by Lara Parker
At that he felt light-headed, as if sleepwalking. After all, he had been lying to himself since he had first seen her, denying suspicions huddled in the corners of his mind. Of course she had come back. All this time, when he could have been finding a way to challenge her, to resist her, instead, like a fool, he had left her to her plans, and she had almost completed them.
Opening the basement door, he whipped the light across the fire-blackened stone of the foundation and the old brick that supported the chimney. As his foot fell upon the stair, Barnabas heard the familiar clink of a loose brick, the same that had betrayed his step hundreds of times when he had returned, each daybreak, satiated from his nightly forays. He thrust the beam into the blackness, and it washed across the masonry arches. Cobwebs clung to the heavy joists that supported the floor above. They hung in tattered remnants, as if time itself had shriveled into a sticky tangle of gauze. Yes. There it lay, covered in dust, as though undisturbed for months. His coffin.
He handed the flashlight back to Willie, who held it nervously, the light playing across the carved mahogany.
“Let’s see if I am here.”
“Jeeze, Barnabas. It’s gotta be empty. That ain’t your coffin anymore.”
His fingers left glossy smears in the dust as he lifted the lid. How many times had he performed this weary gesture when the moment had come to escape the dawn? The squeak of the hinges was the music he remembered, inviting him to sleep. He pushed back, and Willie cast the light into the interior.
It was empty. The blue satin of his inner sanctum bore not even a faint silhouette of his slumbering form.
“What’s that?” Willie whipped the beam around. “You hear that?”
At first Barnabas thought it must be the sound of the sea, just beyond the cliff where the wide lawn tumbled to the rocks. He had often heard the rushing of the waves and the churning of the surf echoing through the chambers beneath the house, lulling him in his daylight dreams. But there it was again, nearer, within the room, a gasp and then a gurgling moan. Barnabas breathed in. There was the smell of newly sanded wood, paint and lacquer, but beneath it two familiar odors intermingled: the reek of a predator and the stench of prey.
“Barnabas . . .” Willie sounded panicked. “Someone’s coming . . . .”
“No. He is already here.”
“Where?”
“Just . . . under those tarps.”
A pile of painters’ cloths, stiff and dried, gave evidence that construction had taken place in the house. Barnabas approached the cans of paint and paint thinner, rolls of wallpaper, and hardened brushes cluttering the floor. Reaching down, he pulled back the canvas.
The man was still alive. He stared up with the helpless gaze of a dog struck by a car in the street, crushed inside but still breathing. From his heavy work boots he looked to be one of the laborers, left to clean up perhaps, after the others had gone home. He was jowly and unshaven and wore overalls and a flannel shirt which was soaked with blood. He sighed, and soft, sweet bubbles formed on his lips. It was a messy kill, careless and cruel. Wasted blood pooled on the floor beneath the man’s head.
The ripped flesh laid bone and sinew bare, exposing the faint flutter of an artery, and Barnabas resisted an old urge as he lifted the man’s head, and gazed into his terrified eyes. He leaned closer, breathing in the scent of blood and saliva.
“Who did this to you?”
The man tried to speak but could only manage a wheezing, “Sh-h-h . . .”
Was the man warning him to be silent? Was the attacker still close by? A chill crept between his shoulder blades as he looked around slowly. But he heard only his own breathing, and Willie’s asthmatic pant, and the rasp of the dying man who shuddered now as his eyes glazed over.
Willie tugged at his sleeve. “Barnabas . . .”
“Help me lift him . . . roll this tarp around him.” He pushed the body on its side.
“You crazy? What for?”
“He must be moved. The last thing we want is for the authorities to come snooping around here and suspect something.”
“But we got nothing to do with it.”
