The Vanishing

by Wendy Webb

  And then we heard the laughter, dark and low and menacing. It was coming from Audra’s angelic face.

  Somehow, I found my voice. “I command you to release this child,” I bellowed, loud and strong, with much more force than I possessed, or felt. “In the name of God the Father Almighty, I take authority over you and order you to release this girl.”

  Audra’s head sprang back into position and she gazed down at me, her sweet face now distorted with unspeakable evil.

  “Mary had a little lamb,” she said in a singsongy, feathery voice. “Its fleece was white as snow.”

  “Release the girl! I command you!”

  “Sing a song of sixpence / A pocket full of rye…”

  Katherine’s strangled screams pierced the air as she fell to her knees. “Do something, Adrian!”

  “Give me the girl!” I demanded.

  “Jack and Jill went up the hill…” The voice wasn’t coming from Audra anymore, not really. It was coming from near the fireplace.

  And now the back of the room. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul…”

  And now just above her screaming mother. “Four and twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie…”

  That was enough. This had to stop. I had to do something. I was the only one who could. “Take me instead,” I shouted. “Release the girl and take me!”

  With that, Audra dropped into her father’s waiting arms, and the next thing I knew, I was on the other side of the room against the wall, a great force bearing down on my chest.

  The scream came from somewhere deep inside of me, radiating outward until it engulfed me.

  The last thing I saw was Mrs. Sinclair standing in front of me with arms outstretched, her white dress covered in blood. “Julia,” she was saying. “Julia.”

  And then that was all there was.

  FORTY-TWO

  My eyes fluttered open. I was lying in my bed at Havenwood under a nest of quilts. Rays of sunlight were peeking around the edges of the thick curtains. I lay there for a moment, trying to get my bearings. How had I gotten here? The last thing I remembered was being in the east salon talking with Drew and Mrs. Sinclair and Adrian… I shook that thought out of my head. I didn’t want to think about the last thing I remembered.

  Drew was sitting in the armchair by the fireplace, his feet on the ottoman, his head resting against the back of the chair. He was wearing light sweatpants, a T-shirt, and slippers. I rustled around in bed and his eyes popped open.

  “You’re awake!” he said, his voice heavy with sleep. “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My head is fuzzy. How did I get up here?”

  “Adrian gave you a sedative.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Do you…?” I could tell he didn’t even want to say the word.

  “Remember the séance? I do.”

  I remembered it all—Adrian’s visit to my apartment on that unusually warm spring day in Minneapolis, his offer to come to Havenwood to re-create a famous séance, and much more than that. The unspeakable things that happened as a result.

  “I was so terrified last night,” Drew said, his voice soft and low.

  I closed my eyes to try to block out the memories, but it was no use. They were with me to stay.

  “I was, too. Like I said, I remember the séance, I remember being here before, but I’m still really confused about a lot of things.”

  “What sorts of things?” Drew asked.

  “Well, like what happened after that night. It’s all a big blur until Jeremy and I got married.”

  “I think we can shed some light on some of that,” he said. “But how about we have some breakfast first?”

  I pushed myself up and glanced at the clock. It was well past nine.

  “We’ve missed it,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

  He smiled. “You can have breakfast any time you bloody well want it. I’ll call down to Marion and order us up a feast.”

  So many questions remained unanswered. Not only about my life after I left Havenwood that first time, but my life since I returned. It all seemed like a muddle of confusion. As soon as I felt strong enough, I knew it was time to straighten it out.

  So, that is how, several days hence, all four of us gathered again after dinner, this time in my favorite room in the house, the west salon, for a conversation that I fervently hoped would have a better conclusion than the first.

  The floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the landscape outside, the moon reflecting off the snowy whiteness and casting a soft glow. A fire blazed in the fireplace, and we all were equipped with our obligatory, standard-Havenwood-issue after-dinner drinks.

  “I suppose we should start where we left off, my darling,” said Mrs. Sinclair, who was standing next to the fire, her long gown, covered in jewels, flickering with the flames.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. And we began.

  “I called an ambulance as quickly as I could get to the phone,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “You were incoherent, Audra was… well, darling, she seemed to be dead. Katherine was bleeding and I was covered with blood. The others in the circle that night, household servants, were unhurt, but they left that very night and never returned.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted, my skin tingling. “Audra didn’t die?”

  “No, thank God,” Mrs. Sinclair said, taking a sip of her Dubonnet cocktail.

  I turned to Adrian. “But I thought you said she was your daughter. It sort of implies that she’s gone.”

  “She is gone,” Adrian said, his shoulders slumping. “She was in the hospital for weeks, not waking up from whatever it is that happened to her. When she finally did, she was in a psychiatric hospital for months after that. And when she finally came back to herself, much like you, she didn’t remember anything. She didn’t remember me. Or her grandmother. Or anything about this house, or the life she lived here. Katherine had divorced me by that time—she never came back to Havenwood after leaving it that horrible night with our daughter—and she convinced me that letting her go would be the best thing for her.”

