Before the Devil Knows You're Here
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Synopsis
Part dark gothic fantasy, part journey into the bizarre, this delicious blending of tall tales and Latin American surrealism will haunt you as you devour it!
"Highly imaginative and powerfully affecting."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
1836, Wisconsin. Catalina lives with her pa and brother in a ramshackle cabin on the edge of the wilderness. Harsh winters have brought the family to the brink of starvation, and Catalina has replaced her poet's soul with an unyielding determination to keep Pa and her brother alive.
When a sudden illness claims Pa, a strange man appears—a man covered in bark, leaves growing from his head, and sap dripping from his eyes. He scoops up her brother and disappears, leaving behind a bird with crimson wings. Catalina can’t let this man—if that’s what he is—have her brother. So, she grabs Pa’s knife and follows the bird.
Along the way, she finds help from a young lumberjack, who has his own reasons for hunting the Man of Sap. As their journey takes them deeper into the woods, they encounter strange beasts and tormented spirits. The more they uncover about the Man of Sap, the more they learn how deeply Catalina’s fate is entwined with his, planted long ago in cursed seeds.
An enchanting mixture of American tall tales and Faustian elements, Before the Devil Knows You’re Here centers a fierce Mexican American poet on a quest to save her brother. Autumn Krause’s vivid, haunting prose and rich symbolism make this a must-read for fans of Maggie Stiefvater and Erin Craig.
Release date: October 3, 2023
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Print pages: 240
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Before the Devil Knows You're Here
Autumn Krause
1836
WISCONSIN, DEEP IN THE WILDERNESS
MOST WOULD SAY THERE’S NO SUCH person as John Chapman. They say he died at nineteen, in the kitchen of his farmhouse. And maybe they’re right. You need to have a heart to be alive and if I ever saw mine, I imagine it’d be an apple. A rotten one, sitting inside my rib cage between my lungs, putrefying me from the inside out. When I put my hand over my bark-covered chest to feel its beats, I become painfully aware of what I wish to forget:
The aphids nibbling at the leaves in my hair, making them twist and curl, though they never fall from my head.
The sticky feeling of spiders stringing their threads between my nostrils and ears.
The tickling of hundreds of ants’ feet marching up and down my legs and arms.
Strongest of all is the strap on my shoulder. It’s light now. The sack is nearly empty. I have sweet relief. But I’ve worn it for so long. I know its ways. Seeds will rise from the bottom. Their weight will make the strap pull and gouge, cutting a weeping gash in my shoulder.
I’ve never gotten used to the next part.
My world turns black. I’m there, eyes staring into darkness, mind awake, thoughts forming with the same slow creep of molasses oozing out of a jar. The times come closer and closer together and I know, soon, I’ll be lost to them completely.
So, now, before I am lost again, I must force my hand to close around the pencil. Bark splinters at my finger joints as they bend, revealing lily-white skin underneath. It’s visible only for a moment before wood grows over my knuckles and my fingers are twigs once again.
There. The pencil is in my hand, and I can begin.
I don’t know if this will ever reach your eyes. But you, of all people, deserve to know my story.
I’ll start long ago.
I was sixteen and dreamed of one thing: apples.
CATALINA
Three apples sat in a row on the doorstep.
Catalina saw them from the garden, where she’d been mending a hole in the fence with rope and sticks so rabbits and deer couldn’t get in. The apples hadn’t been there when she’d gone outside that morning, and she’d only been in the garden for about twenty minutes. No one had come bearing apples, but then no one besides Pa and Jose Luis ever came around here. Their cabin was a small island, lost against an open sea of wilderness. It was one of many that they’d lived in ever since Mamá had died. It’d been so long that Catalina’s mind felt like a tool that’d been left out in the elements, its joints rusting around her thoughts so all she felt was the dull sense that, at some point long ago, there’d been words she’d wanted to say.
Wiping her hands on her skirt, she rose and squinted. The apples were still sitting in their row. Pa’s voice echoed in her head.
“You die with apple on your lips, music in your ears, and his image before your eyes. . . .” It was nonsense. Lines from his fairy tales. Even so, an uneasy edge of fear cut into her. The apples were clearly placed with care. But by who? She could swear she heard something. Behind her, coming from the woods. Instinct spun her around and she stared sharply into the trees, certain that whoever had brought the apples was near, watching.
