by Wendy Webb
The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back and opening my eyes, with Drew, Adrian, and Mrs. Sinclair kneeling beside me.
“Does she need a cool washcloth?” Mrs. Sinclair asked. “Would that help? I’ll ring for Marion.”
“What happened?” I coughed out.
“It appears that you fainted,” Adrian said.
I shook my head from side to side.
“Don’t worry, I was here to catch you,” Drew said, smiling at me and taking my hand in his.
I pulled my hand away, scrambling to my feet and backing into a corner of the room.
“Oh, darling,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Don’t react like this. I know you’re frightened. But the truth was coming out on its own, especially with what happened last night. I wish it had stayed hidden until you were ready to hear it.”
“I don’t think this conversation is such a good idea anymore,” Drew said. “She’s obviously upset. We should have let her remember on her own.”
“I hoped she would,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “But when she didn’t—the ruse of it was too much. All of us pretending we had never seen her before. One of us was going to slip, sooner than later. And then what?”
“And the incident last night—you have to agree, Andrew, that the whole issue is coming to a head now,” Adrian said.
These people were obviously insane. All of them. I glanced across the room, calculating how many steps it would take to get from the east salon to the front door. I had to find a way out of here. I didn’t care that it was the middle of winter and we were in the wilderness. I’d prefer my chances with the wolves and the Windigo than staying with this lot.
“I want to leave,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
“Maybe she’s right,” Drew said. “Maybe we should continue this at another time. When she’s ready.”
I shook my head, backing farther into my corner. “There’s not going to be another time,” I said. “You all seem to believe that I was at Havenwood years ago, presiding over some event that changed all of your lives. Ruined all of your lives. I wasn’t. You’re mistaken. I’m not that person.” My body was shaking, and tears were stinging my eyes. “You’ve got the wrong person. I would never take part in a séance. Never.”
Drew was walking toward me, then, his palms up, his expression pleading. “Julia,” Drew said, his voice low. “Please. I know this is confusing. But remember that you trust me. Nothing has changed from earlier today. Everything is exactly the same.”
“How can you say that?” I asked, looking at each of them. “Nothing is the same! Nothing at all.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not right, Julia. Believe me, nothing has changed.”
“Really?” I said, a shrill tone in my voice. “An hour ago, I was living at a beautiful, albeit haunted, estate with people I was starting to love.” As I said that word and thought of the afternoon I had spent with Drew, my voice splintered. “Now it feels like I’m in an insane asylum.”
Mrs. Sinclair took a few steps closer to me and took my hand. “You’re not at that dreadful institution, darling. Not anymore.”
Her words hovered around me in the air and, try as I might to deflect them, they somehow bored inside, reverberating off the corners of my brain. Not anymore? What could she possibly mean by that? She was the one who was in the asylum, not me.
Still, something about what she said knocked the very stuffing out of me. I sunk down to the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees, resting my head on my arms and sighing. I closed my eyes and wished I could disappear.
It was Adrian who brought me back into the moment. I opened my eyes to see that he was kneeling in front of me. He rested his hands on my knees and had a slight smile on his face.
“Come back to us, Julia,” he said. “We’re here to help you. I know you’re confused and suspicious and even fearful right now, but please. If you listen to the rest of the story, it will all become clear. And my original offer still stands. Do you remember my original offer? If, after hearing it all, you still want to leave Havenwood, I will personally arrange for you to slip unnoticed into the world, with a new identity and an ample bank account to go with it. You know I can make that happen for you, don’t you?”
I nodded. His voice was like a sedative.
“So, please,” he said, taking my hands, “take your seat back on the sofa, let Drew freshen your drink, and let’s hear the rest of the story. I promise you, if you want to leave after hearing what my mother has to say, I will personally pack your bags. Agreed?”
I didn’t know what else to do, so I allowed him to lead me back to the sofa, where Drew was waiting with a glass of brandy for me. I sunk down into the soft leather and took the glass he held out to me, my hands shaking.
“But I’ve never been here before,” I said to Drew, tears escaping my eyes. “I’m not…” My words trailed off into futility.
I took a sip of brandy. What had I gotten myself into? And how could I possibly get out of it? Think, Julia. Think. I knew I had to come up with some concrete reason to make them believe they were mistaken. Mistaken identity, that was what it was called! As simple as that. When they realized they had the wrong person, they would most certainly apologize, we’d all have a good laugh, and then I could go on my way.
What was I doing ten years earlier? I’d have been out of college and working, certainly. My first and only book had been published… hadn’t it? My friends…?
But it was no use. Every time I tried to cast my mind back to that time in my life, I hit a brick wall. My memories were a blur of images, words, and sounds, none coherent enough to translate. I remembered marrying Jeremy, and most everything that came after that. Some of it, anyway. Bits and pieces. With spaces in between. My frequent blackouts, like the ones I had when I first arrived here at Havenwood, didn’t help. My medication…?
Mrs. Sinclair’s voice brought me back into the present. “Tell me, darling,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“That’s the problem, Mrs. Sinclair.” I sighed, slumping against the back of the sofa. “I have no idea.”
