Chapter 1 - The House in the Graveyard

“Do you want to be a raccoon for the rest of your life?” Marjorie asked. “I suppose I hadn’t thought of that; perhaps you decided that you would prefer life as a raccoon to life as a little boy.”

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The raccoon in the basket would not stop wiggling. Marjorie supposed that she could not blame it for being angry; she, herself, would not have been pleased to be in such a place.

Happily, the walk home from the forest was straightforward, cutting through the graveyard. She had taken precautions to make the critter’s trip tolerable, scattering bits of cut fruit in the basket, even stealing some of Mama’s sugar cubes.

October was beginning to creep in, with its chill-that-wasn’t-quite-chill; if one stood in direct sunlight, it could be imagined that a mild September yet loomed. The light from this sun shone over gravestones as she passed them by, trotting the familiar path past names of parishioners who had gone to their eternal reward.

“How do you do, Lord Dempsey?” Marjorie could not help saying, with a curtsy at the ornate marble block marking the resting-place of a man she’d heard had been good and honorable. She was prone to imagining what the deceased might have looked like in life; it was fortunate that portraits existed of Lord Dempsey, displayed in the town hall. 

What of the ordinary townsfolk, though? What did they look like? She could only imagine about them based on their names, or what their gravestones looked like, or the days when they had been born. In many ways, ordinary townsfolk were more interesting than Lord Dempsey, giving her something to think about.

A caterwaul sounded from within the basket, to which Marjorie stomped her foot—as if the captive could see. She then regretted having stomped her foot. She was fifteen summers old, her birthday having been the month previous; it was a habit that she must unlearn.

“Will you stop your crying and eat a berry!” Marjorie said to the creature in the basket. “We’re trying to help you. I’m sorry we had to set a trap in your clearing, but you weren’t making it any easier, were you?”

Rrrow, said the creature defiantly.

“Do you want to be a raccoon for the rest of your life?” Marjorie asked. “I suppose I hadn’t thought of that; perhaps you decided that you would prefer life as a raccoon to life as a little boy. I imagine it is simpler. We’ve brewed a cure for you, though.”

Rrrow. This time the sound was less forceful; the raccoon—or little boy?—in the basket was considering Marjorie’s words, as if he had forgotten what it was like to be a little boy, but now that she mentioned a cure had been brewed, he was not opposed to returning to his original form.

There followed a silence in which she could hear the raccoon-boy munching on the berries she had left inside of the basket. Good; he’d decided to settle down. They would have him back to normal soon, and hopefully they could find his family so that he could return with them.

She neared a mausoleum that made her think of a grandmother’s house, shuttered windows and all, only the windows were barred. It was not a grandmother who had been sealed inside of the structure; it was the resting-place of twelve monks from a nearby abbey long abandoned. Franciscans, she’d heard Papa say. Marjorie thought that they should have designed this mausoleum to resemble a church and not a house; only a stone cross standing in front of the door evidenced its story.

Next, she tipped her hat to the plain but respectable gravestones of Mr. Briggs and Mr. Jones. They had been sailors in their youth, and had grown so close during their travels that they were like brothers. It was their wish to one day be buried side-by-side. Only Mr. Jones had married, and his wife rested to his right, but his brother Adam Briggs would accompany him forever. Marjorie wondered if they still sang drinking songs after death.

Marjorie smiled as she spotted the family home straight ahead. It had once belonged to the grave-digger, but no one used this land anymore for burying loved ones; a new graveyard had been designated nearer to the town. Any person who died after the year of eighteen-eighty was to rest down the hill. She did not mind the privacy that this afforded her family, and Papa did not complain about having no graves to dig. He had business to tend to, matters immaterial as the spirits surrounding them, but every bit as real.

Moments later, Marjorie hopped up the two stone steps (another habit she must unlearn) and knocked at the door. 

“Mama!” she called. “We caught him at last.”

The door opened at once. Nina Brahms looked faint with relief at the sight of her daughter and the basket that she carried. Her relief hardened to disapproval just as quickly.

“You oughtn’t have gone alone, Margo,” she scolded. “Your father’s been in the greenhouse all morning; surely he could have helped you, if he’d known what you were up to.”

Marjorie smiled, hoping to reassure her mother. “I enjoy walking alone,” she said, stepping into the house and placing the basket-with-the-raccoon on a nearby chair. “Especially in October. It’s the golden month, you know, at least in my mind.”

Mama was no longer listening. She knelt to examine the basket in that cautious manner of hers. Her silver-streaked blonde hair was pulled back, as always, into a chignon. A curly lock had escaped a pin and was shielding her vision. She batted at it with irritation and said over her shoulder, “Go and call your father. I’d like to get this done in the daytime, but I won’t get started alone.”

“And Adam?” Marjorie asked, thinking of her twelve-year-old brother who always balked when not included in things.

“He’ll hear, I am sure, and be downstairs in a blink. Now, go—get your father.”

