by V. J. Banis
“Don’t be afraid,” Marcella assured her without even pausing. “You are, aren’t you?”
“A little,” Jennifer admitted.
“I know every tree here on sight. I even have names for some of them. That’s old Fred there.” She pointed to a particularly old, rather spindly tree.
“Isn’t that a strange name for a tree?” Jennifer asked, staring at the tree. It did not look at all like a Fred to her.
“I think of them as my friends,” Marcella said.
“Do you really like them? The trees, I mean. This forest?” It was difficult for Jennifer to imagine anyone liking anything about the place.
“Of course. I love everything here.”
The path led up a slope. As they topped the rise, Marcella came to an abrupt halt. “There you are,” she said, pointing into the distance.
Even Jennifer had to admit that the scene was a picturesque one. The stream fell from a small bluff to twist and splash its way through the hollow below. On the mossy banks ferns and cattails swayed in the gentle breeze. A willow tree dipped low over the brook, seeming to drink from the crystalline waters, and somewhere nearby a bird sang its joyful song.
At another time, under other circumstances, she might have been quite enchanted by this spot. “But this is no time for admiring the scenery,” she reminded herself. There below them, sitting on a fallen log near the stream itself, was Aunt Abbie’s husband, Wilfred. It was he she had come to see, and not the view.
“There he is,” she said aloud, starting eagerly down the hill. She looked back impatiently to discover that Marcella had not moved from the spot.
“Well for Heaven’s sake, come on,” she snapped.
“I can’t,” Marcella said, remaining where she was. “I can’t go any closer than this.”
“Why on earth not?”
“This is where I drowned,” Marcella said.
“Oh!” Jennifer grimaced with annoyance. She did not feel inclined just now to try to coax Marcella from her strange morbid fantasies. She looked in the direction of Wilfred, almost afraid that he would suddenly disappear from the spot. Of all the times for Marcella to be difficult, she thought.
“All right,” she said to Marcella. She did not want to argue with her now. “You wait here for me. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
She hurried down the hill. By this time Wilfred had seen them on the path, and now he watched her approach. He did not greet her, but sat without moving. As she came closer to him, she saw that he had been whittling a piece of wood. It was a homely and harmless seeming pastime. The pen knife in his fingers moved quickly back and forth over the block, shaping it deftly and easily.
“Hello,” she greeted him when she was almost to him. He met her gaze without reply. She had expected to find the customary reaction to herself in his eyes. To her surprise his expression was a different one from the one she had seen before. He did not look at all angry now, or violent. If anything, he looked rather mournfully sad, and this encouraged her a little.
“I hate to bother you,” she said, since it was apparent that he was not going to return her greeting. “But I do need your help. Please, can you help me find my car? We left it in the stream, if you remember.”
His answer was so long in coming that she began to think perhaps he too was speechless, like Aunt Christine’s husband; but no, he had talked to her before, albeit briefly, the night of her arrival. She was about to repeat her question when he finally spoke.
“Your car’s gone,” he said, returning his attention to the wood in his hands.
“Gone?” she echoed. But of course, she should have foreseen that. They had stolen her purse, with the car keys in it. And they would have taken the car by this time, to prevent her escape.
“They’ve stolen it,” she said aloud, making it a statement of fact rather than a question. He said nothing.
“Well, I don’t care,” she said. “They’re welcome to anything, if only I can leave. Will you help me at least find the road, please? I don’t care if I have to walk. I don’t care if I have to crawl, if I can only leave.”
He looked at her again, a long sad look. “You’ll never leave here,” he said finally, his voice flat and emotionless.
Jennifer was startled by his statement. It was so unlike anything he had said to her before, and it was so close to her own worst fears. “Oh, but I must,” she insisted. “I must and I will. If you’ll only help me, if you’ll only show me where the road is....”
“I tried to leave here once,” he said, plunging the knife into the wood in a deep, violent movement. The piece that he had been carving, the gentle image of a dancer, split grotesquely.
“You tried?” Jennifer asked. “But how could they stop you? They’re only women, and you’re a man.”
“There’s a curse on this place,” he said. “It goes back a hundred years; no, closer to two hundred. There was a man wanted to marry one of the Kelsey girls. Her mother interfered. Refused to let them marry, and when they planned to elope, she had the girl locked up. Made her a prisoner, and hired somebody to whip the boy and run him out of town. Whoever she hired did too good a job, and the boy died from the beating he got.”
He paused, looking at the broken piece of wood in his hand. It was the longest speech Jennifer had ever heard him make, and she was afraid to try to encourage him to go on, lest he stubbornly end his story there. She waited in guarded silence.
“Before he died, though, he put a curse on the Kelseys,” Wilfred went on. “He said the women of the family were evil, that he saw the women of the line joined in a common bond of possession. And he cursed them and swore that they would ever remain so. He said that they will remain together for all eternity. No matter how they try to free themselves from one another. They might try to go away. They might actually live apart. And those whose lives were gentle and whose deaths were natural would find peace. But the others were forever tied together, and to this house.”
