Heather Graham's Haunted Treasures

by Heather Graham

  She swallowed hard. Nathaniel had told her the same thing. He had told her when they had awakened in the old abandoned farmhouse on a morning that now seemed like part of a distant world as well. He'd held her very tightly, and told her that he'd bring her home—or as close to it as he could—but that she'd best swear not to make any more nocturnal excursions.

  She hadn't done so, of course, and he'd been angry with her, and she had wound up lowering her head as if she agreed with his warnings, and finally, in exasperation, he'd held her fiercely again and said, "You will not wander out again, do you understand, Lenore?"

  "I never wandered—" she began.

  "Dammit, you know what I'm saying. And you know why!"

  And she did. He had stayed with her through the darkness, and oddly enough, it wasn't until morning's light that she had been afraid again.

  And that had been when she had recalled the horrible whispers she had heard when she had been alone.

  Lenore...

  It had called her name.

  Something evil had whispered her name...

  She hadn't let Nathaniel see her fear. She'd tried to tell him that she was all right, that he must return to his own men. He had refused to do so, assuring her that he could leave her safely—and disappear before any Reb could think about capturing him. The North, he assured her, did have a few decent horsemen left, even if the Rebels did pride themselves on their cavalry. She'd even smiled then. Yet her smile had faded because it was time to go. And he'd taken her to the river, and watched while some of the Rebs had seen them and risen, and she had called out. And then he had proven himself right; he had mounted his bay, and ridden into the forest.

  And she had been left to tell Dr. Claiborne something of the truth...

  Of course, she had left out everything that had happened in the old farmhouse. The night had remained a secret she guarded well within her heart. One that she dreamed about in the darkness now, one so very sweet, and so very painful.

  The war went on. Nathaniel besieged her city. She didn't carry arms, but they were enemies nevertheless.

  All that she could have of him was the dream...

  "You were the best smuggler we had!" Doc Tempe said now with a sigh. "If only..."

  "If Dr. Claiborne finds anything out there that can be procured," she said softly, "I'll be going for it."

  "Lenore, you don't seem to realize—"

  "I realize perfectly well," she assured him. "I was terrified out there. But you forget, I have a brother—a fourteen-year-old brother—fighting on the line. And a grandfather. And every man who comes in here hit might have been one of them, and I never will know until the very end if or when one of them will wind up on an operating table. I'm not so stupid that I'm not afraid—it's just that whatever we can bring in, we have to!"

  Doc Tempe shook his head. "It's a sad thing, eh, when we have to risk the very flowers of the South!"

  She smiled at him. It was a gallant comment.

  "Doc Tempe!" the orderly called out. They both turned. The orderly stood at the back of the church. "The lad's waiting on you, Doc!" he said very softly.

  "We'll talk later if need be," Doc Tempe told her. "But I guess we're needed now. Sure you're up to this one?"

  She shook her head. "I'm never up to them. But let's go."

  They went. The boy awakened while the very brief preparations were being made. Doc Tempe was calm and reassuring while the orderly doled out a little of the precious morphine.

  Lenore moved mechanically, trying not to feel the boy's pain and loss. It seemed a very long and hard day, even in the midst of so many other long and hard days.

  She went home in the darkness that night, after the last of the day's wounded had been brought in.

  Walking from the church, Lenore felt a strange breeze seem to creep around her. It was chilling, and she found herself hurrying through the streets.

