by Lara Parker
They walked down the road beneath the barren trees and turned in at the gate. Night was falling, but they could still see the tombstones with their alien shapes and the spaces between them filled up with snow. Jackie stopped to stare at the same statue of an angel that had protected her from the boys, and she caught her breath and blanched as though she were seeing a ghost. All the joy seeped out of her face.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. Some family member who died in the eighteenth century.” He leaned over and pushed the snow off the inscription. “Angelique Bouchard,” he read, “October 1772–December 1796. Love Sleeps in Death’s Embrace.”
The angel stared down at them, her arms reaching out in a gesture of supplication, her shoulders caped in white and her wings high and laden with snow. Jackie looked at her and shivered, frightened by the sorrowful gaze in the all too human eyes.
“Come on,” David said, and tugged Jackie toward the mausoleum. He was being pulled by what felt like a giant magnet, a vision in his brain of a flat square thing wrapped in a blanket. His triumph with the automobile had left him brimming with confidence and her nearness had inflamed his resolve. They wound their way through the marble columns and odd obelisks, sometimes stopping to look at the dates faintly legible on those most decayed: 1692, 1795, 1864. He was breathless when they reached the two pilasters and the wrought iron gate beneath the stone words COLLINS MAUSOLEUM and tramped up the stairs through the heavy snow. Skeletal fingers of vines clasped the bars, and David pulled aside thorny branches in order to find the latch.
A damp and musty odor permeated the room and their footsteps echoed like faraway cymbals. The silence hovered in the gloomy interior as if time had ceased to flow, and cold seemed to seep from the walls. The vault contained three dark caskets and an iron candelabra with overflowing tapers; pools of clotted wax and decayed bouquets of flowers were strewn across the pavers.
Jackie was gripping his arm. “Why did you want to look in here?” she said. “There’s nothing but dead people, and they don’t know anything.”
“Why? Did you already ask them?” David said, and grinned when she playfully smacked his arm. When David saw that the tomb was empty, his chest caved a little. He had been so certain.
“Wait,” he muttered to himself, “I think there’s another room, but I don’t know how to get inside it.” He felt around the arched area that resembled a door, but nothing gave way. Then he looked up at the carved head of a lion staring down at them above the portal.
“Pull on that,” Jackie whispered, and pointed to the iron ring in the lion’s mouth.
David looked over at her and winked.
The ring was cold in his fingers and tight in the stone. He jerked but nothing happened, and he was about to give up when he heard a faint grinding, and one of the steps to the portal shifted slightly. He pulled harder. A smell of decay oozed out of the opening. He turned back to Jackie, and she was nodding.
The inner sanctum was too dark to see anything and David waited, hoping to discern some shapes. “Stay here,” he said, and he inched slowly into the room, his hands out in front of him, and he shivered when his fingers came upon the edge of another coffin, its rolled lid and carved sides slippery polished wood. His mouth felt dry, and his courage deserted him when he thought of the dead man lying inside. He wanted to run as fast as he could away from this place, but still he could see his vision of the portrait so clearly that he resisted the urge to turn around. His legs were like water as he forced himself to ease his body past the casket, holding on to it and keeping himself upright just in case he tripped. But he found nothing but an empty room. Slowly, his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he was startled to see the casket was open.
“Jackie,” he said. “Look at this. It’s empty.”
She slipped in by his side and they both stared down in total amazement at the silken red interior.
“What could it mean? Who was buried here?”
They both had the same thought, but he was afraid to say it. “Barnabas,” she whispered.
“Do you think that was his coffin?”
She nodded.
“Then that can only mean … he’s—”
“Hadn’t you guessed? He’s … he’s one of the living dead.”
“You mean he’s…”
“A vampire.”
David reached for her and pulled her face against his chest. Both were trembling. “Don’t think about it,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t so.” But he couldn’t help but remember Dr. Blair and his accusations. “Let’s get out of here.”
