The Tale of Halcyon Crane (32 page)

Somewhere, very far away, I heard Iris’s voice. “Keep looking, Halcyon. It’s right there before you.”

But I didn’t see Julie, not just yet. What I saw was my mother, entranced with her photography, her own gift, oblivious to everything going on around her. The capturing of souls was a heady thing; it intoxicated her, I could see it in her eyes. Every time she developed one of her photographs, she was like an addict, insatiably drawn to what she would find there. I saw it clearly: This gift, this obsession, left very little time for other things, like husbands and children. That’s why she didn’t see I was in danger. And I knew then this part of the tale was cautionary. I made a mental note to remember that I, too, risked addiction. I needed to keep my eyes on what was really important.

“So what if she’s having visits from previous occupants of this house?” my mother said to Noah, waving off his fears. “They’re my
relatives
, for heaven’s sake.”

“Maddie, I think we should leave the island,” he pleaded. “Let’s get away from here.”

“Are you kidding?” she spat back at him. “Leave my father here alone? No, Noah. Absolutely not.”

I saw more arguments, then. Doors slamming, tears from both of them. “This is a wonderful place to grow up,” Madlyn told her husband. “Hallie has friends and a great school and a whole island to explore—without cars to run her over. You’ve got a fine job, and I can do my work from here. These are my roots and they’re Hallie’s roots. You can’t seriously want to take her away from all of that because you think she sees ghosts.”

She said that last bit with a kind of sarcastic venom that Noah had never before heard from his wife, and I saw the defeated look on his face. Nobody was leaving the island. Desperate, grieving, and frightened, he whispered into my ear that he’d protect me as best he could, promising to watch me with a hawk’s keen eye.

Then the scene shifted, and I saw somebody new on the island shopping for groceries. She followed my father and me out of the store and touched him on the sleeve. He turned and saw a young woman. She looked into his eyes and said, conspiratorially, “I can see that your daughter has quite a gift.”

I could almost hear Noah’s heart beating. He took a deep breath and whispered, “What do you mean, a gift?”

“The sight. I have it, too.”

He grabbed the young woman’s arm and hustled her over to a quiet corner of the street. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or how you know what you know, but I really need to talk to you,” he said to her.

Now I saw the woman’s face more clearly than I had before. Mira?
It couldn’t be.
And yet there she was, her face younger and brighter than I knew it to be, but plain as day.

I watched my father meet Mira for a clandestine dinner on the mainland that evening. Of course they couldn’t be seen together on the island—word would get back to my mother in a flash—so they picked an out-of-the-way restaurant not far from the ferry dock. He told Mira everything: how I didn’t see until I was three years old but was constantly talking about visual things and people and animals, how I regained my sight in an instant one day, how I was immersed in stories of my ancestors’ pasts, how I had always played with imaginary friends but now those games were turning dangerous.

“What does your wife say?” Mira asked him shyly.

“She discounts it, all of it. She is totally in denial and says I’m insane to be worried. I’ve tried everything to make her understand, but she won’t listen, she won’t . . .” His words trailed off into a sigh.

I watched as a coy grin appeared on Mira’s face and knew she was very glad to hear this. I saw images of the two of them meeting again and again, intimate dinners and rendezvous at out-of-the-way hotels. They had had an affair? I felt sick. All those times she had been so friendly toward me, so helpful, she had never once said anything about this.

Then I saw Julie Sutton’s parents drop her off at the house for the afternoon. My father found us playing in a third-floor room, sitting on the floor with a tea party spread out before us. I was pouring imaginary tea from a pot and chattering
away to Julie and to the stuffed bears I had positioned as the other guests.

“You girls are playing so happily up here, honey.” He smiled at me, relieved to find me immersed in a normal child’s activity—a tea party with a real live friend—and went on his way down the stairs.

But then came the screaming: high-pitched, horrible screams. My father flew back into the room and found me, scratches bleeding all over my face, locked in a struggle with, to him, what was an unseen foe. But I could see exactly who it was.

I saw myself screaming, holding my arms in front of me to fend off a girl in a white dress: Patience—but her face was not the face I had come to know. It had morphed into a grotesque worm-eaten skull, its flesh paper-thin and flaking. Her eyes were gone—only empty black holes remained—and she was yelling, “We weren’t invited to this party! You didn’t invite
us
to this party!”

Julie was crying and cowering in the corner, and then Persephone was upon her, scratching and pushing her, tearing at her dress, and finally putting her tiny hands around Julie’s throat.

Seeing all this, I was stunned into a stupor. I couldn’t shake the images from my view and I couldn’t move; the images held me captive even though I wanted to get up from that bench and run more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. This scene now before me was what my mind had locked away.

• • •

I kept screaming and fighting against this unseen enemy—unseen by my father, that is. I knocked over lamps and tore bedding off beds, I fell and tumbled and screamed. My father was just standing there—paralyzed with shock, I assumed—until one of them—Penelope—knocked into his legs and he felt, with certainty, her presence there.

He dove into the fray and tried to grab whatever it was that was torturing me. In doing so, he turned Penelope’s wrath against him. She flew at him, scratching his face and biting and tearing his shirt—he could not see her, but I was seeing it all—until he was backed into the wall near the open window.

I couldn’t catch my breath. There I was again, on top of a roller coaster, about to plunge toward the ground whether I wanted to or not.

In the confusion, with me fighting off Patience and my dad fighting off Penelope, Persephone saw her opportunity and took it, pushing Julie out of the open window. I ran to the window and watched her fall. She locked eyes with me as she tumbled all the way to the ground, mouthing my name. The last thing I saw was her terrified face before her skull hit a rock, making a sickening cracking sound.

