The Bone Flute (2 page)
Camrose burst through the wall of trees into the hollow and stumbled to a halt. She flung up an arm to shield her eyes.
A house stood there. A tall house made of stone. The lintels over the windows were carved with leaf shapes, and ivy grew up the walls between them. The wide front door was black and polished, with a brass plate fastened across the bottom and an S-shaped brass handle.
And from step to chimneys it was a mass of flames, flames that should have roared but made no noise. A window on the second floor burst outward in a silent spray of glass. Flames licked up, soundless, and curled around the edge of the roof.
“Cam! Wake up! What's the matter?”
Mark was bobbing in front of her. She grabbed at him to yank him back from the flames.
“Watch out!” She tried to pull him around, but he was too heavy to shove. “Look out! The fire!”
“Fire? What are you talking about?”
“The house! It's burning!”
“Oh, I get it. This is one of your games, right?” He took a step back toward the house and stood there, grinning out at her through a sheet of flame.
An outline of treetops formed behind him through the walls of the house. The fire in the windows turned pale yellow, then green, then blue, a watery shadow printed on the trees. And then the house, with its brass, its ivy and its fiery windows, melted into the night.
W
hen Camrose could see straight again she found herself sitting in the grass with Mark kneeling beside her.
“What's the matter with you?”
“I ⦠I saw something.”
“You were babbling about some house.”
“There was a house on fire.” She rubbed her eyes. “Right there.” She pointed, though there wasn't anything to see on the dark grass now except her light blue towel.
“Is it there now?”
“No.” She lurched to her feet and scooped up her towel.
“So, this wasn't a game?”
“No!”
“I suppose there could have been a house here once.” Mark led the way across the hollow into the woods again. The street-lights on Grant Street sent broken gleams through the trees. “I've never heard of one, though.”
They walked in silence, Camrose frowning, Mark concen-trating on the uneven path under his feet, until the trees were behind them and Grant Street rose up the hill ahead. Camrose stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
“All right. If I didn't see a house burning back there, what
did
I see? Because I'm telling you, I saw something.”
Mark sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “A reflection.”
“A reflection! On what?”
“Okay, um ⦠I know. Fog.”
“Fog?”
“Sure.” He waved his hand in a loop. “There's often a bit of fog at night. Maybe the light hit it just right, and you imagâined the rest.”
“There was no fog.”
“And you never imagine things.”
Camrose closed her mouth tight. She was on the verge of losing her temper, and it didn't help that Mark didn't even seem to notice. She stayed on the verge until they turned up Stone Road. By that time the burning house had faded in her mind. It no longer seemed real. She wondered if maybe he was right.
“See you tomorrow.” With a wave of his towel, Mark headed along the sidewalk past the lilac hedge, then cut across the lawn to Number Sixteen. Shrieks rang out as he opened the front door to his houseâhis little brothers, Ben and Sweeney, fighting againâthen the door shut, and silence fell.
Camrose stood by the closed gate of Number Fourteen, trying to decide what to say to avoid getting yelled at. If only her father were home instead of Bronwyn.
The night was so quiet you could hear the hum of traffic on King Street, two blocks east of the park. You could hear â¦
Footsteps. On the sidewalk, slow and quiet. Somebody out for a stroll. Hard shoes: the clipâclip of stiff leather on concrete. And alongside, an irregular pattering: clicketyâpauseâclick. Dog toenails. Sounded like it was on three legs.
The footsteps stopped. Camrose looked around, up the street and down, but there was nothing to see.
So? That was nothing special. Just somebody and his dog standing in the dappled darkness under a tree, where you couldn't see them, that was all. No law against it.
But what were they doing? Just standing there? Watching her?
She backed away and pushed at the wooden gate. It stuck, as usual. She slammed it open with her hip, then wedged it shut behind her, turned and ran up the walk toward the front door. Laughter bubbled behind her, so soft it could almost have been the sound of her own quick breathing.
The front door swung open. Bronwyn stood in the doorway. The hall light made a halo of her rust-colored hair, darker than Camrose's but just as thorny. “Where've you been? I was just about to come looking for you.”
“It was still light when I started home.” Camrose squeezed past her into the hall and looked back. The street was empty.
“Well, make sure you're home before dark after this. There are too many strange characters out there.” She scowled out at the night, then shut the door and locked it. “And remember, I'm in charge.”
Camrose trailed up the stairs. This was going to be the longest weekend on record. How was she going to figure out what happened to her in the hollow with her father a thousand kilometers away? Why did community college media arts teachers have to have conferences in Halifax anyway?
She couldn't even consider telling Bronwyn, who seemed to think it was her duty to cut a younger sister down to size as often and as short as possible. Camrose couldn't wait till she left for university in the fall.
Once in her room she closed the door. It clicked open again, as it always did. She closed it again and jiggled the handle until the latch caught. There was a keyhole but there'd never been a key, so far as she could remember. The whole house was like that. Dad said he liked old houses, but he never got around to fixing anything.
It took less than two minutes to change from her damp bathâing suit into her favorite pajamas, an old T-shirt and briefs. She picked up the parcel from her desk.
