In the Beginning

Two minutes after Mabel Maypother gave birth, she looked down into her newborn’s steel gray eyes and smiled. Then she lay back on the hospital gurney and died.

Thus began the auspicious life of Noleen-Anne Harris Morgan Maypother, the wee babe clutched tightly in her dead mother’s slowly cooling embrace.

Harold Maypother was distraught. Mabel had been the love of his life. He had no idea what he was going to do without her. While he quietly began to lose his grip on reality, his two sisters—and only living relatives—took possession of Noleen-Anne.

Clara was the oldest Maypother and very bossy. She had bossed Harold around from the time he was in diapers all the way up until his marriage to Mabel Harris three years earlier. Aunt Clara thought it was her job to boss. It made her happy and kept the people around her from being messy. And, in truth, by picking up where she had left off on her brother’s wedding day, she probably saved his sanity that awful night.

With baby Noleen tucked into the folds of her coat, Aunt Clara marched herself and her two siblings back to Harold’s small apartment and, after giving baby Noleen a bottle, sent everyone off to bed with the adage that things always look better in the morning.

Baby Noleen woke up to find herself wrapped in a pair of warm, strong arms. She trained her gray eyes up into the smiling face of her aunt Sarah. At the time, Sarah was only sixteen, but there was something ancient in her lovely face. When she was older and better read, Noh surmised that Aunt Sarah and Florence Nightingale probably had a few things in common. But at the time, she only saw the glow that emanated from her young aunt, and it made her feel warm and loved.

Poor little Noh, her aunt cooed. We’ll love you, motherless or not. You’re a special little girl… even if you don’t know it yet.

Noh didn’t understand then, but later she would. There was indeed something very special inside the little girl, something passed down through the bloodline of the Maypother women, so that in each generation there was one female child born with a special talent. This special talent would bide its time, watching and waiting for the day when it could finally show itself—and then, whether she liked it or not, Noh’s life would be changed forever.

Noh the Magnificent

The summer had been a mess so far.

Noh was supposed to be spending the already messy summer with her father in the Appalachians while he studied the mating habits of the Appalachian Russell Newt. But at the last minute he had decided that his daughter was just too young to go slogging through the muck In Search Of, so he shipped her off to Aunt Clara’s house for the summer.

When she got there—the note from her father explaining the situation clutched in her small, sweaty hand—she found that Aunt Clara had packed up her family and gone to the beach for the summer.Well, since she wasn’t sure exactly what beach her aunt and cousins had decamped to, she didn’t think spending the summer with them was going to be a viable solution.

Noh thought about getting back on the train and trying to find Harold, but she decided against it in the end. She thought, quite justly, that he would already be far into the woods and completely unreachable.

She sat on Aunt Clara’s stoop for a good two hours, debating her options and eating the lemons (rind, seeds, and all) she had collected from the backyard.

Tired and feeling the onset of an acidy stomach, she walked back to the train station and booked a seat on the night train to New Newbridge. She knew that the only stable person in her family (i.e., guaranteed to be where they were supposed to be) was her aunt Sarah, who taught English literature at the New Newbridge Academy. And anyway, Noh was going to be starting there in the fall for sixth grade, so she figured it was as good a decision as she could make at the time.

She slept the whole way on the train. Her mind was filled with very lucid dreams that tickled her brain. She saw a boy her own age sitting at a tall desk, reading a crumpled and smudged letter. Sensing her presence, he glared angrily at her.

The old lady sitting beside her nudged her awake at the New Newbridge stop. Noh collected her bag and stepped out into a very humid summer day.

In the Cemetery

New Newbridge was not a big town. Noh was able to navigate her way from the train station to the school without much difficulty. She had visited her aunt Sarah three times since she had taken the teaching position there three years before.

Noh’s sense of what was where was more highly developed than if she had never been there at all, so she only got lost once—when she tried to take a shortcut through the old cemetery.

The cemetery had been in business since the pioneer days. There were graves that had been so exposed to the elements that you could barely read the rudimentary inscriptions. Noh, who was strangely drawn to any and every cemetery she had had the good fortune to come across, clapped her hands happily and opened the creaky iron gate. Pieces of rust came off onto her hands, staining them. But she didn’t mind.

