Authors: Anne C. Petty
September 8, Thursday—Present Day
Pulling into her parking bay under the house, Alice was relieved to see Nik’s slot empty. The interview with Cecil had taken less than an hour, but she’d been afraid Nik and Margaret would beat her home, which would prevent her from carrying out her plan. She climbed the stairs, her swollen ankle complaining at every step, and went into the house. In her bedroom, she dug Harrow’s notebook out of its hiding place. All these months she’d kept it hidden in a shoebox in the top of her closet under blankets and old pillows. She wondered now if having it in her bedroom, so close to her all this time, accounted for her insomnia and disturbing dreams.
Going to the kitchen, she collected a box of long wooden matches and a tin of lighter fluid, which she tossed in the shoebox beside the notebook. Then she took an armload of newspapers from the top of the pile stacked on the breakfast bar. Tucking the shoebox and the newsprint under her arm, she headed slowly down the stairs to the laundry room. Dawg followed her, his tail in gear. She gave his ears a scratch.
“I don’t know if you ought to come along,” she said. “Maybe I should shut you in here.” Dawg wagged, and sat down on the patio, just outside the laundry room door.
Alice pulled a beach towel out of the dryer and draped it over her arm. Then she gimped painfully across the yard toward the woods behind the house. She found the trail that led to the pond and checked the time: nearly 3:00. This had better be over and done by the time Nik and Margaret got home.
Alice navigated her way down the trail, stepping carefully over tangles of cat-brier and poison ivy as Dawg ran ahead of her. It took about twenty minutes to reach a natural clearing just east of the pond. A red-shouldered hawk took flight from a nearby laurel oak as she walked out from under the trees, its sharp KEER keer keer adding to the sense of desolation. Looking around, she found an open spot and cleared away all the brush and leaves, making a pile of small branches and twigs that could feed a decent-sized fire once she got it going.
Checking her watch again, she crumpled the newspaper pages into balls and worked them into the small pile of twigs and brush where she intended to build the fire. Once everything was ready, she spread the beach towel over the ground and sat down on it. Gritting her teeth against the pain throbbing up her leg, she settled the shoebox in her lap. Dawg immediately claimed a corner of the towel and flopped down, his rump pushed against her thigh. Alice patted his backside and then opened the box.
She took out the notebook, intending to look through it carefully one more time, and then consign it to the flames for good and all. When she’d first discovered the folder containing the notebook on a dust-covered shelf in the county library, she’d used its contents to fill out details in her somewhat fictionalized history of the old church and its founder. And when she’d burned the manuscript of her book in a blind panic, hoping to rid herself of Harrow and his hideous companion, she hadn’t thought of the notebook. But now, here it was—an artifact the man had actually held in his own hands. With trembling fingers, she turned it over, remembering the story she’d written about him and how it seemed to have come not from her own imagination, but told as if she were a silent observer to real events. Alice shivered. This plain, water-stained notebook was so much more than it appeared.
From a curator’s perspective, the book was an excellent specimen of a late nineteenth-century folio, its covers bound in calfskin. Harrow had used the first thirty pages to document church business, and she read through them carefully this time, looking for names and dates of events. A paragraph on the second page alluded to gold brought with him in both nugget and dust form from gold-mining towns in Queensland. On the facing page was a tally of weights and amounts, and subtractions from the total in terms of U.S. dollars.
She wondered why she hadn’t paid attention to this entry before, because here in Harrow’s very own handwriting was the evidence that he’d come from Australia. And not only that, it was a clue as to what he’d been doing before immigrating to America. If he hadn’t been actually down in the mines himself, he’d somehow been involved in the gold rush that afflicted the area in the 1800s. Perhaps he was connected to the Aboriginals who resisted the gold-mining invasion of their territory and were later eliminated from the land. Alice wished she knew more of the history of that time and place and resolved to research it as soon as she could.
