Black Ambrosia

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  “Odd, that funeral. I saw no emotion, not even from the parents of the children we buried. I looked around at the faces of the people in the crowd as the minister gave the service, and they all had deep lines etched in them, as if slashed there by razor blades. There was no conversation, no talk, no tears, no nothing. This town had been sucked dry over the months. Sucked dry.

  “After the funeral, we held another meeting. That’s when the emotion emerged, and it came out as rage. She’d killed another four people the night before. She knew about the trap—the guys who set it even thought they’d seen her, but they didn’t know . . . They didn’t have any idea of what we were dealing with. Neither did I, really.

  “Anyway, it was on a Thursday, or a Friday—I can’t really remember, except that it was a school day, and we held the meeting at the fairgrounds just outside of Wilton. Everybody in town must have been there—all the factions were divided up. It was an angry crowd, and they had no one to vent their anger at, so they took it out on each other.

  “One group wanted to call the National Guard. Another group wanted to call the Pope. One guy gave us a deadline. He said he would be going to the national press to sell his story and the story of Wilton’s bloodsucking monster on Monday. If we wanted it kept quiet, we would have until Monday. The people who would benefit from a town full of gawkers wanted to tell the press anyway; the police and the mayor only wanted to tell people who could help.

  “It was a mess. An entire town united only in fear.

  “I just wanted to find Angelina’s hiding place before she moved on.

  “And then I saw him. A kid, hanging out on the fringes of the crowd. He had a look on his face, a cockiness, a standoffishness in his attitude. He knew where she was, I was sure of it.

  “But by the time I’d been introduced and told them what I knew about her, told all the townsfolk about my years of tracking her and what we’d found in her wake, there were too many questions and explanations. I couldn’t keep my eyes on him.

  “He was a kid, though, and the only one there. No kid was staying home from school those days in Wilton. Escorted to and from and no one was left alone or at home. Except this kid. He knew something, he had to.”

  The fear I felt upon awakening was a painless pressure—clearly recognizable as fear, only it held no physical reaction as it does for mortals with normal responses. Like the ache in my legs, which had become a physical heaviness, so too the fear was a sensation of weight, of pressure.

  I felt cool and clear, calm and knowledgeable. I had tarried too long in Wilton, and now I was being tracked—hunted by the best. My senses came to life, sharpened by this fear.

  Boyd had come for me.

  Boyd. The thought of him brought back memories—strange memories that seemed steeped in confusion, but then they were from a different time, a different age; they were experienced by a different Angelina.

  Boyd. What would it be like to see him again, to talk with him, to be close?

  Could we hunt together, Boyd and I?

  Yes, Angelina, I told myself. He is hunting. He is hunting you.

  I backed up from my—romantic?—notions and began to plan. It was time to move on. Maybe I had made mistakes in Wilton that I would not make elsewhere. Maybe I would change my habits. The time had come to put away my childish fantasies. The time had come to indulge only enough to ensure my survival and put my energies instead into discovering a companion, a friend, a confidant, a comrade.

  A lover of the night.

  I moved to slide from my sleeping cell, but something was different. I felt the walls around me—they were different, they were solid. I pushed up on the top with all my strength, but it didn’t budge. Fear hugged me close and I stopped struggling and began to think.

  Daniel. Of course. He knew I was there and he had told me that he knew; he had hung the crucifix to alert me, and I had foolishly done nothing about it. And now, while I slept, he had imprisoned me, nailed me securely inside a freshly built coffin.

  To knock my way out would alert the whole household. Furthermore, it was questionable whether I would be able to free myself. The construction seemed competent. The box was solid. Then again, if I made enough noise, surely the parents would come and release me. No. Daniel would convince them otherwise, and then I would have more to deal with than just Daniel. I could deal with Daniel if he was alone.

  I tried the music, but the box yielded neither to the strains of melody nor to my lack of substance. I was still entirely solid, just vague in appearance when the music soared.

