Ophelia had changed, but her room had not. She kept it as it was as a sort of monument to her past life. Being in the room was like being in her own tomb, but it was oddly reassuring. No doubt it had something to do with the reason spirits of the departed remained behind in the place where they had once been alive and happy.
The only purely girlish icon in the room was the princess doll her mother had given her one year for Christmas. It was gorgeous and had cost a small fortune. The doll was kept in a place of honor on the dresser, a glass case protecting its elaborate white satin gown from dust. Beneath the expansive full-length skirt and ruffled petticoats was a full bottle of Demerol. Ophelia had taken the bottle from her mother’s room after they took her to the hospital to die. Sometime, when she could stand the pain no longer, Ophelia would swallow the bottle’s contents and become a ghost herself.
Earlier that day, after school and her visit to Dr. Glass, she’d taken a taxi to a private Episcopal school where the chapel was haunted. There were nuns buried in the chapel basement, and according to rumor, baby bones were buried there, too. In a rare stroke of luck, Ophelia had managed to take a dozen interior photos of the chapel before a teacher discovered her and asked her to leave. That was a coup, even if she was disappointed that she hadn’t been able to find the door leading down to the crypt.
The images flew into the Mac G3, and she processed the best pictures in PhotoShop and had them up on the Web in no time. Computers were Ophelia’s one material vice. She had to have the newest and fastest.
When she was finished, she took out her journal and her favorite antique fountain pen and got ready to write some poetry in her Book of Lies. She was tempted to start out, Dr. Glass, the fatuous ass…—but that was far too obvious. She closed her eyes and waited for the muse to come to her. There was strange energy in the air that night. The house on Mulberry Street was even sadder than usual.
She leaned over the Book of Lies and wrote:
All houses are haunted,
And in every past there is a ghost.
A light went on across the street.
Ophelia looked up, her Egyptian-mascara eyes wide as she pushed away from her desk and went to the window, the black onyx pen still in her hand. Across the street, a light had been switched on in an upstairs bedroom at 1666 Mulberry Street.
A ghost, Ophelia thought, but then she saw the silhouette of a man move past the window, a shape far too well defined, she thought, to be a specter.
Someone was in the Haunted House, someone alive and breathing.
Perhaps its owner had at long last returned home.
30
The Graveyard
JANET WARRING SLEPT beneath a tombstone carved from Paradise Black Marble, the trade name for calcitic marble quarried in Canada. Her daughter had picked the monument from a catalog at the St. Regis & Eberhart Mortuary. Ophelia’s father had been too deranged with grief to look after the arrangements, so it was up to their only child, then a sophomore in high school, to meet with the mortician and plan Janet Warring’s funeral.
Ophelia chose what the catalog called a “companion marker,” a double-wide headstone with ample room for her parents’ names, birth, and death dates. The funeral director, a sympathetic young gay woman in a navy blue wool pant suit, had approved of Ophelia’s choice of black marble, which she termed “tasteful.” She did not try to talk Ophelia out of buying the largest tombstone available without special order, a monument that was five feet wide, three feet six inches high, and eight inches thick. The price, $6,088, included engraving the stone with the family name, the given names for her mother and father, the dates bracketing their time in the world of the living, and a twenty-five-word “endearment phrase” for each parent. The funeral director had suggested Beloved Wife and Mother on Janet Warring’s half of the marker, but Ophelia had something different in mind. She had already decided on a quotation from “Adonais,” Shelley’s ode to the dead poet Keats. The words carved into the rock over her mother’s bones were these: Awaken’d from the Dream of Life. Ophelia and her father were still trapped in life’s nightmare, but her mother had “awaken’d.”
The headstone sat on a rectangular marble base in a pleasant, shaded part of the cemetery. When she arrived for her Sunday afternoon visit, Ophelia put a single rose on top of the tombstone before spreading a light blanket on the grass over the grave. She arranged a row of votive candles along the stone base. As she crouched on her knees, the grass felt thick and rich beneath her. When she was at the cemetery, sitting on her mother’s grave, she had nearly the same sense of security that she remembered from when she was a little girl, sitting on her mother’s lap.
Ophelia took out The Book of Lies and put it on the blanket in front of her. She liked to read the poetry she was working on to her mother, the same as she had done when Janet Warring was still alive. Tucked inside the journal was a letter with the return address of the admissions office at Smith College printed on it. She took it out and propped it up against the headstone behind the candles. Ophelia’s mother had graduated from Smith. The women’s college had the reputation for being one of the best places for a young poet to spread her wings. Sylvia Plath had gone to Smith, and her journals and handwritten drafts of poetry were part of the school’s collection.
Plath was one of Ophelia’s icons. They had more than a few things in common. Like Plath, Ophelia earned an early reputation for brilliance, had a passion for poetry, and experienced periods of soaring aspirations for the highest levels of success that alternated with bleak episodes of the darkest despair.
And, of course, Plath had committed suicide. Ophelia intended to do the same, when the time was ripe.