  “Oh no,” I said, looking from Adrian to his mother and back again. “That can’t be. You two are so loving and wonderful! How—” But his eyes, filled with tears, stopped my words.

  “Think about how it felt, just a few days ago, for you to remember that night,” he said softly. “Now think about how it would feel if you were a child.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “But ten years have passed,” I tried. “Surely…”

  He just shook his head. “I watch out for her, in my own way,” he said. “My ‘business trips’? I’m looking after her, from afar. When she turns twenty-one, she will receive a check from an anonymous benefactor, who will take care of her every need for the rest of her life.”

  “I’d argue she needs a father more,” I said.

  “She has one,” he said, brushing away the sadness that had escaped from his eye. “Katherine remarried. He’s the only father Audra knows. A good man, all in all. Believe me, I’ve checked him out. No, Audra disappeared from my life that night forever. I had a daughter that meant the entire world to me, and then she vanished. In the blink of an eye.”

  Mrs. Sinclair muffled a sob into the handkerchief she was holding up to her mouth.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. We remained in silence for a while, respecting the grief they were both feeling.

  But there was more of the tale to tell. And soon, Mrs. Sinclair took it up again.

  “And as for me,” she said. “You can see, now, why I refused to write another word. The horror of that night was too much to bear. My greediness for more and more, my insatiability for fame and all the trappings that came with it, caused me to unleash real evil in this house, not something from my imagination, but real, unspeakable evil. Coming face-to-face with that will take the horror novelist right out of you. At least, it did for me. And the aftermath. We lost Audra, the light of our lives. As soon as I realized that, I was finished with writing, wit
h fame, with anything related to it.”

  That was all well and good, I thought, but what about the mental institution?

  “Vanishing from the public eye completely was the only way to go,” she went on, winking at me. “You must realize that by now. No questions, no reporters. You’re free.”

  She did have a point. Still, I wondered if she was going to tell me the whole story or not. She seemed to be glossing over the part where she wound up in an asylum.

  “And that all brings us back to you,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Obviously, you remember the séance. Anything else after that? Have any other memories come to you?”

  I tried to cast my thoughts back, but that same brick wall stood in the way. I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “Where did you meet your husband?” Mrs. Sinclair asked.

  An odd question, I thought, but when I opened my mouth to answer it, I realized I had no idea. “College?” I offered. “Through friends, maybe?”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I shook my head, my mind in a jumble. Where did I meet Jeremy?

  Mrs. Sinclair crossed the room and sunk down onto the sofa next to me, taking my hands in hers. “Are you ready to hear it all?”

  “I am,” I said, my voice a bit louder than I intended it to be. “I want to know everything, so I can move forward.”

  “You left here that night on a stretcher, Julia. You were in a catatonic state for months. You were sitting up, your eyes were open, but you did not speak. You didn’t answer when people talked to you. It was as though whatever happened to you that night during the séance, your body and soul simply couldn’t handle it.”

  My mind was swimming. Not me. This couldn’t possibly be about me. She was talking about herself, wasn’t she? What about the phone call I had heard between Adrian and her psychiatrist?

  “You shut down,” she went on, patting my hand. “And who could blame you? You saved Audra’s life, of that I have no doubt, and put your own in jeopardy in the process. You were willing to sacrifice yourself for her. None of us ever forgot that, Julia.”

  I shook my head. It couldn’t be.

  “You had been at Havenwood for several months before that night,” she continued. “We took to you then just like we did now, darling.” She winked at Drew. “All of us. Some more than others. And, of course, after that accursed séance, we felt responsible for your care.”

  “That’s just not possible,” I protested, looking from one to the other. “You were in a catatonic state, not me. Isn’t that right? That’s the reason you dropped out of sight and stopped writing. Isn’t that so?”

  Mrs. Sinclair took my hand and brought it to her lips, kissing it a few times before continuing to speak. “Darling,” she said gently. “No.”

  My thoughts were muddy and vague, as though I were trying to remember a movie I had seen long ago, not something that really happened to me. And then images began to hover in the corner of my vision—flashing lights, a small white room, a lawn filled with sweet-smelling grass. Could it be…?

  “You were in the hospital in town, at first,” Mrs. Sinclair went on, seeming to choose her words carefully. “After that, a psychiatric hospital. When you came out of the catatonic state, we were all overjoyed. But then we realized you didn’t remember any of us. You had long-term memories, but not short-term ones. We visited, but…” Her words trailed off into a long sigh, and she dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  I shook my head. Catatonic state?

  “The doctors thought it would probably be better if we just let you recuperate on your own,” Adrian took up where she left off. “Our visits would agitate you. We made you suspicious and afraid, and you’d retreat even further into your own world. They believed, and we came to believe, that you were associating us with that night. We were actually hindering your recovery.”

  “I fully intended to simply take you out of the hospital and bring you here to Havenwood, with a full-time nurse if that’s what you needed,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “But we couldn’t. Your doctors advised against taking you back to where it happened; they were adamantly opposed to it. And as dear as you were to us, you weren’t a relative. Our hands were tied. So in the end, we had to let you go.”

