Angel Among Us (29 page)

As the afternoon wore on, I realized that Alice Hernandez was right: the butler was indeed keeping an eye on Lamont Carter. Several times, when Carter was getting to leave his room, I arrived in the hallway first and spotted the butler disappearing around the corner. I could also feel him outside the door, listening in, and I wondered how much he knew.

Finally, just as dusk was starting to gather, Carter visited the kitchen and asked the old man for Dakota Wylie's dinner. ‘She's extra hungry tonight,' he told the old man. ‘She's eating for two, you know?'

The old man looked skeptical, his eyesight wasn't so bad that he didn't know that Dakota Wylie was wasting away to nothing. But he still prepared a tray piled high with sandwiches and fruit. It seemed to be all anyone in the house ever ate. He added a huge glass of milk and returned Carter's stare by saying, ‘She needs the extra calcium, sir. Especially if she plans to breast feed.' If he was being sarcastic, he hid it well.

Carter took the tray from the old man without bothering to thank him and started down the long hall toward the main stairs. Just before he reached the foyer, he darted down a side hallway, pushing his way out of a small door that opened on to a flower garden arranged beneath the library windows. He looked around to see if he was being observed, then pulled a small electric lantern out of a hiding place in a boxwood hedge. Spotting Rodrigo cleaning his gardening tools in the shed, Carter quickly walked across a patch of lawn and darted behind a hedge of tall bushes. He walked faster, lantern and tray in hand.

Carter had planned well. By the time he turned the corner and started across the main lawn, it was dusk. He was almost invisible in the strange yellowish light that comes when neither the day nor the night prevails. By then, he was moving so fast that the milk had sloshed over on to the tray, leaving little in the glass, but he did not slow his step.

Halfway across the field, he glanced up at some cherry trees growing to his left. When he was about ten feet from the edge of the lawn next to the trees, he placed the tray on the grass and knelt. He started searching the grass with his hands, seeking something only he knew was there. Even though he had to have been there many times before, it took him nearly a minute to find what he was looking for. Glancing around to see if anyone was observing him, he reached deep into the lush turf and pulled. A square of lawn opened upward to reveal an opening in the earth and the top of a ladder leading beneath the lawn.

The rumors were true: the house
had
been a stop on the Underground Railroad. I wondered how Carter had discovered it. Probably by searching for buried gold, I thought. He was the type who would have heard those rumors and believed them.

But his real pot of gold lay beneath the earth – his only ticket to magazine covers and fat contracts now that Dakota Wylie had ruined her face. Arcelia Gallagher was slumped against the earthen walls of an underground room, the same prison I had seen during my strange vision the night before. She was either half asleep or losing strength. She barely opened her eyes as Lamont Carter climbed down the ladder, the tray of food still balanced on one hand and the lantern looped over the other. He had the arm strength of a chimp and would be a formidable opponent to anyone who tried to take him on.

There was a plate of food already at her feet, mostly untouched, stiffening and turning brown in the stale air.

Carter stared at the food before he looked up at her and said, with confident authority, ‘If you don't eat more, you will kill your baby. Is that what you want? To kill your baby?'

Arcelia Gallagher glared at him with contempt. ‘I have been tortured by real men,' she spat at him. ‘I have stood up to men who make you look like the little boy you are.'

I thought for a moment he might hit her. Instead, Carter placed the tray of food on the dirt floor by her feet and laughed. ‘How does it feel to disappear?' he asked. ‘How does it feel to know that you will never see the sun again? Look around you, this is your tomb. As soon as the baby is born, you will watch me climb that ladder for the final time and, after that, you will never see me – or the sun – again.'

She lunged for him, but one wrist was handcuffed to a bolt embedded in a plank shoring up the wall and she could not reach him. ‘They will find you,' she predicted. ‘They will find you and they will kill you.'

Carter laughed again. ‘No, “they” won't find me. “They” won't find you either. Wake up. The world is convinced your husband is your killer. No one will ever take a look at me.'

Arcelia Gallagher gasped suddenly and pulled her legs toward her. Carter smiled. ‘Those are labor pains, aren't they?' His voice shifted, taking on a heavy southern drawl. ‘I knew the baby was near. It won't be long now.'

