After Always

by Barbara J. Hancock

  Michael found me there, shivering and alone. There might have been a few tears mixed with the rain on my face, but who could distinguish warm saltwater from cold this soon after midnight?

  “She apologized for kicking my ass,” Michael said. There was rueful humor in his voice, as if he were embarrassed by what had happened but too unused to being physically bested for it to get him down. “I told her the kiss was apology enough.”

  My chin lifted, suddenly, but I saw the flash of his smile in the dark. His face was dimly lit by the lights from the house, but well enough for me to see his grin. I shoved against him with my shoulder backed by my full body weight, but it was nothing for him to reach out and stop me.

  Nothing and everything.

  His warm hands on my bare shoulders made me draw in a damp breath weighted by the fog that had rolled in off the cove in the wake of the storm. Visibility narrowed even more with the fog than it had by darkness alone.

  Michael and I stood separated from everyone and everything by lightly falling mist and white, thick air that swirled around us seeming to press us closer together.

  “I mean, if a ghost is going to stop me from kissing you I’m happy to watch someone who can,” he said.

  But his hands tightened on my arms and his jaw hardened and I knew it was a lie. He’d been angry because he hadn’t liked my pain or hers. He’d wanted to help me and Hannah, but especially me, I thought, he’d wanted to make Jericho stop.

  “I’m okay,” I assured him. “It’s nothing.”

  I was conscious of his grip on my arms and how, even tight, I was sure he wouldn’t bruise my skin. He was strong man, but he was also careful with his strength.

  He lifted one hand up to touch the corner of my lip where it was slightly swollen. I drew in air, startled by the sensation of his unsteady finger on my lips. He stepped closer, as if my reaction drew him in, as if he was fascinated when I let out the air I’d drawn in a long, wavering sigh.

  “I promised I wouldn’t kiss you again,” he said. “I’m following your lead, remember?”

  Moisture dampened his hair and skin. It trickled down his handsome face. It clung in wet droplets on his dark jacket and caused his white shirt to go sheer. I was fascinated by the glimpse of his skin beneath the white—a hint of pale peached bronze. The shirt stuck and unstuck as he moved, drawn to his chest by the damp.

  My face was hot again.

  Because he’d leaned closer and I hadn’t pulled away.

  I hadn’t asked for that promise. I wanted his kiss. I think maybe the fear and confusion Jericho had stoked in me had been meant to come between us. But now Michael had to see the desire on my face. I was still confused about a lot of things, but not about him. Or wanting his kiss. When his lips brushed softly against mine, another sigh was lost in the hiss of rain and rustle of fabric.

  Our salty, wet lips clung, then released, clung, then released. Each contact less tentative than the last until we allowed our tongues to touch—tasting, testing our nerve and our self-control.

  I held his soaked lapels. The heat of his body rose in steamy contrast to the chilled fabric. And he deepened the kiss. He tasted like chocolate. He must have managed to snag some of Della’s sweets before I came downstairs for the séance. I didn’t mind. I thought it was probably the best flavor for kisses.

  But a noise—a footfall on flagstones or a curse or a stumble—broke us apart.

  I looked out into the misty night. The moonlight didn’t illuminate. It merely reflected off the rolling mist and fog making visibility worse. I couldn’t see anything. Someone could have been standing only a few feet away, and I wouldn’t have been able to see them.

  We had stepped back from each other, but Michael still held my hand. He tightened his fingers around mine as if he would protect me from the source of the noise with the strength of his hand. I didn’t mind. I liked the companionship and the reassurance. I’d faced a lot of things alone. Having Hannah and Michael in my life was new, and it felt like a blessing.

  I squeezed his fingers back. Gently, calmly, not like I was trying to hold on for dear life, but I squeezed. He seemed startled by my response. He looked at me. Really looked. Then, he looked back out into the fog as if the possibility of something actually being in it had just occurred to him because of me tightening my hand.

