by John Manning
Sue just stared at him.
Billy let out a whimper. Sue saw the utter terror in his eyes.
So she was right.
Billy ran out the door. Marjorie looked after him, shaking her head, apparently concluding it was a lovers’ squabble.
But Sue knew differently.
She lowered her head, and began to cry.
Bernadette was back, standing beside her.
“Leave town,” she whispered. “Get out while you can. Go to see your mother. There is still time.”
Sue just sat there crying, the enormity of the horror settling around her.
“Your mother,” Bernadette repeated. “Go see your mother.”
61
“So I got back into my car,” Sue said, draining her wineglass and holding it out for Ginny to refill, “but I didn’t leave town. Not right away.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to the campus. Just what Bernadette warned me against doing.”
“Why?”
“Because now I had some sense of my power. I wasn’t afraid. I just wanted answers.”
“Who did you want to see on campus?” Ginny asked.
“Who else? Dean Gregory.”
62
Sue rang the doorbell at the dean’s house.
This is where they killed Tish Lewis.
Sue knew it the moment her finger had touched the bell.
They killed Tish—but I condemned her to die.
The horror and the guilt and the shame sank deep into Sue’s soul.
“Hello, Sue.”
It was Mrs. Gregory, dressed in a red robe.
“Is the dean in?”
It was a weekend. Sue expected that Gregory would be at home, rather than at the office.
But he was out, his wife explained. “Would you like to wait for him?” Mrs. Gregory asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
Mrs. Gregory stepped aside so that Sue could enter. “Did you have a nice holiday in New York?”
“Yes,” Sue lied. She was certain that her grandparents had called Gregory to report she’d left abruptly. He’s out looking for me, Sue realized. I’ve got them all in a tizzy.
“You’re back on campus earlier than expected,” Mrs. Gregory said. Sue realized the woman was nervous.
“Yes,” Sue said, maintaining the charade. “I came back early to study for my finals.”
“What a good student you are, Sue. Here, why don’t you wait in the parlor? I’ll call Ted on his cell phone…”
And rustle up his goons to overpower me…
“Mrs. Gregory, wait,” Sue said. “I just have a quick question for you. Did you know my mother?”
“Your mother?” Mousy Mona’s face blanched. Her shaky hand went to a button on her blouse, which she twiddled anxiously. “Oh, no, I’m afraid we weren’t yet on campus then…”
“But you were involved, weren’t you? You must have been.”
Mrs. Gregory smiled nervously. “Involved in what, dear?”
“The cult of Revelation. The movement to bring about the end times. You must have been. Otherwise, your husband wouldn’t have been named dean.”
Mrs. Gregory fell silent.
“Was it worth it, Mona?” Sue asked, drawing close to the woman, almost menacingly. “What it did to your sons?”
In a flash, looking into Mrs. Gregory’s eyes, Sue had seen the tragedy of the two Gregory boys. One was now dead—an overdose in just the last couple of days—though she didn’t think Mona knew about that part yet.
“My sons,” Mrs. Gregory said. Then she began to cry.
“What will you get when it’s all done?” Sue asked, so close to Mona that she could see the whites of her eyes. “What have they promised you? Certainly, your husband isn’t content with just staying dean of some backwoods women’s college.”
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
Sue could see she’d get nowhere with Mrs. Gregory, who just stood there bawling her eyes out. She knew now it had been a mistake to come here. She could get trapped. Gregory would keep her—
“Tell your husband I’m not going to play the game the way he intended,” Sue said, moving away from Mona toward the door. “I have a few ideas of my own.”
“You can’t leave,” Mona managed to say.
“Watch me.”
“No!” Mrs. Gregory’s arm darted out, her hand gripping Sue around her wrist. “If I let you go, they’ll punish me.”
“Let go of me!”
Sue felt something rising inside of her—something that seemed to fill her brain and her body like water filling a glass. A force pushed into the very back of her mind. Powerful. It felt thrilling.
It felt good.
The power rose within her, and Sue’s vision was tinted with red. Her entire body was tingling, the hairs on her arms standing up, and it felt good, so good, like nothing she’d ever felt before in her life. This is who I am, she thought. This is who I am meant to be. A smile played across her lips as Mrs. Gregory’s tears suddenly turned to blood.
Sue wrenched her arm free.
And then the dean’s wife was sailing through the air, smashing against the opposite wall with a horrible thud. For a moment, she stared at Sue, her face covered in blood. “You cannot escape who you are…” she said, before her eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped down, lifeless, to the floor.
63
“She was dead.”
Sue put her wineglass down with shaky hands.
“I walked over to her, checked her pulse, but there wasn’t one. She was dead, and I had killed her. I killed her, Dr. Marshall, and what was more, it felt good while I was doing it.”
“Sue, when I spoke with Dean Gregory, he didn’t mention his wife’s death,” Ginny told her. “I think he would have…maybe you imagined all of this…”
“Don’t you see? He didn’t care about her. She was just an obstacle.” Sue laughed bitterly. “He has far greater things to worry about than Mousy Mona’s death.”
“Well, if it’s true, then you have a great deal to worry about. A charge of murder.”
