Avenged

by Lynn Carthage

  “Perhaps so,” says Kate. “There’s so little information about the Sangreçu, and none of it online. I had to return to the archives where I found the book in which this prophecy appears. I combed the shelves, scanning the texts. I only found a few mentions.”

  “Thank you for all your efforts on our part.”

  “Are you ready for some really ‘out there’ information?”

  “Yes,” says Phoebe at the same time her mother says, “I think so.”

  “It’s Christianity meets King Arthur,” says Kate. “Did you know Launcelot was an eighth-degree descendant of Christ?”

  Anne looks at her blankly.

  “I know, it’s so silly sounding. The man of a myth connected to a historical personage.”

  Anne wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and seems to be rousing herself to some better form of interest. “So much of Christian history has its roots in pagan lore. The Christmas tree, the Easter bunny.”

  “Exactly so!” says Kate. “And it is said Merlin was the child of a Christian princess and an incubus.”

  “A what?”

  “A sort of demon that visits in the night for sexual purposes.”

  “And can . . . impregnate?” Anne asks in horror.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Really!”

  “Birth control is so important,” Kate says, venturing a joke, and is rewarded by Anne’s surprised guffaw.

  “You’re too much!” They share a genuine, amused— and might I say, fond—look. It crosses my mind that Kate is really not that much older than us . . . and given that Phoebe should be a year older now . . . is Anne relating to her as she might’ve related to a slightly older version of Phoebe?

  “Merlin—actually, I should call him by his Welsh name Myrddin—has often been associated with dragons, as if incubi were not enough to have the mind reel,” says Kate. “It’s for that reason that the Sangreçu emblem . . . Sangreçu means blood received, by the way . . . is usually depicted as showing a trapped dragon.”

  “Because Merlin was trapped by his lover,” says Anne. “I remember that from some movie.”

  I take a deep breath, or what passes for a breath postmortem.

  “Yes. Merlin created the Sangreçu blood.” Kate pauses. “Collect yourself?”

  “Impossible, but please go on anyway.”

  “Sooo . . . the Sangreçu blood derives from trace amounts left in the vessel Joseph of Arimathea collected Christ’s blood in. Commonly known as the Holy Grail.”

  “The Holy Grail,” repeats Anne faintly.

  “The Grail itself was achieved by certain knights of the Round Table. Men pure of heart, including Launcelot’s son. That part of the tale is done. But Merlin took the most infinitesimal droplet, merged it with his own blood, said spells, and created a concoction that bestowed a sort of immortality on those who drank it. They can never die a blood death, although they can die other ways.”

  “So my daughter drank this blood and that’s why she’s haunting us? How did she get it?”

  “I don’t know. If she’s one of the ‘thre wyghts’ from the prophecy, it would explain her lingering. The prophecy makes it sound like if she hasn’t, she should drink. All three of them should.”

  “And how does a ghost drink?” Anne demands. She stands up and pushes her chair in, then thinks better of it and sinks down again. “I’m sorry to snap at you. It’s all so much to take in, especially when teens are disappearing and I’m worried my husband—” She cuts herself off.

  “You’re worried about?”

  Anne twists the wedding ring on her finger a few times before answering. “To be blunt and brutal, I’m worried my husband is involved in those kids disappearing.”

  Kate’s jaw drops. “How you can think it?”

  “The police think so, too,” says Ann defensively.

  “But he’s so . . .”

  “I know,” says Anne. “I’m struggling with this, and I feel like a traitor for even thinking it. But he hasn’t been himself.”

  “So can you keep an eye on him?”

  “I can and have. As if I don’t already have enough things to be concerned with. My daughter is dead, and she may well be listening now for all I know. I feel helpless and angry. . . and meanwhile my husband . . . I don’t want him to harm anyone.”

  Kate nods. I venture a glance at Phoebe. She’s looking at the surface of the table. I know she senses me, but doesn’t look up.

