Was I afraid? I was afraid for Michael but not for myself. He was my only reason for living. My father had Nonie. I had lost Rachel, or rather I had never had Rachel. She had caused me the worst pain that I could imagine. Perhaps I should have felt some relief knowing that I hadn’t been responsible for Eva’s death, but I got no comfort from the fact. And Press. I hadn’t really had him either. He had belonged to Rachel. But a part of me didn’t wholly believe that. Rachel, in her hubris, imagined that Press would never use her in the way he had used me. Press wanted something from her, and I assume it was the same thing he wanted from me. She had given him a daughter, but maybe she would try to give him a son. Like me, Rachel was a womb.
There was too much stillness, given the number of people I knew were in the room. Would they kill me? Kill J.C.? I didn’t know where she was. It had been easy enough for Press to fake the circumstances of Eva’s death. How much easier would it be to excuse my death? Poor, mad, careless Charlotte who had let her daughter die. Did all these other people know that Rachel had killed Eva? What did Press really know?
Slowly, slowly the drape was pulled from my body.
“Charlotte.”
How often had that voice called my name? From the hallway. From the other side of my bed. Sensuous in its depth. Even now I hear it, long after I last saw Press.
“Charlotte.”
Even from the new depths of my loathing for him, my body, my treacherous body responded.
He walked into my view.
Press was naked. He seemed broader, taller than he had ever seemed before, and the black hair on his chest and groin was opaque in the dim light. I recognized my husband even though he, too, was wearing a half-mask. How foolish and strange. But my life was so strange. Why shouldn’t everyone around me have been wearing masks? Only Rachel had shown her face. That was like her. She would want everyone to see her. It was her lifeblood to be seen.
Somewhere behind Press, someone was pounding a stick, a walking stick perhaps, on the floor. Slowly, at first, but then the tempo increased.
The intense lethargy that had been like a weight over my entire body was beginning to abate. Whatever Jack had injected me with was wearing off.
I had witnessed Olivia’s rape. Her ultimate humiliation. My terror lay in wondering if Press would be the only man, the only person to use me that night. I felt the force of the masked stares. I had witnessed their debasement. But as long as they kept on their masks, I would try my hardest to forget, to erase them from my mind. If I survived.
“Charlotte.”
Three times. The third time Press spoke my name, it sounded different. Final.
The stick continued its beat, reverberating in my body. The anticipation of the circle gathered around me was a palpable, hungry thing. Rachel, however, looked unhappy. Even in my fear, I felt some small satisfaction in that.
Press climbed a stair to reach me. What was there in him that was compelling him to do this in front of all these people?
I closed my eyes, unwilling to witness my own humiliation. As he entered me, the onlookers were silent, but I’m certain I felt the house shudder beneath me.
My husband had made love to me many times, but never with such slow deliberation. His breath quickened, and the breath of the circle of people quickened along with it.
Then something in the air changed. I opened my eyes. The room turned viciously cold and one of the women cried out as the air around us crystallized into something like snow—not falling, but simply hanging midair around us. The crystals stung, clinging to our skin. Press, apparently unaffected, continued. My body was now frozen inside and out. The pounding of the stick faltered only for a moment, then also kept on.
People began to fall away, alarmed. Only Rachel stayed. Her eyes had widened in her bizarrely made-up face, and her look of displeasure had turned to fascination.
The house shuddered again with a tremendous groan, and the walls of the theater bowed inward, creating a web of cracks across the long ceiling and causing the chandeliers to swing wildly. Now there were more cries from the others in the room, frightened exclamations that the doors couldn’t be opened. Press’s breath was hot in my ear and I knew he wouldn’t last much longer. Rachel leaned forward, rapt. Over her shoulder I could see Jack, his mask insufficient to hide his crown of white hair. It was Jack who held the stick. Jack who was keeping time despite the chaos around him. The trusses above the ceiling shrieked with strain.
