Refuge

by Kirsty Ferry

  ‘They have to see you – they have to believe. Then, once they are satisfied justice has been done, I would imagine they will leave you alone. When they return,’ he shrugged, ‘you will be gone.’

  Genevieve fingered the gun and looked at the man before her. ‘Do it,’ she said again. He held his hand out and she passed the gun to him.

  Swift as lightning, Montgomery leaned into Genevieve. If anyone had witnessed it, he would have appeared to have been kissing her. The girl let out one gasping scream and slumped forwards, her eyes closed. The man caught her and laid her gently on an old, box-like tomb. Then he raised the gun and shot her through the heart.

  ***

  There was blood, of course, a lot of blood. When they found her, the gun was in her hand, her fingers loosely curled around the trigger; a clear case of murder-suicide. The girl had been unbalanced, they knew that. Her family had made that obvious and her recent behaviour had proved it. They stood over her body, wondering what to do. She was evil, a murderess. There was no motive except her insanity.

  One of the men stared at her and shook his head. ‘We’re too late,’ he said. ‘We have to go back and tell the Master. Do we take her with us?’

  Another man looked at him in horror. ‘Take that back to the Master?’ he said, indicating the bloodied body. ‘No. We tell him what we saw. Then he can come down here himself if he wants to see it. Do we tell her family?’

  ‘No. We tell our Master first,’ said another. ‘He’s the one that needs to know.’ They took a last look at Genevieve de Havilland. ‘God only knows what evil was hiding behind that face,’ muttered the first man. ‘Come on. We should go.’ They turned and mounted their horses again, urging the animals away from the chapel, back towards Hartside.

  ***

  Montgomery came out from behind the pillar where he had been standing. Nobody had realised he was there; that was one benefit, he thought, of a half-life such as his. He could fool them into thinking he was invisible at times. He walked over to Veva and leaned over her. He pushed her hair back and studied the two deep marks in her neck. Blood had poured down from the gash where he had severed her jugular, soaking the front of her dress and, mingled with the mess of the bullet wound in her chest; a layman might assume that the blood all came from the bullet wound. He stood up and lifted the girl gently in his arms. He wouldn’t have to wait long before she was with him again, but she was a wild one, no doubt about it. A gust of wind blew down the moor and snow began to fall from the heavy clouds above; he didn’t feel any of it. He half smiled again. He didn’t envy her brother when she woke up.

  ***

  There was a cottage on the moors, an abandoned, estate-worker’s cottage hidden behind a small clump of trees. It was fairly dry inside. Montgomery didn’t care about heat or warmth; Veva wouldn’t either, when she woke up. He shouldered the door open and walked inside. There were two rooms which led off from a small, stone passageway. Montgomery went into the room on the right and laid the girl down on the one remaining wooden bench by the inglenook fireplace. He sat opposite her to wait.

  There was no gentle stirring from her. She moved her head and her eyes snapped open, staring straight at him. Her expression was shocked and confused for a split second, but then she smiled at him, slowly and triumphantly. Even being what he was, and knowing what he knew, Montgomery still experienced a shiver of trepidation as he looked into the girl’s eyes.

  ‘You did it,’ she said. ‘Did they see me?’

  Montgomery nodded. ‘They did indeed,’ he said. ‘Your fate was sealed. Your body has been moved, you are dead to them. You are no longer their concern.’

  Veva sat up carefully. She looked about her, and her eyes rested on the front of her ballgown. A bloodied, burnt hole scarred the blue fabric at her breast. ‘My beautiful dress!’ she cried ‘Oh no!’ She pressed her hand to her chest. ‘Did you shoot me? I can feel something...’

  ‘It will soon heal over,’ said Montgomery. ‘We don’t sustain our injuries for very long.’

  ‘I’m glad I shot them,’ she said. ‘Now, there is more work I need to do.’ She swung her legs over the side of the bench and stood up unsteadily.

  Montgomery reached out to take her hand, gently yet firmly stopping her. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You need to gain strength, my love. You’re still weak. Let your body heal and your mind adjust.’

