by Nancy Holder
Thomas pressed the lever and the elevator hiccupped, then began its descent toward the mine pit, and the vats, where they had submerged other inconvenient… persons. No matter if Alan had told the entire village of his plans to come here. Lucille had searched for a horse and carriage and deduced that the fool had walked here. Through a snowstorm. He had deserved to die.
And speaking of dying…
She still had the boning knife, and that ridiculous, yipping dog was still alive.
“Come here, doggie,” she said sweetly. “Come see what I have.”
* * *
Blood is only crimson while it’s fresh, Thomas thought, as he tried to make Dr. McMichael as comfortable as possible within the confines of the pit. Brown blood means that it is no longer flowing. There was a very little bit of brown mixed in with the red, and Thomas hoped that meant it was no longer pumping because it was thickening… not because McMichael was dying.
Lucille did not, could not know that the man was still alive. She would realize that Thomas had betrayed her… and then she would kill McMichael herself. Could she not see that the last act of their terrible Grand Guignol had concluded?
Thomas looked the man straight in the eye. “Can you hold on?”
McMichael nodded weakly, and Thomas handed him his handkerchief. As if that could possibly staunch the flow of blood. So much of it. Thomas prayed the doctor had guided his aim true, and that his wounds, while gruesome, were not fatal.
“I have to go,” Thomas told him. “Lucille has taken Edith to her room. She has the papers. The minute she signs them, she’s dead.” He felt so different, as if he had finally become a man. The key in his back was gone, and he was moving under his own volition for the first time in memory.
He added, “I am getting you both out.”
* * *
Things in the clay vats bobbed and tapped. Things under the stones shifted.
One very sharp thing gleamed.
And waited to be used.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE KILLING ROOM.
Edith was dazed. Lucille had hit her over and over and dragged her into her workroom, then forced her to sit in an overstuffed chair while she left to fetch something. Edith had almost summoned enough strength to bolt when Lucille had sailed back in and dropped some papers in her lap.
“No need to read them, just sign.”
Edith didn’t move. She knew she was in shock. Thomas had stabbed Alan to death right in front of her.
I am so, so sorry, Alan. Please forgive me. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t yet. She must stay alive.
She must stop Thomas and Lucille Sharpe by any means necessary. Alan would not have died in vain; these monsters must never be allowed to hurt anyone ever again.
Frigid and dank, Lucille’s room was like a crypt, brimming with the corpses of hapless insects and dozens of bat-like black moths. Living moths fluttered through the dust motes and hovered around Edith’s head like a crown of powdery black thorns.
Edith stared down at the death warrant placed before her: the legal papers from William Ferguson that would transfer all her assets to Thomas. Next Lucille handed Edith a different sort of weapon: the golden fountain pen her father had given her. Whoever it was that had said that the pen was mightier than the sword had not faced a madwoman with a sharp, bloody blade.
Edith held the pen. In her mind, she was little Edith again, and the blackened figure of her mother was materializing in front of the grandfather clock. She trembled, more terrified now than she had been then.
“What are you waiting for?” Lucille demanded angrily. “You have nothing to live for now. He never loved you. Any of you. He loves only me.”
“That’s not true,” Edith replied, dizzy and soul-sick. Thomas had tried to save her. He had wanted to change. But he was trapped in a mad waltz with this house, and this woman, and he couldn’t stop dancing until the music stopped. He was cursed, and the curse had not yet been broken.
And she was struck with the terrible realization that the only way that the curse would be lifted was through his death.
Could I do it if it came to that?
The question was moot; first she had to live through these moments with Lucille. Edith saw the madness in her eyes and wondered how she had missed it before, how they had all missed it. Lucille hadn’t been in Buffalo long, just a sufficient amount of time to set the trap for Edith.
Glaring at her, Lucille picked up the pages of Edith’s novel. With a flick of her wrist, she began to feed the manuscript page by page into the fire. It was a move calculated to hurt her and nothing more.
“It’s indisputably true,” Lucille countered. “All the women we found—in London, Edinburgh, Milan—”
“America,” Edith reminded her.
“America,” Lucille concurred, as if she were humoring Edith—and she didn’t really count.
She kept tossing the sheets into the fire. As the flames rose to destroy Edith’s story, Lucille’s mood brightened considerably. She was a sadist; she was enjoying this. No doubt she had celebrated each heiress’s agonizing death with glee.
“Yes, America. They all had what was necessary: money, broken dreams, and no living relatives. Mercy killings, all of them.”
Not “all of you,” Edith noted. She was not yet included among their victims. Thomas had said she was different. She had thought it a compliment born of true love—that she was unique because she was his soul mate. But the hideous truth was that she simply violated their pattern of chosen prey: she had had a father. They had killed him so that she would have no protection, only a lawyer who would do her bidding.
They had not counted on a friend like Alan. A man who had loved her all her life, whom she had overlooked, taken for granted simply because he had always been there. Her eyes welled but still she did not cry. There was so much to cry over, so many deaths.
