Seeker

“I’m not crying!” John said, burying his face deeper into the pile of clothing.

“John, come out of there.” Maggie’s voice was soft from beyond the closet door.

“I’m not crying,” he said again, feeling his mother’s blue scarf absorbing his tears.

The closet door handle rattled as Maggie tried to get in. He clutched his mother’s belongings around him in the darkness. He’d managed to keep the door shut by wedging one of Catherine’s scarves firmly beneath it, but now there was a crack of light as Maggie forced it open.

He hid his face in the cloth. He could hear her pushing the door; then her hands were beneath his arms, pulling him up. When he opened his eyes, John was looking into her lined face as she knelt in front of him inside her own closet.

“I’m not crying,” he whispered again, though he could still feel wetness on his cheeks.

“What’s all this?” she asked, her eyes moving over the pile of items heaped on the floor. “Your mother’s things?”

There were scarves and hats and photographs and small items that had sat on shelves. They were the things that most reminded John of Catherine.

“They were putting them in boxes. They were taking them away!”

“John.”

“Grandfather says I’m not allowed to look at her things so much. I yelled and stamped on his foot. I told him to go to hell.”

Maggie’s grip on his shoulders became more firm. Her soft eyes took on a look that was not nearly so soft.

“He loves you, boy,” she said.

“He doesn’t!”

“You know he does, John.” She shook him slightly to make sure he was paying attention. “He doesn’t want to see you sad for so long. It’s been a year. He’s worried about you.”

“He wants to make her disappear.”

“No. He’s worried you’ll try to be like her. He doesn’t want to lose you as well.”

“But I will be like her, Nana!”

“John, you mustn’t call me that. Not here, not if you want to stay together. I told you so you would know you had more family. But our blood connection is a secret.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t say it.”

“I’m not your grandmother, not really.”

“You’re Mother’s grandmother.”

“I’m older than that, boy. Come.”

She took him by the hand and led him out of the closet. John let her seat him on the ancient embroidered quilt upon her small cot in her servant’s chamber on Traveler. The room was on the bottom deck, where the engine noise was deep and constant.

There were several framed pictures hung on her walls, each of a castle. Some of these images were photographs; others were fine line drawings. Maggie walked to the first of the pictures and took it down. It was a photograph, in black-and-white, of a fortress with low, round towers and a partially ruined wall.

“Where is that castle, Maggie?” he asked.

“It happens it’s in France. But the castle is only a reminder to me of what’s behind it.” She sat on the bed next to him and turned the frame over. Carefully, she removed the back. Hidden between a piece of cloth and the picture itself was a small stack of photographs. Maggie’s hands shook slightly as she removed them and placed them facedown on the bed.

“You are younger than I like for this, John. I wouldn’t show you these now, except it’s necessary for you to know.” She began to lay the pictures faceup on the quilt, one after another. “From early years we have no pictures, but the ones we do have tell enough of the story.”

John couldn’t at first make sense of the black-and-white images. They appeared completely chaotic. Then all at once they came into sharp focus in his mind. They were pictures of death. Dead people in a room that had been torn apart. It was not death like you saw on the television. It was much worse, much messier.

The photographs showed a man, a woman, and four children, in clothing that placed them more than a century in the past. They had been cut. Someone had cut them deeply, carefully, and abundantly.

The man and woman were pinned to a wall as though glued there, with their heads lolling forward. When John looked more closely, he could see the long knives sticking out from their shoulders, knives someone had thrust all the way through them and into the wall behind.

There was no red in these photographs—no color at all—but something in the quality of the black-and-white let John imagine the deep crimson of their blood as it cascaded from those wounds and onto the floor. The four children had not been pinned to the wall, but they lay in positions of agony, their clothing ripped where they’d been cut, their own blood turning the cloth dark. The youngest could not have been more than five. He lay facedown near his sisters, blood around his head in a dark halo.

On a clean patch of the small boy’s white shirt, something had been traced with a finger dipped in that blood. It was a drawing of an animal.

