by Wendy Webb
“Jane’s mother was terrified, I don’t mind telling you that,” Carter continued. “She said it was the spell book, and she had seen it before. She knew full well that the three of them were coming together for a dark and evil purpose. She nearly took Jane away from here the night they came, but we all convinced her to stay. She was needed here by the other children and Mr. Alban, and even Mrs. Charity needed her.”
I took a moment to let all of this sink in. “Does this have anything to do with the old legend—the one that says my great-grandfather cut down a witch’s wood to build this house and that he got her spirit in the bargain?”
Carter smiled. “That silly tale was just that, miss. A tale.”
It didn’t sound right to me. “But I’ve felt it myself, Carter,” I protested. “I’ve always felt this house hummed with a life of its own.”
“I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’ve experienced,” he went on. “I’m saying the tale about the witch’s wood is just a legend. It sprung up, as legends tend to do, from a grain of truth, from the women who have always been ladies of the manor here at Alban House. Until your mother, of course.”
My mind felt fuzzy and fluid, as though I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. It didn’t make any sense to me. “But Carter, my great-grandfather John James Alban the First built this house. He was the son of refugees from the Potato Famine; he made his fortune and went to Ireland to find his bride and—” My words stopped cold when I realized I had just uttered the answer to my own question.
“Exactly, my dear,” Carter said. “He went to Ireland to find his bride. Emmaline. She’s the witch he brought back to this country, not some silly story about a witch imprisoned in the wood. A real-life, flesh-and-blood witch. I’ve no doubt that you’ve felt her presence here, miss. Once they infest a place, they never leave it.”
I stared at him. “But you were talking about Charity, my grandmother. Surely—”
“Emmaline sent your grandfather, her son, to the old country to find a bride, just as his father had done,” Carter said. “Charity wasn’t a relation to Emmaline, but she and her mother were a part of the same coven. Jane can attest to this.”
Matthew and I exchanged confused glances. This story was getting more and more outlandish by the minute.
“Okay, Carter—” I began, but he cut me off.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said quickly. “But you haven’t heard what comes next. I think you’ll change your mind when you hear what happened.”
“We were talking about Mercy, and I think we got sidetracked,” Matthew offered. “So she fell ill—”
“We didn’t get sidetracked and she didn’t just fall ill,” Carter said, slamming his glass down on the table with a thud. “Listen, man, you of all people should understand that there are things in this world beyond our comprehension, beyond our sight, and beyond our ability to believe. Isn’t that, essentially, what you spend your life doing? Asking people to believe a fantastic, rather supernatural story that happened two thousand years ago involving a man who could walk on water and turn water into wine?”
Matthew smiled at him. “That I do, Carter,” he said. “You’ve got me there. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you this—in my church, we don’t put a whole lot of stock in the occult. We think all of that stems from the most evil source there is, so that’s where I’m coming from. But I promise you, I’ll listen to the rest of your story with an open mind.”
“That’s good,” Carter said. “Because Mercy is creeping around in this house right now, and both of you need to hear this, loud and clear.”
“So,” I prodded, “Charity’s mother and grandmother arrived with a spell book. Then what happened?”
“They were huddled together, poring over that book, for days,” Carter said, picking up his glass again and swirling the scotch around. “Until one night. I was in the carriage house and could see it all clearly. The three of them, dressed in flowing white gowns, down by the lakeshore.”
A chill ran through me. “Dancing around a fire ring?”
He nodded. “That’s exactly what they were doing. Dancing, chanting in a language I didn’t recognize. They were reciting an ancient Celtic spell, invoking an evil force.”
“How do you know that’s what they intended?” I asked him. “Maybe—”
“No maybes about it, dear girl. I know because that very night, Mercy rose from the grave. The women had opened the door of the crypt, and I saw it with my own eyes, little Mercy walking out of there on her two legs in the dress she was buried in, as though she had simply been hiding in the crypt all that time.”
