Dark Homecoming

by William Patterson

  “You were going to let David take the rap.”

  Mrs. Hoffman waved a hand in disgust. “David.” She said the name as if it were something dirty. “His philandering is what sent poor Dominique on her never-ending quest to stay beautiful. If only he had appreciated her . . . because no matter how old she got, she was always going to be the most beautiful woman to have ever lived. He didn’t deserve her! After we are through here, and your blood has restored my beautiful Dominque, she and I will be together forever, without any of you sad, pathetic creatures around us. And that includes David.”

  “The police will search this place from top to bottom after I tell them what’s happened here.”

  “You’ll tell them nothing,” Mrs. Hoffman replied. “You’ll do what I say.”

  Suddenly there was a voice, calling from below: “Hello!”

  Liz recognized it as Detective Foley’s voice.

  “Go ahead,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “Answer him. Tell him where we are.”

  Liz attempted to shout out to him, but found she could not.

  Mrs. Hoffman nodded. “Variola taught me so many useful tricks. Pity that she’s not around anymore to see what a brilliant student I was.” She shrugged. “Well, I think she figured that out by the end.”

  Liz gripped her throat, feeling the tightening there. It was getting difficult to breathe.

  Mrs. Hoffman withdrew a small wooden doll from her robe. There was a ribbon tied around its throat.

  “How very much I should like to just snap this doll’s head right off,” she said. “But you see, my dear, I’ve got to keep you alive for a little while more. Just long enough to provide Dominique with one more drink.”

  Liz tried to move, but found she was rooted to the spot.

  “She’s almost there,” the housekeeper said. “One more good long drink of your blood and she will be restored to what she was.”

  Liz thought she might pass out for lack of air.

  “We’re up here, Detective!” Mrs. Hoffman suddenly called out the door. “Oh, please come quickly! Liz is hurt badly!”

  As she spoke, Mrs. Hoffman switched the wooden doll into her left hand, while withdrawing Roger’s pistol from another pocket with her right hand.

  No, Liz thought. Foley’s walking into a trap. And I can’t warn him!

  “Up here!” Mrs. Hoffman shouted, positioning herself against the wall so she could surprise the detective. “Please hurry!”

  The wind screeched into the room at that moment, dousing them with water as if someone was heaving buckets at them. Liz’s hair dripped down the sides of her face. The last of her perfume bottles on her dresser toppled over onto the floor. Her elegant white canopy bed collapsed as if it had been made with toothpicks. A couple of white satin pillows were caught by a whirlwind and drawn out into the storm.

  Liz saw Foley appear in the doorway, his gun drawn. Mrs. Hoffman leveled her own gun at the detective.

  What happened next took only a matter of seconds, but for Liz, time slowed way down. She saw every step, every tiny action, clearly and deliberately.

  As Hoffman gripped the gun with both of her hands, she dropped the wooden doll. It went tumbling through the air to the floor.

  Meanwhile, Detective Foley was glancing around the room, his eyes at first seeing nothing. Then he spotted Mrs. Hoffman with the gun and his expression turned to alarm.

  Hoffman pulled the trigger. Foley had no time to duck or turn his gun to her.

  But Liz had time. With the doll out of Hoffman’s hand, Liz was suddenly free to move, and so she lashed out, both fists clenched, slamming them directly into Mrs. Hoffman’s face. The monstrous woman screamed as she fired her gun.

  Foley was hit. He went down in a spray of blood, his own gun firing uselessly into the ceiling. He collapsed onto the floor and was still.

  Mrs. Hoffman was wailing. Dropping the gun, she covered her face with her hands and staggered across the room. “What have you done?” she cried. “What have you done?”

  Liz looked over at her. As Hoffman removed her hands, her face broke away in a dozen pieces, as if it really had been a plastic mask all along.

  “No!” Hoffman screamed, looking at herself in the mirror. What stared back at her was a ghoul with a pulpy red face and bulging eyes, sinewy muscles and veins exposed. No amount of plastic surgery—or magic—could help Hoffman now. She raised her head to the ceiling and howled like a wounded dog.

