Something plucking at her now, filtering down through fathoms, a too-bright skewer popped in and twisted, over and over again. The squeal of a thousand pigs. Or, better yet—
(the bloody phone)
And up she came again, like a popped cork. Back out into the real world, brow wet, arm already flailing for the receiver.
“Yeah? Gavia Pratt, this is, from Hermes Lifequality. Who? Oh, Sayyid—he’s one of mine, yeah. Put him on, please.” A second of silence to let both breath and pulse slow as she waited. Then Sayyid’s Arabic lilt, more exasperated than upset: “Sorry to disturb so early, Miss Pratt—”
Reflexively, she glanced at the red LEDs of the clock radio: 5:45 a.m. Could be worse. Then memory clicked. “Jaiden left you to cover her shift again? Might’ve let the switchboard know. . . .” Trailed off, suddenly thinking, But that’s not like her, really—not after today.
“I do not think it matters if she arrives or not, very much. Mister Zukauskas is dead.”
That set her back. She’d never had much use for the typical euphemisms—“passing on” or “away”—but they were taught not to be so blunt, ’specially in front of other people; then again, that first voice had had an EMT’s impersonal professionalism, or a cop’s. “What happened?”
A sigh. “I checked on him at three thirty; he was still breathing at that point, his wife in her chair as always. I thought she had gone to sleep. Made sure the call button was under his hand, then went downstairs, where I . . . also closed my eyes, but only for a moment; that was my intent. When I woke, it was a few minutes past the hour, and when I went upstairs, he was gone.”
“The wife?”
“Gone as well. I called paramedics, as per S.O.P.—”
“Wait—not in the house? She’s much the same age, Jaiden said; not likely to wander off, I’d think.”
“Quite old, yes, but nevertheless. An emotional break? Nothing seems taken, so I’ve no doubt the lady will return, but Jaiden knows her better than I do, to a degree. Perhaps, if and when she arrives . . .”
A shadow moved in the hallway, sliding down the wall towards Gavin’s room. Gavia shrugged it off, sure it must be Kristle going to check on the boy—then stopped, all at once realizing she could hear Kristle’s snores from the main bedroom.
What the fuck is that?
“ ’Scuse me a moment, Sayyid,” she said, voice low, and put the phone down sideways ’cross the cradle, not quite hanging it up.
Been a long time gone since she’d gotten herself in (or out of) trouble, but fear’s spike brought all the old tricks rushing forward. She grabbed up that brick of a book Karen’d left behind on the end table—do for a club to the face, in a pinch—and slid soundless off the couch, stalking quiet, balanced on the balls of her feet. Gavin’s door’d been shut—she’d done that herself, but it now stood open. Fingers clenched ’round the book’s spine, aching with effort, Gavia lifted it high and was ’cross the threshold in one quick stride, poised to strike at whatever she might find—
But all that greeted her was a woman, completely unfamiliar, plain gray coat belted under her high little breasts like an Empire gown and neither young nor old at first glance: small-framed yet upright, hair hung down dark in a double curtain, soft as smoke. She stood there staring down into Gavin’s crib, transfixed, as though he were something far less ordinary, more precious, than a mere sleeping baby—at least till Gavia made some small noise, alerting her to her presence. And even then she didn’t turn, per se; just cocked her head, birdlike, to glance back over her shoulder and smile very faintly.
“Such handsome boy,” this creature told Gavia, accent vaguely Baltic. “Such lovely place you have here, with family, even so far from home—so very lucky you are, mažai močiutė. Your life here is pleasant dreaming, surely.”
Her grip failing, muscles gone slack, the book Gavia clutched came wavering back down, abruptly too heavy to hold; that black wave swept back up and over in one vertiginous rush, frost and tide and pain, a scraping, keening rush of sound. Memory, swirling headlong into words; Jaiden’s voice, cautious but driven, once more telling her how I’m afraid I won’t even get the chance to say no, before she just starts in to pressing on me. . . .
But, “Who’re you?” Gavia husked, or tried to—abruptly gone all vowels, throat constricted thick with indignation. “What d’you—what y’ want, here? Whuh, whaaah . . .”