She turned pages slowly, reading the entries. She’d seen all this before in researching her book, but now her perspective was vastly different. More stuff about worship services and lists of candidates for his so-called Body of the Church and Sisters of the Blood, groups she’d described in her aborted book as initiates who enforced Harrow’s will over the congregation. Alice shuddered to see some names with checks beside them and others with lines drawn through them; did it mean that those who didn’t pass his test of initiation were somehow eliminated? In the first year, more than half the initiate’s names were crossed out. On another page, she found what looked like a floor plan of the original church, with cornerstones and the front steps clearly marked. She stared at it for a full minute, unable to pull her eyes away from the image. There was something there … but finally she forced herself to turn the page.
On page thirty, which contained his final entries in the book (with the exception of the dozen pages in the back that Alice was saving for last), she saw what she’d been looking for. The top of the page was dated January 1900, and under the heading Initiates was a list of fifteen names, alphabetized by surname. Alice scanned the list and suddenly stopped. The eleventh name was circled.
“Holy shit!” Alice gasped aloud, and Dawg looked up, panting. Alice blinked. The circled name was Tanner, Elise.
She’d found her link. But more disturbing was the person’s first name. Elise was the name she’d given to a character in her short-lived attempt to turn the old church’s history into a work of fiction. It was a little hard to recall that scene now because she hadn’t allowed herself to think about the manuscript in almost a year, but the gist of it was still in her brain. In her story, Harrow had assaulted a young woman chosen from his initiates. Reluctantly, Alice allowed herself to remember the paragraph in which Harrow had taken a knife and marked the girl’s cheek with a serpent sigil. Shockingly, she’d felt the actual pain on her own face as she’d written the words down. It was that particular experience that had convinced her the story she thought she was inventing was something else entirely. It was Margaret who suggested she’d been channeling a history instead of inventing one.
Alice sat very still, thinking. Her mind was connecting the dots of something untenable, something so horrible to contemplate it made her sick to her stomach. What if that scene she’d written had been more or less true (according to the notebook entry, a real person named Elise Tanner had been one of Harrow’s inner circle). What if Harrow had fathered a child with her?
That child would be a member of the missing Tanner family, who, as Milton had surmised, lived on a small farm near Magnolia. They’d buried Harrow, but had his offspring survived? Alice’s mind spiraled into overdrive as it inched closer to the connection she was trying her damndest not to see. She suppressed the urge to whip out her cell phone and call Cecil Rider on the spot to ask him if he knew the birth date of the man adopted by his grandmother, the man he claimed was her grandfather, but she didn’t really need to call him. The connection was already made. Lacy Rider, or Tanner, was Harrow’s son.
Drenched in sweat, she turned to the back of the notebook. She had skimmed these pages cursorily in the past, but now she studied each one. If what Cecil had told her were true, this was her gateway to the spirit world where her father had gone. With damp fingers, she turned the pages, gripping them by the edges to avoid touching the images. She saw handprints, animal tracks, a doglike creature with fangs bared that took up an entire page, several man-shaped figures turned on their heads with spears or sharp arrow-like implements beside them, and finally, snakes.
One of them was drawn across a two-page spread, its blunt tail placed in the bottom corner of the left-hand page and its thick body drawn in wavy stripes diagonally toward the opposite corner where its oblong head and rounded eye rested in the righthand corner. Alice fumbled, losing her grip on the book, and then realized her fingers were turning numb. Frightened, she looked at Dawg beside her. He seemed to think everything was normal and yawned at her, his tail thumping a few times.
Alice turned back at the book, but found it hard to focus. The serpent’s outline had gone blurry. Lines appeared doubled, then tripled, and then slowly began to wrap around themselves, forming a strand of twisted dots and stripes. Without thinking, she brushed her fingertips across the image. Instantly, her world went dark.
A warm night breeze breathed over her face and whispered in her ears. Some distance away, soft voices spoke to each other in a liquid language full of open vowels couched between rippling rs and ls. Alice rubbed her eyes and saw firelight. The sky overhead was full of stars so bright and piercing they seemed close enough to touch. Hard rock was under her hand, and a lone dingo howled in the distance.
