The Ghost and Miss Demure (20 page)

“Where are we going?” Karo asked, but it was a pointless question. She could guess where they were headed. The only thing at this end of the property was the family graveyard. There was a slave’s cemetery somewhere else, but it had boasted only wooden crosses that had rotted away, and now the location was forgotten.

“To find the old reprobate’s mausoleum,” Tristam answered. “I want to leave some garlic on his tomb.”

“Hawthorne,” she corrected him again. “Garlic is for vampires.”

Tristam thrust open the iron gate that separated the living and the dead. It should have squealed but the Campions had been busy in there as well. The old stones and Gothic temples no longer looked eerie now that the creepers had been shorn back and the headstones pushed straight. Things looked better, but there was yet some proof that weeds had been at work for decades, pushing their way into every crack in every headstone and marker. Karo chose not to dwell on the fact that plants in the cemetery were better fed than the rest of the garden—except in one corner.

“Where is he?” Tristam growled, prowling among the stones.

Karo called his name worriedly, looking about for snakes and spiders before following. “You aren’t really thinking of doing anything, are you? I mean, we can’t go around desecrating graves or anything like that.”

“Who said anything about desecration? I just want to give the pervert a taste of his own medicine. Maybe it’ll teach him some respect if we take a peek at his naked bones. Maybe I’ll take them hostage as an assurance of good behavior.”

“Don’t say that!” she pleaded, hurrying after him. “That’s a horrible thought.”

“Well, at the very least I want to see that he actually has some bones to peek at. That’s the main cause of classical hauntings, don’t you know. Missing bones.”

“You have a point, I suppose,” she conceded unhappily. His explanation felt correct on a visceral level. “But let’s not do anything drastic. We don’t want to piss him off.”

“Speak for yourself,” Tristam retorted. “But maybe he wants his bones back. We could be doing him a favor. There’s Valperga.” Her employer pointed. “What a hideous angel! It looks just like the pilaster on the second floor. Is it crying because it’s stuck on her grave until kingdom come?”

Karo stared at the ill-favored cherub. It did bare a strong resemblance to the gargoyles clinging to the parapets of Notre Dame, only not so noble of brow. She remarked, “Bad taste should be carried to the grave but no further. I wouldn’t want that squatting on my grave for all eternity.”

They walked on slowly. They were running out of possible sites where Hugh’s remains could be resting, and Karo found herself growing every bit as anxious as Tristam to find Vellacourt’s tomb and make sure his bones were where they ought to be. The thought of Hugh’s remains going astray made her uncomfortable.

They reached the end of the wrought-iron enclosure and a grim-faced Tristam slowly turned her way. He pointed to a heap of white rubble that had collapsed in an untidy pile. There was a great deal of it, enough to build a wall. Or a mausoleum. And nothing grew there. It was as though the earth had been sewn with salt. It did not cheer Karo to find that the ground around it was laced with cypress roots and rocks and was obviously unseeded by any subterranean graves: Hugh had been buried aboveground.

“He’s not here. Maybe his marker was here…”

“No. There isn’t so much as a trace of a name on this stone.” Tristam added to himself, “This
has to be it, though. Why isn’t he here anymore? This is where they buried him, I’m certain. Where else could he be?”

“Maybe the grave was moved when the mausoleum collapsed. It was over three hundred years old.”

“This is most irregular, though. I have no notes of his being moved from his mausoleum—or of its collapse. Some mention should be made in some document.”

“Uh-oh. It kind of looks like lightning hit the grave.” Karo stared at the pile of shattered stone and felt the small hairs on the back of her neck rising. She had seen similar scorch marks on the road after the lightning strike. She spun around and began reviewing headstones. “Where’s Eustacie’s grave? Shouldn’t she be here, too?”

“Eustacie La Belle?”

“Maybe that’s what Hugh wants,” Karo continued. “Eustacie. Remember that story of the lovers’ graves parted by the mother-in-law tree? Maybe they only moved his bones.”

The two of them stared at each other. It was a famous ghost story of the Tidewater region. According to it, parted lovers could sometimes lead to hauntings.

“I don’t have any records of her being buried here. She was a lot younger than Vellacourt. She might have married after he was gone.”

