The thing hiding under the cobwebs was huge—more than life-sized. It had the mass of a nightmare monster. Still reluctant to get too close, Chloe forced herself to look up at the beast squatting on the corbelled roof whose peak was just above her head. Through the grimy curtain she could see that it had wings on its back, but with its filthy veil of floral detritus it seemed closer kin to a gargoyle than a guardian angel. Surely no thief would ever want such a nightmarish creature. Yet this was her job, her quest. She had to complete her work.
It was dismaying, but she would have to clear the dirty webs if she were to take a clear photograph. She looked about, but there was nothing she could use as a broom or dust rag. She would have to get closer . . . would have to touch the sticky silk with her bare hands.
Shuddering, she stepped forward onto the iron fence, careful of the sharp spikes. She swept the cobwebs away, wiping her clammy fingers on the long white dress she had been given to wear on this special trip to the Patrick boneyard. The beast was at last revealed. It had a lion’s mane—though thick and ropey like a nest of snakes—and a baboon’s face filled with vicious viper’s fangs. Its paws were a grotesque evolution of articulate human fingers and raptor claws. Its unnaturally long tail curved around the jagged eaves of the roof like a striking serpent, and reminded Chloe of a bloody Mayan god. Hurriedly she stepped back, tearing her dress on the fence’s iron spikes.
Chloe looked down and saw that she had brought her old thirty-five millimeter camera. That was wrong, but she couldn’t go back now. She raised the device with trembling hands and tried to focus. Through the lens, she could see the yellow lichen that had grown over the beast’s eyes in a thick cataract. Her fingers depressed the shutter, but as the aperture snapped open, the petrified eyes seemed to contract and then twitch under their parasitic bandage.
No! She rejected that notion firmly. It was just the shadows moving around her, old tree leaves passing between the statue and the summer sun; that was what had caused the beast to go from light to dark and back again. It was not blinking. Its waxy skin did not move. It did not breathe. It was not animate.
Yet, as she watched, the stone talons seemed to flex themselves and the broad chest stirred.
She dropped her camera from nerveless fingers and stared with dilating pupils. The beast’s eyes blinked again, shearing the lichen from their stony surface. The lips curled back from the horrible teeth and a narrow, whip-like tongue slithered from its mouth to reach for her. It flicked over her face, stinging like a cold lash everywhere it touched.
Chloe tried to run, but she had stepped off her hummock and the wet ground had sucked up her feet; the subterranean cypress roots had knotted at her ankles, holding her in place. The cold, tentacle noose of the beast’s tongue curved around her neck. She began to scream, but it was too late. The monster choked off her breath as it drew her into its stony maw and down to its empty belly. . . .
“Geez!” Chloe wheezed in the darkness. It was a dream! Just a dream from the stress, she reminded her scrambling heart, panicking at her efforts to recall what she’d seen. She had been having a lot of dreams lately. This one was bad—the worst yet—but she was awake now and it would stop scaring her. Because it wasn’t real.
“I’ve gotta quit watching those old DVDs—I don’t care how sexy vampires are,” she said. But that was just rationalization. Her nightmares weren’t from the movies. They were most likely from her grandmother. And her great-grandmother. And all the other great-greats back to the seventh generation. The sins of the mothers were being visited upon the children, except that Chloe’s mother hadn’t lived long enough to say if she had also had “the Sight.”
After a moment, Chloe snapped on her bedside lamp and reached for a book with a hand that still trembled. She hesitated a moment and then skipped over the murder mystery, reaching instead for a romance.
Reading at one a.m. was not the wisest choice of activities when she wanted to get an early start in the morning, but she needed to relax for a bit and she found solace in the written word. Chloe promised herself that she would stop reading after the first love scene, but that was a lie. Once she started a book, she would read straight through to the end. Especially if the alternative was facing another of the nightmares that lurked in her subconscious.
Maybe, she thought, it would have been wiser to have taken the job in Florida, alligators, heat, leeches and all. The assignment to photograph large reptiles couldn’t have upset her any more than this trip to Virginia—to Gran’s infernal territory.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
and the soul outwears the breast.