Jennifer continued to sit in silence. She thought of her mother, and her possessiveness. Yes, she could see that much of it. And she could see that sort of possessiveness here, with Aunt Christine and Aunt Abbie; she could see it in their efforts to keep her here—possessiveness carried to an insane extreme.
“It’s a terrible story,” she said aloud, trying to dismiss her own uneasiness. “But it is only a story. A legend. And a legend can’t really keep us here, if we put our minds to leaving. You and I can go, if you’ll only help me....”
He wasn’t listening, though; at least, he wasn’t listening to her. His head was cocked as though listening to a sound in the distance, as though someone were calling him far off. He was oblivious suddenly to her presence. She held her breath, listening with him, but she heard nothing except the sighing of the wind in the trees.
He suddenly turned back to her. “You’d better go back to the house,” he said. His expression was no longer sad and sympathetic, but one of fear.
“But why?” she asked. She was sure, quite sure now, that he truly wanted to help her. She had seen it in his eyes a moment before. Why had he changed so quickly, for no apparent reason?
“You’d better go,” he insisted, his voice rising on a frightened note. He stood, backing slowly away from her as if she somehow were a threat to him.
Frightened herself, Jennifer moved away slightly. She wanted to argue with him, try to convince him that they could indeed leave; that she could go, and take him with her. But in some way she didn’t understand she had frightened him, and his fear was contagious. What if he suddenly should become violent? He still held his carving knife in his hand, and he held it now in a menacing fashion.
“Please...,” she began, but he cut her off with a violent shake of his head.
“Go,” he said sharply, almost shouting.
She could do nothing but leave him there. She turned and started quickly up the rise, puzzled and frightened by this abrupt dismissal. Once she glanced back to find him staring after her, watching h
er go with obvious relief.
Well, she thought, perhaps it was hoping too much to think that he might be sane. No one else around the place was. Even Marcella....
She stopped in her tracks, looking about. Marcella was gone. She had reached the place where Marcella had been waiting, and the young girl was nowhere to be seen.
“Marcella?” she called. How could the girl be gone, she asked herself, annoyed and more than a little concerned. She surely had not been with Wilfred more than a few minutes, and Marcella had promised to wait for her. The child knew that she could not find her way alone through the woods. She had specifically asked Marcella to wait right here for her.
She looked back toward the stream. Wilfred too had vanished. There was no sign of him below. Like it or not, she was alone.
“And I don’t like it,” she said.
There was nothing she could do but start walking, watching for familiar landmarks. At least this time she had paid a little more attention to where they were going. Yes, there was the tree Marcella had pointed out earlier, the one she called Fred.
I am on the right track, she told herself, without feeling particularly reassured. At Kelsey everything could change so suddenly; one could count on nothing.
She stopped again, listening. Had she imagined it, or was there someone behind her. There was no sound now, only the gentle rustling of the leaves overhead. She started again, moving more slowly.
There it was again, the scraping of branches, the snapping of a twig. Someone was behind her, someone was following her.
“Wilfred?” she called, looking over her shoulder. She saw no one, and received no answer. The woods were silent again.
“Marcella?” Still nothing.
She began to walk again, faster now. There was no question of it, there was someone behind her, someone who stopped when she stopped, moved when she moved. It was more than sounds; she could actually feel the presence, so strongly that it was not a hunch but a certainty. She was walking faster and faster, and then she was running, and the sounds and the presence stayed close behind her, never dwindling, never falling back.
Oblivious to where she was going, Jennifer ran in panic, crashing through the brush, stumbling and rushing. Her heart pounded in her chest, her breath came in short, uneven gasps. I’m too weak for this, she thought frantically. I can’t go on.
With a small groan she fell face downward upon the ground, gasping for breath. Her legs simply would not carry her any farther. Her body refused to obey her commands to flee.
Let them kill me, she thought. I haven’t the strength left to fight back.
“Jennifer.”
For a moment she lay with her face in the grass, trying to breathe.
“Jennifer,” the voice said again, and this time she recognized the voice. She looked up.
Marcella stood over her, staring down. Marcella. Had it been Marcella following her? She was afraid to ask. She had once again that feeling of being in a nightmare from which she must soon awaken.
She began to cry. She tried to get up, but she was too weak.
“Are you all right?” Marcella asked, kneeling beside her.
“Please,” Jennifer begged in a whisper. “Help me back to the house.”
A moment ago, she thought, I was begging to leave this place. And now I want to be back in Kelsey House. I too am possessed; possessed not by demons, but by the evil spirit of that house.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was the next day. At least, it seemed so to her, although her sense of time had long since abandoned her. Her fever had returned, but despite this fact, she was amazed to discover that she felt progressively stronger. Aside from her lightheadedness, she felt better than she had in several days.
But that, she reminded herself, could be a delusion. One thing was abundantly clear to her. Food or no food, assistance or no assistance, if she was to escape from Kelsey House it must be now, at once. Another day, another hour even, might be too much.
How long could a person survive without food, she wondered.
