Shadows on the Wall Chapter 106

CHAPTER 106:  Back Again

by Nicky

Voiceover by Marie Wallace:  “On this night, there is birth in the small coastal town of Collinsport, Maine.  Business hasn’t boomed on these streets in many a year, but tonight that will change.  Tonight there is a shop in Collinsport’s downtown newly opened.  And the opening of these doors will usher in a new wave of terror for all the residents of this haunted little town … and for those who dwell in the cursed house on the hill above.”

1

            Megan Todd sighed happily as she turned to her husband, but Philip was wrestling with another crate, exploding everywhere with its stuffing like shreds of hay.  He was resisting the urge to sneeze as he pulled out a bronze (or bronze looking, she amended) statue that was nearly half his size and depicted a somber looking woman dressed in robes.  He was handsome, she thought, in his own quiet way, a scholar, an English lit major she met at Miskatonic University down in Arkham when she was finishing her own degree in History, and she had found him quietly attractive then, just as she did now.  It had never occurred to either of them that they might open an antique shop, “But what else,” Philip pointed out to her, laughing, “what else do you do with combined English and History degrees?  No one else has any sense,” and so they had laughed together, and now here they were, back in her girlhood home of Collinsport, Maine, and they had, only yesterday, opened their dream palace:  TODD’S ANTIQUES, the sign outside proclaimed proudly. 

            And so here she was, sighing happily.

            Philip noticed her at last, and, grinning, finally pulled the statue from its crate.  A shower of crate-hay settled gently to earth.  Some of it caught in the dark curls of his hair.  She giggled, and he said, “Anything else my lady requires?”

            “Not today, kind sir,” Megan said, and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.  “Well, perhaps I could use a hand with …”  And she gestured to the other crates, hundreds of them, seemingly, and more arrived every day.  Did Collinsport really require an antique shop?  She hadn’t been convinced at first; it was Philip who finally convinced her, his boyish excitement and growing buoyancy eventually filling her with that same feeling of lightness and, eventually, certainty.  “Summer people,” he had told her, “darling, think of those summer dollars.  And Collinsport is an artsy place, right?  Artists love this kind of thing.”

            She still wasn’t quite sure of that, and the fact that they were opening their shop in late October – the day before Halloween, in fact – remained a tad disquieting, but she trusted Philip.  She loved him.  She was there with him, helping him to first fight the alcoholism that had knit itself up around him like a shroud, ever since high school, but they fought it together, hadn’t they, Philip sweating, calling her name; the hospital, finally, after he stopped breathing one night and his lips turned that dreadful, misty blue; and then the meetings, the endless meetings, separate, of course, because she had never had a problem controlling her drinking, but she stopped now, for him, not even a glass of wine at dinner.  And she did it because she loved him.  She trusted him.  So here they were, with these endless crates piling up, but it didn’t matter, because she was happy.  Happy.

            He put his arms around her from behind, and pressed his lips against that sensitive place where her neck curved, swan-like, into her shoulder.  “Happy, darling?” he asked, echoing her thoughts.

            “Yes,” she murmured.

            He turned her to face him.  A frown crossed his face, those delicate features, almost feminine.  “What is it?” he said, and though his tone was still light, joshing, he called it, a shadow lingered above his brow.  “You don’t look happy.”

            “I am,” she insisted.  “I really am.  Philip, this is like a dream.”

            “A happy dream.”

            “Yes,” she said.  “It’s real, isn’t it?  All this?”

            He nodded somberly, then a grin lit up his features.  “Absolutely,” he said. 

            “Good.”  She snuggled against his chest. 

            “This is a good town,” he said.

            She blinked up at him.  “Do you think so?”

            “Don’t you?”