  She came to the big Victorian house where she lived alone now except for Matty, who had practically raised both her and Teddy. With Teddy and her grandfather on the lines, it seemed a lonely place. Matty worked at hospital locations throughout the long days, too, but just like a mother, she always tried to reach home before Lenore, and most often, when Lenore did come home, Matty was there, and when she could manage it, she had a bath ready for Lenore and something hot to drink—even if it was painfully weak coffee. Matty loved her, and Lenore loved Matty right back. The tall, slim black woman seemed ageless, and she seemed to carry all the wisdom of a dozen centuries. Lenore knew that her grandfather had bought Matty and her old husband when her last owner had been determined to sell them both off wherever he could, and that Matty had always been grateful that Lenore's grandfather had believed that slaves were human with human feelings and that no man had a right to split up a man and wife. Lenore was certain that Matty must want the Yanks to win—she didn't believe in slavery, and she had pointed out to Lenore often enough that many masters were downright vicious to their slaves, and Lenore had been forced to admit that it was true, even if she had pointed out in turn the goodness of some men. Right now, it didn't matter. They weathered the siege alone, seeing Teddy and Grandpa infrequently, and all of them eating at the old table in the kitchen on those few special nights when Grandpa or Teddy did make it back from the trenches.

  When Lenore came into the house, Matty was sitting on the bottom step of the center stairway right behind the entryway. She was darning some old, worn socks, but she offered Lenore a smile. "In the kitchen, missy," she told Lenore, "there's a kettle of water over the fire, and the hip tub's drawn right to it." Matty frowned. "Good night for it? You look right worn down!"

  "More so and more so," Lenore told her, trying to speak lightly and offer the woman a smile in return. She started through the door at her left to the kitchen, which took up much of that side of the house. "Then again," she called back, "the siege is a nightmare, but I've got you, and a bath sounds like a little brush with heaven!"

  Matty chuckled softly after her. Lenore quickly discarded her clothing, tossing it all over a chair by the fire. She poured the last of the water into the tub, smiling as the steam rose to her face, then she crawled into her bath. The good thing about a siege, she thought, was that it could make the littlest things seem like the greatest wonders in the world. A bath... hot, luxurious, causing the aches and the pains and even some of the heartache to seep from her body.

  She leaned her head back against the wooden rim of the tub and closed her eyes. She opened them just a slit and watched the steam start to rise. For a few moments, she felt really deliciously oblivious to the world around her. Maybe she was just exhausted, so exhausted that she managed to make it disappear at will...

  Maybe she just dozed. She must have slept, must have dreamed. For she was suddenly back in the forest.

  And listening while someone, something, whispered her name.

  Lenore... Lenore...

  Chills swept around her—she could scarcely see, for the air was filled with a swirling mist and the black powder that prevailed after a battle. But she could hear, and feel, the evil.

  Lenore... Lenore...

  There was someone standing before her. She had to see; she prayed not to see. The mist was lightening. Any minute she would see his face, and she didn't want to see it.

  She tried to waken.

  She could not. She could only stare as the mist cleared away.

  Then she saw...

  Saw his face, his eyes, the evil in them. For a moment, it seemed that he was there, alive. Then it seemed that he was a walking corpse. A terrible corpse, caked with mud, long dead. She could see his skull, his eye sockets, staring, empty...

  Bruce!

  No...

  Lenore... Lenore...

  And he started walking toward her.

  He didn't look at her, though; he looked beyond her. She knew that someone stood behind her, someone who meant to protect her, at the cost of his own life. Nathaniel. And the thing with the empty eye socket
s was still whispering. Lenore, Lenore. I'd never hurt you, just send you to hell with him!

  Her voice was locked in her throat. Then she managed to scream. With terror, with vehemence. And, suddenly, she was out of the forest and the mist, and back in her own kitchen, and Matty was there, standing above the tub, her lean face lined with worry, her hands upon Lenore's shoulders. "Missy! Missy!"

  "Oh!" Lenore stared at her. "Oh!" she said again, and buried her face in her hands. "Oh, dear God, Matty, it was horrible. You can't imagine..."

  Matty stood and disappeared for a moment, then returned with a small glass that offered an even smaller sip of whiskey. It was about all they had left. But Lenore accepted it gratefully, swallowed the burning amber liquid, and leaned back again.

  "A dream," Matty said.

  Lenore nodded.

  "You've had it before?" Matty suggested.

  Had she? Yes, ever since she had been alone in the forest, waiting for Nathaniel to return that night, she had been haunted by the whispers she had heard.