“Who are they?” John asked.

Maggie picked up a picture that showed the small boy in detail.

“The little one survived,” she said. “We—the photographer discovered he was still breathing. It was a miracle, though he was crippled his whole life. He was your great, great, great-grandfather, John.”

John couldn’t take his eyes off the figure of the small boy, even smaller than John, slumped on the floor next to his sister’s skirt. “Is that a bear?”

“Yes. It is the sign of the house of the man who killed them,” she said.

“We’re a fox,” John whispered.

“Yes, we are.”

There were more photographs hidden in the other frames. One by one Maggie took them down and made him look. The images were a parade of horror, moving forward through time until John was looking at color prints. They were distant uncles, grandfathers’ fathers, cousins of all kinds. Most were young in the pictures, dying in terrible ways—stabbed, shot, strangled, drowned. In many, there was an animal drawn in blood on one of the victims.

The faces began to blur, but eventually there was a young woman John recognized. Her blue eyes were wide in death, and her hands clutched a gaping wound in her belly.

“My—my mother?” he asked.

“No, boy, though they are very alike, aren’t they? She was your mother’s older sister, Anna.”

The girl was beautiful, despite a gash across her cheek, and she was so much like Catherine that John had a difficult time believing it was not her.

“She recorded it,” Maggie said softly. “I have her film. I want you to watch it.”

There was a thin video screen hidden in one of the frames, which Maggie withdrew and set on John’s lap. Tapping the screen, she brought an image to life. It had been filmed perhaps by a dropped phone, half concealed beneath a bed, but the image was clear enough.

John didn’t want to watch but found himself unable to turn away. He was looking at his mother’s sister, crawling across the floor as a young man with dark hair stepped between her and the camera. This man’s words were lost as the girl screamed, but his actions were clear. He was cutting her, slowly, awfully, his back toward the camera. Once he looked to his right, speaking excitedly to someone in another part of the room, and a few of his words were audible: “… didn’t listen … he’s angry …”

Eventually the girl was quiet. When the man moved away, John could see what he had done. She’d bled to death from the wound he had made across her belly. And there was a shape drawn on her blouse with her own blood—a ram.

John was turning away, overcome, but there were more. The last photographs were of a room he recognized. It was his mother’s living room, as he’d last seen it. The large pool of blood was spread across the floor, smeared where her body had been. He’d seen this himself, when he escaped from that room. But he had not seen the animal shape that had been drawn at one corner of the drying lake of blood: a ram.

Darkness began to creep in around his vision, and nausea rolled over him. Sometime later, Maggie shook his shoulder as he lay curled on her bed, his arms around his stomach.

“Sit up, John,” she said.© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

Her words were kind but firm, and he did as she told him. She was kneeling, her eyes level with his. He had often thought of her as a very old woman, but at this moment she looked both ancient and young, alive with emotion.

“They have tried to make us nothing, John. They will only be happy when we’re nothing.”

“Who?” he asked.

“The other houses. We are at the center and beginning of Seekers. They want us gone. They’ve been trying to stamp us out for hundreds of years.”

“They’ll kill me too, won’t they?” he asked her, his eyes filling with tears.

“They will certainly try when they get the chance.”

John began to cry.

“Cry if you like,” she told him. “But tears are a step toward death. Your mother took a different path. Do you understand her path?”

John looked again at the photographs spread across the bed, then back to Maggie. He nodded.

“To take my oath,” he said. “To get back the athame and repay them for what they’ve done. To find her book, because they took it when they …”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “All those things. But why?”

John looked up at her, unsure of the answer.

“With the athame and the book, John, someday you will destroy the houses who have harmed us. And put things to rights. You will become what we were in the beginning, powerful but good.”

He sat on the bed quietly for a while, thinking of the man with dark hair who had killed his mother’s sister. He had seen that man before, had seen his boots as they stood in Catherine’s living room, before those colored lights and that awful high-pitched whine had put an end to her as well.

