Serafina and the Black Cloak (6 page)

“What about the girl I saw disappear?” she asked in confusion. She couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t more interested in what she was telling him.

“Children don’t just disappear, Sera,” he said as he continued his efforts.

Her heart sank. He still didn’t believe her.

Her pa looked around the room one last time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and then he looked at her. For a moment, she thought he was finally going to listen to what she was
saying, but then he pointed at her hairbrush and snapped, “For God’s sake, girl, pick up your things!”

“But what about the Man in the Black Cloak?” she argued.

“I don’t want you thinking about anything like that,” he barked. “It was nothing but a nightmare. Now hush up.”

She flinched from the words. She couldn’t understand why he was being so mean. But she could hear the worry in his voice along with the anger, and in the distance she could hear the search
party coming down the stairs. She knew it wasn’t just the threat of discovery that scared him. He hated any talk of the supernatural or any sort of dark and fiendish forces out in the world
that he couldn’t fix with his wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers.

“But it’s real!” she demanded. “The girl’s actually gone, Pa. I’m telling the truth!”

“A little girl’s gotten herself lost, that’s it, and they’re lookin’ for her, so they’ll find her, wherever she is. Get your wits about you. People
don’t just vanish. She’s gotta be someplace.”

She stood in the center of the room. “I think we should both go out there right now and tell them everything I saw,” she declared boldly.

“No, Sera,” he said. “They’ll spit nails if they find me livin’ down here. They’ll fire me. Do you understand that? And God knows what they’ll make of
you. They don’t even know you’re alive, and we’re gonna keep it that way. I’m talkin’ to you dead straight now, girl. You hear me?”

The sound of the search party could be heard down the corridor, and it was coming their way.

Clenching her teeth, she shook her head in frustration and stood before him. “Why, Pa? Why? Why can’t people see me?” She didn’t have the courage to tell him that at
least one Vanderbilt already had, and that he knew her name. “Just tell me, Pa, whatever it is. I’m twelve years old. I’m grown up. I deserve to know.”

“Look, Sera,” he said, “last night, somebody sabotaged the dynamo, did it some real damage that I’m not sure I can mend. If I don’t get it fixed by nightfall,
there’s gonna be hell to pay from the boss, and rightly so. The lights, the elevators, the servant-call system—this whole place depends on the Edison machine.”

She tried to imagine someone sneaking into the electrical room and damaging the equipment. “But why would someone do that, Pa?”

The search party was making its way through the kitchens and would arrive in the workshop at any moment.

“I ain’t got time to think about it,” he said, moving toward her with his huge body. “I just gotta get it workin’, that’s all. Now do what I tell
ya!”

He charged around the room and hid things with such roughness and loudness and violence that it frightened her. She crept behind the boiler and watched him. She knew that when he was like this
she couldn’t get anywhere with him. He just wanted to be left alone to do his job and work on his machines. But it was gnawing at her, and the more she thought about it, the madder she got.
She knew it wasn’t the right time to talk to him about everything she’d been thinking and feeling, but she didn’t care. She just blurted it out.

“I’m sorry, Pa,” she said. “I know you’re busy, but please just tell me why you don’t want anyone to see me.” She stepped out from behind the boiler and
faced him, her voice getting louder now. “Why have you been hiding me all these years?” she demanded. “Just tell me what’s wrong with me. I want to know. Why are you ashamed
of me?”

By the time she was done, she was practically screaming at him. Her voice was so loud and shrill that it actually echoed.

Her pa stopped dead in his tracks and looked at her. She knew she had finally reached down inside him and grabbed that armored heart of his. She’d finally stirred him up. She felt a sudden
impulse to take it all back and dart behind the boiler again to hide, but she didn’t. She stood before him and looked at him as steadily as she could, her eyes watering.

He stood very still over by the bench, his huge hands balled into fists. A visible wave of pain and despair seemed to pass through him all at once, and for a moment he couldn’t speak.

“I’m not ashamed of you,” he said gruffly, his voice strangely hoarse. The searchers were now only one room away.

