by John Saul
“She’s here,” Carson whispered. “Don’t you understand, Cal? It’s Amanda. She’s using Michelle. She’s here. Can’t you feel it? She’s here!”
He began laughing then, softly at first, then louder and louder until Cal could stand it no longer.
“Stop that!” he shouted.
It was as though a spell had been broken. Carson shook himself, then glanced once more at the picture. With an odd expression of victory on his face, he started for the door. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better get back to the house. I have a feeling things have just begun.”
Cal was about to follow him when he saw the stain on the floor. “Jesus,” he whispered.
It was as it had been the day they moved in. Reddish brown, thick, caked with dust, almost unidentifiable. But it had been cleaned up. He remembered it clearly, remembered June, on her hands and knees, chipping at it.
And now it was back.
Once more, he looked at the painting. The blood, dripping from Louise Carson’s wounded breast, gushing from her open throat.…
It was as if somehow the past, so clearly depicted on the canvas, was alive again in the studio.
Tim Hartwick and Corinne Hatcher arrived as Cal and Josiah Carson returned to the house. June, still pale, hadn’t moved from her chair in the living room. The group gathered around her.
“Did you see it?” June asked Cal. He nodded. “I didn’t paint it,” June repeated.
“Where did it come from?”
“The closet,” June said vacantly. “I found it in the closet a week or so ago. It—it was only a sketch then. But today, when I went out there, it was on the easel.”
“What was?” Tim broke in. “What are you talking about?”
“A picture,” June said softly. “It’s in the studio. You might as well go look at it—it’s what I wanted you to see.”
Mystified, Tim and Corinne started out of the room, but paused as the telephone rang. Though June was closest to the phone, she made no move to pick it up, and it was Cal who finally answered.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Pendleton?” The voice at the other end was shaking.
“Yes.”
“This is Bertha Carstairs. I—I wonder, is Joe Carson there with you?”
Cal frowned slightly. “Yes, he is.” He looked questioningly at Carson, half-expecting him to refuse the call. But Carson seemed to be himself again, as if the strange scene in the studio had never happened. He took the phone.
“This is Dr. Carson.”
“It’s Bertha Carstairs, Joe. Something terrible has happened. Sally and Alison Adams just came in, and they told me that Annie Whitmore is in the playground. Joe—they think she’s dead.
“She’s under the swings. Sally said it looked as though she’d fallen off. Like it was an accident or something …”
Her voice trailed off, and Carson knew she was holding something back.
“What else, Bertha? There is something else, isn’t there?”
Bertha Carstairs hesitated, and when she spoke again, she sounded almost apologetic.
“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “It might not be important—it might not mean anything at all—but, well.…” She paused a second, then her words came clearly over the line. “Joe, Sally saw Michelle Pendleton today. She was walking along the road, coming from town. And Sally said that last week Michelle and Annie were playing together quite a bit, and what with Susan Peterson, and Billy Evans—well, I don’t know. I hate to say it …” Again, Bertha’s voice faded away.
“I understand,” Carson said. “It’s all right, Bertha.”
He hung up the phone and turned to the four people who were watching him. “It’s Annie Whitmore,” he said. “Something’s happened to her.” He told them what Bertha Carstairs had said, leaving out nothing.
“Dear God,” June moaned when he was done. “Help Michelle. Please help her!” Then her eyes widened and she leaped to her feet.
“But where is she?” she cried. “If Sally saw her coming out this way, she must have been coming home.” Her eyes suddenly wild, she ran toward the hall. “Michelle? MICHELLE!”
They heard her repeat her daughter’s name as she ran up the stairs. Suddenly there was a silence, then they heard her coming back down again.
“She’s not here. Cal, she’s not here!”
“It’s all right,” Cal told her. “We’ll find her.”
“Lisa!” Tim’s voice was choked, but only Corinne knew what he meant.