No one but Noh knew why she loved cemeteries. And if you had asked her, Noh probably wouldn’t have told you, anyway. But, suffice it to say, it had something to do with the word serenity. Serenity oozed from the graves and made Noh feel safe and secure. She imagined that when she lay in the grass near a welcoming headstone, it was like being wrapped in her dead mother’s warm embrace.

It was a phantom pain she felt—being motherless. Because how could her feelings of grief be real if she had never even known the person she had lost in the first place? But still… it felt pretty real to her, anyway.

Noh had once tried to explain all this to her cousin Jordy, but he had only run and told Aunt Clara, who had promptly told Noh’s father, who had sent her to see a psychologist in a drab gray building downtown. So, from that day forth, she had decided to keep any strange leanings to herself.

Noh walked through the old cemetery, picking wildflowers and reading the inscriptions on the headstones.

She was so intent on what she was doing that she didn’t notice that she was back where she had started. The only thing that made her realize she was going in circles was that the headstone inscriptions started repeating themselves.

The next go-around, she paid more attention to where she was going. Yet when she thought she was on the other side of the cemetery, she found herself instead back at the rusty gate. It didn’t matter where she started or how slow or fast she walked—Noh just couldn’t seem to get to the other side. Finally, she chalked it all up to hunger and low blood sugar and slunk back out the same gate she had happily walked through two hours before.

What’re you doing here, girl? You don’t belong here!

The voice was harsh, tinged with age, and pretty mean-sounding to boot. Noh looked up, startled to find an old woman standing just inside the gate of the cemetery, glaring at her.

Noh may have been lost in thought as she had exited the cemetery only moments ago, but she wasn’t blind—Noh knew the old woman hadn’t been there before.

I thought anyone could visit a cemetery, Noh said defiantly. Usually she was pretty respectful of people older than herself, but there was something about this old woman that made her want to talk back. Maybe it was the cruel turn of the old woman’s mouth or the hateful glint in her eye, but it was all Noh could do not to stick out her tongue at her.

Don’t you sass me, girl, the old woman hissed, her bony shoulders shaking beneath the homemade black woolen dress that covered her stick-figure frame. Noh couldn’t help thinking that the old woman looked just like a witch. All she needed was a broomstick, a pointy black hat, and a cat.

It’s a free country, Noh said, trying not to be too rude, even though it was very hard not to say what was on her mind. Anyone should be able to pay their respects, ma’am.

The old woman spit on the ground in front of the cemetery gate.

This is private property, she hissed again before slamming the gate shut right in front of Noh’s face. "We don’t want any of your respects—we like it just as it is. We don’t need your kind coming in and stirring things up!"

The old woman took a small stone from her pocket and threw it through the bars of the cemetery gate, where it landed right at Noh’s feet. Noh reached down to pick it up, curious to find a hand-carved eye cut into its polished gray surface.

She knew exactly what this stone was… it was an evil eye.

Noh looked up, opening her mouth to protest the strange gift, but closed it when she saw that the old woman was gone. She had somehow disappeared among the graves while Noh was picking up the stone. Noh walked over to the cemetery gate and looked inside, but she could find neither hide nor hair of the crazy old woman.

She knew that the old woman probably hadn’t meant the stone to be a gift, but that’s exactly what Noh decided it was. She wasn’t scared of the evil eye—in fact, she kind of liked it. She put it into her pocket, rubbing her fingers against its polished surface. It would be a good reminder that there was always something strange and interesting lurking just around the corner.

The New Newbridge Academy

After her strange run-in at the cemetery, Noh spent the rest of her walk to the New Newbridge Academy deep in thought, trying to figure out how an old woman could simply disappear like that.

That was why she smelled the New Newbridge Academy before she saw it. The cook, Mrs. Marble, was known throughout five counties for her apple pie, and she was in baking heaven today. Noh’s mouth began to water the minute the school’s front drive came into view.

All in all, the school was really a hodgepodge of different architectural styles. The old building itself was Gothic