by Ivan Blake
So, if the Cathar treasure is at Marymount, where might it be? In the Mary Tower of course!
“Oh, this is too cool!” Chris said, then grabbed his throat, and gasped. “Owww.” In that moment, he realized his swim in the ditch and soaking wet hike home had cost him more than a painful wrist. His throat burned, his skin felt sweaty, his shoulders ached and his head swam. But he was too fired up at the thought of finding the Cathar treasure to stay in bed.
He held on to the bedside table attempting to stand. He wasn’t going to sleep until he’d checked out the Mary Tower. For a moment, he sensed he might not be thinking straight, then dismissed the notion. Besides, checking the tower wasn’t going to be difficult. All he had to do was get down to the cellar in the dark and smash a centuries-old padlock. How hard would that be?
He staggered down the stairs. “Why doesn’t someone turn on the lights?” he cried out. He was shivering and the house was rolling and heaving beneath his feet like a ship in a gale. But he hadn’t much farther to go. At the top of the cellar stairs, his hand accidentally hit the light switch. “Thank you,” he said. “Okay, one step at a time.”
The cellar was like an ice box, and its only light came from a bare bulb at the foot of the stairs. The corridor to the great room twisted and turned and undulated like a wave, growing darker and darker still as Chris moved away from the stairs. He didn’t remember the corridor being so long. Were those eyes watching him from the many black recesses on either side? The cowering creatures were probably jealous because he’d solved the mystery and they hadn’t.
At the central chamber, he bellowed, “Will someone turn on the light?” No answer. In the dim illumination from the passage behind him, Chris could just make out the walls of the tower and its tiny door. He staggered forward and fumbled for the padlock then looked around for something with which to break it but found nothing. The dirt floor was icy beneath his bare feet. Shivering uncontrollably, he started to topple sideways, but at the last instant propped himself up against the stone tower. That’s when he heard the cry.
The wail of a woman’s voice...high above him, muffled, far beyond the chamber ceiling. Then silence. The cry had rattled Chris, but what happened next made the blood freeze in his veins.
A second cry, high overhead, up in the darkness, at first muffled, then plummeting downward! “My son!” the voice cried out. A woman appeared, or rather the outline of a woman in pale blue light, the merest suggestion of a woman, tumbling downward, through the ceiling, arms flailing about as though clutching at the air. Her fall ended abruptly, two or three feet from the ground. There she lay, suspended, like a great shimmering spider, her limbs writhing in agony as if impaled on spikes. Eyes rolled back in her head, she whispered something—it may have been “I hate you” or “I forgive you” or “I beg you” followed by the name “Mary”—then she fell still.
Her form faded to nothing.
Chris hadn’t drawn a breath since the phantom had first cried out, but as she disappeared, he gasped and staggered backward into the passageway. “What the hell was that?” he bellowed.
Chapter 6
Thursday, March 5
“Are you decent?” Rose called from the mudroom.
“In here.” Chris’s voice was barely audible. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, his head resting on the table. His body shivered so violently the legs of the table rattled on the tile floor.
“What’s happened?” Rose asked.
“I spent the night here.”
“Whatever for?” She felt his forehead. “You’re burning up.”
“You never told me about the ghost.”
“I did. Rixende Donat.”
“Not the ghost in the cemetery. The ghost in the cellar.”
“Oh,” Rose said as she helped Chris into the parlor. There she wrapped him in an afghan and settled him on the sofa. “So you saw Braida.”
“Who?”
“Braida de Montserver,” Rose said as she returned to the kitchen. “She’s been here since the Civil War.”
“What happened to her?”
Rose pottered in the kitchen, filled the kettle, and got breakfast items out of the fridge. “Her son was killed at Gettysburg. She couldn’t take the grief. She came up to the tower one morning and spent several hours planting sharpened stakes in the ground because she knew that a fall from the tower wouldn’t be fatal without them.” Rose returned to the parlor with a plate of toast and mug of tea. “In the afternoon, Braida climbed the tower. We know that because many people have seen her shadow pass by the windows.”
