by Cege Smith
“What are these small conditions, Ellie?” His voice was weary, with none of the anger that she anticipated.
“I want to know that David is safe. And I don’t want to kill anyone for you, ever,” she said softly. “I am not like Lillian. I will never be like Lillian, and no one, not even you, can make me do that.”
There was a long pause, and Ellie wanted to pull her hands from his, but couldn’t. There was just enough firmness there that she knew he would fight her. He wasn’t done with her yet. He kneaded her flesh for a few more moments and then released them. A shade of a smile flitted across his face as he saw her look of amazement at the glowing, healthy skin that had replaced the burned tissue.
“I know you aren’t like Lillian, Ellie. I wouldn’t have chosen you if you were. You are so much more than she ever could be. David is safe, and I promise you will see him again soon. You have my word. Killing isn’t necessary for what I require from you. Perhaps it was just that Lillian and Joseph got a bit…overzealous over the years,” Mikel’s eyes seemed to grow larger and Ellie gulped and looked away. “Is there anything else, Ellie?”
She looked over her shoulder and shook her head.
“Then I can count on you to listen closely to everything that Jeffrey tells you, and do everything that he says?”
Ellie nodded slowly. Suddenly her chin was in his hand and she found herself staring into his eyes again. An electrifying wave of warmth shot down her spine.
“Ellie, you must not ever try to do something so stupid as to harm yourself again. I don’t think you fully understand the ramifications of that action, and so I am going to be blunt. You are not dead here, in this place. And if you ever expect to cross over to a plane of existence that would fit the description of heaven that you humans so love to talk about, then you cannot end your life in a place such as this. You would forfeit your right to that garden of eternal bliss. Do you understand?”
Ellie realized that she was playing a dangerous game indeed, but Mikel had just answered several questions that had been spinning around in her mind. Unfortunately, he had also just given her about a dozen more. But now wasn’t the time to ask questions.
“Yes,” she said simply. Moments later she found herself sitting on the couch once again, right where she had been when Mikel had first appeared. Mikel was framed in the doorway that led to the hall, watching her.
“Until we meet again, Ellie,” he said, mockingly bowing his head toward her.
“Ellie?” Jeffrey’s voice called from the other room. “I have prepared some food for you. I expect you’re hungry.”
Ellie’s stomach growled in response and she put her hand to her stomach and the other to her chest. Her heart was racing. She had rolled the dice and won this hand. Now it was time to watch, listen, and learn. All things she was very good at. Ellie stood up and found Jeffrey standing in the doorway with a look of concern on his face.
“Thank you, Jeffrey. I am feeling a bit famished,” she said. She felt invisible eyes watching her as she left the room, but she didn’t turn around.
CHAPTER FIVE
David was still berating himself for letting Mikel get the better of him. His perception of time had once again phased to nothing more than a bitter understanding of the experience of heat and ice. He dreamed of being stranded on a polar ice cap. He hoped that his brashness hadn’t cost him ever seeing Ellie again. Instead, he focused on trying to fill the holes in his memories. Now he knew that they were there. It just required him to scrape beneath the surface of whatever spell had been cast to keep them away from him.
Even though he couldn’t see a landscape beyond the confines of the walls of the room, his inner circadian rhythm told him that it was nighttime. He didn’t know if he could trust it or not, but he was grateful for any reminder that he was still bound by a somewhat normal human existence. When he felt that tug, he slept. It was a small thing, but one that comforted him.
He sat in his corner staring at the wall where the window had appeared during Mikel’s visit. The wallpaper looked exactly the same as it had when he entered the room, but he sensed something different about it. Unable to focus now, he found that his eyes kept returning to that spot. He curled up on the floor, ready to give himself over to another dreamless sleep, but his eyes fluttered open to stare there. It was like his subconscious was trying to tell him something, but he didn’t understand the message. He forced his thoughts toward sleep and a welcome escape, faulty sham as it was, but an escape. That was when he saw it.
He sat up and peered in the gloom of the room. He thought it was his imagination, but then he saw it again. The wallpaper bulged ever so slightly from the wall and then returned to its previous flat state. Suddenly he was certain that he wasn’t alone anymore. Was this one of Mikel’s tricks?
David slowly got up from the floor and moved toward the wall. He took a step back, watching with wide eyes as the wall bulged again, this time very clearly pushing several inches into the room. It wasn’t his eyes playing tricks on him at all. Something was on the other side of the wall. Then the wall sank back into itself, as if nothing had ever been there.
Tired of unanswered questions, David strode to the wall and placed his palm on the spot. “Who’s there?” he demanded in a voice that sounded more confident than he felt.
As if to answer his question, the wall pushed out against his hand. He snatched his hand away and then watched the paper split right where his palm had rested seconds before. David took in a deep breath as the wall returned to its flattened state. He waited for a few more minutes, but nothing else happened. He took his hand and traced the split in the paper, which looked to be about six inches long. Cautiously he took one side of the paper into his fingers and pulled.
