He collected the forms. Andrew was the last to hand his back.
“This way, please. Once we reach the room, I’d like to have a few words with you before you enter, for your safety.”
Zoey and Emily shared a look. Even Margot, the stalwart cynic in the crowd, had gone slightly pale.
Floor-to-ceiling panels of dark gumwood lined the walls, accented by lantern-esque light fixtures every few yards. There seemed to be few guests in this section of the hotel. Emily tried to peer out the windows to see if she could spot other patrons in the parking lot below, but the windows were stained glass, and what little light the fog allowed in was further obscured by the deep blues and russets in the faceted panes.
After a few more twists and turns they traveled down a remote hallway until they reached an old-fashioned servant’s staircase. They began their ascent, climbing three stories of tread-worn stairs that narrowed with each passing flight. The chilly air around them smelled of oiled wood and age, and the floor creaked under their feet from the burden of so much weight.
Once they reached the top landing, Hans paused as if to catch his breath, then turned to them. An amber pool of light raked across his face from the lone lantern in the hallway. He seemed so much older than only a few minutes before, and older still as he cast his eyes upon the far end of the hall to a single door secured by a padlock. Without a word, he took a ring of keys from his pocket.
“You really lock her in?” whispered Christian uneasily.
The old man shook his head. “You cannot keep The Lady in Red contained anywhere. She goes where she desires. This is to keep unsuspecting patrons out. Liability, you know.”
Once they reached the door, he paused once more. “You have the room for the next few hours. I sincerely hope you do not require it for that long. If you need me, I will be down in my office.”
He opened the door. A gust of cold, stale air blew over the threshold. Emily blinked against it as her eyes fought to adjust to the adjacent darkness. The large room was sparsely furnished, only a dusty sideboard and a few mismatched pieces of worn furniture lined its circumference, as though moved in haste. In the middle of the floor sat an imposing circular wooden table surrounded by haphazardly placed chairs. A lone window was shrouded with a tattered curtain, the gray bleakness of the day bleeding around its frayed edges. Shivering, she buried her hands in the pockets of Andrew’s coat and was surprised to find Nick’s key and ring at the bottom. She pressed them hard into her hand until she could feel them leave a mark.
“I will leave you to your work,” the old man concluded, though he hesitated at the entrance to the room. His eyes settled on Emily, sending one last chill down her spine. “Please remember…there are things in this world we cannot understand, that science cannot explain away, and that the modern day cannot extinguish.” Before anyone could respond, he gave a nod and departed. The door sealed shut behind him.
A communal shiver seemed to pass through all of them, and they each looked to one another as how to proceed. Simon muttered, “So, how do we sit? Boy, girl? Meth addict, non-meth addict?”
But Dwayne and Egan were already unpacking their bags, lugging equipment out onto the floor. Anxious, Emily walked over to the window and glanced down at the grounds below.
“You can open the shade,” Dwayne told her.
“Won’t it interfere with the vapors or something?”
“Believe you me, we want to see this one coming. The really nasty ones like the dark.”
“Brilliant,” Andrew muttered, staring at both Dwayne and her.
Buck and Dinesh busied themselves assembling their paraphernalia, most of which resembled video cameras on tripods and Klieg lights. Dwayne began to sprinkle a gray powder on the floor.
“What is that?” asked Margot, turning up her nose at the strange odor the dust was emitting.
“Blessed powdered Rowan berries. Wards off evil spirits.”
“Isn’t that counterproductive?”
“She won’t want to stay long.”
Next he opened a box and proceeded to hand out leis made of leaves and red berries to everyone present. They smelled the same as the gray powder.
“Is this really necessary?”
“Better to be safe than sorry. Hopefully, they’ll be strong enough to keep her out of your body for a bit. You don’t want this lady messing around in your mind.”