“I have,” Chris said.
“In the evening, she cried out so loud from the top of the tower that the whole village heard her. Then she jumped. She died on the stakes. And because her death was a suicide, she’s stuck here.”
“You could have warned me,” Chris said, cupping the warm mug in both hands.
“I didn’t expect you to be poking around in the cellar at night. Why on earth were you doing that? Oh, of course, you’ve been reading about the Cathar treasure. You idiot.”
“I thought I’d solved the mystery.”
“You and the hundred other people who’ve shown up in Lewis over the years hunting for the Cathar treasure. And I’ll tell you what I told them—there is no treasure, not in the tower, not at the village, not in the graves. No treasure, got it?”
“Why is the tower locked?”
“Because it’s dangerous. It’s old, crumbling, the upper floors are full of bird dirt, and we use the lower floors to store family mementos. Besides, what business is it of yours anyway? You’re sick as a dog, and now poking about has practically killed you. So, get to bed, forget about Cathar treasure, and do the job my brother hired you to do. Guard our graveyard. Got it?”
“At the end, it sounded like Braida asked Mary to forgive her? Was she asking the Virgin Mary for forgiveness?”
“Chris! Let it go!”
* * * *
The previous weekend, the lead news story on the Bangor and Portland TV stations had been the funerals of a popular minister and his family from Roebuck, Maine, about three hours east of Lewis. The entire town had turned out to say goodbye to the young pastor, his lovely wife and their three little children, all killed eight days earlier in the fiery rollover of their minivan, after a potluck supper at the pastor’s tiny church. Gilbert and Dolli had watched every pathetic minute of the coverage: all the shots of weeping locals, the maudlin commentary by the news anchors, and the many tearful interviews with relatives. Gilbert had giggled non-stop at the futility of their grief. “They’re dead,” he’d muttered at the TV. “They’re not hearing you, and they sure as hell ain’t coming back.” At one point he’d bellowed, “Get real! They’re not angels!! They’re brisket!”
That had been Saturday. On Wednesday, after his fight with the DuCalice woman, Gilbert recalled a request they’d received recently for an entire family of skeletons. The pathetic funerals in Maine were the opportunity Gilbert needed. Roebuck was in the middle of nowhere, and Gilbert would have bet dollars to donuts that the young pastor’s church was probably some old double-wide trailer on a dirt road outside the village proper. He’d seen a hundred such sorry little places of worship all across America, the creation of some nutcase with a personal calling from God to gather up a handful of gullible locals and hammer them with his sorry message of torment and redemption. From Gilbert’s experience, the cemetery was likely to be some untilled field at the edge of impenetrable bush. Stuck out there, far from prying eyes, the pastor and his brood would be ripe for Gilbert’s picking.
Before anyone else was up, Gilbert woke Blood and Sweat and informed them they were going for supplies. He’d winked and they’d known immediately what he had in mind. “Road trip,” they’d squealed. Only as they were leaving town in the twins’ lavender-colored panel truck did Gilbert explain the complications. First, they had to get all five bodies; one or two wouldn’t do, so they’d have to keep digging until they had
mom, dad and the kids all packed away nicely in the truck. Second, they couldn’t be seen, since the area was sparsely populated and the presence of a lavender van and three Goths might be remembered if their raid were ever discovered. Their only option was to arrive after dark and work late into the night. And third, the bodies were going to be very fresh, in the ground less than five days, which meant they’d have to stop on the way home to strip the skeletons. He’d brought gasoline, bleach, plastic sheets, axes and everything else he thought they might need for the job.
Gilbert didn’t know how the twins might react to the challenges, but they’d both howled with pleasure. “Oh, Gilbert,” Blood said, “we have such fun with you!”
