Robert Beatty - Serafina and the Black Cloak

By the time she was done, she was practically screaming at him. Her voice was so loud and shrill that it actually echoed.

Her pa stopped dead in his tracks and looked at her. She knew she had finally reached down inside him and grabbed that armoured heart of his. She’d finally stirred him up. She felt a sudden impulse to take it all back and dart behind the boiler again to hide, but she didn’t. She stood before him and looked at him as steadily as she could, her eyes watering.

He stood very still over by the bench, his huge hands balled into fists. A visible wave of pain and despair seemed to pass through him all at once, and for a moment he couldn’t speak.

‘I’m not ashamed of you,’ he said gruffly, his voice strangely hoarse. The searchers were now only one room away.

‘You are,’ she shot back. She was trembling in fear, but she wasn’t going to give up this time. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to shake him to the core. ‘You’re ashamed of me,’ she said again.

He turned away from her so that she couldn’t see his face, just the back of his head and huge, bulky body. Several seconds of silence went by. Then he shook his head like he was arguing with himself, or furious with her, or both – she wasn’t sure.

‘Just keep your mouth shut and follow me,’ he said as he turned and walked out of the room.

Scurrying after him, she caught up with him in the corridor. Her body felt queasy all over. She didn’t know where he was taking her or what was going to happen. She could barely suck in breaths as he led her down the narrow stone stairs to the sub-basement and into the electrical room with the iron dynamo and thick black wires that spidered up the walls. They had left the search party behind them, at least for a little while.

‘We’ll hole up in here,’ he said as he pulled the door shut with a heavy thud and locked them in. As he lit a lantern against the darkness, she’d never seen him look so serious, so grave and pale, and it frightened her.

‘What’s happening, Pa?’ she asked, her voice shaking.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Ya ain’t gonna like what I got to tell ya, but it might help ya understand.’

Serafina swallowed, sat on an old wooden spool of copper wire and prepared herself to listen. Her pa sat on the floor facing her, with his back against the wall. Staring down at the floor and deep in thought, he began to talk.

‘Years ago, I was workin’ as a mechanic in the train yard in Asheville,’ he said. ‘The foreman and his wife had just had their third baby boy and their home was full of joy, but while everyone else celebrated, I sat alone in a kind of self-made misery. I ain’t proud of it, the way I was soppin’ around that night, but things just weren’t workin’ out for me the way they were supposed to in a man’s life. I wanted to meet a good woman, build a house in town and have children of my own, but years had gone by and it hadn’t happened. I was a big man and not much to look at. I sweated all day on the engines, and those few times I encountered any womenfolk I could never find my words. I could talk about nuts and bolts till the mornin’ come, but not much else.’

She opened her mouth to ask a question, but she didn’t want to disrupt the story that was finally pouring out of her pa.

‘That night, while everyone was tipping the jug,’ he continued, ‘I was feelin’ pretty poor, and I headed out. I went for a long walk, just walkin’ like ya do when you got too much on your mind to do naught else. I went deep into the forest, up through River’s Gap and into the mountains. When night came, I just kept walkin’.’

It was hard for her to picture her father travelling through the forest. All those times he had warned her had led her to believe that he would never set foot in the forest. He hated the forest. At least he did now.

‘Were you scared, Pa?’

‘Naw, I weren’t,’ he said, shaking his head and still looking at the floor. ‘But I shoulda been.’

‘Why? What happened?’ She couldn’t even imagine what it was. The flicker of the lantern cast an eerie shadow on his face. She had always loved his stories, but this one felt closer to his heart than any story he had ever told.

‘As I was walkin’ through the woods, I heard a queer howlin’ noise, like an animal in terrible, writhing pain. The bushes were movin’ somethin’ fierce, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was.’

‘Was it somethin’ dyin’, Pa?’ She leaned toward him.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, looking up at her. ‘The ruckus in the bushes went on for a spell, then the noise stopped all sudden-like. I thought it was over, but then a pair of amber-yellow eyes peered at me from the darkness. Whatever sort of man or beast it was, it circled slowly round me, taking one position and then another, studying me real careful, like it was trying to make a decision about me, whether I was worth eatin’ or just lettin’ be. I sensed a real power behind those eyes. But then the eyes disappeared. The beast was gone. And I heard a strange mewling, crying sound.’

She straightened her back and looked at him. ‘Crying?’ she asked in confusion. That definitely wasn’t what she was expecting.

‘I searched through the bushes. Blood covered the ground, and in the blood lay a pile of small creatures. Three of ’em were dead, but one remained just barely alive.’

She got off the wooden spool and crouched down beside her pa. She stared at him, totally absorbed in his story. In her mind, she could see the bloody creatures on the ground.

‘But what kind of creatures were they?’ she asked in amazement.

He shook his head. ‘Like everyone else who lives in these mountains, I’d heard the stories of black magic, but I never gave them much credit until that night. I studied the one that was still alive the best I could in the darkness, but I still couldn’t figure what kind of thing it was. Or more like my mind just couldn’t believe it. But when I finally took up the creature in my bare hands and held it I realised that it was actually a tiny human baby curled into a little ball.’

Serafina’s eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘What? Wait. I don’t understand. What happened? How did a baby get there?’

‘The same question was runnin’ through my own mind, believe me, but one thing I knew for certain: regardless of how she came into the world, I had to get this baby some help. I bundled her up in my jacket, hiked back down the hill and carried her out of the woods. I took her to the midwives at the convent and begged them to help, but they gasped at the sight of her, muttering that she was the devil’s work. They said she was malformed, near to death and that there was nothing they could do to help her.’

‘But why?’ Serafina cried in outrage. ‘That’s terrible! That’s so mean!’ Just because something looked different didn’t mean you just threw it away. She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world it was out there. The attitude of the midwives almost bothered her more than the idea of a yellow-eyed beast lurking in the night. But she felt a renewed glimmer of admiration for her pa as she imagined his huge, warm hands wrapped around that tiny little baby’s body, giving it heat, keeping it alive.

Her father took a long, deep, troubled breath as he remembered that night, and then he continued his story. ‘You have to understand the poor little thing had been born with her eyes closed, Sera, and the nuns said that she would never see. She’d been born deaf, and they said she would never hear. And it was plain enough to see that she had four toes on each foot instead of five, but that was the least of it. Her collarbones were malformed, and she had an unnaturally long, curving spine – all twisted-like – and she did not look like she could survive.’