Black Creek Crossing (23 page)

“Look at this place,” Seth said. “Nobody’s been in it for practically forever. I bet nobody but us even knows it’s here—I mean, I’m practically the only one who ever comes out here anyway, and I didn’t even know about it.”

“But if we just leave it here and somebody does come—”

“Look!” Seth uttered the word so sharply it startled Angel into silence, and she turned to look where he was pointing.

Houdini was no longer on the hearth. Now he’d moved around to the right side of the fireplace and was pawing at one of the stone blocks just above the floor. The cat moved aside as soon as Seth and Angel went over to get a closer look. Seth crouched down, felt around the rock the cat had been pawing, and a moment later found just enough of a groove for him to grip it. He pulled, and the rock slid out, revealing another cavity, a little bigger than the one in which they’d found the book an hour earlier.

“Still think he’s just a cat?” Seth asked as he went to the counter and picked up the old leather-bound book.

As she watched Seth slide it into the cavity in the wall of the fireplace, Angel tried to tell herself that it was just a coincidence, that the cat couldn’t possibly have been showing them anything. But even as she tried to convince herself, Houdini rose to his feet, went over to the book, and sniffed at it.

Then he looked up and his glowing golden eyes seemed to bore straight into her.

And Angel knew that not any of it—finding the book, the cabin, and the niche in the fireplace—was a coincidence. “It’s for us,” she said, her voice so soft that Seth could barely hear her. She turned to face him, and Seth saw her eyes glowing almost as brightly as those of the cat. “Don’t you see?” she said, her voice edged with the excitement growing inside her. “It’s for us. That’s why he led us here! He wanted us to have the book, and he brought us here! But what are we supposed to do with it?”

“First we have to find out what it really is,” Seth said. “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll hide the book here, at least until we can find a better place for it. And tonight I’ll look on the Internet. Or maybe tomorrow night we’ll meet at the library and see if we can find out what it is. Okay?”

Angel hesitated. What if someone did find the cabin and the book? What if they came back tomorrow or the next day and it was gone?

But before she could say anything, Seth slid the book deep into the recess inside the fireplace, and replaced the rock that hid the niche. The stone block slid perfectly into position, leaving no sign that anything could be concealed behind it.

Angel stared at it for a long time, trying to see any hint that the rock that now hid the book was not set firmly into the chimney.

There was none.

The book would be safe.

A few minutes later they left the cabin. When they’d climbed once more over the mound of rubble in front of it, Angel turned to look back. Just as Seth had said, no trace of the cabin was visible at all. From where she stood, all that could be seen was the face of the bluff.

Houdini too had vanished.

“How are we going to find our way back?” Angel asked, knowing there was no way she’d remember all the twists and turns they’d taken while following the cat through the woods. “Are we lost?”

Seth shook his head. “All we have to do is head west, and we should come to Black Creek Road. We should be a little farther out than your house, but not very far.”

He started through the forest, and Angel followed him, still not certain they were going in the right direction. But no more than three minutes later they came to what looked like a path. The floor of the forest appeared worn, and here and there she thought she saw marks on the trunks of trees. By the time they came out on Black Creek Road—almost exactly where Seth had told her they’d be—she was almost sure that if she had to, she could find her way back to the tiny cabin by herself.

Almost sure, but not quite.

She was not alone.

Angel could feel it. She’d felt the first twinge of the peculiar sense that there was someone nearby when they turned away from the cabin and began picking their way through the forest, following the path that for a while only Seth could see. At first she thought it must be the cat, but Houdini had performed another of his vanishing acts and was nowhere to be seen.

Besides, the feeling wasn’t quite like the one she’d begun to recognize whenever Houdini followed her to school, walked home with her, or curled up in her room when her father wasn’t around.

This was a different feeling, as if an unseen being were hovering just beyond the fringes of her senses. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling—not like the creepy feeling when someone was watching her, when the hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she could almost hear people whispering about her. No, this new feeling was almost like having an unseen companion who was there to watch over her.

She must have glanced back over her shoulder three or four times, almost certain there was someone there, following them through the forest, but she’d seen nothing, though she was pretty sure Seth felt the same thing she did.

He kept stopping to look around, but when she asked him what he was looking for, all he said was that he thought he’d heard something.

She had heard nothing.

It was just a feeling, which she was certain would pass as soon as they were out of the forest.

It hadn’t. In fact, it had grown stronger, and as she turned off Black Creek Road and started across the patch of unkempt lawn around the little house, it became so strong that she was almost certain Seth was behind her. But when she turned to look, he was on his way home, just disappearing around the bend in the road.

Her father was at the kitchen table, an open bottle of beer in front of him. When he looked at her, Angel could see by the ruddiness of his complexion that it wasn’t his first beer.

“Where you been?” he demanded, his bleary eyes narrowing to suspicious slits.

Angel thought quickly. “I—I stopped at church on the way home,” she blurted, telling herself it wasn’t quite a lie; she actually
had
gone to church yesterday, and she hadn’t actually said that she’d gone
today.

“You sure you weren’t with that boy?” her father pressed.

“He’s not even Catholic,” Angel replied, again not quite telling a lie by avoiding the question.

“I don’t like him,” her father said. “I don’t want him hanging around here anymore. You understand?”

Angel nodded, knowing better than to tell her father that after what had happened the day before yesterday, Seth was almost too frightened even to come into the house that afternoon. “I’ve got some homework to do,” she said, turning away to hurry upstairs before her father could say anything else.

