The Hawley Book of the Dead by Chrysler Szarlan Read Free Book Online Page A

Hollow, or Bozrah Brook, or the long way round Hell’s Kitchen. We always ended up back at Hawley Five Corners, just at dusk, with only enough time to ride back and be home for supper.
    I had always known the history of the Five Corners was entwined with my own family’s. By the time Jolon and I started riding in Hawley Forest, the old stories just seemed like other fairy tales. Over the years, I all but forgot them. All the years our horses loafed and crunched the tall grass, and we laughed too loudly, blowing smoke rings into the fairy air.
    The stories came back to me, though, after Jolon was long gone, lost to me. On cool misty evenings when I’d trailered my horse to the forest, ridden too long and too late and arrived at the Five Corners alone. Even when I was cold and sweaty and chilled to the bone, a warmth would blanket me at the Corners. I never felt afraid in the forest. It was my refuge then, so it wasn’t really surprising to me that I ended up in Hawley, the place of all places I’d felt safest in. Things do happen for a reason. When Nan’s letter came to me, I remembered my childhood rides in the forest, and coming upon that abandoned landscape. I remembered Nan’s stories, too, and the satiny edge of the blanket I liked to clutch between my fingers while she told them, and the nightlight, with scenes from Sleeping Beauty revolving in a magic lantern.
    Nan was right. I still felt safe at the Five Corners. But the feeling had no basis in solid fact, only old memories and older stories.
    As I looked at my girls in the fading light of our first day in Hawley, I hoped I’d done the right thing, reverting to the past, to the Dyer name. Or was I just trading one kind of magic for another?
3
    Magic is the oldest art. The first person who learned to control fire was the first magician. Perhaps it is its unimaginable age, its place at the beginning of human history, that ensures there is nothing new in it. Elements of the same tricks and illusions are performed in nearly every magic show, to greater or lesser perfection, with perhaps a new twist every hundred years or so. There is something a little tawdry about magic. It is the magician’s finest trick to rise above the dime-store tackiness that infuses our profession.
    I’d never been good at it. I still remember the magic show Jolon and I put on when we were ten. I was the magician, he was the assistant. Jolon was always too trusting, let me have my head like his favorite pony. I wore a long dress and a cape made from an old velvet bathrobe of my mother’s. I shuffled cards and dropped them, pulled my guinea pig out of the balaclava I’d stitched him into. I would have tried to saw Jolon in half, but for my grandmother who took the saw away from me. Altogether, I was a rotten magician, but I’d always had a soft spot for magic.
    My magical inheritance was of another sort, although no less necessary to the success of the Amazing Maskelynes. It began with the Dyer women.
    An artful conjurer can set her own body on fire with no visible damage, can cut off her arm without pain, can eat glass or razor blades. All are tricks that must be learned and practiced. But vanishing—and its necessary counterpoint, reappearing—is an art that relies not so much on tricks as on timing. The audience’s attention is directed away from the person disappearing. Even the visible vanish is not truly visible. Except in my case. Because my gift is that I really can disappear.
    We all have them, all the women in my family, extraordinary gifts. Occasionally, a boy reveals a power, but not often, and none in my generation. One of our Dyer ancestors could play any musical instrument she picked up without benefit of lessons. Another could make a feast from a bit of bread and water. Yet another could summon rain. Sometimes these gifts take years to reveal themselves, and have varying degrees of usefulness. I knew from experience the talents of my living relatives. My Nan is able to