Then it was no longer Press laboring over me, and I felt a sharp pain deep inside. The man wore the same mask, but the hand that gripped my shoulder so violently felt icy and thin. Thinner than that of any other human on earth. Below the mask, the face was mottled and scarred. The lips were nothing but two faded, cracked lines of gray flesh.
Behind the mask, the eyeholes were empty. There was no life there, no humanity. There was nothing. I opened my mouth and screamed.
I retreated inside myself as deeply as I could in that lifetime of minutes. Far, far back to a time that was made up mostly of stories I told myself about my mother. I was in her bedroom, lying on her bed, playing with the cat that had been hers when she married my father. What was the name? The name? The sounds, the pain were bleeding through and I tried to remember the cat. Fredo? Frederick? No, it was Alfredo. Creamy white with azure marble eyes and a tail nearly as long as my arm. My mother kneeling near the bed, petting the cat, talking to it, telling it to be gentle with me. And another day, the cat had scratched me, and I heard my father’s voice, loud, as he pitched it across the room, angry. No, not that day. I needed another day to block out the sounds and the hideous smell of the grave.
So much pain! Those eyes, the empty eyes stared back at me, even when my eyelids were closed. I would see them forever. I tried to think of the back yard, playing in the grass, waiting for my mother, the sun on my face, the rough surface of the patio bricks beneath my small hands. Looking toward the driveway and the garage. The garage door was open. No!
There was no safe place for me. No escape from the thing that had been Press ill-using my body. Digging into my shoulder, splitting open the inside of me as though he would stab me until I bled.
I opened my eyes once again.
The thing’s mouth was slack beneath the mask, its putrid breath a fog between us in the frigid room, and I finally recognized it.
My tongue worked inside my mouth, dry and thick. I thought of water. Clear water.
My voice came, but it was only a whisper.
“Olivia. Please, Olivia.”
The creature didn’t seem to hear when the house groaned again. (I knew what it was. Who it was. I had seen him/it before, hadn’t I? He was worse now. More decayed, barely more than articulated bones hung with rotted flesh. He was no longer human, if he had ever been.)
My shoulder ached where he gripped me and my insides felt as though they were on fire.
Then came the scent of roses. Olivia.
I had never had a truly murderous thought until that moment. It was a thought wrapped in the heavy, languid scent of early June roses, the bower of white and red and yellow of Olivia’s garden. With the scent, I felt the blood flowing back into my limbs, and my revulsion for the creature panting above me grew, and I stopped being afraid.
At the edges of my vision, I saw climbing rose vines chasing from the pedestal where I lay. They ran over the carpets, blooming, blooming, blooming, their petals a violent white against their thick green leaves and snaking vines. They ran to the corners, crowding, fighting to cover the walls, the windows, the floors. They were my hope: both innocence and death. I knew they meant death as well as salvation. Finally the room was engulfed, the scent overpowering. It was only then that I realized that the vines were coming from my own hands—a strange and terrifying gift.
As the roses grew, the demon above me flickered and faded away and there was only Press. The grimace on his face, though, was nearly as hideous as the creature’s. Perhaps it had been Press all along, and in my fear I ha
d hallucinated Randolph/the creature.
If God is truly merciful, He will someday let me forget the moment I chose to kill my husband. To punish him for letting our daughter die, and for every act of cruelty he’d committed since Olivia had died. With my blood freed from whatever numbing drug that Jack had used, I could lift my hands, and they were no longer my hands, but leafy vines studded with thorns. While my husband stared, horrified, into my eyes, I raised my hands to his powerful neck and pressed them against his skin. At that moment there was mercy, for I felt nothing as I did it—neither the piercing of the thorns nor the pain of killing someone I loved. As he screamed, the light in the eyes behind the mask flared, then dimmed. Blood erupted from him, raining down on me.
