A rack of rifles lined a cabinet in the front room. Micah swung the glass front open and inspected them.
“Civil War era,” he said. “That is a Lindsay model. A Whitworth, there. These guns are over a hundred years old.”
They went upstairs. The walls were papered with a pattern of cabbage roses faded to dim blots. The front bedroom overlooked the mess and sleeping quarters. A pair of field binoculars rested on a tripod before the window. Minerva peered through them. She could see across the fields to the woods fringing the basin that they had climbed earlier.
The room had a desk. The home’s sole photo sat upon it. A sepia shot of a man whose large round head sat atop a thick neck. A walrus mustache. Fat fleshy lips. He stared forward with a certain imperiousness, as if challenging the viewer to contradict his view of the world.
Augustus C. Preston was written on a brass nameplate below the photo.
“The lord of the manor?” said Minerva.
“I reckon.”
“He kept a framed, labeled photo of hissown self on his desk?” Minerva spat on the floor. “Maybe he had Alzheimer’s. Needed to remind himself of who the hell he was.”
Micah opened the desk drawers. Receipts and logbooks, all dated the years 1873 and 1874. The papers were yellowed and dry; a few slips crumbled apart in his fingers. Minerva saw receipts for shipping notices, sums paid, debits owing. Another notebook was labeled ENROLLMENT. Ten boys were listed, between the ages of nine and fifteen. Walter Albee. Percy Snell. Horace Fudge. Cornelius Benn. Wilfred Tens. Five more. Orphan was marked beside eight of the ten names, and Ward of the State beside the remaining two. Recidivist was jotted beside six of the ten—even Merle Pugg, the nine-year-old.
Micah found a sheaf of letters in another drawer, all sent from one Conrad Preston. He teased the first letter out of its envelope. It was dated August 17, 1874. He looked it over and then passed it to Minerva.
“Read it.”
Dearest Auggie,
LEAVE THAT PLACE. I BEG YOU.
My brother, you must. That godforsaken wilderness has clambered into both you and your misbegotten charges. I fear something dreadful shall befall you.
You speak of a voice. A shadowy herald calling to you from the trees. But do you not recall it was a voice that called you into that blasted wilderness in the first? The voice of God, as you told me? Perchance it was, Auggie dear. And so you set about building your refuge, where you only wished to educate young striplings under the watchful eye of the Lord—while never sparing the lash, as it must be.
But now you write to me of such grim tidings. The Devil walks those woods. You speak of hearing the lonesome notes of a flute coming from the forest. Boys wandering away never to return—or if so, horribly altered. I am not one to jump at spooks, but there is much of this world we do not comprehend. That land is known only to the Red Indian, and perchance he possesses a savage means to cope with such deviltry. You do not. You are a white man, and civilized.
Come home! Your ambitions are noble, but having already used up your inheritance on the erection of the School, you have, I fear, left yourself in a position of keen vulnerability. I would come myself, but my tubercular state has rendered me inert. Only heroic doses of laudanum keep the agonies at bay.
Do not be so pigheaded, Auggie! If the boys will not come with you, leave them. They are runaways. That is their nature! Whether it be through cobbled side streets or into the dim woods, they run! I admire a streak of iron as much as any man, but there comes a time when that iron turns poisonous in the blood.
Your latest missive… Auggie, do not take this wrongly, but if I had not recognized your handwriting I might have thought it had been misposted from the nuthatch up in Courtney Hills. You find yourself in a dark place—darkness of the spirit, a darkening of the heart. Why put your soul at peril? Leave, please. Take those charges who will come, abandon the rest. They are society’s leavings. Nobody shall place blame on you or mourn their passing. They have no kin.
YOU have kin, Auggie. Me. Your loving brother. Come back to me. I beg of you. From the bottom of my heart I beg.
That was the final letter. The ones below bore postmarks from earlier dates. Minerva skimmed them, reading the odd snippet. The initial excitement and productivity at the Preston School appeared to have given way to creeping signs that became increasingly menacing. Sounds from the forest. The haunting trill of a flute.
According to the letters, boys at the Preston School had started to disappear—or this was Minerva’s understanding based on Connie Preston’s one-sided narrative.
The boys disappeared, but they came back. Just like Eli Rathbone? With his white hair and gray eyes and blanket of hissing bugs?
In the second-to-last letter, Conrad Preston mentioned the desertion of the school’s guards, leaving Augustus as the lone authority. Minerva tried to picture Augustus and his delinquent boys stranded on this solitary outcropping. Yet throughout it all—to judge by Conrad’s increasingly desperate letters—Augustus maintained a fervent belief, even as events spiraled into madness. He was Ahab pursuing his white whale.
“Jesus, Shug,” Minerva said. “Do you think… Is it possible that what’s happening at Little Heaven now has happened before? Nearly a hundred years ago?”
Micah said, “I cannot say what is happening now.”
“But if it did happen, how could nobody know about it?”
“People go missing. Whole groups.”
“But this many? Ten boys, maybe more, and their batshit-crazy warden?”
“There are a million ways it could have happened.”
“But I don’t think it happened any of those ways, Shug. I think it happened the way it’s happening at Little Heaven. And I think you do, too.”
Night had begun to fold over the Preston School. Micah said, “Make a fire.”
THEY FOUND A POTBELLIED STOVE in the kitchen. Micah hurled the mattress off Augustus Preston’s bed. He put his boots to the bed frame. The wood was hard oak. Micah was sweating by the time it started to splinter. He ripped the shattered wood from the joists. When he had enough, he slit the mattress and ripped out handfuls of stuffing.
He filled the stove with that cottony fluff, then tossed in bits of the bed frame. Before long, a fire was roaring. Micah seemed pleased. He must have found it cathartic to torch the bed of a blue-blooded sadist who had locked up little boys in boxes.
Minerva hunted through the cupboards. Just crockery. A ringbolt was set in the kitchen floor. Pulling on it opened a trapdoor leading to the cold cellar.
“Flashlight, Shug.”
Micah handed it to her. She went down the worn steps. The cellar swept out under the flashlight’s glow. Ancient dust swirled in the flashlight beam.
The shelves were stocked with preserves that had long gone off. Some of the mason jars had burst, their contents hanging off the edge of the shelf in stalactites—as if the shelves had grown fangs. The liquid had gone thin in other jars, the color of formaldehyde. Things sat suspended inside the liquid. Bulging shapes like beets or blackened turnips or… something. A jar of pickled eggs with some kind of weird flagellate tails attached to them…
She swept the beam away from the jars. It fell upon something that puzzled her. Bars. Crosshatched iron bars. A square of them set into the center of the wall.