When they finally discovered the old well, to the north of the Devil’s Hand, they were both out of breath, but pleased to have found it at last.
“This is where Gertie died?” Fawn asked, her breath coming out in cloudy puffs. Mimi the doll was clutched tight in her arms.
Ruthie nodded and looked down into the well—a circle of field-stone surrounding a big dark hole that seemed to go down forever.
She tried to imagine falling down it, looking up at the bright circle of daylight, seeing it get farther and farther away, until it was like some distant moon.
The girls stood, bundled in winter coats, snowshoes strapped to their feet. The sun had just come up over the hill, and they could see its hazy glow through the trees. The forest around them was blanketed in white, absolutely still. Not even the wind stirred. It felt as if the whole world were sleeping and they were the only two awake.
“Then this seems right,” Fawn said. She slipped off the small backpack she’d been carrying, opened it up, pulled out the journal pages, and handed them over. “I think you should be the one to do it,” she said, seeming suddenly like a much older girl, a wise old lady trapped in a child’s body. “You’re related to her.”
Ruthie took the pages in her hands; the ink was faded, the paper stained and wrinkled, splattered with Candace’s blood. There, in slanted cursive, were her distant aunt’s words. The instructions for creating sleepers she’d copied from Auntie’s letter.
She traced the sentences with her finger, thinking that her own birth parents, Tom and Bridget, once held these in their hands, believing they were going to change the world, get rich, make a better life for their daughter.
Then there were the pages Gary found: Auntie’s letter to Sara, the map she had drawn, more notes from Sara.
It was all there—Sara’s story, Auntie’s story. Ruthie’s own story, even.
The story of a little girl named Gertie who died.
Whose mother loved her too much to let her go.
So she brought her back.
Only the world she came back to wasn’t the same.
Shewasn’t the same.
Ruthie dropped the papers into the well one at a time, watching them flutter like pale, broken butterflies, like snowflakes, down, down, down, until she couldn’t see them anymore.
“This means no more can be made, right?” Fawn asked.
“Yeah,” Ruthie said, watching the last page fall. She knew, in that moment, what she would do. She would stay in West Hall and help her mother as guardian of the hill, keeper of its secrets. She smiled as she thought of it, how it seemed so simple really, like something that was meant to be; like destiny, after all.
Then, sensing movement, Ruthie turned just in time to catch a glimpse of a little girl in ragged clothes with a pale face peeking out from behind a tree.
She smiled at them, then slipped back into the shadows.
Katherine
Once awakened, a sleeper will walk for seven days. After that, they are gone from this world forever.
Katherine stared at the words on her computer screen. She had the memory card from Gary’s Nikon plugged in and was studying Gary’s photos of the missing diary pages, Auntie’s letter, and the map.
How bizarre it would all seem to someone looking at it for the first time, someone who hadn’t been to the caves, who hadn’t seen what Katherine had seen.
Losing these pages forever seemed criminal, a terrible waste. At the very least, they were of historical significance. She had a friend, a sociology professor at BU, who might enjoy having a look at them. And wouldn’t the man she’d met at the bookstore in town love to get his hands on a copy?
With a few keystrokes, she shrank the map showing the way to the cave entrance at the Devil’s Hand to postage-stamp size and pushedPRINT. While the laser jet did its work, she glanced down at her own hand, at the bone ring on her third finger: Auntie’s ring. Auntie the sorceress. Auntie, who could bring back the dead.
The ring had been Gary’s last gift to her.
To new beginnings.
She stood up, stretched. The day had flown by, as time often did when she was lost in her work. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and she hadn’t eaten either lunch or supper.
The page printed, she carried it over to the art table and cutout the tiny copy of the map. She’d been finishing up the newest assemblage box since she got back to the apartment in the wee hours of the morning. The outside was painted to look like bricks; there was a door in the middle, and a neat sign above that saidLOU LOU’S CAFÉ. To the left of the door, a large window made of thin Plexiglas. Katherine pulled open the door and could almost imagine the smells inside: coffee, freshly baked rolls, apple pie. There, sitting at a table in the center of the café, was the tiny Alice doll. Across from her sat Gary in miniature, wearing the good black pants and white shirt he’d left home in that morning.
