When Darkness Falls

by Susan Krinard, Tanith Lee, Evelyn Vaughn

  Connor paused. His face had no expression.

  "A girl called Alex took the part of Abigail Williams. She was young enough, apparently, about seventeen, eighteen. But also she was an astonishingly good actress. She wasn't better than Kate—and certainly not so polished or skilled. Alex didn't know enough yet, but she had a kind of quality… a letting go. She'd come out on stage, even in rehearsal, in jeans, with her hair tied back in an elastic band—and she was… gone. Abigail was there instead. Alex had some special gift not all of us get.

  "Vivien, I liked this girl, and I admired her ability. She was easy to work with, and ready to learn. And yes, she was attractive. But there was nothing else between us, except what's in the play. I need you to believe that, Vivien. Kate never did."

  Vivien sat, still as he. She felt cold under the sun. She said nothing, nor did he prompt her.

  "Maybe if I'd been on my own, I might have been interested. But I wasn't. And it was Kate I was in love with. Oh, I really was. I'd go crazy every Friday night, knowing she'd be there on Saturday. I used to hate saying goodbye on Monday morning. I kept saying to her, 'Come and stay for longer.' At first she said she couldn't. Then she wouldn't. Then, when she did come, it was different. She'd started to try to trap me—that's how she described it afterwards. To catch me out. I didn't notice how she kept on and on about Patrick and Emily and Nevins. Kate thought Alex and I were having sex. We weren't.

  "Perhaps I praised Alex too much. I don't know. I've tried to know. I think for Kate it was being alone in London. No work. No me. In the beginning we'd speak on the telephone every night. Until the calls got weird. That was when she'd decided I was cheating on her, and she was trying to trap me. And I was too much of a klutz to realize what was going on. So I'd try to coax her into a better mood, and she'd start lamming into me down die phone—how I didn't care about her, wanted it all ways. Insane stuff. I'd get angry myself. Didn't figure it out. I had a lot on my mind with the play. Didn't think. I was a bloody fool.

  "Then it was first night. Actors can be superstitious. Even if I hadn't been—I got a card from Kate, which I'd half expected, even though I was supposed to meet her off the train that day. I opened it—it was a plain postcard, and she'd written slantways across it. I still remember exactly. It said: Shan't be there, sweetie. Because you don't need me. You've got your glorious Alex. Just like your rotten father had his gambling, and rotten Emily had her Nevins. So enjoy your rotten selves.

  "I called the flat. No one answered. I couldn't let everyone else down. So I thought. I got through that damned play somehow. About 2:00 a.m. I took a train down to London."

  Connor stood up. He turned from Vivien and looked out across the orchard to the fields in wavering sunlight. All Vivien wanted was to hold him, shield him from the edge of this awful memory—but she found she could not move.

  "When I walked in through the door of the flat, Kate was sitting there in the room with eight sides we'd both liked so much. She hadn't showered or washed her hair—but she'd chopped it short, unevenly. She looked up and grinned at me. 'What kept you?' she said. 'Couldn't drag yourself off her?'

  "Then it all came out. All she thought I'd done. I tried so hard to explain it away. You think that if you're not lying, you're going to be believed.

  "She wasn't even shouting or being particularly spiteful, the way she'd got over the phone. She just brushed everything I said aside. Then she said, 'Let's have a cup of tea.' I let her go into the kitchen—I was trying to get myself together. Then I realized she'd been gone a long time.

  "When I went into the kitchen, it was full of steam. It was like that time with you, when Lewis—Just like that. She was standing there over the teapot, crying, while the water boiled away. I put my arms round her and she threw me off. She made me stand across the room, and she refilled the kettle. I thought she'd scald herself—somehow she didn't. Then we just stood there, the kettle boiled, and she made the tea.

  "She said to me 'I made this with love.' I drank the cup down. It was bitter—I didn't think. She stood looking at me, and then she said, 'My love for you comes in a little bottle marked Sleeping Pills. That's what I mixed in the tea. I reckon you've just swallowed about six.'