 

            She hesitated.  That was the rub, wasn’t it, and what she hadn’t wanted to admit to him when he suggested they return to the town where she grew up.  Bugaboos, she told herself sternly; nothing real, nothing concrete.  Whistling through the graveyard.  Shadows on the wall.  Collinsport had a reputation up and down the coast as a place where … well, where weirdness happened.  When she was a girl, there had been nothing so dramatic.  But it was a place where witches had once been burned, all the kids said at school, and sometimes they’d scare each other to death, holding flashlights up to their faces, with stories of the Witch Angelique, who supposedly haunted the old courthouse, and of Josette Collins, the widow whose suicide garnered the peak where she’d met her gruesome demise its name.  Legends, spook stories. 

            Except that things happened here.  Murders, for one, and they were starting to add up.  Megan did her homework; always had.  She saw that, in just the past year and a half, the proprietor at the Collinsport Inn, kindly Mr. Wells, had been decapitated; rich girl Sabrina Stuart vanished without a trace; Tom Jennings, killed by an animal; his sister Amy, no details, not officially, but she had died somehow, up there in that house on the hill; and Paul Stoddard, sliced up to ribbons upon his return to Collinwood.

            Maybe it was Collinwood itself, she thought now, snuggled up against her husband’s chest; perhaps it was that cursed house and its cursed family.  Perhaps they’re responsible for everything.

            And there had been the other disappearances too, just in the past few weeks.

            Werewolves, witches, ghosts, and vampires …

            “Don’t you?” Philip asked again.

            “Sorry,” Megan said, blinking.  “I was woolgathering.”

            “My poor baby,” he said, and kissed her forehead.  “Maybe we should knock off the day, whadda ya say?”

            “We can’t,” she said, and squirmed out of his embrace.  “Too much to do.  Besides, it’s not even six.”

           

            “Dark out there,” Philip said, hands on his hips, looking out the window.  “Gloomy.”

            “Nonsense.”  She forced bravura into her voice, but it sounded strained and false in her ears.  Quickly, she moved across the room to the crate Philip over which Philip had finally triumphed.  She knelt beside the statue which he had released and squinted at it.  “Nice looking girl, isn’t she,” Megan said.

            “That’s Ereshkigal,” Philip said, still looking out the window.  “She’s the Sumerian goddess of death or something, so you should be especially nice to her.”

            “I don’t believe it.  She looks far to motherly to be any kind of …”  She laughed, but inside she felt unsettled.  “…goddess of death.” 

            “Where is everyone?” Philip said, but Megan figured he wasn’t talking to her.  His eyes were scanning the shadowed streets outside.  “This town sure rolls its streets up when the sun goes down, huh.”

            Vampires, Megan wanted to say, but she was afraid it wouldn’t sound like the joke it was – had to be – if she said the word aloud. 

 

            She was about to stand again, walk over to her husband, and return the embrace he’d offered her a few minutes ago, but a glint – a bare flash – of something metallic caught her eye, far back in the now-empty crate that had held the statue of Ereshkigal.  “Philip,” she said slowly, unwilling to acknowledge the finger of dread that was even now stroking her heart.  “There’s something else in here.”

            “Can’t be,” he said, all jolly good humor.  And he was the one with the invoice in his hand, wasn’t he?  Wouldn’t he know?  “Only one Sumerian death goddess, that’s all we ordered.”

            But she was already reaching into the crate, then drew her hand back with a cry.  Philip was at her side in an instant.  “What is it?” he cried.

            “Look!” she said, whimpering, and held out her palm.  There was a long vertical slash across her hand, and blood was already beginning to ooze from it, with dreamy slow certainty.  Philip didn’t hesitate; he ran immediately to the kitchen area in the back of the shop and returned with gauze and a roll of tape.  “Have to stop the bleeding,” he said grimly, wrapping the gauze swiftly around her hand, then binding it with the tape.  “Poor baby,” he said again.  “Does it hurt dreadfully?”

            “Not too badly,” she said, embarrassed because she was crying.  “Should I go to the hospital, do you think?”

