The woman in red held out the chalice for Callie to sniff.
“The Wicked Queen.”
“Never wicked. Humiliated, betrayed, unloved, but never wicked.”
Callie felt sick.
“I was Rose’s friend. From the center. I was never one of them,” Marta said. “But they convinced Rose that what I was doing was worse than anything they were doing. I tried to warn her, but they turned her against me.”
My Love…
Cheryl, Susan, and Olivia giggling.
Callie standing in front of the room, hands in the elocutionist’s pose, reading the love letter aloud while the others hooted with laughter.
The Goddesses vowing revenge for getting them in trouble, for telling Rose what they were doing in her house.
Callie’s own mother suggesting their revenge and the ultimate betrayal: “Let’s take him.”
It wasn’t Leah who was the fifth petal of the rose. It was Marta.
“You were supposed to be at the blessing that night.”
“Rose forbid it. She took your mother’s side against me.”
“She was kicking us out of her house! Because of what you told her.”
“I told them not to go that night.”
“To the blessing?” Callie wasn’t sure what Marta was telling her.
“To him.”
Callie remembered the man on the bed. The blood.
“What they were doing was wrong. Especially with a child around. Your mother convinced Rose that I was part of it, procuring men for them: the Goddesses’ madam. But you were right. I was supposed to be at the blessing. And so I came.”
The rift between the Goddesses and Marta had become a crevasse far deeper than the one at Proctor’s Ledge. It may have been Rose who had recited Sarah Good’s name that night, but Marta, Sarah Good’s true descendant, could just as easily have spoken the name herself, because she’d been there all along, Callie realized in horror. The curse that Rose heard that night hadn’t come from the banshee, it had come from Marta just before she pulled the blade across Susan’s throat. When Rose told the police that she had seen the Goddess turn, she hadn’t been referring to the one who’d been trapped in the oak, she’d been talking about Marta.
God will give you blood to drink…Callie heard the words she’d long ago erased from her memory.
“I have another name,” Marta said again.
Callie stared at her. “You killed my mother…and the others.”
“They deserved to die.”
“And Paul…”
“Paul is not worthy of you. He’s a Whiting. He would have betrayed you, the same way Finn betrayed me. It’s what they do, the Whitings, generation after generation.
“I tried to warn you. You shouldn’t have come back, Callie. You should have taken my advice and run for your life.”
Callie stared at her. “You loved him. I know you did.”
“Once,” she said. “A long, long time ago, when I was a stupid girl who thought love conquered all. You were there, you know my name.”
Callie felt the floor fall away. She was going to be sick.
“Say it.”
“Morrigan.”
Callie could see the blood dripping down the walls now, the same blood she had seen that night, first at the castle and later in the woods. She vomited violently, and Marta, with a look of revulsion, took a tiny step backward.
Summoning her strength, Callie got to her feet and rushed toward the elevator. Marta grabbed her, sliding the silver blade across her throat as Callie threw her voice against the wall, and it bounced back hard, throwing Marta off balance. Instead of skin, the blade caught the oak rosary, slicing it and scattering its beads on the stone floor. She slashed again wildly, and Callie felt the skin on her arm slice open, felt the blood running down her fingers as she fell back, slamming into the sea well. She grabbed at Marta as hard as she could, and they both tumbled backward into the frigid tidal waters fifteen feet below.
Rafferty walked the beach, peering at the granite cliff, searching for the opening that had to be there. When the beach ended, he found himself in water, first at knee level, then up to his hips. Incoming waves made it difficult to maneuver, and finally impossible, so he climbed, reaching a jutting plateau five feet above the water. The ledge was only a few inches wide, and he placed his feet sideways, holding on, white knuckled, as he inched along, looking for the way in.
He didn’t see it until he had almost passed it. A few feet higher on the cliff, where the rock formed a natural indentation, was an opening of about fifteen inches. It looked like erosion, or a storm gash where the rock had tumbled to the sea below. He almost rejected it until the light from his phone revealed a stairway. There were no decent footholds to hoist himself with, and the first one he tried crumbled under his weight, sending rock falling into the black churn of turning tide.
He repositioned and pulled himself upward until he reached the split. Crawling inside, he saw a tiny opening, barely child-size. Burrowing, making himself as small as possible, and pushing his hand out in front of him in the darkness, he felt his way forward. A centipede skittered across his arm, sending a shiver down his spine.
He counted his steps as he moved, ten in all before he reached a framed opening and found himself in what could only be described as an upright coffin: wooden, musty, and damp. He could go no farther. He’d reached a dead end.
There is not one culture, nor is there one individual who does not harbor a prejudice against those they consider “other.”
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
Callie was deep inside the frigid blackness, kelp lining the sides of the ancient oak, its hollow trunk slimy with marine vegetation. Severed limbs stretched from the hollowed trunk of the sea well as the tide receded to dead low. The sides were too slick to climb, and so she floated, losing blood, certain she could feel it flowing out of her, as if the frigid seawater was pulling it. She could feel the nightmare creatures Paul had described to her, their bony fingers grabbing at her, touching her from one side and then another. She thrashed, spinning around to face them, but each time they vanished before she could see them.
