by Lara Parker
He made a moaning sound, reeling from her words as though struck.
“But you can only live at night,” she whispered. “When the sun rises, you must return to this coffin, to sleep, to live in seclusion, or you will be destroyed.”
“I remember the curse,” he said raggedly. “‘All who love you will die.’ Didn’t you say that? Well? Didn’t you?”
“Yes…”
His eyes brimmed with fire. “And do you still love me, Angelique? Is that why you tried to stop me?” His torment was unbearable, even greater than his rage, as he descended upon her. “Did you know you would be the first?”
She shook her head, afraid to speak, and he lunged for her, viciously embraced her. She pushed against him feebly, helplessly, as he bent her back over the casket.
“Were you lying when you said you loved me?”
“No! I love you still. I will always love you!”
“Then according to the curse, you must die!” He crushed her to him. “Love me, Angelique! Cling to me! Kiss me, with the kiss of death! All your powers of witchcraft cannot save you now!”
He drew her lips into his, and she felt her heart rush out of her wounded mouth as his powerful hands closed about her throat. The pain was searing, excruciating, as her breath slowly, mercifully, was stopped, and she was in the dark water at last, deep down in the fathomless current where there was no air and no light, and the swirling blackness enveloped her forever. The last sound she heard was his tormented howl. “What have you done to me? Sorceress! I would rather be dead than go through eternity as I am! As what I have become!”
* * *
The Dark Spirit was waiting for her.
“You want me still?” she asked.
“More than anything.”
“Why?” she asked, puzzled.
“I am the void. I am nothing without a presence—a mind to imagine me. What you see is only your dream of evil incarnate.”
“But do you exist?”
“Come, Angelique.”
* * *
He led her down even deeper into the dark, where there was a light from the coldest of all fires, and there he removed her clothes. He unfastened the taffeta skirt and the embroidered bodice. He pulled the pins from her hair and let it fall.
When she objected, he said, “The ways of the Underworld are my ways.”
He pulled the jewels from her ears and she sighed to lose them. She had not had them long. He took the ouanga from her neck, and she wept to see it go. The moonstone fell in the slime. Next he undid the laces of her corset and the ties of her petticoats. He slipped her camisole over her head. She loved the delicate underthings, but he said, “Do not question me.”
Then she stood before him naked and holy—like all women—the source of life and love, and for a moment she was resigned. Then he took her skin off her bones, and she was lost to him, and her soul merged with his.
* * *
Barnabas closed the journal and let it fall against his knees. He placed his hand on the cover of the diary and stroked the rough leather with his fingertips. Reading Angelique’s story had brought her back so acutely, as though she had lived again, and his heart felt light and released from bitterness. He breathed a long sigh, and rose and walked to the window. So it was love that motivated her all along. She had never given up hope.
What would have happened, he wondered, if he had stayed with her—before she was destroyed by heartbreak, before the madness began. It was all so long ago. If he had taken her away, caressed her and held her, easing her pain. She had cursed him with his loathsome divinity, but she had left him with life—life as a monster—but life, nevertheless. And she had forfeited her own life for the chance to make his journey with him.
He had always maligned his vile existence, and had lived as a creature in torment, but now, look what had happened. Here he was today, prepared to begin again. It was 1971. He was free to live as an ordinary man, and he had so much to look forward to. Sunlight streamed across the lawn, and Barnabas realized that it was morning. There was a knock on his door.
“Come in.”
Julia appeared, dressed for the day, brisk and smiling, her manner, as usual, tentative but hopeful. He was glad to see her, and he went to her and embraced her.
“Barnabas, Roger has asked that you meet him in the drawing room.”
“Very well. Tell him I’ll come down immediately, and … perhaps…”
He liked the shine on her auburn hair.
“Yes, Barnabas?”
“Perhaps we can go for a drive later in the day. Just the two of us. I would like so much to be with you.”
Her eyes lit with unexpected happiness, and she smiled. “That would be lovely.”
