The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,25
stranger without anyone else seeing them look.
The service ended and the flow of people bottlenecked itself around the interloper. A few of the first-pew families had taken it upon themselves to make introductions and inquiries. They hoped he’d enjoyed their little service (although Ade was unconvinced that enjoyment was even a distant goal of Preacher McDowell’s) and wondered at his occupation in the area. Perhaps he had relations nearby? Or business on the river?
“Thank you very kindly, sirs, but no, I’ve no interest in riverboats. I confess I’m a land man, looking for likely property.” His voice carried over the heads of the congregation, nasally and foreign-sounding, and Mama Larson huffed beside Ade. No one ought to speak above a respectful murmur while under the church roof.
“I heard in Mayfield there might be some affordable acreage near here—apparently it’s haunted, and not much used—and I took this opportunity to make myself known to you folks.” There was a rippling beside the stranger, a pulling-away. Ade supposed they didn’t much like the idea of a big-city northerner bulling into their church just to swindle them out of cheap land. They weren’t far enough south for carpetbaggers to be much more than badly inked cartoons in the Sunday paper, but they knew the signs. From the tone of their muttered replies Ade guessed they were stonewalling him (no, sir, no land hereabouts, you’ll have to look somewheres else).
The stream of people began to leave and Ade trailed behind Aunt Lizzie as they filed down the aisle. The stranger was still smiling with affable condescension at everyone, undeterred. Ade stopped.
“We got a house on our property that everybody knows is full of haunts—saw one myself, just yesterday—but it’s not for sale,” she told the stranger. She didn’t know why she said it, except she wanted to shake the smugness out of him and prove they weren’t poor rural folk who would sell land cheaply out of baseless superstition. And perhaps because she was curious, hungry for the man’s worldly otherness.
“Did you now.” The man smiled at her in what he must have thought was a charming manner, and leaned closer. “Permit me to walk you out, in that case.” Ade found her arm clamped to his suit sleeve, her feet stumbling alongside his. Her aunts were already outside, likely fanning themselves and gossiping. “Now, what’s the nature of these haunts? What did you see, precisely?”
But her desire to speak to the man had evaporated. She tugged her hand away, shrugging in a sullen, adolescent way, and would have left without speaking another word except that his eyes caught hers. They were the color of moons or coins, unspeakably cold but also somehow alluring, as if they possessed their own gravitational pull.
Even years later, curled beside me in the languorous warmth of the late-afternoon sun, Ade would shudder, just a little, as she described that gaze.
“Tell me all about it,” the stranger breathed.
And Ade did. “Well, I just was going to the old cabin for no reason and there was a ghost boy waiting there. Or at least that’s what I thought he was at first, on account of he was black and funny-dressed and speaking in tongues. But he didn’t come from hell or anything. I don’t know where he come from, exactly, except he ended up walking out of our cabin door. And I’m glad he did, I liked him, liked his hands—” She closed her teeth on the words, reeling and a little breathless.
The not-very-charming smile had returned to the stranger’s face as she spoke, except now there was a kind of predatory stillness beneath it. “Thank you awfully much, Miss—?”
“Adelaide Lee Larson.” She swallowed, blinked. “Pardon me, sir, my aunts are calling.”
She skittered out the church doors without looking back at the stranger in the neat suit. She felt his eyes like a pair of dimes pressed to the back of her neck.
Because of her aunts’ essential softheartedness, Ade’s punishments never varied. She was confined to the upstairs room where they all slept (except Mama Larson, who did not sleep so much as nap haphazardly in a variety of semisupine positions downstairs) for the following two days. Ade bore this confinement with poor grace—the Larson women would spend those days haunted by bangings and thumpings above them, as if their house hosted a particularly foul-tempered poltergeist—but no real resistance. In her figuring, it was best to lull them into complacence before climbing out the window and scrabbling down the honeysuckle