What had Paul told her about hypothermia? Struggling made the blood rush to the extremities, causing death much more quickly. She should wait for the tide to lift her, the way Paul had done, but that wasn’t possible. She had to keep moving to get away from the bony fingers that reached for her.
She was almost relieved when she felt Marta’s human hands until they found her neck, tightening, and dragging them both under.
Callie fought her way to the surface, struggling for breath, only to be pulled under once again, as a vision overtook her.
They were standing at the edge of the void, nothing but emptiness stretching before them. She couldn’t breathe or move. She was trapped with Marta in the abyss, the emptiness that was eternal. No, she thought. Not like this.
Callie ducked her chin to her chest and grabbed Marta’s tightening fingers with both hands, forcing them both deeper underwater, sliding one hand to Marta’s elbow and loosening her grip, then using Marta’s wrist and arm as a lever to turn her, until the two women came face-to-face. Callie looked into the empty eyes that stared back at her and saw for the first time what Rose had seen that night on Proctor’s Ledge: not Marta, not the banshee, but the turning itself.
Callie didn’t close her eyes against it, but made herself look.
It began slowly, a falling feeling as in a dream. She felt the water recede, leaving behind the scent of oranges. Then the music began, single notes. Was that the plucking of a harp? As quickly as she recognized the sound, the plucking stopped and was replaced by other notes, both distant and dissonant, tones she had never before been able to hear.
What had just moments before been Marta’s bony fingers were now a braided witch hazel switch.
Every lash Marta had ever received, Callie now felt. The whipping became a rhythm, and as the switch struck, the emptiness deepened, the
dissonant sounds became louder, first in disjointed disharmony, then crystallizing into words.
“What have you done?”
Strike.
“Nothing, Mama.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
Strike.
“I love him.”
“They have taken everything from us. They can’t have you, too!”
Strike.
“He loves me.”
“He will betray you! The Whitings always do!”
Strike.
“He wants to marry me.”
“You stupid, stupid girl.”
Strike. Strike. Strike.
Callie felt the pulse of blood rushing to the reddening welts on Marta’s bare thighs.
“He will betray you again and again! The same way his father betrayed yours, and his father before him!”
Strike.
And, for the first time, Callie understood the real meaning of Rose’s phrase. Marta had courted the strike. By standing alone with a Whiting and against her family, she had incurred the rage of generations.
Strike.
The music of the lash was rhythmic. Callie felt her body convulse with each strike.
Now Callie saw Marta as a young woman arguing with Rose.
“Why did you tell me that?” Rose demanded. “You accuse them of unspeakable things.”
“You need to know what they are doing in your house. For the sake of the child.”
“You mean what you are doing!”
Marta stared at her.
“They told me. It was you who called yourself Goddess. You who first brought men to them.”
“No, I swear! I never…” Marta insisted.
“Get out of my sight,” Rose said.
Strike.
Marta holding Leah’s hand, guiding her through a series of dark enclosures, then a long dark tunnel to the spa. “Are you sure Finn said to meet him here?” Marta turned. Leah saw the flash of a blade.
A slash; blood everywhere. Marta pushed Leah’s lifeless body into the sea well.
Strike.
Glint of a blade. Three final slashes. The crevasse and the bloody, still-costumed bodies below.
Strike.
Marta looked around to make sure no one saw her entering the Left Hand Path. She unwrapped a cloth and handed Susan’s white hair and a patch of skin to the old witch.
The witch looked at the hair, then the skin. She looked at Marta. “What have you done?”
“Nothing,” Marta said, but the witch knew better.
The witch took a step backward, away from the trophies.
“I’ve given you what you demanded and more,” Marta said. “Now give him to me.”
“I cannot.”
“Yes, you can.”
“You must leave this place. Or be discovered.” The witch stared at Marta, seeing all that she’d done. “The older one sees what you’ve become.”
“I’ve become only what he’s forced me to become,” Marta said. “Now give him to me as you promised. Or I will confess that you helped me. Because you wanted these.” She pointed to the trophies.
“I cannot,” the old witch said.
“What?”
“He will marry the one who is with his child.”
“I’ve taken care of her. He will not marry her.”
“No,” the old witch said, looking shocked as she scried and envisioned carnage. “She lives.”
“Impossible.” Marta shook her head.
“You have killed the wrong rivals.”
Strike.
The music of the lash became another kind of music then, the sound of waves beating on the ledge below. Marta stood on the cliffs at Hammond Castle looking out at the searchlights, watching as they pulled her father’s lifeless body out of the water. The Whitings were there as well, not with Marta and her mother, but standing on the opposite side of the cliff: young Finn standing with his mother and father, his arm around a young and pregnant Emily, a large wedding ring on her finger.
Finn’s eyes met Marta’s across the divide. Then he looked away.
As she watched her husband’s lifeless body being dragged from the water, Marta’s mother began to keen, an otherworldly sound that echoed across the cliffs and down to the water’s edge. She pointed a finger at the Whitings and, in a voice not her own, intoned: “God will give you blood to drink!”
