Boys in the Valley(21)
The snow.
I jump out of bed, stand on the cold floor and look out the window. The sky is a sheet of white, the sun pale as a blind eye. I step close to the window, turn my gaze downward, and gasp.
The ground is covered in snow. The fresh layer appears to be at least a couple inches deep, maybe more.
In the near distance, the large, black-cloaked form of Brother Johnson catches my eye, a blank space against the white. He walks into the gap between the barn and the narrow road, and I realize he’s going to get Bartholomew. I can’t help but wonder if the boy is still alive.
My peripheral vision flitters. I hear windswept voices. I press my forehead against the cold, wet glass, and look down to my left. What I see there explains why we haven’t been disturbed. I assume the priests most likely hoped we’d all sleep through the morning.
This is not something they’d want the children to see.
Poole, Andrew, and Father White stand outside our graveyard, which is nothing but a small patch of crudely fenced-in ground dotted with crosses, the tapered points rammed into the earth near the heads of dead boys. To my knowledge, at least one priest sleeps in the earth with the orphans, a man named Gideon who died the year I arrived, having succumbed to a strain of flu that also claimed the lives of several children.
Standing with the priests are three other men, and I assume they’re the ones who arrived in the night. Closer to the road is a horse-pulled wagon. Three more horses are tied to a nearby gate, stomping the thin layer of snow to mud.
On the ground at the men’s feet, wrapped head-to-toe in brown sackcloth, are two bodies. I can’t tell if the men are preparing to bury them or take them away. I assume one of the bodies is the injured man Johnson spoke of. I have no idea who the other might be.
I try to recall the sounds from the night’s chaos: the horrible laughter, the screams, the loud voices . . . the pistol shot.
Was a man murdered here? I wonder, and decide I’ll need to pry the entire story out of Andrew as soon as the right moment allows.
“What’s all this, then?”
I turn to my left, toward the voice. David has woken, standing on the other side of my cot, staring out the next window. His head is tilted toward the graveyard, and I assume he’s seeing the same things I am, but I have no answer.
“Hey!” Another voice calls out to my right. “It’s Bartholomew!”
A small group of boys have grouped against the window to my right, all of them staring outward, gawping and excited. More boys leave their beds and jostle past me for position, relieving me of my view of the graveyard.
Distracted as I was by the strange men and the bodies, I had forgotten about seeing Johnson stalking out for Bartholomew. I look that way now and understand why it’s gotten the others so worked up.
Bartholomew stands in the snow, still as a statue. The gaping mouth of the hole’s hatch still open behind him, Johnson readying to drop it back into place. I study the thin boy as he walks, seemingly unbothered, through the blanket of snow toward the orphanage. Johnson, seemingly surprised to be left behind, hurries to catch up, walking in stride with the boy. He asks him something, but Bartholomew doesn’t respond.
As they get closer, Bartholomew tilts his head upward, toward the dorm windows.
I try to imagine what he’s seeing: pale faces through distorted glass, hands pressed in curiosity and greeting, all eyes following his crossing back to us, to warmth and comfort. To reality.
I get jostled again but hold my place. Something about what I’m seeing strikes me as odd, but I can’t put my finger on it. I rub a sleeve across the glass, wiping clear a patch fogged by a thin film of condensation.
Bartholomew is close now, almost beneath us. He still stares upward, and for a moment it feels like he’s not only studying the windows, but looking at me directly. I can’t help the sensation that he’s meeting my eye.
I realize then what’s off about him—something I’ve never seen from a boy who just spent a long, cold night in the hole.
He’s smiling.
14
ANDREW WATCHES POOLE AND THE SHERIFF WITH A dreamlike disconnect.
He’s exhausted, emotionally and physically trampled, and still reeling in partial disbelief over the events he witnessed only hours ago.
The deputy Paul Baker had stabbed in the neck was dead. Paul Baker, also, was dead. The sheriff and his two remaining deputies had apologized to Father Poole, and to Andrew, for bringing horror to their doorstep. It was obvious they’d had no idea what they’d been up against.
Andrew is convinced Paul Baker had been possessed, which was implausible but—as he’d been taught many times over, with acute examples and firsthand accounts—nowhere near impossible. Demons were out there, an infestation among the people on the planet, the remnants of a battle fought since before the existence of man, a war that raged on every day. In Andrew’s mind, there was simply no logic, no hidden rationale, that accounted for the injured man’s strength, or his ability to continue living and breathing despite brutal physical damage. His strange vocal emanations and his violent, painful reaction to Poole’s attack, fueled by nothing more than prayer and blessed water, were inexplicable.
The discussion now, in the early morning light, is about burial. Sheriff Baker wants to bury his brother at the orphanage, and return the body of the deputy to his family in Chester.