“She was with Sally and Alison,” she said. “Uncle Joe, did Mrs. Carstairs say anything about Lisa?”
Josiah Carson shook his head. Tim grabbed the phone. “What’s her number?” he demanded. “Quick, what’s the Carstairses’ number?”
Snatching the telephone from him, Corinne dialed. The phone rang once, twice, then twice again before Bertha Carstairs’s harried voice came on the line.
“Mrs. Carstairs? This is Corinne Hatcher. What about Lisa Hartwick? Was she with Sally and Alison? Did she come home with them?”
“Why, no,” Bertha said. “Just a minute—” There was a silence, then Bertha came back on the line.
“She stayed out at the Bensons’. She and Jeff were going down to the cove. I wish the kids wouldn’t play down there—the currents are so dangerous—”
But Corinne cut her off. “Never mind,” she said. “I’m out at the Pendletons’, and I’m sure we’ll find her.” She hung up the phone and turned to Tim.
“She’s out here somewhere. She and Jeff Benson were going down to the beach.”
“It’s that doll,” June suddenly screamed. “It’s that damned doll!” They stared at her, but only Josiah Carson understood what she was saying. “Don’t you see it?” she cried. “It all started with that damned doll!” Once again June rushed up the stairs and burst into Michelle’s room. She looked around frantically, searching for the doll.
Amanda!
It was all Amanda’s fault.
If she could just get rid of the doll!
And then she saw it, propped up on the window seat, its glass eyes staring emptily out toward Devil’s Passage. She crossed the room and picked it up. But as she was about to turn away from the window, a flicker of movement caught her eye.
She stared out, trying to see through the rain-blurred glass.
Out by the bluff, north, close to the cemetery.
It was Michelle.
Standing on the bluff, leaning against a boulder, staring down toward the beach.
But she wasn’t leaning against the boulder.
What was she doing?
She was pushing it.
“Oh, no,” June gasped. Grabbing the doll, she dashed out of the room.
“She’s outside,” she called. “Michelle’s outside! Cal, go get her. Please, go get her!”
The fog was gathering quickly around Michelle, and the beach had disappeared. All she was aware of was Amanda, standing close to her, touching her, whispering to her.
“They’re coming. I can see them, Michelle. I can see them! They’re coming closer … they’re almost there.… Now! Help me, Michelle. Help me!”
Michelle reached out, touched the rock. It seemed to vibrate under her fingers, as if it were alive.
“Harder,” Amanda hissed. “We have to push it harder, before it’s too late!”
Again, Michelle felt the rock move, then watched as it teetered. She wanted to pull away from it, but couldn’t. She felt it slip, lurch a little, then come free.…
It was a low sound, almost lost in the crashing of the surf, but Jeff heard it, and looked up.
Above him.
The sound had come from above him.
Then he saw it, plunging toward him.
He knew the rock was going to hit him, knew he had to move quickly, jump to the side—backward—anywhere. But he couldn’t move. His mouth quivered, and his stomach tightened. He was going to die—he knew it.
But he was frozen. Only at the last second d
id his muscles suddenly obey him. Too late.
The boulder, four feet across, hit him. He buckled to the ground, feeling the crushing weight of it, and he thought he could hear it, grinding him under its mass.
And he could hear something else, too. Laughter.
It floated over him as he died, and he wondered where it was coming from. It was a little girl, and she was laughing at him. But why? What had he done?
Then Jeff Benson died.
Michelle heard the laughter, too, and knew it was Amanda. Amanda was pleased with her, and that made her happy. But she wasn’t sure why Amanda was pleased.
The fog began to clear, and Michelle looked down. She could see the beach again.
There was a girl on the beach, standing still, staring at the fallen rock. It could have hit her, Michelle realized. But it hadn’t.
Then why was the girl screaming?
It was the boulder. Something was sticking out from under the boulder. But what was it?
The last traces of the fog drifted away, and Michelle could see clearly.
It was a leg. Someone’s leg was sticking out from under the rock.
