by Nancy Holder
Carefully she helped him up into a sitting position, caressing his hair, trying to gently but firmly rouse him. After a second or two his eyes opened, and, seeing her, he instantly brightened. Just as quickly his smile turned to a grimace, eyelids squeezing shut, and his face lost its color again.
“We will get out of here,” she told him as she helped him to his feet. “We will. Now you have to trust me.”
The sound of her voice echoed off the walls of the mine. As they began to move back to the elevator, she heard rapid footfalls coming their way. They, too, echoed.
It had to be Lucille.
Edith stopped, propping Alan upright against the rough, dank wall.
The footfalls slowed, then stopped.
Though Lucille could not see her, and vice versa, that didn’t stop the madwoman from shouting an accusation.
“Thomas is dead because of you. You killed him!” she shrieked.
As the insane proclamation echoed and faded, Edith’s blood turned to ice. Was she telling the truth? If Thomas had indeed been killed, it was by his sister’s own hand. She eased Alan more deeply into the shadows. She would have to leave him there. Abandoning him there was one of the hardest things she would ever do, but if Lucille found her while she was holding him up, there would be no fight, no hope. It would be a slaughter and they would both surely die.
Crouching low, she watched Lucille gliding like a ghost over to the pile of objects beside Enola Sciotti’s trunk. In the silence Edith was again aware of the sounds of dripping water, plip-plop, plip-plop, like the ticking of a hundred unsynchronized clocks. Bending down, Lucille grunted and struggled with something at her feet. At first Edith couldn’t tell what she was doing; then she saw the woman lift aside one of the stones set in the floor.
“Before they put me away, I kept a little souvenir from Mother,” Lucille announced over her shoulder to her unseen audience. Then she took from the hole a meat cleaver—it appeared to be the same one in the illustration on the front page of the Cumberland Ledger, which had been driven into Beatrice Sharpe’s skull. The same nightmarish cockscomb worn by the dead woman’s spirit.
Lucille rose, turned, and started coming in Edith’s direction; in seconds, she would be on top of her—
Edith drew back further out of sight. She needed to lead the murderess away from the defenseless Alan and then find something to fight her with. Panting for air, she looked wildly around…
At the perimeter of the dimly lit cavern, the entrance to the mine tunnel opened onto blackness. She caught the faint gleam of metal in the floor, and remembered what it signified. Embedded rails that were designed to carry crude, wheeled carts that the mine workers loaded with clay, then pushed and dragged to the surface. The light glinting off the rails was coming from above.
Steeling herself for the ordeal, she lunged from cover. It didn’t matter that Lucille would see her; there was no way to avoid that now. She had to cross in front of her; she had to beat her to the entrance. Hurling herself forward despite the pain, she reached the tracks and ran into the tunnel, turned her face toward the soft flow of light. The source of the illumination became clear: a tiny, bright rectangle in the distance. How far up the steep incline, she could not tell. It looked like a postage stamp.
A howl of anger close on her heels spurred her to flight. As she ran up the tunnel’s slope she stumbled, lurching awkwardly on her bad leg and waving her arms for balance. On either side of her, the narrow, rusted rails were held together and cleated to the soft substrate by perpendicular wooden ties. Though muck-covered and slick, the ties’ rough front edges gave Edith’s numbed feet purchase. Supported by ancient, rotting timbers and braces, the shadowy ceiling hung low and dripped red tears on her head and shoulders; the walls were shored with sodden planks to keep the sides from collapsing inward and burying hapless workers alive.
Fighting to stay ahead of Lucille, Edith pushed her legs, the good one and the bad, to their absolute limit. And when both began to tremble and fail, she used her hands and arms to scrabble forward, digging her fingers in the muck. For an instant she thought she could feel Alan gazing down upon her, urging her on. She prayed that no matter what happened he would remain silent; if Lucille discovered he was still alive, he wouldn’t be for long.
If he is still alive. Oh, dear God, what if he’s already dead?
Then what is there to live for?
Don’t think of that now. Keep moving!
Her guttural gasps for air and whimpers of pain roared in her ears; savage, animalistic, inhuman, they were all she could hear. The atmosphere below ground was as poisonous to her as the tea, a wretched miasma of pungent clay and snowmelt that coated the inside of her mouth and her throat. She could feel the cold, wet weight of it filling her lungs as she inhaled, making it more and more difficult for her to breathe. Without turning her head to look over her shoulder, she couldn’t tell if Lucille was suffering from the same difficulty. But she knew the other woman was gaining on her: Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the dark scrambling shape behind.
Keep going. The command was almost a whisper in her ear, uttered by someone else. Mama? Pamela? Enola? Margaret? Or was she hearing the voice of her own spirit fighting to survive?
Sweat streamed down her face and stung her eyes; her arms were slippery with putrid clay. The rectangle of light at the end of the tunnel had grown larger and brighter, she could just make out the timbers framing the exit, but the slope at this end was steeper—every yard upward was agony. The hem of her voluminous nightgown wound around her legs—dragged through the muck, caught on rail spikes and splinters of wood, it seemed to grow heavier and heavier. Her long, plaited hair kept falling into her eyes but she didn’t dare pause to brush it away.