* * *
When Barnabas entered the drawing room, Roger was standing by the fireplace speaking to a visitor. He was amiable and jocular, rather energetic for this hour of the day, Barnabas thought.
“Barnabas, come in,” he exclaimed the instant he saw him. “My dear boy, I have some extraordinary news.”
“What is it, Roger?”
“Why, I’m absolutely delighted. We have had an offer on the Old House! Well, that is to say, on the land. An individual who possesses both vision and means wishes to perform a complete restoration. Oh, I’m so sorry, please forgive me. May I introduce, with pleasure, Miss Antoinette Harpignies.”
The tall, fair-haired woman looking out the window turned slowly as Roger spoke. She smiled and walked toward Barnabas with her hand outstretched.
“Mr. Collins,” she said, “it is such a delight to meet you.”
As he shook her hand, he was startled to see that he was looking into eyes of the brightest possible blue.
Thirty-Two
Remembering that he had promised to see Julia that afternoon, Barnabas stood instead at his window and looked down at the wide expanse of lawn that stretched to the sea. Troubling scenes from his life flashed across his mind, and all seemed imbued with regret. As he had so many times in the past, Barnabas conjured up again, in a sort of panicked desperation, his reckless seduction of Angelique, her surrender, and her surprising tenaciousness; but he found himself struggling to change the story, to say not those words, but something different, some remark that would twist the nightmare, draw it down a new path, so all that came to pass so tragically could be rewritten. Like a helpless shareholder who had seen his money disappear in a rash investment, or an actor who turned down the role that would have launched his career, Barnabas would start again and try to rewrite the past. And yet the unraveling would persist, and the same tale would unfold.
The heart in love is like a compass, he thought, the pointer ever true. A broken lens cannot change its aim, and, even unhinged from its face, the floating needle is still drawn irresistibly to the same North Star. Thus it was in his daydreaming; he danced through time, haphazardly moving from the past to the present and back again. As always when he indulged himself in idle contemplation, he relived the moment when he had first seen Josette, her rustling silks, her bright smile; but then his visions were helplessly drawn to her body broken on the rocks, the tide lapping at her still, white hand.
He could not see those rocks from his window as the cliff that rose above the foam obscured his view, but he could gaze out past the vista that was Collinwood’s majesty, where the great deep seemed to rise toward the far horizon like a massive sheet of slate. The sea’s immense embrace left him vaguely weary and vexed by thoughts of his own death, which for the first time since his cure he realized was now inevitable, and he was disquieted by an unfamiliar dread. Time that had been a mighty burden was now sand through a sieve. He turned to the glass that crowned the dresser beside his bed and was once again caught by his wavering reflection, lost for so many years, as though liquid mercury watered his flickering image. He appeared older, and he shut his eyes to it and put his face in his hands, drained of the contentment he had felt only an hour earlier, before he had seen the woman in the drawing room. The sto
ry was not finished, and he could not change the ending, no matter how hard he tried to reenter the dream and weave with a new warp. As much as he resisted, he could not help but return to the room where he had died, and to the moment I was reborn. He groaned and sat on the bed, idly rubbing his cheeks, and sighed deeply. Then he reached for the small wooden chest and inspected the lock.
Meeting the new owner of the Old House had forced all those visions back into his brain just at the moment when reading Angelique’s diary had left him drained. Dire thoughts nagged at the back of his mind for one reason. The woman had so resembled Angelique that his teeth had clenched and his throat tightened into a knot. She seemed, or pretended, not to know him, and had spoken as if to a stranger.
“I have brought something for you,” she said, her wide eyes merely curious as a small frown centered itself between her brows. “I don’t know whether it is important or not, but I found this box hidden within the floor, under the rugs of one of the back bedrooms, one that had not been burned so badly.” She held a small carved chest in her hands, smoke-damaged but intact. “I thought you should have it.”