  I tried to locate Daniel and force him, by way of the music, to come to me, to release me, but there was no one home. I searched throughout the house; there was not a heartbeat, not a breath, not a living cell in the building.

  Daniel had outsmarted me. He had taken advantage of my weakness and gained the upper hand. He would pay. He would pay.

  I gave the wood one solid kick in frustration and winced at the loud noise reverberating in the closed space. It would be impossible to escape. Reluctantly I settled back to wait, bringing my hands to my chest in the most comfortable resting position. The crucifix lay there, cold on my chest. I toyed with it, feeling the little golden chain, running my thumbnail over the cross-hatching on the front.

  Fury felt the same.

  The boy would pay.

  “The kid disappeared before I could get to him. No one else seemed to have seen him—at least no one else could tell me who he was. After the meeting at the fairgrounds, everybody seemed pretty heated up; we told them to all go home and check their fruit cellars and garages and the trunks of old rusted-out cars. She had to be hiding somewhere. That helped to diffuse their mob-style agitation. It gave them something active to do instead of dwelling on their impotency. I went back to the mayor’s house, where we’d set up a kind of temporary headquarters.

  “Just before sundown, as the streetlights of the town were beginning to come on, families started to congregate together for safety. We set up shelters in the schools and churches. Nobody was to stay at home. The children laughed and played, thinking this mass slumber party was a celebration, while the adults clung together in fear so physical it had scent.

  “I was having a cup of coffee on the mayor’s porch, nodding and waving to the folks as they passed by with blankets and food and children, when that same boy came tearing down the street and ran right up to the porch, slamming the screen door behind him. He stood there, his face red, panting for breath, and he had to breathe hard for a minute or two before he could speak. He had the wild look of a scared rabbit in his eye.

  “Mrs. Haskill, the mayor’s wife, came out, saw who it was, and said, ‘William!’ She looked at him with mild concern on her face. ‘Sit down here, Will, and I’ll get you a glass of juice.’

  “ ‘No thanks, ma’am,’ Will said, then took some deep breaths. ‘I just need to talk to . . .’ He indicated me with a shake of his head.

  “ ‘Boyd,’ I said.

  “ ‘Mr. Boyd. Please, Mrs. Haskill?’ He was desperate for privacy.

  “ ‘All right, of course,’ and she closed the door behind her.

  “ ‘Sit down here, Will.’

  “ ‘No thank you, sir. I caught her, sir. I caught her. I caught the killer. I put her in a box in my basement.’

  “ ‘You did what?’

  “ ‘She killed all those people. She killed our neighbors, and I could have stopped her, but I didn’t. I knew she was down there, she woke me up the other night, and I put Mom’s crucifix over her, but she got up that night and killed that family. I didn’t know about it until the meeting at the fairgrounds, but then I left there and went to Dad’s shop and built a big strong box; she’ll never get out of it, sir, and I put her in it and now I’m scared. I’m so scared. She’ll wake up at sundown, right? And she’ll know I did it. She woke me up one night, she was sitting on my bed . . .�
� He began to cry. ‘Oh, God, it was awful.’

  “I patted the boy’s shoulder and let him be alone for a moment while I went in for Kleenex and some of that juice Mrs. Haskill had. When I came back, he was hiccuping lightly, his face was still red and his eyes huge.

  “ ‘Okay now, Will,’ I said, after he’d gulped some juice and blown his nose. ‘Tell me what she looked like.’

  “ ‘Tiny,’ he said. ‘Little and blonde. Skinny. Real light, I had to pick her up to put her in the box. Real small, bony and cold. Cold like damp concrete. But light.’ He shivered. ‘She was sleeping in a little fortlike thing she’d made under the stairs in our house. I had to dismantle that and pull her out of it, then lift her into the box, and she never even twitched. I’d have thought she was dead, except that she was so . . .’ He moved his arms around.

  “ ‘Limber?’