  “Who would have thought a simpering little fool like you could destroy me?” She stumbled across the room as the wind raged. “What a world! What a world!”

  Raising her arms in anguish and despair, Mrs. Hoffman let out a piercing scream, a sound that cracked the mirror and became one with the wail of the storm. Then, despite her best efforts to repel them, the winds took hold of her and sucked her out into the hurricane.

  83

  Standing under the overhang of the garage, doing her best to defy the encroaching winds of the storm, Aggie heard gunshots from the house, and then a terrible, unearthly scream.

  “Joe!” she shouted into her handheld transceiver. “Joe, are you all right?”

  Other police cars were now speeding up the long driveway.

  “Hang on, Joe!” Aggie cried. “Backup’s here.”

  Behind her, the people were getting restless. “You’ve got to let us go,” Lyndon Merriwell said. “The storm is doubling back on us.”

  “You’re not going anywhere except with the officers who are arriving now,” Aggie snapped, turning to look at them with contempt in her eyes. “I know what you people are. Maria Martinez made a full confession. You’re all going to be charged with accessory to murder, on God only knows how many counts.”

  The people in the garage fell silent after that.

  Out in back of the house, a man was scrambling over the wall. He dropped onto the grass and went running through the driving rain toward the house.

  84

  Liz bent over the fallen police detective. She could hear his radio crackling.

  Joe, are you all right? Joe, answer me!

  Liz wished she knew how to work the thing so she could respond and let them know what happened. But it didn’t matter: it sounded as if Detective McFarland was downstairs, and more help was on its way. Liz just needed to make her way down to the first floor and—

  “Where is Mrs. Hoffman?”

  Liz spun around. The voice was ragged and hoarse, but strong enough.

  Dominique was standing in front of her, wearing a lacy white dress, the same one she wore in the portrait. Her face and hands were still bloody, however, and she was pointing Roger’s gun at Liz.

  “She fell,” Liz managed to say.

  “You killed her.”

  “No,” Liz said, her eyes focused on the gun in Dominique’s hand.

  She couldn’t have come this far—survived everything thrown at her—and with salvation waiting for her downstairs—to get killed now.

  But that appeared to be Dominique’s plan for her.

  “You tried to take my place,” the madwoman said.

  “No,” Liz replied.

  “This was my room.”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “I should never have called it my own. I always felt you here, Dominque. It was always your room.”

  “You married David.”

  “Yes, but no one could ever take your place, Dominique. You are beautiful. You are enchanting and unique. I could never hope to be you, or as beautiful as you.”

  “Beautiful,” Dominique repeated, almost trancelike.

  “We’re very different women, you and I,” Liz told her. “I could never be you. Just as you could never be me.”

  “You’re going to tell,” Dominique said.

  “I’m not going to tell . . .”

  “Yes, you are!” Dominique’s voice shrilled in anger, like a child’s. “You are going to tell about our coven!”

  “No, Dominique, I won’t—”

  “I have to kill you.”
r />   “No, please!” Instinctively Liz lifted her hands in front of her face.

  “Dominique, stop!”

  It was a man’s voice that suddenly barked from behind her. Liz turned to look.

  David.

  It was David.

  He stood in the doorway, drenched and windblown, his eyes wide and desperate.

  “Dominique,” he said. “Put the gun down.”

  “David,” Dominique said in a hoarse little whisper.

  “You don’t want to kill anybody,” David told her, stepping gingerly over Foley’s body as he entered the room.

  She just stared at him.

  “We loved each other once, many years ago,” he said. “Do you remember?”

  “Remember,” she said. “Love . . .”

  “Give me the gun, Dominique,” David said.

  “No!” She kept the gun pointed at Liz. “You cheated on me! You made me feel . . . old . . . ugly . . .”

  “I’m sorry about that, Dominique. Very sorry. But you aren’t old and ugly anymore.”

