take her daughters with me and keep them safe. So my husband and I moved to Boston with the girls. But not before Rebekah protected me.”

“How?” I wasn’t sure any answer could convince me.

“It was simple, really; she laid a hand on my head and stated, ‘Be ye forever and always protected.’ And except for the polio in my leg and the occasional cold, nothing has harmed me since.” Sarah’s sadness was thickly worn behind her eyes.

“That’s it? Why couldn’t she protect herself, too? Why didn’t she leave?”
Why would Rebekah have stayed here to die?

“She knew she was sick already, before I left. Besides, she could not leave. People hunted witches back then, and they regarded Rebekah, with her power and her visions, as in league with Satan.”

“The basement.” My stomach knotted. I thought of my dream, of the dread that had rolled through me when I looked at the old stone walls of the hospital basement. “That cell.”

Sarah nodded.

“She was locked in with the insane. But that was later; at first the almshouse staff worked her like a dog just like they did to everyone unfortunate enough to end up there. I was the only one who seemed to feel sympathy for the poor girl. Her family had been killed during the Indian wars.” Sarah shook her head slowly. “She was an orphan when she came to our town looking for someplace that would take her in. Years later, when the director of the almshouse had her committed to the basement, I tried to help her escape. I worked there, had a key to her cell. But we were caught, and I was stripped of my duties.”

We sat silently for a while as I attempted to sort through what I had just heard. Was it real? Part of it? All of it? It sounded insane, but it felt true to me.

A thought popped into my head. “Do you know if I’m related to Rebekah?”

“You are, my dear.” Sarah reached across the desk and patted my hand. “Not closely, of course, but you are one of her descendants.”

“How do you know?”

“I kept track of her descendants—all the daughters of Hekate.” Sarah smiled. “She told me about you, the girl who would have powers that rivaled her own. All the daughters have
had the dreams, but the power was wildly different from girl to girl.”

“So my sister was like this, too?” My heart thudded loudly in my ears.

“Yes, but it is unlikely she understood the dreams. You are the only one since Rebekah who bears the mark. Are you sixteen years old?”

“Almost.”

“That is when it appeared on Rebakah, too. You are truly Hekate’s daughter.”

I wondered if Athena had gotten the mark, too. My suspicion was that she hadn’t, since I had never seen it when we went swimming.

“I still don’t understand what Hekate has to do with anything.” I sighed. “What are we, Greek witches or something?”

“All I know is that Rebekah said her power was ancient, passed down through generations. She said it predated the pagans by many centuries.” Sarah smiled again. “But I am not privy to the knowledge of Hekate. That is what the book is for.”

“But I can’t read the stupid book!” I knew she was only trying to help me, but the holes in her knowledge were beyond frustrating.

“Someday you will be able to. Don’t ever doubt that.”

Graham was already in the cafeteria when I came in for lunch the next day. Brody sat next to him like usual, but today Zach was
sitting on the other side of Brody. Zach looked up, and our eyes met. I blushed and made a beeline for the food.

It was the first time I had seen Zach since my dream about him, and just that one look had put me back there, lying in bed with him. My lips tingled like they were slicked with menthol, and I pressed my fingers to them. Maybe if I applied pressure, the way I did when my eye twitched, it would stop. No such luck.

After I got my food, I stalled at the salad bar as long as I could—laboring over my choice of salad dressings—but I knew I had to sit down eventually. The longer I avoided it, the stranger it would look.

Toy was at the table now, too, talking animatedly to Graham. As I sat down next to Adriana, I caught the tail end of something Toy was saying about a game night Mr. Carr had planned.

I stole a glance at Zach, and my stomach flipped over. I felt sure that if he looked into my eyes, he would know everything I was thinking. He would know about my dream from the other night. He had said that he had to touch a person to sense thoughts, but mine were so vivid that it wouldn’t have surprised me if they leaped straight across the lunch table and into his mind.

Strangely, after a moment I realized he was hardly looking at me. My heart skipped a beat.
Maybe it actually had been
Zach
in my dream
.

He had dreamed the same dream I’d had about the graveyard. What if he’d shared this one, too? My face flooded with fire, and I looked down at my food. And there was the strange
comment Corinne had made, as if he’d come into my dream on purpose.

“So, Adriana, are you going to go to the SAC on Wednesday for game night?” Brody asked hopefully.