Waking the Dead

by Heather Graham

  “Good,” Quinn said. “Well, let’s get these, uh, pieces together.”

  They carefully collected the body, the larger disjointed bones and leathered skin and any bits that had fallen off the corpse. A grotesque task but a necessary one... When it was wrapped in the sheet, the corpse didn’t weigh much at all. Quinn carried the bundle. He didn’t look around as they walked out of the crypt.

  They passed through the pantry, the kitchen and the great hall.

  When they stepped outside, Quinn immediately felt the chill. He glanced up; the sky was roiling. Black clouds seemed to burst upon black clouds. A gust of wind struck him, and he worried that they might burn down half of Geneva if they didn’t get it taken care of quickly.

  As Danni had said, Bo Ray and Ron had created a good fire—and they’d been aware of the wind and the danger. They’d found a nook in the stone structure of the castle; the wind blew toward it, so there was little risk of the fire sweeping at them backward. They had some kind of leftover packing crate ready for the corpse. Quinn laid his bundle on it and, with Father Ryan, lifted the entire crate-turned-brazier and set it over the fire.

  The flames snapped and soared, an eerie blue color. Hattie stepped back, but then moved forward again, wearing a determined expression.

  They grouped around the fire. Father Ryan let Natasha intone the first words. He went next, praying that Henry Sebastian Hubert could now rest in peace and cease any evil he sought to perpetrate on earth.

  The corpse, in its deteriorated condition, burned fast. The flames began to subside, but Quinn could still identify remnants of bone...and other things.

  He wanted it all gone. Completely gone.

  He fed more gasoline to the flames from the can Bo Ray and Ron had used.

  They watched again. As the fire once more subsided, they saw that there was nothing left but ash; Quinn couldn’t even see the remnants of bone.

  Then they heard a rumbling overhead. Quinn expected it to be the sound of distant thunder. It wasn’t, though, and he couldn’t tell what had caused the noise, since the clouds over the castle had dispersed. The sky was darkening, but that was because night was coming on.

  “Let’s keep going,” he said to the others.

  Bo Ray had seen to it that they had a bucket to collect the ash—whatever was left of the wooden crate and the body, now mixed in a pile. When that task was finished, they headed to the lake, where they divided the ashes, sending them in different directions, into the wind and the water.

  Done. It was done.

  Quinn should have felt a massive sense of relief. A feeling that it was over.

  He didn’t. Looking at Danni, he thought she was puzzled, as well—certain that she should’ve felt the sense of a burden being lifted. He knew, of course, that the painting still existed, presumably in New Orleans somewhere, and thought perhaps that explained his continued discomfort.

  “So, we did it, and we all look as if we’ve been mud wrestling in plaster,” Hattie observed.

  “There are some old tubs, and we can heat water,” Billie said grudgingly.

  “That would be quite nice, Mr. McDougall. And sincerely appreciated,” Hattie told him.

  “Mrs. Lamont?” Father Ryan asked. “Would it be presumptuous of me to hope that you ordered a good Irish whiskey delivered with the food supplies?”

  “Not at all, Father Ryan. Not at all. Besides our baths, a drink would seem to be in order.”

  “Well, speaking of those baths,” Bo Ray said, “guess I’m hauling the water, huh?”

  “Only if you want to,” Hattie replied.

  Bo Ray grinned at her. “After that plane trip over here...yeah! I want to haul water!”

  “If we all help, it won’t take long,” Quinn said.

  “Shall we head in?” Father Ryan suggested. “I’m ready for a shot of whiskey.”

  “I was thinking of jumping in the lake,” Bo Ray admitted. He shrugged and turned to follow Father Ryan, Hattie and Billie back to the castle.

  Ron and Natasha stayed with Quinn and Danni by the lake.

  “It is done, right?” Ron asked. “He’s gone.”

  “He is gone,” Natasha agreed.

  “Then why are you all acting like you expected something to be different?” Ron asked.

  Quinn figured it was an appropriate time to tell him what had happened in NOLA. “There were other deaths back home,” he said. “Three of them.”

