Fifteen
I remained at the enchanted garden until the sound of their voices faded in the distance. A few minutes later, I heard the slamming of car doors and the gunning of engines, but I still didn’t return to the main entrance. What if one of them waited for me there? Instead, I decided to go out the side gate, through which, I suspected, the early-morning visitor had departed.
The footprints, the dead starlings and even my encounter with Jonathan Devlin seemed far removed from me now, little more than curiosities that paled in comparison to the real-world threat of Claire Bellefontaine and her stepbrother, Rance Duvall. I couldn’t know for certain the pair meant me harm. I wasn’t even sure they were members of the Congé, but I’d seen and heard enough to be on my guard around them.
As I gathered up my gear, I tried to recall everything that Dr. Shaw had told me about the nefarious group. They recruited from the Order of the Coffin and the Claw, conscripting the elite from the elite to form a brigade of warriors to do battle against the supernatural. And now they’d gone mainstream, he’d said, spreading their influence into banking, finance and every level of government.
It sounded like the plot of a very bad movie, but my life was all about the incredible. As much as I wanted to discount such a threat, chalk it up to fairy tale and fantasy, I knew better. I’d long ago accepted that nothing was impossible in my world.
Slinging my backpack over one shoulder, I headed east through the cemetery as dusk seeped in from the river and settled like fine linen over the gravestones. The light had deepened to violet and soon the veil would be at its thinnest. The ghosts would come through, drawn to the living world by their hunger for human warmth and by the light inside of me that beckoned them.
Already I could feel the chill of the dead world in the breeze that undulated through the bushes and trees and in the frosty breath that blew down my collar. Zipping my jacket against the cold, I gazed up into those rippling leaves where I imagined ghost eyes peering back at me. Where I could hear unearthly voices whispering down to me.
Something happened then, unnerving even by my standards. The wind carried the whiff of a familiar scent and suddenly I was transported to a different time and place. I was trapped in a watery cocoon that had once kept me safe. The distant and rhythmic thumping that had once soothed me had gone silent and the soft walls that had cradled and protected me had become a death chamber. I knew nothing but hunger and darkness and a lurking presence that lured me deeper into the Gray, promising me succor and shelter as it claimed me for its own.
Whether memory or portent, the vision left me shaken. There were those who believed in a prebirth consciousness, and what I had just experienced seemed like a fleeting recall of my birth mother’s death and the terrifying aftermath of her silenced heartbeat. I knew that she had been murdered with me in her womb and so it wasn’t hard to imagine that such a dramatic moment could have somehow been imprinted upon my brain. But like my dream about my mother and aunt, why had it surfaced now?
For the first time in a long time, I thought of Asher Falls, the place where I had died and then been born. I thought of that lurking evil that had seduced and entrapped my birth father’s family for generations, the same malevolent presence that still lay hidden in the pastoral foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I now knew my time in that withering town had been carefully orchestrated, perhaps even preordained once my father’s rules were broken. I had been lured to that place where the evil was strongest when my defenses were at their weakest.
After escaping from Asher Falls, I’d chosen to believe that only there could I be touched by the evil. It needed the portal of my birthplace to influence my thoughts and behavior and to seduce me back to the other side. But the entity could watch over me from anywhere and I had no doubt that it waited for me still. It might even invade my dreams from time to time, but I was safe so long as I stayed away from Asher Falls. So long as I remained vigilant and kept my defenses strong.
But I could have sworn I sensed that fiendish presence now—or one like it—in the rising wind that tore at my clothes and whipped at my hair. In the distant howl that blew in with the twilight.
Peeling away the loose strands from my face, I clutched Rose’s key for protection against an unexpected assault.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I whispered.
You should be, the leaves seemed to taunt me.
I glanced out over the cemetery, skimming the headstones and peering into all the dark corners. The ghosts were coming through. I could see the shimmer of their manifestations and the faint glow of their auras in the fading light. I could hear the chatter of ethereal voices in my head, could feel the tug of all those unseen hands. I wondered if the evil was there among them, a nameless, formless presence that gathered strength from their energy and fed off their lost souls as it slithered over graves and around headstones, creeping closer. Ever closer.
It was bad enough that the ghost of a murdered child had latched on to me. Worse still that I found myself in the crosshairs of the deadly Congé. Now it seemed an old enemy may have come calling. An ancient evil that had watched me since before my birth, biding time until it could ooze underneath the veil while I basked in the false security of my evolving gift and heightened senses.
Tucking Rose’s key into my shirt, I hurried my steps, refusing to glance over my shoulder as I pulled open the iron gate and stepped through to the road. The ghost voices didn’t follow me as they once would have done, nor did the entities swarm me as they had in Kroll Cemetery. But I could hear a voice in my head, a familiar missive that grew stronger and more insistent as I moved away from the gate.
Mercy.
I could feel the ghost child’s presence behind me, but I didn’t turn. Instead, I took stock of my surroundings, ever mindful of Prosper Lamb’s warning that an unsavory element invaded the cemetery after dark. I didn’t want to be caught unaware by the living or the dead.
