The Dark Read Free Page A

Brambles tear their stockings, which are already laddered with darning.
    Maggie halts her sister in a copse of gnarled trees. For once Maggie is glad they are both smaller statured girls than average. Slips of things, as people say.
    “Hold your breath, Kat. Listen.”
    No hound. Only the dread-quiet of something watching.
    Then a peabody cries. A hare darts near.
    “Damn-it-all, where’s the fence?” Maggie whispers.
    “Were it the other way?” Katie whispers back. Tears runnel her pale skin, her thin arched nose. Her eyes are grey or lavender depending on the light and are heavy-lidded, giving the impressionof a sleepy nature, except when she is terrified, as now. Now they are as round as marbles.
    “Here,” Maggie says. “Up! Up! Get up the tree.” She stirrups her fingers for Katie. Katie points, rigid. They see him: a teeth-bared, savage-eyed creature, big as a wolf. He is three trees distant and stalking onwards. Katie sobs. Maggie grabs her waist. “Get up. Up!” she yells.
    Katie’s pinafore is also weighted with apples, hindering her movements. “I can’t!” she shouts. Maggie snatches up a fallen, jagged-edged branch and tears after her. They scream in unison as the hound breaks into a loping run. Katie stumbles and falls. Maggie stands over her sister, branch clenched like a spear. Katie prays face down in the grass.
    “Damn it! Damn-it-all,” Maggie incants. “I hate this place. I hate this place.”
    A distant whistle sounds. The hound halts. It is so close Maggie can smell its rank hair. Another whistle. The hound snarls and slinks off.
    “He’s gone, Kat. He’s gone.” Maggie helps her up. They walk quick, breathing hard, shriven with fear. Finally they reach the split-rail fence. They climb over it and into the dusty ruts of the public road. “We’re safe now. Really,” Maggie adds.
    They keep walking, mind, putting the orchard at a distance. Overhead, geese call out warnings of winter. The woodlands are ablaze with dying leaves. The wind carries the smell of field burn, of something rotting, and now the faint smell of peppermint from the fields abutting the road. In August these fields are said to be oceaned with blossoms of pink. Maggie sniffs and thinks of peppermint sticks and peppermint tonics. The peppermint, she decides, is the one good thing about Hydesville.
    From the verge Maggie spies their rented saltbox house, set there in its lonesome pocket of field, black shutters the only embellishment on its squat two storeys. She spies their father’s smithy aside the road, the buttery, the necessary, a low stone wall, three balm o’ Gileads in a row. A close grouping, small and plain as a doll set. No sign of the wagon or their old dun horse. Theirparents must still be in Newark buying supplies for the long wintering-in.
    Maggie’s heart steadies. Already she is recalling the incident in the orchard as exciting rather than terrifying. Already she is angry at the tender for letting his hound chase them like that. She takes her sister’s hand. Katie’s face is pale. Her eyes have darkened to slate and her jaw is clenched. Her fingers? They tremble. Ah, no, Maggie thinks. One of Katie’s peculiar little fits is coming on. They last only a few moments, these fits. Katie stands rigid, trembling, vacant-eyed; on three occasions she has fallen and drummed her heels. When she does return to herself, she can’t recall a thing. “It’s as if I plain ole vanish,” she has told Maggie.
    To distract her sister, to keep her in herself, Maggie stands with arms akimbo and pretends fussed perplexity, pretends, that is, to be their mother. “Now, girls. Girls!” she says in a raised, nervous voice. “What do you mean you hate it here? We’ll get rich growing peppermint, won’t we? Oh, and we’ve only been here in Hideawayville, I mean Hydesville, for two months. It’s not so awfully dull. You’ve got me and your pa, don’t you? And your dear brother, David, and a passel of kin are