Lay of the Land Read online

  Lay of the Land

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  Buckley Township, Michigan, 1954

  Alice stood perfectly still in the middle of the library, as if stillness and silence would magically be enough to save her from what was about to happen. She kept her hands folded behind her back, her chin up, and her heels together, every inch the dutiful daughter who would never intentionally upset her father, would never run off into the woods to chase a dangerous rumor, and would certainly never be found asleep on a couch belonging to a member of the Covenant of St. George. Why, there wasn’t enough never in the world!

  It was really too bad that her father had met her before.

  “I don’t think you understand the situation, Alice, and that worries me, because God knows you’ve had it explained to you thoroughly enough,” said Jonathan. He sounded exhausted, like he hadn’t slept in a week. The dark circles under his eyes were even more telling. “I’d have you out of Buckley tonight if there was any place for us to go. That’s how dangerous this is. Do you understand?”

  I understand that you’ve been looking for an excuse to get me out of Buckley since Mama died, thought Alice. Aloud, she said only, “I understand better than you think I do. I’m just not going to lock myself in the attic until Mr. Price leaves town. He was a gentleman, Daddy! He let me in even though he didn’t have to, even though he didn’t know who I was. He thought I was just some little girl who got lost in the woods, and he opened his door for me. Why would he have done that if he were as bad as you say?”

  “Because you look like your grandmother, and your grandmother looks like every other Carew girl who ever picked up a rifle and said she’d do as the Covenant bid,” said Jonathan. “You carry your ancestors with you, and he’s Covenant bred. He knows what a Carew looks like. He read your face like a book, and he let you inside because he wanted you to trust him. That’s what they do.”

  “I thought they killed people,” Alice said. “Innocent people, like Aunt Mary or Uncle Naga.”

  “The Covenant has never concerned itself much with ghosts,” said Jonathan, before he thought better of it. He shook his head. “That’s beside the point. The Covenant doesn’t just come in guns blazing. That would be counter-productive. They come in carefully, they get the lay of the land, and then they strike. You’re young enough that they might see you as a potential asset. All they’d need to do is twist your mind and convince you that they’re the good guys.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” said Alice. “I am not going to join the Covenant of St. George just because some nice man lets me sleep on his couch.”

  Jonathan rubbed his face with one hand. “I am not getting through to you at all, am I? I’m trying to keep you safe, Alice. That means I’m not thinking of whether you want to stay away from Mr. Price. I’m thinking of whether staying away from him will keep you safe. As your father, and as the one with more experience dealing with the Covenant, I am ordering you to stay away from the Parrish Place. Do not associate with this man. Do not ‘accidentally’ wind up in the woods behind his house. Leave him alone. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Daddy, but—”

  “Good. Then we’re done talking about it.” He stepped forward, smoothing her hair back from her face before pressing a kiss against her forehead. “Oh, Alice. You’re all I have. You know that, don’t you? That’s why I worry about you so much. That’s why I need you to listen to me.”

  Alice—who loved her father, even as she chafed against the restrictions he was increasingly heaping on her—ducked her chin to keep him from seeing the look in her eyes. “I do listen, Daddy. I promise I do.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “Stay away from the Parrish Place. Mind me, now, and we’ll be just fine.”

  He walked out of the library, leaving his silent, not at all dutiful daughter behind.

  Alice waited in the library until she heard the front door slam: her father heading off to work at the real library, the Buckley Township Library, which was larger and quieter and had a lot fewer books on how to take things apart. Her father and her grandfather had both worked there for as long as she could remember. People had started to mutter about her grandfather needing to retire, and she supposed he probably would, soon enough, if only to keep people from making a fuss. Nobody hated a fuss like her grandpa.

  Cautiously, and fully aware of the consequences if she timed this wrong, Alice stuck her head out of the library and looked up and down the hall. Nothing moved, not even a mouse: the Aeslin were all up in the attic, involved in a three-day ceremony honoring her Great-Grandmother Caroline and something impressive she’d done with a bed sheet. Alice was sure it was more complicated than it sounded—mouse rituals generally were—but she had long since learned not to ask.

  Sure now that her father wasn’t lurking to pounce on her and continue his lecture about trusting strangers from the Covenant, Alice crept down the hall to the front room, where she peeped out the window and confirmed that her father’s truck was no longer parked in the driveway. He was gone, then, really and truly, and she could breathe again.

  Her father was a good man; her father loved her; her father’s ability to cope with the thought that she might get hurt was virtually nonexistent. She had known these things for most of her life. Sometimes they felt like all she had to hold on to. Those, and her grandparents, who somehow managed to love her without any of her father’s reservations. They looked at her and didn’t see her mother’s ghost. That seemed to make all the difference. When Jonathan was around, it was like all the air got sucked out of the room and replaced with formaldehyde. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t move. All she could do was float, endlessly preserved, in the amber sea of his concern.

  Alice walked back down the hall, passing the library, until she reached the kitchen door and stuck her head inside. As she had hoped, her grandmother was still where she had been earlier: sitting at the kitchen table with a leather-bound book open in front of her, meticulously transcribing the last month’s-worth of observations about the local wildlife. Tracking the jackalope herds was a manual process, but it was worth it, if it helped them to know when the migrations would happen.

