Blood Roots

by Richie Tankersley Cusick

  So the other one must be Grandmother.

  Olivia frowned at the contrast. Grandmother looking so happy, and Mama looking so …

  Desperate.

  The word came to her so unexpectedly that she glanced around in surprise, as if some age-old spirit had whispered in her ear. Mama did look desperate—so much more than just unhappy—

  Olivia ran one fingertip carefully along the dusty glass. The images in the picture were so faint she could hardly make them out, yet there seemed to be crosses showing in the air and at different heights along the ground just behind where the two women were standing. A cemetery? And there—in one corner where the shadows gathered—it looked almost as if a single, taller shadow was easing away from the others.

  A shadow … or a person?

  Olivia shook her head uncertainly. It was impossible to tell … the quality of the photograph was poor, and there were spots along its surface that had darkened and distorted with age. She turned it slowly in her hands, trying to study it from every angle, then jumped as the floor creaked behind her.

  No one was there. As her eyes swept along the walls, she could see that she was still quite alone, and her breath came out in a rush. She hadn’t meant to trespass and poke around in private belongings. She felt sure that this was Miss Rose’s bedroom, and she felt guilty for having stayed so long. She put the picture back on the table and glanced toward the row of tall windows where the purple curtains had been drawn against the outside world. Then she went quickly back into the hallway and let herself out again at the rear of the house.

  There still didn’t seem to be anyone around, and the heavy silence was eerie and unnerving. As Olivia followed the veranda to the back staircase, she fought down a wave of panic and tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t truly alone, that everyone was merely off attending to separate duties and that soon she’d hear the sound of voices again. She paused at the foot of the steps and took a long, slow look around. If everyone really is dead, then I’m the mistress here now, I’m the only one alive at Devereaux House, this is my world and I can manage it however I please.

  The thought appealed to her.

  She stopped on the walkway, breathing in deeply of the air, thoughts flowing free, thick as mist.

  It was then that she caught a movement from the corner of her eye. It came from somewhere within the mass of shadows beneath the stairs.

  Olivia leaned down, peering into the alcove. She could see weeds under there—dead plants and rotting wooden crates and stacks of flowerpots—yet as her gaze fixed on the cluttered darkness, she was sure there was something else … hidden … drawn far, far back behind a heap of old barrels.

  She felt a prickle work its way up her spine. She felt her hand reach out for the railing as she moved slowly backward.

  Something gave a soft, soft whimper.

  Without warning the broken boards shifted and fell as something dislodged them.

  And then Olivia saw the eyes … looking back at her … wide and full of terror.

  10

  “HELEN—WE’VE BEEN LOOKING for you.”

  Olivia whirled as a voice spoke at her shoulder. For one second, she stood face to face with Skyler. Then he calmly stepped around her and leaned in under the stairs.

  “You shouldn’t run off like that,” he went on smoothly. “You know how we all worry.”

  Olivia watched as he reached back into the shadows … saw the quick tensing of his muscles as he yanked something out. The girl stumbled and nearly fell, but Skyler still had hold of her wrists and managed to steady her in time. She looked so small, so young—fourteen at most—and her sweet, plain face was ghostly white and streaked with dirt. She wore an old shapeless dress, still spattered with dried blood. There were no shoes on her feet, and her stringy hair fell forward over her cheeks, almost concealing her big, scared eyes. Skyler reached up and ran his fingers slowly over her forehead, smoothing back her hair. The girl blushed and looked at the ground.

  “I didn’t know,” Olivia said quickly, moving to the girl’s side, hating the fear she saw there, the trapped look of helplessness. “I didn’t know you were under the stairs—I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “She can’t talk.” Skyler glanced back over his shoulder. “She doesn’t have a tongue.”

  “Oh, God …” A cold shudder went through Olivia’s veins, but she tried not to show it. “Is she hurt?”

  To Olivia’s annoyance, Skyler looked the girl thoroughly up and down, smiling as her blush deepened.

