“It’s bad enough that people talk about us. Don’t go giving them fuel for their rumors. And trust me, you don’t want to follow Sophie’s path anyway. It won’t take you anywhere you want to be.”
Laura gulps. For some reason, the images of the stained-glass saints from the church windows pop into her mind, those contorted demon faces and the look of Saint David as he cast them out.
“Where did it take her, then?” she asks with bated breath.
“Nowhere you want to be,” her mother repeats gruffly. “They say Sophie is hardly even human anymore. She walks on all fours and growls like an animal, more demon than human. And if you come across her in the woods—”
A nervous, disbelieving laugh bubbles out of Laura in spite of herself. “On all fours?”
“You think this is funny?” Her mother’s puffy eyes narrow, and her face shuts down. The closeness Laura briefly felt, the connection, is gone.
“It just sounds a little—”
“The Bergmanns had a cabin in the forest by the river,” her mother goes on, nonchalantly cutting her off. “But they don’t go there anymore. Nobody goes there anymore. Why do you think that is?”
Laura has heard of the cabin by the river. There’s not just the one, but several—the older teenagers were rumored to throw wild parties there, the kind of parties she could only dream of being invited to.
“It’s not because of some witch,” Laura says. “It’s because the cabins get flooded every spring.”
Once again, her mother ignores her.
“They say Sophie’s whole family is now cursed,” she says. Nothing in her tone suggests this is anything but the absolute truth. “She brought the curse on them with her actions. They might think they’re rid of her, but the curse is there. It’ll catch up to them sooner or later.”
There’s a sudden flash of clarity in Laura’s mind. She remembers exactly where she’d heard about La Grosse Sophie and what her real name was. She clasps her hand over her mouth, not sure whether to chuckle or be horrified.
“Sophie Bergmann,” she says. “You’re talking about Sophie Bergmann?”
Her mother nods. “Yes. The very same. You can’t possibly remember her. You were this tall when she went away.”
Sure enough, but Laura knows exactly who she’s talking about. She may never have met Sophie herself, but she knows her family rather well.
“Pierre Bergmann’s wife,” she says, still a little incredulous. “Tony’s mom?”
“That boy is bad news,” her mother says triumphantly. “Just like his mother.”
Laura knew that Tony’s mom took off years ago, when he and his older brother were kids. But somehow she never made the connection until that moment.
Geez, she thinks. No wonder Tony is so messed up. But his father, Pierre, is respected in town. He’s the chief of police, and the oldest son followed in his footsteps. As straight and narrow as can be.
“The curse will catch up to them,” her mother says, and her utter certainty strikes Laura as incongruous and strange.
The next day, Laura leaves home early—early for her, anyway. She’s more determined than ever to track down Tony and talk to him. When she doesn’t find him at any of the usual places, she decides she knows exactly where to go.
She makes it across town in barely twenty minutes. As she leaves the busy stretch of the main street behind her, people become scarce, only cars pass by every so often. She takes the turn onto the dirt road that leads toward the woods by the river. She can’t help but ask herself if this is the last time anyone will have seen her. If she were not to come back, could anyone even tell where she’d been headed, where she was last seen?
These are stupid thoughts, she tells herself. Her boots are covered in mud, and so are the hems of her jeans, soaking through, with splatters going higher than her knees. Her toes are starting to get a bit cold. It’s just that her mother’s words got under her skin, she decides. Which was probably the point. She was most likely just scaring Laura straight, and here’s Laura now, doing the exact opposite of what she was supposed to.
There’s no witch. Tony’s mom ran away with some guy—that’s what Laura had heard before. It was stuff kids whispered about—and they took care to whisper quietly, so quietly Tony wouldn’t get wind of it. Since Tony himself was a kid, he’d been someone to fear, especially if he caught you talking shit about his family. And if he heard someone spreading rumors about Sophie Bergmann being a witch—well, Laura would rather not find out what might happen.