            “It’s not too bad.”  He was rubbing her shoulders in the way he knew she liked.  Her hand throbbed, the pain sharp and glassy.  “We’ll check the dressing before bed.  It doesn’t look too deep to me though.”

            “It hurts.”

            “Poor darling.  What was it back in there?”

            “I don’t know,” she said tearfully.  “I dropped it.”

            He knelt beside the crate and picked it up, a curving blade, a dagger.  “This,” he said, “was not on the bill of sale.”

            “It’s awful.”

            “I agree.  It also looks very old.”

            “Is it supposed to go along with the statue, do you think?”

 

            “Look, honey.”  He ran his finger along the blade.  She wanted to cry out a warning, but she was silly, damnit, she was just being a silly woman.  She knew he would think that, and she wouldn’t have it.  “It has little runes, just marching all up and down the blade.”

            She made a face.  “My blood is on it.  Wash it off, Philip, it’s horrible.”

            “Of course.”  But he wasn’t standing.  He was just sitting there, staring at the damned thing.

            “Philip!” she said, and her voice was shrill in her ears, even for her.  Like old times, she thought with despair; that was the tone of voice she’d used without being able to help herself, on the nights when Philip came stumbling in at three in the morning, booze fumes swimming around his head in an almost visible miasma.  Some things never change, she thought mournfully, and found that the tears still trembled on her eyelids. 

            “Sorry,” he said, but then the door behind them was opening; and they both jumped; the bell attached tinkled merrily, and …

 

            … and …

            “Why,” Megan said, astonished, “you look just like me!”

            One of the women did, at least.  The other was tall and blonde and severe, with her hair pulled back tightly, braided, and the braid was coiled behind her head.  But the first woman, the woman who had opened the door:  with her long fall of unfettered red hair and flashing eyes, she was the image of Megan Todd herself.

            “I don’t know how that can be,” the woman said slyly, and was there some trace of an accent?  Megan thought there was.  Spanish?  French?  “There is only one of me in all this world.”

            “You’re open,” the blonde woman said.  It wasn’t a question.

            “Just closing,” Philip boomed cheerfully.  “Can we help you, Miss …?”

 

            “Eltridge,” the woman who could be the twin, the very mirror image, of Megan herself said, simpering.  “Leona Eltridge.”

2

            I am very tired, Julia managed to think through her shock and bewilderment and overwhelming sense of terror, I am very very tired of requiring rescue.  And yet here she was again, with her dead-undead-dead-resurrected and still obviously undead ex-boyfriend baring his fangs in her face, ready to resume his quest to turn her into his vampire bride.  He wants to sink those fangs into me, Julia thought, he wants to bite me and drain me and turn me into what he is.

            What Barnabas is.

            No.  Never again.

            She reached into the pocket of her coat.

 

            “Juuuuuulia,” Tom purred.  He reached out to stroke her cheek.  His touch was icy, burning cold, and scorched her flesh with its ice.  She recoiled, and a look of dark, desperate unhappiness passed over him.  “Julia,” he said again, quieter this time, bowing his head.  Yet his eyes continued to burn into her.  “Julia.  I’ve come back.  I’ve come back for you.”

            “How?” she said through gritted teeth, still fumbling in her pocket.  “You were dead, Tom.  Barnabas destroyed you.”

            “He tried,” Tom sneered.  “But you know all about vampires, don’t you, dear Julia?  We are very difficult to kill, and it’s even more difficult to keep us dead.”

            “I suppose that’s true,” she said sadly.  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Tom.  I never had the chance to tell you that.  But I am sorry.”

            “Save your apologies,” he said, grinning again, revealing his bristling mouthful of fangs in the process.  “There is no need for them.  We’re going to be together, Julia, just you and me, in a world without end, a world where we –”

            But he never finished his sentence.  Julia found what she needed, what she carried with her at all times now that she was dealing with a baby vampire whose hunger proved, occasionally, overwhelming for her; and so Julia pulled out the over-sized silver crucifix she carried in her pocket and held it up before her former lover’s night-whitened face.