“How long,” she asked aloud, “have I been in this house?” She did not know the answer to either question.
There was still one avenue of escape left open to her; she had remembered it upon waking. Still one route left unexplored.
There was a path behind the house, a path that wound its way from the house up over a hill. A path must go somewhere. Paths did not just appear, they were formed, formed by people coming and going somewhere. She would go wherever that somewhere was. There was still the question of how far she could go without food, but she did feel stronger, and there was always the possibility that she would find another house quite nearby. It would be ironic if, all this time, there were another house just over that little hill.
Again she ignored Aunt Christine’s summons at her door, and waited until she thought the family would be at breakfast. This time she did not want to see any of them, not even Marcella. There was no longer any hope left in her that she could obtain any help from any of them. Marcella, Wilfred, perhaps even Mr. Kelsey—any of them might have helped her, but there was something that held them in check. She did not know what it was; something about the house, perhaps, some unknown power that was stronger than their sympathy for her. She had felt it herself, a paralyzing fear, an unseen presence that was always near, ever dangerous. It seemed a part of Kelsey House itself.
Well, she would not be paralyzed today. With quiet determination she stole from her room and from the house. This time she was in no danger of getting lost. She knew just where she was going and, in the beginning at least, she was on familiar ground. She could move quickly, following the path around the corner of the house, into the thick growth at the side. She made her way carefully along the length of the building, never straying from the wall.
She came to the rear of the house, and paused when she reached the steps descending into the cellar of the house. Was this after all what she had been seeking? Was it possible that the kitchens they used for food preparation, and the food itself, were in the cellars? It could be only another blind alley; but the possibility was too strong to pass by without investigating.
She went down the steps slowly to the battered wooden doors. They sat at an angle, not quite horizontal in front of her. She hesitated and then reached for the handles. The doors were unlocked, and she swung them cautiously outward, half expecting cries of surprise from within. The doors moved slowly, laboriously on rusted hinges, and the only sound was the squeak of the hinges. Before her was a dark, musty interior into which the light penetrated but faintly.
“If only I had a flashlight,” she thought, gazing down into that blackness. She smiled ruefully, as her own words came back to her. If she were wishing, there was a long list of things she could wish for.
It was impossible to tell what that darkness concealed. Frightened, she took a step inside.
Something moved, off to her right. Someone was hiding here, waiting for her. Or perhaps not waiting. Perhaps this was after all what she had been seeking, and they meant to frighten her away before she could confirm that fact.
I will not run away, she promised herself. I will not let them scare me again.
She took another step, and again something moved. This time it dashed out to scurry across her foot.
A rat! She shuddered with disgust, turning to run up the stairs, back into the daylight. She did not bother to close the door after herself. There was nothing there, she was sure of it. The cellar had that air of emptiness about it that she had learned to identify at Kelsey. It was better to save her strength, and her time; she would need them to make good her escape.
She came to the path; for a time she had even doubted that it would still exist. She had been half afraid that she would find that it too had vanished, that it was only something she had imagined. But it was there, inviting her up the hill.
Panting from exertion and from excitement she made her way up the hill. The path was faint in a few places, but fo
r the most part it was easy to follow, circling about the worst of the growth.
She rounded a clump of bushes and there before her was a cemetery. It was small and old, surrounded by a wooden fence that was too low to do much more than indicate the area. It appeared to be a family plot. Jennifer paused for several seconds, curious despite her eagerness to be on. A huge elm tree shaded the place from the morning sun. The stones all of them apparently old, were haphazardly tilted, and some had fallen to the ground, victims of years of weather and neglect. The place looked little cared for, and quite desolate.
She felt an urge to look at the stones, to learn some little thing about the house and the family. She knew so little; and here was, in a sense, the family history before her. It was strange, the people in Kelsey House were the only family that she had and yet for all the time she had been here she knew no more about them than when she had first come, except that they were strange and dangerous. But there must be more to them than that. Perhaps here would be some clue to explain their behavior, to make them less bewildering to her.
She shook her head resolutely. No, this was not the time for studying family history. Fascinating though the graveyard was, it would not be of any help to her in her plan to escape. And that was where her interest lay now.
The graveyard was, she noticed, where the path led. The trail she had been following stopped at the gate in the low wooden fence.
She looked about, uncertain. She was above the house now, out of sight of it, and the hill still rose above her. Path or not, the way was open, deep with weeds but free from trees and the dense growth nearer the house. Even without the path she could not get lost here. She decided to go on to the top of the hill.
She walked more rapidly now, making her way through the tall weeds that surrounded her and finally coming over the crest of the hill. Below her was a hollow, still weedy but open and rolling; and beyond that, the woods again, standing like an ominous wall that separated Kelsey from the world beyond.
She walked more slowly, down into the hollow and then up again, although not so sharply, until she stood at the edge of the woods, the trees not so much like trees as like dark angels, hovering over her, watching her. Here she stopped. Should she go on, commit herself to the woods and hope that she found her way through them, or perhaps follow their border as far as possible?
