Now
I am kneeling on the floor of our Southernmost tower when I hear the faint sound of hooves. Immediately, the hair on the back of my neck stands up and I am on my feet, tucking the book back into my corset as I yell down the stairs.
“Bertha!”
I hear a rustling from below. She always sleeps at the bottom of the staircase when I am up here: a sort of sentinel she is.
“Bertha, wake up! A horse is coming toward the house!”
By the time I’m finished, she’s halfway down the turret stairs, back on the third story and running down the hall, her heavy frame weighing on the sagging wooden floors. I yell at her again to slow down and be cautious but to also be quick. The next moment I turn my head again to the window one last time just to make sure it is really horses and not a pack of wolves or something worse howling at the moon and at us, and then, since I see nothing but in fact the lone full moon, I turn my head back to the wooden sculpture I had been pretending to work on up here. My hands are shaking but I pick up the chisel anyway and start to work it across the wood. God, do not let a terrible fate befall us here, I pray, and even as I do, the hoofbeats grow louder and I can see three burning torches held up to the sky, and all of a sudden, the strange tranquility - forced tranquility - that I had found up in that tower surrounded by this fake sculpture and the book I had come to treasure above all others, is gone. Caput. Drenched in magic invisible power and then…puff, like a mist it dissolves, leaving me trembling, looking out in the opposite direction of the hoofbeats and torches, toward the full moon and something beneath it and beyond it, something that I can’t quite put my finger on, since everything from this direction is shrouded in darkness.
But for one brief moment I see something, something I am almost sure is not actually there. It is orange and glowing and the light seems to outline two horns and in the midst of it two burning pools of light and I can sense, right then and there, that they are looking at me, and only me. And in looking at me, they are marking me for death. No, I whisper to myself, or perhaps to God. No, do not let them find me.