            He hissed as if scalded and took a shambling step away from her.  “Put that away,” he groaned.

             “Can’t,” she gasped. 

            “Julia, for Chrissakes,” he whimpered.  When he held up his hands, she saw that the fingers had grown long and thin and ended in points, fingernails glassy and smoothly perfect.

            “Go away, Tom,” she said firmly.

            He still couldn’t look at her.  “I love you.  I want you to understand that.”

            “You do,” she said, “and you don’t.  You’ve changed.  I don’t think you even know how much.  But you’re different, and your love will only destroy me if I allow it.”

            “It isn’t so different.  You’ll see.”

            “I don’t want to see.”

            “That isn’t true.”  He was gloating now, furious.  “What about Barnabas Collins?  You’d give it all up for him, wouldn’t you.  You’d change for him, if he asked you to, wouldn’t you.”  Now he screamed.  “Wouldn’t you!”

            She stared at him coolly, much calmer than she really felt on the inside.  “Go away, Tom.  You are a nightmare now.”

            “I’ll come for you, Juuuuuulia,” Tom said, stepping backward now, into a shaft of moonlight that fell, delicately and lacy, through the trees around them.  “You will never escape me.”

            “JENNINGS!”  Barnabas burst from the trees behind her, and Julia would swear later that it was simply a reflex, but she swung around and thrust the cross into his face, and he fell backward, choking and clutching at his face.  Tom, laughing wildly, continued to take steps backward, and faded as he went into the ray of moonlight.

            And they were alone.

            “Julia, please,” Barnabas breathed at last, and Julia realized that she was still clutching the cross and holding it up high, high in his face.

            She hesitated.  Took a breath.

            She looked at him.

            And lowered the cross.  “Leave me alone, Barnabas,” she said finally.

 

            “I … I came to find you,” he said.  His voice sounded broken.  Good, she thought, good.

            “You didn’t need to do that.”

            “I had to.  I had to explain.  To try.”

            “There’s nothing to explain.”  The words were bitter, beyond acrimonious, and burned her lips and her throat.  But she wouldn’t say them.  She wouldn’t even mention Angelique’s name.  It wasn’t her fault, after all; she was as much a victim of Barnabas Collins as anyone else on this estate:  Vicki, Josette, Julia herself.  The fault – all the fault, she thought – lay with Barnabas.

            And, worse, she’d known it all along.

            “Julia, please, let me try –”

            She said nothing.  She turned away instead and began to march firmly back in the direction of Collinwood.  It had been stupid of her to run blindly into the woods and directly into Tom’s path.  She wouldn’t make that mistake again, she swore it.

            Tom.

            She stopped, which gave Barnabas enough time to catch up with her.  Not that he needs the time, she thought bitterly; if Barnabas wanted to catch someone, he certainly could.  And easily.

            Who made Tom a vampire, after all?

             “We have far more to worry about, I’m afraid,” he said, and tried to make his voice gentle.  She felt that dark stab of hatred again, and, trembling, realized how much it scared her.  Perhaps I can understand Angelique more than I realized, she thought.

            “Tom,” she said.  Her voice was dry, just a husk.

            “How has he returned?”

            “I don’t know, Barnabas,” she said through gritted teeth.  “I didn’t bring him back.”

            “That isn’t what I –”

            “If I had to guess,” and she released an exasperated sigh, “I would say that the Enemy had a hand in it.”

            “But why?”

            “He wants to kill me,” Julia said.  “That much hasn’t changed.”

            “But Jennings doesn’t want to just kill you.  We both know that.”

            “No.  He wants me for his bride.”  Barnabas winced.  Julia enjoyed the pain that flashed in his eyes, and then felt that despair well up in her again. 

 

            “That wouldn’t serve the Enemy’s purpose,” Barnabas said at last.  “It doesn’t make sense.  It wants you dead, Julia, not immortal and more powerful than ever.”