Barnabas suppressed the impulse to strike Willie. Always his dimwitted servant opposed the simplest instruction, the most obvious choice of action. He was ruled by cowardice. But Barnabas had no one else he could trust, no one who knew of his past and still remained loyal. He strove for patience. “As you have shown me, Willie, the house is now perfectly restored, and this basement room was—”
“Okay, Barnabas, okay, we’ll take him to the cliff and—”
“No, Willie, better the woods. We’ll bury him in the woods.”
The corpse was light, like a sack of paper rubbish. Willie wrapped the body in the drop cloth and tied it with a length of rope. Then he and Barnabas carried it out to the Bentley.
The clouds had passed and faint starlight shone down. A new wind lifted the branches of the great oaks, and flurries floated to the ground, swirling around the two men. Leaves brushed by their heads and scraped their faces, and Barnabas tasted dust and debris.
It was first necessary to empty the trunk of the two carpets Barnabas had recently purchased to add to his collection. They had arrived that morning and he had not yet taken them to the shop. Rolled and tied with taut string, they were bundled like the dead man, but heavier, bulkier, and Barnabas dragged them across the gravel and struggled with their weight as he shoved them into the back seat. The corpse fell easily into the boot, and one arm tumbled out of the wrapping and over the bumper. Barnabas picked it up gently and placed it against the body. The bones of the wrist were still pliable, and he felt for the faintest pulse, but there was none; it was death, final and forever. Another unfortunate had perished that a beast might live to hunt again.
After searching for a deserted area close to the river, Barnabas turned off the road and drove in jarring lunges through sparse undergrowth in among the trees. There they found a place. Even though Willie had brought a shovel and a pick, he was incapable of digging the grave alone, and the two of them hacked the unyielding earth for the better part of an hour. The leaves were the problem—leaves that lay in knee-high drifts, concealing rocks the shovel struck with a harsh ring—dry leaves that once raked away, blew back into the grave as though utterly depraved, a whirlwind of leaves, filling the hole up again with insidious purpose, as though they would make the tomb their own. In the end, he and Willie dragged the body into the shallow excavation and covered it over with rotting compost. Most difficult to bury were the worn, paint-spattered boots, protruding out of the mulch.
As Barnabas walked back to the car, the residue of physical effort triggered a surge of nausea. At first he thought he was going to faint, or be sick to his stomach. These, he remembered, were the first signs of the unpleasant symptoms he had been experiencing since his cure. New blood, manufactured within his own bones, rushed through his arteries and ricocheted into the ventricles of his heart like a flashflood tumbling into a dry gulch. The vampire’s silver stream and the cool, tensile strength in his limbs were gone forever. In their place were spasms that doubled him up in pain. Throbbing began in his temples as though his heart was burdened with blood too thick for his veins. Dizziness ensued and he began to pant for breath.
Willie looked over. “What’s the matter, Barnabas? You okay?”
“It’s the cure again,” he muttered. “At times, it’s unbearable.” As he spoke he felt his legs grow numb and crumple beneath him. His hands were charged with an electrical tingling, as if they had been asleep, and blood was flowing back into them with a slow dull ache. Heat rose out of his core. He wondered whether diabetics or epileptics also learned the signs of convulsions coming on, and waited for them to begin, knowing nothing could stop them. He reached for Willie and gripped his shoulder.
“Barnabas?”
The blood heat began and grew steadily. A volcano stirred, bubbled, expanded; his breath came in gasps, until his whole body pulsed like coals fanned in a gra
te. A mist settled over his skin, and in seconds he was bathed in clammy sweat and reeking of his new human smell. Breathless and exhausted, he began to shiver—always the inevitable aftermath of the reaction—and he drew his cape about him. He looked over at Willie’s face, which was shadowed with concern. “I’m fine,” he whispered. “Let’s forget all about this place.”
“Yeah, right, Barnabas. Tonight never happened.”
LATER THAT NIGHT Barnabas sat by the fire in the drawing room at Collinwood. His arms ached from digging, his hands were cramped, and blisters reddened his palms. Now he remained deep in thought. Had Antoinette placed his casket in the secret room? Had she known about the body? Was she aware of a vampire on the loose? There must be some connection. Perhaps she herself . . . no, but still, if she were actually Angelique, nothing was beneath her.