  “Grandma?”

  Enid looked up, and smiled at the sight of Alice’s head peeking around the doorframe. “Hello, sweetheart. There’s some shortbread next to the stove. What are you still doing inside? It’s a beautiful day. You should be out enjoying it.”

  “Daddy just left,” said Alice, walking into the kitchen and heading directly for the promised shortbread. She was always hungry these days, partially due to having to refuse seconds at mealtimes: her father would ask why she was eating so many eggs, and she would stammer and stutter over her answer, knowing all the while that if he had any indication that she was running around the woods at night, she’d wind up grounded. Again.

  Since she was already grounded, she could probably have gotten away with double helpings, but then her father might have figured out that she was sneaking out her window every night, and who needed that sort of stress?

  “I see,” said Enid. She watched Alice pick up three pieces of shortbread before suggesting, mildly, “There’s also lemonade, if you want to be able to swallow all that.”

  “Thanks, Grandma.” For a moment, everything was quiet and clanking as Alice fixed her afternoon snack. Finally, she came to sit at the table across from her grandmother, setting the plate of shortbread and glass of lemonade in front of herself.

  The silence continued. Alice cleared her throat.

  “Grandma?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Did you…hear what we were talking about?”

  Enid closed the book and set her pen aside. She’d been waiting for Alice
to work her way around to this conversation for days. Now that they were finally going to have it, she was going to give the girl her full attention. “I heard parts of it.”

  “Is he…I mean…when he says…” Alice stopped and waved her hands helplessly, like she could encompass all the missing parts of her sentences with a few simple motions. It didn’t work. Defeated, she slumped in her seat, and said, “I just don’t understand.”

  “Which part don’t you understand?”

  “How Mr. Price could have known I’d come out of the woods right behind his house,” said Alice. “Daddy thinks he was laying a trap for me, because he’s Covenant and they’re all sneaky and clever and stuff. But I just don’t see how that makes sense. I didn’t know where I was going to come out of the woods. I sure couldn’t have told you when I was going to come out of the woods. So how could somebody who didn’t know the woods as well as I do guess when and where I’d be popping out?”

  “What do you think happened, Alice?”

  “I think my timing was just good,” she said. “He turned his lights on. I followed them out of the trees. If he hadn’t turned the lights on, or if I’d been facing another direction, I wouldn’t have come out where I did. I would have kept going until I saw a different house, and I would have come out there.”

  “So do you think there’s any chance that Mr. Price heard you moving around in the trees, and decided to lure you into the open?”

  Alice snorted. “Gosh, no. Even if he’d been waiting on the porch when I walked up, I was being pretty quiet. He would’ve had to be in the woods with me to have heard me coming, and then I would have heard him. He looked plenty surprised to find me on his porch, too. I don’t think I was the Welcome Wagon he was expecting.”

  “Yes, well, he was a little preoccupied with the idea that the real Welcome Wagon was going to shoot him in the head and bury him out in the swamp.” Enid failed to suppress her smile. To be fair, she hadn’t tried particularly hard. “He came here while you were asleep in his living room, you know.”

  “I figured he must’ve, or you wouldn’t have ended up there to get me,” said Alice. “Isn’t that why Daddy’s so mad?”

  “Yes, but dear, he didn’t know you were our grandchild when he came to the house,” said Enid. “He wanted to let us know that the Covenant had sent him to Buckley to keep an eye on us and report back about our activities—and more importantly, he wanted us to know that he wasn’t going to do it. I’m not sure what his story is, but I got the feeling he’d been sent here because he did something naughty, and now the Covenant wants to punish him.”

  Alice’s eyes had gone wide and round. “He’s spying on us?” she asked, voice barely above a squeak.

  “No, he’s not,” said Enid. “He’s supposed to be. That isn’t the same as actually doing it. He’s a Price. If he says he’s not going to follow an order he’s decided he dislikes, he’s not going to follow it.”

  “What does him being a Price have to do with anything?” asked Alice, her shocked expression giving way to a frown.

  Enid smiled. “Sometimes I forget what a good job we did of raising you outside of the Covenant’s reach. There are things that every proper Covenant girl knows long before she comes of age. Never step out with a Falls boy, as they tend to have wandering hands. Never go into a fight against anything bigger than a manticore unless you have a Brandt or a Carew with you. And never ask a Price to go back on their word.”

  “You can’t breed for personality types,” said Alice.

  “Oh, really. Tell me more about this lack of specialization, my violent, excitable child of a violent, excitable woman.” Enid’s smile softened around the edges, as it always did when she was thinking about Fran. “We’re all the children of our parents, both by blood and by the way they raised us. There’s always some variance, of course, but I’d trust any Price man I’d ever met to keep his word all the way to the end of the world. He’s not going to hurt us, Ally, even if he’s supposed to be keeping an eye on us for the Covenant. If anything, having him here will offer a certain measure of protection.”

  “Because the Covenant won’t send anyone else while he’s here?” Alice ventured.

  “Exactly. If he wants to sit in the Parrish Place and pretend to be spying on us, that means we can keep breathing.”

