Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

His heart seemed to shudder. Impossible, he told himself. A trick of the mind. The lack of sleep, or perhaps the lingering effect of the piping affected his senses. He pushed a hand against his temple to drive away the strange working of memory and guilt that had overtaken his brain. The voice of mad Flora had entered his mind and would not leave. He shook his head sharply once, twice, then drew in a deep breath before taking another step. The voice faded but came back, stronger, and unmistakable. Flora was speaking to him, using the alien, sibilant language that had so mesmerized him on the ship. But Flora was gone, hundreds of miles away, back on the high seas by now.

He moved through the shadows as if in a dream, until he saw a candle lantern that had been hung from a peg in the center aisle of the barn. Impossibly, the phantom was there, sitting cross-legged in the pool of light with her back to him; the heads of the horses extended beyond their stall doors, and the animals seemed to be listening attentively. It was all a dream. He had to be dreaming. His consciousness had surrendered to his guilt. Her long, dark hair flowed down the blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders. The way she spoke the strange syllables, which echoed in his memory every night, left no doubt. The phantom was Flora, his murderess, whose hand he had held in the dark.

“Haudenosaunee! Haudenosaunee!” came the chant. “Ohkwari!”

She seemed to be addressing someone, though she spoke toward the oak plank wall. Her head bent lower and lower, as if she were falling into a trance, and Duncan ventured closer, fifteen feet away, then ten, and still she spoke her strange tongue without seeming to notice him. Finally the Flora of his nightmares would have a face.

But as he took another step, a hand closed around his arm. He turned to see Crispin beside him, wearing a haunted, frightened expression. The big man gripped him so tightly it hurt, pulling him backward, not making a sound. Suddenly the chanting stopped and the woman turned, shot upright, lifting the blanket over her head, and fled into the shadows. But in that instant Duncan had glimpsed her face.

“Sarah!” he gasped.

A shadow appeared at the opposite end of the barn and intercepted the girl, pulling her toward the fields. Duncan, too, felt himself led away, his mind roiling with contradiction. He found himself seated on a low stool in one of the oak-planked tool rooms at the back of the barn, lit by a solitary candle, and looked up into the tortured countenance of Crispin.

“I’ve been so blind,” Duncan groaned, sinking his head into his hands. His slender certainties were in ashes. Everything he had concluded about the murders, everything he had done since the storm on the ship, had to be reconsidered, every piece of the puzzle dismantled. “It’s her grave out there after all,” he said. “But she didn’t die.”

“They thought so,” Crispin whispered. “They truly thought so, for a dozen years, and her mother mourned her every day, had the children pray for her soul. The bodies had been mutilated, many burnt to the bone.”

“Instead, she was taken.”

“Sometimes they make slaves of children,” Crispin’s voice cracked as he spoke.

Duncan felt again the despair he had first experienced at the grave, only deeper now. He felt as if he would weep at any moment, as he thought of the beautiful, gentle girl Sarah must have been as a six-year-old, and the horror she must have suffered with the savages, wrenched away from the world, deprived of all mercy, love, and hope. “A ghostwalker,” Duncan said with a chill, and the word had an odd, biting texture on his tongue. Sarah’s sickness had a name after all. She was one of the wretched souls who had returned from the purgatory of captivity, having lost all connection to the civilized world.

The heavy door swung open and Woolford entered. “The sergeant has her,” he assured Crispin. “She weeps.”

“It’s how it goes,” Crispin said in a tormented voice. “She has one of her spells, then she cries, then she goes very still, as if paralyzed, nothing moving but her eyes and lips, whispering those words of hers. Usually at night, the hours before dawn. At first, last fall, she did it every night. Her father caned her until she stopped, shouting he would beat the savage out of her. Tonight I watched her door for three hours but drifted off. Then the piping started. She was at the bottom of the stairs already when I woke, disappeared into the night in the seconds it took me to reach the door.”

“You’re saying she went outside because of me?” Duncan asked. “That she. . went into her spell,” he said, borrowing Crispin’s words for lack of better, “because of the pipes?”

“I will not say why she does anything, only that the pipes sounded and she slipped away to speak those words. But why the barn? Why here, with all the woods about?” Crispin asked Woolford, who only shook his head. “Too many already call her witch,” Crispin added. “If the men find her like this. . ” His voice grew too weak to finish the sentence.

Duncan searched the ranger’s face. “You found her at Stony Run,” he ventured.

Woolford sighed, glanced at Crispin, and nodded. “She was unconscious when Pike’s men discovered her in the brush, tended by two other white captives who would not leave her. Some of the senior officers at the camp knew the Ramseys. She was the spitting image of her mother, and around her neck she still wore a Ramsey locket, wrapped in fur. She had lost nearly all her English, wouldn’t sleep on a bed the first month.”

“You should have told me.”

“No!” Crispin insisted. “Lord Ramsey forbade anyone from speaking of it. At first I did not think he could bear the shame of it. How could one of the greatest families in all the empire have it known that their eldest had been a slave to the savages for a dozen years, that she had become little more than a savage herself? How could she inherit, how could she be respected by the landed families? How could she have a life of her own? I would not speak of it, even if Lord Ramsey had said nothing, for her sake. Nor should you, by all that’s holy. God only knows the horrors they commited. . It’s bad enough without more talk of it. You’ve seen the way the people in the settlements look at her.”

“What happened after she was found?” Duncan’s confusion was quickly giving way to shame. He had begun to think of her as an impostor, had clung to his memory of the faceless Flora while resenting Sarah, when in fact the woman who had touched him so deeply on the cell deck and the troubled Ramsey daughter were one and the same.

“Some of us won’t speak of it for fear of what it will do to the girl,” Woolford confessed. “All the others won’t for fear of the girl herself.”

“Surely there is nothing to fear from Sarah,” Duncan said.

Crispin seemed surprised at Duncan’s words. “When she was brought out of the woods, she carried a stick, a club really, with bear claws fastened into it like thorns, strips of fur hanging from it. She shook it at people and they grew ill. That’s when people began calling her a witch.”

“She had been taken from the one whom even the Indians fear,” Woolford added in a low voice, fixing Duncan with a pointed gaze.

It took a moment for Duncan to understand. “Tashgua,” he said with a shudder. Sarah may not be a witch, but she had been enslaved to one.

“The army left her at the Moravian mission in the north,” Crispin explained. “She wouldn’t leave, so we went there, taught her how to be English again. Sometimes she would call out in the night, make noises like animals. We stayed with her for weeks, then took her to the city. Even then I would have to sit and hold her hand, sometimes for hours.”