The forest has had time to engulf the road that once led to the smattering of little riverside cabins, and there’s a barely discernible winding path that Laura manages to find by sheer luck. Only because, at this time of year, there’s no grass yet and no leaves. You’d never know by looking at those bare branches that the trees weren’t dead, that in a couple of short weeks, leaves would sprout from buds, and the grass and underbrush would be so thick you couldn’t walk through it. As it is, the ground is covered with a thick layer of last year’s fallen foliage. It squelches beneath her every step, and her hole-riddled boots are now full of muddy water.
It’s lucky that the winter was relatively mild, without too much snow, or the very place where Laura now walks would be flooded. She’d have to wade through knee-deep water just to get to where the cabins are. Why anyone would build their cabins there in the first place, she didn’t really know. She’d asked her mother once, and her mother had shrugged and told her not to ask dumb questions. When she asked a teacher at school, she was told that the cabins didn’t used to get flooded every year. Only in recent years did the river start to overflow. Laura was itching to ask why that was, but she didn’t want anyone to think she was a teacher’s pet or something. She tried to think of an explanation by herself, but her mind went to unexpected, scary places. If the river didn’t overflow before but was overflowing now, what did it mean for the future? Would it keep overflowing until it submerged the houses and the fields and the church? Her imagination painted a vivid picture of Marly underwater, only the church spire protruding over a vast, murky lake.
The first of the cabins comes into view after about fifteen minutes of her huffing and puffing and tripping over exposed gnarled tree roots. The first thing Laura notices is that the little log cabin might not look lived in but it doesn’t look totally abandoned either. There’s a big padlock on the door, and in the windows she can make out quaint lace curtains through the grimy glass. An overturned canoe sits propped up on two tree stumps. She passes this one without hesitation—nothing much for her to do here—and moves on to the next one, trying to figure out which one belongs to the Bergmanns.
As she gets closer to the river, the cabins progressively get shabbier. Paint peels so much that only flakes remain clinging to the wood. Windows are smashed. Most of the cabins here sit on short, stubby stilts, but Laura can see the lines along their walls that water left, marking its level one year after another. Those wouldn’t be habitable for sure.
The moment she sees the right cabin, she knows it instinctively. It’s bigger than the others and nicer—or at least it used to be nicer before the river took its toll. She can still see the effort someone once put into its maintenance. The crackling paint was once a nice, lively color, and the windowpanes are carved, probably by hand. The roof is starting to show its age but you can still tell that it was built to last with heavy, quality shingles.
And the door is open.
Not wide open, merely open a crack. Laura can only tell from a certain angle once she gets close enough. She draws a breath and makes her way up to the cabin. High wooden stairs, six of them, lead up to the porch.
She places her foot tentatively on the first one. It holds her weight perfectly without so much as a creak or groan. Just like the rest of the cabin, the stairs are solidly built from quality treated wood. She goes up two, then three stairs, and before she knows it, she’s standing in front of the door.
I could still make a run for it, she catches herself thinking. I don’t have to go inside. This is crazy. It’s an abandoned cabin. There’s nothing in there.
Yet with her right hand she’s already feeling nervously around the pockets of her coat for the flashlight she brought. She finds it and holds it aloft and then gingerly pushes open the door, the beam of the flashlight aimed straight ahead.
The door creaks open. The light falls on a dirty wooden floor. Laura advances cautiously, one step, then another, and then she’s inside the cabin.
There’s a reason it looked bigger than the others—it is. Unlike the simple structures that consist of one big room with a wood furnace in the corner, this is an actual chalet on two levels. A staircase in the far left corner leads up to a mezzanine. The windows are grimy and barely let in any light, so she has to rely on her flashlight as she takes step after careful step farther into the cabin.
Her pulse accelerates. In her shaky hand, the beam of the flashlight dances on the surroundings. The smell in here is vile, stifling, too sweet, and there’s a distant sound of buzzing that gives her the creeps.
I should go, she has time to think. I really should get the hell out of here.
And she’s close to doing just that, but at the same moment, the light slices across the surface of the old table, marooned in the dead center of the space. Something glints—the last thing Laura expected to see, the bright, clean yellow gleam that’s so familiar. She steadies her hand and inches forward. Her heart thrums so loudly it drowns out her thoughts.
