The Tale of Halcyon Crane (27 page)

I did not want to hear the rest of this story. I knew where it was going, and I didn’t want it to go there. But it did.

“I started down the stairs,” he said. “And Hallie, I know this is going to sound absurd but I swear to you that I was pushed. I don’t know if I was dreaming or sleepwalking, but I definitely felt hands on my back.”

“Somebody pushed you?”

Will shook his head in amazement. “I think so.”

I had fallen asleep believing that the Hill House ghosts were nothing but memories surfacing in my own head, and frankly I liked that notion. But now, Iris’s stories were swirling around in my brain, her assertion that the girls had driven her cousin off a cliff, poor Amelia’s sudden falls, and now
Will tumbling down the stairs. These certainly weren’t products of my imagination.

“I think we should get out of here right now,” I said. “Let’s go to your place.”

Will shook his head. “My place is all the way on the other side of the island. Besides, it’s almost morning. Let’s just make some coffee and watch the sun come up.”

There, with the lights of the kitchen illuminating the darkness, in a house built on secrets and filled with ghosts and murder, I realized that the lines between Iris’s stories and my reality were blurring. Were Will and I somehow caught up in my family’s grim and bloody fairy tale?

I
asked Will not to go into the office the next day, but he insisted. “I thought you didn’t have anything to do in the off -season.” I was terrified that he would collapse alone in the office from the aftereffects of a concussion.

“I don’t have
much
to do.” He smiled, pulling on jeans and a sweater.

“Then why go in? We could spend the day reading or taking a walk around the grounds.”

“I’ve got a conference call to make—”

“Which you could do here.” I wasn’t letting this go.

“Yes, I could. And I would, if my files and my computer weren’t down at the office. Besides, I have to go into town anyway to get feed for Belle. I won’t stay long. I promise.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” I yawned.

He smiled and wrapped his arms around me. “Stay here and take a nap. I’ll come back after lunch. How’s that?”

I relented. “Okay.”

“Any thoughts on dinner?” he wondered. I shook my head. “How about if I make us a stir-fry?”

“A great lover who also cooks.” I managed a tired smile. “You’re too good to be true.”

I walked with him down the stairs, saw him out the back door, the cold air snatching away any sleep I might have fallen back into that morning, and watched as he and Belle set off toward town. I pulled on a jacket and sat on the sunporch with a cup of strong coffee, staring out at the angry water and thinking about everything and nothing at all.

“Morning, miss.” It was Iris, walking in from the kitchen.

I wanted to ask her whether she thought Will’s and Amelia’s falls might be connected somehow. I had intended to bring it up right away, but for some reason I can’t explain, I didn’t. She started in on another of her tales and I found myself fully drawn into the past, the present goings-on receding into the background like one of my wispy visions.

“Madlyn Hill was born on a spring day when the lilacs came into full bloom here on the island. She came into this world feet first and both mother and daughter nearly died during the ordeal, but Amelia finally delivered the girls with Charles—”

I interrupted. “You said
girls,
Iris. Plural.”

Iris nodded. “Twins. Maddie was born first, healthy and pink and crying. Only then did the doctor realize he had more work to do, and shortly thereafter he delivered a second girl, Sadie.

“I was tending to Maddie when Sadie was born. Amelia was exhausted and near-delirious from the difficult delivery, but when the nurse rushed into the study to tell Charles that
another baby was coming, he was over the moon with excitement. His joy, however, was short-lived. It lasted just long enough for him actually to see the baby.”

Iris closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out an image too painful to recall, before she continued. “I’ll never forget the sight of Sadie, so tiny and blue and delicate, like a newly hatched baby bird. She lived for only a few minutes, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. I could see she did not belong in this world.

“As the doctor explained it, while the twins were in the womb, Madlyn was taking in most of the nutrients. She grew bigger and stronger as her twin withered and starved. A horrible thought, really. It was as though Madlyn ingested her sister’s very life. I wish Amelia had not heard the doctor’s explanation of how the twins had developed. I wish she had been told only of the death. It might have made things easier, later.”

I shuddered at this, closing my eyes to the vision I knew was beginning to form.

“We buried Sadie the next day in the family plot, next to Hannah and Simeon. There was a short service, a few prayers read. Amelia was too weak to attend. And though Charles grieved for his lost daughter, in time he embraced life again. Amelia was a different matter. She was forever haunted by the thought of Sadie’s death. Somewhere deep inside, in her darkest, most twisted thoughts, Amelia believed Maddie had killed her sister.”

“Killed her? On purpose? That’s crazy, Iris.”

“You’re absolutely right. After the birth, Amelia did sink into a sort of madness.”

“Postpartum depression?”

“Worse. Amelia didn’t get out of bed for days and days, not to wash, not to eat. She didn’t want to see the baby, hold her, or even feed her. She spent most days tossing and turning in her bed and most nights wandering the hallways of the house in her white nightdress, her hair wild and uncombed. Poor Charles would find her in the nursery in the middle of the night, hovering over Maddie’s crib, staring, muttering incomprehensible things. One night he caught her carrying the baby down the hall toward the stairs.

“With memories of his mother’s madness fresh in his mind, Charles was terrified that he’d have to institutionalize his young wife. So he didn’t call the doctor or tell anyone about Amelia’s odd behavior. I believed this was a mistake. Amelia was intent on hurting the child, anyone could see that. Charles certainly did. But he decided to handle the situation himself, so what could I say?

“I did what I could, taking it upon myself to protect little Maddie from her mother, stationing myself in a hard-backed chair in the nursery as soon as the sun went down and not leaving again until it rose in the morning. Night after night, Amelia would appear in Maddie’s room, wild-eyed, her face white as bone, and I’d order her back to bed. Most of the time, thank goodness, she obeyed me. But some nights I’d have to shove her out of the room.”

