Lair of Dreams

“Every choice has consequences. Balance must be maintained. For what is given, something else is taken. Think well upon your motives, Adelaide Proctor.”


Addie had thought upon her motives every night as she cried softly into her blanket so that her sister, Lillian, sleeping peacefully beside her, would not hear. At sixteen, Adelaide had lost the love of her life. The boy who should’ve been her husband and the father of her children lay six feet under the mocking sweetness of summer clover. She did not waver in her choice.

“Anything,” she said again, and the man in the hat smiled. “May I see him, sir? Oh, bring him to me, please!”

“You shall have your Elijah in time,” the man said. “Sleep. For you are young; your days are many. But know this: You belong to me now, Adelaide Keziah Proctor. When the time comes, I shall call upon the promise you make this day. For your patriotism to me.”

He pressed his thumb to her forehead and she tumbled backward through the grave, unable to stop herself from falling.

Addie woke to a great thirst and sweaty bedsheets. Her fever had broken. The moon was a faded wax seal against the pale gold parchment of dawn. But where was Elijah? The man had promised. For days and days, he did not come, and Addie began to believe her promise was nothing more than a fever dream.

Then came the signs.

She would find her diary open to a page about her love for Elijah. Warm winds blew through open windows, and with them came the sweet sunshine smell of him. On a moonlit night, she was sure she heard music coming from the tall grass of the field. It was the faintest whisper of a song Elijah used to sing to her. And the daisies: She’d find them on her side of the bed, lying across her hope chest, or beside her music box. Once, when she took her apron down from the hook, she reached a hand into the pocket and came up with a coating of waxy white petals. Only Elijah knew that daisies were her favorite. Her mother accused her of trying to call attention to herself, but Addie knew these small favors belonged to Elijah. Even in death, he remembered her. Her joy was boundless.

Fever visited the Proctor household once more, this time with a vengeance. When it finally took its leave a week later, it had claimed Addie’s father and younger brother, two servants, and the foreman’s wife and baby daughter.

Balance.

Addie attended their funerals mute and pale, fearful of what she’d done, of what might still come. That night, she heard her name whispered so sweetly that she woke with a fresh tear upon her cheek. Beyond her window, the moon bled bright behind passing clouds. A nightingale chirruped a warning.

Her name came again, soft as moonlight. “Adelaide, my love. I am here.”

Awash in silvery moonlight, Elijah stood at the edge of the field. He’d returned to her, as the man had promised. Addie rushed out after him, following the firefly glimmer of him through the woods, into the old churchyard, past tombstones, until she came to his grave marker. Whispers sounded around them in the September dark. It was cold here, so cold. Elijah shone like a coin in a pond. He was her beautiful love, but there was something of the grave about him now. Weeds wove into his thinning hair. Shadows ringed his eyes and made gaunt his cheekbones. His shirt wept blood where the bullet had done its work.

“You’ve summoned me, my love.”

“Yes,” Addie said, eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve paid the price for you, too.”

“Don’t you know that every soul you give him increases his power? That it binds you to him forever?”

Addie didn’t understand. Why wasn’t Elijah happy? “I did it so that we could be together always.”

“And so we shall. For I cannot rest until you do. I am bound to love you till you die.”

His mouth opened in a scream then. From it fell beetles and maggots and all manner of death. In the trees, the crows cawed, and it sounded like cruel laughter. This creature before her was not Elijah, not the Elijah she’d kissed under the sun. He was something else entirely, and she wanted no part of him. Adelaide ran. She ran past the tombstones and the scarecrows, all the way back to the safety of her bed, which was no safety at all.

In the morning, when she threw back the blanket, she screamed loud enough to wake her sister. There in the covers was a dead mouse with its eyes missing and its entrails ripped out. It lay on a blanket of browned daisy petals.

Addie read the books. She learned the spells. At midnight, she went to Elijah’s grave and dug up what was left of him, breaking off a sliver of finger bone, prying out a tooth, cutting off a lock of his hair, scooping up a handful of graveyard dirt. These she placed in an iron box, and then she performed the ritual to bind Elijah’s spirit so that he could not come to her anymore. He could not harm her.