I might have dropped my hands at that, but I found myself filled with a sense of something—someone—who was not me. Neither was it Olivia or Eva. Something to do with the ballroom, the hundreds of images of Japanese women. No. Just one woman, over and over. And the strange, sharp scent of chrysanthemums. Why chrysanthemums? There were cherry blossoms on the ballroom walls. Whoever it was overwhelmed me with their rage, and that rage flew from me, propelling Press across the big room and crushing his body high against the wall of thorn-covered vines.
He fell.
As I watched, the vines covering the room melted away like snow under the noon sun. Press lay slumped on the floor, unmoving.
Chapter 43
One More Funeral
One more death, one more funeral. No one in Old Gate was surprised. October had become November, frigid with rare early snow that fell on our hats and coats as we stood by Press’s open grave. I had considered making the service private, but everyone in town would have come anyway. Afterwards, they filed up our drive in their cars and trucks, led by the sheriff’s cruiser, ready for their fill of funeral meats. Only there was no Terrance, stiff and formal and alarming to strangers in the way of church bishops and Boris Karloff, to greet them and serve them sweetened iced tea. After he and Press and the other man took me into the theater, I didn’t see him again. He hadn’t been in costume, and I was certain he wasn’t one of the partygoers. After Press’s body was taken away, I discovered he’d slipped away from Bliss House like a thief in the night. His room was empty of every belonging, the surfaces thick with undisturbed layers of dust that might have been there for decades.
No one ever tried to find him. No one cared. I asked Marlene, who had slept two rooms away from him and worked beside him for over ten years, if she knew where he might have gone. There was a moment—not even a second long—when she seemed not to know who I was talking about. She blinked.
“Did you ever see him eat?” she asked. Puzzled, I told her that I hadn’t. “Every time he sat down, it was as though he was afraid he would never have another meal. I’ve never seen the like in a grown man. Then he would do his dishes and get on with his job. I hope that wherever he’s gone, there’s someone to feed him.” That single, astonishing thing was all she had to say about him.
She stayed with us for another year, until she married a man from her church who owned the butcher shop in town. I couldn’t blame her for anything Press had done, or what she had believed of him. She seemed unaffected by the strange things that happened in the house. I envied her that.
“No sherry, no Scotch,” I told her as we made plans for the funeral. “It will just make people stay longer.”
But after the guests began to arrive I changed my mind, and had her put out sherry, Scotch, and other liquor as well. If anyone thought it was suspiciously like a celebration rather than a wake, I didn’t care. Bliss House had been a place of sadness for too long. It was time to open the house up and let other influences in. We had all had enough of Press and his dark hand over our lives.
I had Michael back. (Later that terrible night, I had found him safely asleep at the orchardkeeper’s house, with a confused and upset Shelley.) Nonie had returned with my father, though he remained ensconced in a chair in the library during the funeral service, his casted leg resting on an ottoman. I had turned the library into a temporary bedroom so he didn’t have to use the stairs.
Bliss House was mine, as much as it could belong to anybody.
“He’s dead.” Hugh Walters had gently lifted the half-mask from Press’s face and closed his eyes. It was a peculiar thing to do, given that he was a policeman and Press was a victim, but it sent a signal that he knew Press’s death couldn’t be handled as a regular crime. Hugh’s pleasant face looked bewildered. I had liked him, and almost felt sorry for him until I remembered how many crimes he must have covered up for Press. How he had stood by like the others while I lay drugged and exposed.
J.C. spoke from halfway across the room, where she stood against a wall, her hands pressed behind her as though she were ready to launch herself into one of the windows opposite. Her voice was now clear, despite the injuries to her face.
“Obviously, he had a terrible accident.”
Rachel, who was clinging to Jack, gasped.
“That’s insane. She killed him.” She pointed at me. “She’s got a goddamn knife. Look at her!”
I looked down. The jeweled peacock knife was in my right hand. Both the blade and my hand were covered with blood. A later glance at one of the tall, elaborately framed mirrors standing against the walls would reveal that my tunic sweater and bare legs were also bloody.
“You bitch!”
Jack held Rachel by the arms while she screamed unrepeatable profanities at me.