  My head was beginning to pound. “This is a lot to take in,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Why did you mention Jeremy?”

  “That’s where you met him, my dear,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “The psychiatric hospital. He was a patient there as well.”

  My mind reached back to my earliest memories with him: long walks on the lawn, afternoons by the lake, our wedding day. It might have been in a hospital chapel, for all I knew. I just wasn’t sure.

  This caused my stomach to turn. “What was he in for?”

  “We were never able to find out,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “But with everything that happened later…”

  A light went on. “The police told me he was a sociopath.”

  “He was released before you were. He married you and, as next of kin, took you from the hospital.”

  I could see it, then, in my mind. A car pulling into a circular driveway. Jeremy standing there. Me running into his arms. What they were saying started to make a sick kind of sense.

  “You had total amnesia about the séance and some time before and after it, much like people who are in auto accidents lose whole days,” Mrs. Sinclair went on. “Your stay in the hospital didn’t do anything to improve that. In fact I gather it never improved until you came back here to Havenwood.”

  “But…” My mind was running in many directions at once. “If all of this is true, how did you find me? In Chicago, I mean.”

  Adrian cleared his throat. “Because we weren’t family, nobody notified us that you had left the hospital. You married this man, he changed your name, and you basically disappeared into the fabric of the world. Goodness knows how he managed it. Connections with organized crime, perhaps. He was certainly a criminal, based on what came after. We had no way to track you down.”

  “A decade passed, Julia,” Drew said. “We looked for you, but it was as though you disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “Until the scandal,” I said, remembering the newspaper articles and television coverage.

  Adrian smiled. “I despised the man who took you from us, but I came to love him for the notoriety. When I saw you on the news, I couldn’t believe it. There you were! A decade later, we had found you! If you had been living a happy life, we’d have been glad for you but stayed away. From the news reports, however, we knew you were in trouble, and even in danger. And so it was our turn to rescue you, just as you rescued Audra.”

  They were all smiling, but this time, unlike the other day, it warmed me. These people were looking out for my best interests. They truly were my family.

  “When I arrived on your doorstep that day, I didn’t quite know what to expect,” Adrian went on. “When it was clear you didn’t remember me, or us, or anything that had happened, I knew we’d have to tread carefully with you.”

  “So you concocted the story about wanting me to be Mrs. Sinclair’s companion.”

  “We did that before I visited,” Adrian said, nodding. “We knew that if you didn’t remember us, you’d need a reason to come to Havenwood. It seemed like the only way to get you to leave with an absolute stranger.”

  “We got in touch with your psychiatrist,” Mrs. Sinclair added. “He gave us further advice and monitored what was happening here.”

  “But why would he talk to you at all? You’re not family, and he opposed you taking me back to Havenwood initially.”

  Adrian smiled. “Let’s just say he was persuaded. The threat of a lawsuit on your behalf and all the publicity that would surround it convinced him to cooperate with us. All we wanted was for you to regain your memories. Or barring that, we hoped you’d fall in love with Havenwood all over again. Our main concern was helping you, Julia. You needed rescuing. We were not about to leave you alone to deal with the situation
your husband created. You deserved much better.”

  I sighed and leaned back against the sofa. It all seemed to be tied up into a neat bow. Except it wasn’t.

  “There’s something about this story I don’t understand,” I began. “I don’t quite know how to say this, but… I’ve seen Audra. In this house. With all the ghosts here, I assumed… But you told me she’s alive and well.”

  Mrs. Sinclair and Adrian exchanged glances. “What did you see, exactly?” he asked.

  “A girl, wearing a long nightgown, floating in the air. Reciting nursery rhymes.” The thought of it sent a chill through me.

  Drew pushed himself up and poured himself another drink at the sideboard. “This isn’t good,” he said, locking eyes with Adrian.

  “It might simply have been flickers of her memory coming back,” Adrian said. “Images from that night trying to bubble to the surface, as it were. The doctor said we should watch out for that.”

  “But, coupled with what she saw in the library the night of the blackout—”

  “What did she see?” Mrs. Sinclair interrupted.

  Drew and Adrian exchanged glances. “Well, the thing is she saw you, Mother.”

  “Me? I wasn’t in the library that night. I’d never creep around this house during a blackout.”

  My hands started to feel clammy. “If it wasn’t you, then who was it?”

  But I knew the answer to that, before I even got the words out. It wasn’t a memory. And it wasn’t Mrs. Sinclair. It was Gideon.

  FORTY-THREE

  We need to banish that thing from this house once and for all,” I said to them.

  Mrs. Sinclair sighed. “Oh, darling, you’re not the first to say that. Believe me, we’ve tried.”

  “And Seraphina tried,” Drew piped up. “It’s in the journals. Before she left Havenwood, she tried.”

  “But it didn’t work,” I said.

  “No,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Not entirely.”

  “And Andrew and his family lived here with it?”