            “I would be powerful,” Julia murmured to herself.

            Barnabas ignored this.  “Who would want Tom Jennings restored to life?  Who has that kind of power?”

            They were both thinking Angelique, Julia knew, but that option made no sense as well, and they both knew it.  “Nicholas Blair?” Julia said finally.

            “Maggie destroyed him.  She told Eliot.”

            She shrugged.  “Cats and witches are hard to kill.”  And vampires, she added silently, but thought that admitting that aloud might be in poor taste.

            “Perhaps,” Barnabas said thoughtfully, “perhaps our mystery attacker.  The one who nearly killed Sebastian.”

            She sighed heavily.  “We have more research to do.”

            He offered her a smile, hesitant, tentative, and reached for her.  She flinched away.  The smile vanished.  She turned on her heel and began to march back toward Collinwood.  “Julia?” he called after her.

            She didn’t look at him.  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said through gritted teeth, and didn’t slow her speed.  “We are not friends, Barnabas.  Not for awhile, anyway.”

            “For … for how long?”  He sounded like a little boy.

            “I don’t know,” she said, and wouldn’t look at him.  She picked up her pace instead.  “I don’t, Barnabas.  We’ll … we’ll have to see.”

            He didn’t respond to that.  Which was good. 

            She didn’t feel like crying anymore.  That was also good.

            They walked together, silently, side by side, and neither said a word as the great house of Collinwood loomed before them out of the darkness.

3

 

            “I don’t understand how you could keep this from me,” Elizabeth said, but accepted the cup of tea her daughter handed her.  “All … all this.”

           

            Carolyn hesitated for a moment as she took back her hand, then sat in the chair beside the sofa in the drawing room.  Only a few days ago this room was full of smoke, Carolyn thought, shuddering, smoke and the sweet-dark stink of burning flesh.  “I think,” she said slowly, and tried to shed the memory of Cassandra engulfed in her mother’s flames, “I think because I’m so new to it myself.  I grew up in this house, and you did too, and I think we both know what the villagers whisper about us, but Mother, I swear that I never actually saw anything – nothing really, not like they say – until last year.”

           

            “When Vicki came,” Elizabeth said tightly.

           

            “And Barnabas,” Carolyn replied. 

            Elizabeth looked at her over the lip of the teacup.  “Do you think it’s a coincidence?”

           

            “I don’t know what I think anymore,” Carolyn said, exhausted.  Then her brow furrowed and her lips tightened.  “No.  That isn’t true.  I do know what I think, and I think that I don’t believe in coincidences.  Not anymore.  Not when it has to do with our family, with this house – our house.”

            “Collinwood,” Elizabeth said softly.  “And to think, this has all been going on right … right under my nose.”

            “I’ve told you everything I know.”

            “Vicki travelled back in time,” Elizabeth mused.  “Back to … what year was it?”

            “1897.”

            “To save us.  1897.”  She sighed.  “And I … I was a murderess?”  She shook her head.  “Before her grand sojourn.  I was some kind of dreadful serial killer.  Carolyn, surely you must realize how absurd that sounds.”

            “I do.”

            “And yet.”  Elizabeth closed her eyes, and Carolyn watched her closely.  At last she opened one eye.  “And yet, it explains so much.  Louise.  Victor Fenn-Gibbon, and his … his powers.”  She spat the word, then daubed at her mouth delicately with one of Nora Collins’ napkins, part of a trousseau for a wedding that had never reached fruition.  “But Vicki possessed those same powers, didn’t she.”

            “Julia thinks they corrupted her.”

 

            “Yes, I imagine they did.  More tea, darling, please.”  Carolyn obliged as Elizabeth toyed absently with the pearls adorning her dress, a plain black number she had purchased in Portsmouth last winter.  Except, Carolyn thought with something akin to despair, except in one reality she didn’t.  She was too busy cleaning up after her own messes; too busy dying at the hands of that monster Petofi to go shopping.  And I …

            But that thought was almost too much to bear.

