by Ivan Blake
Chris walked with a cane he’d found in one of the cottage’s many cupboards. Gillian wanted to take his arm but dared not.
They chatted as they walked, about the cottage and Chris’s studies, about the inquiry, and finally about Nigel and how wonderful he was. Gillian recounted all that Nigel had done recently to help her mother, even the fact they’d been out to dinner several times. At first Gillian hadn’t known what to make of their relationship, but since they were both alone and obviously cared for one another, Gillian hoped her mom might make the most of an opportunity for happiness. On the way back to Bemishstock, Gillian intended to ask Nigel about his intentions and urge him to press his case.
Then they talked about Rose DuCalice and the strange family that owned Marymount, about its ghosts and graveyard, then about Cathars and Mary Magdalene, until it became obvious to both of them they were speaking about everything except what they really wanted to discuss—their own relationship.
Gillian stopped suddenly, and look directly at Chris. “Let’s cut to the chase, Mr. Chandler. I heard what you said to Nigel this morning...about us.”
“What...what did you hear?”
“You’re afraid my feelings may have changed since you left Bemishstock. And you’ve decided to stay as far away from me as possible in order to protect me.” She marched straight up to Chris, stared him in the eye, and said, “Well let me say this, for a smart guy, you can be pretty dumb!”
“I...I—”
“Let me finish. I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you...Well no, that’s not true. At first I thought you were a complete idiot with your dark clothes and your moody ways, then a pompous fool with all your sneers and snide remarks...”
“Can we get back to how you love me?”
“Okay, so it took me a while to see past all the pretense, but when I did, I fell so deeply in love with you, that...that...I would walk through fire for you.”
“Well, actually you did.” Chris was grinning from ear to ear.
“And don’t you ever forget it!” Gillian had such a frown on her face, like a nursery school teacher disciplining a troublesome child.
“But that’s what I’m afraid of,” Chris said. “That you’ll do it again, only it’ll turn out far worse.”
“You’d do the same for me.”
“Of course, but that’s different.”
Gillian rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake! Stop being such a chauvinist. You have no right to do all the heroics just because you’re the boy. If I want to save you, then I have the right to do it and you have no right to stop me. If you really love me, then you’ll let me be just as brave as you, you selfish chauvinist pig!”
“God, I want to kiss you,” Chris said with the biggest, goofiest smile ever.
“And I want to tear your clothes off and jump all over you!”
“Gillian!”
“What, you think all I dream of is us having tea parties together? I’m way past wanting to kiss you. I’m eighteen and you’re my first boyfriend. I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up. You should see the new underwear I bought for this trip on the remotest chance Mallory might be gone.”
“God, I wish you hadn’t told me that. Can you imagine how hard it is to stay away from you? I sat watching you sleep on the sofa for hours last night. I finally had to have a cold shower to keep from completely humiliating myself!”
“But why didn’t you wake me? There was nothing to prevent us from doing a little innocent strip teasing for each other.”
“Except I wouldn’t have been able to stop there. I would have leapt on you like a tiger on a puppy.”
A wicked smile crossed Gillian’s face. “Did I hear you tell Nigel this morning Mallory is going easier on you these days?” She took a step toward him and opened her coat. “Maybe we could chance it.” She undid the buttons on her blouse...
“Oh God, Gillian!”
“If you’re strong enough to take Mallory’s abuse, maybe I am too.” She pulled her blouse out of her slacks.
“Gillian, no! Mallory might be taking it easy on me, but she sure as hell isn’t going easy on people I touch. Did you hear what she did to Ed Balzer?”
“A little.”
“She tore his face off. And even with me, she still goes crazy sometimes. Over there.” He pointed at the side of the lane up ahead. “That’s where she threw me in the ditch and held my head under water until I thought I was dead. I swallowed so much mud, I threw it up for days.”
“Oh heavens, Chris, what are we going to do?” She closed her coat tightly across her chest.
“What we planned. We talk to this priest, get Mallory’s spirit back in her bones, and lay her to rest once and for all.”