  “My, my, Helen …” He ran one hand slowly down the front of her dress, as if to brush her off. “What a mess you are. But other than that”—his eyes turned back to Olivia—“she doesn’t look hurt. She just gets … confused sometimes.”

  Spells, Miss Rose had called them. Half-wit, Mathilde had said. Again Olivia felt sorry for the girl. She saw Helen’s half-frightened, half-shy glance at Skyler and was relieved when he finally let her go.

  “Helen doesn’t sleep well at night,” Skyler murmured, stepping back from the girl. “She has dreams that scare her. Sometimes she can’t tell if they’re real or make-believe … not even in the daylight. Can you, Helen?”

  As Olivia watched, Helen trembled slightly. Then she fingered her small, thin wrists where Skyler’s hands had touched.

  “I’m Olivia. I’m going to work here, too.” Olivia moved forward, trying to get Helen’s attention. “You were hurt in my room this morning. I hope you’re feeling better.”

  “We have to watch out for her.” Skyler’s eyebrow lifted. “We have to make sure she doesn’t scare herself. When she imagines things.” He turned his gaze back to Helen, his lips sliding into a smile. “Now wasn’t that silly of you … trying to hide?”

  Again the girl’s eyes dropped … again her cheeks flushed with color. Skyler gently took her arm and steered her toward the yard.

  “Go on. Yoly needs help with the wash.”

  Olivia watched as Helen went away … as Skyler looked back with a thoughtful smile.

  “Sweet,” he nodded. “Very … sweet girl.”

  It had unsettled Olivia more than she cared to admit, seeing Helen’s reactions, the blood on Helen’s clothes, remembering how the poor girl had looked that morning hanging limp in Yoly’s arms. It frightened her and confused her, and she tried to disguise her feelings with an apathetic reply.

  “Compared to Mathilde, I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  Skyler seemed to find that amusing. “And I was right about Mathilde, wasn’t I? She hates you. Although it’s nothing personal. She doesn’t like Helen either.”

  “Is there anything she does like?”

  He pondered a moment in exaggerated thought. “She has a strange affection for cold-blooded little pets.”

  In her mind Olivia could see the horrible black snake again, slithering down Mathilde’s arm—and Mathilde, slithering up against Skyler.

  “Her snake?” she said coolly. “Or you?”

  For a brief instant, Skyler’s eyes sparked with some hidden emotion, but then his mouth relaxed into a slow grin, and he turned and walked past her, his chest deliberately brushing against her shoulder. Olivia’s heart pounded in a strange blend of excitement and dread. Instead of going upstairs as she had planned, she headed off in a new direction past the house, out into the overgrown yard at the side. Reaching an impasse of trees and shrubs, she paused and glanced back, just to make sure Skyler wasn’t following. Then she took a deep breath and pushed her way through the moss.

  She had no idea where she was going. This morning’s incidents had left her tired and shaken, and she needed to think. She couldn’t get the tragic picture of Helen out of her mind, nor the few remarks she’d heard about the girl’s identity. Spells? No tongue? Maybe she was epileptic … suffered from seizures … or maybe she’d met with some appalling accident in her early childhood that had left her scarred and feeble-minded.

  Or maybe she had a mother like mine … or a father without a
name, without a face, without a past … poor innocent Helen, you didn’t ask to be born, you didn’t ask to be the way you are, maybe you’re just like your mother, cursed like your mother, or maybe like your father and you can’t help it and you wish you could find out where you came from and who you really are, you wish you understood all the scary things pulling you deep deep inside yourself—you wish, you wish, you keep on wishing—poor Helen poor poor Olivia—

  Throwing her arms around the broad trunk of an oak, Olivia rammed her forehead against it, letting the pain and dizziness wash over her in long, long waves, fighting back tears. Around her the fog curled and beckoned, and as she finally lifted her head again, she noticed a pathway worn into the soft ground at her feet, continuing on for another five yards or so, then vanishing abruptly into the thick, lush greenery ahead. It seemed to be a rather well-traveled path, and after another look over her shoulder, she decided to see where it led. She pushed her way through the last barrier of moss and low-sweeping leaves and then stopped in wonder.