  “I feel sorry for you,” says Anne. “All you meant to do was see some swords.”

  * * *

  After Anne shows Kate to the door, she goes to look in on Tabby.

  She sings a lullaby although Tabby’s already asleep, and then sits in the rocking chair crying softly. The power of her lonesomeness is fearsome to me. She can’t trust her husband, her daughter is dead, she’s trapped in a manor with a gruesome history, and now she’s been told absurd and preposterous stories about how her daughter might’ve drunk a potion whose root is Christ’s blood.

  “Mom, no,” says Phoebe, kneeling beside her.

  I feel I’m violating their very private grief. “I’ll come back later,” I say softly. She nods without looking up.

  I intention to Miles, sitting with his back up against an oak, near the sleeping form of Steven. “He hasn’t moved,” he says.

  “Do you want to go with me, then? Phoebe found a vials rack in the cellars. Empty, of course. But perhaps worth looking at again.”

  “Incredible,” he says. “But there’s no use for us to go without her, is there? It will be pitch-dark.”

  He’s right. It is fruitless to go without her special power to touch older Arnaud materials.

  “So let’s go get her,” he adds.

  I tamp down my irritation. All he wants is her. “She’s having some special time with her mother.”

  “No, she isn’t. Her mother has no idea she’s there.”

  “Well, she’s . . .”

  “It’s the perfect time to act. Steven’s dead asleep and can be left for a while.”

  I look down at Steven, his chest moving with his deep breaths. “He’s exhausted.”

  “Exactly so. Let’s fetch Phoebe. Where there’s a vials rack, there must be vials.”

  * * *

  After a brief discussion with Phoebe, we intention down to the cellars, where she locates another set of matches to light a torch for us. We return to the empty vials rack, lying sideways from when she threw it. Perhaps there’s a clue we missed. I stare again at the elegant tracery, where glass bottles once dangled.

  Did I slide the bottles into their metal housing? After I’d paid the silversmith for his work and dismissed him?

  I do my best to access that shadowed part of my brain where some residual memory may lie. Apparently I created the mixture inside the missing vials, with traces of holy blood and my own conflicted, half-demonic blood. Did I make a hundred vials, or five? Where did I place them? Some were here, and some were in France.

  Think, Eleanor. Remember. Throw yourself back through the centuries. Phoebe and Miles had remembered only fractured bits of images when they drank the Sangreçu blood. Miles saw himself on the battlefield, which surely must’ve been, based on his description, his last day fighting at Camlann.

  I flush thinking of Phoebe’s recalled memory. It was her burying me.

  “I only hear the faintest fog of sound from the rack,” says Miles. “Can you sense anything, Eleanor?”

  “You’re the only one who ever hears it, Miles,” says Phoebe.

  It strikes me that if Phoebe is of the water, he is of the air. He can blow the candle flame, he hears sounds none of us do.

  And if that is the case, what am I? Of the earth? Of fire?

  Of rock, I conclude. I can sense the rock above my head, the capstone that has kept me still as a statue. I am of caves, grottoes, dark places. Hardened dragon scales. Armor plates. Immobility.

  It wasn’t always so. I was the most mutable of bein
gs. I shape-shifted. I became many men. I loved trickery of all sorts. Those of us who work spells delight in deception. In our nature is the desire to surprise, to make things not as they are. To cast a glamour on faces so they appear to be other faces.

  I taught these things to Nimue.

  I traveled the world in many guises. I was in France, the land that drew so many of the knights. I sidled through forests where only a few trees away a beast snuffled and snorted, unaware of me. I pulled gems from crowns and reappointed them. Pretending I was too lame to walk, I cast away my walking stick and crouched and sprang like a tiger. My favorite expression on another’s face, the perpetual O of disbelief. And on Nimue’s face I wished to make that soften, wished to see her neck arch like the swan’s, wished her breath to catch in her throat for me.