  Veva narrowed her eyes and turned to Montgomery. She wrenched her hand out of his and snarled at him. ‘You think that you are the one who can tell me what to do now, is that it? No. You have given me independence. I can do what I want now, but I need to settle some old scores first.’

  ‘I am not telling you what to do,’ said Montgomery, ‘I am advising you to rest. Your body has gone through an ordeal and it may take some time to recover.’

  ‘I went through worse this summer at the hands of my brother. I died, you know. They told me. But then I came back. Joseph did not know whether to be grateful or resentful. I am sure he wished me dead.’ She smiled. ‘Dear Joseph. He did his best. Sadly, it was not enough to stop me. I must pay him a visit.’

  Montgomery sighed. ‘Go then, Genevieve. Go and see him. I can see that I have no power over you to prevent it. I would have visited him myself, but why should I rob you of the experience? All I will say is that if you rest now, you will be stronger. Look, you are still unsteady on your feet. Please – an hour, two hours at the most. That will be enough time for you. It will be enough time for the message to reach him as well. Would it not be better to visit him from a position of such strength in two hours time, than to go now and risk more people seeing you as the news of your apparent suicide spreads? You have much to learn and I can teach you, but the first step is to trust me.’

  Veva paused in the doorway of the cottage, looking thoughtfully at Montgomery. ‘You tell me that I will be stronger if I wait?’ she asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘I found it best to wait.’

  ‘Why did you make this choice?’ asked Veva curiously. She walked across to him and stared down at him thoughtfully. ‘What was it that you did?’

  ‘I made many mistakes in life,’ replied Montgomery. ‘I inherited a failing estate. I had no business acumen. I begged people like your brother to help me. I did not necessarily want the money, but I would have appreciated the support. He, amongst others, laughed at my disgrace and sent me away. I decided that my only chance was to gamble with the few remaining shreds of my fortune, and I lost. I remember sitting in a dark room, with nothing left to my name except a few coins in my hand, wondering how I could kill myself painlessly. I wandered through the streets of London that night, intending to throw myself into the river. I saw a lady in the shadows, and decided to spend my money on her before I finished it for good. I found myself telling her what had happened. She offered me a way out – a new way of life where I could start again and would not have to rely on mortal fortune to feed me or shelter me. I was desperate. So I made my choice. I shall not go into how I recovered my money - and more - from the men I gambled with. Suffice it to say, I felt vindicated. Thus, I returned to my family estate where I live quite alone, apart from the occasional visit from a housekeeper who knows better than to ask any questions.’

  Veva nodded. ‘I see. Then, if you advise me to wait, I shall wait. I shall wait for two hours and no longer. Tell me, Sir. How do you think we should pass the time?’

  Montgomery stood up, that half-smile playing across his lips again. ‘I think you know the answer to that, my little wild one,’ he said and cupped her face in his hands. ‘Veva, you are perfect.’

  Veva smiled and drew closer to him as the clouds gathered in the sky and the day began to darken over the ruined chapel. ‘I think I shall let you call me Veva,’ she whispered, ‘just this once.’

  ‘And you, my love,’ he replied, ‘can call me Guy.’

  ***

  It is a myth that vampires do not rest. They sleep as most creatures do and when Montgomery awoke, it was to fi
nd Veva gone. He knew where she would have gone: and he felt no remorse over it. He smiled into the darkness; there was no need for him to linger here any longer. He would leave immediately. First, he stretched across to where his cloak lay abandoned on the ground. He felt around the inside pocket and his fingers closed over the object he sought; the silver dagger he had stolen from the girl in London, the first night of his new life. He had no idea what it was for – vaguely, he remembered, he had wondered if he would need some sort of security, just in case. Just in case the killing didn’t come easily. Just in case he didn’t succeed in reclaiming his fortune. Just in case. At least Veva hadn’t found that. She had obviously been eager to leave.

  ‘Rest in peace, Joseph de Havilland,’ Sir Guy Montgomery murmured. ‘I’m pleased that she is the one who will do it. You deserve no less.’