  “ ‘Yeah.’ He went back to his juice. ‘I was afraid she’d wake up. I almost couldn’t do it I was so scared.’ He rubbed the goose bumps from his arms. ‘She was almost pretty, you know, I mean, I could see where . . .’

  “ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  “ ‘So we wait until morning and then put a stake through her heart, right?’

  “It wasn’t until that moment that I realized the insanity that had taken over this town. Here’s a young kid, probably fourteen, talking about putting a stake through Angelina’s heart. He prob­ably wanted to cut off her head and stuff her mouth with garlic, too. God. But then, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The whole town was on a witch-hunt. Superstition abounded, there were hexes and charms hung over every doorway and around every person’s neck. There were people who predicted—for money, of course—who would be next; I even heard that some were ripping open chickens to read their futures in the entrails. I tried to ignore it all, but when Will said that, it hit home. I knew we had to proceed very, very carefully to avoid a catastrophe.

  “ ‘No, Will, things aren’t done that way. She’s a person, just like you and me.’

  “ ‘No, she ain’t.’

  “ ‘She’s just sick, that’s all.’

  “He looked at the floor and shuffled his feet. ‘So what’re we going to do?’

  “ ‘She’s locked up tight, you say?’

  “He nodded.

  “ ‘Well, then we’ll wait until tomorrow and unlock her. And then tomorrow night, when she wakes up, we’ll talk to her.’

  “ ‘You’re nuts.’

  “ ‘I know her, Will. You saw for yourself how small she is. You don’t think you and I can handle her?’

  “He looked at me with big eyes, and I saw a little of myself in him. ‘I don’t think anyone can handle her,’ he said.”

  37

  The night wore on. I lay in a foreign box, immobilized and furious—helpless and hopeless, and I waited. I waited. My fingers became intimately familiar with the little gold cross as I lay there, waiting.

  I waited through the night. No one entered the house, no one drew near. I fanned my consciousness out, roaming the house, the neighborhood, searching for Boyd, for surely he was behind this degradation. The mounting swirl of fear maddened me in my impotent state.

  Can’t you face me, Boyd? Must you send a child to do your work in the daytime, to chain me as I sleep? You follow me, hunt me, dog my trail for years, Boyd, with your self-serving attitude, and when the final moment comes, you care not to see for yourself?

  I have little interest in your piddling ways, Boyd. Better men than you have died under my loving touch, and were grateful for it. Release me and let us meet.

  If you dare.

  “Will and I talked into the middle of the night, then we got some blankets from Mrs. Haskill and slept on the daybeds out on the porch. I listened to the boy breathe for a long time before he fell asleep. I stayed awake a lot longer than that. Knowing that Angelina was crated up and helpless was somehow of no comfort. I knew the town was safe from her for the night, but I felt her presence, felt her awful, almost-­inhuman wrath, and I knew that when we released her, she would be very difficult to deal with. We just had to do it right—carefully, and without causing a panic in the town.

  “When we can show them that it’s just Angelina, just a warped little girl and not some legendary monster from Transylvania, then they’ll settle down. But if they mobbed Will’s basement, we’d have a big problem.

  “I could see her, almost, locked inside that dark box. Every time I closed my eyes I could see her face—eyes wide open and glittering with a luminescence of their own, skin thin and glossy, stretched too tightly, too whitely, over sharp bones. I saw her and saw her lips—bloodless they were—saw those terrible white lips curl up in a smile as her eyes flashed in recognition and she said my name. ‘Boyd.’

  “I sat up quickly, feeling bile rise, the perspiration running down my face. I must have gone to sleep, although I couldn’t remember nodding off. The voice of my dream kept bouncing around inside my head, but it had been just a bad dream. Angelina didn’t look anything at all like that . . . that . . . grotesque living skull I imagined in my sleep.

  “I wrapped the blanket around me a little closer and lay back down. Tomorrow would come soon enough to settle this whole thing.