Egan instructed them to take their seats when suddenly cries of NO, NO, NO! smashed through Emily’s mind. Like a hallway of doors slamming open, the unknown voices wailed at her to flee, to escape. She stood paralyzed on the spot; the closest real door seemed a million miles away and Andrew just as far, though he was merely across the room.
“Emily?” he asked, his brow creased in concern.
She felt as if strings were being cut inside of her and things were falling away, like weights from balloons, and soon she would float away too. She made a fist with her hand to prove to herself that she was alive and real.
“Let us all form a circle,” Egan intoned.
She watched Andrew move to the table, his eyes never leaving hers as they sat at the two remaining seats opposite each other. Looking behind him, she gasped. Andrew whirled around. A figure stood across the room—white as a corpse—but it was only her reflection in a mirror that lined the wall. She laid a hand on her chest to calm her heart.
“Emily?” Andrew pressed, offering her one last chance to bolt. She shook her head, took her seat, and closed her eyes upon Egan’s command.
Instead of the talk of circles he had fumbled through the last time they had all sat together, Egan began to speak in a language she didn’t understand. He chanted for a few moments and quieted, reminding them all to continue to breathe. Next to him, Zoey took a huge gulp of air as though afraid it would be her last.
To Emily’s left sat Christian, who reached over and squeezed her hand. After what felt like an eternity, the equipment around them began to buzz and hum and click. An odor, sharp and acrid, filled the air. The closest thing she could liken it to was the smell of burning hair. Margot coughed and seemed to fight down the urge to be ill.
“I, um, we seek an audience with The Lady in Red,” Egan mumbled, his control of the situation faltering with the increasingly strained whizzing and wheezing sounds of the apparatus behind him. “Is she here?”
Silence. Deafening silence. Then a sound. A dank, viscous, sucking sound, as if a seeping corpse was willing itself across the floor with one foot still trapped in the grave. Emily held onto Zoey’s and Christian’s hands even tighter.
The room’s temperature plummeted to an icy chill as the low, dull sound came closer. Then a gurgled, choking laughter, a hissing exhalation, froze the blood in Emily’s veins. There was nothing alive in this creature, nothing remotely human; it kept no vestige of a heart.
She could hear the sound of Andrew’s chair scraping across the floor as if preparing to fight.
“Lady in Red, there is a woman present who would ask you a question. Will you make yourself known?” Egan asked in his most subservient voice.
The wet, evil crawling sound circled them, as if smelling each body. Finally, it came to rest behind Emily. Every hair on the back of her neck stood straight up.
“She’s here,” a voice rasped. “Again.”
Emily’s eyes flew open, as did everyone else’s. Fear as she had never known overcame her. Reflecting in the mirror behind her, hovered a grotesque vision. Red tatters of a dress licked about her corpse like greedy flames. Putrid abscesses oozing with pus covered her flesh; they sucked in the rags and then blew them free like a foul cancerous wheeze and made the large crucifix that hung around her neck shudder. What was left of her moldering hair hung in sparse clumps around a skull housing a set of hard eyes that were seemingly plucked from a dead trophy animal, except these lifeless orbs were murky, milky white with cataracts. In spite of their hideous film they studied Emily and categorized her every facet in twisted fascination as though prepari
ng her for butchering. Emily’s blood ran cold as she remembered the ghost from the night in the Columbarium.
“I want this one.”
“No!” Andrew shouted and lunged across the table. Buck and Dinesh grabbed hold of him and struggled to wrestle him back into his seat.
“You’d die for her, wouldn’t you?” Her gruesome smile exposed broken, rotting teeth and a tongue the color of rancid meat. She stared in amusement at Andrew as he was fighting to break free. “Always the same.”
“Get away from her!”
Finding strength from God knows where, Emily looked into the reflection in the mirror, into those cataclysmic eyes, and made her lips form the words. “Please tell us about the warning you gave your son.”
The revulsion in her face was stunning; a festering of jealously and hatred twisted themselves into her words. “What son?”
“Nick—Nicholas Chamberlain.”