—Lord Byron
Chapter One
Jarvis Perth was in his accustomed place on Old Mill Road, which was to say that he was dead center of both lanes and trundling along at a solid seven miles per hour—the greatest speed his aging tractor could manage on the slightly uphill stretch of pavement. Or on a downhill stretch, unless it was tumbling end over end, which from the collection of branches and mud in the roll cage above the driver’s seat, it would seem to have done quite recently.
Chloe knew that it was Jarvis Perth who was slowing the parade of muddy pickups through town because a woman dressed in a loudly patterned housecoat and filthy pink mules had bellowed out a greeting to him in a voice shrill enough to frighten off every crow in the southern states. The lady was the only one who was hollering though, so Chloe assumed that Jarvis was a beloved local character whose foibles were tolerated because of his immense charm and goodness. Anyway, the folks in Riverview, Virginia, didn’t seem to be real rigid about things like traffic lanes and speed limits. Since she had entered the county, no one in the snail parade seemed to take the 55 MPH signs posted along the tree-lined roadway as anything other than roadside decorations. Perhaps it was because they all seemed very busy eating pork rinds and rearranging their gun racks as they drove.
Chloe mentally smacked herself for that last thought. Just because her granny was a backwoods horror show, that didn’t mean everyone around here was backwards.
Normally, the tortoise-like pace along a smelly tar road being slowly torn up by tractor treads that punched deep grooves in the melting macadam and left the surface with an unattractive rash would cause frustration sweats and hyperventilation, but since she was in no particular hurry to arrive at the Riverview Plantation, and had missed her morning infusion of double-strength caffeine, Chloe was able to meander along with her humor unimpaired, occasionally waving and smiling at total strangers who cheerfully smiled and waved back. The superficial contact helped her resist the heat-induced somnambulism that had been threatening to overpower her for the last hour and more.
“ ‘Woke up this morning,’ ” she began to croon, doing her best Stevie Ray Vaughan voice. Except, she hadn’t woken up this morning. She’d never actually gone back to sleep after that damned dream. And she probably shouldn’t be singing the blues about this. That quiz had said that sleep deprivation in middle-class white females didn’t count unless it was on account of being in jail, or being stabbed in a back alley by a woman whose man you had stolen. The blues weren’t about psychic grandmothers, job stress and not having air conditioning.
Also, she wasn’t sure people from downtown Atlanta could have the blues. True, it was a city in the South, but it was also fairly high-tech. The blues didn’t go well with ultra-modern lighting and computers. You could get the blues in some parts of Texas, anywhere in Alabama or Mississippi, and of course in the older sections of Chicago or Detroit—and certainly anywhere in New Orleans—but not in California or Hawaii. It might be some rule about proximity to beaches, or perhaps the need to live in a flood plain or where they had deep snow in winters that lasted for six months. That wouldn’t rule out Duluth or Aspen, though, and you never heard of great blues classics coming from there. . . .
Chloe shook her head. Maybe that quiz had been right about her after all.
Geography aside, the blues could be about running away. And
that was sort of what she was doing, though not chased by an angry lover with a shotgun or a switchblade, or the law.
“ ‘O, I ran away this morning—but my troubles are chasin’ me. Yeah, I ran away this mornin’—’ ” Running away sounded childish, though, when your life wasn’t in danger. And it might not help her escape her personal baggage, which had been piling up of late. Especially given the direction she was running, because the travel-trunk of emotional baggage lived in Virginia. But she wouldn’t know until she gave running a try. And surely anything was better than huddling in her bed, doing her best to avoid both the phone and sleep in the long hours that belonged to the street sweeper, and the stray cats who prowled the Dumpsters in the parking lot.
Forget the blues. She needed a paradigm shift. She wasn’t running away. Instead, independent Chloe Smith was headed for a new—and possibly diplomatically challenging—job at Riverview Plantation. Which was why she wasn’t in any hurry to arrive. There was no need to rush at her fate now that the meeting was scheduled. Didn’t everyone keep saying that life was a journey and not a destination?
