Dark Terrors 3 (50 page)

That was for her, this one thing he’d brought back to Pollepel that he was afraid of and this one thing he loved beyond words or sanity. The conscious acquisition that could question the collection, the collector.

‘I have too much money,’ he said once, after the purchase of a plaster replica of Carnegie’s
Diplodocus
skeleton to be mounted for the foyer and she asked the sense of it and ‘It’s a way of getting rid of some of the goddamned money,’ he said.

She blinked her owlslow, owlwise blink at him, her gold and crimson eyes scoffing sadly.

‘You know the emptiness inside you, Silas. These things are a poor substitute for the things you’re missing.’ So he’d drawn the draperies on her cage and left them drawn for a week, as long as he could stand to be without the sight of her.

* * * *

Nineteen eighteen, so almost three years after his son was pulled screaming from his wife’s swollen body, pulled wet and blind into the waiting, dogjawed world; helpless thing the raw colour of a burn. His heir and Silas Desvernine could hardly bear the sight of it, the squalling sound of it. Angeline almost dying in the delivery nightmare of blood and sweat, immeasurable hours of breathless pain and there would be no others, the doctor said. Named for father and grandfather’s ghost, Eustace Silas, sickly infant that grew stronger slowly, even as its mother’s health began to falter, the raising of her child left to indifferent servants; Silas seeing her less and less often, until, finally, she rarely left her room in the east wing.

And one night, late October and the first winter storm rolling down on Pollepel from the mountains, arctic Catskill breath and Silas away in the city. Intending to be back before dark, but the weather so bad and him exhausted after hours with thickheaded engineers, no patience for the train, so the night spent in the warmth and convenience of his apartment near Central Park.

Some dream or night terror and Angeline left her rooms, wandered half-awake, confused, through the sleeping house, no slippers or stockings, bare feet sneakthief soft over Turkish carpets and cold stone, looking for something or someone real. Someone to touch or talk to, someone to bring her back to this world from her clinging nightmares. Something against the storm rubbing itself across the walls and windows, savage snowpelt, wild and wanting in and her alone on the second story: the servants down below, her child and his nurse far away in another part of the house that, at that derelict hour, seemed to weave endlessly back upon itself. Halls as unfamiliar as if she’d never walked them, doors that opened on rooms she couldn’t recall. Strange paintings to watch over her, stranger sights whenever she came to a window to stand staring into the swirling silver night, bare trees and unremembered statuary or hedges. Alien gardens, and all of it so much like the dream, as empty, as hungry; lost in her husband’s house and inside herself, Angeline came at last to the mahogany doors to Silas’ gallery, wood like old blood and his cabinet beyond, and how many years since she’d come that way? But
this
she recognized, hingecreak and woodsqueal as she stepped across the threshold, the crude design traced into the floor there, design within designs that made her dizzy to look directly at.

‘Silas?’ and no answer but the storm outside, smothering a dead world. Her so small, so alone at the mouth of this long and cluttered room of glass and dust and careful labels, his grotesquerie, cache of hideous treasures. Everything he loved instead of her; the grey years of hating herself flashing to anger like steam, then, flashing to scalding revelation. Something in her hands, aboriginal weapon or talisman pulled from its bracket on the wall and she swung it in long and ruthless arcs, smashing, breaking, shadow become destroyer. Glass like rain, shatter puddles that sliced at the soles of her feet, splinter and crash and the sicksweet stench of formaldehyde. Angeline imagining gratitude in the blank, green eyes of a two-headed bobcat that tumbled off its pedestal and lay fiercely still, stuffed, mothgnawed, in her path.

And the wail rising up from the depths of her, soul’s waters stagnant so long become a tempest to rival the fury and thundervoice of the blizzard. Become a war-cry, dragging her in its red undertow, and when she reached the far side, the high, velvet drapes hiding some final rivalry: tearing at the cloth with her hands, pulling so hard the drapes ripped free of brass rings and slipped like shedding skin to the floor.

Iron bars and at first nothing else, gloom thick as the fog in her head, thick as jam, but nothing more. One step backwards, panting, feeling the damage to her feet, and the subtle shift of light or dark, then, all the nothing coalescing, made solid and beautiful and hateful, hurting eyes that she understood the way she understood her own captivity, her own loneliness.

And the woman with wings and shining bird eyes said her name,
Angeline,
said her name so it meant things she’d never suspected, some way the name held everything she was in three syllables. One long arm out to her, arm too long and thin to believe, skin like moonlight or afterbirth, fingers longer still and pointing to the door of the cage. Padlocked steel and the interlace design from the threshold again, engraved there like a warning; ‘Please,’ the woman in the cage said, ‘Please, Angeline.’

Angeline Desvernine ran, then, ran from even the possibility of this pleading thing, door slammed shut behind her, closing it away and closing away the fading illusion of her victory. Almost an hour before she found her way back to her own room, trailing pools and crusting smears of blood from her ruined feet; crawling, hands and knees, at the end. She locked her door, and by then the sound of servants awake, distant commotion, her name called again and again, but there was no comfort left after those eyes, the ragged holes they’d put in her. No way not to see them or hear that silk and thorny voice.

Most of the storm’s fury spent by dawn, by the time the maids and cooks and various manservants gave up and called for someone from the stables to take the door off its hinges.

First leadflat light in the empty room, the balcony doors standing open wide and tiny drifts of snow reaching almost to the bed. They found her hanging from the balustrade, noose from curtain cord tiebacks, snow in her tangled black hair, crimson icicles from the sliced flesh of her toes and heels. And her eyes open wide and staring sightless toward the Storm King.