Both feeling shaky, they closed the door to the inner vault. David tried to change the subject. “I thought we would find it. I could see the painting in my mind, in the dark, leaning against the stone wall. Isn’t that what you saw?”
She thought a minute. “There was a dirt floor.”
Jackie was more sober now as they walked back toward the car. She stopped to read the inscriptions on the tombstones. “So many children,” she said, sighing. The marble carving of a baby rested in a basket of stone ferns. “Only three months. She lived only three months.”
“Here’s another,” said David. “Oh, I remember her. Sarah Collins, six years old when she died of pneumonia.”
The wind whispered through the bare-limbed oaks and the sky hung between the branches like pieces of torn sheet. The sun had dropped below the trees, and darkness was setting in. David felt deflated, like something brilliant had come to an end, and he thought he had ruined the excitement of the day, the beautiful car, and the thrilling ride with Jackie beside him. Somehow, he had hoped for more. He reached for her hand and she gave it to him reluctantly. Together they trudged through the snow, their shoes crunching, and their breaths puffs of vapor, until, growing impatient, she pulled away and wandered off through the gravestones to read the other inscriptions.
All the gravestones shifted in the pale light, and the cemetery was alive with phantoms, snow flurries like ghosts swirling around them, as if restless spirits had awakened in the dusk and were readying for the night. He could see the car through the gray mist—its luminous color; its high, majestic frame; the elegant curves of the fenders; and the glimmering chrome. For a moment the car was another vault, attached to the cemetery, another depository for some deceased patron celebrated in life. He turned back to look for Jackie and saw her standing among the tombstones, small and fragile, her coat wrapped around the flapper dress, her face grim. She was a specter as well, her silhouette dark among the falling flakes. Then she called to him.
“Here’s another one.”
He followed her gaze. “What?”
“Another one of those stone crypts.”
It was a low vault with a rotting wooden door, abandoned, and without a name on the cornice. “Not likely,” he said.
But once again, he took heart. They were detectives together on a journey, following the call, insanely curious and excited. The ache in his rib cage nudged him as he felt what was now a familiar longing to be worthy of her, to see her face light up with happiness.
When he reached the door, the opening was so low he saw he would have to duck in order to crawl inside. He held on to the heavy latch and jerked the frame on its rusty hinges. It gave, but with a horrid squeaking noise. He felt around for a casket and found the floor was covered with rotten leaves that smelled of the forest in the summer. When his hand slipped beneath them, they were warm, and there was something furry there, alive and wiggling. He jerked back and shrieked as a rat crawled across his wrist and over his leg. He tumbled back and fell in a drift as three—no, four—more rodents nosed out, their thick bodies and long tails slithering as they scurried off across the black snow.
“What was it?” said Jackie, helping him up.
“Rats.”
“Oh, God, David. Never mind. Don’t go back in there.”
“No, I have to.” He knelt down again and peered into the tomb. This time he turned around and felt about with his
feet for some object on the floor, and then, sucking in his breath, he reached inside and drew his hand along the damp slime of the walls. That was when he nudged something loose, and a heavy object fell against his leg. He felt a jolt of excitement. Letting go of the latch he reached down in the dark, caught hold of the unwieldy article, and dragged it back outside where Jackie was waiting.
“I told you we would find it,” he said.
His heart was pounding. After brushing the debris from his clothes, he leaned the thick frame against the wall, and then sat down on the ground and tried to breathe. Jackie stared at him for a minute, then walked over to the large object and tugged away a wrinkled cover of damp blue satin.
At first they could see nothing, only the dark shape of a man, but as soon as she made out his features in the moonlight, Jackie gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.
“That isn’t it,” she said. “That can’t be it.”
David only muttered, “Who else could it be?”
Thinking to take a closer look, they trudged through the gravestones carrying the painting until they reached the automobile where they were able to position the picture in the headlights. The rats had chewed away large areas of the canvas, a part of one eye and half the cheek were completely gone, and only slack weaving gaped where the hands had been. “He looks pretty rough,” David said unhappily. “Torn in half.” He reached down and pulled the frayed edges together. “My God. Look at it.”
