Page 45 of The Forest of Lost Souls

Aconitine and aconine are the poisons in monkshood. Because those substances can be absorbed through the skin with lethal effect, Vida wore nitrile gloves and a face shield while crushing and then steeping the plants. Filtered through muslin, the resultant clear liquid would have provided swift justice to Sheriff Deacon. However, to increase potency, Vida had boiled and reduced the brew to a thin syrup, concentrating the unwholesome chemicals.

A fully satisfying reaction to monkshood can take from just ten minutes to a few hours. It has been Vida’s intention to ensure her unwanted suitor will succumb in a timely manner, both as amatter of mercy and in the interest of getting on with the work ahead of her.

The deep, white bowls had been stacked one atop the other, and the bottom bowl had contained an inch of the reduction. Even if the sheriff had come to the cooktop as she had separated the bowls, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the puddle of clear liquid in one of them before Vida ladled lentils into it. Besides, his suspicions were allayed when she’d drunk the wine he’d switched with hers, and there was nothing alarming about being served soup out of the same pot from which she took hers.

His vision will cloud and grow dim. Creeping paralysis of the respiratory system, declining blood pressure, and a faltering pulse will leave him weak. As his body temperature falls, he will feel as if his veins carry ice water rather than blood, and he will begin to shudder uncontrollably. Paralysis of the heart muscle will be the ultimate cause of death.

Eighteen years earlier, the seer with raven hair said,You’ll be a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.If indeed that’s what Vida is becoming, it seems that she will be required to do hard things. Perhaps that should be no surprise. Nature herself is as hard as she is beautiful, red of tooth and claw.

Vida waits fifteen minutes before returning to the kitchen. Nash Deacon is dead—and something of a mess.

She rolls him facedown and with some effort pulls off his sport coat to search its pockets.

On that afternoon eight months ago, intending murder, Belden Bead hadn’t carried his phone, for its transponder could produce evidence putting him at the scene of the crime. Nash Deacon has not been quite that circumspect, although the phone Vida retrieves from an interior pocket of his coat is evidently notthe one connected to him by a telecom account, but instead a cheap disposable for special occasions. He surely didn’t purchase it with a credit card or from any vendor who might know him. Therefore, no one will be tracking its signal to search for Sheriff Deacon when he goes missing. She will nevertheless smash the phone with a hammer before burying it with the lawless lawman.

She rolls up the corpse in a drop cloth and seals that shroud with duct tape. She cleans up what mess remains.

The sky darkles from blue to purple to black, and the stars are born again as they have been every night for billions of years, and the moon rises as it has risen for somewhat fewer billions of years, and for the second night in eight months, the insistent growl of the backhoe carries across the meadow and fades into the sound-baffling forest.

During the hours of labor, as Vida operates the machine from the elevated driver’s seat, mosquitoes forage through the darkness for blood, but not one lands on her exposed skin; in all her years, none of their kind has bitten her. Neither do night moths flutter about her, nor do the day flies annoy her. She has never been stung by a bee or nipped by a spider. There comes a moment when a ghostly presence appears beyond the certain identification that the lights of the backhoe might have provided, a pale and fluid form low to the ground, like a humbled spirit that must crawl the territory it is condemned to haunt. Vida believes this is Azrael, the albino cougar that appeared in a bolder fashion on the day when Anna Lagare, the mortician’s daughter, came to visit. If the big cat is here as an omen of a death to come, it doesn’t linger to impress Vida with its dire message, and she fears neither Azrael nor what its apparition is said to foretell. She watches it deliquesce into the dark, and she continues digging a grave forthe man and his Trans Am. Later, when she’s in the pit, hoisting soil out with the long, jointed arm of the backhoe, she considers the placer mine, where over centuries Nature has deposited beauty and treasure. In this hastily stocked placer mine of Vida’s creation, nothing lovely or of value waits to be found, but if eighteen years ago the seer was right about her purpose and destiny, this too is an essential work of Nature.

37

MY HEART IS READY

The meadow earth is soft, and the first strata of rock lies deeper than the grave of the man and his machine needs to be. Vida is motivated to work without rest until Deacon and everything of his, including his hat and the silver-mesh dog collar, is under compacted soil. Something more explicit than the intuition that previously served her well, some power of perception for which she has no name, warns her that the perils she’s put behind her will be greatly exceeded by the threats that are still to come. She intends to be ready for them.

The cosmology influenced by modern physics might contend that the past and present and future exist simultaneously and eternally, that all time is unredeemable, leading to only one possible end. However, if that is true, she’s no less obliged to make choices, take risks, stand for what she believes in, endure the consequences. To do otherwise would be to concede the world to those who distill ever more potent evil in the chambers of their hearts.

She showers as night wanes, falls into bed at first light, and dreams of gemstones scattered among skeletons.

At eleven o’clock Saturday morning, after five hours of deep sleep, she eats a breakfast of lentil soup, pork tenderloin, and roastpotatoes. She uses her everyday dishes rather than the fine china that she reserves for special occasions.