  She had seen the man standing in the mist.

  She had never seen the mist clear before, never seen before that it was Bruce standing there. Nor had she seen that he was coming after her, and Nathaniel.

  She shivered violently now, feeling a wave of heartsickness seem to wash over her with a vengeance. Bruce! He had never been cruel, surely never evil...

  But it hadn't really been Bruce, not the man she had married. Rather, it had seemed to be some kind of a mockery of him, like...

  Like the prisoner they had held in the Yankee camp. Even Nathaniel had said it. Yes, the man had looked like Bruce, but it hadn't been Bruce...

  "Matty, have you ever thought that you had seen a ghost?" she asked softly, miserably. She realized how foolish she must have sounded. "Ghost! Dear Lord! Listen to me, how—"

  "There are more things that prowl the worlds between the living and the dead than mere ghosts!" Matty said.

  Lenore's eyes shot to those of the woman she thought she knew so well. Matty wasn't laughing at her, or frowning at her with concern. She didn't seem to think that Lenore was crazy at all for asking about ghosts.

  "What?" Lenore whispered.

  Matty smiled then, just slightly, taking the empty whiskey glass from Lenore's knotted fingers. "So many things prowl the world, missy, that we do not want to see! And when you were out that time, you ran into one, and you still do not want to see it."

  "Matty, you can't—"

  "I've listened to your nightmares, your cries in the night," Matty said softly.

  "But—but it is all a nightmare!" Lenore said. "The war, the siege—"

  "And the creature who murders the Yankee soldiers each month by the light of the full moon."

  Lenore gasped. "You know—"

  "Everyone knows. You have been gone scavenging too often to hear what's been going on. The Yanks had threatened to hang Rebel prisoners each time one was murdered, but even they know that it is nothing sanctioned by Southern generals. They no longer threaten, but still, there are whispers about what goes on everywhere, speculation."

  "And what do you speculate?" Lenore asked her.

  Matty shrugged, walking over to the kitchen window, parting the curtain slightly. "I think," she said, "that it is going to be a full moon again tonight. And then we will see."

  "Matty, you can't believe—"

  "I was born on the island of Haiti, Miss Lenore, you know that. We believe many things there. The moon is rising now. We will see very shortly."

  Lenore's water seemed to turn very cold. She couldn't move. She sat within it shivering.

  And she prayed.

  Not for herself. She prayed for Nathaniel, and she longed for him. Yearned to be back with him, held in his arms.

  To feel his heartbeat...

  Until the long hours of night passed, and the sun burst through the darkness, and the nightmare, once again.

  A deeper fear swept into her. Nathaniel was in so much danger. And he didn't know it. He hadn't believed that she had heard the whisper in the woods.

  But it had been real...

  Dear God, just what would the night with the full moon bring this time?

  Chapter 6

  The full moon had come again.

  Nathaniel had watched it all night, watched it from a time when it had still been day, when the moon had been a ghostly sphere in the blue sky. Then it had brightened against the sky dusk, against the golden colors that had streaked the heavens. And finally, when full darkness had fallen, the moon was a white orb, glowing over the velvet black of the night.

  His patrols were out, twenty men to a company. He had warned them to stay together, to watch each other's backs.

  So the hours passed and the evening progressed. He took a guard shift himself, riding the perimeters of their camp. He sat with Lieutenant Green afterward, sipping coffee, trying to stay awake. He had marched through enough nights, so the long vigil didn't seem so deadly.

  Yet, as the night went on, he found himself thinking far more about Lenore than about his own men.

  A month ago. It had been just a month ago when so many of his men had been slain. When he had found her trying to get home with her precious vials of medication. When he'd dragged her into camp...

  When he'd made love to her in the deserted farmhouse.

  Thinking about her so made him ache. Burn inside, long for her again. Don't love me, she had told him, but he could never forget holding her, feeling her; the look in her eyes, the warmth that enveloped him when he touched her. Don't love her. He did love her. He had spent years dreaming of having her. Somehow, the war had delivered her to him. And now, if he survived the war...