  "I didn't believe her. Then the kitchen went round and I found myself flat on the floor. I blacked out before she used the knife on me. She could have finished me. I don't know what stopped her. It didn't stop her from—"

  Connor's voice ended. It was like a theater, one actor alone on the stage. Vivien saw this. She saw she was the single audience. She thought, No, it isn't that.

  Then his voice, steady and perfect with its training, resumed. "She swallowed the rest of the pills. By the time I came round, it was too late. The ambulance guys kept telling me that. Kate left a suicide note. Somehow I can't recall what that one said."

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  « ^ »

  When the doorbell went, Vivien crossed her tiny flat, neither quickly nor slowly, and opened the door. If she had had any feeling left in her, she might have been surprised to see Angela Blake, not the postman, standing there in a smart linen dress.

  "Can I come in? Yes, I can. Thank you so much, Vivien." She slid straight by, passing Vivien with the slickness of a thin fish. In the front room Angela halted, waiting for Vivien to join her. "What do you want?"

  "To know why you left Connor up in Gloucester." Vivien said, "That's none of your business."

  "Yes, it is. But anyway, I've guessed. He told you about Kate, the whole disgusting saga two years ago. And I assume, from your prissy flight back to Camden, you didn't believe him. You thought he drove Kate to what she did by his unfaithfulness, lies and cruelty." Vivien felt something give way inside her. She hadn't let it do so until now. All through the journey back, all through these three days, the phone unplugged, her bed unslept in, she had been steel.

  Even now, rationally, she said, "I didn't want to believe that. But he is an actor. And… it was a perfect performance."

  Angela scowled at her with icy blue eyes. She looked abruptly familiar, as though Vivien had seen her many times in the past. Why confide in her, though?

  Vivien heard herself say, softly, "Let's face it, Angela, anyone could say what he said to me. How can I ever know if it's true?"

  "Couldn't you just have trusted him—after he told you so much?" Angela seemed angry. Well, she was Connor's friend apparently.

  "I trusted someone before. No, it wasn't anything like this. But I know me, I get taken in—"

  "For heaven's sake!" Angela, annoyed, was impressive. Hot, then cold once more. She said, "Sit down. I've heard you. Now you'll listen to me."

  "Why should I?"

  "Because Kate Mortimer was my sister, may the lord forgive my parents. I can prove it. Oh yes, I know you, too. I've brought the proper documents with me." She clapped the slim-line bag at her side. "I have them here, and my marriage lines, to show my maiden name of Mortimer. Oh, and something from a private detective Kate hired to investigate Connor. The man couldn't find anything against him. Made no difference to Kate."

  "Her… sister?"

  "That is what I said. I wish I hadn't been. She was an insecure and untrustworthy kid, who grew into an unbalanced and manipulative woman. And jealousy? Kate invented it. She was jealous of everyone. Of me. Of our brother. And worst of all, of every man she ever had. And she used to get back at us. Connor? She adored Connor, couldn't wait to get him. Then she got him. Then she started being jealous of him, following her usual timetable. He could never see it then. If he sees it now, he'll never say. He is loyal, Connor. Infuriatingly so. Even to Lewis for so long. And to Cinnamon, that idiotic little tramp—"

  Astounded, Vivien stared.

  "Kate resented every good acting role that Connor landed. That may sound odd, but it's completely true. When he went to Leeds, she said one thing to him and something else to everyone else she knew. She spent hours whining to me about the part she'd been cheated of, and how he'd left he
r alone with nothing. What she was really saying was, I want what he has. It was her only creed. Then she fed herself the idea he was two-timing her. Connor. I said he's loyal. And he loved her. That's the worst part. Loved her to bits."

  "Then—"

  "Then finally she managed to drive herself completely off her own head. Connor was cheating, had shamed her. And all he'd done, Vivien, was love her, and be too blind not to see what she really was. In the end she was mad enough with pills and drink to do what she did. To both of them. But I try to think it was some mangled remaining shred of decency that made her miss with that knife."