She hissed and beat her breast repeatedly. “You came here thinking I’d help him? That I’d lift one finger to help that spiteful idiot and that whore? Never. I want them to rot in hell. I want them to suffer forever for what they did to me. I told him, I told her, and they both laughed at me. I gave everything to that boy, sacrificed everything for him—and that was the thanks I got. To be laughed at and insulted. No, I want them in agony. I want them to feel what it’s like to be abandoned.”
“Emily,” Andrew warned, Buck and Dinesh’s hands still on him, his breathing uneven.
“Sit back, boy. Don’t you know I could kill her right now if I wanted? I could infect her mind and make her crash through that window. Would you like to see that? Her body slashed by those shards of glass and broken on the street? But no, it’s so much worse what you’ll face.”
“What? What is it?” Emily choked out.
The Lady in Red hesitated, staring blackly at Emily, and then two skeletal hands descended on Emily’s shoulders while her filthy rags draped down Emily’s back and the large crucifix pressed into Emily’s neck. Her bones rose to comb through Emily’s hair, and she raised a lock to her leprous face and smiled. Emily’s stomach roiled.
“You’re so beautiful, so alive. Both of you. It’s always this way at the end.” She closed her eyes and inhaled like she was smelling a baby.
“He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” The Lady’s putrid breath blew across Emily’s cheek, and she closed her eyes, battling the nausea. “When he takes you in bed with him how does it feel? Beyond telling, beyond words, like a million souls are fornicating inside of you?”
Emily’s head was throbbing, and the pain felt unbearable, like the ghoul was inside her mind.
“Doesn’t it feel that way, boy? Doesn’t it feel that way when you’re screwing her?”
Andrew shook off Buck and Dinesh and flew from the chair; it crashed behind him.
She smiled, evidently pleased. “You’d never be able to resist her. She’s a Thomas. You have to be with her. Can you remember a time you didn’t want her? Even as a boy, you dreamed about her, wanted her. But it wasn’t normal, was it? It was never normal. You were never normal. Tell me, when they locked you up in those cold, white, piss-scented rooms, didn’t you think your mind had snapped? Didn’t you wish you were dead?”
“Shut up!” All the color had drained from his face, his fists clenched tight.
“And now, can’t you feel it prey on your mind? The need to be with her, to touch her, to feel the skin of this neck?” Her skeletal digits burned along Emily’s throat. “Thomases. What a poison they are. That’s what the white ghost told me, what I begged Nicholas to understand. Throughout all time, how they destroy Chamberlains’ souls. Whores, harlots, adulteresses—they will love you like no other—and seduce you beyond want, beyond sanity.”
“Stop it! Just stop it!”
“What do you think happens to that passion when they die, pretty boy? Do you think their need for each other just fades away? Do you think the obsession Nicholas had for his slut perished with their deaths? Of course not. No, it passed on to the next Chamberlain and Thomas cursed enough to find each other. It passed on to you.”
“No,” Emily whispered. “No.”
“But do you know what the truly tragic part is?” she continued, wheezing out the words eagerly. “Each generation builds on the other, becoming more and more violent, and multiplying in each soul. It was awful for Nicholas at the end. I could see it. How are you even alive now? How can you even stand to be near her at this point? How hasn’t it killed you?” Her filmy eyes narrowed on Andrew in a sick kind of wonder.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he railed at her.
“Don’t you know why Chamberlains and Thomases love more violently than anything ever on this earth? It’s because their curse ensures they die the most horrible of deaths—more gruesome than anything imaginable. It’s only a matter of time for you now. You see how death has begun to follow you already, how you’ve barely avoided it. But that specter will find you. You can’t run. Especially now, not after you’ve pledged yourself to her.”
Andrew took a step around the table. It would be impossible to say whose face held more hatred at that moment.
“Listen, you fucking piece of death, nothing you say is going to stop me—”
“No Chamberlain who bears the curse has ever married a Thomas. They’ve all died before they could take the vow. You’re no different, boy.”