Marjorie nodded. She reached for an apple from the basket on the side table and bounded out of the house again, taking a bite as she made her way around the corner to the shed where Papa did the bits of his work that Mama thought inappropriate to keep inside of a family home. 

The four of them referred to it as the greenhouse, since it stood where there could have been a lovely garden, but it was more likely to have been used for storing shovels, rope, and other things needed for grave-digging. All of those objects, she hoped, had been disposed of when Papa bought the property.

She held her breath as she neared the greenhouse door. Its bottom hinge had broken off of the wood, weather-beaten as that wood had been. This made it difficult to close; when left open, the door always hung crooked by the one remaining hinge.

Marjorie and Mama both had asked Papa multiple times if he would not like to install a new door that would provide security for the material stored inside of the greenhouse, but Papa was a forgetful creature. He had agreed twice that a door would be a capital idea, only to forget the day after.

In this instance, the crooked door had been left ajar, and she could hear her father singing a folk song in his native language of German as he worked.

“Papa?” Marjorie called through the ajar door. “May I come in?”

“Of course, my ro-ose, of course.” It was a reply in song, Papa’s voice wearing the cadence of a melody that he hadn’t finished. Sobering, he added, “Your mama has given me a chore to do, correct?”

With great care, Marjorie pulled the door aside until there was a gap wide enough for her to slip through. It was a long building with a large window that had been flung open to allow the crisping air to scatter the smell of whatever Papa was brewing. She could not think of a word to describe how the brew smelled. It had the stab of dreams interrupted before they reached completion. It also had the relief of freshly covered graves, dirt settling over caskets, eager to shield the bodies underneath until the world ended. 

She thought, for a heartbeat, of asking Papa what he was doing. What was Bamoy’s latest invention? Though his name was Johann, he was known by the villagers for some reason as Bamoy. 

“Oh,” he said noncommittally the one time she asked about the name, “I got into some mischief, and the name stuck.” 

“I checked the trap,” Marjorie told him, as he tipped a vial of purplish liquid into a small black cauldron. It was but one from his extensive collection; he possessed one of every size. The largest sat at the far back, covered with a sheet so that leaves and debris would not gather inside. It was large enough for a human child to crawl inside of it and become trapped. “The creature’s in a basket, and Mama wants you to change him back to a boy at once.”

Papa turned to look at her, and in the light of the golden sun she could see the surprise on his face. He was not yet fifty, yet there was something in his eyes that gave the impression he was hundreds of years old. Mama said he was a very handsome man as a youth, when he’d been apprenticed to the magician from whom he learned the craft. 

That was when the two met, and they did not wait long to marry, though they did a good deal of wandering Europe together in the early years of their marriage before deciding to settle. Eventually, they chose a quiet life in remote Scotland, where Marjorie had been born in this house amongst the gravestones.

“Don’t tell me you went to fool around with the trap alone, Margo,” said Papa, though his words of rebuke were gentle. “There are wild animals in the forest, my dear. If the creature in the trap hadn’t exacted revenge on you, they might have finished you off.”

Marjorie could only smile feebly; she’d had a similar conversation with Mama. “I didn’t want to interrupt you,” she admitted. “And I fancied a walk in the afternoon air.”

“Interrupt me? My little rose, our work is not simple. We aren’t farmers or shopkeepers, in which case I would have been happy to let you carry out duties alone. In this case, we are working to eradicate a curse. We still do not know what the boy will be like when we change him back into a human.”

Her eyes roamed about the greenhouse, taking in the jars and knickknacks that evidenced the whimsical, mysterious nature of her father’s work.

“Are you ever going to teach me some of your work?” she asked. “Then I could stay here where it’s safe, and you’d be the one traipsing out to check on traps.”

Amusement shimmered in Bamoy’s blue eyes. “I’d been thinking about it,” he said to her great surprise, “but that is a discussion I shall have with your mama before I make any promises. Come; let us free the poor child from whatever hex has trapped him into the form of a rodent.”

“He’s a raccoon,” Marjorie said. “I had my doubts for a while; I thought, until today, that he might be a big cat.”

“Cats do not need curses to behave as if they intend to kill somebody,” said Papa mildly as they exited the greenhouse. “Let us be silent, before Wolfgang overhears and decides to knock a candle off of the table. Nothing I do pleases him, it seems. Such is the way with cats.”

He took Marjorie’s hand and they made their way back to the house. Surrounding them stood hundreds of gravestones, grinning like crooked teeth. She looked away before her imagination could get the better of her.

Innocent as those gravestones appeared, Marjorie was not allowed out of the house at night. When she’d asked her parents why, they said that it was too easy to become lost among the tombs, but she suspected there was more to it.

One night, she intended to slip away for a walk through the graveyard, regardless of what she was told.

Author’s Note: Chapter 2 will be published on Monday! I hope you enjoyed the beginning of my new book as much as I’m enjoying writing it.

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