  There might have been dark movement in the swirls of fog. We held tight to each other and strained to see, but the rain picked up intensity again. It lashed at us until we gave up peering into the fog and fled into the house for shelter.

  Michael held my hand when we ran inside, and I tasted chocolate on my lips, long after I’d retreated back to my room.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

  My love as deep. The more I give to thee,

  The more I have, for both are infinite.”

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2)

  The man was gaunt to the point of being skeletal.

  Though he wore the fine tailored suit of an upper class Victorian servant, it hung on his limbs in flapping folds as if it was nothing more than a costume he had pulled on just before he took to the stage. The fit of his suit was comical. He was not. There was strength evident in his long arms and legs and in his lean back, though it was little more than muscle and bone.

  His face was angular. The bones so prominent that they pressed against his skin. It seemed like the wrong move would cause his cheekbones to cut his cheeks. But it was the expression in his eyes that caused me to recognize the dream as nightmare. His dark eyes sat like burnt coals above his pointed cheeks, and they glittered with the blackest of intention.

  I watched his movements with ever-growing trepidation. He was obviously going about the regular business of tending to his master’s clothes and shoes, but there was an intensity to his presence that lent an air of importance to him far beyond his current actions.

  The other servants shied away from him. Their faces were tight with fear. And disapproval. More than one crossed themselves when he walked by, including a young woman with sun-streaked hair.

  I focused on her face for a long time. There was something familiar about her…she looked both afraid and angry. But she was also very young. Not much older than I was. In no way could she have been a match for the intense valet.

  When Alexander Jericho strode into the scene, I trembled and murmured in my sleep. He was as handsome as his portrait had led me to believe. But where his portrait had shown a man of intensity and strength, my dream showed me a man with madness in his eyes. They hardly focused on anything or anyone but the valet. It wasn’t until he met the valet’s gaze that his settled. His whole being calmed. He seemed connected and grounded by the valet in strange ways I couldn’t understand.

  They walked through Stonebridge together. The valet at his master’s heels. They strode through rooms familiar to me, but changed. Arranged as they would have been years ago.

  They walked by the mirror on the west landing, and I choked in my sleep. Because their actual reflections weren’t what I saw. They were rotted corpses in the glass. Blackened skin hung from their bones. Muscles were exposed. Black blood ran down their faces. Their clothes were nothing but rags on their bodies. I could see into their torsos where black hearts beat and lungs expanded and contracted in their chests.

  Even when they left the mirror behind, their appearance was changed for me. Though I knew they’d appeared as normal men when these events took place, I saw their rotten corpses beneath their fit bodies. I couldn’t unsee the truth of what I’d seen in the west landing mirror. The dream had given me a glimpse into their corrupt souls.

  Finally, they came to Octavia’s room in the west wing. When they were alone, it was obvious who was the master.

  It wasn’t Jericho.

  The bold, swaggering ship’s captain fell to his knees in front of the valet. He prostrated himself with his forehead to the ground. The valet laughed with his whole body, throwing his he
ad back and stretching his mouth open wide as if he would swallow the world if it pleased him.

  Then, he shed the ill-fitting valet’s suit. He stripped down to nothing but a scrap of cloth, and I saw the sinewy muscles of his bony form. Jericho stayed prostrate on the floor while the valet, turned rogue Vodou priest, chanted above his head.

  It was only then that I noticed the bodies.

  On a table that wasn’t in the room during our time, they lay.

  I tried to wake up. With all my might, I tried to wake.

  But I was trapped in a truth that had unfolded a hundred years ago.

  They were draped in white sheets, the mother and the tiny form that must have been her stillborn baby.

  Thank God for that.

  I didn’t have to see their faces.

  Jericho rose at the high priest’s bidding, and they both approached the sheet-draped figures. The priest picked up the small body. He scooped it up and held it to his naked chest. I hated that. I wanted to shout at him to put the baby down. But I couldn’t. I had no power of speech in my nightmare. I was only a helpless observer. I had to watch as the evil man held the baby who had never been allowed to live to his chest.