Roger spoke. “I told her I didn’t recognize it. It seems quite old. Have you ever seen it, Barnabas?”
He knew it at once, but strove to dissemble, merely to assuage Roger’s tendency to pry. If there were contents within, he did not wish to share them.
Instead, he said, “I have no idea. Let me see it.” As he took the chest from the woman, his fingers grazed hers, and a tremor of excitement flowed through him. He gripped the chest, feigning disinterest, and spoke in a noncommittal tone. “Yes, my mother once showed it to me; that is, I believe it belonged to my great-grandmother.”
“Then probably you should have it,” Roger acknowledged. “It appears to be locked. Lord knows where the key might be.”
After a few more efforts at civility, Barnabas found he could hide his discomfort no longer and took his leave. Now, alone again in his room, he sat on his bed and examined the box, its surface somewhat obscured by soot, but he could make out the intricate inlay of ivory and the parquet picture of a pirate brigantine, sails aloft, fashioned as a mosaic out of many different kinds of wood. The darks and the lights suggested foam on the sea, the oars, and the full-bellied rig with a goddess painted on the bulge of the sail. Although he had not seen the box for almost two centuries, he remembered it well.
Using a metal nail file he found in his dresser, he forced the lock, damaging the wood, but loosening what was a rather fragile closure. He raised the lid. The odor of dust in attics, things long put away, rose to his nostrils along with a fainter aroma of dried rose petals strewn over the contents, petals that turned to ashes when he touched them. Beneath them was a piece of lace, the work so delicate that when he pulled it out, it tore in his fingers. Under that he found, wrapped in tissue, and in an oval frame, the small black silhouette of a young girl, done in the popular style before photography, when a child’s image could be projected on a white background by a sort of camera obscura, and the edge traced on black paper. The girl stood with her hands folded in front of her, and the bow of her apron lifted in back above her full skirt. A ribbon held her hair in place. Not knowing who the child could be, he set the frame aside and looked further.
A gold locket glimmered and opened readily to reveal a painted miniature of a young woman Barnabas recognized as his mother when she was a girl. There was a cameo of his mother as well, an angelic carving in ivory, her lovely features preserved within a rim of gold tracery. Several coins slid out from under a packet of ship letters with English stamps, the top one dated 1795, Falmouth to New York. He fingered the English pence and gold sovereigns before placing them on the bed to dig further. He was surprised to discover a drawing of his parents when they were quite old, captured in that stiff pose required for a long sitting, their faces grim as though they were concentrating on their many disappointments. They sat side by side, but not touching, as if misfortune had robbed them of all intimacy. Seeing them so soured and statuesque caused his eyes to well up, and he was amazed. It had been so many years since he had shed tears.
Beneath another packet of letters tied with a blue ribbon was a watercolor of his mother holding a child in a baptism gown of lace so long that it fell to the floor over her skirt, and he knew it was a portrait of his childhood self. He stared for a long moment at the wide-eyed face of the boy, frozen in an expression of curiosity. He searched further, shuffling through handwritten wedding invitations and birth announcements, the ink too faded to read the names. There were brooches, a gold wedding band, and a diamond cross on a chain, along with miniatures of family members, the rendition rather crude in some, and others quite skilled. Seeing these objects, his mother’s treasures, caused a heavy pain in his heart, for he knew she had suffered for him, and in spite of everything, she had never ceased to love him.
Then, at the very bottom of the box he saw a yellowed envelope and recognized the handwriting as his own. Parents always keep their children’s letters, and she had kept his. Fingers trembling, he withdrew the epistle and opened the flap, knowing at once what it was. He had written it in a desperate attempt to explain all that had happened. When his parents had discovered his odious transformation, his father had never been able to comprehend a fate so grotesque and had thought only of covering up any shame that might come to the family. But his mother had been more willing to believe that her son had never meant to perform acts so evil. How clearly he remembered writing the words that blurred on the page as he began to read.