“You are eight years old, John. Too young, but that can’t be helped. Choosing your mother’s path means you must grow up quickly. You must be willing—”

“To do what has to be done,” he finished. “Even kill. I know.”

“It’s easy to say. But there will be many things that try to pull you from the path. Hatred is one, and love is another. Both are everywhere, and both are dangerous.”

“It seems like everything is dangerous.”

Maggie smiled. “For you, yes.”

“I have already chosen, Maggie,” John told her. “I promised her”—he nodded to the photographs—“and I promise them.” His voice sounded different in his own ears, as though he had aged over the past few minutes.

“Very good, John. Now you must listen to me about your grandfather.” She took one of his hands in her own, forcing him to look up at her. “He cared about your mother; he needed her. Now she’s gone, just as your father is gone. You’re all he has left. He’s a weak man, and he wants to keep you safe.”

“I promised I would start my training—”

“You will. We’ll convince Gavin. In time. For now, let him be happy having you close. His position, this home, they protect you while you’re young. I had reasons for bringing your mother to this family.” She gestured to the photographs still spread across the bed, then put her hands on either side of John’s face, bringing their heads close together. “John, your grandfather thinks he is strong, but he’s not. So we won’t burden him with our secret plans. Do you understand? We will make them in private.”

John nodded solemnly. He understood. “Our plans are secret,” he said.

“In the meantime, I will ask him to bring instructors to Traveler, to teach you to fight. Would you like that?”

John nodded again, his eyes straying to the images of death lying on the quilt next to him. It would be good to know how to protect himself.

Maggie leaned close again and whispered, “And there’s one more secret. You love your grandfather, and he loves you. But if that ever changes, we have a way to control him …”

“The boy wishes to apologize to you, sir.”

John stood outside the door to his grandfather’s rooms, holding a large box full of his mother’s belongings. Maggie stood behind him. When Gavin smiled and stepped aside to let him enter, John felt her squeeze his shoulder. Then he walked into the room on his own.

“I’m sorry I cursed at you, Grandfather,” he whispered. “I understand I shouldn’t be looking at my mother’s things all the time.”

“That’s all right, John,” Gavin said, taking a seat on the small sofa by the fireplace. John climbed up beside him, leaving the box of Catherine’s things on the floor by their feet.

Gavin put a hand on his grandson’s head and cleared his throat in the way he often did, making a strange scratching sound. “Your mother has given so much to me, John. I want you to remember her.” He was looking down at John, his face kind. “But when you stare at her belongings all day, I worry. You don’t—you don’t have to do the things she did. Dangerous things. She restored our fortunes. It’s done. We can survive without risking you.”

John looked up at the old man and nodded, as though he agreed. “I understand,” he whispered.

Gavin pulled him close, and they sat for a while, peacefully looking at the fire. But soon the boy’s eyes strayed to the open box on the floor. A picture of his mother and himself was visible at the top. In the image, they were sitting together on the floor of her bedroom on Traveler, and her arms were around John. Her eyes were looking at him now from within the photograph, and he could feel tears starting again at the back of his throat.

He got down from the couch and pushed the box toward his grandfather.

“You take these, please, Grandfather.”

Gavin peered into the box, picking up the picture on top and studying Catherine’s other belongings.

“You should keep them, John. It’s only a few things.”

“No,” the boy whispered. “You’re right. I shouldn’t look at them so much. I don’t want to be sad and angry all the time.”

“Wouldn’t you like to keep the photograph with you, at least?” he asked.

“Maybe when I’m bigger. Now I can remember her inside.” He touched a hand to his chest. “Like you do with my father.”

“Yes, like I do with your father,” Gavin murmured. He did not keep pictures of his dead son Archie around. Archie, who had died before he could marry Catherine, before John was born. Gavin said pictures of his son made it too hard to carry on with life. John understood that now. He too must carry on with his life—and it was going to be a dangerous one, a life that would require his full attention.

Gavin shut the box, hiding the photograph of Catherine from view. But John felt she was still with him, her older sister was still with him, all those who had been tortured and killed were still with him. He had them inside himself.