Seated around a campfire in the mouth of a large rock shelter were two Aboriginal men, two women who could have been their wives but might have been some other relation, several children, and an old woman. An ancient man with frizzy white hair sat slightly apart from the others, his chin resting on his chest as he reclined against the cave wall, apparently asleep. They spoke softly among themselves, laughing occasionally and communicating as much with their hands as with words, while the children dozed beside or in the laps of their parents. It was a domestic scene of such tranquility that Alice longed to be one of those sleeping, protected children.
Abruptly, the ancient man sprang up with a spryness that belied his age. He looked directly at Alice and began walking toward her. The others seemed oblivious, never even looking in his direction. He grinned widely, revealing a missing front tooth. In his nose was a flat bone about the size and shape of a popsicle stick. He was totally naked, and his torso was covered in decorative scars that looped and spiraled around his chest and stomach.
She knew at once that he was a powerful senior man, a clever man or seer who could travel the spirit world while his corporeal body rested in the safety of his family grouping. Indeed, when she looked back at the shelter, she saw his body resting in its trance state against the rock wall. His spirit body walked right up to Alice and touched her on the forehead.
“We bin go now,” he said and walked past her, heading down a path through rocks and scrub vegetation. Higher up, Alice could hear the tumbling splash of a waterfall. She turned and followed him, stumbling along the path in the darkness, hurrying to catch up. Off to her left, dingo songs filled the night.
“They bin sing you up, say you come soon,” he said, walking faster.
“S-sing what?” Her voice sounded far away.
“You’ll see.”
They rounded a boulder higher than Alice’s head and the solid ground under her feet came to an abrupt end. She looked over the edge into a sea of stars and distant galaxies. A small island of land seemed to float in empty space several yards away, like a raft moored by an invisible rope to the mainland. On it, a circular plot of ground was ringed in stones the shape of ostrich eggs.
In the center stood a tall Aboriginal woman with glistening mahogany skin and bronze-gold hair framing her head in a fine, curling halo of radiance. Beside her, an enormous white dingo sat on its haunches, its ears pricked forward on alert. Tiny red flames burned in its bright eyes as it watched the approaching strangers without blinking. On the woman’s other side, a shining, coiled taipan with greenish-golden scales lay in great looping coils. It raised its head and tasted the air in their direction.
As they drew near, the woman held out her hand and rainbow light spilled through her fingers like mist. A chorus of howls filled the air, and Alice realized that at least a dozen normal-sized dingoes inhabited in the shadows behind the three, just outside the rim of the circle.
“They bin waiting,” said the Senior man. “You mob,” he said to the three inside the circle. “I brought you this one, she bin come like you told me.” To Alice he said, “Go on there now,” nodding toward the circle. “Big Dingo Dreaming waiting on you. You’ll see.”
“Wait, don’t leave me—” But he was already walking away on his skinny bent legs.
Her heart thudding, she turned back to the ceremonial circle. The rainbow light spilling from the woman’s hand had formed itself into a semi-transparent bridge that just touched the cliff’s edge at Alice’s feet. Her pulse racing, Alice knelt down, reached out, and found the ribbon of light solid to the touch. Holding her breath, she stood up and stepped forward. The bridge was firm under her feet, though she could see stars through it. She took a breath and walked quickly toward the circle, trying not to look down.
The Senior Law woman watched Alice with large luminous eyes and beckoned her forward with outstretched hands. Terrified, Alice forced her feet across the circle until they stood face to face. The Dingo Ancestor got off its haunches, and the Taipan Ancestor uncoiled its long body, raising itself up taller than the shaman beside it.
“Who are you?” Alice asked, shivering down to her molecules.
The woman smiled, and waves of rainbow light engulfed her as if flowing from every pore of her body. “Great-great-grandmother.” Her voice was ephemeral, like a sigh through the gum trees.
She took Alice by the hands, and the circle disappeared. They stood on a narrow plateau under a setting sun that painted the sky in purple and gold. Far below, Alice could hear water rushing. Stepping to the cliff’s edge, she looked down at the storm-swollen river, its flowing current spattered with diamonds from the sunlight slanting into the canyon.