“But he’d have wanted her here, wouldn’t he? In spite of some mere husband or his own children’s objections. He would have made arrangements for her burial.”

“Would Valperga have respected them? I confess to skepticism,” Tristam pointed out.

“She’s isn’t here. Tristam, I’ve been having a—”

“Maybe she’s in the slave cemetery. Frankly, I’m a lot more worried about Hugh’s remains. If he has gone missing…This is Valperga’s doing, I’ll bet. She really hated the old man. She’d have gladly booted them both out of the family crypt.”

“And separated them.”

“And maybe knocked the whole thing down.” Tristam kicked at a white stone. It didn’t budge. The fallen blocks were too heavy to move casually. No, Valperga couldn’t have done this. Only a tornado or a tractor could have. Or maybe repeated lightning strikes, if they were very, very powerful. Could Hugh, in the midst of a temper tantrum, have done it himself?

“Not to sound melodramatic, but do you suppose she had the slaves rebury him at a crossroads or dump him in unhallowed ground?” Karo shivered with sudden cold.

“Very likely. That or quicklime. Damn and blast! Now what the devil are we going to do? If we can’t find his bones, we’ll never be rid of him!”

“No,” Karo agreed. “And I wouldn’t count on Hugh being so obliging as to show us where he’s buried. I think he’s quite happy as he is and not anxious to see the hereafter.”

“We’ll just see about that. There are ways to compel spirits to talk…” Tristam’s jaw thrust out belligerently. “Come on. Back to the library. We are going to take that room apart. I want to know exactly what the old bat was up to. There must be rec ords somewhere.”

“The
Malleus Maleficarum
,” Karo reminded him. “We haven’t found that yet, and I bet you it’s at fault one way or another. It probably gave Valperga the idea of moving him. It might be key to figuring this whole thing out. In fact, I’ve heard of spirits being bound to objects rather than houses. Maybe she decided to try her hand at magic.”

“I suspect you are correct. There must be a clause in the will about keeping the book here at Belle Ange—perpetual torture. I should have seen it before. There has to be a good reason why Clarice won’t let that book out of the house if we find it. She’s usually as avaricious and unsentimental as I am. If she could, she’d sell it in a minute.”

“I notice that she doesn’t live here. Did she ever? Do you think she knows about him?” A locust began to chirp. Other night sounds were beginning, too.

He paused, thinking. “I’m certain she does. But it’s nice to think that we might be able to escape the old ghoul by moving to Florida.”

“Would
she
conspire to do something so cruel, keep a spirit from its rest?”

“Maybe,” he mused. “Clarice likes money. If it was a condition of inheritance, sure, she might very well go along with it. And she might not know that there’s anything she could do to lay a ghost. It isn’t a normal kind of pest control problem.”

Tristam’s words were reasonable, but Karo was suddenly pretty sure that she didn’t like Clarice Vellacourt. “Maybe the
Maleficarum
is the only thing holding Hugh to this part of the world. Maybe the book has to stay or he escapes.” Karo
was appalled at the suppositions that were popping into her brain—and what it meant if she were right and someone removed the tome. The vision of eternal pursuit by a bored Hugh Vella-court was all too easy to imagine.

Tristam seemed to feel the same. “Hell and damnation, you’ve got the pitch. Without it he might be able travel without let or hindrance. Irish banshees certainly do, at least in repute. They can supposedly even visit the New World by traveling over the land bridge.”

Karo had a sudden thought. “I wonder if we’re misjudging Valperga. Maybe it was some kind of affection that made her keep him around. They were family after all.” Karo slapped at a mosquito. They were growing in number as the light died.

“If it was her idea,” Tristam said, as he again took her arm, “I think we can count on it being something else entirely than affection. Self-defense. Revenge, even. I can just see her chortling over a gory plan to imprison Vellacourt at Belle Ange for all eternity. She’s probably still laughing somewhere in the beyond.”

“Maybe. I just wish I knew if Hugh has a plan of his own.”

“What?”

“A plan. For us. For himself.”

