Charlotte’s Story (39 page)

While I was grateful that no one had come near me, I felt as though I were waiting for something. In my heart, I understood that that thing—that person—was Press. Or whoever he had become.

I must have slept, or at least I have no memory of someone putting me into darkness. No, not total darkness. I could see faint shapes beyond whatever piece of incense-fragrant fabric lay over me. The theater—if that was still where I was—had gone silent.

Was I afraid? I was afraid for Michael but not for myself. He was my only reason for living. My father had Nonie. I had lost Rachel, or rather I had never had Rachel. She had caused me the worst pain that I could imagine. Perhaps I should have felt some relief knowing that I hadn’t been responsible for Eva’s death, but I got no comfort from the fact. And Press. I hadn’t really had him either. He had belonged to Rachel. But a part of me didn’t wholly believe that. Rachel, in her hubris, imagined that Press would never use her in the way he had used me. Press wanted something from her, and I assume it was the same thing he wanted from me. She had given him a daughter, but maybe she would try to give him a son. Like me, Rachel was a womb.

There was too much stillness, given the number of people I knew were in the room. Would they kill me? Kill J.C.? I didn’t know where she was. It had been easy enough for Press to fake the circumstances of Eva’s death. How much easier would it be to excuse my death? Poor, mad, careless Charlotte who had let her daughter die. Did all these other people know that Rachel had killed Eva? What did Press really know?

Slowly, slowly the drape was pulled from my body.

“Charlotte.”

How often had that voice called my name? From the hallway. From the other side of my bed. Sensuous in its depth. Even now I hear it, long after I last saw Press.

“Charlotte.”

Even from the new depths of my loathing for him, my body, my treacherous body responded.

He walked into my view.

Press was naked. He seemed broader, taller than he had ever seemed before, and the black hair on his chest and groin was opaque in the dim light. I recognized my husband even though he, too, was wearing a half-mask. How foolish and strange. But my life was so strange. Why shouldn’t everyone around me have been wearing masks? Only Rachel had shown her face. That was like her. She would want everyone to see her. It was her lifeblood to be seen.

Somewhere behind Press, someone was pounding a stick, a walking stick perhaps, on the floor. Slowly, at first, but then the tempo increased.

The intense lethargy that had been like a weight over my entire body was beginning to abate. Whatever Jack had injected me with was wearing off.

I had witnessed Olivia’s rape. Her ultimate humiliation. My terror lay in wondering if Press would be the only man, the only person to use me that night. I felt the force of the masked stares. I had witnessed their debasement. But as long as they kept on their masks, I would try my hardest to forget, to erase them from my mind. If I survived.

“Charlotte.”

Three times. The third time Press spoke my name, it sounded different. Final.

The stick continued its beat, reverberating in my body. The anticipation of the circle gathered around me was a palpable, hungry thing. Rachel, however, looked unhappy. Even in my fear, I felt some small satisfaction in that.

Press climbed a stair to reach me. What was there in him that was compelling him to do this in front of all these people?

I closed my eyes, unwilling to witness my own humiliation. As he entered me, the onlookers were silent, but I’m certain I felt the house shudder beneath me.

My husband had made love to me many times, but never with such slow deliberation. His breath quickened, and the breath of the circle of people quickened along with it.

Then something in the air changed. I opened my eyes. The room turned viciously cold and one of the women cried out as the air around us crystallized into something like snow—not falling, but simply hanging midair around us. The crystals stung, clinging to our skin. Press, apparently unaffected, continued. My body was now frozen inside and out. The pounding of the stick faltered only for a moment, then also kept on.

People began to fall away, alarmed. Only Rachel stayed. Her eyes had widened in her bizarrely made-up face, and her look of displeasure had turned to fascination.

The house shuddered again with a tremendous groan, and the walls of the theater bowed inward, creating a web of cracks across the long ceiling and causing the chandeliers to swing wildly. Now there were more cries from the others in the room, frightened exclamations that the doors couldn’t be opened. Press’s breath was hot in my ear and I knew he wouldn’t last much longer. Rachel leaned forward, rapt. Over her shoulder I could see Jack, his mask insufficient to hide his crown of white hair. It was Jack who held the stick. Jack who was keeping time despite the chaos around him. The trusses above the ceiling shrieked with strain.

Then it was no longer Press laboring over me, and I felt a sharp pain deep inside. The man wore the same mask, but the hand that gripped my shoulder so violently felt icy and thin. Thinner than that of any other human on earth. Below the mask, the face was mottled and scarred. The lips were nothing but two faded, cracked lines of gray flesh.

Behind the mask, the eyeholes were empty. There was no life there, no humanity. There was nothing. I opened my mouth and screamed.

I retreated inside myself as deeply as I could in that lifetime of minutes. Far, far back to a time that was made up mostly of stories I told myself about my mother. I was in her bedroom, lying on her bed, playing with the cat that had been hers when she married my father. What was the name? The name? The sounds, the pain were bleeding through and I tried to remember the cat. Fredo? Frederick? No, it was Alfredo. Creamy white with azure marble eyes and a tail nearly as long as my arm. My mother kneeling near the bed, petting the cat, talking to it, telling it to be gentle with me. And another day, the cat had scratched me, and I heard my father’s voice, loud, as he pitched it across the room, angry. No, not that day. I needed another day to block out the sounds and the hideous smell of the grave.

So much pain! Those eyes, the empty eyes stared back at me, even when my eyelids were closed. I would see them forever. I tried to think of the back yard, playing in the grass, waiting for my mother, the sun on my face, the rough surface of the patio bricks beneath my small hands. Looking toward the driveway and the garage. The garage door was open. No!