“I hope you understand what it cost me not to peek, all these years,” her father said that morning at breakfast, just before he'd left for Ottawa International Airport.
The outer brown paper wrapping was torn open at one end. Inside was a package also wrapped in brown paper, but still sealed. On the outer wrapping, in a black, upright, heavily pressed hand was written: “To Miss Camrose Jane Ferguson, c/o Mr. and Mrs. Ian Ferguson, 14 Stone Road, Lynx Landing, Ontario.”
Camrose held the package by the corners as if it might bite. She inspected the postmark again. July 26, 1991. A year exactly between Gilda's death and Camrose's birth. That stretch of time was a black chasm, a void that nothing living could cross. Yet here in her hands was something that had crossed. Word from the dead.
She tried to imagine what sort of gift you would send across such a chasm. It would have to be something unique. What would I send if I were Gilda? Camrose wondered. The map to a lost island. A box of jewels. A bottle of moondust.
She pulled the outer wrapping off and dropped it on the desk. The package sat there looking neat and mysterious.
TO MY GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER
CAMROSE JANE ON HER 12
TH
BIRTHDAY
was inked across it in thick black capitals. Under that,
NOT TO BE OPENED BY ANYONE ELSE3
with two lines scored underneath so fiercely they bit through the paper.
“Imagine waiting all those years without opening it! How could they stand the suspense?” She felt a little sad because her mother, who died when she was two, would never know what was in it.
Stop stalling! Camrose told herself.
She took a deep breath, ripped a layer of sticky tape off one end of the parcel, and peeled off the paper. Inside was a hard, reddish-brown cardboard box with
Tabac Havane Havana
Tobacco
printed on the lid.
Tueros
, it said.
Cigares 25 Cigars
.
“Cigars?”
Camrose flipped up the lid. Inside was what looked like a letter, and ⦠She tipped it out, shook the box, and looked at the bottom. And nothing. Only a letter.
But still ⦠word from the dead. All right! She sat down and unfolded the letter. There were three pages, all covered with that stern black handwriting. She smoothed them on the desk.
My dear Camrose,
she read.
I'm sorry I can't be there to explain
things to you in person â¦
Her lips moved silently for a few seconds.
Across the room, the door creaked open an inch. Camrose slapped the letter face down on the desk, in case it was Bronwyn sticking her nose in. But Bronwyn didn't appear.
“Darn door.” Camrose got up and closed it, then returned to the desk. As she reached for the letter, the door inched open again.
“Bron?” She went and stood in the doorway. The dim upstairs hall was deserted. From downstairs came the crackle of canned laughter from a TV show. It sounded very far away.
Up here, in the quiet, you could hear the cricks and ticks of the old house as it contracted in the cool of the night. Sounded almost like stealthy footsteps, if you let your imagiânation run wild.
Something gleamed in the stairwell beyond the banister railâing. A nail head, maybe. It looked like an eye, watching her.
She stepped back into her room and closed the door firmly. Then she snatched up the pages of the letter and folded them.
“Can't keep this to myself!”
What she really meant, and knew it, was, Don't want to be alone. Not now, not here
.
C
amrose pulled on shorts, shoved her feet into sandals and wedged the folded letter into her back pocket.
The window was open as wide as it would go. Pushing up the two hooks that held the screen to the window frame, she lifted it out, laid it flat on the asphalt shingle roof outside and climbed out herself.
Her room was at the back of the house, overlooking a long shed where the lawnmower and gardening tools and bicycles were stored. To the right of her window was Dad's, now dark. On that side of the shed stood a huge old chestnut tree. One limb snaked over the shed roof, with another, smaller branch reaching out about six feet above it.
Steadying herself with one hand on the branch above her head, she walked quickly along the lower limb to the trunk. On a quiet night like this, the tree was as solid as a house. More solid than our house, she thought. Only the great tent of leaves stirred, with a sound like rain.
A rope lay coiled in a hole in the trunk at the height of her head, just above a limb on the side away from the house. She pulled it out and let it uncoil to the ground. The top end was securely tied to the limb, and triple knots twice as big as her fist ran down the length of it.
She had a good grip on the rope and was feeling downward with one foot when something scrambled up the other side of the tree, something big, with claws that scraped the bark. She yelped and nearly let go.
Leaves thrashed above her head. A triangular face poked through and black eyes in a black mask glittered down at her. She laughed, and her heart stopped thumping. The raccoon chittered furiously.
“Take it easy! I won't bother you.”
It ducked back up. Camrose lowered herself down the rope to the ground. It was an easy dash across the lawn, a scramble to the top of the fence and over, landing with a thud on the grass on the other side. Detour around the patch of tomato plants, climb to the top of the lean-to that sheltered the Shoemakers' firewood, and from there to the roof of a shed identical to the one on the Ferguson house.
Two squares of yellow light splashed across the roof. Mark's was the nearest. She scratched on the screen. Mark, who was dressed now in shorts and a T-shirt, came to the window with a colorful brochure in his hands.