My father didn’t see exactly what happened, but he saw me leaning out of the window. When he looked out the window, he saw, to his horror, the body of Julie Sutton lying on the ground.

“Oh, my God,” I murmured to myself. “He thought I did it!”

Noah flew through the house, down the stairs, and outside, stopping only when he reached Julie. I watched from the window as he attempted CPR, but it was useless; she was dead. He called the police and the Suttons.

“It was the girls,” I whispered. “They killed Julie. But my father thought it was me. That’s why we left the island.”

The vision swirled into view again. My mother was away when it happened, so my dad asked Mira to come to the house that evening. She did, and he told her everything that had occurred during the day—by that time, of course, the whole island knew there had been a death at Hill House. And Mira hatched the plan for escape—leaving the island. Within Noah’s panic, she saw a clear road leading to what she wanted, so she took it.

“I’m going to take the blame, Mira,” I heard my father say. “Just so long as none of this touches Hallie.”

Mira shook her head. “Your daughter is in grave danger,” she told him slyly. “I can feel it. This is not the end of the matter. You need to get her out of here. With you in prison, who is going to watch over Hallie? Your wife?”

Noah sat down hard on one of the kitchen chairs, defeated.

“Listen,” she said, in low conspiratorial tones. “I know a man on the mainland. He can come up with a whole new identity for you. For us. We can run away together and start a new life somewhere, pretending that this never happened.”

I put my head in my hands, feeling the beginning throb of a migraine. Or was it my father’s head I felt hurting? Somehow, I could see it in his eyes. He never intended to take Mira with us; she was merely his means of escape.

“I’ve given Madlyn several chances to see that something is very wrong here,” he murmured, nodding. “Hallie’s in danger, that’s never been more clear. But Madlyn won’t see it. All she keeps saying is that she herself was perfectly safe growing up in that house. But Hallie’s life could very well be at stake.”

Noah arranged everything with the man on the mainland: a new driver’s license, birth certificate, college degree, everything. And he waited for the right time. Meanwhile, the police investigation was turning nasty, as was island opinion. Everyone was horrified by Julie Sutton’s death and there was only one person who could be responsible: Noah Crane. He allowed the police to believe that he was the one who killed that poor girl. Never once did the harsh eye of blame come to rest on me.

I saw my father and Mira cooking up an escape plan. She would tow a fishing boat to the designated site; she would find our overturned kayak, thus making everyone think we had died. Noah would send for her later, when he reached our destination.

Still, he waited and wondered. Was leaving really the right thing to do? The last straw came the day Madlyn showed him the latest photo she had taken of me, swinging in the backyard. Noah saw it loud and clear, his mute daughter calling out:
Help me.
That was it for my father. He tried, one last time. “Can you not see she is in danger here? Can you not see that, Madlyn?” But she was as blind as I had been during my first years of life.

It was time to go. In the middle of the night, Mira towed a fishing boat to the enormous arched rock formation known
as the Ring, where she left it moored securely, along with a change of clothes and some supplies. The next day, after kissing my mother goodbye, Noah Crane paddled the double kayak toward the north side of the island with me sitting still, as I knew to do, in the front seat. Young as I was, I knew that keeping one’s center was the most important part of kayaking. If you lost it, you’d tip. My dad had taught me that.

Noah knew we were just minutes away from death, a death he had carefully planned. He was paddling toward a remote part of the island that could not be seen from shore, a spot that few people frequented. It was a tricky thing, dying. The calm weather that was perfect for kayaking on this great lake called many people to the water. It was difficult to find the solitude he needed. He scanned the horizon. If he saw any other people nearby—a kayak, a sailboat, even a swimmer—he would have to abort the plan and try another day.

My dad’s face was stern and determined. He was so close. The plan seemed to be falling into place perfectly. Nobody was around, as far as the eye could see. Just a few more strokes. He poured on the steam, as though he were paddling for his life; in a way, he was. His arms began to ache, his muscles tiring. Still, he couldn’t stop now. It was really happening. He was really doing it.

If Madlyn didn’t believe we were dead, she would surely hunt us down and bring me back to the island; my father would go to jail. But Noah wasn’t worried about failure on this day. He was a methodical man, and he had calculated every eventuality. His plan would work.

The image shifted slightly, and I saw my dad withdrawing money from his bank account again and again and again,
sums not large enough to attract notice, but enough. It was easy for him to squirrel this money away for himself, and he had traveled to the mainland to open a bank account under his new name, Thomas James. He had managed to stockpile almost six figures. He had a few thousand more stuffed into his jacket pocket. Not a fortune, but enough to start us in a new life.

I could see it on his face; the enormity of this thing was overwhelming to him. What he was doing was illegal, never mind the cruel immorality of taking a child away from her mother. He still loved Madlyn and knew he always would. But love comes a distant second to the safety of your child. He told himself that, over and over, until it took root in his soul.

I saw my dad think of all these things that day, as he paddled his kayak under the Ring. Local legend had it that the Ring was the gateway to the spirit world. It would be our gateway, too.

“See that, Daddy?” I called to him, silently, from my mute world. (I was not to speak a word for two years because of the trauma.) I was staring back toward shore. Then I turned my head and looked back at him, the fear apparent in my eyes. Noah had no idea I was also seeing the girls, standing on the shoreline, angry. He tried to say something to me, but the words caught in his throat. If he had had any moments of doubt about what he was doing, they were put to rest. Thank God he was getting his daughter away from this accursed place.

He passed through the Ring and found what he knew would be there, a fishing boat tethered to a rock on the sandbar, all gassed up, ready to go. Mira had stuck to their agreement.
Now,
Noah prayed.
Please let us get away.
He slowed his paddling and floated onto the bar.

“Hallie, we’re going to do something fun today,” he said, in a voice that was not quite his own. “Are you ready?”