Darkwater

by V. J. Banis

  If that is the case, she told herself, they should both be happy now, because undoubtedly the peace is broken.

  As it turned out, she was more right even than she thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Of course no one was surprised when Alicia had one of her “spells” later that evening. What was surprising, at least to Jennifer, was the intensity of the attack. For the first time she began to take seriously the possibility that there might be something really wrong physically with Alicia.

  “I can’t breathe,” Alicia gasped, writhing upon her bed and clawing at her throat. “I tell you, it’s like someone is strangling me.”

  Jennifer had gotten up from bed when Alicia’s bell rang during the night. Walter had come down too but she sent him away, saying she would spend the night with Alicia. At first she thought it was just another of Alicia’s emotional traumas and that when she had talked for a while, spilling out some of her venomous hatred for the child living in the house, she would fall asleep and Jennifer could return to the comfort of her bed.

  Now she was not so sure. “Tell me how you feel,” she said, leaning close over the bed. There was no doubt that the pain twisting Alicia’s face into a grotesque mask was real. Jennifer wondered if she should send someone for Doctor Goodman.

  “I can’t breathe, I told you,” Alicia snapped. “And I feel so weak, as if the life were being drained out of me. It’s that girl, I tell you, that little witch.”

  “Nonsense. You can’t possibly believe that Liza could have anything to do with this. She’s in her own bed by now, sound asleep.”

  “Are you so sure? Have you looked?”

  “Why, no,” Jennifer said, surprised. “But what has that to do with it anyway? How can you think that she, wherever she is, could make it difficult for you to breathe?”

  “The same way she made that handful of feathers and straw lay an egg. You saw her do that the same as I did. It was magic, black magic that she learned from her mother in that swamp. And she’s killing me with it, and no one cares.”

  With that Alicia burst into sobs, flinging herself back against her pillow, but almost at once the sobs were cut off and she began to gasp and choke so violently that Jennifer was alarmed.

  “Here, let me help you sit up,” she said, tugging at Alicia’s shoulders. “You’ll breathe more easily sitting up.”

  Together they got Alicia to a sitting position, the pillows propped up behind her, but even this did not seem to help much. By now Alicia was actually white with the effort of breathing and her eyes were wide with fright.

  “I am going to send for the doctor,” Jennifer said.

  “Don’t...leave me,” Alicia whispered hoarsely. “I...I’m so frightened....”

  “I will only be gone a minute.” Jennifer went without waiting for further protest, and ran along the hall and up the stairs. Without even knocking, she opened the door to Helen’s room and went in.

  Helen sat up in bed, silhouetted against the moonlight from the window. “Who is it?” she asked sleepily.

  “It’s Jennifer. Please, get up, I need help.”

  At once Helen was struggling to get out of the bed and to don a dressing gown. In a minute she had a lamp lit.

  “What is wrong?”

  “It’s Alicia, she’s quite ill. I think the doctor should be summoned.”

  Some of the alarm went out of Helen’s eyes. “Oh, that,” she said, adjusting the chimney to the lamp. “Are you quite sure? Doctor Goodman does not like to be summoned all the way to Darkwater in the dead of the night, just for Alicia’s spells.”

  “I think this is rather more serious.” Something in her tone conveyed the concern she felt. For a moment Helen regarded her across the room. Then she seemed to accept what Jennifer said.

  “Wait here,” she said. “I will get Walter.” She slipped from the room with a rustling of silk and disappeared along the dark hallway.

  * * * * * * *

  Alone in her room, Alicia was tormented by fear, by her conviction that it was wicked magic that was torturing her. She always wore a narrow ribbon about her throat but now even this seemed to strangle her. She clawed at it and tore it away, flinging it from her. Still she could not get air into her lungs. It was as if giant hands were slowly squeezing her neck, strangling the life out of her.

  It’s evil, that’s what it is, she thought, gasping frantically. If only Jennifer would come back...if only one of them would believe me....