Matthew held my gaze and I couldn’t tell whether he thought Carter, along with Mercy, was a candidate for a psychiatric hospital or whether he was entertaining the thought that this fantastic story was true.
“Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother greeted her with tears and wails and cheers,” he said, his eyes looking deeply into the past. “They took her down to the lakeshore, where the four of them danced and chanted and sang until the sun came up. By that time, Mercy was exhausted, and Charity carried her into the house and placed her in her bed, waking Fate so she could see that her sister was home now to stay.”
“But,” Matthew began, “how could she possibly have explained this to her husband and to all of you? People don’t just rise from the dead. It doesn’t happen.”
“She didn’t have to explain,” Carter said. “It was the three of them, Charity, her mother, and her grandmother. They stood together and told all of us, Mr. Alban included, to not question these events and, furthermore, to stay silent about them. There was a horrible mistake, they said, a misdiagnosis of death, and Mercy was alive after all. End of story. And we were to leave it at that.”
“And you believed them?” I asked.
Carter let out a snort. “Of course not. But you don’t understand what kind of force they—three witches together—put out. It was as though we were standing in the very presence of evil. We knew better than to question anything.”
Carter took another sip of scotch as the wind and thunder roared outside and the fire flickered. “Fate saw it first,” he continued. “A few days later. It was a look in Mercy’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. Then Johnny noticed it. And then we all began to see it. A strange sheen in her eyes. A knowing smirk on her face. Something was just not right with that child. She was not a little girl anymore. She was something else. Something monstrous and hideous and evil was lurking behind the angelic mask of a child.”
CHAPTER 36
I was squeezing Matthew’s hand so tightly that it was turning white. I couldn’t take my eyes off Carter. He looked so earnest that I knew he believed everything he was saying to be true. Based on what Jane had said earlier—Mercy was dead, and then she wasn’t—I knew she believed it, too.
I didn’t know what I believed. I could tell Matthew was feeling the same way.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to hear the rest of the story. I’d reserve judgment until then.
“Go on, Carter,” I urged him. “We’re listening.”
He lifted his glass to his lips with shaking hands, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “It started with animals,” he whispered. “Thomas would find them in the yard, in the garden. Even on the patio. Squirrels, birds, chipmunks. Even the odd duck or two.”
My whole body went cold. “You’d find them dead?” I choked out the words, not quite believing I was saying them.
He nodded, lifting a hand to his forehead and rubbing his brow. “We had no idea what was going on at first,” he said. “But then I saw it myself, child. One afternoon, I was in the carriage house and, through the window, I saw Mercy in the yard. She lured a chipmunk to her with a handful of peanuts and then, quick as a wink, grabbed it and snapped its neck. And then she laughed. She dropped its poor little body, turned around, and saw me looking at her through the window. And she laughed again, locking eyes with me. I’ll tell you, i
t gave me a chill.”
I snuggled closer to Matthew.
“And then the accidents started happening,” he went on. “Workmen would be on the roof and their ladders would go missing, stranding them there. Knives would be buried, blade side up, in the dirt to cut the hands of the gardeners. Tires on the cars would be slashed.”
“She was trying to intentionally hurt people?” Matthew asked. “What did you—or more appropriately, her parents—do about it?”
Carter nodded. “Mr. Alban saw it right away, he knew. But Mrs. Charity wasn’t having any of it. She was blind to what was going on, and nobody could make her see. But then Mercy tried to drown her sister in the lake, almost taking Johnny with them in the bargain.”
He dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. “We heard it, all of us. Fate’s terrified screams, Johnny’s shouting. The splashing. We ran to the lakeshore, me from the carriage house, Thomas from the gardens in back, Jane and her mother, along with Mr. and Mrs. Alban from the house, and we found Mercy holding her sister underwater, with Johnny trying everything he could to stop it. She turned on him, then, pushing him under …” He shook his head, remembering. “It took all of us to get her off of them. She was just a child, but it was like she had otherworldly strength.”