My Dearest Mother,
I know there is no way to bring you solace. You have seen the worst misfortune that could be imagined befall your son, and I know your heart must be broken. But you also watched as I clung to my dream of a life with Josette, and you saw how I tried to be true to her. Slowly, you became aware that Angelique was my tormentor, even as you gave her your sweet acceptance and welcomed her into the family. You never saw her rages, her poisoned heart. You believed that she mourned by my bedside in those last hours, but you never knew that she was a true sorceress, and never did you suspect the agony it was to wake in the clutches of her curse.
At first I had thought that by some miracle I was still alive. The fever had passed, and I had survived. I woke in darkness, in possession of my faculties, disoriented but conscious, and believed myself to be in a hospital bed in a shuttered room, restrained for my own safety. Surely the curtains were drawn because the sunlight earlier had caused me such suffering. But as I felt around the rough boards of my compartment, my elation turned to confusion, and then to dread. The walls seemed to resemble—no!—unmistakable—a coffin? Fear clenched my heart. Had I been buried alive?
Before I could struggle to free myself, a mist came over my mind that rendered me insensate, and a shaft of light sliced the darkness along with a rush of cold air. I felt a creaking vibration as the doorway to the outer world was lifted. Involuntarily, I shut my eyes again against the scorching light and lay still as death. A sweet, familiar smell settled over me and warm whispers brushed my ears, but I feigned slumber, paralyzed by vague apprehensions.
Something lodged itself near my heart, pressed a sharp point into my chest, and another body near my own shifted its weight. Unable to resist any longer, I jerked open my eyes, and I saw leaning over me as if to offer comfort a blurred vision: a striped green dress, yellow hair, and dark eyes flooded with tears. You will have guessed who it was. There was a rustling, a spear pierced my wainscot, and my gaze locked with hers. Her eyes flew wide in fear, a gasp escaped her lips, and before I could stop myself, I was lunging upward and had her by the throat.
There is a measured realm of reason, but all is lost in the firebrand of rage. Only later came clarity, the helpless reassessment. She held a mallet and a stake. I had survived her demon spells, and she had come again to destroy me. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity, but I had no way of knowing that better she should have done her deed than for me to live out eternity as the cr
eature I had become. I should never have stopped her and, what’s more, I was a fool to kill her; she had brought the curse and only she could reverse it. In one rash moment I closed an iron barrier on my fate. What was her curse, you are wondering. Wait …
I can still see the look in her eyes, her face contorted with panic like nothing I had seen in her expression before. She turned pale and trembled, as though she were looking at a monster, something inhuman. There was a mallet and a stake. What desperate attempt to defend herself was this? Had she the strength to send it home?
A realization slowly dawned; I could feel something had changed. Always in the past she had been able to stop me with a flick of a finger, a wave of her hand. For Mother, you must believe me when I tell you, she was a demon, a witch whose spells had always infuriated me and left me weak. Did you know that I tried to kill her when she threatened Sarah? And even when I shot her, shattered her breast, she had lived and found the strength to utter her damnation. She had reached deep within herself for some virulent power, and now I will tell you what she did. She called an infernal rodent to come, a rabid bat, that fluttered up to my neck, hung to the skin by its clawed wings, pierced my throat with its tiny teeth, and sucked blood from my jugular. And she cursed me, Mother, with a magic as ancient as the Harpies. All her venomous jealousy poured into that curse which would condemn me to a hideous existence until the end of time.
Even Ben had said when he heard: I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to kill her.
Yet I could feel the bones of her neck splinter in my hands as strength flowed into my arms, and I have often since reflected on the bitter irony that she had created a monster with a greater power than her own. The bones of her throat shattered, and her eyes bulged as I bent her back over my casket and kissed her mouth, drawing my first taste of blood, her blood, between my lips and discovering, to my surprise, my own raw need. For that is what she made me, Mother, and then, there she lay, broken on the stones, her eyes frozen open in the wide stare of death.