  “Not anymore . . .”

  “You are young and beautiful.”

  “Young . . .” she repeated. “Beautiful . . .”

  David took another step closer to her. Liz held her breath, terrified that Dominique would pull the trigger at any point.

  “Look at yourself in the mirror,” David was saying. “Turn and look over there. See how beautiful your magic has made you.”

  Dominique hesitated. But finally her eyes turned irresistibly toward the cracked mirror, though she made sure to keep the gun trained on Liz.

  What she saw in the mirror made Dominique scream.

  Her face was still twisted and broken. Her eyes were still protruding.

  Dominique screamed again.

  “Is that how you want to look for the rest of your life?” David asked.

  Dominique was sobbing uncontrollably. The gun trembled in her hands.

  “All your black magic couldn’t help you,” David told her cruelly.

  Liz braced herself. What was David doing? He was goading Dominique to kill her!

  But he knew his wife better than she did.

  “That is how you will look for all time,” he told her.

  Dominique was sobbing. Tilting the weapon in her hands upward, she brought it in close to her chest. Then, in one swift, continuous move, she slipped the barrel into her mouth. Liz closed her eyes against the sickening explosion of gunfire.

  That was when blackness overcame Liz as well, and she collapsed to the floor.

  85

  “Joe, are you all right?”

  Foley was sitting shirtless on the floor, leaning against the wall, his left hand gripping his right shoulder, trying to contain the bleeding.

  “I blacked out,” he told Aggie, who squatted beside him. “I’d be dead if Liz hadn’t knocked Hoffman off stride just as she was firing.”

  He looked out into the room. The storm’s second round hadn’t lasted as long as the first. The winds were already fading away and the occasional ray of sunlight was piercing the rain and the haze to slip into the room. But what the sun illuminated was grisly. Dominique’s brains were splattered all over the floor and the bed. Police photographers were snapping pictures of her body. Two different sets of detectives were interviewing Liz and David Huntington separately.

  “Mrs. Delacorte broke down in the garage,” Aggie was telling Joe. “She confirmed Mrs. Martinez’s account.”

  “So they really were witches,” Joe said in amazement.

  “Playacting at being witches, I suspect,” Aggie replied. “The Haitian woman taught them vodou, and Mrs. Hoffman became convinced that the blood of the living could restore her precious Dominique.”

  “Who didn’t die on the yacht, apparently.”

  Aggie shrugged. “Not if those are her brains all over the floor.” She smirked. “Either that, or she did die, and they raised her from the watery depths with their magic. Vodou can make the dead walk, you know. Or haven’t you seen any zombie movies?”

  Joe shook his head. “What a deluded bunch of fools.” He grimaced as a medic wrapped his shoulder in gauze. “So David didn’t kill Rita, or any of them.”

  “It was his brother and Mrs. Hoffman who wielded the knives, according to the confessions we’ve gotten. We’ve found some corpses down the hall that had been drained of blood.” Aggie gave him a sad look. “I think they’re your missing girls.’

  “I wish I hadn’t been right about that,” Joe said.

  “It’s all so ghoulish.” Aggie shivered. “It’ll take some sorting out to determine who killed who, but it appears that David was being set up to take the fall, at least for Rita.”

  “But Rita wasn’t killed for her blood. Neither was Jamison.” As the medic pinned the gauze in place, Joe winced again. “I suspect they were both killed because they knew too much, or threatened to expose the cult.”

  “Coven,” Aggie corrected him.

  “So many questions still to be answered,” Joe said, as the medic helped him to his feet. He waved away a stretcher that was offered to him. “I can walk,” he said.

  Joe looked over at Liz. She seemed in shock, sitting on a chair, wrapped in a blanket, her eyes glassy, barely responding to the detectives interviewing her.

  “Poor kid,” Foley said. “I suspect she’ll never be the same.”

  Aggie helped him down the stairs. Outside an ambulance awaited.