But no one was there.
She took a quick breath. There had to be an innocuous explanation for the apples. Sometimes preachers sought out families living far from town and brought them food purchased with donations from wealthy congregants back east. Her tired mind was making her conjure dangers where there were none. The hard winter had shaped her into something much more bone than blood. It was odd, though, that the apples were so beautiful. Light flowed through their dark red centers, sending splatters of sunbeams onto the threshold. She should go closer. It was too hard to see them from this distance.
“My sparrow!” Pa called to her. He’d gone out to the trapline today. She let out a small sigh of relief. Then she saw there were nothing but tiny wildflowers in his belt. He was always doing one half of a strange waltz, and today was no exception. Ambling up to her, he held out a dandelion. “A flower to gaze upon while you write.”
Catalina pretended to be too busy fixing the fence to notice the dandelion.
“I don’t write anymore,” she said, more to herself than to him.
Before last winter, she’d written poems, scribbling them out with dirt-stained hands and pencil nubs by the fire. Jose Luis would whittle and pause to lean against her, peering over her shoulder as words danced in staccato across the page. He was her first reader, always. Didn’t matter that he was also her only one. If she had a hundred readers to choose from, he would be the first. But then, slowly, she’d written less and less as the hunger had grown more and more, and she realized her brother was starving before her eyes. Finally, she’d stopped altogether, a silent bargain against the wind-driven sleet and the dwindling pantry and the skin drawing so thin around Jose Luis’s face it looked like paper.
“But you must!” Pa cried, eyes owlishly magnified behind his round spectacles. His protest sparked anger in Catalina. If everyone meandered through the day as though it were a meadow, they would most certainly starve next winter. She couldn’t act like him, trading in daydreams when the world traded in hunger and fear. Tying off the rope, she straightened, still ignoring the outstretched dandelion.
“There’s apples,” she said. “By the door.”
The dandelion dropped from Pa’s hand. He turned toward the cabin. Catalina watched. Long had he insisted they needed to beware apples. They were poisonous because the Man of Sap brought them. Never eat them. It certainly wasn’t a hard edict to follow. Apples were a delicacy and this was the first time Catalina had directly encountered any. She placed Pa’s paranoia with his stories, tales stretched tall to fit Revolutionary War haunts and St. Nicholas and La Llorona, which he retold from Mamá’s canon.
Pa walked over to the apples. He stood still, staring at them. Then, without a word, he lifted his boot. It violently descended. It was rare to see him display physical strength or anger, but both twined through him. He stomped the apples, squashing. They gave easily, dark red skin turning to yellowish whiteish mush. Kneeling, he scooped the remains into a cedar bucket by the door and, without a word to Catalina, carried the remains off into the woods.
Once he was out of sight, Catalina warily went to the cabin and frowned. The apples had sat in a row like teeth on a lower jaw, waiting to snap closed. She rubbed her hand over her forehead. Whether she wanted them or not, she shared Pa’s eccentricities, and she would excise them, forcing them away like her poems. At least Pa had done a thorough job sweeping up the apple slush. Nothing remained but the faintest streaks of juice.
“Guarding the door?” Jose Luis came toward her, carrying a basket. He had Pa’s delicate build, one made even more frail by the previous winter. But while Pa’s eyes were clouded with whims, Jose Luis’s were clear, as though you could see right through to his mind. To Catalina, he seemed both young and old, the two opposite polars of life meeting in his thoughtful gaze.
“Someone has to,” she said with a smile. “Come inside. I’ll make us some food then come out to the field with you.”
“Field.” Jose Luis’s countenance fell. “More like a dirt patch.”
He spoke Catalina’s fears aloud. Crops were necessary to survive; their paltry harvest last year—the yield of the only seeds they could afford—hadn’t been enough and their pantry had emptied long before the snow melted. This year, they’d planted even fewer seeds and had no horse to plow, since Jericho had been a casualty of last winter, and no eggs because they’d been forced to eat their chickens after their food ran out. Harvest was beginning but there was hardly anything to gather. Their baskets yawned large around too-small potatoes and poorly filled ears of corn.
“Nonsense,” she lied, longing to ease the worry in his face. “It’s teeming with life.”