She sat cross-legged on her mother’s grave for ten minutes, communing with her mother’s memory, summoning—she hoped—her mother’s spirit from out of the earth or down from the sky or wherever it was your energy went when it was finally freed from being shackled to a dying animal.
“I know you wanted this even more than I, so I waited to share it with you,” Ophelia finally said, indicating the letter from Smith.
“My test scores were good, as you know. And I’ve kept my grades up. I promised you I would. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t all that difficult. Everything is so dumbed down. I haven’t kept up with the extracurricular activities—student senate, the debate team, the volunteering, and the rest of the things I used to do. I haven’t been able to make myself do it. That might make a difference. It’s not enough to be smart; you have to be socially engaged in the politically correct fashion. But maybe I can rest on my laurels. I used to do a lot. But I just couldn’t put up with the hypocrisy anymore. And the futility. What difference does it make if everything you care about can be destroyed, lost, taken away?”
The flames on the votive candles danced as the breeze came up, the only answer Ophelia would get from the beyond.
“I might as well get it over with.”
Ophelia held the letter up to the light so she could see the outline of the paper inside the envelope. Smith was the only school she had even bothered to apply to. Her counselor told her she needed some other options, that she was walking a tightrope without a net. She hadn’t listened, though, which was part of the reason the private prep school she attended had insisted she talk to Dr. Glass. If it hadn’t been for the pain it would have caused her mother’s ghost, Ophelia would have just as soon dropped out.
She tore the envelope open along its narrow end, careful not to damage the letter inside. She pulled the letter out, unfolded it, and began to read out loud.
“ ‘Dear Ms. Warring…’ “
Ophelia folded the letter back up, slipped it back into the envelope, and put the envelope back into The Book of Lies.
Someone was moving obliquely across her field of view, walking in great, long strides. She looked up with irritation. She liked to have the cemetery to herself, which is why she came late in the day on Sundays, when there were no funerals and only rarely other visitors. The m
an was dressed all in black, like her. He appeared to be in his thirties, but wore his long hair black in a ponytail. He was not too far away for Ophelia to see the sharply drawn features. He had a serious, almost fierce look on his face. The flash of silver on his wrist was not a bracelet, as she first thought, but one of those stainless-steel “sport” watches men with too much money and testosterone wear. If the interloper saw her watching him, he gave no sign, so Ophelia did not bother to look into the basket to make sure the small .22-caliber pistol was close at hand, since a cemetery was a good place to get mugged and raped.
The gun was her father’s. Ophelia had stolen it to keep him from using it on himself, though she doubted he realized the weapon was even missing. Ophelia always brought the gun to the graveyard. She sometimes carried it with her when she went out on the town, though not always. Ophelia knew how to look out for herself, and she didn’t want to become too comfortable with the gun. If her father could use it to put himself out of his earthly misery, she could certainly do the same. If it ever came to that, Ophelia planned to shoot herself in the heart. The thought of putting the barrel in her mouth and then pulling the trigger was too overtly sexual.
The man kept going, up the hill into the older section of the graveyard, a necropolis of mausoleums from the nineteenth century. Ophelia stared at him, hoping to think him out of sight, but he stopped in front of a mausoleum at the top of the hill. He stood there a long moment, looking up at the name carved above the bronze doors, then sat on the marble bench in front of the portico.
Ophelia read from The Book of Lies for a little while, but she soon felt herself becoming tired. It was a warm afternoon, and she had been feeling particularly exhausted. Ophelia was having a lot of trouble sleeping. She hardly ever got to sleep until around two, and then she always woke up at three-thirty. She usually had trouble getting back to sleep, and then she would wake up again about the time it started to get light. She lay down on the blanket and closed her eyes and instantly fell into a dreamless slumber. Some weeks the only real rest she got came from these naps on her mother’s grave.
It was getting dark when Ophelia awoke.
She sat up, feeling confused and disoriented, the way she usually did after being asleep. After a few moments she began to blow out the votives and pack them away in the tea tin she used to carry them. She folded up the blanket and put it in the basket, with her journal.
Curiosity made her leave by an indirect route, up the hill past where the man had been sitting earlier. There was no sign of him now. Ophelia decided he must have left while she was asleep.
The mausoleum he’d been sitting outside was a stately Greek Revival structure that might have been patterned after the temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis. Ophelia’s aura began to tingle as she approached it, the way it did when she sensed she needed to be aware of something beyond what the eyes could see. She slowed as the feeling grew stronger until the ominous sensation brought her to a dead stop.
What was it?
The unsettling sensation, like a slight electrical shock, trilled up and down the back of her neck as she strained to reach out with her psychic powers and identify the source of her peculiar sense of danger.
Her eyes found the first solid sign. The doors on the mausoleum, two heavy cast bronze portals that looked like something from the entry of a palazzo in Venice, did not join where they would have met, had they been closed. The right door stood just far enough out from its partner for Ophelia to see a thin vertical line of darkness, a glimpse of the chamber within. The mausoleum had been opened.