If she had returned, if this so-called Antoinette were truly she, then she was a living connection to his past. He felt a sudden twinge in his throat. He despised her. But he had been certain she had died by his hand, forever, lost to him but for the memory of her insatiable love.
And if that were not sufficient torment, he now faced a new and even more formidable opponent. Just as he had relinquished all supremacy, another vampire had entered his domain.
TWO
Salem Village—1692
THE MADNESS HAD BEGUN early in the year, but it was only a matter of weeks since Miranda du Val had first begun to suspect she herself was in danger. That spring day she had been on her way to her farm, the walk being over an hour along the forest path, and she had warned herself to stay fast to the ground. Never let them see her in the trees, never give them cause. They had hanged a woman in Topsfield for reading books not the Bible, and another in Marblehead for giving birth to a deformed child. The day would come when they would saw off Judah’s head in Bedford, and bury it far from his body, that he might not ride the night. Little did they know.
She remembered that she must use the utmost care, never let them see her fly, nor give them any reason to imagine she was peculiar. Two were in prison in Salem Village waiting trial: one an old hag who deserved to die, vile and dishonest; another a sharp-tongued woman with a questionable reputation. Neither of them witches.
They had drowned a girl in Whethersfield, proving that she was not a witch, which Miranda could have told them, even though the girl was first stripped and searched for marks. The pure water never released its grasp on her struggling body, and she died to defy their sentence. What beasts they were. Loathing women. Desiring women. Ashamed, resentful, full of hate.
She had watched them as they moved out of the meetinghouse that morning in their tall hats and black waistcoats, their faces grim above starched lace, their eyes darting, judgmental, fearful. She had listened to the sermon: “The Devil hath been raised among us and his Rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, only God knows. We must cast out the impure. Let no aberration exist among us.” And she had read their inner thoughts: And mine own un-Godly covetings, I must repress.
That sunny morning, as she struggled through the tasseled grasses towards the forest, her heart ached to be at her farm again, though she knew it would be sadly overgrown, and to see the wood lot and the broadsided house built by her father, with its faded red paint, the tint of blood. It had been six weeks since she had seen it. Careful she must be that they not take it from her.
As the forest grew darker, and she moved across the dappled shadows into the caves of green, she thought of the many nights she had spent in these woods as a child, living with the Wampanoags, before the Reverend Collins found her and took her back to Salem Village. Often she had slept high in the trees, rocked by the wind. Moths sometimes clung to her eyes, and one dawn a spider spun its web across her mouth. Another morning she woke to a sparrow building a nest in her hair. She was so at home in the trees her fingers were often stuck together with sap, and the bottoms of her feet grew rough as bark. She flew easily through the branches and across the canopy. Sooleawa, the Wampanoags called her. Sisika. “Tree Flying Girl.”
When small birds began to follow her, she knew her farm was near, just beyond the rise. A woodchuck whistled in the leaves, and when she saw the snake her heart lifted, the pattern on his skin more intricate than clock springs. She followed his path through wild strawberry, and his design blended with the old leaf shapes, crimson and pale yellow and deep, brackish brown. The whispering sound he made, though faint, gave way to another, a broken twig, and then a silence came more quiet than a duck’s swimming, as birdsong ceased. She broke a vine across her path, and in the ruffled green she saw the doe’s eyes. With her was a strong fawn, out of spots, mossy antlers newly sprouted. Her farm was shining through the shadows of the last trees pouring gold and green across the hills.
