Avenged

by Lynn Carthage

  * * *

  When I find Phoebe, she’s cursing the influence of Raven. “It’s not Steven’s fault,” she’s telling Miles. “Raven has put some kind of spell on him. He loves my mom.”

  Miles says nothing. I wonder, should I tell them it looks like Steven really is responsible for Dee’s and Alexander’s deaths? I worry that if I do, she won’t be able to recover enough to be helpful. She’s already upset thinking he’s guilty only of intended adultery. Maybe I’ll tell Miles later, when we have some time alone. But for now, my focus is narrow: we have to find those vials.

  “That evil little bitch,” says Phoebe. “My mom’s had enough to deal with. Having her husband cheat on her with jailbait is just . . .”

  “You’re right,” I say when her voice trails off. “Steven’s innocent and this is all Raven’s doing. She’s trying to manipulate things so she benefits from the prophecy.”

  Miles puts his head in his hands. I’m lying and he knows it. Anytime a grown man is involved with a girl, it’s wrong and his fault. He’s the adult.

  “So we have to figure out the prophecy before her and get Steven out of her grasp,” I continue. “And the key to that is the vials.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s the only way. So we have to look at the manor blueprints. Get Tabby to tell Steven to pull them out for us. Then we can rescue him from Raven.”

  “Thank you,” she says. She gives me a weak smile, and I’m pleased that she was so easy to convince.

  “No time to waste,” I say.

  * * *

  We have decided, the three of us, that the word to focus upon is blueprints. So this is the word Phoebe is firmly and insistently supplying to Tabby’s ear. Tabby reacts as if a housefly keeps buzzing near her earlobe.

  “It’s me, Tabby,” she says finally in exasperation. “I’m always here. You know that. So hear me!”

  But Tabitha instead asks her mother for permission to watch television, which is granted, and then Phoebe must struggle over the loud voices of actors on this incredible contraption.

  “Anyone else want to try?” asks Phoebe glumly, looking from Miles to me.

  “She never knew me,” I say.

  “Why not?” says Miles. “It’s worth a shot.” He kneels next to Tabby and begins the monotonous repetition. I watch her face carefully. She’s hearing something, all right, since she keeps twitching away from that affected ear. But she seems bent on ignoring it.

  Is it possible Tabby is knowingly cutting off contact with her dead sister?

  Perhaps it is too painful for her, little dear girl.

  “Break it up into two words,” I suggest. “Blue and prints. Any child knows the color blue.”

  “Blue,” says Miles firmly.

  Tabby sighs, a deep, strangely adult sound. “Boo,” she repeats.

  Phoebe jumps up, elated. “You did it, Miles! You got to her!”

  “Prints,” Miles says.

  There’s a very long pause. “Pince,” says Tabby.

  “That’s right, sweetie! Blue. Prints.”

  “Boo. Pince.”

  “Okay, great. Go tell Steven.”

  Obediently, Tabby gets up and goes over to her father. “Boo. Pince,” she says carefully as she crawls up into his lap.

  I watch Phoebe’s face. She’s clearly struggling not to be enraged at Steven. Placing all the blame at Raven’s door is helping, but not completely.

  Steven buries his face into her hair in a long, sweet hug. “Hello, adorable,” he says. “What was that you said?”

  “Boo.”

  “Ooh, don’t scare me!” he says.

  “Boo,” she says.

  “But I don’t want to be scared!” he says, thinking he’s playing along.

  “Boo . . . boo pants,” she says.

  “Prints!” shouts Phoebe. She gets control of herself and goes over to say the word in Tabby’s ear.

  “Pince,” amends Tabby.

  Steven’s laughing at her cuteness, and I see Tabby’s frustration increasing. She’s already doing something she doesn’t want to do, and now he can’t seem to hear her message.

  “Blueprints,” repeats Phoebe, and her little sister does her best. “Boo pince.”

  “Ooh, a blue prince?” says Phoebe’s mum. “That’s a neat thing to think about. His crown has sapphires in it?”

  Phoebe gives her mum the kind of look I believe would not have been abided by my own mother. Disbelief mixed with scorn. It is not a pleasant look, and not one her mother deserves.