The woman shook her head, however. Put one scar-white, nailless finger to her own lips—one of six, Gavia now saw, on either delicate hand—before reaching out to lay it on Gavia’s instead, bisecting her mouth in mid-protest like a sharp downward cut, a needle-thrust, a still-burning brand.
Not fair, she might well’ve complained, if only her tongue would allow it; why her, for Christ’s own sake, of all people, to be selected for recompense—she who’d never even set foot in Zukauskas’s house, let alone heard him boast of his ancient crime? Why not Jaiden, who’d worked the contract and listened to the stories, who already knew this fast-unravelling shell of a thing—this pretty nightmare, this swan-queen refeathered, this selkie without a skin—by sight?
Salt in her lungs, a wet gasp, swallowed under fathoms; pain in her chest, her heart, light and hollow, dank and deep. Kristle’d find her drowned on dry land by sunrise, no doubt, with Gavin suffocated in his sleep nearby and no possible hope of a swap even were she able to beg one out loud, no last-minute offering up of old for new. For nightmares, Gavia well knew, were rarely so logical, and cruel by default.
Better by far to try to fail than not to try at all, though. She could do that, at the very least.
Letting go book-first, skeptic and practical Gavia Pratt fell by slow degrees, a tree toppling, doing her level best to broadcast, all the way to the floor, Not him, me, take me. I’ll even marry you, that’s what you’re lookin’ for again; marry or burn, either way. Falling down down down, with no attempt at protest. . . .
Whilst the woman, in turn—Zukauskas’s wife no longer—only let that smile of hers widen in return till the whole front of her head fell open, a hole of stars through which only a dim black beach could be glimpsed, far away in the distance: some empty world, stretched out dead and cold under a faint white sun, irregular-shaped and pale-shining as the top of a baby skeleton’s soft skull.
THE DAUGHTER OUT OF DARKNESS
NANCY HOLDER
The Daughter Out of Darkness by Dr. John Seward
With an addendum provided by his wife
Transcribed from wax phonograph rolls found among the belongings of the former Mary Holder, ancestress of Nancy Holder
SEWARD ASYLUM
LONDON
JANUARY, 1906
Some hold that there is more darkness in women. That they are the daughters of Eve; they are weak and easily seduced by the tantalizing power of evil. Some say that is why Dracula was able to scale the walls of my asylum and make Mina Harker his own. The darkness, the invitation to invade, churned within her and she surrendered to its siren call.
Thus, the argument runs that the weaker sex requires the guidance of strong, moral men to keep their faces toward the light. It is through our strength of character and wisdom that we temper love with patience; when we fail to correct, we fail them. One sees this in the tens of thousands of unfortunate women teeming the streets of London—depraved, lost, wretched. Soulless. They have no men on whom they can depend, and so they are scattered to the winds like rotten leaves.
Does that mean, then, that we men were not strong enough to thwart Dracula’s seduction of Mina, our fair sister in all but blood? Not sufficiently moral to keep the monster at bay?
Was it my own weakness that drove my first wife mad?
Do I have the fortitude to combat the evil in our midst tonight?
These are questions I must answer now, for in this palace of madmen, we are under siege. I stand between disaster and triumph, and I must remain resolute.
Though I did not know it then, the path to destruction began six
months ago. As the solstice sun descended and our small estate was cloaked in shadow, Elizabeth Louise Thornton, the woman who had divorced me five years previous, shrieked an eldritch chant that compelled my complete attention. Over and over, a hundred times, a thousand, she called out the same refrain. Fascinated, I copied down the syllables that ripped from her throat: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih!”
Did she summon him with those words? Is that how he found my Mary?
“Jack!”
It is Mary who calls me now. Mary Holder, now Seward, once my head nurse and now my wife, struggles at the door, which I have locked. She beseeches me. She summons me. I am speaking this into my phonograph diary in darkness, for I dare not light the lamp. They must not find me here. They must not know my grim purpose. And it is this: I shall kill everyone in this fortress to modern psychiatric medicine. My cure rate is formidable. Alas, though, for Eliza, she has grown worse. Now I know why: she carries within herself another voice, and is forced to commune with nightmares.