They stood gazing at one another, longing, heartbroken, and lustful, all in the same instant.
“I did tell you I brought Mallory’s bones with me, didn’t I? They’re in the car. Maybe we could at least try to get Mallory’s spirit back in her bones ourselves while I’m here, maybe even read the prayers from the letter?”
“I guess we could.” They resumed their walk to the gate.
“Meantime, I’ll wear Granddad’s long johns next time,” Gillian said with a smile.
“But that’s even more exciting!”
* * * *
Gillian put the small blue suitcase down on the kitchen table. It had once held her granddad’s many sets of worn-out dentures, fifty years’ worth, in fact. “Never know when they might fit again,” he said each time he added a pair to his collection. Gillian had transferred the dentures to her grandmother’s trunk of crocheted tablecloths before filling the suitcase with Mallory’s bones. When Nigel arrived to collect her for the drive to Lewis, she’d slipped the case out to the car while Nigel and her mother were chatting.
Gillian, Chris, and Nigel stood staring at the case.
“I’m not comfortable with this,” Nigel said. “If I’d known you were withholding evidence from the courts, I would have objected long ago.”
“The police already have some of Mallory’s bones,” Gillian replied. “The pathologist has examined and reported on them. Why would he need more?”
“It’s still withholding evidence.”
“Evidence the court doesn’t need.”
“That’s what Chief Boucher tried to argue.”
“Nigel, whose need is greater right now?” said Chris.
“Not sure I know.”
“Look, I know you don’t believe Mallory is hurting Chris,” Gillian said, “but trust me, she is, and until we can get her back into these bones and lay her to rest...”
Nigel shook his head. “All right, all right...let’s have a look.”
Gillian touched Nigel’s hand, and then unfastened the latches on the case. “Chris,” she said, “I was wondering...what...what happens if Mallory does reenter her bones right here, right now?”
“I guess that would be great. We’d bury her immediately.”
“No, I mean how will we know if she’s reentered her remains?”
“Captain Dahlman’s first letter said Mallory’s remains would start thrashing about. So I guess her bones will hop about too.”
“You actually think her bones might start moving?” Nigel said in disbelief.
“Maybe. But it’s not likely. We know the barn fire somehow released her, and she’ll only reenter her remains if her gods order her to.”
“And that will require another cleansing death ceremony, which you don’t know how to perform,” Nigel said.
“Right,” Gillian said, “and that’s why we need the priest from Boston.”
“Okay, so if we don’t think anything is going to happen, and we don’t know how to read the prayers to make something happen, then why are we doing this?” Nigel’s discomfort was quite obvious.
“I...I’m not sure.” Chris replied.
“Because,” Gillian said with a note of irritation, “if there’s even the slightest chance the first ceremony her father performed m
ight still be working, then I want to find out.”
“Okay,” Nigel said, “let’s see what we’ve got.”
The case was filled with newspaper parcels of every size. Gillian carefully lifted out the largest object, and unwrapped it. Mallory’s skull.
Chris was horrified to see so much blackened flesh still stretched across the face. He’d naively expected the skull to be bleached white and stripped of all its flesh, but that certainly wasn’t the case. The cheeks were covered in dried black leather. Tendons still held the jaw in place. Strands of Mallory’s black hair were still stuck to her charcoal scalp. Charred gums held several sooty teeth. A leathery tongue dangled by a single tendon from the gaping mouth. Even an eyeball, albeit shrunken and badly scorched but clearly recognizable as such, stared out of its blackened socket.
“Christ, Gillian,” Chris said in a hushed voice, “when I asked you to save some of Mallory’s remains from the fire, I had no idea...!”
“I guess I did it without thinking.”
“And these bones were in a tidal pool all the time you were in hospital?” Nigel asked.
“Maybe that’s what preserved some of the flesh—the salt.”
“Okay, so what else have we got?” Chris said.
“Well, part of her pelvis.” Gillian lifted out the second parcel.
