Serafina and the Black Cloak (14 page)

“I want you to ride with me in my carriage, Braeden,” Mr. Vanderbilt said. “Mr. Crankshod will drive us.”

“Yes, sir,” Braeden said, “I understand, but we need to bring my horses home.” His horses had been harnessed, but there wasn’t a coachman to drive them.

“I’ll take care of it,” Mr. Thorne volunteered. He walked over to the horses, patted their heads gently as they nuzzled him, then climbed up into the empty driver’s seat
and gathered the reins.

Serafina saw Braeden smile, relieved that Mr. Thorne was willing to help, but something struck her as a bit odd. Many gentlemen were accomplished riders, but few had any experience with driving
a carriage, which was a servant’s job.

Mr. Bendel, who was riding his thoroughbred, came up alongside Mr. Thorne. “Well, there you go, Thorne. You’ve got a fallback position if you ever lose your fortune.”

“I have to get a fortune before I can lose it,” Mr. Thorne said humbly.

The two gentlemen laughed with each other, but then Mr. Bendel became more serious, tipped his hat to Mr. Thorne and Mr. Vanderbilt, and joined the search party of half a dozen riders that was
heading out to look for Nolan.

“Don’t wait on supper for me,” Mr. Bendel called back to his friends as he rode off with the other horsemen.

Soon the carriages were all moving and heading down the road toward home.

Serafina wanted desperately to go with them, but she knew she couldn’t. She remained hidden in the bushes. She had to suppress a sense of panic that she was being left behind, that
she’d never be able to find her way through the forest back to Biltmore. And she missed Braeden’s company already. As she watched the carriages recede into the distance, she thought,
Good-bye, my friend,
and she hoped he was thinking the same.

But even as the carriages disappeared, she felt a tingling sensation course through her limbs. She should have been frightened to be in the forest alone. All her life she’d been told to
stay away from it, but now here she was. Far from Biltmore. Alone in the trees. And she had an idea. She was downright keen on it. She just hoped that it wasn’t going to get her lost. Or
killed.

As she stepped onto the empty road and looked down the length of it, she had a weird and foreign feeling from being so far away from her pa and Biltmore and all the commotion
there. She half expected to burst into tears, go running after the carriages, and wail,
Wait! Wait! You forgot about me!

But she didn’t. And she felt rather grown-up about it.

The sun was well up now and casting a lovely warm light on the trees. Birds were singing. There was a gentle breeze. Things weren’t so bad in the forest.

But then she looked down the long road winding through the trees and remembered that she was eleven miles from home.

“I’ll try to be home for dinner, Pa,” she said with a pang of uncertainty in her stomach, and she started walking. But she wasn’t exactly heading for home. Not
directly.

The Man in the Black Cloak had seemed to know the forest very well, and she remembered the tales of folk going missing. She had a creeping suspicion that the Man in the Black Cloak might be in
some way connected to the abandoned village that she’d heard tell about. She had decided she was going to find the old village and see if it gave her any clues. Why would all the people in a
town abandon their homes and leave?

There was a part of her, too, that was anxious to delve into the shadows of the forest, to see this mysterious world. It drew her, not just because she’d been forbidden by her pa to come
here, but by the thorny truth of her pa’s own account: she’d been
born
here.

She decided to walk on down the road a spell and see what she could see. Perhaps there would be an old sign pointing to the abandoned village, or perhaps she’d meet someone along the road
who might be able to tell her how to get there. One way or another, it seemed like it would be pretty easy to find an entire town.

As she walked, her mind kept drifting back to her pa. She wished she could get a message to him. He’d be worried sick about her, especially with the horrible tales of disappearing
children. She wondered if he ever got the dynamo working.

It created the one thing that everyone other than her needed so desperately at night: light. Who in the world would purposely damage an electric generator? And who would even know how to do
something like that? Her pa was the only man on the estate who knew how it worked. Him, and maybe George Vanderbilt if he referred to one of the books in his library.

She thought that it was interesting how just about everyone had a special talent or skill, something they were naturally drawn to and good at, and then they worked years to master it. Nobody
knew how to do everything. It wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough time in the night. But everyone knew something. And everyone was a little different. Some people did one thing. Others
did another. It made her think that maybe God intended for them to all fit together, like a puzzle made whole.

It still stunned her when she tried to imagine her big, train mechanic pa carrying a newborn baby out of the forest and taking care of her all those years. It had never occurred to her until now
that she belonged anywhere but in the basement with her father, but now her mind ran wild with questions and ideas. She was anxious to get home, but walking down that road, she felt a little
exhilarated that she was free and on her own. She could go in any direction she chose.

She walked for an hour without seeing a soul, nothing but blue jays and chickadees twitching about her, a few squirrels chattering away at her, and a mink dashing across the road in front of her
like his life depended on it. She wasn’t even sure she was still heading in the right direction anymore, but she figured she couldn’t go wrong if she stayed on the road.

Then she came to a three-way split.

The left road was the widest and seemed to be the most traveled. She got down on her hands and knees and studied the rocky ground. It was hard to tell, but she thought that maybe she could see
the indention of carriage wheels. But the middle road was wide and clear as well, with occasional dents in the ground that might be from the hooves of horses. Either one of these roads could be the
road to Biltmore.

