The Tale of Halcyon Crane (18 page)

My own eyes had welled with tears, and as I reached for
my napkin to blot them away, Iris handed me an old lace handkerchief. Like her, it smelled of decaying roses and dust. “I know, child,” she said, with a softness on her face that I hadn’t before seen. “I know.” She waited until I had blown my nose and dried my eyes and then continued her tale.

“Hannah Hill didn’t know it, but she was walking directly toward the cliff. She would’ve stumbled to her death if she hadn’t heard voices, soft and low, on the wind behind her. She held her breath and listened.

“ ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ The voices seemed to be saying. ‘You’re cold! You’re ice cold!’ And then laughter.

“Was it the children playing hide-and-seek? Hannah turned and began walking blindly in the direction of the voices. ‘Girls? Where are you?’

“She heard, ‘Warmer! You’re getting warmer!’

“ ‘Girls! Stop this game and come inside!’

“ ‘Warmer, Mama, warmer!’ And so Hannah kept going, against the wind, one foot in front of the other, following the sound of those voices—’You’re hot! You’re burning up!’—until one foot bumped into a stone step. Hannah was astonished to find herself standing at her own back door. She hadn’t been able to see the house until she was upon it.

“Hannah stood there for a long while, listening in vain for the voices; she heard only the howling of the wind. Had the voices been there at all? Surely no child could have been playing out in that storm.

“She thought she might rest a moment before heading out to look for her daughters once again. She went inside, closed the door, and lay down on the floor in front of the fire, her face and arms bleeding from the razor-thin cuts made by the
icy snow. She would just put her head down for a moment, she thought, and then resume the search. She was so tired.”

“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Don’t tell me—”

Iris nodded. “Yes, child. This is no children’s story. It’s as real as it gets. Poor Hannah woke up the next day, after the storm had passed. The residents of Grand Manitou Island, including Hannah Hill, knew it was time to look for the dead and do what they could for the living. As they emerged from their homes, they saw a world completely covered in ice. Bright sunshine glinted off shining trees, porches, and fences. Three feet of snow had fallen, drifting to cover second-story windows in some places. It might have seemed beautiful, had it not been so deadly. Hannah tried to make her way from her house to the cliff but could not manage to slog through all that snow. Digging out would have to be the work of hardier souls, those with snowshoes and shovels and spirits that were not in mourning. She went back into her house and slumped in a chair by the fire, waiting for someone to come.

“It was a good thing she was not the one to find the bodies of her daughters, frozen together, their terrified expressions still clearly visible through the inch-thick layer of ice that encased them. But they weren’t the only souls frozen to death that day.

“For nearly a week after the storm, Manitou residents watched in horror as the frozen, deathly still bodies of sailors, having perished on steamers and freighters and fishing boats, floated ashore, one after another, in a ghostly parade of the dead.”

I thought about the dream I’d had about my father and
knew then where all those lost souls had come from. “And Simeon? Did he survive?”

Iris nodded. “Miraculously enough, he did. Everyone on board his steamer lived to tell the tale. The waves had run the boat aground on an enormous rock, so it didn’t sink despite the fact that much of it was torn to shreds. The passengers had huddled together in the pilothouse. After the storm subsided they tried to break out through the doors and windows, using anything they could find. But it was no use. A thick layer of ice covered everything. They were entombed.

“Luckily for them, rescue was on the way. The next day, men from the island made their way to the steamer in fishing boats and were astonished to find everyone alive, trapped within. The rescuers went back to the island, grabbed every pickax and shovel they could find, and returned to the steamer, working furiously to break the icy shell.

“Simeon’s gratitude for surviving the storm was short-lived. He came home to find his beloved daughters dead and his wife in a state of catatonic grief. Nature’s fury had taken more from him than his own life.

“Time passed, and Hannah slowly came back to herself. She and her husband were resilient and not unaccustomed to death, so they leaned on each other for comfort and support, and in time, they put the enormous pain of their loss behind them. Their lives went on. Simeon and Hannah had a son a few years later.

“But that is not the end of this sad tale. Curiously enough, until the day she died, Hannah Hill was never again caught unawares by a storm as she was on that horrible day.”

“What do you mean, Iris? How?”

“Whenever a storm was brewing, whether it was an emotional storm, as when, many years later, Simeon died of a heart attack one afternoon on the golf course, or a dangerous physical storm like the one that took her daughters’ lives, Hannah would hear small voices whispering to her, warning her of impending doom.”

“How can you possibly know all this, Iris? Did you hear the story from my mother?”

Pridefully, she sat a little straighter. “Child, I was the one who told these stories to your mother and to her father before her. I was here. My mother was Hannah and Simeon’s housekeeper. We lived here, on the third floor of this house. I knew the girls and I saw it all. And everything that came after.”

“You knew the girls?” I was stunned.

“Of course! I played with them. I was just a girl myself.”

Somehow, it was not difficult to imagine the creepy Iris playing with those three bedeviled girls.

“So where were you when the storm hit?”

“I was on the mainland that day, with my mother,” she explained. “It was her day off and we went to shop as we oftentimes did. We were stranded in the hotel; the snowdrifts were so high we couldn’t see out of the second-floor windows! If I hadn’t gone with her, I surely would’ve been playing with the girls outside that day. My life was spared.”

I gazed out the window. I had no idea how much time had passed while Iris was telling her tale, but it seemed to me that the gray day was spilling into a gray evening.