“Can ghosts have plans?” Tristam looked appalled but Karo didn’t notice. She was busy taking a long look around the wooded estate and remembered the way she had felt on the day of her arrival. There had been a great deal of anticipation in the air before the lightning strike, and a feeling of guidance, of being lured. Had she been enticed
from her car for a specific reason? Hugh said he wanted to talk to her, but why? “I just wonder who’s really having the last laugh here,” Karo added softly. “Valperga might have thought chaining a spirit was punishment, but I don’t think Hugh minds. Maybe, if she didn’t do it out of affection…I wonder if he manipulated her into doing it.”

“I’m going to pray to every god in every pantheon that you are wrong. If he’s that clever, we’re in terrible trouble.”

We shall die in darkness and be buried in the rain.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay from
“Justice Denied in Massachusetts”

“We must find that book, and the only place we haven’t looked is the basement,” Tristam said as Karo set the grocery bag on the counter. In need of comfort, she had borrowed his car and immediately gone to the local market. It was small by most grocer standards, but they stocked all the legal perversions. Karo had returned with wine, donuts and potato chips.

“But…” She glanced at the window. The light was nearly gone. Her reasons for not wanting to search for the book at night would sound silly, given that Hugh had manifested more often during the day, but she was very reluctant to attempt anything once the sun was down. The dream had been one heck of a big manifestation.

“No, we won’t do it tonight,” Tristam assured her, sensing her fear. “The basement goes on forever and it hasn’t much in the way of light. The Campions have been setting up some outdoor lights along the driveway. We’ll get them to run something external down into the basement.”

“I suppose we’ll have to gloss over all of the
reasons,” Karo said unhappily, thinking of the outside world’s response to Hugh.

“Gloss? Not even marine varnish would make this look shiny. No, this is something we keep to ourselves to our dying day. Every bloody bit of it. We’ll just tell the Campions that we’re looking for old wine bottles or something. They are fairly incurious as a rule.”

Thinking specifically of what her parents might say about her brush with ghosts and witchcraft, Karo could only agree that silence was the best option.

Though it called for some willpower, Tristam and Karo went to their separate beds just after ten o’clock and stayed apart that night. Hugh did not trouble them with dreams, perhaps because neither of them slept much.

They rose early the next morning and, after coffee and toast, Tristam went down to the basement with the Campions to ascertain what might be done to shed some light in that heretofore unilluminated netherworld. Karo did the dishes while the men talked wiring, and then she tried her best to find Hugh by wandering through the house and waiting for a hot flash that never came. Was the ghost evading her? Maybe they actually were on the right track. Or perhaps—and this was a horrible thought—he was hiding in her shadow, a shade within a shade. Watching but not helping.

Time limped slowly and then dropped to its knees and began to crawl. Still Tristam didn’t appear. Hugh remained invisible, too, and Karo began to feel guilty about their proposed endeavor.
She returned to the kitchen because it was the sanest room in the house. Her sudden three-sixty, her internal defense of Hugh Vellacourt was impossible to explain, especially as she didn’t understand her own feelings. The whole thing, from beginning to end, sounded like the silliest gothic romance, which no one would believe—assuming she ever breathed a word of it to anyone, which wasn’t likely. So, didn’t she want this ghost out of her life? Why was she flip-flopping every time she thought of him?

Karo’s brain worked in secret, her internal logic a language no one else spoke. Until Tristam. He did have the knack for following her unspoken thoughts. Great minds and all that.

But not this time. Hugh had clearly crossed a line with Tristam, and her boss was not going to be deterred from attempting to rid himself of the ghost. What was the last thing he’d said before they’d gone to bed?
I don’t approve of you and Hugh
.

“There is no ‘Hugh and I,’ and don’t couple our names please,” she had answered with a shudder. But she was lying. Just a little, she did actually feel some kind of a connection to the ghost.

Would using the book work? Assuming they lit up the basement like the surface of the sun and actually found the
Malleus Maleficarum
in one piece, could it really be used to banish Hugh? Vellacourt was no fragile ghost to be run off by light, however bright. Nor did remorse seem to be his weakness. He had lived his life as he wanted and the world be damned. He might not even believe in God. She didn’t see how a book would help,
unless there was really some sort of connection to his remains.