  Nothing she’d seen so far at Devereaux House had prepared her for this.

  There must be some mistake … I must be dreaming.

  Olivia pinched herself, but the vision remained. She stepped forward cautiously, half expecting it to vanish as she got closer.

  She was in a clearing, large and cool and pleasantly green, but instead of waist-high weeds there was a manicured carpet of grass, and high trimmed hedges, and riotous bursts of color where flowers blossomed and grew. As she moved ahead she realized that she was entirely surrounded by trees—not only the ponderous oaks that guarded the house, but weeping willows and crepe myrtles, mimosas, elms, and cedars, beeches and poplars and dozens more she couldn’t even begin to recognize. Rustling gently in the warm, soft breeze, they wove themselves together in intricate patterns of leaves and branches, forming a magical boundary between this unexpected paradise and the decay she’d left behind. Olivia had never seen such beauty.

  As she followed the winding footpath, she noticed weatherworn figurines and oversized urns and crumbling statuary scattered among the plants. A broken stone cupid was poised atop a pedestal, his cherub head covered with ivy, his bow hung with spiderwebs. Pale, golden light filtered down from the leaves overhead, speckling the folded wings of marble swans as they nestled along waterless, overgrown pools.

  My God … he said he took care of the grounds … but I didn’t believe him …

  Looking up, Olivia saw a lustrous green dome against the sky, magnolias entwined with hickory and hemlock, and more tumbling green waterfalls of willows. She followed the pathway on and on beneath the trees, through openings in the overgrown hedges, each new discovery luring her on to the next, grove after grove, one wooded enclosure after another, like a maze of secret, enchanted rooms. There were elaborate beds of flowers and herbs, wrought-iron benches tucked back beneath stands of pecan trees, perfumed trails of crushed violets and rose petals. She saw stone ponds and silent fountains, the bright flash of fish darting beneath lily pads … she found sundials rotting quietly in nests of lacy ferns. The air was thick with the rich, wild sweetness of lilacs and magnolias, warm earth and honeysuckle, and as Olivia paused and lifted her face to the breeze, it occurred to her that she hadn’t heard the sound of a single bird since she’d entered the gardens.

  She had no idea how far she’d come, or even how long she’d been away from the house. Strangely enough, she felt no need to hurry here, for there was no concept at all of time or even of another world beyond this one. Totally and happily absorbed, she slipped through yet another break in the tall, tangled hedges, then stopped in dismay.

  It was as if a gate had closed behind her, forbidding light—and life—to enter this place.

  Olivia gazed in quiet horror upon the crumbling cemetery. She felt the serenity of the gardens fading away from her … and the slow creeping chill that replaced it. She had never actually seen graves aboveground until now.

  They spread out before her, rotting monuments to long-ago dead.

  Trees pressed ominously here, as they did at the house, long gray tears of moss in perpetual mourning. The enclosure was small, yet in the very center rose an immense mausoleum of black marble, the name DEVEREAUX engraved above its entrance, letters barely visible beneath crawling patches of ivy. The door was barred by a locked iron gate. A dead wreath hung there, dripping spiderwebs. Weeds and ferns sprouted from the roof and along the foundation, and below the moldering Devereaux name, a carved stone serpent swallowed its tail in a symbol of eternity.

  Olivia let her eyes wander slowly across the other graves. They were all normal-sized, crowded close together without pattern or design, staggered across the uneven ground and grown up with weeds. There were no flowers here … no color. The tombs themselves—some oblong, some square—stood at varying heights, several of them flat, others with sloped, pedimented roofs—resembling miniature houses in a macabre city of the dead. As Olivia took a hesitant step forward, she could see that some of them were actually sunk into the earth, their inscriptions all but vanished. Once-whitewashed walls were now gray, mottled with lichen and black crusts of damp, and some had partially disintegrated, leaving nothing but soft piles of crushed bricks. Here and there a lopsided cross still adorned a final resting place, held together by straggling brown vines. Olivia heard something rustle in the tall weeds, and as she stepped back, a huge lizard slithered around one of the tombs and wriggled itself into a hole at the back of the crumbling foundation.