My brow is wet, my hands cold and clammy. The cylinders of that other, horrid nightmare—our pursuit of the dread vampire king Dracula—were destroyed when the first Whitby Asylum burned to the ground. Eliza found those rolls after we had married, and after listening to them, she left me, believing me a madman or a demon. She believed that my spoken diary contained either delusions or horrible, debased truths that I had kept from her before marrying her. She raged at me, told me that I should have shared all before her ring was on my finger, so that she could have judged more prudently my suitability as a husband.
I countered that how could I have initiated an innocent, pure angel into a world that had such creatures in it? She called me a coward, and that I do now own. Though I swore to her I remained silent because I did not dare fret her heart, I carried on my soul the terrible question that plagued me night and day. Had we killed the vampire? Was he, as Dr. Van Helsing would say, true dead?
I believed that she was correct to leave me; that this was the curse that hung over me like the Sword of Damocles, and I had no cause to draw her beneath that sword. I had loved selfishly, with no thought of her protection, nor that of children should we be so blessed. I had thought not of her at all, only of my loneliness among the madmen and women in my care. Tormented souls! Now I share their descent into hell. . . .
For Mary Holder brought with her a dread secret of her own, which she did not disclose until this very night. I knew some of it: I knew that she had lied, and stolen, and left in the night with the reprobate Sir George Burnwell, who would have made her a fallen woman, but married her at the last.
But I did not know that she had committed murder.
Hours ago, as the snows swirled and eddied in the leaded windows of our great hall, cutting us off from tonight’s thin crescent of light, an echoic pounding rumbled through our hall. My assistant, Peter Duinsmire, went to answer and I trailed after, for it was uncommon for us to receive visitors at such an hour. Into blackest pitch the door opened with a squeal.
Were our fates sealed then?
I recognized the figure who stood before us, as Mary had kept the newspaper articles detailing his many peccadillos and scrapes with the authorities. Tall Sir George Burnwell was, and dressed like, an aristocrat in a greatcoat and top hat. His bones were stacked precariously on his frame, with little tissue between them, the musculature withered. His fingers were claws of bone. His face shone gray and green from the grave, and his eyes were not his. They were not his. They blazed with an evil I never dreamed of, although I had reconciled myself long before to his villainy and cruelty when Mary disclosed to me the facts—but not all the facts, I was soon to learn—of her first marriage.
But among all these revolting facts of his appearance, one surpassed them in every way: his mouth hung open as happens in death, and I saw inside a dark, frenzied whirlpool of worms and beetles where his tongue should be. Then words issued from that mouth, although the hinges of his jaw were dislocated. They poured out as if from a phonograph recording, and he said:
“I am the legal husband of Mary Burnwell, née Holder. If she is under this roof, I demand that you give her to me at once. Then we shall leave you in peace.”
A triple bolt of lightning illuminated the doorway, and I saw that the cadaverous Burnwell was not alone. Another stood beside him, and although his appearance was less hideous—he seemed to be a member of the Egyptian race, wearing a fez above a black-hued face, though the dark features were entirely Caucasian—a miasma of such depravity issued from him that I took three steps back and slammed the door before my accustomed civility allowed them entry.
I turned . . . and beheld my Mary. She wore an apron over her dressing gown, her hair was askew, and there was a fresh scratch on her cheek from which bubbled droplets of blood. As she stared at the door, she gathered up the folds of her apron between her fists, uttered a cry of horror, and collapsed to the floor.
Duinsmire stood guard whilst I lifted my unconscious wife in my arms and hied her out of the room, down corridors, directing the securing of gates and doors at every juncture. At last she was in our apartment in the madhouse. I lay her down on our bed and applied spirits of hartshorn. She roused with a start and uttered a horrible scream only equal to Mina Harker’s shriek after the vampire had forced her to drink his blood.
Just then, as the room lit up with St. Elmo’s fire, a loud wail vibrated through the stone. It was Eliza, screaming her mad syllables: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih! Y’btbn . . . h’ebye-n’grkdll’lb . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
Mary clung to me and cried, “Jack, Jack, what is happening?”