Callie gasped, choking on seawater that tasted like human blood, the curse of Sarah Good echoing in her ears. The music was unbearably loud now, not music anymore but pure noise. Callie tried to summon the calming notes of the solfeggio scale that she had heard in Matera, but the music was bound, just as Dagda’s harp had once been.
Callie was floating in a viscous pool of warm seawater and human blood somewhere between life and death. She could feel her mother and the other Goddesses, who she now knew had ended up in the sea well with Leah, but when she reached for them, Callie grasped only bones. Then, from her mother, she heard one tone, lower and under the noise: “Ut.” Just the first note of the ancient scale, but it was there.
The sound started softly, mournful at first, as if it contained every drop of sorrow that had ever existed in the world. She opened her mouth to join the tone, letting it echo through her, building the vibration. Time shifted and stretched. And in these eternal moments, as she came face-to-face with Marta, she saw the others who had died in the wake of this great sin that had been kept alive through the generations. Time stretched to encompass them all, then vanished completely, leaving them trapped in the abyss: accused and accusers together. Floating in a liquid that was more blood than seawater now, the blood of the living and the blood of their ancestors. The harp began to play.
And Callie could see that the abyss, the nothingness that she had been faced with, was not nothing but everything: every possibility that had ever existed in the world and every choice made. She felt Marta’s pain as if it were her own. And in that moment Rose’s last words came back to her: Sometimes the only healing is death.
The sorrow Marta felt, the anger that had consumed her, now turned to something else, something Callie had heard only once before. It was far louder this time, its sound pitching higher and wilder as it circled, swirled, and shrieked, pulling them both inside its vortex of fury.
It was the lightning strike that finally freed the trapped and much changed goddess. In a stunning act of self-sacrifice from which recovery was not possible, the oak gave up its own life to save the banshee.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
Moving his hands along the wood, through cobwebs, Rafferty searched for an opening. He knocked on the sides of the coffin, hearing a hollow thump at the far corner. Running his hands upward in the darkness, he located a latch, and, as he unhooked it, the bottom of the coffin swung open into another, slightly larger one.
He moved into the second coffin and realized it was a closet. Beyond it was another, and, past that, yet another. The closets were empty, just wide enough to stand in, and linked one to another, bottom to corner, forming a chain of tiny upright rooms. Stepping sideways through the openings, he moved forward. Each room was slightly larger than the last until he found himself on the backside of a real closet, something heavy blocking its opening.
He threw his full weight against it, forcing the door to yield, and found himself standing amid a pile of papers and books that had spilled from the bookcase propped against the outside of the door he’d just forced. He recognized where he was from the strong smell of port that had permeated the walls over the last century. He was inside the speakeasy.
He unlocked the door to the hallway, and, as it opened, the sound rushed at him like a hurricane siren, driving Rafferty to his knees. It felt as if all the rage he had ever experienced was contained in the sound, every affront, every inhumanity. He pressed his hands over his ears as the shriek shattered all the wine bottles in the racks. Then it stopped, taking with it all possible sound and sucking the world into a silence so pervasive that Rafferty was momen
tarily uncertain he had survived the banshee’s rage.
Towner, Ann, and Mickey arrived at Pride’s Heart together. Glancing into the library, they saw the coroner bagging Finn’s body.
“What the hell happened here tonight?” one of the Beverly officers said to the EMT as the paramedics took Paul and Callie away on stretchers.
Intuiting both the origin and the cure for their illness, Ann climbed into the ambulance and accompanied them to the hospital. Mickey followed in Ann’s car.
Towner waited for Rafferty.
Beverly wasn’t his jurisdiction, but he was on the scene, and, given all the possible connections to Salem, the local cops wanted him in the loop. So Rafferty joined the Beverly police when they looked through Marta’s office in the speakeasy. They found several books on poisons, including one that had been written by Ann Chase, indexing common plants and herbs, detailing their beneficial medicinal purposes as well as their dangers. They also found a small volume of Longfellow’s poems with a romantic inscription from Finn on the occasion of Marta’s twenty-fifth birthday, To Morrigan from Dag. This was significant to no one but Rafferty; he paged through the book of poetry until he found “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and the reference to Norman’s Woe.
He joined Towner in the front hall of Pride’s Heart.
“Oh God,” she said, burying her head in Rafferty’s chest, hugging him tightly. “Oh my God.”
The call came in from Ann just as they were crossing the Beverly Bridge. Rafferty switched to speaker so Towner could hear.
“Callie will be fine. She’s being treated at Salem,” Ann said.
“What about Paul?” Towner asked.
“Paul was airlifted to Mass General. His heart is severely damaged.”
Turns out it wasn’t the crazy homeless woman, it was the rich bitch all along. No big surprise there.
—LIKESTOSAIL
The bones started to surface after Marta’s death. The root hole was uncovered so the grounds crew could complete their job, and when the tide went out the bones clung to the dark earth. A skeletal hand appeared, and the Beverly Police were called. They, in turn, called Rafferty.
The Fifth Petal Page 42