A thick piece of wallpaper about two inches wide pulled away from the wall easily and David dropped it on the floor. Underneath the wallpaper was a black-and-white shiny surface, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Excited, he started to rip away at the paper and moments later, he was rewarded with an image. It was a photograph of two people, a man and a woman. Judging by the clothes, the picture had been taken a long time ago. But the resemblance of the man in the picture to David’s own face made him feel like someone had sucker punched him. The woman in the photograph he recognized, having seen her ghostly image with Ellie on that last night. The woman was his mother, which meant that he was staring at a picture of his parents, Henry and Emma Decatur. He had never met them.
His parents had been killed the night he was born by his aunt and uncle, Lillian and Joseph Bradford, in a blood ritual that ushered in the whole dark cycle that eventually closed itself around him and Ellie. As far as he knew, that same ritual where they perished had bound him to the Bradford mansion. His destiny was intertwined with it. David slammed his palm into the wall above the picture and stared into his mother’s face.
“Why?” he asked, not expecting a response. He hated that everything he knew about himself was a lie. David had no idea what was real in his head and what might have been plugged in there, and that thought was terrifying.
Then he saw it. A small sharp corner that touched the bottom of the photograph. He realized that there was more hidden under the wallpaper. Even though it caused sweat to intensify and stream down his body, that discomfort was soon forgotten as David hacked and pulled and shredded the paper on the wall in front of him. Soon he had cleared away the entire section from the corner to the fireplace. As he stood back in the piles of shredded pale blue paper at his feet he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
There were pictures everywhere. In every one of them, David saw an image that he recognized as himself. It was a gigantic collage of his life. David as a toddler, David as a young boy, David as a teenager, and as he approached the photos closer to the fireplace, David found images of himself at or near the age he was now. His life was captured there in front of him. There were pictures of all shapes and sizes, showing an obvious shift in time from the first pictures to the last. Bu
t the only thing that remained constant was that each picture was taken inside the Bradford mansion.
If David had required any further proof that every memory he had prior to arriving on the doorstep of Ellie’s coffee shop had been a lie, it was on the wall in front of him. But along with his face, hundreds of others stared back at him that he didn’t recognize. He took a step closer to the wall and scanned the photos. It didn’t take him long to find them: Lillian and Joseph were there with him in more than half of them. But while David’s face was always normal, he saw what looked like a superimposed image of a skeletal face over each of theirs. He traced the pictures across the wall, watching himself grow, and Lillian and Joseph age and get young, age and get young. But always their bones and red eyes sat there, right beneath the surface.
David touched his own face in one of them. He guessed that he was eight or nine years old, and he was sitting on the grand staircase in the front foyer of the mansion. Lillian sat on the step below him, looking up at him with a smile on her face. He was laughing and pointing at something behind the camera. He looked...happy.
He looked at another one. In this one, he was slightly older. He was sitting in the library with a huge book settled across his lap. A man he didn’t know sat beside him and it looked like David was reading to him. The man had a lowball glass in his hand and was looking intently over David’s shoulder pointing at something in the book. In the background, David could see a woman reshelving an armful of books. He had no idea who she was either.
David reviewed the pictures quickly, looking for any clues to his life, but saw nothing but a life that looked normal. He looked happy and was often smiling. But the multitude of strange faces in the pictures with him gave him great trepidation. He knew that Lillian and Joseph had been serving Mikel in the mansion for a long time, but was he not only looking at a visual past of his forgotten childhood, but a roster of Lillian and Joseph’s victims?
“What part did I play in all of this?” he whispered. David was afraid of the answer. When someone is raised by soul-sucking monsters, how is it possible not to be as nefarious and evil as they were?
His knees buckled and he fell to the floor, wrapping his arms around his torso taking it all in. He had expected to see a sign that he was a victim to his fate. But there was nothing like that in the pictures at all. He was left with two conclusions: either Lillian and Joseph had hidden the truth of what they were and what they were doing from him for all of those years, or he had willingly participated in their schemes to rip people’s souls from their bodies and feed them to any one of the attending parties that seemed to require that kind of energy.
The implications of the latter weighed heavily on him. David’s pretend life, as he was starting to think of it, was dedicated to helping people rid themselves of sickness and disease. He loved being a doctor. He vividly remembered the looks of gratitude on the faces of his patients when he told them that they were going to be okay. It was the best feeling in the world. That person, the person that he thought he was, couldn’t have been someone who would have helped Lillian and Joseph cause these people an infinite amount of pain.
In his ears, David could still hear Jenny Marks’ screams when Joseph took her soul and the soul of the infant son that David had just delivered. Even though he had been deep in a calming trance Lillian had cast on him, the horror of witnessing that event was branded on his soul. It was not something that David wanted any part of ever again, but he didn’t know if he was going to have any choice. He wondered if Ellie was going to be forced to do something like that now, and he worried about her.
“Oh, my poor conflicted Jack.”
It was like David’s thoughts had brought Lillian Bradford into being. David shot to his feet and found her there, studying him.