“Karo?” Tristam interrupted her thoughts. She saw at once that he had a small digital camera in his hands; he was enough of a historian to want to keep a record of what they were doing. “The lights are up, but look, there’s no need for you to go down there. It’s pretty foul. One of the Campions already threw up because of the stench.”

“I don’t care. You don’t really think I would leave you to face this alone, do you?” Also, this could be history in the making. She had to be there.

“Okay. But I hope you aren’t attached to those shoes. They’ll be ruined.”

“They’re my grubbies,” Karo answered.

The basement might have had an egress from within the house at one time, but they had not discovered it in their search. Likely the door had been plastered over at some point. The only known entrance was through an outside bulkhead, which had been overgrown with thorny vines whose sap bled a strange brownish red and smelled a bit like rotten meat and raised blisters on the skin.

Piled near the door were a sledgehammer, crowbar, shovel and a claw-foot hammer. And two familiar masks. They wouldn’t keep out odors, but they would help with dust and mold.

“Give me the camera,” Karo said. “I have deep pockets on these pants. It’ll be safe.”

Tristam went first. It took a surprising amount of will to enter the basement, even with the Campions’ spotlights illuminating the old stair and the space beyond. The darkness soon returned after
that. The spots might have been adequate to fight off night along the drive, but they were no match for the miasma beneath the mansion.

Karo paused to take a picture of the opening. There was no sign saying ABANDON ALL HOPE, but there didn’t need to be. This wasn’t a basement. It was more like a dungeon. No one in their sane mind would go inside with hope.

The ground was slimy with some kind of algae and the air was unpleasantly cold and filled with a smell she was reluctant to take into her lungs despite it being filtered through a mask. She also saw, almost immediately, that to call the place a basement was to use massive understatement. This was not a basement in the singular. It was actually a series of subterranean rooms, half a cellar and half a swamp, and completely unhealthy for humans.

The stairs were steep and slippery. There was a railing but—

“Don’t depend on it to save you,” Tristam said without turning. “The wood is rotten, as soft as a sponge.”

Thirteen steps, deep ones. Karo counted, her heart pounding all the way. Then the horrible stair with its uneven treads finally came to an end.

Tristam handed her the shovel as they reached the floor and took the rest of the tools himself. The ground continued to be slimy, but the sludge was thicker now and deeper. It came up over the toes of her shoes. It was also gritty with what Karo realized was plaster and crumbled mortar, which was peeling off the walls.

“Is there a sump pump?” she asked.

“Yes, but it doesn’t work. I think the basement settled and has breached the water table. It is below the water line now. And it floods. Look at the walls.” They were wet to the ceiling and growing mold.

“Ugh.”

“Indeed. Let’s get started.”

They were methodical in their search at the beginning. They began at the left wall and traveled in a clockwise direction. The basement had been compartmentalized. Some walls were unmortared stone, some brick. Near the doorway of the first room were rotten shelves whose brackets had rusted and pulled away from the wall. The shelves had held some kind of jars that were mostly broken, though there was one that seemed to be intact. Karo photographed it. The flash showed the glass to be purpled. That suggested great age. They should retrieve it later.

“Best to be thorough,” Tristam agreed as she took a second picture. His voice was muffled, perhaps by the mask but also by the still air that ate all sound. The acoustics were odd, allowing no normal reverberation, and Karo wondered with growing paranoia if the pillars and walls had been placed deliberately to cause this effect.

“I think the Campions cleared out all the snakes,” Tristam said, “but have a care where you step—and keep that shovel handy.”

The warning was unnecessary. Alarm and paranoia had Karo’s eyes opened to their widest.

They skirted a wall made of brick, which had clearly been added at a later time. The rest of the foundation and support pillars in that part of the
basement were built from stone that had been plastered and painted, though little of either remained on the damp walls.

The stench on the far side of the brick wall was greater and reached out to them even before they ducked through the low arch and entered what might have been a wine cellar. There were no bottles left, only some scraps of rotten wood, but along with the smell of rot there remained the trace odor of something rather vinegary. Again, Karo fished out the camera and photographed the room. The camera’s flash briefly drove back the thick shadows, but it showed them nothing except the bones of a giant rat and more spiders than Karo cared to count.

What the hell were these spiders eating? Each other?