“It was in self-defense.” Sue laughed again, a sound that unnerved Ginny with its cavalier attitude. “Besides, the body was destroyed. There’s no evidence. I’m certain of that. I’ve seen it in my mind.”
Ginny shuddered.
“You’re right to tremble, Dr. Marshall. I’ve become a monster. In that moment, I knew what I was. And I knew what I had to do. I got off that campus as fast as I could. I stopped at an Internet café in Senandaga and got directions to Star of Bethlehem, the town where Joyce Davenport told me my mother lived. Curious name, no? Ironic. But I knew I had to follow that star. Bernadette told me to go see my mother…”
64
Star of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was just across the state line. According to the directions Sue had gotten off the Internet, it was about a six-hour drive from Senandaga. She spent that night in a motel a few hours from the border, paying cash for the room. Drifting in and out of a dreamless sleep, Sue steeled herself for what else she might discover about herself the next day. When the sun finally came up, she quickly showered and dressed and got back on the road.
The Fair Oaks Rest Home was on the far side of the little town. The building was large and made of red brick. The woman at the desk, overweight, in her late fifties, glanced up at Sue without smiling.
“Help you?” she asked.
“I would like to see—” Sue swallowed and took a deep breath before continuing. “I would like to see Mariclare Barlow.”
The woman’s eyebrows darted up. “Mariclare Barlow?”
“Is that a problem?”
Maybe she’s here under an assumed name…
“No problem.” The woman shrugged. “It’s just that she doesn’t get too many visitors.” She pushed a clipboard and a pen across her desk. “You need to sign in. I’ll call up to see if she’s finished with her breakfast.”
She glanced down at
the clipboard after Sue signed it.
“A relative?” she asked after noting the name.
“I’m her daughter,” Sue said.
All her life, Sue had dreamed about her mother. She had playacted a moment like this, meeting the woman who had given her birth. She’d gazed at her photograph in the shrines set up to her, examined every little contour of her face, hoping to spot a resemblance. She’d imagined what her mother might be like, how she might have sounded, how she might have reacted to the daughter she never knew.
And now, all of that was about to be revealed.
Sitting in the spartan waiting room, uncomfortable on a hard plastic chair, Sue only felt numb. No excitement. No fear. No anticipation.
She felt nothing.
“Miss Barlow?”
An Asian nurse in a spotless white uniform had appeared in the doorway.
“If you’ll follow me?”
Sue stood, following the nurse down a narrow, dimly lit hallway into a small room. At the door, the nurse paused.
“She didn’t seem surprised when I told her you were here.”
Sue didn’t reply.
“I didn’t know Mariclare had a daughter.”
Sue lifted an eyebrow. “What should I expect?”
“She’s usually very quiet. A very sweet lady, in fact. She’s not a danger. Poor dear, she’s simply delusional.”
Sue gave her a weak smile, then walked into the room. A woman was seated at a table with her back to Sue. Long red hair streaked with gray fell down her back. She wore a cheap-looking, floral-patterned cotton housedress. As Sue rounded the table and got a look at her, she thought the woman—her mother—looked tired. Dark circles drooped under large, luminous green eyes.
“Hello, Susan,” her mother said as Sue sat down.
Sue stared at her. There was a strong resemblance to the photographs she’d grown up with—bone structure doesn’t go away with the passing of time. Mariclare’s face was devoid of makeup, but her hair was carefully brushed and held out of her face with two plastic pink barrettes. Despite the streaks of red cobwebbed through the whites, her eyes were still very beautiful.
“She said you weren’t surprised when you heard I was here,” Sue said.
“I knew you’d come someday,” Mariclare said. She smiled. “Joyce was here a few days ago. She said she was going to tell you the truth.”
“Well,” Sue said. “She did.”
“Was it terribly hard for you?” her mother asked.
Sue gave her a tight smile. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“What a pretty girl you are,” Mariclare said.
But I don’t look like you, Sue thought.
I look like my father.
She didn’t know what to say to this pitiful woman sitting in front of her. All her life she’d missed her mother, thought about her, wished she was still alive—and now that she was sitting across a table from her, she couldn’t think of anything to say. She felt tears forming in her eyes, and bit her lower lip.
“They kept you away from me all these years.” Mariclare said. She started drumming her fingertips on the table. “I guess they didn’t want you to know your mother was a lunatic…though they’re just as crazy as I am. Your grandparents, I mean. They told you I was dead, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And they sent you to Wilbourne.”
Sue nodded.
“Mother called me yesterday. She told me if you came here, I should refuse to see you.”
“I’m not surprised,” Sue said.
Mariclare smiled. “But they can’t tell me what to do anymore.”
“Did they know what would happen to you at Wilbourne?”
“Do you mean, did they know I’d be the one? The one who’d be raped?”
Sue nodded.
“I think he did. My father. At least, I think he was hoping I’d be the one.” She gave her a bitter smile. “It was a great honor, you know.”
Sue couldn’t speak.
“I didn’t know anything. I was just like you, dear Susan. Just a naïve sheep being led to the slaughter.”
“But now you know…you understand what happened to you.”