* * * *

‘They’re my dreams,’ he says, whispers loud, and she says ‘They’re lies,’ and he keeps his eyes on the last colourless smudges of afternoon and says low, mumbled so she won’t hear, ‘Then they’re my lies.’

* * * *

This time, this dog-eared incarnation of the climb up Storm King and he’s alone, except for the thunder and lightning and rain like wet needles against exposed skin, wind that would take him in its cold fist and fling him, broken, back down to the rocks below, to the impatient, waiting river. No sign anymore of the trail he’s followed from the road, faintest path for deer or whatever else might come this way and now even that’s gone. He can see in the white spaces after the thunder, flashpowder snapshots of the mountain, trees bending and the hulk of Breakneck across the river, Storm King’s twin. Jealous Siamese thing severed by the acid Hudson, and he thinks
No, somewhere deep they’re still connected,
still bound safe by their granite vinculum below the water’s slash and silt.

Thunder that sounds like angels burning and he slips, catches himself, numb hands into the roots of something small that writhes, woodsy revulsion at his touch, and he’s shivering now, the mud and wet straight through his clothes. He lies so still, waiting, to fall, to drown in the gurgling runoff, until the thunder says it’s time to get moving again and he opens his eyes. And he’s standing at the summit, little clearing and the tall stone at its heart like a stake to hold the world in place. Grey megalith like things he’s seen in England or Denmark or France and in the crackling brief electric flash he can see the marks made in the stone, marks smoothed almost away by time and frost and a hundred thousand storms before. Forgotten characters traced in clean rivulets like emphasis. He would turn and run, from the place and the moment,
If you had it to do over again, If you could take it back,
but the roots have twisted
about his wrists, greenstick pythons and for all his clever, distracting variations, there’s only this one way it can go.

She steps out of the place where the stone is, brilliant moment, thinnest sliver of an instant caught and held in forked lightning teeth; the rain that beads, rolls off her feathers, each exquisite, roughgem drop and the strange angles of her arms and legs, too many joints. The head that turns on its elegant neck and the eyes that find him, sharp face and molten eyes that will never let him go.

‘Nothing from the Pterodactyle, I shouldn’t think,’ says Professor Osborn, standing somewhere behind him, ‘though the cranium is oddly reminiscent of the
Dimorphodon,
isn’t it?’ and Silas Desvernine bows his head, stares down at the soggy darkness where his feet must be and waits for the leather and satin rustle of her wings, gentle loversound through the storm. The rain catches his tears and washes them away with everything else.

* * * *

The funeral over and the servants busy downstairs when Silas opened the doors of his gallery; viewed the damage she’d done for the first time, knew it was mostly broken glass and little that couldn’t be put right again, but the sight hurt his chest, hurt his eyes. Heart already so broken and eyes already so raw but new pain anyway. No bottom to this pain, and he bent over and picked up his dodo, retrieved it from a bed of diamond shards and Silas brushed the glass from its dusty beak and rump feathers. Set it back on the high shelf between passenger pigeons and three Carolina parakeets. Another step closer to her cage, the drapes still pulled open, and his shoes crunched. Her, crouched in the shadows, wings wrapped tight about her like a cocoon, living shield against him, and he said, ‘What did you do to her, Tisiphone?’ And surprised at how calm his voice could be, how empty of everything locked inside him and clawing to get out.

The wings shivered, cringed and folded back; ‘That’s not my name,’ she said.

‘What did you do to her, Megaera?’

‘Shut up,’ words spit at the wall where her face was still hidden, at him, ‘You know that I’m not one of the three, you’ve known that all along.’

‘She couldn’t have hurt you, even if she’d wanted to,’ he said, hearing her words but as close as he would ever come to being able to ignore them: her weak, and his grief too wide to cross even for her voice. ‘Did you think she could hurt you?’ he said.

‘No,’ and shaking her head now, forehead bang and smack against brick and he could see the sticky, black smear she left on the wall.

‘Then you did it to get back at me. Is that it? You thought to hurt me by hurting her.’

‘No,’ she said and that was the only time he ever saw her cry, if it was crying, the dim phosphorescence leaking from the corners of her eyes. ‘No,
no ..
.’

‘But you know she’s dead, don’t you?’ and ‘Yes,’ she said, small yes too quick and it made him want to wring her white throat, lock his strong hands around her neck and twist until he was rewarded with the pop and cartilage grind of ruined vertebrae. Squeeze until her tongue hung useless from her lipless mouth.

‘She never hurt anyone, Alecto,’ he hissed and she turned around, snake-sudden movement and he took a step away from the bars despite himself.

‘I asked her to
help
me,’ and she was screaming now, perfect, crystal teeth bared. ‘I asked her to free me,’ and her hurt and fury swept over him, blast furnace heat rushing away from her, and faint smell of nutmeg and decay left in the air around his head.

‘I
asked
her to unlock the fucking cage, Silas!’ and the wings slipped from off her back and lay bloody and very still on the unclean metal and hay-strewn floor of the cage.

* * * *

In the simplest sense, these things, at least, are true: that during the last week of June 1916, Silas Desvernine hired workmen from Haverstraw to excavate a large stone from a
spot near the summit of Storm King, and that during this excavation several men died or fell seriously ill, each under circumstances that only seemed unusual if considered in connection with one another. When the foreman resigned (monkeyed little Scotsman with a face like ripe cranberries), Silas hired a second crew and in July the stone was carried down and away from the mountain, ingenious block-and-tackle of his own design, then horse and wagon, and finally, barge, the short distance upriver to Pollepel Island. Moneys were paid to a Mr Harriman of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, well enough known for his discretion in such matters, and no questions were asked.