Another arch, another room. By Karo’s reckoning, they had traveled almost a hundred feet now. They would have passed beyond the foundation of the present house. Had there perhaps been some older building? The floor was angling down and the sludge was getting thicker. Karo began using the shovel as a walking stick.

The third room held the remains of a wooden staircase, and with the aid of the camera flash they could see where a door had been bricked in high up the wall. It barely looked large enough to accommodate a child and Karo pitied whoever had been forced to use it. At the fourth area, the Campions’ light was conquered completely, and Tristam fished a flashlight out of his pocket. It was a strong light but did little to drive back the gloom and growing cold gathering around them.

“I am not an imaginative man, but this feels like a very bad place,” he said.

“This is it,” Karo whispered. Her words were all but swallowed by the stench and darkness.

“Look at the walls,” Tristam remarked, ducking under the low arch. He paused almost at once as something—perhaps some loosened plaster—fell from the wall and splashed into the mud. The sludge burped, sounding almost human.

“Is it safe?” Karo asked, forcing herself to go on. Her gorge was rising along with fear and the tiny blonde hairs on her arms.

“I think so.” But Tristam sounded dubious. How did one judge safety when their potential attackers were ghosts and mold spores that might evade their simple masks?

This part of the basement was older; the stone walls had not been plastered except in one area where a closet-sized enclosure had been built out. The stone was as wet as it was everywhere else in the basement, but in this room it supported a strange gray-green lichen that seemed to glow whenever the flashlight left it. The patches appeared suggestively body-sized.

Karo noticed this unusual phenomenon but was immediately taken with the thing that Tristam had captured in the flashlight beam. Ugly mushrooms and mold were doing their best to obscure the mural painted on the coffin-sized cyst protruding from the wall, but the image was still clear enough to cause hesitation: A dark angel—probably a fallen one—spread its somber wings over the enclosure and out along the wall. The painting was crude, perhaps done in charcoal.

And blood. That was the usual fixative
.

This was a sinner’s grave if ever there was one.

Simple it might have been in terms of execution, but the image still had the power to repel. Karo found it hard to breathe, and her hands were clumsy as she took out the camera and took several shots of the disintegrating mural. More of the rotting plaster dropped from the wall as she worked, suggesting to her lurid imagination that something was trying to get out.

“We’ll have to destroy it to get inside,” Tristam said. There wasn’t much regret in his voice.

“I know.” And she did, but she didn’t like it. The plaster wasn’t just keeping them out—it was also keeping something in. “I just hope the book isn’t rotten.”

Tristam looked back at her. In the poor light with his face half covered, she couldn’t read his expression. “Take the flashlight,” he said. “And stand back.”

Karo did as asked. The light wavered a bit because her hands were shaking. She would have liked to brace herself against the wall, but the lichen was repulsive. Not just unhealthy but actually evil. She didn’t want it on her sweater or in her hair. As it was, she was going to have to throw away her shoes and pants.

Tristam’s hand curled around the sledge’s handle. In the wavering light his long fingers looked like something on a marble statue. He swung the sledge with shocking force, and suddenly the room was full of sound and heat. There was also a fearful clap of thunder, and behind
them the Campions’s string of lights went out. Nature—or something more sinister—had pulled the plug.

Left only with the flashlight, it was difficult to see what happened to the wall. One moment the plaster and its sinister angel were there and then both were gone, shattered like a mirror. Tristam said something obscene as he stepped back from the cyst, and Karo fumbled for the camera with her right hand. She let the shovel fall against the wall.

The electronic strobe showed more clearly what was fixed in the wall. She was allowed time for one flash and then the skeleton embedded in the decaying plaster freed itself and fell to the floor where it started to submerge in the sludge.

“Get the bones! Don’t let them sink,” she ordered, pulling off her sweater. This was difficult to do while holding the flashlight. “Put them in here.”

Tristam had already pulled out two handfuls of what were probably leg bones. The ribs came next. They were not intact. This was not some classroom specimen that had been wired together.

Karo didn’t offer to help. One of them had to keep their hands clean to operate the camera. Also, it was beyond her capability to actually reach into that horrible goo and touch those browned bones. It was all she could go not to retch.