  Natasha’s beautiful features were stoic.

  Ron paled. “Before we did this, obviously.”

  “Yes.”

  Natasha said, “Maybe one day we’ll discover the science behind what we don’t understand. Science once claimed that the sun revolved around a flat earth, you’ll recall, Doctor.”

  “There are eight of us,” Danni said, changing the subject abruptly. “If we’re all going to halfway clean up—and I don’t feel like wearing crypt dust when we board a plane tomorrow—we’ll have to get going on the whole water-hauling event.”

  As they walked back toward the castle, Natasha and Quinn hung back for a moment.

  “You don’t think it’s really over, do you?” he asked quietly.

  She shook her head and glanced at Danni’s retreating back. “No. Neither does Danni. And neither do you.”

  “Why?” Quinn asked. “We did what we should have done. From any work I ever did with Angus and from the pages of his Millicent Smith book, this is how we end it.”

  Natasha shook her head again. “Maybe I’m wrong. We did do everything we were supposed to. Except...”

  “Except the painting’s still out there.” Quinn finished her sentence. “And whoever killed to get that painting is still out there.”

  She nodded, and Quinn set an arm around her shoulders. “Okay, tomorrow we go home and find the painting. But if Hubert created it with his blood, he shouldn’t be able to inhabit the painting anymore.”

  “I know Hattie Lamont won’t have a problem destroying it. I’m certain of that,” Natasha said.

  “True, but for now...”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m with Hattie. This crypt dust and dirt is...”

  “Creepy?” Natasha asked.

  He laughed. “Creepy—and disgusting.”

  Together they walked back to the castle.

  * * *

  Danni couldn’t help being amused that they managed to make something of a game out of supplying water to the massive tubs in the guest rooms upstairs.

  Everyone joined in—except Hattie.

  That wasn’t because she was unwilling. They’d all tacitly agreed that, despite the fact that she was so fit, they weren’t letting a woman her age haul buckets up and down the stairs.

  She insisted, however, that she’d take care of the cleaning up.

  “Really?” Ron teased her.

  “Well, of course. I’ll order in a crew after we leave,” she told him.

  Getting everyone bathed took two and a half hours. But those who’d gone first had started working in the kitchen. Sometime around 9:30 p.m. they’d concocted a meal of chicken and pasta, salad and vegetables; they even had a box of delightful French pastries for dessert.

  Danni didn’t understand why she still felt so worried—apart from the one obvious reality. The painting hadn’t been destroyed yet. She knew that she and Quinn would talk later, when they had time.

  She wasn’t sure if it was logic—or something else—that had told her where to find Henry Hubert. Instinct. Logic and instinct.

  His wife hadn’t wanted his body. She’d wanted the castle kept in the family—but never occupied.

  Where would you put someone you thought should disappear into the earth as deeply as possible? At the far end of the crypt. You wouldn’t leave any outward sign of him because you wouldn’t want idiotic devil worshippers digging him up. Eloisa’s journal had been obscure about her instructions for his burial, but she’d revealed enough to lead Danni to his final resting place.

  Just as she
was thinking about the body, Bo Ray, licking his fingers after finishing what must have been an especially delicious éclair, said, “I get the impression Hubert’s wife really wanted nothing to do with him—or his body. And I guess she couldn’t cremate him because it wasn’t done in Christian societies at the time.”

  Father Ryan nodded. “It’s only recently that the Catholic Church began to condone cremation.”

  “Well, she buried him, all right,” Natasha said. “Or had him buried. We’re lucky Danni found him.”

  “It wasn’t that hard. I was remembering a vague comment in his wife’s journal,” Danni said. She didn’t want to think about being in the crypt. She’d been in cemeteries and catacombs, and she’d never felt as uncomfortable as she’d felt in that crypt. It almost seemed as if the walls were infused with evil.

  Quinn chose that moment to tell the group at large that three more people had died in their absence.