Mariclare nodded. “When you’ve been fucked by a demon, you get a few things in return.” She laughed, a brittle sound from deep inside her throat. “You can see things. Understand things. So much suddenly made sense. Those other girls who went missing or were killed at Wilbourne? Part of the bargain. Virgin blood, to keep the dark forces sustained. Keep them interested. Because to bring about the Rapture—”
“You mean, the end times? The prophecy of Revelation?”
Mariclare nodded. “That’s right. To bring about the end times, they needed an Antichrist. And Revelation says it will be a girl, eighteen years of age, and her name will be Susan.”
“It doesn’t say that,” Sue said. “I’ve read Revelation…”
“But not the lost books of Revelation.” Mariclare grinned, almost smugly. “The ones the Vatican tried to hide for centuries. But some renegade priest smuggled them out. Formed his own little cult, headed up by a good little Satanist named Sarah Wilbourne.” Her smile faded. “I got to see the lost books of Revelation. I actually got to read them. I told you there were a few perks to being fucked by Satan.”
Sue recoiled. This woman was crazy. And yet…she made sense.
She made horrible sense.
Mariclare looked over her shoulder, gesturing toward the door with a nod of her head. “Here, they all think I’m quite insane, you know. Delusional. It’s much easier to believe that I’m crazy than to think that I am telling the truth. No one wants to hear the truth, you know. Not when the truth is too frightening to contemplate. Not when the truth can’t be fit into a box of logic and rationally explained away. No, it’s easier to think poor Mariclare lost her mind when she was raped nineteen years ago. She became delusional because she can’t handle the reality of what happened to her.”
Sue was suddenly overcome with sympathy and compassion for her mother, and began to cry.
Mariclare seemed not to notice. “Not that it matters what they think. They can’t do anything more to me than what they’ve already done.”
“Mother—” The word didn’t feel right coming out of her mouth, but Sue said it anyway. “There’s got to be a way we can beat them. There is this girl. She told me there was still hope. She’s seen the Virgin Mary—”
“A good Christian girl, I suppose. But the Christians haven’t got the lock on God. This goes far deeper than just God and Satan, Susan. This is much more elemental. This is about the power of good and the power of evil. It transcends all religions.”
“So what can we do?”
Mariclare shook her head. “They’ve been planning this for a long time. It goes back over a hundred years. And now, finally, is the time.”
“Because of me,” Sue said quietly.
Her mother nodded. “Every religion has its own diabolical messenger, the one who is destined to ignite the final battle between good and evil. The Christians call it the Antichrist.”
“No,” Sue said. “They call it Susan.”
Her mother gave her a compassionate smile. “The girl you spoke of,” she said, reaching across the table and taking Sue’s hand. “The one who saw the Virgin.”
“Bernadette.”
“She’s right. It’s not too late. You don’t have to fulfill the prophecies, you know. I told Joyce that you wouldn’t succumb, but she said you would.”
At Joyce’s name, Sue’s ears perked up. “Was she really your friend?”
“Yes, she was.” Mariclare’s face grew dark. “When we were girls, she was a happy child. Filled with sunlight. But then her father went bankrupt and all her dreams seemed dashed. She was failing in school. It was only the influence of my father that got her into Wilbourne.” She closed her eyes. “But Joyce betrayed me. She left the room that night, knowing what was to occur. She’d already made her dark bargain with the p
eople running the school. Success, fame—that’s what she wanted. She never told me anything, never warned me. And because of that, she’s gotten everything she’s always dreamed of.”
“Why do you see her then? Why do you let her come here?”
Mariclare smiled. “Because some part of her is torn with guilt. She knows what she did. She sees me, hoping to sway me over to her side—but I just sit here and laugh at her. I take some comfort in how she squirms.”
All at once, she leaned across the table, her green eyes filled with passion.
“But you have free will, Susan! Just as I did! I could have joined their cult. I could have sung out the praises of the dark lord who defiled me. If I had, I would have been raised to the highest honors as the mother of his daughter. But I said no. I said no—and I still say no!”
“That’s why they put you in here,” Sue said.
“That’s right. They hid me away because they couldn’t kill me.” She smiled. “You see, I’ve realized my own power—my own power for good.” She opened her blouse, revealing wrinkled, freckled skin. Around her neck hung a crucifix. As well as a Star of David. A Wiccan pentacle. An Egyptian scarab. A medal of the Hindu goddess Durga. And other symbols Sue didn’t recognize.
Sue looked from the symbols back into her mother’s eyes. “But I’m not you,” she said. “I’m not—human.”
“Yes, you are, Susan. You are my daughter as much as his.”
Sue sat back in her chair, struck by the realization.
“There is someone who can help you, isn’t there? A teacher. Someone who knows, someone who will know what to do…”
Sue refocused her eyes on Mariclare. “Dr. Marshall…”
Her mother nodded. “Yes. I told you. I can see things. I can see her now. She’s writing. I can see that she is good. Strong. Wise.”
“She’s left campus,” Sue said. “She’s gone to Louisiana.”
“You have an address for her. I know you do. You must go to her, Susan. They will try to find you…to force you to do their bidding.”
Sue stood up. “I—”