            “Power,” Elizabeth said.  “The Collins family has always possessed it in abundance.  But nothing like Vicki.”  Her face grew dark.  “Or Cassandra.”

            Carolyn shifted uncomfortably on the chair.  The entire story had begun with Cassandra’s part, of course; when Carolyn finally decided that her mother had a right to know everything that was happening under roof – or as much of everything as Carolyn herself knew or understood – she had begun with Cassandra.  “She’s here to help, Mother,” Carolyn said for the third or fourth time.  “Julia insisted, and Julia isn’t a huge fan of her either.”

            “But she isn’t just Cassandra.  She’s also Mrs. Rumson.”

            “Yes.”

            “And she’s also a servant girl.”

            “She was,” Carolyn said.  “A long time ago.”

            “Hundreds of years.”

            “She came to this house from Martinique in the late 18^th century.  1795 or 96, I think.  That’s about all I’ve been able to uncover.”  She was beginning to feel exhausted, and wished she had prepared coffee instead of tea.

            “But she didn’t stay a servant for long.”  Elizabeth’s mouth grew thinner.  “She married Barnabas Collins.  And then turned him into a vampire.”

            Carolyn had put those pieces together herself, and had finally managed to drag the truth out of Professor Stokes.  “I have to know,” she had told him angrily the evening that followed Cassandra’s near-burning.  It helped her stitch together her own broken memories, the ones that came after Vicki released her from Danielle Roget’s pernicious clutches, when Barnabas began to feed on her.  It also helped explain the injections Julia had administered her ever since then.

 

            Because she was able to cure him once before.

            But somehow he had relapsed.

            She was shivering, she found, and was unable to stop.  She remembered the feel of his teeth in her, the way she burned for him every time he bit her, the pleasure that exploded up inside her every time he penetrated her.

            But there was the sickening feeling that followed, and the knowledge now that she had been used, drained, debased … degraded.  She became his slave and he used her like a whore. 

            He raped her.

           

            She hated him.

            And she hadn’t seen him since her own discovery, since Professor Stokes’ admission.

            “Darling?” Elizabeth said.

            “Yes,” she said instantly.

            “Unbelievable,” Elizabeth said, settling back.  “But then again, it explains so much, as I said.”

            “We’re being threatened,” Carolyn said.  “That’s really all the Professor and Julia know, Mother.  Some dark force –”

            “I,” Elizabeth said, smiling a bit, “would just like to encounter a light force sometime.  Or something in the way of a happy medium.”

 

            Carolyn smiled despite herself.  “We are a family born to tragedy,” Uncle Roger told her one time; but she couldn’t think of him now.  “Professor Stokes calls it ‘The Enemy,’” she said.  “We’ve been trying to learn everything we can about it.”

            “And that’s what I saw,” Elizabeth said.  “What looked like my father.”

            “It wasn’t, though.”

            “Carolyn, you didn’t see him.  It was my father.  Just as I remember him.  Just as I saw him last.”

            “This … this thing.  It can conjure up ghosts, spirits, replicas …”

            “And it wanted me to kill Cassandra,” Elizabeth said.  “That’s rather telling, isn’t it.”

            She couldn’t prevent the impatience from sharpening her tone.  “She wants to help, Mother.  Professor Stokes thinks it’s time we put aside all our little differences and work together.  For once.”

            “For once,” Elizabeth said softly.

            “People change,” Carolyn whispered.  “Sometimes they even change for the better.”

            Elizabeth said nothing.  She sipped her tea instead and watched her daughter with her inscrutably dark movie star eyes.

            “For you,” Elizabeth said at last.  “I will do what you ask.  I will do anything to help this family.”

            “Mother,” Carolyn said, and reached out, and the women’s hands met and touched.  Their fingers laced together.  They held each other that way, and for a long time it was good.