  “Seriously? She’s going with blue prince instead of blueprints?” says Phoebe.

  “It is so hard when two things sound like each other,” I murmur.

  “Boo pince!” screams Tabby at the top of her lungs.

  That gets everyone’s attention. Can Tabby hear us? Is she constantly distracted by the two conversations going on, one “real” and understood and heard by the living, and the other interrupting, confusing, distracting?

  “She’s giving us a message,” says Phoebe’s mother. “It’s something from Phoebe.” She kneels at Steven’s feet and looks intensely in Tabby’s face. “What does that mean, sweetie? Can your sister tell us more?”

  “Floor plans,” says Phoebe promptly.

  “Foor pans,” says Tabby.

  “Four pans . . . ?” Phoebe’s mum looks at Steven with a huge frown. “I want to understand . . .”

  Tabby bursts into tears. “Oh, sweetie, it’s all right, it’s all right,” says Phoebe’s mum. “It’s fine.”

  “I understand,” says Steven. “She’s saying blueprints and floor plans. Phoebe must want to see them for the manor. She’s onto something.”

  “Yes!” Phoebe exults. She looks at Miles wildly, and he flashes her the kind of smile that makes my heart leap. If only it were aimed at me.

  “It’s fine, Tabby, please don’t cry,” pleads her mum, her own eyes full of tears. “I love you, Phoebe,” she says to the air.

  “I’ll get them now,” says Steven. “I’ll spread them over the table. If you can take her, Anne?”

  “Of course.” Phoebe’s mum pulls Tabby off his lap into a long hug. He stands and looks around the room.

  “Are you here, Phoebe?” he asks. “I love you.”

  A long pause ensues. I’m waiting for her to say it back, even if he can’t hear it, but she just can’t do it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  While I was at my bath last Saturday, my keys were taken, for I heard them jingling. I rose and shouted and heard the clink of them falling back onto the table, and although I hastened out as quickly as I could, the culprit had long since fled. This is not a crime of mere mischief, but a dreadful and dire one that will lead to the immediate punishment and sacking of the offender. If you’ve heard talk of such a prank, come to me with your intelligence, for I do not consider it a light transgression.

  —Miss Sneldam’s address to the gathered staff

  The plans, carefully spread by Steven onto the dining room table, are written in a spidery hand, archaic even to my eye. I stare at the outlines of rooms I once worked in, bedchambers where I hauled coal and scraped ashes and cinders into a dustbin. I see rendered as parallel lines the staircases where I scurried up and down to do Madame Arnaud’s bidding.

  The blueprints show towers at the top of the house. I had never been in them, only seen them from the ground, glass and iron that seemed to reflect the sun in a blinding way.

  We look at the cellars, where musty-smelling rooms housed hundreds of wine bottles, where we stored vegetables and twine-wrapped meats. Phoebe trails a finger over the passageways that, in true life, haven’t been walked in lifetimes.

  “What is this?” asks Miles. He points to where we can see the faint edge of another piece of paper laid atop the map. The ink on this paper is a slightly different color, perhaps added much later so time aged it differently, or perhaps inked with a different batch. The paper shows three chambers, marked as storage.

&nb
sp; “What do you think is under there?” I ask. “Is it significant, or simply an area where an error was made?”

  “One way to find out,” says Phoebe.

  We intention to the dark cellars. It is black as pitch and I can’t see a thing. I hear Miles utter a foul word.

  “We need light,” says Phoebe glumly. “Time to go talk to Tabby again.”

  “Wait,” I say. “In the parts of the cellars I had been into before, there were flares set in the walls and here and there the maids left boxes of lucifers tucked in between the stones. If no one has moved them, they should still be here.”

  “Lucifers?” she asks, her voice suddenly close. She has moved toward me in the dark.

  “I think she means matches,” says Miles.

  I wait. It’s so dark I nearly intention away, but I force myself to stay calm and remain. Nothing can hurt me now, but I still feel the tremulous waves of fear rush over me.