  “And I’m not there,” Ron moaned. “I should’ve been there. I need to see the bodies. I need to know if the killings were related. The only way to figure that out is...well, I’d have to compare them.” He paused. “Not that we don’t have a number of talented medical examiners. I’ll just have to look at the autopsy reports tomorrow.”

  “Where’d it happen?” Bo Ray demanded.

  There was silence for a minute.

  “Quinn, where were they killed?” Bo Ray persisted.

  Quinn told him.

  “That’s the corner down the street from the Cheshire Cat!” he said.

  “Yes. The three of them were staying at a hotel on Royal. They were going back there from Bourbon.”

  Bo Ray shuddered. “But that was before we burned the body, right?”

  “Yes,” Ron answered, and Quinn nodded.

  “Bo Ray, we acted as quickly as we could,” Father Ryan said. “We’re doing everything we can to stop this evil.”

  “I guess I was thinking that as creepy as this castle is, I’m glad I’m here, and not at home. I know I’m being selfish, but...that’s too close.”

  “We can’t undo what’s been done,” Natasha said. “We can only hope to right the present and safeguard the future.”

  The room fell silent again.

  Father Ryan raised his glass and said, “As Natasha says, all we can do is move forward and act to the best of our abilities. We’ve done what we needed to do—but more work lies ahead. And I wish to thank Dr. Ronald Hubert and Mrs. Hattie Lamont. Without your help, Ron, we couldn’t be here. And, Hattie, without your brilliant planning as well as your generous financing, it would’ve been a far more wretched trip.”

  “A toast to you both!” Billie cried, holding his tumbler of whiskey aloft.

  “Ah, thank you.” Hattie lifted her wineglass. “Without you, I wouldn’t be alive.”

  Quinn was drinking water. He raised his own glass in a toast to the others. “To all of us, because everyone’s put in what was needed, and I’m grateful, too.”

  “Can’t find many water haulers better than me,” Bo Ray said in a mock-boastful tone that made Danni smile.

  “You know,” Hattie said, “it’s really too bad that we’re here under such circumstances. It would be fun to experience this place more as tourists. I can imagine Mary Shelley and Clare, both beautiful in their Empire gowns, reclining on the sofa. And Byron. I wonder what it was like to hear the man speak. Was he as brilliant as we believe? Or was he just a dilettante? Do you think Shelley was morose—or charming and seductive?”

  For a moment, Danni could almost hear the people who would’ve been in this room nearly two hundred years earlier. She saw Mary move about, her hair pulled back, a few curls escaping. In her imagination, Mary laughed easily. Clare, an absolute beauty, would have been pining after Lord Byron. And Henry Hubert...

  Had he been jealous of Byron’s friendships with Polidori and Shelley?

  Had he joined in the conversation, and yet watched them carefully, yearning to really be one of them?

  Natasha stood and walked over to the hearth, gazing up at the painting. “There were many reasons the tale of Frankenstein’s monster came to Mary Shelley’s mind. Remember, there were scientists all over the world conducting experiments with electricity. Her father’s home was open to the greatest minds of her day.”

  “Not to mention the experiments being done on corpses!” Ron said. “It was a pretty macabre time in medical research. But all over Europe and beyond, graveyards were being plundered for corpses. Medical schools needed them. More importantly for our purposes, several men had used frogs and other small creatures to prove that electricity could cause movement in the dead when shot through the nervous system and into the muscles.”

  “Mary knew all that. And then, while they were at Villa Diodati, they read German ghost stories,” Hattie said, adding, “I’ve been researching all this and even reading some of those stories. Can’t you just hear her talking to Henry Hubert, telling him about her nightmares?”

  “They probably sat in this very room on their visit to Hubert,” Bo Ray said, “talking about everything they were doing. All the stuff they’d learned...”

  “And fantasized about,” Ron threw in.

  “Hubert would’ve felt the need to keep up,” Hattie said thoughtfully. “Those beautiful people! So bright and shining to Hubert!”