And Amanda was laughing. Amanda was laughing, and saying something to her. She listened carefully, straining to hear Amanda’s words.
“It’s done,” Amanda was saying. “It’s done, all of it, and I can go now. Good-bye, Michelle.” She laughed once more, happily, and then the sound of her voice faded away.
There were other voices now. Michelle could hear them. Voices calling to her, shouting at her.
She turned. There were people running toward her, calling her name.
She knew what they wanted.
They wanted to catch her, to punish her, to send her away.
But she hadn’t done anything. It was Amanda who did it. All she had done was obey Amanda. How could they blame her? But they would—she knew they would.
It was like her dream.
She had to get away from them. She couldn’t let them catch her.
She began running, her lame leg dragging at her, holding her back. Her hip throbbed with pain, but she tried to ignore it.
The voices were getting closer to her—they were catching up with her. She stopped, just as she had in the dream, and looked back.
She recognized her father, and Dr. Carson. And there was her teacher, Miss Hatcher. And that other man—who was he? Oh, yes, Mr. Hartwick. Why was he after her? She had thought he was her friend. But he wasn’t, she knew that now. He had been trying to trick her. He hated her too.
Amanda. Only Amanda was her friend.
But Amanda had gone.
Gone where?
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that she had to get away, and that she couldn’t run.
But in her dream she had gotten away. Desperately, she tried to remember what she had done in her dream.
She had fallen.
That was it.
She had fallen, just like Susan Peterson, and Billy Evans, and Annie Whitmore. And like Jeff Benson, fallen under the rock.
That was the answer.
She would fall, and Amanda would take care of her.
As the voices closed in around her, shouted to her, Michelle Pendleton stepped off the bluff.
But Amanda didn’t come to take care of her. Just before she hit the rocks, she knew.
Amanda was never going to come again. The rocks reached out to her, as they had in the dream. Only this time, she didn’t scream.
This time, Michelle welcomed their embrace.
There was a quiet in the living room of the Pendletons’ house, but the silence offered no peace to the four people who sat stiffly around the fireplace. June seemed almost impassive, her eyes fixed on the fire that she had lit early in the day, lit only so that she could burn the doll. And burn it she had, and then, as if by unspoken consent, the fire had been kept alive.
They still didn’t know what had happened.
Josiah Carson had gone home, refusing to tell any of them what he had been talking about in the studio. Cal had tried to repeat Josiah’s garbled mumblings, but they seemed to make no sense, and finally, sometime in the afternoon, Tim had gone out to the studio. He had stared at the strange painting for a long time, then begun searching, not knowing exactly what he was looking for, but knowing that somewhere there would be something—something that would give him an answer.
He had found the sketches and taken them into the house. They had studied them, and seen with their own eyes how Susan Peterson had died, and how Billy Evans had died.
And each of them, at one time or another, had drifted out to the studio to look once more at the crimson-streaked painting that still rested on the easel, a mysterious link with a past they didn’t understand.
It was Corinne who first noticed the shadow.
It was indistinct, nearly lost in the vivid violence of the picture, but once she had pointed it out to them, they all saw it From one corner of the picture, a shadow appeared to project across the floor toward the dying Louise Carson.
It was a silhouette, really. A silhouette of a young girl, wearing an old-fashioned dress, and a bonnet. One of her arms was raised, and in her hand there seemed to be some kind of an object.
To each of them it was clear that the object in the child’s hand was a knife.
They all knew that Michelle had done the sketches and the painting. Tim insisted that it was the dark side of her personality expressing itself. She must have seen a picture of Louise Carson somewhere, and the image had remained in her mind. And then, as she began to invent “Amanda,” she had begun to take the stories of Paradise Point, the legends of that other, long-dead Amanda, and weave them together. For her, the ghost had truly been real. Even though it existed only in her own mind, it had been real.