  ***

  Veva didn’t quite know what drew her back to the house after she left Montgomery. She needed to be certain in her own mind. Had Will died, then? She wasn’t sure any more. She wondered what she would do if someone saw her? Well – the answer was simple. She would kill them. She crept around the outside of the house like a shadow. She wanted to look into the drawing room and remember Will, remember how he had been with her. Maybe he was still there. But now she had spent the night with Montgomery, she realised just how different her times with Will had been. She had felt more detached with Montgomery, had concentrated more on her pleasure than his. It had been very different with Will. There was a fine line, she realised, between love and hate. She had loved Will desperately, but had hated him with a passion when she pulled the trigger. Oh – so maybe he was dead? She frowned. It was easier to hate the girl than to ponder on the mechanics of the situation. Cassandra - that was what she was called. Veva felt the anger bubble up inside her as she pressed herself close to the wall and melted into the brickwork, listening for any activity inside. Her senses were alive: she buzzed with the stimulation around her, noises were magnified and her eyes saw things so much more clearly, she wondered how she had possibly managed before. She stopped suddenly, looking upwards to an open bedroom window. She wrinkled her nose. She could smell blood – metallic and sharp, yet underlined with a sickly sweetness. She heard ragged breathing from the room, a shallow stuttering and gurgling coming from someone who obviously lay there. Her first thought was of Will. Was he still alive? She straightened up and stared at the window. No. He couldn’t be. Not the way she had hit him, full force in the chest with the bullet. The girl, then - could it be...? No. No, she didn’t want to think about her surviving. The anger enveloped her again and she narrowed her eyes, listening carefully.

  The walls of the house were a rough hewn stone. Veva stood back a little, assessing them. She reached out her fingers, running them across the bricks, searching for crevasses and cracks in the mortar. She tensed her body and with her finger-tips somehow curling into the niches, she began to scale the wall. She proceeded cautiously at first, then her confidence grew and she clambered up until she was able to quietly prise the casement open and peer through the gap.

  It was the girl. She lay in a pristine white bed, her coppery hair spread out around her. Veva made a small growling sound in her throat and pushed the window open further, just enough to ease her way inside the gap and land silently on the polished wooden floorboards. She moved across to the bed and stared at the girl. She knew instinctively what she needed to do and leaned over her.

  ‘I can’t let you live, you know that don’t you?’ she muttered to the unresponsive figure on the bed. ‘I should have made sure before...’

  ***

  Joseph de Havilland stood in the ruins of the chapel looking at the table tomb where they said her body had been found. He could see that she had been there; her blood had soaked into the old grey stone and run down the sides of it, seeping into the grass where it stained the slush a dark rust colour. They had told him yesterday what had happened. At first he hadn’t believed it and had raged at them all. Then, when he had demanded to be taken to Hartside, he had seen Will’s body and realised that his sister had killed her lover.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. It was in them all. Older than Genevieve, Joseph had copied his behaviour from his father. His father had taken his own life as well – they had passed it off as a hunting accident with a shot gun. What was it about guns? How had his sister acquired that one? And, more importantly, why? Joseph’s blood chilled a little as he processed the thought. He had a good idea why. Well. He was safe now. Her death was a relief. He knew he had gone too far in the summer, and she had constantly chipped away at him since, threatening to tell the truth. She had earned several beatings since by pushing him to his limit. Why would she never learn? He was willing to bet she had told Will Hartley the truth; he was relieved that he was dead as well. Now the family could erase the pair of them from their lives and move on.

  But it was a mystery where the body had gone, he pondered. Maybe a wild animal had taken her? That was preposterous. No. He didn’t know where the body had gone, but someone must have taken it. He would make more enquiries in the village, but deep down he recoiled at the fact that he would be expected to wax lyrical at her funeral; to pretend that they had actually cared about one another as siblings were supposed to. No, he wouldn’t be in a rush, he thought, to locate Genevieve.