I do not want to die here. I do not want to die here.
Lucille was gaining; she could feel it. Then came a sudden pull from behind—hard, determined—and she knew Lucille had grabbed hold of her gown.
Edith looked up and saw that she was mere feet from the surface. She lowered her head and with a backwards kick and desperate burst of effort, fought free of the restraint. Crawling frantically on all fours she tumbled out of the tunnel’s red mouth.
But she had not escaped hell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE HEAT OF the fading afternoon sun had melted the snow that lay thinnest upon the ground, and the condensation mixed with freezing air had caused a dense, choking mist to rise and cling to the grounds. Visibility had shrunk to a ring of no more than a half dozen yards across. At the edges of the haze, crimson-tinged fingers of fog caressed the boiler of Thomas’s harvester, filtered between the skeletal legs of the poppet, hid and then revealed a long-dead conveyor and an oven where bricks had once been baked.
A gust of bitter wind ripped the air from Edith’s lungs and slapped her full in the face; the impact made her groan. She tried to move forward and found all her joints had gone rigid from the flash of intense cold—suddenly she was wearing the iron boots of Cinderella’s stepsisters. The icy air had penetrated the marrow of her bad leg as well. It felt like it was being slowly sawed off at the point of the injury, the imagined saw moving in time with the beating of her heart. Back and forth. Back and forth, the pain sharp, deep, and excruciating.
Then Lucille burst out of the mine a few feet behind her. Hair matted with red clay, face and arms likewise smeared with a gouache of crimson. In the center of her chest bright blood oozed forth in a steady trickle from the wound Edith had given her. She still clutched the obscene cleaver firmly.
When Lucille started scrambling to reach her feet a fresh rush of fear coursed through Edith’s body. Adrenaline animated her like a puppet or a wind-up doll. She jumped up and ran as fast as she could for the cover of the fog bank. The air inside it was thick as soup; it burned the inside of her nose to breathe it in.
I need a weapon.
She scanned the scaffolding of the poppet, the snow-filled buckets of the conveyor belt, and climbed up on t
he harvester. The machine burst into life, and the chugging of its heart matched her own.
Her hiding place revealed, she clambered back down. Lucille would know where she was now.
Dear God, let there be a mislaid hammer, a wrench—no, something to give leverage, something to overcome Lucille’s advantage in strength and speed.
The face of the man who had taught her about mechanics swam before her eyes, crushed and broken. Then she stumbled over it, the thing that she sought.
A shovel!
She grabbed the tool and hefted it in both hands. The connection between blade and handle felt solid and the blade’s edge looked thinned and sharpened by use. She turned back toward the tunnel mouth, the one place she would be able to see Lucille coming at her. She used the shovel as a crutch, hopping on her good leg, conserving her strength, easing her pain, groping her way through layer upon layer of swirling fog, which thinned to a haze when she reached the cluster of machinery.
“What do you want, Lucille?” Edith called out.
“I want to smash your face in with a stone—and then to count your teeth as I break them off…” shouted a voice almost lost in the mist.
Edith had already reasoned the answer to her question; it was the sound and direction of the voice that she was after.
Wielding her shovel in both hands like a lance, Edith moved through the roiling murk. As daylight from above faded in and out, shadows and shapes half-seen and blurred seemed to shift of their own accord in the haze. She mock-parried with the weapon, defining the boundary she could easily defend. The edge of steel was far too wide, the point too dull to stab with—but it could chop and hack bone-deep. She could not let Lucille get hold of the blade, though. That would reverse her only advantage.
“…cut you into pieces and make you disappear. That’s what I want. Can you give me that? Or must I take it?”
Lucille’s voice seemed to emerge from everywhere and nowhere. As Edith neared the harvesting machine, whose base was still banked with drifts of clean snow, Lucille darted out of the red mist and slashed at her with the cleaver. She was too slow bringing up the shovel to block it. Searing pain shot through her cheek just below her eye, and before she could strike back, her adversary had vanished into the fog.
Lucille’s speed and accuracy on the run made her heart sink. Perhaps she wasn’t badly injured at all? A hot trickle of blood rolled down her cheek. She swiped it away with the back of her hand. A sound behind her made her turn. She seized the end of the handle and swung it with both hands like a medieval broadsword.
Getting it moving was easier than stopping it once it was in motion. Before she could recover from the wasted blow, a dark form burst from the mist to her left. Lucille brushed against her hip as she used the cleaver’s edge to make another cut. The shovel clanged against the side of the boiler as Edith tried and failed to hit her assailant in the back. With her bad leg she could not give chase; she had to watch as her tormentor disappeared into the swirling mist.
Silence descended on the hazy clearing, searing, malevolent silence. Edith strained to hear, to see as she turned and turned again, making the landscape of dead machines and bleeding earth revolve around her. She had no idea where Lucille was, where she would come from next. She had no idea if Alan was still alive.
As seconds became minutes, the tension of remaining on her guard began to drain away her last ounces of strength. The weight of the shovel blade made her back bow and her arms from shoulder to wrist spasm and quake. When she could no longer carry it, she let it drag behind her as she searched. It was not a ploy to draw out Lucille, but it functioned to that end.