Whether he believed her or not, he nodded. He set the basket down, picked up the hoe resting against the garden fence, and jousted an invisible opponent. It reminded her of the little boy she’d once ruled the woods with. In early childhood, they’d made shelters out of spiky branches and declared themselves king and queen of the magical woodland. They’d run over the open fields with bare legs and untamed hair, screaming at the top of their lungs for the sheer pleasure of the wild sound. They’d fought invisible armies of pirates or soldiers or ghosts, side by side. That wildling creature inside Catalina had died, time and loss drawing her into adulthood after Mamá was gone and they moved time and again, but she was determined to keep it alive in Jose Luis—and to keep him alive, period.
Seemingly successful in his joust, Jose Luis set the hoe against the cabin and went inside. Catalina began to head after him but stopped at the doorway. Bending down, she stared. The apple’s juice had turned sludgy. A revolting smell rose from the streaks, one laced with musty, wet rot. How could that be? The apples had been in the peak of health. Alarmed, she kicked dirt over it.
Then she hurried into their cabin, though the putrid scent trailed after her, as though following her inside.
Pa didn’t come home till supper, but that wasn’t uncommon. He often was in the throes of projects soon to be abandoned: digging a channel from the stream to their field, building newfangled snares, constructing a smokehouse. All good ideas if they’d ever be completed and if there weren’t more pressing things to do. Catalina was the one who made certain the tasks for their survival got ticked off, one by one.
Gruffly, Pa sat down at the table, face cut from unrelenting stone until they made the sign of the cross over themselves. It was a gesture Mamá used to do all the time. When she was worried. When she was happy. When she was tucking Catalina and Jose Luis in bed—only then she made it over them, as though it were a blanket for them to settle beneath.
“After supper,” Catalina said, noticing Jose Luis watching Pa with worry, “we should read some Sor Juana.”
Sor Juana de la Cruz was Mamá’s favorite poet. Mamá had owned a book of her poems—poemas, as she called them—and translated every one of them with a pencil so they could practice reading. The book was on the mantel, which they’d turned into an ofrenda displaying the treasures Mamá had brought with her from Mexico. Her mantilla veil, folded and wrapped in cloth, sat next to her two red glass candleholders. The candles had long ago burned down to stubs. The sight hurt Catalina’s heart. They only used the fire for light now, having no time or animal fat to render into tallow for new candles. It seemed wrong. Flames were immediate and present, and whenever Catalina lit them for Mamá, she seemed more immediate and present too, as though the flickering shadows from the bobbing flames were cast there by her skirts as she moved through the cabin.
Pa poured water from their pitcher into his cup and took a long swig. He set it down with a clatter. Catalina stifled a sigh. Once he was in a bad mood, it was hard to get him out of it. She wished she could ask him about the apples, but it would drive him further into the quicksand of his thoughts. It would be better to keep talking to Jose Luis instead.
“Which poem—Pa?” Pa’s hands scrabbled at his throat, as though trying to claw out the water he’d drank. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were so wide they were nearly all whites, the pupils swiveling around for help. Catalina jumped to her feet, knocking her chair over. Jose Luis stared in horror. “What’s wrong? Pa!”
He started to get up but fell forward onto the table, crashing into the dishes and knocking over the pitcher. Water gushed out. A bubbly red foam swirled through the liquid. The fragrance of apples blended with a vile, corrosive odor. Catalina grabbed Pa and tried to lift him. What had been in the pitcher?
“Jose Luis! Help!” Catalina screamed. Face white, Jose Luis hurried over to support him. Even though Pa was a small man, he fell through their hands, dragging all three of them to the floor in a grotesque family portrait. His head lolled back in Catalina’s lap. “Get up. We need to get him to the bed.”
Together, they hoisted him onto his bed. Catalina tried to figure out what was wrong, what had happened. Red marks spread out from his mouth and down his neck, following the path of the water. When she pulled open his shirt, the marks webbed to the center of his chest, where they then shot out, multiple prongs of one lurid star.
There were only remedies to try. She put wet washcloths on his forehead, dosed him with tonic from the bottle, made a poultice of gum salve. Jose Luis aided, but eventually she told him to go to sleep.
Nothing worked, and as the night cupped a hand over the cabin, darkness penetrated their home.
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