The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [164]
Emily craned her neck to read the title of the book, and her heart sank: The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. She watched the flushed faces of the adults as their eyes darted back and forth between Anise and her girls and started to cry. Anise noticed but was unmoved. Then she pulled from a pocket at the front of her cape what looked like a bouquet of Italian parsley, but Emily was confident it was instead a plant that was both venomous and rare—something discovered or bred by these women from seeds they had found in some exotic corner of the planet. Anise pulled off the leaves and dropped them into the cauldron, as if they were merely bay leaves for a stew.
“John,” Emily whispered, her voice urgent and quavering, “please, let us go. If we can help you, we will. You know that. But, please, please let us go. I’m begging you: Please don’t hurt my girls.”
John’s eyes looked a little watery, too, and his profile a bit less regal: She wondered if perhaps he was weakening. But it was only age. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he smiled and shook his head firmly. “This is hard for all of us. I understand. I really do. But we only need one and it will all be over soon.”
Emily recalled what Reseda had told her, but still it seemed too cruel to be true. “You only need one … what? One of my children?”
He nodded. “It’s a very intense ritual, a very complicated process. A complicated recipe. You need the right person—the right genes—and the right plants. You need a twin, and, according to the formula, the blood has to have been forged by a great trauma.” He raised his eyebrows and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Tansy never forgave us—or herself. But our intentions were good, Verbena. You have to believe me. And the fact is, it worked with Sawyer. It was awfully effective. I am so sorry about what happened to the boy, but the tincture worked. Sadly, nothing from nature lasts forever, and now we need, well, boosters. We need more.”
“Did you kill Sawyer? Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”
“You must think we’re absolute fiends,” John said, and he actually chuckled. “Besides, I’m a lawyer. You can’t possibly believe that I would confess to something like that! Now, you should pay attention,” he admonished her. “We both should.”
Celandine was approaching Anise with a potted plant, the leaves cochleate and yellow as daffodils, with one spear-shaped bulb rising from the center. The plant was perhaps eighteen inches tall and the bulb the size of a grown-up’s fist. Clary Hardin and Ginger Jackson fell to their knees, their heads thrown back, nearly swooning with anticipation, as did another pair of women Emily didn’t recognize. They dropped their goblets onto the ground and spread wide their arms in ecstasy.
“They’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” John murmured. “Many of us have. To be so very, very close to the end and get a second chance? What a delightful notion!”
Sage Messner began herding the twins forward, edging them closer to the cauldron. Then the girls’ schoolteacher, Mrs. Collier—Yarrow Collier, Emily remembered—knelt before the children, handed them each a goblet, and said in a voice as soothing as a lullaby, “Enjoy this. Drink, girls, drink up.”
They both looked across the greenhouse at their mother, wondering what they should do, and so Emily violently shook her head. They looked tiny to her, more like big dolls than small children. Even in their winter coats they appeared waiflike. “Don’t,” she yelled to them, hoping she sounded more resolute than panicked—because she knew she was panicked. But she knew also that whatever herbal potion these women had prepared for her children would only harm them. She was as sure of that as she had been of anything in her life. “Don’t drink it!”
“Verbena, that’s enough,” Anise said, speaking to her for the first time since they had arrived at the greenhouse, and the two men tightened their grips on her arms. Her voice was absolutely inscrutable to Emily.