Of course, most people—as her father would say—were so full of it their eyes were brown. And that went double for the advice they gave.
Chloe consulted her map again, though there was no need. The road was straight and had no forks.
Her new client was a good buddy of her boss and mentor, Roland Lachaise. She had been thoroughly briefed—and reassured—about the delicate but benign nature of her assignment, but she was still feeling bemused and uneasy. And having super-sized anxiety dreams at night.
Her granny, a fey old witch who’d loved terrorizing her grandchild with tales of the weird anytime Chloe’s parents were absent, had assured Chloe of the child’s inheritance of the matrilineal curse of second Sight. Up until the week just past, Chloe had never believed it. Her traditional Methodist father had always called his mother-inlaw’s vision rituals “bullshit necrophilia” and would have nothing to do with Gran after his wife died. The taxidermy and dining on roadkill thing hadn’t helped. Dad was a complete urbanite, and his world was not accommodating to certain rural ideas.
Gran wasn’t a necrophiliac—not in the strictest technical sense of the word. Was there such a thing as a necrophile? That sounded closer, but Chloe had always thought the old woman was morbid and probably delusional. However, now she was beginning to wonder if Granny Claire had been right in her malicious prognostication. Could Chloe be seeing visions, perhaps—please, God, only metaphorical ones warning of future danger?
“No way,” Chloe muttered. “That is all just bull. All you need is about fifty years of psychotherapy to sort out your family problems.”
These words failed to convince her, though finding a therapist was probably a good idea. Chloe was haunted by her past life, whose ghosts refused to fade away. She had few clear memories of her mother and grandmother together, but those that stayed with her were not pleasant and overshadowed a lot of her life. It was amazing how little time it took to damage a child. The first and maybe worst of their encounters had happened around her fourth birthday. Her mother had taken Chloe to visit her grandmother for the first time then; and it had caused the first and only fight her mother and father had ever had in her presence.
No one had promised Chloe a cake and presents, but a part of her had half expected that there would be one or the other waiting for her at her mysterious granny’s house. After all, she watched TV and had friends with grandmas: It was obligatory, that’s what grannies did.
The ride into the backwoods had been a long one, and no cake or gifts were in evidence when they arrived, not even a pink envelope that might hold a card. But Chloe hadn’t fussed. In fact, Chloe had enjoyed herself, in spite of her initial disappointment about not having a second birthday party. Granny Claire lived in an old cabin with a sod roof where birds foraged for lunch and a dirt floor which would have been great for making mud pies—something she never got to do indoors at home. Of course, one didn’t just blurt out such a request, and Chloe thought that if she was good all the way until lunchtime, perhaps she could bring the idea up then especially since her grandmother had forgotten her birthday and would probably be feeling bad when this was pointed out.
However, it didn’t take long for Chloe to sense that all was not well between her mother and Granny Claire, and that the chance of mud pies in the kitchen was becoming rapidly more distant. There hadn’t even been time for the tea kettle to boil on the fire’s grate before her mother was beside her, leaning down and asking her if she was ready to go.
“Is Mommy’s angel ready for another ride?”
Chloe wasn’t ready, but she knew how to answer.
“Angel?” Granny Claire had loomed over both of them, not bothering to bend down to Chloe’s eye level. “I have never seen a child so lacking in curiosity. I left all these things out for her but all she’s done is stare at the floor. She must be feeble-minded.”
“She’s four, not feeble-minded.”
Chloe wasn’t sure what feeble-minded was, but it couldn’t be a good thing, because it made her mother’s mouth get tight. It had been an unfair accusation as well, she’d realized later when she asked her father about it. Chloe had noticed the many weird things her grandmother had left strewn on the room’s one round table, but her mother had warned her not to touch anything of her grandmother’s and so she had been a good girl. And anyway, Gran’s collection of the arcane had been pretty gross—bones and a crow’s wing and some scary tarot cards laid out in the pattern of a cross. Mud pies and the big spider cleaning up its web in the corner were way more interesting.