  "You say—"

  "I say Connor is blameless. I can give you a list of people who know all the facts. Who knew Kate—years before he did, which is more to the point. But maybe the word of a sister will do. God knows, it's partly why I put up with Lewis. And why he slings it all up at me when he has his little flings. 'Going to go mad like sis?' he says to me. 'Feeling a bit Katish today?'

  "I—" said Vivien.

  "You. You should be ashamed. You left him. But here you are, look at this." And Angela put down on Vivien's lap the documents she had spoken of, all laid out in a folder with insulting neatness.

  Vivien didn't look at them. She whispered something.

  "What? If you want to know why I came here, it's because I don't enjoy lies. And I care about Connor. He's been hurt enough."

  "Actually," Vivien answered, "I just asked if he was still in Gloucester."

  "London. Here's the number. Go and call him. Pray that he answers or I may kill you myself."

  Vivien went to the phone. She prayed Connor would answer. He did.

  Connor's rented London flat was as dire as he had described. There was nothing to look at there but each other, nothing to do there but make love. It was heaven on earth.

  Astride her lover, Vivien gazed down into his agonized face.

  His bare chest rose and fell with his racer's breathing, skin like matt satin over muscles of bronze. Through the smoke of dark hair, the wicked scar, forgotten. She would erase his pain. Where another woman had harmed him, Vivien would make him whole.

  "Wait—" he gasped.

  "No."

  "Darling, if you don't… I can't promise… "

  Vivien smiled, shook her head.

  Dominant and determined, she moved on him, drawing him in and in, holding him, taking away his reason.

  "You're mine," she said.

  His body arched, giving in to her desire and to his own. His hands gripped her. The torrent of his streaming hair, the golden body—bringing him to the summit of delight tipped Vivien also away among the stars.

  They fell together back to the world. It wasn't, after all, such a bad place to be.

  "Vivien, I brought a book with me from Fairford. I want you to see it."

  Into her hands he gave an old, green-cloth-covered volume. She read the faded gilt of the title: No Way But This: The Shakespearean Tragedy of Emily Rose and Patrick Aspen Sinclair.

  "Connor, I'm not sure I want to read this."

  "Just one piece. I've marked the place."

  Vivien opened the book slowly. She glanced at the publishing date, which was 1912. Then she turned to where the bookmark had been inserted.

  "This is the last letter he wrote—"

  "Before he shot himself. I know."

  "Then, why—"

  "You told me about the rose in the conservatory, and the quote from Othello. And the dreams. You told me about the photograph… My God, as if I needed to be told. You—You look so like her, like Emily. The moment you opened the door of the flat that morning… And Kate—She'd written that foul, joking, meaning-it threat on the book—how if I met Emily, Kate would be out of it. And Vivien, she was. And if you never knew why I behaved the way I did, well, there it is."

  "Yes. Connor—"

  "An explanation for the supernatural? I've never been that much into psychic stuff—but, Vivien. The way the statue moved—fell—three men disabled, you and me without a scratch. Please—read Patrick's last letter."

  She read.

  "O, Emily, my Rose. My Life. I killed my own self in those moments that I ended your existence. To follow you is nothing. But yet, I dreamed last night I lay unsleeping on my couch, and your ghost came to me, white, like a girl of stone. I knew you had come to summon me away to death and punishment, but I was not afraid. For on the wall, before ever you touched me, sweet, I saw our two shadows, yours and mine, locked in one holy kiss. In this I read a distant forgiveness, and a love reborn. I have damned myself. But God is all merciful, unlike his creation. Centuries I must suffer, and gladly will, but when I have served my time in Hell, I believe that I may find you once more. Our lips will meet again in Paradise."

  Vivien raised her head. "It was what I dreamed—the other way round. What does it mean?"

  Connor said slowly, "I don't know. Maybe what he says—forgiveness, redress… Maybe love doesn't make him angry anymore. Maybe we set him free."

  "I hope so. Forgive me, then, for leaving you when you told me."

  "Ah, Vivien. But you never left."