She retreats to the library to finishWuthering Heights, which she’d begun on Tuesday, after Nash Deacon’s first visit during which he revealed that he sought her submission. The perception of looming danger remains strong, but she needs a respite from the expectation of violence, a relief that only a Brontë can provide. After all, the river does not race and swell over its banksin anticipationof the storm, and trees don’t char on Mondayin considerationof a forest fire on Tuesday. She has no need to panic.

With an hour of daylight remaining, having finished the novel, Vida walks down the unpaved lane and crosses the county highway to the house where the nameless seer in yellow tennis shoes and a white robe had given her the amaranth nearly two decades earlier.

Vance Burkhardt, who rented to that mysterious woman, has been dead twelve years. His estate sold the property to a congregation of forty Christians who had been conducting Sunday morning services in a VFW lodge rented by the hour. The decaying house was repaired by volunteer labor. A five-hundred-square-foot addition expanded the living room and provided an altar. The house served as rectory and place of worship for ten years, until the minister experienced a moral panic and conversion to a political puritanism that subverted all doctrines, reimagined the nature of sin, and defined as evil those behaviors that for most of human history had been thought virtuous. A third of the communicants were awakened by the preacher to this new belief system. A schism developed. On a rainy Sunday, one of the newly enlightened parishioners came to church with a pistol and killed four of the old-school worshippers before being shot to deathhimself. The congregation dissolved. Mortgage payments ceased to be made. The minister became the manager of a Starbucks coffeehouse. The property reverted to the bank. The bank could find no buyer and ceded the parcel to the county in lieu of unpaid taxes.

The front door hangs open on two of three hinges, which are so corroded they don’t work. Those windows that are not broken out have been etched by blown grit, crusted by snail trails, and peppered with fly excrement that in concert form colorless images capable of inspiring such angst and despair that they might excite in an artist a furious commitment to the renewal of the abstract-expressionism movement. The light of the westering sun has a drowned quality, as if the house is underwater. As she walks through the place, deep shadows gather everywhere and sometimes seem to crawl as if they are not mere shadows.

The kitchen cabinets of the remodeled rectory must have had some value, for they have been stripped out with the appliances. The painted table, on which the seer set her candles, is long gone with the chairs. The room is an empty shell. In addition to a loose windowpane that stutters under the influence of a breeze, the only sounds are those made by whatever small creatures live behind the wallboard and, from time to time, announce themselves with brief, frenzied scuttling.

She breathes a dust that is surely constituted in part of dry rot and mold spores and desiccated insects, but she smells the hot wax of the seer’s candles and the faint attar of roses that she had assumed came not from the candles but from a subtle perfume worn by the enigmatic woman.

Eighteen years earlier, in this humble place, Vida’s journey took a turn she didn’t understand at the time. She still doesn’tfully understand, but she knows it was the right turn to have taken, no matter where it leads.

“My life passes like a shadow,” she says. “Yet a little while, and all will be consummated.”

She walks home in the dark.

The moon is not risen, though it will rise.

The owls are silent, but soon they will call to one another. That night, her uncle Ogden visits Vida in her sleep. He speaks not a word. Perhaps the dead are able to talk only in those dreams that are nothing more than dreams. To guard the secrets of the world to come after this world, maybe the dead are forbidden to speak to the living when the dream is also a door through which a lost uncle can visit a beloved niece in need of guidance. In the dream, Vida is restlessly walking the rooms of her house, dressed for hiking, when her uncle appears. She follows him into the night meadow, into the forest. The phosphorescent glow of the moon, as if emanating from the trees rather than from the heavens, lights the winding paths trodden by generations of deer. She can hear no sound but a faint moaning like the wind, but there is no wind; only she and her uncle move, and otherwise a profound stillness lies over all things. Ogden leads her three miles, to a ravine where a small plane crashed four years earlier. The bodies of the pilot and passenger were bagged and borne by litter to a barren ridge, where they were loaded into a search-and-rescue helicopter. Disassembling the battered double-prop and carrying it out of the wilderness is a task too difficult and dangerous to be undertaken. Vida wades through bristling brush to a ragged hole in the fuselage. The interior is as black as ilmenite crystals until she leans through the gaping wound in the plane, whereupon the soft, effluent, moonlike light that seems to issue from the treesnow radiates as well from the interior surfaces of the aircraft. She studies what she is shown, and she knows what use it will have for her. By one of those transitions so fluid as to remind a dreamer that she’s dreaming, Vida is trailing her uncle along the fractured table rock of a bare ridge. To the right of the ridge lies an abyss, a void without light, and from there issues the faint moaning like the wind in this windless night—a beseeching sound, a lamentation. To her uncle and to the void, she hears herself say, “My heart is ready.”

She wakes and sits up in bed, in darkness that she has never feared. Although she knows not what is coming, she repeats the words she spoke in the dream, without vaunt or bravado, with humility and a daunting sense of her chances of success: “My heart is ready.”

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