A dark human form moved between a jumble of machines, then back into the mist, but no longer in haste, as if testing, observing her vulnerabilities. Edith stopped turning and listened, drawing the shovel’s handle into both hands, poised for the attack that was sure to come.
Out of the fog, with cleaver slashing wildly, Lucille sprang at her weak side—the bad leg side. Edith managed to evade her this time by backing away as she kept the shovel blade between herself and the cleaver’s edge. Steel rang on steel, the sharp clatter instantly swallowed, muffled by the surrounding fog. The shovel was long and slow to swing, even with two hands; Edith persisted because she had no choice now, parrying with answering force every time Lucille attacked. As she drew back, the cleaver flashed down with blinding speed, chipping the wooden handle above her hands, knocking the blade aside. Before Edith could recover, she was cut again. Desperate now, she brought the shovel around, jabbing it at Lucille’s face and eyes. Again, too slow, even slower than before because her arms were growing weaker, and then the cleaver slashed inside her guard. It bit into her flesh more deeply this time and hot blood jetted down the inside of her nightgown’s sleeve.
Edith knew she could not withstand the frantic onslaught much longer. She retreated with shovel raised, and kept on retreating, back into the fog where she hid, trembling and shaking bright red drops into the drifts of clean snow. It was no comfort to her that Lucille did not follow. Lucille was that sure of the kill, and more than content to draw out the filthy business as long as possible.
Edith was grateful that her nightgown concealed the full extent of her injuries; she was afraid that if she knew how bad they were, she would lose heart and fall to her knees to await the inevitable. More than ever she needed to believe in herself. She needed to weave a story so powerful that it would allow her to survive. Once upon a time, there were:
Love.
Death.
And ghosts.
And a world drenched in blood.
A scarlet fog veiled the killing ground, then dripped down through the greedy, starved mineshafts and into the tortured vats of claret clay that bubbled and gasped on the filthy, bone-white tile. Crimson earth seeped back up through the walls of mud. Allerdale Hall was ringed with brilliant red—a stain that clawed toward Edith’s bare and battered feet.
But that was the very least of her troubles.
Because hell’s own child, Lucille Sharpe, was coming for her. Implacable, unstoppable, a creature fueled by madness and rage, that had maimed and murdered and would kill again, unless Edith struck first. But she was weak, coughing blood and stumbling, and this monster had already claimed other lives—other souls—stronger and heartier than hers.
Snowflakes blinded Edith’s swollen cornflower-blue eyes; red droplets specked her golden hair. Her right cheek had been sliced open; the hem of her gauzy nightgown had soaked up blood, rot, and gore.
And crimson clay.
She braced herself for the last battle, the duel to the death. Everywhere shadows and shades loomed, red on red, on red. If she didn’t survive, would she join them? Would she haunt this cursed place forever?
Ghosts are real. That much I know.
She knew much more than that, of course. She knew all of it, the whole brutal story. If only she had pieced it together sooner—the warnings, the clues. But had she learned it too late to save herself and Alan, who had risked so much for her sake?
Behind the snow and scarlet gloaming, she caught a flash of running feet. Lucille was coming for her.
Beside the monolith of Thomas’s excavating machine, near a brick oven, Edith waited, tears streaming down her face. Her leg throbbed and she was freezing, yet her insides burned so hot she expected black smoke to plume from her mouth. She backed up a few steps, whirled around, eyes searching, her breath a rasping sound in the back of her throat. Then time stopped, and her mind cast back to how it was that she, Edith Cushing, had come here to fight for her life.
It seemed too much to wish that she could live happily ever after.
Lucille stepped out of the fog and walked towards her; there was no longer need for guile. The dark eyes boiled with hatred and madness, and lust for revenge. Lucille had killed Thomas but, in her deranged mind, Edith had delivered the fatal stab because he had chosen her over his own flesh and blood.
“I will not stop,” Lucille said, p
anting heavily, “until you kill me or I kill you.”
“I know that…” Edith’s voice quavered, but from exhaustion, not fear. What did it matter? At this point she was half-dead already.
I am no match for her by myself.
And then… she had the strong sense that she was not alone. Someone or something was with her, though she could see nothing in the swirling haze. Insane Allerdale Hall towered above them, but it was not the source of this… presence.
A presence she knew meant her no harm.
Was it Enola? Pamela Upton, perhaps? All three of the murdered brides?
Edith slid her glance from Lucille’s contorted face to the churning ether. She dared to believe what she could not see.
“If you are here with me—” she extended her hand “—show yourselves. Give me a sign.”
There. Edith was flooded with joy as she gazed at the one who had come to help her, out of love. She was ready now.
As she closed distance with Lucille she dragged the shovel like an exhausted berserker trailing his battle axe, building momentum for a final, desperate blow.
Apparently blind to the specter, Lucille’s face radiated triumph. “There’s no one to help you,” she flung at Edith. Her smile was cruel and vindictive; it was unforgiving. “I don’t see anyone, do you?”