“What do you want me to do?” Bob asked.
“After I get the truck, we’ll meet back here and then we’ll stick together. We have a lot to do. Pull over here. The truck’s up that road.”
Alan got out and limped up the logging road. The muddy trail of the big green truck was still visible. He stepped over a tree that had fallen down in the storm.
The truck will probably be smashed, he thought.
He was wrong. The truck stood at a weird angle—its left wheels were higher than the right—but it looked fine. Alan climbed into the cab and it started right up. He backed up to the tree and then jumped out to hook up a rope between the tree and the rear bumper. The truck pulled the tree out of the way easily. Alan backed down the trail to the road. Bob was waiting to make sure he was okay. Alan waved and then led the way back to the house.
Bob parked out of the way and Alan waved him to the truck.
“I want to collect the wood for the fire before it gets too dark,” Alan said. Bob climbed into the cab.
Out back, across the bumpy field, Alan and Joe had stacked a bunch of wood. The tarp looked tattered, but the wood underneath was mostly dry. Alan and Bob loaded it into the truck.
“Are you concerned about next year?” Bob asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you do this process this year, do you think that those things will seek out Liz next fall also?”
Alan stopped with a big chunk of wood in his hands.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Alan said. “I’m pretty focused on getting Joe fixed up.”
“Understandable,” Bob said.
“The diary strongly suggested that the migrators were called by the bones of the old practitioners. I’m going to tear up the floor of the attic and get rid of any bones I find.”
“Huh,” Bob said. He picked up another log and loaded it into the truck.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No—please tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Well,” Bob said, “there’s a lot of missing details here. The Prescott women passed this process down from generation to generation through that ceremony that you witnessed. And then, when it went from mother to daughter, the mother died. Can Liz survive without the passing down ceremony?”
“You remember your idea about this whole thing?” Alan asked.
“Which?”
“You said that maybe they built all the ceremonies as window dressing around a hard nugget of fact. Well maybe the process itself works without all that craziness about passing it down from mother to daughter in an elaborate ceremony. In fact, that’s why I’m willing to give this a try at all. If it doesn’t work—nothing shows up and Joe is still sick—then we haven’t lost anything but some effort. There’s no danger to Liz because she’s not part of the Prescott clan and she didn’t have the elaborate ceremony to move the power to her. But, if that’s all window dressing, then maybe all we need is the science behind calling the creatures. The fire, the blood, the borax, the water—if those things work, then we have a chance at a miracle.”
By the time Alan finished, Bob was nodding.
“I get it,” Bob said. “You’re picking the low-risk parts of the legend à la carte. You’re hoping to find the root of the mechanism.”
“Exactly,” Alan said. “Let’s head back. The bed is almost riding on the tires.”
Alan drove the truck slowly across the field. Unloading next to the Cook House took only a fraction of the time compared to loading. They stacked the wood on top of a bunch of kindling wood that Alan pulled from the shed. When they finished, Alan led the way back to Bob’s SUV.
“Let’s get that borax spread,” Alan said.
They had boxes of the white powder. Alan had signed up for a membership at the warehouse store just so he could buy the quantity he needed. They each grabbed several boxes and started making a line around the house and barn.
“Leave a gap right along here,” Alan said. He indicated a path from the bulkhead to the Cook House.
Around the back side of the barn, they had already used more than half of the boxes.
“We need to go lighter,” Alan said. “I have to spread some on the stairs from the cellar.”
When they’d finished, the borax powder formed a nearly unbroken line around the perimeter of the house and barn. The only gap was where the lines tucked into the house on either side of the bulkhead. From the cellar bulkhead, you could only move in a straight path directly to the bonfire without crossing the line of borax. With the last box, Alan dusted the inside stairs that led up to the first floor. Just looking at the damp treads made his foot ache.
“There’s a little left in this box,” Bob said. “You want me to add it to the cellar stairs?”
“No,” Alan said. “Do me a favor and dust the front porch, just in case.”
“No problem,” Bob said.
We have fire and mineral, Alan thought. Now I need blood.
Alan pulled the cooler from the back of Bob’s SUV. He set it down in the borax path where it crossed the driveway. After talking with Liz that morning, Alan and Bob had left her to study as they’d gone around to collect the materials they needed for the process. The blood was the hardest thing to find. They’d called butcher shops only to find that most only stocked blood for special orders. People would call weeks ahead before they were going to make blood pudding or blood sausage, but the stuff coagulated too readily for the shops to keep any on hand. They’d finally gotten lucky—one shop had just butchered a cow and and the blood wasn’t spoken for. Alan and Bob drove over there to collect the fetid bags. They’d sealed them in the cooler to keep the smell from invading Bob’s SUV.
Alan opened the cooler.
The odor was deep and ripe. Alan pulled one of the bags. The blood was already beginning to clot up. Alan cut the corner and began drizzling a path from the cellar to the bonfire.
In the book, the women described butchering a live animal and dragging it from the water to the fire. Alan hoped that the blood would serve the same purpose. They needed to draw the migrators down the path to where they would use them.
Bob returned from the front porch.
“Shit!” Alan said. “I forgot—we need more borax to close the circle, once they’re in. We should have saved some aside.”
“Can we sweep some up from the ground and reuse it?”
“We barely have enough for the perimeter as it is,” Alan said. “Can you look in the shop? There might be a box on those pantry shelves in there.”
“No problem,” Bob said.
Alan returned his attention to the blood. He used the second bag to draw another line of blood from the cellar to the fire. The clots stayed in the bag and Alan squeezed them, trying to get more liquid to spread.
“You’re in luck,” Bob said. He came out of the shed with a box in each hand.
“Do you think they’re still good?”
The boxes looked old enough to predate the house.
“They’re still powder,” Bob said. He walked them over to near the fire and set them down on the brown grass.
“Do me a favor,” Alan said. “Use half of one of them to put a circle around that little well. I don’t want to get surprised.”
Bob nodded. Alan finished with the blood and then walked over to Bob.
“Okay, we got the blood, the borax, and the fire. What am I forgetting.”
“You decided not to do the dried flower petals, right?”
“Right. Seems like window-dressing and I don’t know where we’d even get them,” Alan said.
“You have a pitchfork, a shovel, walnut leaves, and a small box?”
“Everything but the leaves. I almost forgot those. There’s a walnut tree out back. I’ll go rake some up.”
“That’s all I can think of,” Bob said.