FORTY-ONE
She nodded her head and smiled a knowing smile. They were all smiling at me, their eyes expectant and wide. I didn’t know why they were looking at me when it was Mrs. Sinclair who was supposed to be telling the tale.
I turned to Adrian. “You asked me to listen to the rest of the story,” I said. “I’m listening. If you’re so sure that I was the psychic who conducted a séance at Havenwood ten years ago, which is impossible by the way, then tell me, how did I come to be here? I didn’t even know Havenwood existed until you showed up on my doorstep in Chicago.”
“Bringing you to Havenwood all of those years ago was my idea,” Mrs. Sinclair jumped in, putting a hand to her chest. “If you’re going to blame anyone, Julia, blame me.”
I furrowed my brow. “Why would I blame anybody?”
“For what came after,” she said. “For what happened to you. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I needed something besides the Devil’s Toy Box to re-create Seraphina’s séance. I needed her descendant.”
“Why?”
“Because, my dear, I wanted it to be as authentic as possible. I knew Seraphina couldn’t be here to conduct the séance”—she shot a glance at Drew and chuckled—“obviously, but I had read that these types of gifts, psychic gifts if you will, tend to run in families. I wondered—were there any descendants? If so, did they inherit Seraphina’s gift?
“So, while I was searching high and low for the box, Adrian was on a hunt of his own,” she continued. “We would’ve never found you, never known you existed, if not for that letter. It gave us Seraphina’s real name, her sister’s name, and, from its postmark, an approximate location of where she settled after leaving the world of Spiritualism behind.”
“It wasn’t too terribly difficult to track you down,” Adrian said, “even without the online genealogical sites of today. Goodness, if I had had any of t
hat, I’d have found you in an afternoon. As it was, it took weeks of visiting libraries and courthouses, poring through records.”
“That’s how you came to know my family tree,” I said, remembering seeing it in this very room. That day seemed like lifetimes ago now.
“Not only that,” he said. “Your book had just been released, and it caught our attention because we knew you were Seraphina’s only living descendant. The fact that you mentioned my mother in the acknowledgments cemented this rather odd proposition for us.”
“When we saw the book, we knew it was meant to be that you should come to Havenwood,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Predestined, as if Seraphina herself had sent you.”
Adrian went on. “I paid a call on you in your charming duplex just off Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. Do you remember it, Julia?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “That never happened.”
“Do you remember the duplex apartment, though? At least that? Try, Julia.”
My mind sputtered and skipped. Images flashed before me. A floor-to-ceiling fireplace. A deep porcelain tub. Walks around the lake on warm spring days.
“I do remember the place,” I said, nodding my head slowly, trying to focus my mind into the past at the images that were fading from view. “I lived there for several years.”
“We talked there,” he continued, his voice low and melodious. “About Havenwood. About my mother and your book.”
“No,” I said, once again feeling the beads of perspiration begin to form on my forehead. My pulse seemed to race. “You were never there. The first time I laid eyes on you, it was at my house in Chicago.”
Adrian turned toward his mother. “Is it time?”
“I believe it is,” she said.
“Time for what?” I asked, my breath shallow.
“We’ve been waiting for the right time to show you something, my dear,” Mrs. Sinclair said, rising from her chair and slipping onto the soft next to me to stroke my hair. “I believe it may help you remember.”
Adrian stood and turned toward the door. “Give me a moment,” he said, walking out of the east salon. I listened to his footsteps on the library floor, fading and then becoming louder until he appeared in the doorway once again.
He crossed the room and handed me a book, a book I recognized. My book. I took it from him with shaking hands and laid it in my lap.
“Open it to the title page, Julia,” he said gently. “It will prove to you, without a shadow of a doubt, that what we’re telling you is the truth.”
To Amaris Sinclair,
With the greatest admiration.
Your devoted fan,
Julia Harper
Havenwood, May 14, 2003
I don’t know how long I stared at that page, my heart beating furiously in my chest. I could feel my hands becoming cold and clammy, and perspiration dripping down the back of my spine. I couldn’t take a deep breath and was panting as though I had just run a marathon.
“Julia?” I heard my name, spoken softly in the distance. My vision narrowed, focusing only on those words on the page. The east salon and everyone in it fell away.
I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It was my book. The inscription was in my handwriting. There was no doubt I had signed a copy of my one and only novel for Amaris Sinclair years earlier. I had been to Havenwood before. Everything they were saying was true. And yet it wasn’t. How could it be? I had absolutely no recollection of it, none at all.
Why couldn’t I remember?
To keep my nausea at bay, I closed my eyes and rested my head, which had begun to pound, on the back of the sofa, finally able to take deep breaths. I inhaled and exhaled as I heard the fire crackling in the fireplace and felt it warming my cheeks. Its flames danced and swayed in my mind, sending up shadows behind my eyelids.