It was the roses I remembered. Not the knife. I knew that I was somehow responsible for the blood covering my husband and my own body. Had the roses been my own delusion? Certainly the shaking of the house had not. It had driven everyone else from the room and out of the house. Both the pocket door to the hall and the door to the outer stairway stood open—one to the distant light of the chandelier, the other to the night.
It certainly hadn’t been I who had propelled him across the room.
“That’s not what I saw,” J.C. said, calmly. “I saw him fall off the stage, drunk, onto one of the tools the workmen left behind.”
I could have wept with relief at her words. If only I had trusted her before it had become too late.
Now Rachel turned her attention to J.C. But before she could get a word out, Jack jerked her backwards.
“Be quiet, Rachel. Just shut up!”
He looked like a teenager playing dress-up in his silver leotard and tights. His wings were still stiff and cartoonish. There was something more than anger in his face. There was fear. Press was no longer there to protect them.
Hugh stood up.
“Yes. That’s exactly right.” He walked toward Jack and Rachel. “You need to get her under control, Jack. In fact, just take a quick look at him.” Here, he inclined his head toward Press. “Call the death. We’ll get a certificate later. Let’s get this place cleaned up and I’ll get the coroner and the funeral-home people here.”
“The coroner?” J.C. had crossed the room to come and stand beside me. When she touched my back, I felt myself shaking beneath her hand. I wasn’t sure I would ever stop shaking.
“It won’t be a problem.” Hugh’s voice was low. Not quite ashamed, but neither was it triumphant. “If that sounds good to you, Charlotte.”
I nodded. Press was dead, and yet his influence was still making sure that everything would be taken care of. No one who had been there that night would want it known that they’d been there—or what they’d been up to with Press and, earlier, Zion Heaster. They would want to keep their secrets and, in return, would keep mine.
After the wake, J.C. found me alone in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the butler’s pantry. There had been a frost the night before, and all of the more tender-leafed herbs in the garden outside the window had succumbed. The wilted plants were like slender, ruined creatures fighting to stay upright. I’d been thinking of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit and the animals I’d planned to paint on the walls of the ballroom. I w
ouldn’t bother to try to have it painted again. The house obviously didn’t want the room to change. Whatever—whoever—was attached to it would never let it.
J.C. put a glass of Scotch along with a small glass of sherry on the table, and touched me on the shoulder as she sat down. Her makeup was heavy, but the swelling had abated so that her cheek and lips looked almost normal again. She kept her voice low. “I know we’ve said just about everything, Charlotte. Thank you for forgiving me.”
I nodded. We had said enough the night before as we sat talking in the morning room until nearly two A.M. She was ashamed of her affair with Press but had the dignity not to try to excuse it in light of the bizarre changes that had come over him during the past months. He’d brought her down, secretly, from the hotel a couple of times for the “parties” in Rachel and Jack’s barn, which explained Rachel’s animosity toward her. Of course Rachel would have been jealous. Hearing that, I confessed that I was rather glad she had pretended not to remember Rachel’s name during our chance meeting at The Grange (had it only been the week before?). At that point, anything that made Rachel miserable was fine with me.
But it wasn’t until she told me that Press had hinted that he was going to eventually kill me that I understood how much J.C. had risked. When she told him he was going too far, that it all needed to stop, he had beaten her up and, with Terrance’s help, taken her to the rooms below the house. I never learned the details of what he’d done to her down there over those two days. The distant, guarded look in her eyes told me enough. When I asked how she’d broken free, she said that she believed Olivia had somehow helped her to escape. Knowing all that Olivia had done for me, how could I doubt her?
“Everything’s packed. The car from The Grange will pick me up at two.” J.C. looked at her watch. “Are you sure you and Michael don’t want to get away for a while? The offer’s still open if you want to stay at my cottage on the hotel grounds. I’ll be back in New York in two days. No one will bother you.”
Charlotte’s Story Page 28