  Alice hesitated. “Grandma?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Why is the Covenant interested in us again? I mean, I’ve never seen them before. I thought we’d been forgotten and written off.”

  “I think…” Enid stopped, picked up her coffee, and took a sip to steady herself before she continued, “I think they must have finally heard about your mother. We didn’t hide it when she died. We invited everyone she’d ever touched, and it’s been long enough now that news will have spread. Some trapping team up in Canada, or execution detail down in Argentina will have heard the news that Frances Healy, the Star of New Mexico, is dead. That means we’re weaker than we were. That means it’s worth coming to see if we’re finally weak enough.”

  “Oh.” Alice frowned. “But you don’t think Mr. Price is a part of that.”

  “No, I don’t. If he were, I really do believe he would have told us so. The Covenant isn’t all bad, Ally; I’d be lying to you if I tried to tell you that they were.”

  Alice’s frown deepened. “The Covenant kills people like Uncle Naga and Aunt Mary.”

  “You can’t kill what’s already dead; Mary is safe from anything short of an exorcism. But you’re right that the Covenant tends to shoot first and ask questions never. At the same time, the Covenant takes care of their own. They let women have jobs and positions of authority and guns—do you know how many organizations would have been willing to let me learn how to shoot when I was your age?” Enid shook her head. “No one is the bad guy in their own story. You have to remember that. The Covenant did a lot of good in their time, when humanity was in a more precarious position. Now, well. We walked away for legitimate reasons. Even the best orders, given with the best of intentions, can eventually turn sour when they’re followed without thought.”

  “Do you think Mr. Price follows orders without thinking?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh.” Alice looked at her shortbread. Then she looked at the kitchen around them. It was warm, comfortable, and familiar: in a very real way, it represented the only life she’d ever known, a life that she knew absolutely could have been enough for her, if she’d been allowed to live it without her father constantly trying to shape her according to his own ideas. She was free here. She was trapped here. She needed something to change.

  “Grandma,” she said, abruptly. “Do we have enough of that shortbread for me to take some as a housewarming gift? I didn’t see much of the house before you came to get me, but it seems to me that Mr. Price didn’t bring much in the way of cooking equipment, and I can’t imagine the Parrish Place is the most comfortable thing ever.”

  Enid smiled. “I made an extra plate,” she said, and stood. “Let me help you wrap it up.”

  Getting from the Healy House to the Parrish Place was relatively straightforward: all Alice had to do was balance the plate of carefully-foiled shortbread on her bike’s basket and avoid potholes, oncoming traffic, mud puddles, and anyone who might possibly recognize her and mention her little outing to her father. It wasn’t so much her being outside when she was supposed to be grounded—most people didn’t know she was in trouble, since it was sort of difficult to explain why—as it was her being out on her bike in dungarees and hiking shoes. That was the sort of thing that was expected of a teen boy, or of the twelve-year-old tomboy she still regretted outgrowing. It wasn’t the proper attire for a young lady, especially not one who was going calling, alone, on an unmarried man who’d only been in town for a week.

  She was sort of counting on the inappropriateness of her clothing to help her get away with what she was doing. Her grandfather’s jacket was three sizes too big for her, and her father�
�s hunting cap did a decent job of hiding her hair. No one who got a close look would ever take her for a boy, but if she was careful, she could prevent that from happening.

  Except for Mr. Price, of course. There was no way to keep him from looking, since she was going to his house. Which was even less appropriate than her clothing. At least her grandmother knew, and seemed to approve, in her quiet, noncommittal way. It was hard sometimes to tell whether or not Grandma Enid actually approved of something, or just wanted to see how badly it was all going to fall apart. Either way, she’d given Alice a plate of shortbread and looked the other way as she snuck out the back door, so Alice supposed she had her grandmother’s blessing. Whatever good that was going to do.

  She turned onto Old Logger’s Road, only wobbling a little as she steered around the ruts in the dirt, and angled toward the last house before the woods took over: the old Parrish Place, site of a particularly brutal series of murders, according to gossip at school. Her grandfather had always refused to actually discuss the details of what had happened there—her protests that knowing for sure whether old man Parrish had eaten half of his teenage son would really increase her social standing had fallen on deaf ears—but he’d at least been able to confirm that the murders were a real thing, not just a local legend.

  Someone had taken it upon themselves to paint the house when it was sold. Alice wasn’t sure that turning a supposedly haunted murder house the color of slime mold was really an improvement, but she didn’t have to live there. Maybe Mr. Price would repaint after he’d gotten settled.

  The shadows around the house were deep and twisted, like they were being cast by some unseen light source. Alice looked up at the sky as she parked her bike, squinting a little. The sun looked normal enough. Must’ve been some quirk of the architecture. “That’s what you get for living in a murder house,” she said philosophically, and started for the porch.

  It was hard not to pick out all the broken pieces as she walked. The swing that used to hang from those rusted old chains was long gone; the middle step was broken; whoever decided to paint the house hadn’t bothered to scrape off the old paint first, and where it peeled, it revealed the house’s original reddish-brown, like a corpse slowly rotting in the sun.