I unfolded myself from the couch to grab the scotch decanter and refilled Carter’s glass. “Then what happened?” I asked as I poured.
“Later that day, once Fate had been tended to and Johnny had calmed down, I heard them arguing about it, Mr. and Mrs. Alban. He wanted to send Mercy away. Initially, she would hear none of it. But she couldn’t deny that the girl had tried to hurt her other two children. She realized Mercy was dangerous and something had to be done.
“Soon enough, I was sent to collect the family doctor, who had been administering to the Albans for many years. He was sworn to secrecy—nobody was to know Mercy was alive. The world thought she was dead and buried, and by Mr. Alban’s decree, it was going to stay that way. The doctor prescribed something for her, sedatives, I imagine. And Mr. Alban moved Fate and Johnny downstairs and locked Mercy away on the third floor. She was to live there, in captivity so to speak, away from everyone, until he and Mrs. Charity could agree on what to do.”
“That’s when he must have built the wing on the facility in Switzerland,” I offered, shooting Matthew a look. “The doctor there told me it was built when Mercy was still a child.”
Carter nodded.
“So what? She was locked in her rooms on the third floor for years?” I asked, shaking my head.
“She was,” he said. “Charity tended to her, kept her company, fed her, and even, at night, took her outside. Mercy never interacted with anyone, except her mother, again. Or so we thought.”
Another chill ran through me.
“Nobody knew that she had discovered the passageways. They had been locked, but she was able to unlock them. They became her world. She would creep about, watching us, watching her family, her sister especially.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “If nobody knew that, how do you know it?”
“I shouldn’t say ‘nobody.’ There was one person who knew. Charity. When Charity discovered that Mercy had been using the passageways, she encouraged it. She was torn up about her child, you see, having to be locked away. It was guilt she felt because of her part in it. She knew her husband would send Mercy away if the child didn’t remain sequestered and hidden, but even so, she wanted to give Mercy, evil as she was, some kind of life. And that’s how the passageways became her world. Mercy began to live through her twin sister, imagining it was her out there in the main part of the house, doing whatever it was Fate was doing. Mercy became Fate’s shadow.”
I shivered and glanced at all four walls in the room. Was Mercy in the passageways right now, watching us? Did she have the nurse with her, or worse?
“Of course, nobody knew about this until much, much later,” Carter went on. “And the household gradually returned to normal. Years passed. Fate met your mother at school, dear Adele, who brought so much light and love and laughter into this household. She became part of the family very quickly. Mrs. Charity especially took to her, and I think Fate looked upon her as the sister she no longer had. All of us began to exhale, believing the situation was handled for good. We didn’t know something much, much worse was brewing.”
CHAPTER 37
Carter, do you know for sure what happened to David Coleville that night?” Matthew asked.
Carter held up one hand, and in the firelight it cast a monstrous shadow on the wall behind him. “Back up, Vicar. You’re getting ahead of yourself. There’s part of the story you don’t yet know.” He paused to take a sip of scotch and leaned back in his chair. “I haven’t talked about this in so many years, and yet I can remember every detail as though it were yesterday.”
“Traumatic situations are like that,” Matthew said, squeezing my hand. “Sometimes they don’t recede.” After a moment, he added, “Go on, Carter.”
“We all thought Mercy had disappeared a full year before that ill-fated party happened.”
“Disappeared? But—”
Just then, I heard a clattering in the entryway.
“Mom?” Amity appeared, dressed in a rain slicker.
“Honey!” I rushed to her side and wrapped her in my arms. “What are you doing here?”
She scowled at me. “What do you mean? We got a call at Heather’s house that it was safe for me to come home. The police told Heather’s mom you were expecting me.”