A man in a soiled cravat and a threadbare morning coat glared out of the frame with a sinister expression. On the chest were the medals, the brass buttons, and the piping, but the face was not Quentin’s. It was the face of an ancient man with rheumy eyes and thinning gray hair. The flesh hung on the skull, the skin was sallow, and several teeth appeared to be missing. But the face was more than aged. A malevolent sneer reflected the worst sort of debauchery, eyes yellowed from opium, and the jowls heavy from drink. And yet the visage revealed a lecherous demeanor no dissipation could hide.
“It’s Quentin,” said David shuddering, “but as a very old man. What can it mean? Is this some kind of prediction of the future?”
Jackie shook her head and stared at the portrait transfixed. “No, not the future—it’s the past,” she said simply.
David appeared not to have heard. “He’s old and diseased and he looks like he’s done a lot of drugs.”
“David, don’t you see? It’s the real Quentin,” she whispered, and looked at David, waiting for him to follow her thoughts.
“You mean the painting grew old,” he said finally, “and Quentin didn’t?”
She nodded, biting her lip.
“How can that be?”
“It’s enchanted.”
David shifted the painting and the moonlight crawled over it, reflecting the thick brushstrokes. “Look,” he said, “it’s doing it again!”
Like an overlapping film, the portrait went though another transformation. The gray hair grew thicker and matted over the large pointed ears. The eyes grew swinish, like those of a carnivorous beast, and they peered out of a black muzzle—a snout with grimacing teeth, canine teeth, sharp as picks and slimed with saliva that almost seemed moist on the canvas.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “It’s a werewolf!”
Jackie stared unblinking and then said softly, “The painting is under a spell.”
“And it guards a pretty heavy secret. No wonder he wanted it back.”
“I saw that wolf,” Jackie said, “the night we found Barnabas. Could that have been what attacked him?”
“I don’t know,” said David, “but this could mean Quentin is dangerous—a threat. If that’s really him, Jackie, he’s a dissembler. He’s a member of my family. And he’s a werewolf.”
Jackie just nodded her head, and her fingers closed on David’s arm.
“We have to find out what it all means,” he said simply, and he thought, but didn’t say, that it meant his family lived under an evil curse. A vampire, and now a werewolf. A wave of darkness swept through him.
Not knowing what else to do with it, but reluctant to leave it there, they covered the leering visage with the blue satin and put the painting in the backseat of the car. Snow flurries blasted the windshield when David turned the key and the engine rumbled to life.
He was surprised to hear Jackie say, “I don’t want to go back,” as they started down the road.
“I know. They’ll probably take the car away from us as soon as they see it.”
“What shall we do with that?” She glanced toward the backseat.
“I say we throw it in the swimming pool. With the other ghosts. Let them fight it out.”
She watched the snowflakes roiling in the headlights. “Maybe it’s not it,” she said softly.
“Maybe, but how many paintings do you think there are floating around?”
“What do you know about werewolves?” Jackie said.
“Only folklore. They change on the full moon. And something about silver bullets.”
She looked over at him. “How about we throw it into the sea?”
“Good idea. Let’s toss it off Widow’s Hill and that’ll be the end of it.”
She sighed and stared out the window. “You know we can’t do that. The painting is under a spell. It’s something supernatural. We have to figure it out. We’re the ones who found it. We’re the ones who could uncover the secret.” She watched the trees flash by her window; then she sighed. “But it isn’t ours. We should just give it to Quentin.”
“You’re right. Of course we should.”
“But first I could try to repair it. I have paints.”
“You would touch that hideous thing?”
She smiled. “I’m not afraid. I’m an artist.” She paused, then giggled. “And I’m a witch, remember?”