He leaned in closer to see her better and her legs lashed out with surprising strength. She caught him right in the groin. He tumbled backward, cursing and grabbing at his crotch.

‘You will never get my baby. I will kill you if you try,' she screamed at him.

He lay in the dirt for a moment, fighting to regain control. Amazingly, he stood calmly and began to brush off his clothes. ‘You shouldn't have done that. I could have made it easy on you. I could have given you something to dull the pain.'

He stared at her swollen belly from a safe distance. ‘Now I don't really care. You can scream as loud as you want, no one can hear you here. And the screaming sure as hell won't bother me. If you haven't had the baby by morning, I'll cut it out of you. Come to think of it, it would be my pleasure.'

The love I had seen him show Dakota Wylie had disappeared. The hardness that lurked behind his eyes had taken over his whole being. He radiated hatred toward Arcelia Gallagher, toward himself, toward the entire world.

‘You can't expect me to deliver the baby down here,' Arcelia said. ‘You're putting its life in danger.' Even faced with death, all she wanted was to protect her baby's life.

‘Babies are born in squalor every day,' Carter told her. ‘Don't you know that babies are born into dirt and filth to parents who don't give a shit every single minute of every single day? You think that having a baby is special? You think just because you're going to have one, it makes me want to protect you? Think again. I don't give a shit if you're its mother. I don't even give a shit about the baby. But I need it, so I intend to keep it alive. All it has to do is make it to the house. All you have to do is stay alive until I take it.'

I felt a sort of buzzing rush across the room, a stinging as if a swarm of bees had flown by. Carter flinched. He had felt it, too. I knew then that the second spirit was here in the underground room with us. Once I realized that, I could feel so much more coming from my fellow traveler: terror, violence, extraordinary pain and a thousand memories of a life left behind all washed over me. I could see his memories as vividly as if they were happening now and I was a part of them.

I saw a man, tall and broad-shouldered with dark-colored skin helping a young boy fill a sack with fallen apples. I saw the same man looking up at the top of a cabin made of rough-hewn wood and felt his pride that he had built it. I looked through his eyes across the floor of the cabin at a stout woman bent over a pot of bubbling food mounted over a roaring fire burning deep in a stone hearth. In a handful of seconds, I lived his life with him, feeling joy and pain and sorrow. I saw, once again, his wife and children being taken from him, the pain as fresh as the first time I had felt it. And then I felt his death. I felt the blows raining down on me, the carving of my flesh, the seemingly endless ripping and hacking away at my body. I felt the life drain from me as the world darkened. At last, I felt his stillness and I knew why he had stayed in this place, why he was here keeping Arcelia Gallagher company.

He had been killed here, in this terrible cavern. This was where his bones lay.

Carter looked uneasy. He had felt the spirit's presence, too, as a predator might sense an even bigger predator in the jungle. He backed away from Arcelia Gallagher and nodded toward the food he had just brought. ‘Drink the milk. The baby needs it for the calcium.'

As he started up the ladder, I followed with a glance back toward Arcelia Gallagher. She slumped back against the wall, eyes closed, her hands resting on her belly. God help her if the contractions truly had begun. Once the baby was born, Carter had no use for her.

Darkness had fallen in the upper world. The air was cool and filled with the sounds of spring frogs peeping and the hoots of owls setting out for their evening meals. I smelled fresh grass and new life and marveled that it could exist mere feet above such hell.

Carter replaced the hatch to the cavern and made his way quickly across the lawn. As he reached the edge of the courtyard in the back of the house, he saw the same thing that I saw: the butler standing in one of the kitchen's French windows, watching Carter hurry back toward the house.

Carter did not break stride. He walked through the back door, turned the corner into the kitchen and headed straight for the butler. He wrapped one hand around the old man's neck and pushed him up against the wall, lifting him up off the ground. ‘Mind your own business, old man,' Carter told him.

The butler instantly turned red. His toes were barely reaching the ground and his arms flailed for something he could grab on to. Carter was relentless – and so absorbed that he did not notice what was happening behind him.