The rustling sound of a breeze moving through the trees disguised and almost swallowed the faint sound floating out the tomb door and down the hill to where Ophelia stood in her long black dress, leaning forward with an expression of strained attention on her face, as if she suspected a tiger was hiding just ahead, ready to pounce. At first she thought her imagination was playing tricks on her, but then she knew she was really hearing it.
From within the mausoleum came the unmistakable sound of a man softly crying.
Before Ophelia began to back away, her eyes rose to the name carved in the white stone above the bronze doors, the family name of people who built the crypt a hundred or more years ago: Peregrine.
31
The Hunter
OPHELIA REALIZED AT once that she’d been drugged. At first all she could do was lie there, dazed, unable to move or even open her eyes. After a few moments, her eyes opened and she found herself in perfect darkness. Control trickled back into her limbs as the potion used to poison her wore off. She pushed up into a sitting position and took stock. She had too much power to be killed easily, though it might have appeared otherwise to the monsters and perverts who stalked the city in the night. She put her right hand around her ankh to draw extra strength from it. It might have looked like costume jewelry, but Ophelia had used a ritual to fill it with the immortal energy of the ancient Egyptian rulers who had discovered the secret, now mostly lost to time, of transcending death.
She lifted herself up off the floor and—one hand before her, the other around the ankh—began to explore the darkness. She sensed she was alone, but she knew that was only true in a limited sense. The one who had drugged her might not have been in the room, but he was out there somewhere, waiting.
Her hand found the wall. She followed it to the corner, paused, then turned ninety degrees, knowing that eventually there would be a door, although whether it would be unlocked was a question she would address when the time came. The toe of her boot bumped against something solid but without substance. She knew what it was even before she knelt down to lightly touch the body with her fingertips. She hadn’t sensed it because it was dead. Corpses did not register a psychic signature with her, though the ghost that went with the body would have been another matter.
Judging the distance around the body, Ophelia stepped around it, careful where she walked in the dark room. For all she knew, there could have been a gaping pit inches from her feet, but she did not think so. The person who had done this to her had something different in mind, and she had a pretty good idea what it was.
The door was just on the other side of the body. Her hands found the knob. It turned freely, the lock clicked, and the door came open toward her. A dull light shined through the dirty window at the end of the hall. Ophelia guessed she was in a hotel. It might have been a dormitory or hospital, but somehow she knew it was a hotel. She began to move slowly down the hall, listening for a sound, a tingle of intuition, anything that would alert her to the presence of the one stalking her. The doors were off most of the rooms. Some of the windows were broken out. The place was abandoned, probably slated for demolition, which would make it easier to dispose of the bodies. She smiled to herself in the darkness. He was a clever one.
When she got to the end of the hall, she was able to look out the window. She was up a dozen stories. She didn’t recognize any of the buildings. It could have been any city in the Western world—San Francisco, London, Prague. There were trucks and bulldozers below, the equipment vaguely foreign looking. There was no traffic on the street in front of the building. Except for the rats scuttling in the walls and the one who brought her there, Ophelia was completely alone.
Water dripped somewhere in the distance, a hollow echoing sound, like condensation dripping in a cave. She heard the scrape of shoe leather at precisely the same moment her psychic alarm shrieked danger.
Ophelia glanced at the elevator. There was no point in even trying it. The power to the building had been shut off long ago. She dashed into the stairwell and began to run up the stairs two at a time, holding her long skirt in her hands. It was a classic error—running up the stairs in a building, where there would be no hope of escape except out a window or off the roof. But it was too late to change her mind because she could hear him coming after her.
It was just plain too late, Ophelia thought, feeling suddenly weary.
He was gaining on her, close enough fo
r her to hear his heavy breathing. Instead of continuing the futile race, she slammed through the fire door at the next landing and ran down the hallway as fast as her feet could carry her, hoping there were no obstructions to trip her. She flung herself into the first room and stopped, listening.
Though it made her lungs burn, Ophelia held her breath at first so her panting wouldn’t give her away. She could hear him coming down the hall, looking into the rooms one at a time as he went.
Enough light filtered through the boarded-up window for her to see that the wall where the bathroom was had been torn out, leaving splintered plaster, laths, and exposed pipes. The only place to hide was the closet, which didn’t have a door but stood at a right angle to the door and at least afforded concealment. If he was careless, there was a chance he wouldn’t see her.
Ophelia pressed her back against the closet and tried to be perfectly still.
He was at the doorway. She could hear his breathing and feel his presence. She could even smell him, for her nose was very sensitive.
He stepped into the room. He knew she was there. He was taking his time, enjoying it, probably hoping she’d whimper, maybe even beg him for mercy.
With the sound of a quick shuffle he filled up the closet doorway, blocking her only escape. He was tall and muscular, with a goatee. She knew the type well enough. The ones who chose that form were all sadists at heart. He intended to kill her, but not until he made her suffer. The crude tools of an apprentice were in his hands: a butcher knife in his left hand (he was left-handed, Ophelia thought), and an old milk jug in his right. He would torture her, kill her, and carry her blood back to his vampire master in the jug to curry favor. If he served his sponsor well enough, he would one day be made a vampire, too, as his reward.
American Gothic Page 20