I sensed that my memories were floating somewhere in the darkness of my mind. I could see them, in the distance, coming toward me almost in the same way a bottle with a note in it would float from the sea to the shore. The bottle was there but out of reach. As long as it was beyond my grasp, I was safe. But it was drifting closer and closer. I wanted to open my eyes, or do something, anything, to keep myself away from whatever horrible truths that bottle held. But I could not. The truth finds its way into the light, no matter what you’ve done to contain it. There was nothing I could do but brace myself for it to overtake me.
Images—dark, strange, nightmarish scenes—flashed in my mind, one after another after another like a slide show, and little by little, they melded into one horrific whole.
At first, my memories of this long-ago séance were distant, as though I were watching them unfold on television. But then they became stronger and larger until I was so engulfed by the memories that it was as though I was reliving the moments, in terrifying detail.
I saw Adrian, Mrs. Sinclair, and a woman I knew to be Katherine, along with a few others, sitting around the table in the east salon. Candles flickered, their delicate yellow glow illuminating the room and all of us with the type of soft, magical light I usually associate with late afternoon on a sunny day. The box was sitting in the middle of the table. We clasped hands and I began calling to the spirits of the dead.
I wasn’t quite sure why we were even going through the trouble of having a séance to summon them. Havenwood was filled with ghostly figures that floated through the corridors and peeked out of the paintings. All we needed was to walk down one hallway and we’d meet more spirits than Scrooge did on Christmas Eve.
But the famous author wanted her séance, so a séance we would hold. I had never conducted one, and had told Adrian as much when he made the invitation, but he was unconcerned about that. As long as I was able to communicate with the dead, that was all that mattered to him. And that had never been a problem for me. Ever since I was five years old and figured out that the grandmother who had been tucking me in each night was not exactly alive, and hadn’t been for decades, I was surrounded by spirits. So I agreed to his request, not knowing what I was getting myself into.
I should have known something was wrong at the outset when I realized there were no spirits in the room with us. That was a first. When I called them, they came, hungry as they are for communication with the living and so rare is it for them to find a conduit such as myself. Usually I had a backlog. But not that night. There was no one whispering in my ear about last wishes and hidden wills, no one wanting to give the living hope that there is indeed a life everlasting, no one wanting revenge for wrongs real or imagined. The room was as silent as an empty grave.
But then I heard something, a clattering and scratching, coming from the box in the middle of the table.
“It’s working,” Mrs. Sinclair whispered, her eyes glowing in the candlelight. “Open the box, Julia! Open it!”
I had never heard of anything like that box sitting in the middle of the table. But what could it hurt? It was just a box. So I did as she suggested.
All at once, a great whoosh of air extinguished the candles. I could see my breath in front of me as my teeth began to chatter despite the warmth of the fire blazing in the fireplace just feet from the table. What I can only describe as a great torrent of air circulated around us, and on it, I could hear the deep, dark, low growls and snarls of something, I knew not what. But I knew a sense of evil had filled the room the likes of which I had never before experienced.
I sensed a heaviness on my chest that was pushing me backward in my chair, and before I knew it, I hit the ground and slid, chair and all, toward the opposite wall, as though something was pushing me. I knocked my head so hard on the wall that the room spun around and around, the stars blinding me.
I struggled to my feet, my head pounding.
“Get away from me!” Katherine screamed, pushing at something that was not there, or, rather, not visible. Blood oozed from scratches on her face.
Drew burst into the room, throwing the double doors open so hard they hit the walls behind. Three enormous malam
utes bounded in behind him, snarling and growling.
Before Drew could say anything, I watched as he flew across the room and was pinned against the opposite wall, his eyes bulging, his face contorted, his feet not touching the ground. “Adrian, help!” I called out. I tried to run toward Drew, but the dogs kept me at bay. They didn’t want me anywhere near what was happening there.
“I command you to let him go,” I bellowed, not quite understanding why I was saying the words. It was as though someone—Seraphina perhaps?—was taking over. “In the name of God the Father Almighty, I take authority over you and command you to let him go.”
Drew dropped to the ground. His face was red and he was shaking, but at least he was breathing. I turned to see Mrs. Sinclair on the floor, her white dress now crimson, Adrian kneeling at her side.
I took a few steps toward her—was she hurt? It was then I noticed she was wiping her hands on the front of her dress.
“No matter how many times I try to wipe them, I can’t get the blood off my hands,” she muttered to Adrian. “It keeps coming back.”
Then I caught sight of Katherine, whose expression seemed even more frightening than anything I had just witnessed. She was standing stock-still, staring at the opposite wall, her eyes wide, her face a mask of terror.
I turned in the direction she was staring and saw her daughter, little Audra, suspended high in the air. How had the child gotten into the room in the first place? She had been asleep in her bed when we began the séance. She was simply floating there, as if held aloft by unseen hands. Her arms dangled limply at her sides, and her head was back, as though she was looking into the heavens. But I knew heaven had nothing to do with this. The dogs were crouched beneath her, snarling and growling at whatever it was that had her in its grip.
“Adrian!” I shouted, and when he looked up, he let out a cry so horrific that I thought it would knock me to the ground. He rushed over to Audra and tried to reach her, jumping, to no avail. By this time Drew had scrambled to his feet and was pushing a chair under her.