* * * *
In Gilbert’s absence, Dolli seemed determined to accomplish something. Shortly after nine, she summoned everyone to the stage and assigned them tasks. Geraldine was tasked to make or gather props and store them away in cardboard cartons in the cellar until needed. Seven plays, seven cartons. Gilbert’s proposed program for the theater festival consisted of three different offerings running in repertory. The first production, a three-act play entitled The Mad Surgeon of Rottingwood Asylum, would open the theater in three weeks’ time. The other two evenings of theater were to consist of three one-act plays each, two horror plays and a comedy. Gilbert had written all the horror plays himself and then turned them over to Wolfram who’d heavily edited and enriched them. Wolfram had also ‘adapted’ two classic one-act comedies to transform them into ‘original works’ in order to avoid paying royalties. Of the seven plays, the company had only begun working on three, and of the three, Geraldine had only seen a portion of one actually being rehearsed. It had been so revoltingly violent that she’d become nauseous and run from the theater in tears.
Tickets had been on sale for several weeks, but apart from a slight bump following Francois’ accident, there’d been little public interest. Dolli kept harping on the need for posters and a functioning box office, while Gilbert kept talking about organizing some huge publicity stunt. Geraldine had the distinct impression the whole venture was headed for disaster. She almost felt sorry for her father since he’d hitched his wagon to Gilbert’s fiasco. There was little point in trying to warn him. He never listened to anyone, least of all her. Okay, so she’d focus on helping Rose instead.
It hadn’t taken Geraldine long to figure out that Dolli was the only member of the company trying hard to make the theater work. That task was like herding cats. When Gilbert wasn’t around, Dolli sometimes succeeded in getting people up off their butts, but when Gilbert was present, everyone was content to lay about philosophizing, which drove Dolli nuts.
Geraldine had also figured Dolli ran the business Gilbert was using to finance the theater. Evidently, whatever they were selling wasn’t bringing in the money they needed. Dolli was always nagging Gilbert about his disorganization, and crazy spending and shortage of cash, so when Geraldine learned Gilbert and the twins had left on business, she wondered whether Gilbert might finally have had his fill.
She also believed she’d deciphered relationships in the company. Blood and Sweat were Gilbert’s most trusted allies. Manfred and Emelia had something weird going on but Manfred also spent a lot of time with Wanetta, and Emelia was becoming very suspicious. Geraldine wouldn’t ever want to cross Emelia since she looked like she’d slice your nose off as soon as blink, and had the razor blades in her boots to do it. Blood and Sweat both adored Doctor Shadow, and Lassa Tetana adored Dolli. Creepy Caspar Fredrik had a thing for Lady Twilight, but he was such a wimp—always hiding somewhere—that Twilight barely acknowledged his existence.
Dolli had assigned Lady Twilight to work on props with Geraldine. Although they’d been going to the same school for years, Twilight and Geraldine had never previously spoken. Her father, the local dentist, had a big house outside town and everyone knew he had something going on with his receptionist. Twilight had always seemed like a stuck-up bitch. To Geraldine’s surprise, however, she turned out to be nice…if completely nuts.
“I love Gregorian Chant,” Twilight announced as they sorted the collection of old surgical instruments they’d scrounged. “It helps me feel the presence of death.”
“Me,” Geraldine said, “I like Cindy Lauper.”
Twilight didn’t register Geraldine’s comment. “I have far too many pairs of tights with stripes for a sane person. I’ve seen fairies in church gathering petals as they fell from the wilting flowers. I’ve slept in three graveyards and believe every child should be made to do so.”
“I read Judy Bloom,” Geraldine said.
Twilight kept up her machine-gun narrative as they packed away the rusted blades and saws. “My first kiss was at a funeral. We were thirteen. We hid beneath my aunt’s coffin in the viewing room of the funeral parlor, and each time someone said how lovely my aunt looked, we kissed. It was magical. You can probably tell how evil I’d be if I put my mind to it.”
“You could never be evil,” Geraldine said.
“What a mean thing to say! You don’t think I could be evil?”
“Oh of course! That’s not what I meant. You’re just not evil now, but you certainly could be evil if you wanted to be, so evil, in fact...just in a nice way.”