  A clammy breeze rattled the branches of a dead tree, bringing with it an underlying stench of decay.

  With a gasp Olivia wheeled around, overwhelmed by the feeling that she was no longer alone.

  “Skyler? Is that you?”

  Overhead the trees moaned and bowed, plunging the cemetery deeper into shadow.

  “Skyler?”

  She glanced wildly at the tombs … the scabrous walls … names of people once alive now faded from the gravestones and forgotten. She felt like she was suffocating. In the dangerous quiet, she heard her heart racing and at the same moment heard the sharp snap of a twig from the hedge just behind her.

  And she was backing away now, away from where she’d come in, trying to hurry between the close-packed graves, pieces of the walls turning to dust beneath her groping hands. Terrified, she tried to go faster, but her shoes caught in the weeds and held her back. She felt a sharp tug as her sleeve snagged on a limb—she ripped it free and looked up and her breath froze in her throat.

  He was standing very still … very silent … pressed back against the gate of the mausoleum.

  Olivia’s eyes widened … yet as she stared, a wet, cold wind swept through the cemetery, shrouding the figure in fog and shadow.

  “Skyler?” she whispered. “Answer me …”

  The mist swirled slowly away.

  The graveyard was deserted, and Olivia ran.

  11

  SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE she was going.

  As Olivia left the cemetery behind her, she found herself in deep, twisted woods. Clotted branches and sheets of moss shut out the sky, turning day into night, and if there had ever been a path at all, the shadows swallowed it up. She ran recklessly, with no sense of direction, expecting at any second to hear the sound of footsteps in close pursuit.

  Hopelessly lost, Olivia tried to reason with herself, to calm herself down. Someone would notice she was gone—someone was bound to come searching for her sooner or later. She kept telling herself that she wasn’t that far from the house, that nothing could happen to her out here, that what she’d seen in the graveyard hadn’t been real …

  They’re not real, Mama, they’re only in your mind … they’re not touching you … nobody’s touching you—

  She thought she saw a glimmer of light and went toward it. Amazingly, there was a break in the trees, and as she came out of the forest at last, she saw a wide expanse of field sloping down to yet another dense thicket of oaks. The incline was steeper than it lo
oked; as Olivia started down, she slipped several times and felt the bandage loosen on her leg. The wound was starting to bleed again, and she gritted her teeth as she went on.

  To her surprise, she spotted the bayou ahead, yet she was almost certain this wasn’t the same place she’d been with Skyler that morning. She remembered him telling her that the bayou wound off around the Devereaux property. This area was more thickly wooded, the banks more choked with reeds and cattails and thick marsh grasses than the other location had been. She went slowly along the shore, gazing down at half-submerged tree stumps and trailing puzzles of ivy. Maybe she could find the house again if she just followed the embankment.

  Something rustled within the trees, and she stopped. She let her eyes go slowly over the woods behind her, probing the deep, deep shadows. She walked faster, trying to watch where she was going, trying to locate the house, but no matter how hard she strained, she couldn’t see any sign of a roof or chimneys in the distance.

  Behind the moss, something stirred again.

  Puzzled, Olivia stopped and stared off toward the woods.

  For one second she thought she saw the faintest flicker of movement, camouflaged there by the darkness. Instinctively, she ducked down into the weeds and waited.

  She waited for a long, long time.

  The bayou flowed, silent and sluggish, at her back. The woods were quiet as a grave.

  At last, Olivia roused herself and began to slip quickly along the bank. The ground was like a wet suction beneath her feet. She forced herself not to think about snakes and kept going. Ahead of her a massive oak tree leaned out precariously over the water, its drooping lower limbs forming a natural archway above the ground. Lowering her head, Olivia prepared to go through.

  She didn’t see what hit her.

  One moment she was on the shore, and the next she was gasping in the water, all the breath knocked out of her. She peered up and down along the bank, trying to figure out what had happened, but everything looked just as it had before.