In her room, Angel dropped her backpack on her bed and went to the window. The sun was starting to drop toward the horizon, and the shadows of the huge trees across the street were creeping across the lawn toward the house. She looked to the right and, just above the trees, could see the top of the bluff whose ramparts concealed the tiny cabin in which they’d hidden the book.

The book.

The book whose cover was the same bloodred shade as the lipstick whose markings had been on her mirror.

The book that almost seemed warm the first time she touched it. Had it actually been hot, or had she only imagined it? But Seth’s fingers had jerked away too, when he’d touched the book.

Suddenly, the feeling of no longer being alone was so strong that Angel turned away from the window, and for just a moment she thought she caught a glimpse of something—someone?—at the very edge of her vision. But before she was even sure she’d actually seen it, it was gone.

For the next hour, until her mother called her for dinner, she tried to concentrate on her homework, but over and over again she found herself getting up to go to the window, gazing out into the gathering darkness toward the bluff. And each time she went to the window, she had the feeling there was someone else—someone right behind her—looking over her shoulder.

As night fell, she imagined the cabin with a fire blazing in its hearth, the warm glow of a kerosene lantern suffusing it with a soft light, its door closed and its window barred.

The world shut out of a place that no one knew was even there.

No one but she.

She and Seth.

And someone else . . .

Chapter 23

T’S WITCHCRAFT.”

Angel stared across the table at Seth, certain at first that he must be kidding. But there was nothing in either his expression or his tone of voice that said he was anything but dead serious. In fact, his face looked pale and there was a look in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t fear, exactly, at least not the kind she’d seen in his eyes when her father had found them in her room the other day. Today the look in his eyes told her he wasn’t so much afraid of what he’d found out already as what he might find out next.

Unless she was wrong. If he was kidding her and she fell for it, she’d feel like a complete idiot. They were in the cafeteria, and Seth had found a table way off in the corner, where no one else ever sat. When she’d seen him sitting there, with empty tables all around him, she’d assumed he’d found out something about the book on the Internet last night and wanted to make sure nobody else could hear what they would talk about. She’d filled her tray, doing her best to resist the macaroni and cheese but failing so miserably that she took a double portion, telling herself she’d share it with Seth, then assuaging her conscience by taking a glass of water instead of a Coke, even a diet one. It was as she was setting her tray on the table that he’d spoken the two words:

“It’s witchcraft.”

“You mean like witch doctors?” she asked as she dropped her backpack on the chair next to her and sat down across from him.

“No, I mean like witchcraft,” Seth told her, eyeing the macaroni and cheese covetously. “You going to eat all that yourself?”

“Maybe,” Angel said, but seeing the look of disappointment in his eyes, she relented. “I got enough for both of us. Here.” She handed her plate across to Seth, who transferred a little less than a quarter of it to his plate. “You have to take half—if you don’t, then I’ll eat it all and be even fatter than I am now.”

“You’re not fat,” Seth told her. “You just look healthy.”

“Yeah, right,” Angel said, rolling her eyes. “And you’re going out for football!”

Seth shrugged. “Okay, so you’re a pig! Happy now?” Angel stared at him. “Well, if that’s what you want me to say, I’ll say it! So, do you want to know what I found out on the Internet or not?”

Angel ignored the question. “You don’t really think I look like a pig, do you?” she asked.

Now it was Seth who rolled his eyes. “I already told you what
I
think, but you didn’t like it. So I told you what
you
think, even though it’s wrong. Make up your mind, okay? Either I’ll tell you the truth or I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

“The truth, I guess,” Angel said. “But I do weigh too much.”

“Okay—maybe twenty pounds. Who cares?”

“Would you dance with me? I mean, if we were at a dance or something?”

Seth reddened. “I’ve never danced with anybody.”

“That’s not what I asked. I asked if you’d dance with me!” Angel pressed. “And remember, you have to tell me the truth.”

“Why wouldn’t I dance with you? But you’ll have to teach me how. And we’re not going to any dances anyway, so what does it matter? Now, do you want to know what I found out about the book?”

“You mean you actually found it on the Internet?”

Seth shook his head. “I Googled ‘Recipees and Remedies,’ and I didn’t find that book, but I found out a bunch of other stuff. I mean, like there’s hundreds and hundreds of sites that are all about witchcraft.”

“Just because there’s a bunch of sites doesn’t make it true. There are sites on the Net about everything.”

“I didn’t say it was true,” Seth said. “All I said is that there are lots of sites, and that’s what I think the book’s about.”

“The way you said it sounded like you believe it,” Angel said.

An uncertain look came into Seth’s eyes. “I don’t know—I mean, it seems like if so many people believe it, maybe . . .” His voice trailed off and he shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s like voodoo. I read once that voodoo actually works—you know, where they stick pins in a doll, and the person the doll is supposed to be feels the pain?”

“That’s just superstition,” Angel said. “It doesn’t really work.”

“It does if the person the doll’s supposed to be believes in voodoo and knows someone’s doing voodoo on him.”

Angel frowned. “Really?”

Seth nodded. “Somebody did a big study about it, and if the person who’s being hoodooed believes in voodoo, they’ll actually get sick. Sometimes they even die!”

“ ‘Hoodooed’? What’s that mean?”

“It’s like a voodoo curse,” Seth said.

“I don’t believe in curses,” Angel said.

“It doesn’t matter if you believe in them or not. If someone gets cursed who believes in them, then the curse can work.”

“I still don’t see what it has to do with the book.”