To my right, the narrow lane dead-ended at a broken barricade, behind which I could make out the silhouette of a car shrouded in kudzu. The vine grew over the fence and up a telephone phone, as insidious and voracious an invader as the gathering darkness behind me.
On my left, I could see a ramshackle house set back from the road, no doubt the caretaker’s property. I knew that Prosper Lamb lived near the cemetery, close enough that—according to him—I could holler if I got into trouble. But from my vantage point the place looked deserted. I saw no sign of life. No lights in the windows, no vehicle parked in the front. And yet I had the eerie sensation that eyes watched me from that house.
I swept my gaze along the sagging front porch and then over each window and up to the tin roof. My heart thudded as I caught sight of a figure outlined against the deepening horizon. A cold, dark thing that moved quickly along the peak, pausing briefly to glance in my direction before disappearing over the ridge board, long coat flapping in the wind.
Whether illusion or reality, there was familiarity in the silhouette’s stealth, in the way it melted so seamlessly into the darkness. I had seen that figure before, perhaps in Asher Falls, perhaps in a dream. I had seen it.
Prosper Lamb was right. People and animals were behaving not as they should. Someone was about to pass, but the door had opened too soon, allowing all manner of menaces to crawl through.
I started down the road toward the house, then stopped and whirled back to the cemetery. The pull from Woodbine was suddenly so powerful that I felt incapable of escape. No matter how much I craved the safety of my sanctuary, I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. Something held me fast.
The leaves started to whisper my name, the sound coiling like the coldest of tentacles around my brain. Amelia... Amelia...
Shaking off the shackles of my imagination, I backed away, proving to myself that I could bolt whenever I chose. Why I didn’t do so at that moment, I couldn�
�t quite say. Maybe I need to prove something.
“You’re not real,” I said aloud. “You can’t hurt me.”
I will protect you. All you need do is come back to me...
Once again I resisted the urge to put hands to my ears as another image came to me, born not of a memory but of the story Papa had told me of my birth. I had been cut from my dead mother’s womb, brought into the living world cold and silent until my grandmother had breathed life into my lungs, wresting me from the same evil that had tainted the Asher family for generations. The same evil that now sought a way into Woodbine Cemetery.
Come back to me...
I lifted my chin defiantly. “You can’t touch me here.”
As if to taunt me, the wind whipped open the gate and flung it back against the fence. I could see the crumbling necropolis inside, the crosses and angel wings eerily silhouetted against the horizon.
Come back to me...
I could hear the tinkle of a thousand chimes and the eerie moan of the rising wind. All around me leaves shivered and quaked.
Come back to me...
Suddenly, the ghost child appeared inside the cemetery. She was dressed in white, blonde hair streaming behind her, eyes softly glowing in the fading light. But there was something different about her manifestation. The rage and surly demeanor had dissipated and now the apparition seemed more pitiable and lost. She was beautiful to look at, so airy and fragile, but I didn’t trust this incarnation even as her innocence wrenched at me.
She made no attempt to follow me through the gate. It was almost as if she were chained to Woodbine, but she had once wandered as far as my garden and even farther to the restaurant’s courtyard. She seemed to possess the ability to manifest wherever she wished so what bound her to the cemetery at that moment?
As if sensing my confusion, she drifted closer, hovering just inside the gate. Her face was pale and translucent, her hands unbearably dainty as she reached out to me beseechingly.
I didn’t react to those outstretched hands. I wouldn’t.
But the lure of her manifestation was so powerful it was all I could do not to go to her.
I saw it then. A nameless, formless shadow. A creeping darkness that devoured the graves and monuments as it glided toward the ghost child. Toward me.
I smelled it then. The dank, fetid odor of its essence. Not the scent of death, but the perfume of pure evil.
I knew it then. Knew the tricks that it would employ to trap me, seduce me, even going so far as to use the ghost child as bait.
Grasping Rose’s key, I said harshly, “Get away from her.”
A foul gust knocked me back. I stumbled in the road as the gate slammed shut, blocking the apparition from my view.
The episode was over so quickly I wondered again if I had imagined the shadow, the smell, that sinister voice in my head. Perhaps my subconscious had conjured the formless entity as a way of warning me away from Woodbine Cemetery and all the old secrets that were buried there.
But a trace of that stench lingered, a revolting combination of decaying flesh, wormy earth and sulfur that seemed to seep through my pores like poison, tainting my bloodstream and infecting my senses. My stomach recoiled and I bent double, coughing and retching until I expelled the venom into the dirt.
I hunkered on the road, spent and trembling, as I waited for the nausea to pass. When the heaving subsided, I dug in my backpack for a bottle of water to rinse my mouth and a tissue to wipe my clammy face. I dug even deeper and more frantically for a tin of mints, popping a handful in my mouth to mask the putrid taste.
Had I not lingered searching for those mints, I might never have noticed the footprints in the soft earth before me. Faint tracks made by a woman’s shoes with a strange mark across one of the heels.