  “I think I have it,” says Phoebe. She rustles around and then suddenly I hear the zzzppshh of a lucifer coming to light. A glow now surrounds her face, floating in the black like a lotus sitting on dark water. She looks around, spies a flare and lights it. Now we can see our surroundings, the arched stone passageway of the cellar.

  “This is where the three storage rooms are,” says Miles. “Let’s see what’s stored inside.”

  Phoebe tries each door but they are locked.

  “Any idea where the maids hid the keys?” she asks me.

  “You might try the lintel?”

  She does but there are no hidden keys.

  “Another dead end,” Miles observes.

  “Do not lose hope so quickly now,” I advise. “There must be a way inside.”

  Of course we could intention—but then we wouldn’t have the flare to see with.

  “Didn’t someone have a large ring of keys?” Miles asks. “Jangling around like you see on Downton Abbey?”

  “The head housekeeper did,” I agree. “But when the house was abandoned, whatever did she do with them?”

  “Probably threw them down a well,” says Phoebe. “Or the . . . whatever you call a bathroom.”

  “The privy,” I say, and for a second I indulge in a soft laugh, thinking of stiff-mannered Miss Sneldam detaching her ring and letting it go down into the malodorous pit. She’d always been so firm with her underlings, and yet we knew she harbored affection for us despite our shortcomings.

  “Phoebe, can you kick the door down?” asks Miles. “It’s probably half rotted with all the damp down here anyway.”

  And thus ensues a period of time in which Miles winks endlessly at me and tries to not let Phoebe see his bouts of laughter that bend him double as she kicks the door and throws her shoulder against it like a demon in a fit. I find I must succumb to merriment, too, and I am far less proficient at hiding it than he. Phoebe whirls around and catches us.

  “Glad I’m amusing you while I’m working my butt off trying to break down the door.”

  “It looks like things are more solid down here than we might’ve thought,” says Miles.

  “Can I just say how much it sucks being the only person on this team who can touch things?” she demands.

  “You can say it, but we don’t believe it for a second,” says Miles. “You were clearly a successful door kicker in life.”

  “Why do I get the feeling door kicker is some weird English insult?”

  “It’s so sad you can never seem to trust me,” says Miles silkily, and at that the fun ends for me.

  “Cannot you use a bent nail?” I ask impatiently.

  “Throw one at me and I’ll try it,” she says.

  “I’m sure she would, happily, if she could,” says Miles.

  “Look in the dust along the floor,” I say. “Surely something must have dropped down there that we can use. No one ever wielded a broom on these shadows, I’m sure.”

  I crouch and look, hoping for some dull glint of something we can use.

  “Keys don’t simply fall to the ground because you want them to,” says Phoebe.

  “Oh no?” I counter. I point. “This looks to be exactly that.”

  “Are you effin’ kidding me?” Miles asks.

  He peers into the gloom until Phoebe’s hand plucks the dusty bit of bronze and wipes it off. “It’s a key, all right,” she says.

  It doesn’t work on the first door or the middle door. Just as I am grinding my teeth with frustration, the key moves within the lock of the third door. “It’s turning!” says Phoebe.

  Of course, the door sticks and again Phoebe applies vengeance to its wooden affront, but this time it works and the door reluctantly opens with a groan and a scrape against the stone floor.

  With Phoebe leading us, we enter.

  The space is large. In fact, I turn to look at the door we have entered through, and note that all three doors lead to the same space. Just as the map intimated, the three storage rooms are not as they seem and are instead one cavernous room.

  There are no furnishings, no windows, no adornment of any kind.

  “Do you hear anything, Miles?” asks Phoebe. “Are the vials singing?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “I hear something faint.”

  He kneels at one of the flagstones in the middle of the room. “It’s coming from here,” he says.

  There’s nothing special about the stone; no one but Miles would ever notice it to be different from all the others. Phoebe puts the flare into a wall sconce and then crouches and touches the stone.

  “Is it a trip to a secret door?” she wonders aloud.

  “Give it all your weight,” says Miles.

  She presses as hard as she can, to no avail. Then she runs her fingers around the edges of the stone.