There was no safe place for me. No escape from the thing that had been Press ill-using my body. Digging into my shoulder, splitting open the inside of me as though he would stab me until I bled.

I opened my eyes once again.

The thing’s mouth was slack beneath the mask, its putrid breath a fog between us in the frigid room, and I finally recognized it.

My tongue worked inside my mouth, dry and thick. I thought of water. Clear water.

My voice came, but it was only a whisper.

“Olivia. Please, Olivia.”

The creature didn’t seem to hear when the house groaned again. (I knew what it was. Who it was. I had seen him/it before, hadn’t
I? He was worse now. More decayed, barely more than articulated bones hung with rotted flesh. He was no longer human, if he had ever been.)

My shoulder ached where he gripped me and my insides felt as though they were on fire.

Then came the scent of roses.
Olivia
.

I had never had a truly murderous thought until that moment. It was a thought wrapped in the heavy, languid scent of early June roses, the bower of white and red and yellow of Olivia’s garden. With the scent, I felt the blood flowing back into my limbs, and my revulsion for the creature panting above me grew, and I stopped being afraid.

At the edges of my vision, I saw climbing rose vines chasing from the pedestal where I lay. They ran over the carpets, blooming, blooming, blooming, their petals a violent white against their thick green leaves and snaking vines. They ran to the corners, crowding, fighting to cover the walls, the windows, the floors. They were my hope: both innocence and death. I knew they meant death as well as salvation. Finally the room was engulfed, the scent overpowering. It was only then that I realized that the vines were coming from my own hands—a strange and terrifying gift.

As the roses grew, the demon above me flickered and faded away and there was only Press. The grimace on his face, though, was nearly as hideous as the creature’s. Perhaps it had been Press all along, and in my fear I had hallucinated Randolph/the creature.

If God is truly merciful, He will someday let me forget the moment I chose to kill my husband. To punish him for letting our daughter die, and for every act of cruelty he’d committed since Olivia had died. With my blood freed from whatever numbing drug that Jack had used, I could lift my hands, and they were no longer my hands, but leafy vines studded with thorns. While my husband stared, horrified, into my eyes, I raised my hands to his powerful neck and pressed them against his skin. At that moment there
was
mercy, for I felt nothing as I did it—neither the piercing of the thorns nor the pain of killing someone I loved. As he screamed, the light in the eyes behind the mask flared, then dimmed. Blood erupted from him, raining down on me.

I might have dropped my hands at that, but I found myself filled with a sense of something—someone—who was not me. Neither was it Olivia or Eva.
Something to do with the ballroom, the hundreds of images of Japanese women. No. Just one woman, over and over. And the strange, sharp scent of chrysanthemums. Why chrysanthemums? There were cherry blossoms on the ballroom walls.
Whoever it was overwhelmed me with their rage, and that rage flew from me, propelling Press across the big room and crushing his body high against the wall of thorn-covered vines.

He fell.

As I watched, the vines covering the room melted away like snow under the noon sun. Press lay slumped on the floor, unmoving.

Chapter 43

One More Funeral

One more death, one more funeral. No one in Old Gate was surprised. October had become November, frigid with rare early snow that fell on our hats and coats as we stood by Press’s open grave. I had considered making the service private, but everyone in town would have come anyway. Afterwards, they filed up our drive in their cars and trucks, led by the sheriff’s cruiser, ready for their fill of funeral meats. Only there was no Terrance, stiff and formal and alarming to strangers in the way of church bishops and Boris Karloff, to greet them and serve them sweetened iced tea. After he and Press and the other man took me into the theater, I didn’t see him again. He hadn’t been in costume, and I was certain he wasn’t one of the partygoers. After Press’s body was taken away, I discovered he’d slipped away from Bliss House like a thief in the night. His room was empty of every belonging, the surfaces thick with undisturbed layers of dust that might have been there for decades.

No one ever tried to find him. No one cared. I asked Marlene, who had slept two rooms away from him and worked beside him for over ten years, if she knew where he might have gone. There was a moment—not even a second long—when she seemed not to know who I was talking about. She blinked.

“Did you ever see him eat?” she asked. Puzzled, I told her that I hadn’t. “Every time he sat down, it was as though he was afraid he would never have another meal. I’ve never seen the like in a grown man. Then he would do his dishes and get on with his job. I hope that wherever he’s gone, there’s someone to feed him.” That single, astonishing thing was all she had to say about him.

She stayed with us for another year, until she married a man from her church who owned the butcher shop in town. I couldn’t blame her for anything Press had done, or what she had believed of him. She seemed unaffected by the strange things that happened in the house. I envied her that.

“No sherry, no Scotch,” I told her as we made plans for the funeral. “It will just make people stay longer.”

But after the guests began to arrive I changed my mind, and had her put out sherry, Scotch, and other liquor as well. If anyone thought it was suspiciously like a celebration rather than a wake, I didn’t care. Bliss House had been a place of sadness for too long. It was time to open the house up and let other influences in. We had all had enough of Press and his dark hand over our lives.

I had Michael back. (Later that terrible night, I had found him safely asleep at the orchardkeeper’s house, with a confused and upset Shelley.) Nonie had returned with my father, though he remained ensconced in a chair in the library during the funeral service, his casted leg resting on an ottoman. I had turned the library into a temporary bedroom so he didn’t have to use the stairs.

Bliss House was mine, as much as it could belong to anybody.