“Did my grandmother end up in an institution?” I wanted to know.

Iris shook her head. “It took many months, but Amelia came back to herself. It happened suddenly, and nobody was ever sure how or why. One morning she simply got out of
bed, bathed, and came downstairs to the kitchen as though she had awakened from a coma or a long sickness. Whatever cloud had descended upon her had dissipated, and Amelia walked out of her room smiling, wanting to know where her husband and daughter were, as though none of the madness had ever happened.

“Charles was overjoyed. He stood there, holding his wife and crying openly, so relieved was he to see her back to herself. I credit much of her recovery to his gentle ways and loving nature. He was so patient with her during those long months.

“But Amelia was never the same as she was before the birth of her children, not quite. As Charles was holding her that day, I noticed a strange new look on her face and in her eyes. I don’t want to say it was sinister, exactly, but there was something of an undercurrent to her from that day on. The way she continued to look at her daughter unsettled me quite a bit.

“In no time whatsoever, baby Maddie was crawling, then toddling, then walking and, unlike her father, talking a blue streak from a very early age. However, in a strange development that alarmed her parents and me, little Maddie directed most of her conversation toward one person: her sister.

“Her father brought a toy telephone home for her one afternoon, and Maddie would use it to call her sister. ‘Sadie! Time for dinner! Come to the table!’ This frightened Charles and Amelia, because of course they had not told young Maddie she had had a twin sister, much less the sister’s name. Yet somehow she knew.

‘Who are you talking to, dear?’ Charles would ask. Maddie would simply answer, ‘Sister.’

“There were many whispered and frantic conversations about this odd behavior behind closed doors, but finally Charles came to the decision that they would simply have to live with it. Maddie and Sadie had been twins together in the womb, and somehow Maddie retained the memory. He was sure stranger things had happened at other times to other families. I thought,
Yes, and in this very house
, but of course I did not say it aloud.”

I shuddered as I saw my young mother holding conversations with her dead sister.

“Neither Charles nor Amelia ever knew what was really going on with their daughter.” Iris smiled, her eyes shining. “But I knew. In the womb, as poor Sadie grew weaker and weaker and Maddie grew ever stronger, the two girls made a pact. Sadie would not live a day in the outside world, so Maddie would live for both of them. And right there in the calm waters of the womb, the girls joined hands and Maddie called Sadie’s soul to her.”

Iris paused for effect, looking at me expectantly.

I scowled. “What do you mean, she called Sadie’s soul?”

“It was a gift she would possess her entire life.”

“What do you
mean
, Iris?” I repeated.

“Your mother was called
soul capturer
in her work. It’s how she was known professionally.”

“I had heard that, yes. But I assumed it was because she had a way of capturing a person’s true spirit in her photographs.”

“That’s exactly what it was.” Iris nodded. “The photography came later, of course. But when Madlyn was just a child, she began to collect bits and pieces of people’s souls,
their spirits, wherever she went. They always stayed with her, hovering around her, until she learned to put them in her photographs, the way other children collect butterflies or frogs.”

“I still don’t quite get what you’re saying.”

“It was her special ability, her
gift,
” Iris stressed. “Have you not looked at one of her photographs and known exactly what the person was thinking or feeling?”

I nodded, thinking back to the first time I had found my mother’s website. I could clearly see—and sometimes even hear—her subjects’ thoughts.

“But I’m getting ahead of my story with all of this talk about Madlyn’s photographs. I’ll tell you about them, to be sure, but you have more to hear first.” Iris looked at her slim watch. “But that’s enough for today, miss. I’ll come back and continue the story tomorrow.”

She stood up and prepared to leave. As I shook the visions out of my head, I remembered I had intended to talk with Iris about Will’s fall the previous night.

“Iris, I woke up last night to find Will crumpled at the bottom of the front staircase,” I began. “He thought he had heard voices, children’s voices, and I know this might sound silly but he felt as though someone had pushed him. With you telling me about Amelia’s falls the day before . . .”

Iris stared deeply into my eyes. It made me more than a little uncomfortable. “You’re wondering if something or someone in the house caused those falls.”

“Well, yes.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s a very strange coincidence that certainly could have a reasonable explanation,” I said weakly. It’s not what I thought at all.

Iris nodded, smiling. “That’s what they all say at the beginning.”

I needed answers, not evasions. “Listen, Iris, if you think Will is in any kind of danger—or if I’m in danger—from someone or something in this house, I want to know it right now. Are we safe here?”

“Miss Hallie, you’re asking questions for which I have no answers,” she said sadly. “I am only this family’s storyteller. That is my role. I cannot tell the future. I don’t know what will be. None of us does.”

I wouldn’t let it go. “But, judging from what you’ve told me about things that have happened in the past—Charles needing protection, Amelia’s falls, even your poor cousin—isn’t the same thing happening now?”

Iris’s smile sent a chill through me. “The girls have never liked strangers,” she said, and she turned and went into the kitchen.

Suddenly, I felt the cold. It must’ve been no more than 40 degrees on that porch, and I had been sitting out there in just a jacket listening to Iris. I found myself wishing for a big pot of the stew she made so often, and oddly enough, when I went back into the house, I found just that. She must’ve brought it with her when she arrived that morning and left it simmering on the stove when she came to join me. As I ate a few
spoonfuls of stew right out of the pot, I wished Will were already home.

An hour later, during which time I had done nothing but stare out of the back window watching for him, the ringing of the phone jarred me out of my trance.