  Suddenly, she knew they would never believe her, never—unless she somehow proved to them that what she said was true. And she knew, knew beyond any doubt, that she must get out of her sick bed, must go seek the cause of her torment.

  “Dear God,” she prayed with all the fervor of a devout believer, “give me the strength to rise from my bed.”

  The prayer did seem to give her new strength. She struggled to get her feet free of the bedclothes. Slowly, laboriously, she swung them to the floor. Her chest heaved with the violence of her breathing, but at last she was out of the bed and standing.

  She steadied herself for a moment, clinging to the edge of the big dresser. Moving cautiously, but with a strength born of desperate determination, she went out into the hall.

  She avoided the front stairs. Jennifer might be there and in any case what she was seeking was to the rear of the house. She crept along the hall, to the back stairs.

  Here she had to pause to rest, sitting on the bottom step while her heart pounded and her head swam. For a moment she nearly sank into unconsciousness, but she heard a distant murmur of voices and knew it was Jennifer and Helen and Walter, descending the front stairs, on their way to her room.

  Fear that they would find her and make her return to her bed before she had done what she must do gave her the strength to rise again to her feet and, clinging to the banister, clamber laboriously upward.

  The stairs were dark and it had been so long since she had moved freely about the house. Once she stumbled and would have fallen but for the railing. She stood, clinging to it, swaying weakly to and fro, and prayed for her God to give her the additional strength she needed.

  At last she was at the top and she could move more easily along the hallway, until she came to the room she was seeking, the room in which Liza slept...if she was sleeping.

  The room was dark, and it was a rule of the house that matches were not kept in the children’s rooms, but there was a lamp with matches on the hall table. She lit the lamp with trembling fingers. Shielding the chimney with one hand, she entered Liza’s bedroom.

  Liza was asleep in bed. There was no question that it was her. She had turned facing the door and her face looked more than ever a child’s face in sleep. Nor did Alicia believe she was faking the sleep. It was simply too genuine.

  A wave of disappointment, so real it was almost a physical blow, swept over Alicia. She had been so certain Liza was somehow to blame for her illness. For a moment she nearly dropped the lamp. It seemed as if all the strength she had summoned to make this journey was now spent and she was not even sure she could continue to stand.

  She sat on the wooden chair by the dresser, and as she did so, her eyes went down, to the floor. At once she gave a start as she saw the little rag doll there. She bent, reaching for it, and picked it up.

  A cold chill went over her. It was crude, but it was a doll, like that hen-doll Liza had made, only this one was made in the image of a woman. It had a head, with a face of sorts, and hair, and arms, and a dress.

  Alicia fingered the dress. It was made from a scrap of material from one of her old dresses. She recognized the print that had always been a favorite of hers, a double muscadine.

  And the hair, black strands roughly fastened to the doll’s head...could it be strands of her own hair, gathered somehow from her pillow. It was the same color as hers, the same texture.

  She held the doll toward the light to study it more closely, and saw for the first time the ribbon at its throat. It was one of her ribbons,
there was no doubt of that, a blue one that had been missing for some days. But that was not what sent such terror coursing along her spine.

  The ribbon had been tied tight around the doll’s neck, as if to strangle it. For a moment it seemed to Alicia that the doll’s button face was distorted in a grimace of pain and terror.

  * * * * * * *

  “But where could she have gone?” Jennifer asked, staring at the empty bed in Alicia’s room. “And how? She was so weak a moment ago she could hardly sit up, let alone walk around.”

  “Well, she certainly is not here,” Helen said, a bit sharply. “It is not the first time Alicia’s spells have fooled someone.” She seemed to be criticizing Jennifer for sounding the alarm unnecessarily.

  “If she was as sick as you say, she couldn’t have gone far,” Walter said. “Let’s look around.”

  They went through the downstairs rooms, carrying the lamp with them and even looking into the shadowy corners to assure themselves Alicia was not for some reason hiding there.