The pelvis, with several inches of leg bone dangling from it, bore great chunks of scorched flesh and looked for all the world like a horribly butchered and over-roasted ham hock.
“Oh God,” Nigel muttered.
“The rest are all small pieces,” Gillian said as she unwrapped first a hand, then a portion of spine, several ribs, a foot, and finally three long pieces of bone from either Mallory’s arms or her legs. None was whole; all bore the evidence of the force and great savagery Doctor Meath had used to hack apart Mallory’s corpse after he’d completed his experiment.
“That’s it,” she said at last.
“And you’ve had these hidden in your house since you got out of hospital,” Nigel said in amazement.
“Because Chris needed them.”
“Well, they’re not jumping around,” Nigel muttered with what sounded like a sense of relief.
“Wait, what was that?” Chris said.
A crackling sound, then a burning smell.
“There!” Chris pointed up toward the ceiling. “See it?”
A blue glow, first no larger than a night-light, surrounded by tiny points of fire crackling and fizzing and popping like an electrical short, and then a swirling mist.
Nigel gasped. “What the hell is that?”
“Mallory,” said Chris and Gillian in unison.
The ball of blue light darted back and forth across the room, the crackling grew louder and angrier, and the swirling mist obscured the ceiling. The blue light trailing sparks and mist flew directly at Chris. Eyes appeared in the swirling mist, black, hate-filled, hovering directly above him. Then the eyes drew back, turned from Chris to stare down at the table. Slowly they descended toward the bones. Sparks, once yellow, were now white hot and crackling like bacon in a fry pan, while the blue light deepened, became purple then burgundy and twisted like a maelstrom in a bottomless sea.
“Chris, those eyes,” Nigel cried out, “that’s Mallory?”
“You can see them?” Chris called back.
“Yes!” Nigel and Gillian shouted.
Chris muttered, “She’s really angry this time.”
Suddenly the fragments of bone on the table began to dance about. The pelvis rolled sideways and the piece of leg still attached to it began swinging back and forth as if the leg was trying to walk. Then, most nightmarish of all, the remaining eyeball in Mallory’s skull twisted in Chris’s direction and the jaw opened.
In that same moment, a bloodcurdling cry filled with excruciating pain and sorrow echoed through the house and rattled windows.
The bones fell still. The blue light drew back from the table. The black eyes reappeared amidst the swirling mists and crackling sparks. They looked first at Chris, then spun around as though searching for someone or something, and finally flew up to the ceiling and vanished.
“My God, what just happened?” Nigel said.
“Did Mallory just return to her remains?” Gillian asked.
“Yeah,” Chris replied, “but she’s not there now.”
“And that scream, was that her too?”
“No. Not her,” Chris said.
“Then who?”
“Braida, the ghost in the cellar...and Mallory heard her!” Chris shouted as he bolted for the cellar door. “Come on, we’ve got to see what happens.”
As he raced down the stairs and through the winding passage toward the tower chamber, Chris could just make out the faint glow of Mallory’s blue mist ahead of him. When he got to the archway into the enormous room, he stopped. Gillian and Nigel ran up behind him.
“What...what is it?” Gillian whispered.
“She’s com—” His words were drowned out by a terrible scream from high above, somewhere far beyond the cellar ceiling. Chris scarcely had time to point upwards before the pale green outline of a woman, flailing about as she fell, plunged through the rafters and came to a sudden and terrible halt mere feet from the dirt floor, impaled on sharpened posts now visible in the woman’s green aura. There she writhed in agony for a minute or so, all the while mouthing soundless supplications for mercy and forgiveness.
“Oh my God!” Gillian whispered.