“And I see that you left that stuff out—in spite of my asking you to put it away. You know how Aaron feels about this! And Chloe didn’t touch any of it because I told her not to. And now we’re leaving,” Chloe’s mom had said, her voice flat and for once unhappy.
Chloe shot the old lady a so-there look. This would teach her to forget her granddaughter’s birthday. But Gran’s eyes got narrow and hard.
“Look at her! I think you brought the wrong child home from the hospital. I don’t know why you had to have a baby in the city anyway.” The words were aimed at her mother, but the old lady’s gaze never wavered from Chloe’s face.
Chloe dropped her eyes, frightened by this old woman who suddenly looked about twenty feet tall and as unfriendly as any fairy-tale giant. Sensing that her daughter was paralyzed by the criticism she didn’t understand, Chloe’s mother had taken her daughter’s hand and tugged her toward the door.
“Goodbye, Mother. We’ll try this again after the millennium.” She’d added under her breath, “Don’t mind the venomous asp, sweetie. They can’t help being the way they are.”
“Go, then! I should wash my hands of both of you!” Gran had shouted before slamming the cabin door behind them.
But of course she hadn’t washed her hands of them. Feeble-minded or not, Chloe was her only grandchild, and Chloe’s mother hadn’t been unkind enough to order her grandmother away forever, not when the old lady had claimed to be ill and contrite. They had tried meeting annually until Chloe’s mother died, without any real success at forging a loving relationship. After that, the family meetings stopped.
It was too late, though; the venomous asp had injected enough poison to affect Chloe’s mind, and her father’s distant rationalism hadn’t been enough of an antidote. And now it seemed like the old woman was really sick. Her last letter had been written in a hand so shaky that Chloe had barely been able to make it out.
Trying to distract herself from thoughts of her grandmother, Chloe turned on the radio and reviewed once more what she knew about her client and destination. Reading between the lines, she gathered that Riverview was owned and lorded over by one MacGregor Patrick, an unrepentent sexist who was “maybe one day younger than dirt and just as ugly,”—this according to her boss, who was himself a slightly sexist sexagenarian and homely as a Mississippi mudhen.
Neithe
r her boss’s friendship with the man nor the plantation would have been of professional interest to Chloe except for the fact that MacGregor Patrick was also the proud owner of one very strange cemetery, which he wanted inventoried—immediately—and added to the statewide database of funerary monuments that was being compiled by law enforcement in Virginia. The state’s cemetery files would eventually be added to the secure databases in other states to make up a nationwide catalog of pre-twentieth-century funerary monuments.
This was the part of the assignment that had Chloe shaking her head. Many genealogists wanted pictures of family headstones and monuments, and she had done several shoots for various genealogical organizations that were putting their information onto Web sites—she had even been sent to Europe for six weeks by a wealthy consortium that marketed photos of the graves of famous musicians and poets. But it wasn’t genealogists or taphophiles that were making work for her now and causing headaches for law enforcement; it was interior decorators. The latest fashion trend was for something called “funerary chic,” and interior designers were getting thousands of dollars—yen, pounds and deutsch marks too—for bits of American antique wrought-iron fence, statues and urns. Modern copies apparently just wouldn’t do. The true trendsetters had to possess the authentic grave goods. They had been in People magazine and on CNN.
Naturally, tomb-robbing entrepreneurs were happy to fill this market niche of authentic—and stolen—grave goods. In spite of the five-hundred-dollar punitive fee a and year’s jail time that went with a conviction for grave robbing, the thieves had grown so blatant that they were denuding old cemeteries of everything except their shrubberies—and that would doubtless follow as the fashion spread into the world of funerary horticulture, which was growing now that these criminals had moved out of New Orleans’s stone cemeteries and into the lush countrysides of states like Virginia.
Writ on Water Page 2