  Jennifer had just begun to think she had been the victim of some sort of cruel hoax when they heard Alicia scream. It was a shriek of pure terror, and it came from upstairs.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When they reached the upstairs, Walter leading the way, they found Alicia lying unconscious on the floor, half in and half out of Liza’s bedroom. Peter and Mary, awakened by her screams, stood in the doorway of their bedroom, looking wide-eyed at their mother’s inert form.

  “It’s all right, children, back to bed,” Helen said. She shooed them firmly back inside their room and ordered them into bed again.

  Jennifer knelt beside Alicia. “She’s fainted.”

  “But what on earth was she doing here?” Walter asked.

  “Liza...?” Jennifer said. She knew how Alicia felt, especially now, and there must be some significance to finding Alicia in this very room. Had she come up the stairs, summoning the strength from God knew what source, meaning to harm Liza while she slept?

  The same thought must have occupied to Walter, and he turned as if to investigate, but at the moment Liza appeared, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Alicia is quite ill,” Jennifer said. “She’s fainted. You may go back to bed.”

  Liza seemed not to hear. She stood where she was, staring without expression down upon Alicia, until Walter repeated Jennifer’s order: “Back to bed now, Liza.” With that she went.

  “I’ll carry her downstairs,” Walter said, lifting his wife’s frail body in his arms.

  Helen reappeared from her grandchildren’s bedroom. “I’ll send one of the servants for Doctor Goodman,” she said. “No doubt they are all awake by now anyway.”

  As Walter lifted Alicia, something fell from her hand. He did not see it, but Jennifer knelt to pick it up.

  It was a crudely made doll, fashioned from a sock, really, and clothed in a rag dress. It had what appeared to be real hair, if a bit sparse. Perhaps the most striking thing about it was the ribbon tied so tightly about its neck. Jennifer almost loosened it, but then she thought probably that had been done to give the doll a distinct head.

  Why Alicia should have such a doll she could not fathom. She wondered for a moment if it could have had anything to do with her scream. But surely not, she told herself. She put the doll atop the hall table and followed Walter downstairs.

  Nothing served to revive Alicia and she was still unconscious when, much later in the night, morning, almost, Doctor Goodman finally arrived with the servant who had been sent for him.

  “She’s probably sleeping,” he said, none too cheerfully, when informed that Alicia had not regained consciousness. When he saw her, though, saw the distortion of pain on her face and heard her labored breathing, his attitude changed.

  “I was right, then,” Jennifer said, assisting him at the bedside. “This isn’t just another of her spells. She’s really sick this time.”

  “Yes, thank heaven you sent for me,” he said. “She is really sick. Critically, I might say.”

  “What is it?”

  “I wish to God I knew.” He felt the thin wrist for a pulse.

  Morning came. Jennifer watched the windows grow gray and then light. She started to pull the shades but the doctor stopped her.

  “No, let the light in,” he said. “We may as well see what we’re doing.”

  Jennifer could not see that they were doing much, however. She did not blame the doctor for that. He had tried any number of things, even resorting to steam inhalation in an attempt to clear Alicia’s breathing passages. Nothing seemed to help. Her breath was a ragged gasp each time and her chest rattled with the effort of getting air into her lungs.

  Now, his invention exhausted, the doctor could only sit by the patient, watching for some sign of response to the injection he had given her.

  Finally, he said, “Perhaps some coffee. Not for the patient, for me.” He sounded weary, not with physical effort alone, but with helplessness as well.

  “I’ll see if Helen has some ready”

  She found Walter waiting outside the bedroom door. “How is she?” he asked.

  “She is still unconscious. She seems unable to breathe, as if she were being strangled. I’m afraid Doctor Goodman is stymied.”

  In the kitchen, she found that Bess was up and had plenty of coffee brewing. Breakfast would be ready whenever anyone wanted to eat, she informed them.