  “The next day the townspeople were frantic with relief. For the first time in over four months, a night had gone by with no killings. I tried to enjoy their pleasure without letting on the reason. I begged with them to not relax their vigil, but it was to no avail. Like oppressed citizens who never lose their hope, their optimism, they were all convinced that the plague had ended, the bad dream was over, and they came up joviously for air, anxious to return to their previous way of life. I tried to convince them that caution was advised here, but they weren’t hearing me and I couldn’t exactly tell them what I knew. Not, at least, until after Will and I had taken care of Angelina.”

  38

  I awakened with all faculties absolutely alert. My position remained the same; the security of the box, I could tell, was unchanged. The difference was in the house. My family had come home.

  The parents were watching television, my precious Diana was playing softly in her room, and my Daniel . . . I scoured the house, seeking a whisper of his scent. He was not home.

  The house felt pleasant, the air relaxed.

  The neighborhood had lost its fear.

  I could see my lovely Diana, goddess, angel, and I sent her favorite lullaby to her—the one I had played for her night after night, the melody of which she never grew tired, the one that had given her pleasure every night for months.

  She heard it, and I had her.

  I followed her progress as she silently emerged from her room, walked past her parents, through the kitchen. I saw her hesitate at the door to the cellar, but I urged her, bringing the music up, and then down, threatening to pull it away; just come, little darling, just come a little closer and I shall play for you a symphony, one to enfold you in pleasure and keep you suspended . . .

  She opened the door. The darkness of the cellar rose to meet her.

  I called to her with the music—don’t turn on the lights. This is a symphony of the night, and it is beautiful only in the dark. Do not be afraid, there is only the music, there is nothing to be afraid of, the music is beautiful, and loving, and so are you. Come to me, come to the music, just down one step.

  She came down one step.

  I trilled in pleasure and she came down another to please me, and another, baby hand gliding along the handrail, then another, and soon she lowered herself onto the next as fast as she could, giggling.

  She reached the bottom. The darkness surrounded her and sucked the giggle from her throat. Her bottom lip trembled, and she almost turned around to go back up. Or, worse, call out.

  “Diana,” I spoke, my voice muffled, soft. She knew this pet name, and she adored it. The threatening tear rec
eded as the music once again calmed her. She took little steps to me, tentative, yet unafraid.

  “Diana,” I said. “Can you get into the big box? Can you figure out how to open it?”

  And I could see my prison through her eyes and the latches were simple. Three large hasps lined the box lid, and each had a small dowel pushed through for surety.

  I watched with increasing anxiety as baby fingers fumbled at the adult metal locks.

  “Pull the sticks.” She understood, and tried, but frustrated easily. My agitation mounted as she wiggled one loose, then went on to the next one. The second was harder, but the last came free easily. Then she had to turn the metal ring to line up with the hasp slot. This was harder for her, her hands hurt, and she was beginning to be afraid in the dark. I was losing patience. My freedom was so close—I could foil whatever plans Boyd and the boy had for me if only this little wimp of a child could free me.

  Settle down, Angelina, I had to remind myself. The child is doing her best.

  I began the music again, softly stroking her golden hair with it, easing us both through this tense moment. The burred edges of the metal bit into her soft little fingers and the smell of blood was so loud that I almost screamed inside my prison. The first lock twisted and she lifted the hasp off.

  Good girl, good girl. Now the next one. I could barely stay conscious, I was starving; the tension of the moment had me wanting to explode. She began to whine with the second one. The box was off square, and the hasp didn’t line up right. It was hard to turn.

  I increased the music, hoping to give her extra strength. She worked hard at it, her little pink tongue poking out one side of her mouth. She grunted and groaned, began to cry a little bit and whimper as her blood flowed across the hasp, but I just increased the music; I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, let her stop. I was almost out.

  It worked. The second was free.

  The third was easier to do, and she turned it, then very slowly lifted the hasp off, took two steps back, and put her bleeding fingers into her mouth.