“You are,” she shot back. She was trembling in fear, but she wasn’t going to give up this time. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to shake him to the core.
“You’re ashamed of me,” she said again.

He turned away from her so that she couldn’t see his face, just the back of his head and huge, bulky body. Several seconds of silence went by. Then he shook his head like he was arguing
with himself, or furious with her, or both—she wasn’t sure.

“Just keep your mouth shut and follow me,” he said as he turned and walked out of the room.

Scurrying after him, she caught up with him in the corridor. Her body felt queasy all over. She didn’t know where he was taking her or what was going to happen. She could barely suck in
breaths as he led her down the narrow stone stairs to the subbasement and into the electrical room with the iron dynamo and thick black wires that spidered up the walls. They had left the search
party behind them, at least for a little while.

“We’ll hole up in here,” he said as he pulled the door shut with a heavy thud and locked them in. As he lit a lantern against the darkness, she’d never seen him look so
serious, so grave and pale, and it frightened her.

“What’s happening, Pa?” she asked, her voice shaking.

“Sit down,” he said. “Ya ain’t gonna like what I got to tell ya, but it might help ya understand.”

Serafina swallowed, sat on an old wooden spool of copper wire, and prepared herself to listen. Her pa sat on the floor facing her, with his back against the wall. Staring down
at the floor and deep in thought, he began to talk.

“Years ago, I was workin’ as a mechanic in the train yard in Asheville,” he said. “The foreman and his wife had just had their third baby boy and their home was full of
joy, but while everyone else celebrated, I sat alone in a kind of self-made misery. I ain’t proud of it, the way I was soppin’ around that night, but things just weren’t
workin’ out for me the way they were supposed to in a man’s life. I wanted to meet a good woman, build a house in town, and have children of my own, but years had gone by and it
hadn’t happened. I was a big man and not much to look at. I sweated all day on the engines, and those few times I encountered any womenfolk, I could never find my words. I could talk about
nuts and bolts till the mornin’ come, but not much else.”

She opened her mouth to ask a question, but she didn’t want to disrupt the story that was finally pouring out of her pa.

“That night, while everyone was tipping the jug,” he continued, “I was feelin’ pretty poor, and I headed out. I went for a long walk, just walkin’ like ya do when
you got too much on your mind to do naught else. I went deep into the forest, up through River’s Gap, and into the mountains. When night came, I just kept walkin’.”

It was hard for her to picture her father traveling through the forest. All those times he had warned her had led her to believe that he would never set foot in the forest. He hated the forest.
At least he did now.

“Were you scared, Pa?”

“Naw, I weren’t,” he said, shaking his head and still looking at the floor. “But I shoulda been.”

“Why? What happened?” She couldn’t even imagine what it was. The flicker of the lantern cast an eerie shadow on his face. She had always loved his stories, but this one felt
closer to his heart than any story he had ever told.

“As I was walkin’ through the woods, I heard a queer howlin’ noise, like an animal in terrible, writhing pain. The bushes were movin’ somethin’ fierce, but I
couldn’t quite make out what it was.”

“Was it somethin’ dyin’, Pa?” She leaned toward him.

“I don’t think so,” he said, looking up at her. “The ruckus in the bushes went on for a spell, then the noise stopped all sudden-like. I thought it was over, but then a
pair of greenish-yellow eyes peered at me from the darkness. Whatever sort of man or beast it was, it circled slowly around me, taking one position and then another, studying me real careful, like
it was trying to make a decision about me, whether I was worth eatin’ or just lettin’ be. I sensed a real power behind those eyes. But then the eyes disappeared. The beast was gone. And
I heard a strange mewling, crying sound.”

She straightened her back and looked at him. “Crying?” she asked in confusion. That definitely wasn’t what she was expecting.

“I searched through the bushes. Blood covered the ground, and in the blood lay a pile of small creatures. Three of ’em were dead, but one remained just barely alive.”

She got off the wooden spool and crouched down beside her pa. She stared at him, totally absorbed in his story. In her mind, she could see the bloody creatures on the ground.

“But what kind of creatures were they?” she asked in amazement.

