Simms stumbles over a root ahead of us, and I remember our task. I shake my head free of this latest temptation. Perhaps there will be time for Harp later, after we find the boy. Perhaps he will be the reward the wind promised. Perhaps he will be how I break my fast.
54
Ben stared at Lisbeth in the silence that followed her declaration. In the gleam of the fire, he saw only hunger and madness in her eyes.
He bolted from the room. Roger Armfield stood in the doorway, his arms outstretched as if to stop him. But Ben did not slow. As he ran down the hallway, he registered Armfield’s lanky form crashing to the floor behind him.
If you’re trying to figure out this strange little village of ours, that one hard winter is all you need to know.
He had to find Caroline and Charlie.
Images flashed through his mind. Mrs. White, who had looked so hungry because she had been fed nothing more than a cup of flour. When she’d seen him, she whispered, “Swann.” He hadn’t understood that she had been naming him. Perhaps her naming him had been all that the other Winter Families needed.
Ben remembered his great-uncle Owen’s photograph in Lisbeth’s basement. He should have recalled that image when he saw the same one in the Swannhaven Dispatch article about him being lost in the forest. That story must have been a cover for the true horror of what had happened, for the real reason the Lowells had abandoned their farm and so many of their meager possessions.
The other portraits in Lisbeth’s basement flitted through Ben’s mind as he tore down the hallway. The jawlines, light eyes, and dark hair of the boys in the portraits were the same as his. They were the same as Charlie’s.
He flung open the front door and faced the cold world. He still had Elizabeth Swann’s letters gripped in one hand. Bub was on his shoulder, screaming.
Ben thought of the ancient chain he’d found in the kitchen. He imagined it squeezing Charlie’s small body tight against the charred ruin of the elder tree.
The Preservation Society meetings, the Swannhaven Trust meetings, the old-fashioned church sermons, the cattle cleanup: Ben had bought it all. Swannhaven was special. It was a community that took care of its own. It was like no other place on God’s earth. He wondered just how close he’d come to getting sucked into this insanity.
Above the whirl of the wind: a gunshot. Sound moved strangely here, and the direction was impossible to determine. He heard it shudder up the mountains before it faded.
As he stood on his front steps, a shadow separated itself from the dark of the north woods. He watched as it began to move up to the Crofts. Then Ben saw another one, a few paces from the first. This one was wider around the shoulders. It was difficult to see their black outlines against the mottled banks of snow. Now there were three figures moving up the Drop. He looked to the west and saw more there, wraiths across the frozen fields.
Ben ducked back into the house, gasping in the thin air. This is not your imagination, he told himself. He peered through the window to make sure.
It was then that he stopped being quiet and began to yell. It was then that he stopped waiting and began to run.
55
Ben called for them as he ran, though he doubted that Caroline and Charlie were still in the house. The villagers had taken to the forest to look for them. That was where Ben would go, too. He knew he had to leave the Crofts before the people coming up the Drop reached him. He knew this as well as he’d ever known anything. Every part of him screamed to leave this place.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he whispered into Bub’s hair. The boy’s cries were klaxons in his ears. “But we need to be quiet now,” he said. The boy buried his head in Ben’s shoulder. His sobs were lost in layers of down.
From one of the back doors, Ben searched the Drop for shapes in the night. He saw nothing but the icy fields that lay between the Crofts and the forest. Above all of them, the mountains towered. Silver cirrus clouds streaked the black sky above their heights.
The wind’s gusts burned at his face as he ran the fields. They whipped a dusting of snow along the land like white water. Ben’s tracks disappeared after him as if he ceased to exist beyond the moment his trailing foot left the ground.
Ben chanced a few looks over his shoulder, but the dark house did not tell him anything. He ran as fast as he could through the deep drifts. He made for the tree line. Elizabeth Swann had written about demons in the wood, and Lisbeth had told him about the wendigo, but Ben did not believe any of that. No demons necessary where men suffice. He fell only once, and he managed to twist himself so that he didn’t land on the baby. He lay there for a moment. Beyond the lattice of clouds above, stars blinked their cold light. He stood up and threw himself again into the banks of white.
His ragged breaths made his throat raw, but he kept his pace up as long as he could. When he finally had to slow down, he saw a series of footsteps ahead of him. They were impossible in the wind, but they were there. A fluke of the currents. Some of the prints were small, made with child’s boots, and the ones alongside them were a bit bigger. He did not question them but followed.
Ben glanced back at the Crofts. When he turned ahead again, a huge man stood in his way.
He was dressed in bulky clothes and was draped in fur. He must have been at least half a foot taller than Ben. His face was heavily bearded with a wild tangle of hair, but his small eyes held no malice.
“JoJo,” Ben said.
The man nodded. “Come.”
His voice had a timbre that seemed to begin in his feet. Even in the wind, Ben could smell him.
“Where are they?” Ben asked. He did not move.
“Come,” the man said again. With a thick walking staff, he pointed to the woods beyond the lake. He reached out his hands as if to take Bub, but Ben only held the baby more tightly.
“No,” he told the big man.
“Hurry,” the man said. He began to run toward the forest, and, after a moment, Ben followed him.
“Why did you take him?” Ben asked when he caught up. Despite his size, the man ran like a deer.
“Wasn’t safe.”