I rose on shaky legs and followed those footprints all the way to the ramshackle house where they halted at the edge of the yard just as they had halted that morning at the edge of the copse.
Sixteen
As I stood beside those footprints, I imagined the unknown visitor right there with me, gazing up at that dark, disintegrating house. With the approach of nightfall, the place took on an even more sinister air.
Was it haunted? Setting aside my belief that ghosts were attracted to people, not places, I could well believe the house had fallen prey to diabolical forces—from this world or the next. I was picking up some very strange vibes as I stood there.
Why had the cemetery visitor come here? I wondered. Or at the very least, why had she paused to stare across the yard at the crumbling house? What was her connection to this place, to Prosper Lamb and to the unnamed crib grave in Woodbine Cemetery?
I felt a strange kinship with the visitor even though I didn’t know her name or if our paths had ever crossed. But coincidences were rare in my world, and a case could be made that everything happened for a reason. Even this creepy old house could be a piece of my larger puzzle.
The light was almost gone by now, but enough filtered down through the trees that I could easily trace the clapboard facade. The structure was narrow in the Charleston style with both front and side entrances and wooden shutters over the windows that could be closed during inclement weather.
Rickety steps led up to a porch that ran the width of the house. Long windows flanked the front entrance, but I could detect no movement through the glass, no prying eyes behind the lace curtains. A rusted-out car rested on blocks in the driveway, and the yard was littered with various castaways. By all appearances, the place had long been abandoned to spiders and lizards, but I couldn’t shake the notion that someone was inside watching me at that very moment. I only hoped it was the caretaker.
I lifted my gaze to scan the shingles. I saw nothing on the roof. No predatory shadows. No menacing silhouettes. And yet...
The porch swing creaked in the breeze and I scampered to the other side of the road, hiding in the deep shadows while I continued to reconnoiter. I told myself there was no reason to linger. Even if Prosper Lamb did live there, he might not welcome an uninvited guest. There was no guarantee he would tell me anything more about Woodbine Cemetery than he’d already disclosed upon our first meeting.
But surely he’d had a specific reason for believing that a guilty conscience had facilitated the restoration. I had a feeling he knew the identity of the donor and he might even know the person who had visited the cemetery that morning. He most definitely knew about the birds.
But all those questions and the endless speculation might best be saved for another time. I’d had a long day with too many dramatic encounters and unnerving discoveries. I needed to be home in the shelter of my safe haven to regroup. I was already late. Angus would be waiting for me at the door, eager for his dinner and an evening walk.
Still hugging the shadows, I turned to leave. I even took a few steps down the road toward the front entrance of the cemetery when the faint strands of a familiar melody drifted out to the street. Not the ephemeral tinkling of the wind chimes this time, but the scratchy sound of a needle in the groove of an old record.
The sound was faint but the tune enveloped me. I had come to think of it as the ghost child’s song, but as I closed my eyes, a memory broke loose and I realized the melody had a more personal association. Once more I was transported to a different time and place. I was a child now, curled up on a rug beneath an open window as I listened to my mother and aunt out on the front porch. The house was so quiet I could hear the creak of their rockers and the tinkle of ice in their glasses. The scent of roses, dreamy and hypnotic, drifted in from the nearby cemetery. I lay half asleep, cocooned by familiar surroundings but still lonely. Still alone.
“That song—” My aunt sounded stricken. “I haven’t heard it in ages. Where is it coming from?”
“It’s the radio,” Mama told her. “I’ll go turn it off.”
“No, don’t. I want to hear it.” She hummed along for a moment. “I remember dancing to that song by moonlight once. It was the most romantic night of my life. We’d gone to the beach and the evening was so warm and balmy I didn’t even need a shawl. He took off my shoes so they wouldn’t be ruined and I can still remember the way the sand felt between my toes. I can still smell the woodbine from the sprigs I tucked in my hair before I left the house.” I heard a shiver in her voice. “Honeysuckle was once my favorite scent, but I can’t bear it now. Even after all these years that smell always takes me back.”
“Father chopped down the vines after he sent you away,” Mama said.
“The garden was never the same without it.”
“Nothing was ever the same. The house was so quiet after you’d gone and I was so lonely. I used to sneak into your room after Mother and Father had gone to bed and listen to your music. It made me feel close to you. Father caught me one night and flew into an awful rage. He broke all of your records and gave away your phonograph. I don’t remember there being music in our house ever again.”
“Or laughter,” my aunt said sadly. “Oh, Etta, we were both so young to have suffered so much heartache. I wonder how we stood it. At least you had Caleb and later Amelia.”
“You could have married and had a family of your own,” Mama said. “I always wondered why you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t. Not after what I did. I didn’t deserve happiness.”
“What nonsense,” Mama scolded. “You always get maudlin after you’ve been to the cemetery.”
“It wipes me out for days, but I can’t not go.”
“I know. But don’t think about it anymore, at least for the rest of the evening. Let’s just sit here and watch the moon come up. Pretend that we’re young and innocent again and we have our whole lives ahead of us...”
The Awakening Page 13