  If he survived the war, he would still be the enemy, hated even more once the South was conquered. And it would be conquered. Petersburg could not hold out much longer. Lee would be forced to abandon Richmond as well, and from that point on...

  "I wonder where our boy is tonight?" Lieutenant Green said.

  "Our boy?"

  Green nodded, filling up his coffee cup, staring into the liquid over the campfire. "That strange prisoner, the Rebel boy. The one you said looked like someone you knew."

  Nathaniel looked at Green quizzically. "I thought we sent him to Washington with the others a long time ago."

  Green looked startled. "I thought you knew! But then, maybe it didn't get reported to you. You were gone with Mrs. Latham when it happened. He slipped through our fingers again. That very night, as a matter of fact. When they were being transferred. We're convinced we didn't lose him, but the unit we turned the prisoners over to came up a man short. It made me damned uncomfortable. There was always something about him. He looked wrong; there was something in his eyes... and he—he smelled bad. Like..."

  "Death?" Nathaniel suggested, remembering the man and feeling a sweeping of cold seep down his neck. Death. That was it. The man had smelled like death.

  And he had looked so damned much like Bruce Latham.

  He stood, swallowing down more hot coffee, thinking he needed a good whiskey instead. Lenore had seen him, too. He had scared the hell out of her; Nathaniel had seen it in her eyes.

  So what? What did it all mean? Maybe the Reb was their man. He was someone who looked a whole lot like Bruce Latham, someone who was damned evil, maybe maniacal. And maybe he let himself be caught just so that he could escape and be close at hand to murder his Yankee jailers.

  Maybe. But how did he survive against so many? What man had that kind of strength?

  "My turn to head on out," Green said, standing. He pulled out his pocket watch and flipped open the gold case. "Two a.m., sir! We're making it through the night."

  "Just a few more hours to go," Nathaniel agreed. "I'll be out to join you again in another hour."

  Green nodded and left him. Nathaniel sank down on one of the camp chairs before the fire. He stared into the flames, drank the rest of the coffee in his cup, and set the cup down. His back ached from all the riding
he had done, and he was damned used to riding. The days were long ones. He closed his eyes, just resting them for a moment.

  Lenore...

  Where was she now? He prayed that she was safe. Sleeping, hopefully. Starving, probably.

  Dreaming, maybe...

  The flames snapped and crackled. He was vaguely aware that he had dozed, vaguely aware that he was dreaming himself. He saw Lenore, and it was a wonderful dream. She was running toward him. Yet, as she came, he saw her face, saw the terror in her eyes. She was trying so very hard to reach him. Trying to tell him, to warn him...

  Then he saw through the mist. Bruce Latham—or someone very much like Bruce Latham—was behind her. He was laughing, and the laugh seemed chill, like the black hollows of his eyes. Dead eyes.

  There was a glint of silver. Latham had a knife, razor honed, glittering beneath a full moon. And he was reaching out, grasping at Lenore's hair as she ran.

  "No!" Nathaniel heard himself screaming.

  He must have cried out aloud, and awakened himself. Lenore was gone; Latham was gone. The campfire was burning low.

  And Lieutenant Green, dismounting from his sorrel horse, was before him again.

  Nathaniel leaped to his feet. Green was grim. "The western perimeter, sir! We need you fast!"

  He was up in split seconds, mounted on his waiting horse before half a minute had elapsed.

  He followed Green hard for a full five minutes, then came to a clearing where two men were down, where their companions held and supported them, where others were rushing in. Private Haines, Company B, was the most coherent, quickly saluting Nathaniel and speaking. "All eighteen of us in the company were lined up, sir, near close enough to touch. Then Perry over there screamed out, struck down, and we saw something. We gave chase into the foliage, and both Jacobs and I fought, but we don't exactly know what we fought. Jacobs is injured there. I got away when the others started calling out, but, sir, I swear, I still don't know who or what I was fighting!"