He shook his head. “Like everyone else who lives in these mountains, I’d heard the stories of black magic, but I never gave them much credit until that night. I studied the one that
was still alive the best I could in the darkness, but I still couldn’t figure what kind of thing it was. Or more like my mind just couldn’t believe it. But when I finally took up the
creature in my bare hands and held it, I realized that it was actually a tiny human baby curled into a little ball.”

Serafina’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “What? Wait. I don’t understand. What happened? How did a baby get there?”

“The same question was runnin’ through my own mind, believe me, but one thing I knew for certain: regardless of how she came into the world, I had to get this baby some help. I
bundled her up in my jacket, hiked back down the hill, and carried her out of the woods. I took her to the midwives at the convent and begged them to help, but they gasped at the sight of her,
muttering that she was the devil’s work. They said she was malformed, near to death, and that there was nothing they could do to help her.”

“But why?” Serafina cried in outrage. “That’s terrible! That’s so mean!” Just because something looked different didn’t mean you just threw it away. She
couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world it was out there. The attitude of the midwives almost bothered her more than the idea of a yellow-eyed beast lurking in the night. But she felt a
renewed glimmer of admiration for her pa as she imagined his huge, warm hands wrapped around that tiny little baby’s body, giving it heat, keeping it alive.

Her father took a long, deep, troubled breath as he remembered that night, and then he continued his story. “You have to understand the poor little thing had been born with her eyes
closed, Sera, and the nuns said that she would never see. She’d been born deaf, and they said she would never hear. And it was plain enough to see that she had four toes on each foot instead
of five, but that was the least of it. Her collarbones were malformed, and she had an unnaturally long, curving spine—all twisted-like—and she did not look like she could
survive.”

The shock hit her like a blow. She looked up at her father in astonishment. “I’m the baby!” she shouted, leaping to her feet. This wasn’t just a story, this was
her
story. She’d been born in the forest. That meant her pa had
found
her and taken her in. She was like a baby fox who’d been raised by a coyote. She stood in front of
her pa. “I’m the baby!” she said again.

Her father looked at her, and she saw the truth of it flickering in his eyes, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t say yes and didn’t say no. It was like he couldn’t
reconcile his memory of that dark night with the daughter he had now, and he had to tell the story the only way he could: as if it wasn’t her at all.

“The bones of the baby’s back weren’t connected to each other the way they should have been,” he continued. “The nuns were half scared out of their wits at the idea
of caring for this child, like it was some sort of demon spawn, but to me she was a little baby, a little chitlan, and you didn’t abandon such a thing. Who cares how many toes she
had!”

Serafina kneeled on the floor in front of him, trying to understand it all. She was beginning to see the kind of man her father was and maybe where she got some of her own stick-to-it-iveness.
But it was all so confusing. How could she get anything from him if she wasn’t even his?

“I took that baby away, fearin’ them nuns would drown her,” he said.

“I hate them nuns,” she spat. “They’re terrible!”

He shook his head, not in disagreement, but more like the nuns didn’t mean anything at all because they were the least of his problems.

“I didn’t have any proper food,” he said, “so I crept into a farmer’s barn and milked his goat—stole a bottle, too. Felt ashamed doin’ these things, but
I needed to get some food into her, and I couldn’t see a better road. That night, I fed the little chitlan her first meal, and as bad off as she was, and with her eyes still closed, she drank
it down real good, and I remember praying that somehow it’d help. The more I held her and watched her suck down that milk, the more I wanted her to live.”

“Then what happened?” She slid closer to him. She knew that outside the locked door of the electrical room, somewhere above them, the lawful inhabitants of Biltmore Estate were
searching from room to room, but she didn’t care. “Keep goin’, Pa,” she nudged.

“I looked for a woman who could mother the baby proper, but none of them would do it. They was sure she was gonna die. But two weeks later, while I was fixin’ an engine with one hand
and bottle-feedin’ the chitlan with the other, somethin’ happened. She opened her eyes for the first time and stared straight at me. All I could do was stare right back at her. She had
these big, beautiful yellow eyes that just didn’t stop. I knew then and there that I was hers, and she was mine, that we were kin now, and there was no denyin’ it.”