So would my grandma, I bet, Cassie thought, and she plunged outside again.
There was a strange smell out here, a smell like low tide, like crawling and decaying things. Cassie ran to the edge of the cliff, taking the back route along the bluff to Melanie's house, and she saw that the ocean was dark and wild. The water was neither blue nor green nor gray, but a sludgy, oily color that seemed to be a mixture of all three. Specks of foam were flying on the wind, and there was white froth everywhere.
Above, the clouds took on fantastic shapes, boiling and changing as if molded by unseen hands. The rain drove into Cassie's face. It was a savage and awe-inspiring scene.
No one answered her knock at the door of Number Four. Cassie wasn't sure anybody inside could hear it over the wind and rain. "Aunt Constance?" she shouted, opening the door and peering inside. "Hello?"
She started toward the room that had been given to her mother, and then stopped, turned back guiltily, and wiped her sandy, muddy Reeboks on the mat. Even so, she dripped water on the spotless, mirror-polished hardwood floor as she hurried to the bedroom. The door was barely ajar, and a strange brightness flickered inside.
"Hello? ... Oh, my God!" Cassie poked her head around the door and froze. The room was lit entirely by dozens of white candles. Around the bed were three figures, three women whose appearance was so strange and fantastic that for a moment Cassie didn't recognize them.
One was tall and thin, another was short and plump, and the third was tiny and doll-like. They all had long hair: the tall one's was black and thick, longer than Diana's, the plump one's was silvery-gray and untidy, waving down past her shoulders, and the tiny one's was gauzy and white like floating wisps of seafoam. And they were naked.
Cassie's eyes were popping. "Great-aunt Constance?" she gasped to the one with long black hair.
"Who did you expect?" Melanie's aunt said sharply, her meticulously tweezed eyebrows drawing together. "Lady Godiva? Now go away, child, we're busy."
"Don't be unkind to her," said the plump woman, whom Cassie was now able to identify as Adam's grandmother. She smiled at Cassie, entirely unself-conscious.
"We're trying something to help your mother, dear," the tiny figure, Laurel's Granny Quincey, added. "It's a sky-clad ritual, you see; that's why we're naked. Constance had her doubts, but we convinced her."
"And we need to get on with it," Great-aunt Constance said, gesturing with the wooden cup she was holding. Granny Quincey was holding a bunch of herbs, and Adam's grandmother, a silver bell. Cassie looked at the bed, where her mother lay as motionless as ever. Something about the light in the room made that sleeping face look different, just as it made the three women look different.
"But there's a hurricane coming," Cassie said. "That's why I'm here; I came to warn you."
The women exchanged glances. "Well, if there is, there's no help for it," Adam's grandmother sighed.
"But - "
"Your mother can't be moved, dear," Granny Quincey said firmly. "So you go along and do what you have to, and we'll try to protect her here."
"We're going to fight Black John," Cassie said. The simple statement seemed to hang in the air after she'd said it, and the three old women looked at each other again.
Great-aunt Constance opened her mouth, frowning, but Granny Quincey interrupted her. "There's no one else to do it, Constance. They have to fight."
"Then be careful. You tell Melanie - and all of them - to be careful," Aunt Constance said.
"And you stick together. As long as you stick together you'll have a chance," said Adam's grandmother.
And that was that. The women turned back to the bed. Cassie stood for one more moment looking at the candles - so white, with their flames even whiter, a golden white like Diana's hair - and at the myriad ghostly shadows on the ceiling and walls. Then she left. As she quietly shut the door, all the candle flames danced wildly, and she had a last glimpse of the three women in the room, arms raised, beginning a kind of dance too. The silver bell chimed softly.
She hadn't noticed the wind inside the room, but now she did. Everything outside that door seemed colder and noisier, and the dim light coming in through the windows looked gray and wintry. Cassie had an impulse to go back into the golden room and hide there, but she knew she couldn't.
She walked back to Adam's house, Number Nine, with the wind pushing her all the way.
She was the last one back. The Circle was in Adam's living room, sitting around Sean, who was sitting within the circle of quartz crystals. Sean's face was very pink and scrubbed-looking, his hair was wet and spiky, and he was wearing clothes too big for him. Adam's, Cassie guessed. Around his neck was the canvas pouch full of herbs Diana had prepared. He looked dazed and terrified, but he didn't seem to be trying to get away.
"Were they there? Did you find them?" Diana asked Cassie.
Cassie nodded. She didn't quite want to tell Diana how she had found them. She didn't know how Melanie and Adam and Laurel would feel about their elderly relatives dancing na**d around a sickroom. They might think there was something wrong with it; they might not understand about the golden light.
"They said they'd stay where they were," she said. "Granny Quincey said my mom couldn't be moved, and that they were trying to help her. They said we should be careful, and Adam's grandmother told us to stick together."
"Good advice," Adam said, looking at Sean. "And that's just about the point we've gotten to, here. Are we going to stick together or not?"
"We tried asking him about the murders," Laurel informed Cassie in a low voice, "but he doesn't remember anything - doesn't know what we're talking about. We had to convince him that it wasn't a joke. He believes us now, but he's scared to death."