Alan had doubted her father’s cause of death. She had observed his unease and dismissed it. He had urged caution; she had ignored even that. And her father had paid. Who had done it, Lucille or Thomas? Could the man who had kissed her so passionately have destroyed her father with such savagery?
“Is that what I am going to be? Is that how you explain it to yourself?” Edith asked defiantly. She flared with anger. How she hated this woman.
“I did what I had to do.” Lucille was thoroughly unrepentant. Another page, and another. The sheer number of pages attested to the fact that Edith’s dreams had not been broken when they had picked her out. She had been pursuing her dream of becoming a novelist with a full heart.
And with Thomas’s encouragement. That had been genuine; he had loved reading her ghost story. He had seen himself in Cavendish and followed his path to redemption with interest.
For Thomas, there would be no redemption.
“And the Italian woman?” Edith asked. “You killed her baby.”
Lucille froze, her hand halfway to the fire. She did not look at Edith as she said, “Her baby?” But Edith saw the somber expression on her face, her eyes stained with tears. So somewhere in Lucille’s body there was a heart.
“Didn’t you kill her baby?” Edith pressed, hoping to probe that heart, soften it.
“I did not. None of them ever fucked Thomas. Don’t you understand?”
Edith did not. None of them… except her. And if he was not the father…?
“Then?” she asked.
Lucille’s gaze went distant and her shoulders slumped. She stared downward as she said, “It was mine.”
Edith was speechless. Was she implying, was she actually saying…
“It was born wrong. We should have let it die at birth. But I—I wanted it. She told me she could save it.” Her voice went hard. “She lied.”
“No,” Edith whispered. Lucille had given birth to her brother’s child? She had not thought she could be more sickened. But this secret… all their secrets together… while he had been with her…
“All this horror… for w
hat? For money? To keep the mansion? The Sharpe name? The mines?”
Lucille whirled on her. “What vulgarians you Americans are. The marriages were for money, of course—quite acceptable for people like us, expected, even, for generations. But the horror?”
And now the madness overtook her again. “The horror was for love.”
She went to a narrow set of drawers and opened one to reveal a gleaming set of dissection tools and a row of scissors arranged in perfect order. She took out a narrow scalpel.
“The things we do for a love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret.” She advanced on Edith, who tried very hard not to scream.
“This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.”
She darted forward and grabbed Edith by the hair. Then she sliced off a lock with the scalpel and moved away, braiding it with great care. Edith was gasping.
“But you should have seen him as a child.” She sighed. “Thomas. He was so… so fragile, like a porcelain doll. And I had nothing to give him. Nothing. Just myself.”
She opened another drawer and placed the braided ring of hair next to another four. One of them was gray and covered in blood. Beatrice Sharpe’s, Edith guessed. Was she the first person Lucille and Thomas had murdered? Or the first they had been caught killing?
“You know how many times I was punished instead of him? I couldn’t bear his beautiful, pale skin being marred by scars. He was immaculate. Perfect.” She smiled at the memory.
“So from all his small infractions—from my father’s riding crop and my mother’s cane—I protected him.”
She took out a pair of shiny bone scissors. So many sharp, cutting things.
“And when she found out about us… well, I protected him too.”
She killed her mother. It was Lucille. And now she’s here with me.
“All the love Thomas and I ever knew was from one another. And the only world that kind of love can live in is this one. These rotting walls. In the dark. Hiding.”
Edith barely listened. She was looking at the fountain pen, the only weapon that she had.
“Sign your name! Sign your bloody name!” Lucille shrieked at her.
Edith wanted to burst into tears but she clamped down hard on her emotions. She would not let them win. She would not.
“While I still have a chance… you killed your mother? What about my father?”
Don’t let it be Thomas. Please. At least grant me that.
And Lucille’s tight smile of triumph gave her that. Edith tightened her grip on the pen.
“Such a coarse, condescending man. But he loved you. You should have seen his sad face when I smashed it on the sink—”
No! Edith silently screamed. She would deny Lucille that smile. Deny her victory, her life.
She signed her name with a flourish, and Lucille grabbed the papers from her, scrutinizing them, exulting. Edith took her chance: She plunged the golden pen into Lucille’s chest. She jerked it out, hammered it back in with all her strength, the arc of her swing finding the same hole. She felt the point drive in deeper. And again, a third time. Deeper still.
Lucille staggered backwards. She grabbed at her wounds, gaped at the blood on her hand.
“No one hurts me! No one!” The words tore out of her throat. She was bleeding badly and her face was draining of color. Could she be dying? Could it be that simple?
* * *
It watched.
Wind her up, wind her up…
* * *
Edith lurched to her feet and staggered toward the door, falling against glass cases, the tombs of insects; desiccated butterfly wings fluttered and rained down.
Behind her, Lucille tore open her dress, undamming a waterfall of blood. She stumbled to the washbasin and poured water over her injury, a visible, bleeding gap.
She almost fainted.
* * *
Put her down and make her spin…
The house’s favorite toy still had tricks to perform. And miles to go before she slept.