Chris felt the wave of heat sweep past him, then saw the swirling mists and the blue glow burst into the room and encircle the writhing woman on her bed of spikes. From out of the mist, Mallory’s black eyes stared with a mix of curiosity and pleasure into the shimmering face of the impaled woman. For a moment, the woman seemed to stare back until her eyes rolled back in her head and the eyelids fluttered and closed. As if angered by the impertinence of the phantom dying in front of her, Mallory’s eyes glowed red then burgundy and finally purple before returning to black. The great ball of crackling electricity whipped faster and faster around the impaled woman as her image slowly faded. Mallory spun away from the phantom and raced around the base of the tower like a tornado, swirling dirt from the cellar floor up into dust devils, driving Chris and the others back into the passage, and forcing them to cover their eyes.
When next Chris opened his, Mallory’s face occupied his entire field of vision. She’d ceased her frenzied flight directly in front of Chris. Their eyes met. Mallory must have recognized Chris’s terror because a look of malicious satisfaction filled her gaze. She seized Chris by the hair.
“No,” Gillian screamed. Too late.
Mallory heaved Chris across the chamber to crash headlong into the fieldstone base of the tower. Taking him by the hair once again, Mallory repeatedly struck Chris’s face against the tower stones. Blood filled his eyes. Then he was thrown to the floor, and a great weight fell on him, driving every ounce of breath from his lungs. Something snapped and white-hot pain shot through his chest with his every gasp. Mallory still wasn’t finished. Chris flew across the chamber to lay sprawled near the passageway. For a second, he lay there undisturbed. Then something shattered across his face, crushing his nose and filling his mouth with an unimaginably foul taste. His cheeks were smeared with grease and eyes filled with shards of something, and with that, Mallory was done.
“Oh Chris! Chris, don’t move.” Gillian ran to his side.
“Don’t...don’t touch me,” he said. “Rose. Get Rose.”
“I will,” Nigel said and raced into the passage.
“Gillian,” Chris said. “What did she hit me with?”
“Oh, Chris...”
“What was it?”
“Her skull. Mallory smashed her own skull across your face.”
Chapter 9
Sunday, March 8
Chris was asleep in the front bedroom of the cottage, his chest rising and falling rhythmically as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. That was the powe
r of Rose’s sleeping draft. In fact, his chest was tightly bandaged to prevent his broken rib from perforating a lung, and his face—what one could see of it—was a swollen mass of bloody cuts and angry bruises. Most of his face, however, was concealed behind thick pads of gauze and a heavy layer of Rose’s greenish salve. His closed eyes were mere slits in a puffy purple mass and his mouth looked more like two misshapen chunks of calf’s liver than a pair of lips.
Rose felt Chris’s forehead and muttered, “Slight fever, but nothing to worry about.” She began packing away her salves and drafts and cloths in her antiquated leather satchel.
“Very impressive, Mrs. DuCalice,” Nigel said. “And you’ve had no formal medical training.”
“Just a thousand years of experience,” she muttered. “The swelling will take a few days to go down. He’s suffered no permanent damage, not to his face or to his chest, but he’s going to have to fill a bath each day, mix in a cup of these crystals, and soak for an hour to take care of his rib. Then he must rewrap his chest as tightly as he can for at least a week, and of course, avoid exertion.”
Gillian embraced Rose who tried to pull away, but Gillian wouldn’t let go. “I’m so grateful to you.” When at last Gillian released her, Rose backed away with a look of discomfort. “I only wish we could have met under different circumstances,” Gillian said.
“The truth is,” Rose replied, “I wish we hadn’t met at all.” She picked up her bag and her coat and started for the bedroom door. “This is getting ridiculous. I’ve been out here, what, four times now, to patch up this boy. I’m going to have to speak to my brother.” Rose kept talking as she crossed the hall and started down the stairs. “The boy was supposed to be helping me, but instead I’ve had to spend more time out here than ever.”
Gillian and Nigel followed her downstairs. “Please don’t say that. None of this is Chris’s fault,” Gillian said.
Nigel chimed in. “I wasn’t told Chris would be doing anything more than house-sit for you. And yet you’ve asked him to become a graveyard watchman. That wasn’t the deal.”
Rose spun about angrily at the foot of the stairs. “And you didn’t tell my brother the boy was plagued by a demon!”