  I so carefully doled out those vials. I have one image now, which flashes in and flashes out, like a scene briefly illuminated by lightning. It is the remembrance of digging a hole for one vial alone, buried without the dignity of a special rack to hold it. I had asked our silversmith to make several racks, but then I also bent to the soil and buried a vial without one. Because I knew I was not the only one who loved trickery.

  The wise baker always keeps back a loaf, they say.

  “There’s another vial somewhere,” I tell Miles and Phoebe.

  “Where?” she says.

  I stare at her. She’s part of the reason I had to hide it!

  “Eleanor, what’s giving you that feeling?” asks Miles.

  I force myself to look away from Phoebe’s lovely but treasonous face. “I was thinking of rocks on top of earth.”

  And then with a sickening feeling, I get it. The giant clawing his way out of the dirt. The statue at Versailles in the Enceladus Grove, cast by a medieval artist who was part of that silversmith’s heritage, created in winking homage to me. I am the giant, in power if not size, and I’m still underground.

  * * *

  We can’t even think of Tabby for this. How could she pronounce Enceladus? And how could her mum even associate it with a place at Versailles so briefly visited? No. We have to try to reach Kate Darrow.

  She’s in her flat eating dinner with a tableful of friends. She’s telling them what happened to her, and they refuse to let her be serious about it.

  “Oooh, ghost shapes! Kate, finally you have achieved it! You see dead people!” says one lad, toasting her with his glass of wine.

  “How lovely it blew in your face instead of rattling chains and wailing. This is today’s ghost, loving and affectionate,” adds the woman to his side, wearing an ochre knit cap.

  “It wasn’t like that,” says Kate.

  “Now you can write a sequel: Love Stories of the Living and the Dead,” hoots another man.

  “Fifty Shades of Graveyard!” says the first lad.

  “Will you let me finish?” pleads Kate. “There’s so much more to it.”

  “Next time, please take me,” says the knit cap woman. “Won’t you?”

  Kate says nothing, cuts her chicken while she waits for them to calm down. It takes a good while. I believe they have already been partaking of the wine; their spirits are very high. But finally her somber nature is noticed.

  “Ah crap, Kate, really?” says one of the men.

  “I should throw you lot out,” says Kate. “I feed you and you won’t even listen to me?”

  “I did bring the starter,” points out the other man.

  Kate throws her napkin at him and reluctantly smiles. “I’ve had a really intense day, haven’t I? There’s really, truly something going on at the Arnaud Manor. The wife is worried the husband’s abducting people, and indeed people have gone missing. I listened to the radio on the way home and they were talking about it.”

  They look at her, laughter fled. “Well, then, love, you mustn’t go back there,” says the knit cap woman.

  “But I feel I have to. I helped the wife out with some research, and I just . . . I know I can’t even talk to you about it, you’ll start making fun again.”

  “We won’t!” the woman protests.

  “Oh, but you will. What matters is that I can be there for her as someone who believes. I’m planning to go back there tomorrow.”

  “Don’t get yourself into something odd, Kate. This house is in the middle of nowhere, you said, and someone’s a psychopath!”

  “Wherever did you get that from?” Kate asks in amazement.

  “Well, isn’t the husband killing the missing people? And eating them with a nice Chianti?”

  The table dissolves into laughter again. “Seriously, Kate, if you feel you have to go, please don’t go alone. Bring one of these strapping lads with you,” she says.

  “Cor, nice to see that you don’t volunteer yourself!” says one of the men.

  There’s too much commotion to try to reach Kate, so we wait until after dessert, until conversation dwindles down and finally her friends retrieve their sweaters from the back of the sofa and hug her good-bye.

  She clears the plates and puts them in the sink. She pulls out her papers again to study the notes she made earlier.

  “Blow out the candle, Miles,” I urge.

  We’re lucky the crew lit a taper to eat by. Miles leans over and briskly blows the candle out.

  “Oh, bother,” says Kate. She continues reading. It’s a funny thing how long it takes the fact to penetrate. She looks up at the candle, then at each of her windows, closed to the nighttime air. “Oh,” she says softly.