Only the third road was different. It wasn’t even right to call it a road, but what
used to be
a road. Two old, rotting fir trees had collapsed, making an X across the path. Thick
vines of poison ivy and smothering creeper grew all around and seemed to strangle the two fallen trees. This road obviously hadn’t been traveled by carriage or horseback in years. She
wasn’t even sure a person on foot could get through.

She didn’t see any sign or marker that identified the road, but it seemed possible that an old, unused pathway like this might lead to the abandoned village. Maybe the state of the road
choked off the town. Or maybe the forest took back the road when the townsfolk disappeared. In any case, if she had any hope of solving the mystery of the Man in the Black Cloak, she needed clues
and information. Where did he come from? What was his story? How could she stop him?

Poison ivy had never affected her the way it did other people, but she still climbed carefully through the thicket of vines and thorns. On the other side of the two crossed trees, she came into
a boscage of rotting, dead snags, with rocks on the ground as sharp as ax blades. The narrow, overgrown track twisted and turned, and dove down into a rocky ravine, and she couldn’t see what
lay beyond.

As she gazed at the darkened passage, a shiver went through her spine. She had no idea where it would lead her, but she started down the path.

S
erafina followed the shadowed path for a while, crawling over fallen trees and through nasty thickets, until she came to yet another split.

As she was trying to figure out which direction to go, she heard faint sounds drifting through the branches. The sounds had an eerie, unearthly quality to them. She thought it might be nothing
more than the wind blowing through the trees, but when she listened very carefully it almost seemed like there were people calling to one another in the distance and children playing.

With no other clues to guide her, she decided to go toward the sounds and see what she could find. If she passed a house, then perhaps the inhabitants could point her in the right direction.

The path led her around a sharp curve and plummeted into a steep, bracken-choked ravine, then it climbed back out again, making its way among large moss-covered rocks and old trees twisted by
wind and age. Desperate for soil, the trees’ roots clung to the rocks like giant hands, their massive fingers plunging into the earth beneath them.

This place is terribly creepy,
she thought, but she kept going, determined to keep moving forward.

Unlike normal trees, which grew upward toward the sunlight, these had gnarled, contorted branches, as if they had been twisted by agonizing pain. Many of the trees stood dead and bare, withered
by disease or some other killing force. Still more of the trees lay dead on the ground, their trunks crisscrossing one another as if a giant had pushed them over.

As she made her way, a mist rose up from the leaf-covered forest floor, and a fog set in that obscured her view of the terrain around her.

Oh, great. If I can’t see, I’m gonna get lost for sure
.…

She turned around to head back toward the last split in the path, but the fog became so thick that even this simple navigation was impossible. She tried to control her fear, but she felt the
panic rise up in her. She gulped for air as the mist surrounded her and she lost her sense of place and direction. She began to realize that she’d made a terrible mistake in leaving the main
road.
Stay calm,
she thought.
Just think it through
.…
Find your way home
.…

Her foot hit a lump, and she tripped and fell forward onto the ground. Her hands and face touched something wet and slimy buried in the leaves. She gasped when she saw that it was the bloody
carcass of a deer or some other large animal. Its body had been eviscerated, its guts ripped out. Its head and hind legs were missing, but from what was left over, it appeared that it had been
purposely cached here.

She gagged as she got up onto her feet, wiped her hands on the bark of a slimy tree, and moved on, desperate to find the road.

When she heard voices ahead, she felt a swell of hope. She moved quickly toward them.
Maybe they’re travelers,
she thought.
Perhaps there’s a hunting shack ahead.

But then she stopped in her tracks. They were the same eerie noises she had heard before, but this time they were much closer: hoarse, raucous calling sounds, but with a strange, almost human
quality, like some kind of weird children running and playing in the forest. A surge of fear swept through her. Her legs and hands buzzed with agitation. The sounds were above her and all around
her now, and still she couldn’t see them.

“Show yourself!” she demanded.

Something brushed past her shoulder and she whirled, crouching to the ground to defend herself. A burst of rushing air made her skin crawl as a black shape flew over her and then landed in a
tree.

She looked around her. And then she saw them. First one, and then another. They were surrounding her. The hoarse croaking sounds came from a conspiracy of thirteen ravens moving through the
branches of the trees, calling to one another, speaking in their ancient codes. But the ravens weren’t just conversing with each other—they were looking at her, flying around her,
trying to communicate with her. As if frustrated by her lack of understanding, several of the ravens began diving at her with their claws. Were they attacking her or were they warning her? She
didn’t know.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. She covered her head with her arms and ran to escape them. She dove into a thicket of brush, where the large birds couldn’t fly. Driven by fear,
she just kept running.

When she finally stopped to catch her breath, she looked behind her to see if they were still following. She found herself standing on something hard—some sort of flat surface. She looked
down and saw a long, straight edge of gray stone.
Now what?
she thought.

It was half buried, but she knelt on the ground and wiped away the dirt and leaves to expose the smooth, flat granite underneath.

Serafina read the words that someone had etched in blocky letters into the stone:

HERE LIES BLOOD
,
AND LET IT LIE
,
SPEECHLESS STILL
,
AND NEVER CRY
.

She felt a cold sweat pass over her. She looked around. There was another flat gray stone just a few feet away. She pulled the brush aside and read:

COME HITHER
,
COME HITHER
,
AND LAY WITH ME
.
WE
’
LL MURDER THE MAN WHO MURDERED ME
.
CLOVEN SMITH 1797–1843