“What the hell do you even know? I’m a Hayes, not a Chamberlain.”
She began to laugh, a rheumatic death rattle, her teeth sucking in the flayed flesh of her lips. “Your father’s not a Hayes—you’re not even a St. John. You’re the bastard son of a Chamberlain. It was his birth name. A family name? Remember now, boy?”
A stark pallor fell over Andrew’s face. “A family name,” he repeated, and stumbled a foot backward as though he had been punched in the gut. Lainey. Lainey, that was the nickname Claudia had called Neil. Lainey…a nickname for Chamberlain.
“Andrew Chamberlain. You suffer a part of that tortured bloodline, just like Nicholas did. It’s there in your palm. Even that buffoon could see it.” She glared at Dwayne, who cowered under at her stare. “And she, this pitiful thing, holds the curse as well. And it’s all happening again.”
“What’s happening?”
The bones of the phantom’s hands bit into Emily’s flesh and held her to the chair like she was trying to strangle her, but instead she spoke in a whisper as if she was a small child, though her eyes never left Andrew for one second.
“That man you love who takes your body, he’ll murder you. He will kill you. He’ll have no choice. The same need that drives him to take you will drive him to destroy you. And if he survives, the image of you dead, bloody, and broken will kill him. He won’t be able to live. He’ll take his own life. By knife, by gun, or by the rope. Or much, much worse. Nicholas was lucky that he drove them both off that cliff. But they said she still fought to reach him at the end as she drowned in her own blood.”
Emily buried her head in her shoulder, to sob, to retch; the ghost yanked it back up by her hair with a hiss.
“Don’t you dare show pity for her. Don’t you dare! Look at him.” She pulled her hair harder, forcing her to witness Andrew’s stricken expression. “Look at your killer. I should do it myself if I had any pity. But you’re a Thomas, and I prefer to watch you suffer.”
Then her mouth, that fetid carcass, pressed itself to Emily’s face and kissed her. “You’ll make such a wonderfully brokenhearted ghost, Emily, never to see him again. Ever. And you know it’s true. Just like Nora. You’ve dreamt it. You’ve seen it.”
Her words crashed against the walls of Emily’s mind, and her stomach contorted with acid. The thousands of souls within her screamed as one.
Without warning, the equipment across the room exploded in a spray of flames. With a shriek, The Lady in Red released her.
At that exact moment, Buck yanked
a large silver shotgun from below the table and roared, “Emily! Move!”
She threw herself to the side. Buck aimed and fired.
A blast of light burst from the gun missing Emily by inches. It smashed directly into The Lady in Red’s chest, hurling her backward. Howls of rage wailed from her grotesque figure. Emily watched in horror as the apparition crumbled, remnants of her bloody rags floating in the air, air that reeked of seared flesh. Only her crucifix remained for a moment, then disintegrated along with the rags into a black pile of ash.
“Blessed be,” muttered Buck as he lowered the gun, shaking.
Andrew raced toward Emily, but she threw one hand up to ward him off. She clenched the other across her mouth to fight back the bile erupting into her throat.
Staggering to her feet, she flew from the room. From behind her she heard Margot chastise Andrew to stay, along with the clatter of chairs and incessant shouting. Sweat poured from her forehead, and her legs barely held her. She ran down the steps and launched herself out the first door she could find, not stopping until she fell behind a giant redwood, and threw up until there was nothing left inside of her.
Hunched over her knees, the abomination’s words knifed into her heart. Andrew was a Chamberlain and she was a Thomas. And whatever existed between them was deadly. He would kill her with his own hands.
He would kill her.
She wanted to believe it was a lie; she screamed at herself to believe it was a lie. Andrew would never hurt her. Never. But she knew…in the dark recesses of her heart she had felt that violence within him, and she had seen it in her dreams. And now everything about their past, these last few weeks and the perilous last few days, bore testament to it. They were doomed, cursed.
Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story Page 48