  "That's true."

  They sat leaning together.

  "There is," he said at last, "one further thing you should do. Call your friend Ellie."

  "I already have."

  "Call her back. Ask her over for a wedding."

  "Whose?"

  "If I said ours, would that be too soon?"

  Vivien looked into his face, his eyes. Further.

  "Only if you'd prefer me to ask you."

  "Ask me."

  She knelt down, smiling and naked before him, on one knee.

  "Mr. Connor Sinclair, will you do me the great honor of becoming my lawfully wedded husband?"

  He drew her up again into his arms. "I accept, Vivien Gray. Now, seal it with a kiss."

  Outside the windows, the moon rose on London, white as marble.

  *****

  Dear Reader,

  Love and fear are two of the great archetypal themes. Nearly everyone uses them, from Shakespeare to Walt Disney. They're the main ingredients of some of the oldest stories on earth.

  They create, too, a perfect balance—fear stops the heart, but love makes the world go round.

  Having an opportunity to write a novella where love and fear were the major driving forces was to me both a challenge and a fascination. Though I often deal in both commodities, this concentrated canvas gave me a different freedom. And where fear was the salt and pepper, love certainly became, for me in this work, almost a character in its own right—so much so that I couldn't resist a reference to Eros, the Greek god whose arrows pierce the hearts of humans and cause them to fall in love.

  Love dominates these pages, now playful, now tender, now erotic, a thing of desire—yet, too, a source of deepest pain.

  This mysterious magic that can possess us, rule us, make us mad—or more sane than we've ever been—what is it? Scientists can explain it away in whatever biological or pheromonal terms they wish. For though we're perhaps preprogrammed to sexual desire—where does love come from? It's the triumph of the human race, as well as its stumbling block. And I think we, as people, should be boastfully proud of this wonderful gift we have, which brings with it so much delight and, even in heartbreak, so much knowledge of ourselves and those around us. Perhaps it really is true. Love makes the world—that is, the world of the senses and the spirit—go round. So…let's keep ourselves moving!

  * * *

  THE DEVIL SHE KNEW

  Evelyn Vaughn

  * * *

  I got help from some great critiquers—

  Deb, Mo, Kayli and the Writers of the Storm—

  and I am grateful for every bit of it.

  But this one's gotta go to Leslie and Paige.

  * * *

  Part 1

  « ^ »

  Marcy wrapped a towel around herself, crossed from her bathroom to her bedroom, opened her walk-in closet—

&
nbsp; —and nearly fell into a roiling tunnel of otherworldly flame.

  Smoke billowed into her bedroom, darker than midnight, as if the tongues of bright orange fire were casting sooty black shadows. The stench of heat and something else, something unidentifiable, seared her nose and her lungs and stung her widening eyes. And the sound of it, like a hiss, like a scream…

  Like a whole lot of screams.

  Marcy slammed the door.

  For a long, stunned moment she stared at it, uncomprehending. Then she ran, still towel-clad and barefoot, for her apartment's kitchen. She kept a fire extinguisher there because she'd read she should. Should she use it now or call 911 first? Necessities clashed for order. She had to get her cat, Snowball, out, and to warn the rest of the building, and to—

  It was the laugh that stopped her.

  Deep and malevolent, it splashed out of the bedroom doorway and eddied around her like something physical, something sticky, something downright dangerous. Marcy hesitated.

  A laugh?

  Stuttering reason battled with a different instinct. A more primal understanding clawed upward through her panic.

  Somehow, that fire wasn't fire.

  The closet's crystal doorknob hadn't been hot under her hand. She wasn't burned, although she and the peach-colored bath sheet she'd wrapped around herself, after her shower, now felt unnaturally dry.

  Yes, she'd seen flames—what she thought were flames—but she hadn't actually seen her neatly hung clothes or her built-in dresser burning. In fact, the fire had seemed to swirl, like water spinning down a drain, like a…

  Portal. The word came unbidden, crazy. Like a portal of some kind.

  And fires don't laugh. Not even happy ones.