A reckless urge pulsed through his body and he stepped on the accelerator, easing the car into third gear and picking up speed. It had stopped snowing and the headlights cast their golden stream down the tunnel beneath the trees like a corridor of flame. The radio was playing again, and this time he recognized Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue pouring in a rich horn melody out of the speaker.
David gripped the wheel and watched as the trees flew by and the speedometer crept up to fifty, then beyond. He knew how fast the car could go and he had a fleeting thought of Phaëton in the chariot of the sun, the enormous engine rumbling, the galloping horses beneath the hood, and he knew he should pull in on the reins, that the car was not used to his hand on the wheel, but thoughts of danger slipped to the back of his mind and the idea that nagged at his consciousness was that they might never be here again. The music rose to a crescendo of golden clarinets just before he hit a wide sheet of ice and felt the wheels slip. Jackie cried out, “David! Stop! Don’t hit them!”
There were shapes up ahead moving in the headlights, and pairs of red eyes flared in the beams and glowed in the darkness like burning coals.
He jerked his foot off the gas, but the car had already begun to spin. He felt the wheels break loose and the body slide sideways. It rocked a little, drifted, then turned again, until, with a rumbling shudder, it crashed into a huge drift of snow. He heard Jackie scream as he lurched forward and hit his head on the dash.
When he came to, Jackie was out of the car and standing in the headlights. She seemed to be in shock. The coyotes slunk silently around her, as if they were protecting her, tongues hanging out, tails twitching, curious and restless, waiting for some sign from her. There must have been at least ten of them circling, moving out of the dark through the beams and disappearing again in the blackness.
His head throbbed. “Jackie? Are you okay? Are you hurt?” She turned to look at him. Her eyes were shining orbs of silver, the pupils huge and dark. He could barely make out her expression, but there was something unsmiling and demonic in her stare, and a chill sliced through him. She was so still and barely breathing, and she began to hum softly, vibrating as she glared not at him but throug
h him, her eyes focusing on something behind the car. Her face was suddenly older; her skin was white as marble, and she reminded him for a moment of the statue of the angel in the cemetery. She looked lost and distant, and he suddenly thought of Orpheus who had been so impatient, Orpheus who had rescued his Eurydice, won her freedom from death, only to lose her again when he looked back to see whether she was behind him. He had been impetuous and willful, he had failed her just when he had saved her, and she had been swallowed back up into the Underworld.
Fearing the worst, he climbed out of the car and winced with a pain in his chest as he approached her. She reached for him and took hold of his arm, dug her fingers into his flesh, stared deep into his eyes with an anguished look, and whispered, “Barnabas…” And again, this time in a tone so wretched it made his heart clench, “Where is he? Where is Barnabas?” before her eyes glazed over and with a whistling of breath she slipped to the ground.
“Jackie…” He leaned over and pulled her to him. Her limp body fell against his, and he watched helplessly as the coyotes slunk off into the trees. Then, his throat tight with sobs, he carried her to the car and lifted her inside.
His hands shaking so much he could barely hold on to the wheel, he mumbled a prayer under his breath, “Oh, please God, please help me, please get us out of here,” and reached for the key. The engine rumbled to life and the gears complained as he let out the clutch and put the car in reverse. To his surprise, they slid out of the snowdrift and back onto the road. Jackie was asleep on the seat, her head against his knee, and all he could think was how stupid he had been to imagine he could do this, take the car when he was only sixteen and didn’t really know how to drive, and bring it home safely. He had speeded recklessly, and he raged at himself, furious and terrified that he had hurt her and that she would never recover. This time he drove slowly, methodically, with as much care as he was capable of, easing slowly down the road, the car rolling on the soft snow, the trees flickering by the windows, and the half moon gleaming high in the sky, so bright he could not bear to look at it. He could see the lights of Collinwood in the distance and he wondered what he should do next, drive back to the stables and hide the car, take Jackie inside the house where he could phone a doctor to get some help, or just drive on into Collinsport to the hospital. He was about to settle on the last idea when he heard her moan, and slowly she sat up.