  When Jericho picked up Octavia, my chest constricted in spasms of rage and pain. I’d experienced their relationship through Octavia’s memories. I’d felt her fascination, her thrill, her love, her devastation. She’d once loved the man who held her dead body.

  She’d given him her heart. It hadn’t been enough.

  Mirrors everywhere. I couldn’t escape them. All over Stonebridge they seemed to wink at me with shimmering secrets. Here was a mirror of a moment. I’d loved Tristan. I’d given him my heart. It hadn’t been enough.

  Jericho held his wife with no expression on his face.

  They left Octavia’s room. They traveled through back hallways and passages, some unfamiliar to me, until they came to the rear exit of the house. There was no one around. Maybe people had instinctively stayed away from their master and the horrible valet. What about the young woman I’d seen? Where had she gone? Where did she hide? Had she seen them take her dead mistress and the baby from the house?

  Night had fallen.

  The sheets gleamed in the moonlight as Jericho and the high priest carried them to the cliff and then down the cliff path, down to the sea. I followed. In the dream, I trailed along, fearful of what our destination would be, but not fearful enough to wake.

  We walked along the beach for a long time, far from Stonebridge.

  Finally, the men approached a rocky cliff that had an opening in it. It was a cave. In the dream—the nightmare—I followed them into the cool earth. When the tunnel opened up into a cavern, the men lay the sheet-draped bodies onto nearby rock ledges.

  I cringed, even in my sleep. I wanted to leave this place and these horrible men. I didn’t want to see what they were going to do with poor Octavia and the baby who had been born into the darkest of worlds.

  The high priest stepped to the side and picked up a large iron candelabra. He placed seven black candles into it. He struck seven matches. Each time the flame danced from his prayerful breaths as he lit the candles, one by one. He lifted the candles high when they were all lit. The flickering flames painted garish shadows over the room. Then he carried the candelabra over to the ledges where the bodies lay.

  Jericho had knelt again. He placed his forehead on the floor.

  Seven black candles burned, dripping wax on the ground. I saw the splashes fall on the sheets and on Jericho’s back, but he didn’t cry out. He didn’t stop the man from setting the bodies of his wife and child alight.

  Would he have burned them alive if he hadn’t had to force Octavia into the sea because she was no longer compliant?

  I cried out in my sleep when the high priest touched the burning candles to the sheets. I wept when the flames leapt high. Jericho rose up from the floor at the priest’s bidding. He shed his clothes as well. I looked away, but I couldn’t close my eyes. This was a vision that someone—Octavia?—seemed determined that I would see.

  Black smoke rolled for hours while the priest sang. I still couldn’t wake. When the smoke had died down and the flames had gone out, hot ashes were gathered by the priest. He painted himself and Jericho with the unspeakable paste. He collected some of the hot ash in a pottery jar. I couldn’t hear his words. I could only see the ever-increasing frantic movements of his lips and gyrations of his body.

  This would have been blasphemy in any religion. I was sure of it. But Jericho only accepted it all.

  The ritual continued into the gray light of dawn. Octavia had said Jericho would use the ash in his paintings. That and their empty graves in the cemetery would be the only memorial. This horrible night would fade from the earth and no one would know what had happened to poor Octavia and her child.

  Now, I knew.

  I would never forget.

  A woman had been forced to kill herself because she hadn’t willingly sacrificed her and her baby’s blood.

  He’d worked blood and ash into his paintings. He’d used hair and clothing in the Vodou poppets. All for power. He’d used the dolls to manipulate and control. Then and now. He was dead, but he used the living. He influenced us. And his hold on the living world seemed to be increasing every day.

  It was partly my fault.