  “Hedonists,” Ron said in a sardonic voice. “Even if they weren’t hedonists on the order of Alain Guillaume. From what I’ve heard, he took village girls, had his way with them as they said back then—and murdered them. But one girl who’d gone missing had a father in local government. That’s when the authorities became involved. He tried to kill the local police who came after him...and got himself killed. Beautiful people or not, I can’t imagine anything too edifying going on here!”

  Hattie laughed. “Well, on that cheerful note, I’m off to bed,” she said, rising. “I’ve had all the fun I can take for the moment.”

  “I’ll walk you up,” Ron offered.

  “We should all call it a night,” Quinn said. “I’ll just pick up.”

  “Cleaning crew when we leave,” Hattie reminded him.

  “I’m a creature of habit,” Quinn told her. “I will, at least, throw away the paper and plastic we’ve been using.”

  Natasha and Father Ryan stayed downstairs with them, and Danni wasn’t going up without Quinn. There was something about the castle that made her feel she shouldn’t be alone in it. As they collected the dishes and leftovers, Danni noticed that he didn’t seem to care about using up the generator; he wasn’t turning off any of the lights they’d set up to illuminate the place. Natasha and Father Ryan started up the stairs to the second floor. Quinn took Danni’s hand, and they followed soon after. Halfway up the stairs, Danni paused. She had the sensation that someone was behind her, watching her.

  She shivered and looked back. Had there been movement in the room?

  But nothing seemed different. Then she sensed it again. Movement. Somewhere...on the wall?

  She stared up at the portaint of the knight, the man they all assumed to be the first Lord Guillaume. The painting hadn’t changed.

  Neither had the coat of arms or the crossed swords beneath.

  Her eyes shot to the suits of armor guarding the archway to the kitchen.

  Nothing had moved. Nothing at all.

  “Danni?” Quinn asked worriedly.

  She shook her head. “This whole place is...repulsive. Thank God we’re finished and flying home in the morning!”

  “I’m here with you,” he said. “I won’t leave your side.”

  He slipped his arm around her and they continued up the stairs. Still, as they neared the top, she looked back a final time.

  She just couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

  Of being watched by...

  Something evil.

  They’d killed the evil! she told herself. They’d followed everything they knew about destroying the essence of evil that could survive after
a man’s death. Body burned to ash. They’d seen the body; they’d burned it themselves and scattered the ashes to the four winds.

  Yes, they’d burned Hubert. Nothing remained of him—except his painting. Ghosts in the Mind. Perhaps his most candid expression of evil.

  It also seemed to her, more intensely than ever, that the castle itself, the very walls, the structure and everything in it, was somehow permeated with that same evil.

  She shivered, forced herself to look forward.

  To feel the warmth of Quinn’s arm.

  She would not let the castle claim her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  QUINN LAY AWAKE a long time after Danni had fallen asleep.

  He should have felt good. Exhausted, perhaps, but good. He’d meant to be a gentleman—old-fashioned term though it was—and do nothing but hold Danni until they slept. To his surprise, she’d wanted more. So they’d made love, and for those moments, they’d left the foreboding castle behind. Through their bodies, through sheer sensation and pure emotion, they’d escaped into blissful new regions.

  No eerie ghosts had shrieked in the night; no werewolves on distant hills had howled at the moon.

  The castle was just brick and mortar, wood and stone.

  But they were all bothered by the sense of something unfinished, he knew. At least he, Danni, Father Ryan and Natasha were.

  Father Ryan was behaving almost jovially. Quinn believed he was putting up a front for the others. After all, by 11:00 a.m. the next day, they’d be on a plane heading home and this would all be behind them.

  Lying awake, he was glad they’d have a pleasant trip back the next morning; he intended to sleep the entire way.

  Now, when they got home...

  That would be the time to worry again. Despite the fact that Hubert was dead—more than dead—they had to find and destroy his painting.

  His thoughts continued to plague him but eventually jet lag, the day, the week, took hold, and he fell into a fitful sleep.

  He awoke abruptly to discover that Danni wasn’t at his side.