The men of Salem Village would take her land if they could; they despised a woman owning land, held fast to their resentments. All the recitations of the commandments could never cleanse their hearts of coveting. It was the meat of their thoughts. Old Bartholomew Gedney, that schemer, for certain had an eye on her farm, and her benefactor, Benajah Collins, would stop at nothing had he any inkling of her true nature. But her father had cleared the fields and built the house. It was in her name: a wood lot newly grown, a fast flowing stream, a meadow with bog, and the great forest all around. She would marry Andrew Merriweather in the spring, and they would farm this land together. Somehow she would hide from the world her secret wickedness. Andrew loved her and suspected nothing. He was a simple, kindly man.
She was crossing the field of flax, thick now with young weeds, when she felt water seep into her shoes. She looked down and saw the field was flooded all the way to the stream. The beavers had been at their work again. She half-waded, half leapt through the marsh, flies buzzing in her eyes, and when she reached the waters she saw at once the damage they had done. The dam was already two feet high, a tangled mass of sticks and larger limbs piled in a messy heap that backed the flow of the water into her best wood lot, turning it to swamp. The small trees were dying, and others had been downed by the beavers and already wedged into the dam.
Flinging off her shawl and wading waist deep into the cold water, she began to tug at the branches and to tear away weeks of the beavers’ toil. The sticks clung to one another; mud and leaf mulch held them fast. A large, rust-colored rodent rose to the surface of the pond and waggled his slick head at her before he turned and slapped the water with his tail. The beavers had woven a hillock of trunks and branches, cleverly interlocked and glued together, firm enough to stop the water from flowing. She labored for over an hour, tugging and dragging the branches to the side of the stream. And the irate beaver came more than once to the surface to chatter at her and swim back into his marshy kingdom.
She did not see them before she smelled them, a man’s pungent odor along with his horse’s, drifting over the water. She was hauling a branch up the bank when she saw them on the opposite side, two townsmen from Collins port she recognized, Deodat Larson on his Morgan, and her master, Reverend Benajah Collins, on his sickly mare. Behind them was Judah Zachery, the schoolteacher from nearby Bedford, riding his mule. She felt a sour taste rise in her mouth when she saw Judah, because she knew at once that it was he who had brought them and, of the three, he was the one she feared.
“Good day, my child,” said the Reverend. “What brings you out on the Sabbath?”
“I was to meeting, sir, and, this being my free day, I have come to tend my farm.”
“Have you no work to do at home for Goodwife Collins?”
“She has stayed this day in the town, sir, and given me leave.”
“Would it not be better to spend the day in prayer and thanksgiving for all of God’s many bounties, or in the quiet contemplation of the scripture?”
“God’s beauty and His bounty are here, sir, and this woodland is as holy as any church.”
Reverend Collins’s horse pulled at her bit as he held her too firmly. When he spoke
again, his manner was one of warning-hesitant, but not unkind. “Aye, Miranda du Val, we were just admiring your farm, as you do so call it yours, although it sorely wants care.”
“I will care for it, sir, as soon as I can,” she answered.
“Oh, we are certain of that eventuality, my child, but your indenture is not up.”
“Within the year.”
“But now is the time to plant. And what of debts promised by you for board and clothing? You must sign on for another year, must you not? Meanwhile this good land languishes and turns to marsh.”
“I was clearing out the stream, sir, when you arrived.” She thought of telling them about Andrew, who would have a hand in her release, but at that moment decided to hold her tongue except to say, “What calls you this way, sir, so far from the town?” They wanted something, and it was best to hear them out.
“We have rode out to see this property for Sir Isaac Collins,” said Deodat Larson, smiling down from his saddle. “You must know he is a wealthy merchant in the shipping trade, and he wishes to make you a respectable offer.”
She shivered from her damp clothes and turned to the Reverend. “Sir Isaac Collins? And would that be your kinsman, sir?”
Benajah jerked his horse’s head away from the grass. “He is my brother, and has plans to be . . . an absentee landlord—”
“You may tell him the land is not for sale, sir, and that is the end of it.”
“And when will it be planted?”
“Soon.”
The schoolteacher’s voice was hard. “But what of your lessons, Miranda?” His legs hung low on his mule.