Iris cleared her throat and stood up from the table. “That’s enough for one day, I believe,” she said. She took her cup and saucer to the sink, gave them a quick wash, and dried them with a towel. “I’ll take my leave now, miss, and be back on Wednesday. Perhaps you’d like to pick up where we left off, once I’ve finished my work. There’s much more to tell, and much more for you to see.”

“You’re a wonderful storyteller,” I said to her.

Iris puffed up a little at this compliment, clearly pleased. With that, she pulled on her overcoat and rain bonnet and made her way to the back door. I felt bad about her going out into the rain on her own. I would have offered her a lift home—if I had had the means to give her one.

“Shall I walk with you, Iris? Make sure you get home okay?” I asked, but she just shook her head.

“No need, miss. I’ve been walking these lanes since long before you were born. I know my way well enough.”

I went with her to the door, where I gingerly hugged her brittle frame. “Thank you, Iris. You don’t know what it has meant to me, finally hearing about my family.”

“Oh, I think I do, child.” She smiled. “I think I do.” I watched as she made her way down the path toward the driveway and slipped out of sight, into the gloom. Then I closed the door, but I couldn’t get rid of the damp feeling that had seeped in from outside.

L
ater, as I sat by the fire, I stared into the flames and thought about the story Iris had told me. It was, literally, the first family story I had ever heard. My father never told me anything about his family and he certainly never told me anything about my mother’s. Now I had a history—ancestors with names and lives and, in this case, tragedies—Hannah and Simeon Hill, my great-grandparents. As I looked around the room, I thought,
They built this house, began to raise one family here, lost it, and then somehow finished raising another.
And here I was, a woman with the same genes, the same heritage, the same lineage, living here still. Despite the icy reception I had received from some of the towns-people, I at last had a solid feeling of belonging.

Day slipped intonight and I crept under the covers of my bed, ready for sleep, when two thoughts seeped into my brain, thoughts strange enough to make me sit upright with a jolt.

Iris said she was a child when the girls died, that she knew them. But they died in 1913.
Just how old was Iris?

As I was calming down from that idea—okay, she was old
as the hills, so what?—the second thought occurred to me. I heard, as clearly as if I had been standing in a corner of the room when they were first uttered, the words Martine said to Hannah the day she went to seek out a fertility potion:

By using these herbs, you are calling forth certain powers to deliver a child to you. . . . This cannot be undone. Any child conceived this way, out of—as you call it—witchcraft, can be unpredictable
.
You might get a demon or an angel or something in between; there is no way of knowing.

I had been thinking of Martine as nothing more than a woman who knew enough about the earth and plants and herbs to make poultices and cures for sicknesses and maladies. Women with that type of knowledge were branded as witches back then. But the warning from Martine, and the fact that the girls had indeed been an eerie lot, made me wonder exactly what was in that bag of herbs.

Then Martine’s next lines came to mind:
Children conceived out of witchcraft are witches themselves. As are their children and their children’s children.

I took a quick breath. That meant me.

I
awoke with a start. Somebody had touched my face, I was sure of it. I thought in my grogginess:
Iris?
It couldn’t be. Why would Iris be creeping about in my house in the middle of the night? Still, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and peered this way and that, half expecting to see her face, white and ashen, at my bedside. I looked at the clock: 3:15 a.m. This was silly, I thought. Iris wouldn’t be here in the dead of night.

I was about to close my eyes and fade back into sleep when I realized I had felt the same thing, the same delicate brushing against my face, several nights earlier at the inn. Was that same someone—or something—here in my room now?

I sat up in bed, flipped on the bedside lamp, and looked around. Nothing was amiss that I could see. There was the sweater I had thrown on the chair when I put on my pajamas; there was the book I had been reading before I fell asleep. No ghouls were hiding under the bed, no ghosts floating in the corners of the room.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to give the whole suite a once-over. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, tucked my feet into
my slippers, and padded across the floor to the sitting room. I turned on the light and saw that all was just as I had left it: the afghan on the armchair, the water glass on the side table.

Bathroom? I looked in the tub and poked my head into the shower. Nothing but a spider scurrying toward the drain. I was thinking about opening the bedroom door and looking up and down the hallway for good measure, but I decided against it. I was in a little fortress here, safe and protected in my small suite of rooms. There was no need to open up the door and invite the rest of this enormous house into the mix. If I did that, I’d have to explore every room in order to feel secure enough to sleep.

I lay down on my bed, convinced I had been dreaming. I was just closing my eyes when the singing began.

Say, say, oh, playmate
.

My eyes shot open. Did I really hear what I thought I heard? It was the same song in the same strange minor key that I had heard a few days before. My heart was beating hard and fast in my chest as I gathered the courage to look once again around my room. I did not want to see Iris there—or someone worse—singing that eerie song in the darkness.

Nobody was there, thank goodness. I was alone in the room. I exhaled.

Come out and play with me.

Oh, no, no. Stop that singing! I don’t want to hear more singing. It sounded far away, as though coming from outside. Oh, Lord. Is somebody outside my window, singing? In the middle of the night? How long it would take for this person to find his or her way inside the house? How many paces
would it take me to get to the kitchen, where I could at least grab a knife or even a large fork to protect myself? Was this night going to end with me fighting for my life?

And bring your dollies three.

Like hell I will. I flipped off my bedside light, gathered my courage, and walked over to the window. The bright moon was illuminating the grounds and shining on the water. A multitude of stars filled the sky, and slight wispy clouds floated this way and that. The leafless trees stood sentinel on the cliff, their limbs inky and black.

Nobody was there. Only trees and rocks and the lake, just as they should be. I was midway through my sigh of relief when there it was again.

Climb up my apple tree.