  The great shining parlor below had been destroyed. Walls caved in. Parts of the roof destroyed. Trees thrust through windows. The crystal chandelier shattered on the marble floor.

  Joe looked up as he passed the portrait of Dominique on the staircase.

  It had survived the maelstrom, still hanging evenly in its frame.

  But the beautiful face was now a skull.

  86

  Liz sat staring out of the window into her little backyard in Trenton, New Jersey. The swing set she used to play on as a kid still stood out there, rusted and bent. Her mother had planted some tomatoes in a small square garden, and from the window could see the red fruit ripening in the sun. It was as if she’d gone back in time, and was a little girl again.

  Except she no was no little girl, sitting there in Mom’s kitchen, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea.

  Mom was standing over her.

  “Sweetheart, you know he’s sent more roses. They’re filling up the living room.”

  “Give them away if they get to be too much,” Liz told her.

  “You’re going to have to see him eventually.”

  Liz looked out the window again. “I don’t have to do anything, Mom.”

  “But he’s here again.”

  Liz sighed. “Again?”

  “He’s in the other room.”

  “Send him away.”

  Mom placed her hand on Liz’s shoulder. “My sweet baby girl. I wouldn’t suggest that you see him if I thought it would be bad for you, honey. Believe me. I only have your best interests at heart. Those trials were horrible. I understand why you needed to get away from all that.”

  They had all been tried and convicted. Liz’s testimony had sent the whole perverse bunch of them to prison.

  “But Liz, you need to make peace with all that.”

  “I’m scared to see him, Mom.”

  “I know, baby. But you once took good care of me when I was pretty low, and I promise you I won’t let anything happen to you now.”

  “I appreciate that, Mom,” Liz said, reaching up and patting her hand.

  “It’s just that, after talking with him, I think he really loves you.” Mom sighed. “He’s been here three days in a row now, asking to see you. He’s staying at a local hotel. Says he won’t leave until you see him.”

  Liz didn’t reply.

  “Okay, baby,” Mom said. “I’ll send him away.”

  “No,” Liz said, turning to her. “All right. I’ll see him. Just so he’ll stop coming by and bothering us.”


  Liz’s mother gave her a small smile, and headed out into the living room.

  Liz returned her eyes to the backyard. How simple life had been when she was very little, before Dad went away, before Mom started drinking, before the whole world seemed to fall down around Liz’s shoulders. How simple life had been then, before she had seen all the horrors of the world.

  David stood over her.

  “Hello, Liz,” he said.

  “Hello, David. Why have you come?”

  “I’ve come to ask you to go away with me.”

  She didn’t look up at him. “And why should I do that?”

  “Because you’re my wife.”

  Liz moved her eyes up to him. How haggard he looked. How pale.

  “I’m not your wife,” she said. “Legally, our marriage isn’t valid. Your first wife was still alive when we got married. That’s the law, David.”

  “But you’re still my wife in my heart.”

  She gave him a small laugh. “That’s not the answer that would convince me to go away with you.”

  “I love you, Liz.”

  She looked away. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You have to believe that they had placed me under some sort of spell. I didn’t know Dominique was alive. I didn’t know what I was doing when they sent me away. I know it sounds crazy—”

  Liz laughed. “After everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve been through, that hardly sounds crazy. That sounds utterly reasonable and logical. Of course you were under a spell.”

  He sat down at the table opposite her. “I was compelled to leave . . . you know the police are calling it a posthypnotic suggestion.”

  “But you’re calling it witchcraft,” she said. “Or vodou.”

  “I don’t know what to call it,” he said. “But I do know that I can’t blame it all on Hoffman and Dominique. I have to take part of the blame myself, for the way I walked off and left you in that house of horrors.”

  Liz fixed him with her eyes.

  “I was afraid,” he said. “My entire life has been spent trying to please my father. So if they somehow enchanted me into doing what they wanted me to do, it would have been a relatively easy spell to cast. It wasn’t really going that far against my will to push me out of that house.”