  “Perhaps you are meant to lift it up?” I ask.

  She tries.

  “It’s like a steering wheel,” she observes. “I’ll just . . . drive.” She grasps the stone on either side with both hands and then twists. The stone begrudgingly moves with a scraping sound. It rotates until it is released, and she pushes it onto the stones next to it.

  “Nice driving,” comments Miles.

  “Better than yours,” she says.

  There’s a moment where Miles and I both inhale, taken aback at her audacity to refer so lightly to a horrible memory in his life.

  Where the stone had been, there is darkness. Phoebe retrieves the flare and tries to light the vastness. “There’s a staircase,” she says.

  She goes first with the light, and then me, and then Miles. The staircase is a narrow, grim, stone affair without banisters. It twists around so that I lose Phoebe’s light each time she circles the main shaft of the stairs, a brute column. It’s worse for Miles, so I reach back and take his hand to guide him.

  We descend down, the air growing colder and mustier. I feel surrounded by frigid space; if I were yet breathing, I believe I’d see plumes of vapor emanating from my nose and mouth.

  Finally, we reach the ground. Phoebe walks in a wide circle with the torch, but we can’t see the limit of the walls. The chamber’s vast.

  “What is this place?” I ask. My voice sounds small and forlorn.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s storage,” says Miles.

  “Let’s walk further,” says Phoebe, and we follow her into the blackness, lit only by the pool of light that moves with us. In the distance, I hear water dripping, and then a louder sound as we grow closer. The walls glitter, and I see a grotto where a waterfall flows over moss-covered rocks. We are subterranean. The walls aren’t walls; they’re earth.

  “This place is . . . it’s not good,” says Miles.

  I realize we’re still holding hands as his tightens. “Maybe we should return,” he says.

  “We have to know,” says Phoebe.

  I feel the unholiness radiating from the earthen walls. This place was where horrible things happened, and somehow far worse than what Madame Arnaud did seemingly miles above us in the manor. This is o
lder, more settled in its malevolence.

  As we continue forward, we come across a stone table of sorts, elevated above a dinner table’s height.

  We approach it.

  “It hurts my ears,” says Miles.

  “What do you hear?” I ask.

  “The lamenting,” he says. “That thread of sound I’ve heard ever since I first came to the manor. It’s emanating from here.”

  “From this room?”

  “From this . . . thing.”

  “But it’s not the Sangreçu vials?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so.”

  As we get closer, I see that the flat stone contains several holes and tubes that run from the table down into dug-out reservoirs in the floor. It looks like the tubes are meant to carry away blood, I think.

  I look for bloodstains and see them. This table was not a place of innocence. People were slain here.

  I believe this is an altar for ritual sacrifice.

  “It’s evil,” says Miles, and as soon as the word passes his lips, I begin running back toward the staircase although it’s now hidden to me in the gloom.

  “Use intention!” Miles shouts behind me.

  With a vast sense of relief, I remember that I don’t have to run through darkness. I hurl myself mentally to a place I know like the back of my hand.

  I’m in the meadow now, and it’s past twilight, darkening quickly.

  Miles is there with me, his breath ragged.

  We look at each other with heartbreaking solemnity. Phoebe didn’t come with us.

  But there’s no way we’re going back there.

  * * *

  “This is a beautiful place,” I say almost to myself. “I love the long grass rippling in the wind.”

  “It feels like a world away,” says Miles.

  This is what the earth offers, I think to myself. Humans do terrible things, but the grass keeps accepting the gentle persuasion of the breeze, and a tree lets its leaves flicker for the same. I will always find peace in nature’s wholesome offerings.

  “Hello! So glad to see some others in these godforsaken woods.” I jolt at the too-loud voice right in my ear. “Do you know how to get back to the village?”

  The middle-aged woman is modern, wearing a nubby beige sweater and loose-fitting jeans. “Did you see that creepy man? My name is Amey Adkins, by the way.” I bite my lip. We haven’t been watching Steven, and he must’ve snuck back out. I’m a fool . . . and it’s my fault this woman is dead. I want to sink to my knees and howl.