The police hadn’t even arrived yet, so obviously they hadn’t called to tell Amity it was safe to come home. Then who …? As that thought occurred to me, a sense of terror, the likes of which I had never known, took hold of me. The last thing I wanted was to have my daughter here. But she was standing right in front of me, smiling, and I didn’t want to frighten her.
“Good, honey,” I said to her, helping her out of her slicker and leading her into the living room, my hand firmly around her arm. The more people around my daughter at that moment, the better. “Carter is just telling us a story.”
I settled Amity onto the sofa between Matthew and me as Carter went on. “Come to think of it, the journalist was here that summer also. The four of them, Johnny, Fate, David, and Adele, were thick as thieves, always playing croquet or sailing or just having drinks on the patio. I’d drive the four of them into town for movies or a night out.” He smiled, thinking back. “It was then Mercy disappeared, just before the summer solstice party. Charity discovered she was gone, and as you can imagine, she raised quite the ruckus with her husband, but she had to do it quietly because, remember, nobody outside the family, not even Adele, knew Mercy even existed.”
“My grandfather took her to the hospital in Switzerland, then, without anyone knowing.”
Carter shook his head. “Back then, we, the staff, were not told anything, other than that she was gone and wasn’t coming back. And frankly, we didn’t care if she was dead, locked up, or if she simply went back to whatever evil had made her. All we knew was she was gone. And we were free of her.”
I cut him off. “But … just a moment ago, you said you didn’t realize ‘something much, much worse’ was brewing. That doesn’t sound worse to me. That sounds like the solution.”
“He hasn’t gotten to the best part yet.”
The voice was coming from behind us. Matthew and I snapped our heads around toward the archway and saw Mercy standing there, smiling, holding a ream of paper that I could only assume was the manuscript. “It’s all in here. Haven’t you read it, Grace?”
Matthew was on his feet in an instant, a look of terrible calm on his face. “Miss Alban! So nice to see you again.”
She took a few steps into the room. “I asked Grace a question. Haven’t you read it, my dear? You’re the one who found it after all this time. Both of you.” She smiled at Matthew.
Her stark lucidity, her complete control of herself, sent a shot of icy dread through m
y veins. She certainly was not the fanciful old woman I’d met at the funeral who thought she was at a party in 1956, nor the confused, rumpled lady dancing in circles around the girls. I wondered if the lack of her medication had caused that strange, deluded behavior, or if it was all an act, designed to shock and deceive.
“I knew he loved me,” Mercy went on, coming closer still. The garish makeup she wore to the funeral was gone. Her hair was neatly pulled back, and she was wearing a simple blouse and slacks. She looked more like a fit, active seventy-year-old who had spent a lifetime exercising and eating right rather than someone who had languished in a drug-induced haze at a mental hospital for fifty years.
She set the manuscript on the table before us, and as she did so, I saw that she cradled a large kitchen knife, red with blood, in one hand.
“I knew he loved me,” she said, smiling a radiant smile. “He titled this book for me. Why, it’s all about me!”
“You were the girl in white,” Matthew said, taking my hand and leading me and Amity across the room, putting a table and a sofa of distance between us and Mercy. He nodded his head slightly to Carter, who made a show of refilling his drink but joined us.
“Of course I was, you silly man. Who else? The story frightened you; I know it did. You looked positively ashen when she was reading it to you.”
“You were watching us,” I said. “In the walls.”
“As Carter just said, the passageways were my world,” she said, shifting her focus to rest upon him. “My, haven’t you gotten old. You were always so handsome.”
And then she turned her attention to me. As she held my gaze, her face suddenly seemed very close to mine, and I became transfixed by her eyes—so dead, so lifeless, as though I were looking at a mannequin or into the eyes of a cobra hypnotizing its prey.
“Where is the nurse?” I said finally, my voice wavering.
“She didn’t see me until it was too late.” Mercy giggled. “It’s so easy to catch people unaware. Lucky thing for the rain today, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to have to clean up that much blood. Such a bother.”