* * *
Edith did not so much walk as collapse in a forward motion as she aimed herself toward the staircase, aware that Lucille still lived. The stairs canted crazily and she knew she would not survive a second fall. She had to live. She had to stop them. If she could have set the house ablaze she would have, and died inside if it meant that Thomas and Lucille would be destroyed.
And then she saw him coming at her, and she tried to scream. Thomas held out his hands in a gesture of innocence, surrender.
“Edith, wait!” he cried.
She only hesitated because she was too wobbly to move.
“You cannot take the steps,” he said. “You have to use the elevator. Come with me.”
Mutely she raised her pen, her weapon. His face blurred.
“You lied to me!” she flung at him.
“I did,” he confessed, holding open his arms.
“You poisoned me!”
“I did.”
“You said you loved me!”
“I do.” His face snapped into sharp focus and she saw the truth: He did love her. He had, and he loved her still.
She staggered, and he sustained her, holding her in an embrace very like a waltz… a dance of death. Night’s candles were all burned out. He had drawn not a moth but a butterfly to his flame, and she hovered on the brink of annihilation.
“I will take you to McMichael,” he told her quickly, seriously, honestly. “He is still alive.” He nodded as if to make sure his words were registering, and Edith was overwhelmed. Alan! So Thomas had found a way to spare him?
“You can leave through the throw shaft. I will deal with Lucille,” he promised.
At the eleventh hour, a hero. Not a knight in shining armor, but someone who had finally seen the light. Who had ever said that love was blind?
They got in the elevator, she leaning against him. It was almost over. They had to get Alan to a doctor as fast as possible, and the village was far away. But with Thomas on their side, his chances were ever so much better.
He looked at the pen in her shaking fist and his face changed suddenly. “Wait. You signed the papers?”
“I don’t care about that,” she said. “Come with us.”
“No. It’s your entire fortune,” he insisted. And she understood that he believed his sister would outlive him, and plunder her wealth, and then kill her. His fear frightened Edith; in this haunted house, was Lucille somehow indestructible? Immortal?
“I will get them back,” he said. “I’m going to finish this. Stay here.”
She could do little to disobey; she was too tired, and she needed to rest. She leaned against the back of the elevator and watched him dash off. At the last, a reformed man, a redeemed soul. And Alan alive—these were mercies, blessings. Hope was real. She would cling to hope.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MY LOVE, THOMAS thought, as he walked into Lucille’s room. He saw the destruction of her entomological specimens, the mayhem. In that decaying house, Lucille had catalogued species like a delicate god; he had built toys. She had laid traps and snares; he had retrieved their wounded doves.
How did I ever think this was right? he asked. How did I not see that we are monsters? How could I justify my love for my own sister?
Pain.
Terror.
Torment and cruelty, and never knowing when they would be visited upon him. Such abuse as no child should ever have endured, and no one to stop it. No one but Lucille, who suffered for the both of them. It was the least he could do; she had told him that over and over again. Whatever she wanted, the least. What she wanted was for the mine to reopen and the house to be made whole again. To triumph over the squandering of their fortune, the sullying of their name.
She had loved him beyond all reason; she had assumed that other women would, too. They had. And they had died for it.
Lucille wasn’t in the room, but the bank papers were.
They had spilled all over the floor. He spotted Edith’s signature page, transferring every penny she owned to Sir Thomas Sharpe, his heirs and assigns. With a shaky hand, he set his knife down on a small table and began to gather them up. He knelt down, head bowed, as if begging the universe to accept his atonement. Then he threw the papers into the fire, an offering to the fates.
There was a heap of accumulated ash in the grate. A large amount of paper had already been burned, and he wondered what it was.
Then he saw, and his jaw clenched. It was Edith’s novel, and he could only assume that Lucille had burned it out of sheer spite. The first three of his wives—Pamela, Margaret, Enola—brother and sister had been kind to them, had doted on them as they sipped their poisoned cups of tea and slipped away, slipped away. Lucille had monitored their mail and, of course, the only letters that had been allowed to reach the post were requests for money. No one inquired after them, at least that Thomas knew of.
Thank God Alan McMichael came, he thought. He prayed that the doctor would survive. A man like that would be good for Edith. Of course he, Thomas, would let her go. Their marriage was legal in the sense that he was not a bigamist, as Carter Cushing had assumed—for the simple reason that Lucille had murdered Pamela Upton. As divorce was so uncommon in England, and they hadn’t reported Pamela’s death, he and Lucille had forgotten to account for the Civil Registry. He had married Enola in Italy and Margaret in Scotland. Incestuous adultery could easily be laid at his door, but it was far more likely that Edith would be freed through widowhood, for he would swing. If he could spare her that scandal by other means, he surely would.
A shadow stepped from the corner and for one moment he thought it was one of the ghosts Edith had seen. But it was Lucille, his own black phantom, and blood coated her bodice. His eyes widened in shock.
“What the devil are you doing?” she demanded in a shaking voice.
More blood soaked into the fabric. He reached for her.
“Lucille, you’re injured.”
She brandished the knife at him. At him. Her eyes jittered but her jaw was set. He knew that look. What it meant. It was a look that meant she could kill, and would. But kill him?
