“They will know. We shall go in the morning. After it is light,” he cautioned. “Tonight, one whiff of darkness, one whirl of mist, any small fingers of ivy may twine about you and you will be theirs.”
I nodded and sighed, then turned to see to the children. Dorothy and Benjamin listened, eyes wide. Benjamin’s eyes held terror and suddenly filled with tears. I looked into Dorothy’s eyes for fear, but what I saw was my reflection in the stubborn confidence of one who accepted her grandpa’s fairies and brownies with the pursed lips of a skeptic. I smiled at Benjamin, two years older than his sister yet petrified with fear. I thought, it was true that men were weak. They are noisy, and big and strong. Perhaps all his noise about keeping the fairies at bay was Jacob’s own terror.
I clapped my hands, smiled, knelt before the children, and said, “We shall all stay inside and cook apples in the fire for our supper. A picnic on the hearth, how will that be? I have cinnamon and you may add all the sugar you wish. Now, no tears. No one is going to be caught by the mist and carried to the fairies. Hush, now, Ben. Jacob, you shall have them weeping all night long. It is just a story, wee ones. Well and aye. You may both sleep in my bed this night as we wait for the saints to arise at midnight.” I could not say that that plan was for their comfort any more than for my own.
The night fully closed in and darkness came. We ate apples, and Gwyneth told the wee ones stories. She mixed tales of fairies and ghosts with stories from the Bible, making all sound gentle and sweet for the children. She made the real terror of a changeling into a gentle story of a childless couple who adopted a fairy who kept them rich with stores of milk and butter—so different from real fairy pranks of stealing children and substituting some old demon fairy for a babe, or like Goody Carnegie, fairies capturing people and cutting their minds loose from their bodies. Queen Esther saving her people from doom. Duppies whose worst crime was stealing candy and hiding it in the trees. When I saw Dorothy sound asleep, I said, “It is time for all these lovely stories to go to sleep, too, along with the children hearing them. Off to bed.”
The wind wailed under the eaves. A puff of smoke exhaled into the room from the fireplace as a gust pushed at the chimney. Leaves swirled and brushed against the door and windows. “Mother!” a man’s voice cried from outside the door.
Gwenny gasped. I looked at her, clenching my teeth to keep from shaking.
Jacob stiffened where he sat, and said, “Answer not. It is a spirit.”
Cullah’s voice cried out, “Ma?” It was Cullah. He called again, with a sound as if he were just on the other side of the wooden door, his voice pleading. “Ma, are you about? Won’t you open the door?” It was Cullah! But Cullah’s mother was long dead. His mother had never been here. I bit my lower lip.
Benjamin had been ready to fall asleep, but he cried, “Pa?”
“Benjamin, for the love of everything, please make no noise,” I said. “We must not answer. It is All Hallows. The voice you hear is not your father, though it sounds like him. He would not be calling for his mother, son.”
A hand rapped at the wooden door. The bar rattled in its slot. Then fingers tapped on the glass window. Gwenny screamed soundlessly, her fist against her mouth. Dorothy slept on the settle in a heap of quilted blankets. Jacob’s face was wild with fear. He felt at the hearth and picked up an iron. “Open not that door, Resolute,” he whispered. “Don’t let it in.”
The rapping came again. Insistent. Loud. The voice called, “Mistress MacLammond? Open the door! Please. It is late and I am cold. Only let me in, Mother. Ma?” The bar shook so hard I rushed to it to stop it from falling loose and letting the thing enter the house. Cullah’s voice called, “Is this not the MacLammond house? I have hunted far and wide this night. I saw the candle from below in the dell. Mother?” Then the voice took on a cry of impatience, as from a child, mixed with sorrow and rejection. “Mother? Open the door. Oh, Ma, leave us not out here to die. Only let me in, I beg you. If this is not MacLammonds’ house, please leave us not here to freeze this dark night.”
It was Cullah; I would know his voice on my dying day. He must have been slain and was even now walking the earth on this Hallows’ Even. I could not pray. I could barely breathe, but I choked out the words, “Go away. In the name of God go away, you.”
“Ma!” There was a rushing clump and a bang, as if the thing threw itself against the door. “Ma, let me in! I beg you. We have come such a long way.”
Jacob said, “They will tell you anything to get you to open the door. Let it not in, Resolute. It said it came up from the dell and that there is more than one. That is the graveyard. On your knees, children, and pray them away.”