The butler's wife had lost her vacant stare. Seeing what was happening to her husband, she stood and reached a knife on the counter within a few steps. She grabbed it and walked calmly over to Lamont Carter, the knife held high above her head. The butler saw what she was doing and began to flail. Carter looked over his shoulder and let go of the old man, darting to one side just as she slashed down with the knife, missing his body by inches. Carter stood with his back against the sink, staring at the old lady, as the butler slumped against the wall and gasped for breath.

‘Leave him alone or I will kill you,' she said in the same, strangely deep voice I had from her earlier.

Carter did not move.

The old woman looked back at him with a blank stare then shuffled to her table. She placed the knife on it and sat down as if she had done nothing more important than shut the door. The silence in the room was profound.

I tried to understand what was happening, to read her memories in hopes of knowing what had motivated her. But her mind was blank. She had lapsed back into the void. Or, I thought, never left it in the first place.

Carter stared at her as if she was possessed. I was starting to wonder the same thing myself. ‘That's it,' Carter said. ‘The two of you will be gone by morning.'

‘You have no power over me,' the butler said, rubbing his throat. ‘You can't fire me.'

‘I can tell them about your wife,' Carter said. His voice was devoid of any emotion. He was a robot fueled by hate. ‘If I tell them about your wife, how she does nothing and sits there staring into space all day, how she's violent and threatens people with knives, you can bet she'll lose her job. She'll lose her health insurance, too. Who will take care of her then? You'd have to quit your job, wouldn't you?'

The butler stared at Carter. It was impossible to read his expression but I could feel what he was thinking. He was old and he had seen angry men before, he had seen selfish men before, too. Perhaps he had even been there when hatred had overwhelmed others. He knew enough not to fight back.

‘I thought you'd figure it out,' Carter said to him calmly. ‘Stop following me or you're a dead man. Killing someone old like you would be as easy as pushing you down the basement steps. Your bones would break like peanut brittle.'

Lamont Carter had two men inside him. One was guarded and angry; the other violent and angrier still. Yet I had never seen him anything less than tender when it came to Dakota Wylie. I thought of the power she had to tame his hate and I knew that, without her, he would be lost. But what a terrible force they were when they were together.

The old butler watched Carter leave the kitchen before he rushed to his wife's side. She was still sitting at one end of the kitchen table, staring into space. It was impossible to know whether she understood what had just taken place. He kissed the top of her head and held her close, as if she had been the one threatened and not him.

‘Something bad is going to happen, Muriel,' he whispered to her. ‘I can tell. I felt it before and you know what happened then. I can feel death gathering around this house. It's hungry. All we can do is make sure it's not one of us.'

T
hree times before midnight, Carter descended the steps into his hell on earth and checked on Arcelia as she lay, gasping, trying to endure the spasms that overtook her body at increasingly frequent intervals.

I knew the baby was coming. I could tell because, despite the fear and hatred that filled the room whenever Carter came to check on her labor, I felt an undercurrent there, barely a ribbon, perhaps, of something pure and light growing inside Arcelia Gallagher. It was as warm as an ember inching toward flame. The life inside of her was gathering its strength, determined to make a great journey.

Arcelia herself was astonishingly strong. There she was, trapped beneath the world, all on her own and about to give birth for the first time. She had only her captor to keep her company and he was anything but supportive. He did not hold her hand, nor did he hand her badly needed water. He simply clambered down the steps, waited as long as he needed to in order to time her contractions and left again without ever saying a word. She could have been a cow giving birth to a calf for all he cared.

Just before midnight, as I was despairing that Maggie was getting nowhere with her attempts to find enough evidence in the abandoned car to bring a search team to the house, I felt a change come over Arcelia. The terror and the anger left her, to be replaced by something I had never experienced before. I could not tell if this was of her own will or a reaction she could not control, but all of her being seemed to turn inward as the hours passed. It was as if every scrap of strength she had, every hope for happiness, had been distilled and was now being directed toward that tiny life in her belly, toward her child, the child that, once born, would be taken from her while she was left to die.