  The sun was setting low over the hills and he shivered. The snow had turned a pinkish colour on the horizon, shadowed with purple and lilac. Joseph heard the strange silence that comes with a winter’s evening, and he felt the loneliness of the moors and the fact that there was nothing around him for miles. Hartside was to the North and the Hall was to the South. He was dead centre, Joseph thought, right in the middle of two households that had dealt with death and violence in the last twenty four hours. The thought unsettled him. It was Genevieve’s fault, of course. The selfish bitch had given no thought to those who would have to clear up her mess. He set his lips, anger building up within him. Even in death, she was mocking him, making him suffer for her actions.

  Joseph became aware of a humming nearby, a soft, slightly off-key aria that he recognised as being one of the tunes Genevieve used to pick out on the piano. He whipped his head around to the direction it seemed to be coming from and saw nothing. Then he heard a quiet laugh. He shivered again, shaking his head. He was imagining things. She was always there, always in his head. He would never have any peace from her - never. He heard the laugh again, closer this time, and spun round. He caught sight of a pale blur against the darkness of the church columns and it seemed to drift towards him in the half-light.

  ‘What the..?’ he cried.

  The laugh came again, and a voice began to recite some words from a popular novel. ‘“The yellow glamour of the sunset, clothed in transparent radiance,”’ it said, ‘“this shadowy revenant from the tomb.” From the book John Inglesant: A Romance, by Joseph Henry Shorthouse. You tried to make me read that, do you remember? You tried to instil some worthy religious ideas into my poor, wicked head. I only ever liked that line. I loved that image. I wanted to rise from my tomb, a shadowy revenant which would haunt you for evermore. Have I succeeded? Dearest brother, don’t look so surprised. I came back from the dead once before, did I not? But maybe you did not expect to see me again this time. Have I upset you? Poor, poor brother. I didn’t mean to.’

  The figure came closer to Joseph and he gasped. Before him was Genevieve, clothed in her tattered, bloodied ballgown from days ago, just standing and smiling at him. Her eyes were black and her skin alabaster and Joseph could not read the expression on her face. It was triumphant, complacent, even - yet pure evil radiated from her.

  ‘Genevieve? You’re alive? They said...’ Joseph tailed off. The girl came closer and Joseph’s heart began to pound.

  ‘No, I’m not alive, brother. Neither am I dead.’ She dropped her voice. ‘I am the substance of nightmares,’ she whispered, ‘your nightmares. I really don’t know how to do this. You’ll be my first proper
kill and the one I will remember for the rest of my long, wonderful existence. You can’t hurt me now, Joseph. But I wonder - how shall I kill you? Hmmm.’ She tilted her head on one side and appraised him. Joseph began to shake. He turned and tried to run, but she was in front of him. She laughed. ‘You can’t escape. So don’t even try.’

  ‘Genevieve! It’s a chapel...’

  ‘Deconsecrated!’ she fired back. ‘I told you. You will die here, Joseph. I just need to choose the best way. I want you to suffer. And I want to enjoy it. I want to know how you felt all those times you attacked me. I want to know what is so awe-inspiring about hurting people, about bringing them so close to death...so, so close. And above all, I want to know what made you continue to do it!’ Joseph stumbled backwards as she screeched the last few words, her face inches from his.

  ‘You killed Will!’ he shouted. ‘You don’t need to use me...’

  It was the wrong thing to say. With a cry that froze the blood in his veins, Veva lashed out and dragged her nails across his face, tearing the skin from his cheek. He saw her eyes widen and her lips draw back over her teeth. As she threw herself at him and crashed him to the ground, the last thing he heard was laughter, ringing out around the old ruined chapel.

  Present Day

  ‘So where do you want to start?’ asked Drew. He pushed his hands in his pocket and stared around the street. ‘We have to go to a pub. We have to get wasted the first night. It’s the law.’

  ‘Well, the town centre – if that’s what you can call it - seems to be that way,’ said Lucas. He nodded up the street, and Drew looked in the direction he indicated.

  ‘Yeah, that’s where they all seem to be heading,’ he replied. A stream of people were meandering up the road. Lucas watched a middle aged couple dressed in matching jerseys and walking boots go past. He couldn’t tell if they were holiday makers or locals. But it was a fair bet they were heading to the pub.