“My name isn’t Jack. And you’re in hell,” David said warily. “I watched that thing banish you. So it’s not possible for you to be here.” She looked just like David remembered. Her white hair was elegantly drawn up into a bun at the base of her neck. Pearls encircled her throat, and she wore a pale red pantsuit. She looked ready to go to an afternoon ladies’ brunch. Lillian had always overdressed for every occasion. David wondered how he ever could have believed that a woman like this would have been content working in Ellie’s coffee shop. Obviously an ulterior motive had been involved.
Lillian shrugged and then smiled. That was when David saw the monster lurking there underneath her smooth skin. It was just like in the pictures. Then it was gone. “You will learn soon enough that Mikel will use you as he sees fit and only while you are useful to him. When that ceases, he will cast you aside without a second thought. But that doesn’t mean that he won’t come back and take you if he finds use for you again. Joseph and I, we are bound to Mikel forever. In hell or whatever plane of existence we find ourselves on. That was the deal we made for ourselves.”
“The same deal that Ellie made?” David choked.
Lillian’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t privy to that bargain myself. Seems Mikel became infatuated with her. I should have known. All of the effort he put into finding and securing that piece of weak trash makes me sick.”
David’s fists balled at his sides. “Don’t talk about Ellie like that.”
Lillian stepped closer to him with a concerned look on her face. “Jack, dear, I’m not here to talk about Ellie. I’m here to talk about you. To help you.”
David retreated to the far corner of the room. “I seriously doubt that. Whatever game you are playing, I’m not interested. I’ve got other things to worry about right now than you trying to sway me to your side.”
Although her lips pursed and she frowned, Lillian said nothing. Instead, she turned to the wall of photos and David watched her run her fingers over several of them until they came to rest on the one of his parents. She pulled it from the wall and looked at it for several moments. “We gave you a life that my sister never could have dreamed of. You have immortality within your grasp. You can have your every desire fulfilled and you don’t ever have to want for anything. It’s a heady thing, Jack. It’s what I always wanted for you.”
David lunged forward and swiped the photo from her hands. “I wouldn’t have chosen this life. The person who would want all of those things isn’t who I am. And my name is David, not Jack.”
Lillian threw back her head and laughed. Then she pointed at the pictures on the wall. “Who you are is my son, Jack. You were born and raised in our house. Believe what you will, but you were by my side every step of the way. You were marvelous at twisting those we needed just the right way so that Joseph and I were able to squeeze every last drop of vitality from them. I was so proud of you.”
David put his hands to his ears. “No.”
Then she was there in front of him pulling his hands down. She smelled like lilacs and peppermint, and it filled his nostrils. In an instant it all flashed before him. Every memory, every thought, every laugh, every game. Because that’s all David had ever known it to be: a game that he played with his parents. Then the images were gone but it was like the hole in his head was no longer there. He remembered.
“This can’t be happening,” he moaned.
Lillian reached up and stroked David’s cheek. “Don’t despair, my dear one. I’ve given you back everything you wanted. You do not have to be lost anymore.” She put her arms around him and gave him a tight hug. He didn’t have the strength to push her away.
Over the top of her head, David saw Joseph standing there in front of a door. It was next to the door that went into the bathroom. Joseph opened it and gestured to it. Lillian stepped to the side and gave David a small push against his back.
“Go on, now,” she said. “You’ve been waiting to see your beloved Ellie.” Her tone was sour, but David suddenly didn’t care. If Ellie waited on the other side of the door, he would do whatever they asked.
As he passed Joseph, he glanced over and saw the monster’s face had fully emerged on the man’s shoulders. He gasped and shot t
hrough the door. He was greeted by a blinding light.
CHAPTER SIX
Ellie had just stepped into the kitchen when she heard a loud explosion behind her. She ducked and turned around just in time to see the door to the basement—which was directly across from the back entrance to the library, a doorway she had just exited—slam open. A blinding white light filled the hallway.
She threw up her arm to shield her eyes and heard a loud gasp and then hard panting. As the glare died away and her eyes were able to focus again, she saw a man on his hands and knees in the middle of the hallway.
“David!” she cried out as she rushed to his side. She took his face in her hands and pulled his blue eyes up to meet hers. She was rattled to see that it was like he was looking through her. “David! It’s Ellie! Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
He was sweating profusely and Ellie felt a hot rush of dry air sweep over them right before the door slammed shut behind him. Despite the heat, David was shivering violently. He fell over onto his side and Ellie watched in horror as his pupils rolled back up into his head.
“May I be of some assistance, Ellie?” Jeffrey knelt down beside her.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said frantically as she ran her hands over him looking for any clue as to what had happened to him. Other than a possible fever, she couldn’t see any cuts or bruises or anything else wrong with him. She scooted closer to him and pulled his head onto her lap. She looked up at Jeffrey. “What do I do?”
“Let’s get him upstairs,” Jeffrey suggested. “I’m sure once we get him cleaned up he’ll come around.”
Ellie was going to protest that there was no way that she’d be able to help move him—David was almost a foot taller and had a hundred pounds on her—but then Jeffrey lifted David into his arms as if David was light as feather. Her mouth wide open, she started to sputter a question but Jeffrey was moving quickly down the hallway and into the foyer. Ellie scrambled to her feet and ran to catch up with him.