* * * *
Gilbert and the twins headed north up Powerline Road toward the Canadian border then east across the Maine State line, and finally south toward Roebuck. They found a phone booth on the outskirts of the village with an intact phone book where they looked up the minister’s church. After a day spent driving dirt roads in search of abandoned farms, they eventually found the perfect spot. A sign, shot full of holes, read For Sale, New Price, 10 acres, Outbuildings. The gate was rusted shut but didn’t give Blood much trouble. Down a long dirt road, they came to a boarded-up farm house with crumbling barn, and murky pond. To the side of the house were two rusted oil drums. Perfect!
They dug two fire pits, slid the barrels into them, filled each with pond water, and stacked firewood around both. As they waited for dark, they ate chips and cold burritos. At nine, they headed for the Minister’s address. East of the village, they found an old feed store converted into the Light of the World Church, and next to it the Minister’s tiny bungalow. Both were in darkness. In the field behind the bungalow stood a large plywood sign on wooden posts which read Light of the World Garden of Repose along with a dozen grave stones. Blood drove the van across the field, eased it between clumps of birch, and turned off the headlights.
The Minister’s family was easy to locate. The soil on their graves was still loose and mounded high. Minutes later, the twins were lifting coffins from the earth. All were cheap boxes that sprang open at the lightest blow. The contents were not so easy to handle. Each figure was charred, oily, with pieces of flesh, even limbs, falling away. All were barely recognizable as human. The smell was horrendous. Rot had taken hold. The hardest job was getting each cadaver out of its coffin without it falling to pieces in their hands. In the end, they were forced to lay out a large groundsheet, dump the contents of each coffin onto the sheet, shovel one corpse at a time into a garbage bag, and seal it. Inevitably in all the mess, some of the smaller bones became mixed together. The client was going to have to reconstruct the family for himself, but from the talk they’d had on the phone about payment, Gilbert figured the client had the necessary enthusiasm for the task.
Near dawn, they left the cemetery and drove to the abandoned farm to complete the job of stripping burned flesh from bone.
Chapter 7
Friday, March 6
Twilight actually liked her—her! Overweight, pimply, shy Geraldine Paget. Pumpkin Patch, for God’s sake! The two girls had worked together late into the evening, gluing and painting and boxing up props. At one point they’d fought a pretend duel with plastic swords and Twilight called Geraldine a buxom badass! A buxom badass! And all because of her new Goth name and ridiculous outfit. Never mind the push-up bra was killing her, and she could hardly breathe. N
ever mind her boobs were stuck so far out, she couldn’t see her feet. The discomfort was so worth it! Of course, she wasn’t a lesbian or anything. She wasn’t turned on by girls, not by the sight of Twilight’s delicate neck or her gorgeous white breasts or her slender legs. Okay, so maybe she was a little turned on, but not because she liked girls, not at all. She liked—well—having a friend.
Geraldine had never had a girlfriend, not since elementary school, not anyone! Not until Twilight. They’d talked all afternoon and evening, like Twilight was actually interested in her! And for all Twilight’s darkness and poetry and obsession with graves and death, she’d admitted secretly liking some of the same stupid things as Geraldine...kittens and fairies and unicorns, and David Bowie and Kirk Cameron and Alyssa Milano from Who’s the Boss. Giggling like school girls, they’d both said they’d love to have a sleepover with Alyssa Milano, although Geraldine wasn’t quite clear why Twilight winked and licked her lips when she said it.
First ones awake, Geraldine and Lady Twilight were sitting down to a breakfast of toast and coffee backstage when Twilight smiled and placed her hand on Geraldine’s. Her heart fluttered, then instantly turned to ice as she spotted her father searching about in the wings.
“Is Gilbert here?” he shouted.
Geraldine ducked behind a curtain.
“What do you want, Mr. Paget?” Dolli shouted from Gilbert’s apartment.
“I need to see him.”
“He left town on business early yesterday morning and won’t be back until sometime tonight.”
“I hope to hell he’s out there drumming up interest in this fucking mess of his.”
“I’m sure he’s doing what he can.”
“Well, tell him I stopped by. Oh, and has the DuCalice woman’s new friend been around? The one with the limp and the scars?”