 

            And later, in her bedroom, Carolyn thought of her mother’s silence in those moments that followed, and wondered what she really thought.  She’s more powerful than I think even she knows, Carolyn thought, and lay down on the bed.  She closed her eyes and saw Tony before her, Tony as he was when they first met, before she slit his throat with his own scalpel.

            That wasn’t me.

            But I was there, Carolyn reminded herself, I was there, and I saw it all, and I must never never never be allowed to forget.

            She was tired.  She was so, so tired.

            When she opened her eyes there was a girl looking down at her, only inches away from her face, and she opened her mouth to scream, but the girl held up one finger, and Carolyn made no sound, though she did scoot backward on the bed.

            It was the girl from the past, of course, her black hair unfettered, the bonnet held in one hand.  Her dress was charcoal, severe.  Her face was darkly, grimly serious.  “I don’t have much time,” she said.

            “How are you here?” Carolyn whispered.

            “Time,” the ghost-girl responded.  “It is weak now.  It needs more blood.  It needs blood and bloody thoughts and darkness, and while it is weak I may appear, but only to you, and only now.”

            “But you … you’re it,” Carolyn said.  Her skin crawled slowly, delicately.  “The Enemy.”  She drew a trembling breath.  “Aren’t you?”

            “You want an easy answer,” the Puritan ghost-girl said, and tried to smile.  Carolyn realized she could see the wall of her bedroom behind her.  “There isn’t one.”

            “You can help us defeat it.”

            “The bat,” the girl said.  “Find the bat.  Release the bat.  End the curse.”

            Damn the spirit world; damn their inability to just tell you something when they wanted you to know it.  “What bat?  A living bat?  Is it here?  Now?  Or the past?  I don’t understand.” 

            The girl was flickering; here and then gone; a breath; then here and then gone.  Her mouth didn’t move, but the words came forth nevertheless.  “Release the bat.  End the curse.”

            “What bat?”  Carolyn found she was nearly shrieking.

            But the girl was faded almost completely away.  “I’m an infection,” the girl’s voice whispered.  “I am weakness.  Remember that.  Say it,” she hissed suddenly, her eyes hooded and gray.

            “Infection,” Carolyn whispered, but the girl was gone.

            And Tony Trask was standing before her.  The hole in his throat was black with dried gore.  She could see a tiny hint of spine peeking out at her.

 

            He was grinning.

            He reached for her with gray, trembling hands.

            Carolyn began to scream.

4

            “Oh please,” Megan sobbed, but the women were relentless.  She struggled against the ropes they had tied her with, but they knots were firm and bit into her flesh.

            “Shut up,” her doppelganger snarled and raised an arm against her, but the other woman, blonde, cool, collected, gave her a stern look.  Muttering in what sounded like French, she subsided, lowering her arm and returning to the task at hand.

            The murder of Philip.

           

            The death of Megan’s world.

            He was tied, as she was, in a chair, and Megan had no real idea how such a thing had come about.  Something about these women – the blonde one in particular.  She had … she had done something, almost the moment they entered the shop, pointed, gestured, muttered a word in a language Megan had never heard before but that raised the hackles on the back of her neck, and now here they were, tied up in separate chairs, and the beast-woman with Megan’s face was holding the knife, the dagger that had cut her inside the crate containing the statue of that damned Sumerian death-goddess, holding it to Philip’s throat again.          

            He was already bleeding.  They had torn his shirt open and used that goddamned dagger to carve what Megan thought dimly could only be symbols, runes maybe, signs she didn’t understand and had never seen before.  He had screamed for awhile, but after a few minutes of noise, the blonde woman snapped her fingers beneath his eyes, and Philip quieted, staring around with glazed, empty eyes.  Occasionally he opened his mouth and uttered a hoarse, froggy kind of sound, as if his throat were filled with mulch.