Lisa Hartwick had been given a sedative and put to bed. When she woke up she felt confused, then remembered where she was.
She was in Michelle Pendleton’s bed, in Michelle Pendleton’s house.
She got out of bed, and went to the door. She listened, and heard the sound of voices murmuring downstairs. She opened the door and called to her father.
“Daddy?”
A moment later Tim appeared at the foot of the stairs.
“I can’t sleep,” Lisa complained. “Well, that’s all right.
We’ll be going home soon, anyway.”
“Can we go now?” Lisa asked. “I don’t like it here.”
“Right away, honey,” Tim promised, “You get dressed, then we’ll go.”
Lisa returned to the bedroom, and began dressing. She knew what they were talking about downstairs.
They were talking about Michelle Pendleton.
Lisa wanted to talk about her too, and tell everyone what she had seen on the beach.
But she was afraid to.
She was sure that if she told them, they would think she was crazy, too.
As she started down the stairs, she decided that she would never tell them what she had seen. Besides, maybe she hadn’t really seen it at all.
Maybe there really hadn’t been anybody up there with Michelle. Maybe what she’d seen hadn’t been a little girl in a black dress, wearing a bonnet.
Maybe it had only been a shadow.
EPILOGUE
It was Jennifer Pendleton’s twelfth birthday.
Jenny had grown into a beautiful girl, tall, blond, and blue-eyed like her parents, with a finely chiseled face that belied her youth. People meeting her for the first time seldom realized how young she was, and Jenny enjoyed pretending to be older than her years. If it worried June and Cal when boys seven or eight years older than their daughter called Jenny for dates, they tried not to show it: Jennifer was not only beautiful, but she was bright, and if she thought she could get away with it, she delighted in watching her parents worry about her.
June Pendleton had become something of an anomaly in Paradise Point. As the years passed, those twelve years since the Pendletons had come from
Boston hoping for a better life and found, instead, a nightmare that had, finally, been beyond their comprehension, June had turned more and more to her art. She had found it difficult to make friends in Paradise Point—first because she was a stranger, and later, though it was never said to her face, because certain people in town had never forgiven her for her daughter’s madness. Even as Michelle and her strange insanity passed into the lore of the Point, her mother still lived with it, was reminded of it every day.
At first, she had wanted to leave and return to Boston. But Cal had refused. Through it all, his love for the house had never wavered. And, though he never spoke of it, not even to his wife, he had never forgotten Josiah Carson’s strange words in the studio that day. Whether Carson had spoken the truth or not, Cal chose to believe him. He was, at last, free of the guilt that had plagued him since the day Alan Hanley had died. He hadn’t killed Alan—Amanda had done that, as she had killed them all, including his own daughter. So he had stayed in Paradise Point, ignored the talk, and thrived.
Josiah Carson had left the Point almost immediately after Michelle died. Nearly everyone in the village had thought that something had gone wrong with Carson’s mind—he had spent his last few days in Paradise Point rambling about the “vengeance of the past,” but nobody had paid too much attention to him. Instead, Carson’s vague mumblings only built sympathy for Cal. Slowly at first, but inevitably, they had begun to accept him as the village doctor. There was, after all, no one else.
Neither Cal nor June ever talked about the events of twelve years ago, and when they talked of Michelle, which was seldom, they talked about Michelle as she had been before they had come to Paradise Point. Those first two months in Paradise Point, the months that had nearly torn their family apart, they preferred to ignore.
June didn’t mind; the memories were too painful.
And so the Pendletons lived quietly in the old house above the sea, Cal happily tending to his small practice, and June quietly working in her studio, on her darkly threatening seascapes.
And through it all, Jennifer had grown up, carefully shielded from the tragedies of the first weeks of her life. She heard rumors, of course—it would have been impossible for her not to have. But whenever she had asked her parents about the rumors, they assured her that she mustn’t believe everything she heard from her schoolmates. Stories, they told her, had a way of getting exaggerated.