  Jericho couldn’t take from me what I didn’t offer. He needed me to open up and let him influence me. To continue being so hollow that I’d accept even his evil intrusion rather than be alone. He’d tried again and again to make me give up and give away the life I’d yet to lead, but as long as I fought I kept him at bay. I think he’d tried to do the same thing to my mother years ago. She’d been so strange at Stonebridge she’d frightened me. Jericho must have tried to get her to give up and give herself to him. That’s when Octavia had interceded with the Chopin. I could remember my mother feeling limp like a doll beneath my desperate hugs, but there was something more. Some memory that still floated, hazy, just out of my reach.

  I hoped Octavia had resisted to the very last. When the waves took her last breath, I hoped she’d cursed him. When her baby died as it was being born without ever having the chance to see the light of day, I hope Jericho was damned. Even though he’d used their bodies, I hoped he hadn’t touched their souls.

  …

  I woke before the rest of the house. Della wasn’t in the kitchen. Mr. Abernathy hadn’t made it to his spot on the bridge. I pedaled away from Stonebridge as the first blush of dawn pinked the horizon.

  My mind was a jumble of what I’d learned and what I’d felt the night before.

  I was certain the kiss in the rain with Michael might still be tying my thoughts in knots months from now when this strange summer had faded to macabre memory. I held onto the memory of his lips to banish the chill of the nightmare that had followed.

  My journey down the coast road was damp and cool. The air was heavy from the storm the night before and the fog, warmed by the first rays of the sun, was lifting in curling mist toward the sky.

  The bike seemed rustier and creakier. The pedals resisted my efforts to speed the tires along. I persisted, putting my back into it. I used the weight of my body, rising up off the cracked vinyl seat on the hills.

  Finally, the old lighthouse came into view. It was dark and silent. Michael had stayed in a room at Stonebridge after the séance, after the kiss. He’d said good night to me in the foyer as if it was 1952, all stiff and polite, his chocolate flavor still on my tongue.

  I wasn’t sure it was possible to have a summer romance when I was so haunted by my past, by Jericho, by the looming hulk of Stonebridge itself, so empty and yet so full of what had happened years before.

  Octavia had spoken through Hannah.

  Our baby.

  I’d had many dark dreams last night. The worst had been the one about Jericho and his evil valet. But I’d had others. Ones where I couldn’t get the rubber boots off and Michael couldn’t reach me in time.
Water had rushed into my nose and mouth, and I’d struggled all the way down to the mucky sand at the bottom of the cove.

  Octavia had been forced to drown herself and her baby.

  She’d waded out into the sea, unable to stop, until it had taken her, closing over her head, robbing her of light and sound and air. I thought of the poppets. Was one in the basket at Stonebridge still filled with strands of Octavia’s hair?

  The horror of her desperation had slithered its way under my skin until I had perpetual goose flesh and a tingling awareness of shock along my spine.

  This time, when I reached the cemetery gate, I hid my bike behind the flower vines growing along the iron fence.

  Michael had stood between me and the Jericho graves. But I don’t think he’d been aware of his actions. He had been influenced by Alexander Jericho. I’d been influenced myself—playing the violin, visiting the cemetery, drawn to the jetty of rocks that led out to sea where Octavia had drowned.

  I thought maybe Octavia had led me here the first time I’d visited, and Jericho had caused Michael to block my way. There was something in the cemetery that Octavia wanted me to see.

  I closed the gate behind me and headed directly for the curving path in the hill that led to the tomb and gravesite I needed to see. What had I missed when Michael had stood in my way?

  The faint beams of strengthening sunrise made the black marble of Jericho’s tomb gleam darkly on the rise. In contrast, Octavia’s grave was left in shadow marked only by a simple headstone.

  No one stopped me this time. Either Michael still slept or the séance had drained the spirits who tried to control us. Maybe Octavia and Jericho had used up whatever energy they possessed in speaking through Hannah.

  Poor Hannah.

  I promised myself I would go to her later in the day to make sure she was okay.

  I drew closer to Octavia’s grave. I didn’t have flowers, but I did murmur some regrets for what she’d been through. Michael had kept her headstone clear and her grave tended. The weeds were cut back. The sandy earth raked and graveled.