  Jennifer did not feel much like eating. She could only think of Alicia, weak as she was, somehow, for some reason, making that journey upstairs. Why had she done it, and what had made her scream as she had, a scream of pure horror?

  “It won’t do to make yourself ill,” Walter said, helping her carry the coffeepot back to Alicia’s room.

  “I know, I’m fine, really,” she said, giving him a weary smile. “I’ve been trying to think. Why did Alicia scream like that? What frightened her so?”

  “We all know how she feels about Liza, and she was in Liza’s room.”

  “Yes, but why go there at all? She certainly went there under her own power, which must have required an incredible effort. And why scream? She has never before shrieked at the mere sight of Liza.”

  Walter stopped to face her directly. “Are you suggesting Liza did something to her?”

  She had to say, “No, I don’t think that. Unless she is a very fine actress, Liza had certainly been asleep when she came to the door of her room.”

  “You will call me if there’s any change,” Walter said at the door to Alicia’s bedroom.

  Jennifer promised that she would and, taking the coffeepot from him, went in. Her heartbeat quickened a little when she saw the doctor bent over his patient.

  “What has happened?” she asked.

  “She was conscious for a moment,” he said. “I thought she acted as if she wanted to tell me something, but her mind must have been wandering. All she talked about was a doll.”

  “A doll? What doll?”

  “I have no idea. She said it was her, and that it was killing her. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  Jennifer did not reply. She watched in silence as the doctor tried to revive Alicia again, but she had sunk once more into that pained sleep.

  Suddenly, so unexpectedly that it made Jennifer jump, Alicia’s eyes flew open. She looked straight upward.

  “My God, she’s killing me,” she said. “She’s really killing me this time.”

  “Mrs. Dere,” Doctor Goodman began, but he could say no more before she grasped at her throat with a low cry of pain. She seemed to be trying to tear something away, as if invisible hands were strangling her. Her eyes were fixed and as glassy as death.

  Alicia gasped and closed her eyes again, writhing upon the bed, choking, strangling. The sounds that came from her throat now were unintelligible, inarticulate gurgles of fast-failing breath.

  “You’d better call Mr. Dere,” the doctor said, feeling again for a pulse. />
  Walter was at his post outside when Jennifer opened the door. He looked at her with anxious eyes and she only nodded and motioned for him to go in. She knew there was nothing more she could do inside, and Alicia was entitled to those few seconds of life alone with her husband.

  She went along the hall, but was startled to discover Liza, still in her nightdress, seated on one of the lower steps.

  “What are you doing out of bed?” she asked, a bit sharply because she was very tired and her nerves were on edge.

  “It’s morning,” Liza said without expression. “I always get up at this time.”

  Jennifer had forgotten that the sun had come up. Although the windows had been open in Alicia’s room, it seemed as if she had just left the black gloom of night.

  “Is she worse?” Liza asked.

  “She is dying.”

  Walter came out of Alicia’s bedroom. From inside, the doctor called after him, “Get kerosene. Maybe that will cut the phlegm.”

  Walter went to do his bidding and Jennifer sat on the steps beside Liza. Before Walter returned, however, the doctor came out of the room, head down, and closed the door softly. Coming down the hall with the kerosene, Walter saw him and paused.

  “She is in the hands of her maker,” the doctor said.

  Walter went into the bedroom alone. The doctor saw Jennifer and came to where she was now standing.

  “Thank you for your assistance,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I did very little.”

  “Indeed. I did too little myself.”

  “What...?” She let the question go unfinished.

  “What was wrong with her? I don’t really know. Some sort of croup, I suppose. That’s what I shall put on the certificate, but I don’t really know. I never saw anything like it.”

  When he had gone on to the kitchen, Jennifer remembered his remarks about a doll that Alicia thought was killing her. Could it have been the doll she saw upstairs? Her mind had been so occupied she had forgotten it until now.