I answered her question with my own question. “Mary, what the deuce was that thing? That was your husband, yes? And another?”
Her face was a ghastly white. She began to weep, and said brokenly, “I brought this upon us. I am cursed!”
Then she told me all. She had killed the bounder when he had attacked her, he intending, I believe, to use her in some dark rite. She described to me an octagonal room filled with hideous paintings on the walls and a statue of a creature composed of eyes and tentacles. Unholy, blasphemous, repugnant. She had thwarted him by pretending to fall into a swoon, then bashed his head in with a smaller statue that she could not describe. She had left him dead in their villa. Of that she had been certain.
And the thing outside had to be dead. It could not be a living man.
Eliza was screaming again: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih!”
Mad Eliza. My fault.
In 1901, after my asylum had burned, Mary and I moved to Texas, and eventually Dr. Van Helsing joined us. Three years later, Eliza’s wealthy uncle wrote me, revealing that my former wife had gone quite mad, and that he laid her affliction at my door. Like her, he believed that the very air of my asylum carried the contagion of insanity. That it was a disease that one could catch. I doubt that she shared with him the secret of my diary, for how, in that case, could he ask me to care for her?
As congress with you has utterly overset her, I charge you now to return to England and minister to her. I shall set up a small asylum for you to run, with but a few patients, and in return, she shall be your primary concern. I do this to prevent further scandal. I will not brook a refusal on your part. It was I who arranged for your divorce, and I understand that you have remarried. Thus, you owe Elizabeth and me a double debt.
It was so, and to my astonishment, Mary insisted that we conform to the man’s wishes, and so we returned to London. And we have cared for her all this time, my new wife attending my mad wife. Surely you who are listening know that it is impossible to obtain a writ of divorcement in England. I wonder then, if her uncle knew that she was weak-minded, for one can divorce by reason of insanity. Perhaps he had done it so that I could not claim that legal relief when her affliction could be hidden no longer.
“Jack,” Mary calls to me again through the door. In my mind’s eye, I can see the deep scratch on her cheek, sustained when Eliza wounded her while struggling in vain to pull the b
ars from her windows.
After Mary had confessed, we rushed together to Eliza’s room. The door, of course, was barred and locked. Mary had the keys and I ordered her to stand aside whilst I opened it, fearing an attack from the madwoman within. But the door itself fought against my efforts, and it was not until I had called for Duinsmire to assist me that we succeeded in forcing it open.
A dervish of wind and rain assaulted us from an enormous hole in the wall opposite! Colors—green and purple and a noxious ochre—whirled from the center, and as we fought to reach it, I thrust Mary behind myself and shouted to Duinsmire to remove her from the place. But she would not go, clinging instead to my hand, and we staggered forward en suite, the three of us.
Then I was filled with a dread certainty that something lurked behind us, and I instinctively ducked, pulling my dear wife down with me. But Duinsmire was not so lucky, and I beheld the corpse of Burnwell bringing down the blade of his sabre—and he cleaved my poor assistant in half!
“So I will do to you!” he bellowed to us both.
Then Coates, the new head nurse, hung in the doorway shouting, “Sir, sir! There is a devilish man in the wards!” Her gaze fell upon the grisly, dripping remains of Duinsmire, now tossed wildly by the gale, and she began to scream.
The colors spun and I charged grimly ahead, but I saw no sign of Eliza. My mind informed me that our enemies had breached my home, but how, I did not know. The hole was in the outer wall; the door, locked. Where was the inmate? She, whose purity I had sullied, whose mind had been lost?
The colors . . . they danced before me. . . . I do not know if I stopped in my tracks, rooted in the tempest; I do not know what happened to me. But my mind spun; I lost all purchase on my surroundings; my mouth hung open in astonishment. I thought I saw stars, and a vast city of monoliths, blocks of granite covered with runes; I hovered hundreds of feet above a vast, surging landscape and a boiling sea. And I longed—how I longed!—to caper with the strange, shadowed creatures whose forms I could only glimpse from the corners of my eyes. I felt as if I were beholding a great truth; that I was privileged to commune with a purity of being I had not dreamed of.
What the #@&% Is That? Page 25