  “Light it again,” I urge her.

  But she doesn’t. She sits, looking around her as if burglars and criminals are crowding each other to get to her.

  “She’s terrified,” says Miles.

  I pause, my hand extended to her cheek. “Do you think I oughtn’t touch her?”

  “Maybe give her a few minutes first. She really does look freaked out. It’s probably one thing to see a ghost when you’re in a cemetery, and quite another when it’s in your own kitchen.”

  I put my hand down and study her face.

  “Is someone there?” she asks.

  “It’s us,” says Miles cheerfully. “We came to you this time! Special delivery.”

  “We are the very, very nice ghosts who mean no harm and are not malevolent,” I say.

  “Did we already mention nice?” says Miles.

  I wait for her eyes to stop shifting around the room and focus on my shape. It takes a while.

  She gasps. “I see you! A sort of wavering of the air!”

  “Yes!” I say. “Well done!”

  “Now try to listen to us,” says Miles. “Take us to the Enceladus Grove, where you’ve got to do some digging and find us some Sangreçu blood.”

  I look at him. “She can’t possibly take all that in,” I say. “Maybe let’s start just with a word.”

  “Enceladus.”

  “That’s too grandiose,” I say. “How about help?”

  Over a period of hours, we work with Kate. She’s an easier target than Tabby once she manages to calm down. She puts her pencil to the paper and writes down key words as we make them clear to her.

  There has been so much shouting into her ear that my throat is sore. Miles has gotten so worked up he had to leave for a bit, but then came back. I don’t stop for a second. By the time we finish, a sliver of moon is at the window listening in.

  “All right,” says Kate. “Looks like I have a little sudden vacation in my life.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The grounds at Versailles were constantly reconfigured. For instance, a hedgerow labyrinth with thirty-nine fountains with statues based on the Aesop’s fables animals, positioned to appear as if they were talking to each other with water spewing from their mouths, was replaced a hundred years later with an English-style garden. The estate is a jigsaw puzzle of projects begun, abandoned, completed, destroyed.

  —Nooks and Crannies of Versailles

  A day later, Miles and I are in the Enceladus Grove again, the
little walled garden on the grounds of the palace of Versailles. Phoebe’s back in Grenshire alternately watching Steven and her little sister. The statue of the giant is so upsetting, so majestic in its uproar. He holds a stone he has clawed his way to the surface with, but there is no one to throw it at. Did he ever get revenge, I wonder?

  Kate has brought a garden trowel that fit in her purse, and she takes it out now as she regards the statue contemplatively. There are about six other people here in the trellised grove with us. She can’t exactly kneel and start digging; she’d be reported.

  She walks around the circular limits of the fountain. “Do you know where I start?” she asks the air—which means us.

  “I don’t know,” I answer, but I know she doesn’t hear me.

  “Wouldn’t they have found the vial when they built the fountain?” asks Miles.

  “The sculptor knew,” I say. “He was Sangreçu, too.”

  “And you know this how?” he asks.

  “The way you know you fought with a sword and watched your own blood spill to mar the green field.”

  “Convincing enough,” says Miles.

  Kate sees something we don’t, gasps, and bends to dig. We wait, hovering behind her to see what arises. She has to stop whenever people enter the grove. She keeps pausing, pretending to scroll through photos on her phone, until they leave.

  It takes forever, and I can tell even she is getting frustrated, but finally her trowel hits something. She carefully pulls it out. Good timing, too: a few tourists have just entered the grove. She rises nonchalantly and walks away from the statue.

  She holds a crumpled package, which looks to be a bed cloth folded over onto itself several times. “It’s samite,” she says to herself, and then for our benefit, “the fabric of royalty.”

  I look at Miles and see he is in a near swoon, his eyes drifting closed and his mouth open in a slackened ecstasy.

  “You hear something?” I ask.

  “Something? Everything! You can’t hear that?”

  “No.”