            Tears continued to run down Megan’s cheeks.  This isn’t real, she thought for awhile, this can’t be real, things like this don’t happen to people like us; but the throbbing in her hand, pulsing within her palm like a rotted tooth, told her otherwise. 

            And this is Collinsport.  This is exactly the place where things like this happen to people like us.  Because this town is diseased.  It is vile.  And all of us – all of us ­– are doomed, doomed, doomed.

            “Ia ia shuggoth,” the blonde woman intoned, holding the knife high above her with both hands wrapped around the haft, “n’yarlhotep astua astua ia ia nga!”

           

            “This is taking too long,” Leona Eltridge growled, but the other woman shot her a quick, fiery glance, and Leona subsided again.

 

            “Don’t do this,” Megan whimpered.  “Please.  Leave us alone.”

           

            “Can’t,” the blonde woman said.  She lowered the knife, released the haft with one hand, and held it with the other; her left, Megan noticed.  A sheen of sweat drops had formed on her forehead, and she panted like a dog.  “There must be a sacrifice.”

            “You people are crazy,” Megan sobbed, then thrashed against her chair, railed against her bonds.  “Let me go!” she shrieked.

            “Let me cut her throat,” Leona Eltridge said.  “It will be so pleasant.  I could drown her in her own blood.”

            “No,” the blonde woman said.  Her eyes were cold, her face darkly aristocratic.  Then, slyly, she added, “Not yet, Leona.  Not yet.”

            “I don’t trust this Roxanne woman,” Leona growled.  “Why do you?”

            “Because she restored us both,” the blonde woman said.  She was perfectly composed; her eyes, Megan saw, were fanatical, the eyes of a lunatic.  Her face glowed with glory.  “She allowed us to live again, and we owe her a great debt.  And if the Dagger of Ereshkigal makes her happy, then by Hecate we’ll get it for her.”

            “I’ve heard of you,” Leona said sulkily.  “I thought you were big.  I didn’t know you could grovel so.  Like a chien, cher.”

            “Shut up,” the woman hissed at her, then raised the knife.  Megan’s mouth gaped; in that moment, darkness flooded the blonde woman’s eyes until they glowed, absolutely black, like droplets of living oil.  She grinned, her face a fiend’s. 

            “Megan?” Philip said suddenly.  His eyes were blinking and half-lidded.  He was looking around now, trying to find her.  “Megan, where are you?”

            “Oh Philip!” Megan cried.  “Philip, you –”

            But she never spoke the words.  With a guttural cry, the blonde woman raised the knife in her left hand, and with a quick, brutal movement, sliced it through the air, slashing open wide Philip Todd’s throat in the process.

            Megan screamed.  She thought she would never stop.

            “Ereshkigal!” the blonde woman shrieked, holding the knife eye, her black eyes flashing.  Megan moaned:  the tip of the knife – the whole blade, suddenly – glowed with a terrible purple vibrancy, a light that moved and shift as if it were alive.  Philip’s eyes glared with awful sightless fixation.  “Ereshkigal, bringer of sweet death, hear your servant’s voice once again!  Edith Collins calls upon your holy name!  Lend us your power, dark one!  Imbue this blade with your holy essence that we may use it to work your will!  Ia ia, shuggoth!  Ia ia nyarlhotep!”

 

            The shop was plunged into darkness, and the floor quaked; Megan was lifted by a terrific force and then flung down; for a moment she remembered what it felt like to float out in Joey Haskell’s boat when they were just teenagers and she had just caught (and just as swiftly lost) his eye, the way the waves would lift the dinghy gently and then bring it down, lift it, and then bring it down; but this was a ferocious force, primal.

            The power of Ereshkigal.

            Megan realized that her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

            Trembling, she opened them.

            The lights had returned to the shop.

            And that woman – that dreadful woman with her face – that Leona Eltridge – was beaming down at her.

            “Bon soir, cheri,” she purred.

            And used the Dagger of Ereshkigal to open up Megan’s throat.

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...