Monstrous Beauty (28 page)

“You said I had to talk you away!” she cried. “You lied to me!”

His eyes rolled into his head.

“Not like this, Pastor!”

His face was blue. The spasms of his body subsided. She wrapped her arms around him, leaned her cheek against his head, and held him tightly. Within a minute, he was absolutely still.

“You lied to me,” she whispered into his ear. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Chapter 42

H
ESTER EASED
P
ASTOR
McKee’s body down. She closed his eyelids, put his arms by his sides, and smoothed his wild white hair away from his face. And then she remembered that she was the only one who could see his body or touch it, and the full weight of his aloneness hit her.

She got up slowly with aching knees. She picked up the flask and stopper. He had given it to her as a memento of their friendship, and she would treasure it. Making sure the stopper was in tight, she tucked the flask into the pocket of her shorts. She walked on wobbly legs back to the stairs, where she had set down her bag, and gingerly pulled the doll from the main compartment. She fixed the doll’s hair and hugged her to her chest.

Now she knew what unpinning a spirit entailed. Pastor McKee hadn’t had the heart to tell her. And maybe he was right not to: she might not have agreed to it. It meant causing her friends to experience their deaths again, with all the pain of the original event. It meant being helpless to ease their suffering.

She walked up the crypt stairs and outside. It was not yet dawn. Linnie was waiting for her—a waif of a shadow, huddled behind a tombstone in the dark. Hester put the doll behind her back.

“Hi, Linnie.”

“Where is Pastor McKee?” Linnie’s voice was puny.

“He’s inside—in the crypt.”

In the faint light streaming out of the doorway, Hester could see Linnie shaking her head.

“I don’t feel him.”

“He’s there, I just left him.”

“He’s not there!” Linnie shouted.

“Linnie…”

“Call him to the doorway!” And then she crouched again. “My head hurts.”

Tears came to Hester’s eyes.

“I know it does. I’m sorry. Please believe me that I’m so sorry.”

“What are you holding behind your back?”

“It’s … I found something for you, Linnie. Something you lost. My friend had it all along, and I didn’t know it.”

She brought the doll out from behind her back.

“Poppet,” Linnie whispered. She stepped around the gravestone.

“Wait,” Hester said. She wanted to explain. She wanted to say something that would make what was going to happen easier. But Linnie was already running toward her. And how could she make death easier for a child with just words?

Instead, when Linnie grabbed the doll Hester scooped her up in her arms before she fell to the ground. The doll was wedged between them.

Linnie let out an inhuman wail of agony.

“Forgive me, Linnie,” Hester said.

But Linnie began to thrash wildly. She wrenched herself out of Hester’s arms and started pounding on her with the power of a grown man, all while clutching the doll. She grabbed Hester by the shirt, ripping a sleeve partly off, and threw her to the ground several feet away. Hester crawled to a granite tombstone. She instinctively rolled into a ball, tucking herself into a fetal position facing the tombstone, with her arms protecting her head. Linnie stumbled over like an injured bear and began kicking her with massive blows, screaming in pain.

“Drop the doll, Linnie!” Hester shouted, not knowing what else to do to end Linnie’s pain. She would be killed herself if Linnie kicked in her head, or decided in her rage to use a stone as a weapon. But Linnie wouldn’t drop the doll, and all at once she fell in a heap on the ground next to Hester. The attack had ended as quickly as it had begun. She had fallen face forward, and Hester saw that the beautiful thick rope of a scar—the scar Hester had secretly coveted as a child—had opened into a gaping, bloody gash the size of a man’s hand. Her skull had fractured, and the bony plates had cleaved open, exposing the brain underneath.

“Linnie!” Hester cried. She crawled to the little girl’s side and rolled her over. A fluorescent burst of lightning revealed Linnie’s open and lifeless eyes. Poppet was still clenched under her arm.

A clap of thunder made Hester jump. She kissed her old friend’s cheek—plump with youth.

“Rest now, Linnie.”

She closed Linnie’s eyes. Fat raindrops began to fall. She gently wiggled Poppet from Linnie’s grasp, whispering “I’m sorry,” and carried the doll inside the church, out of the rain. She leaned Poppet against the wall, away from the door, so that Peter would find it in the event that—she didn’t know what. The skies opened, and the rain came down in beating sheets. The wind picked up with a hurricane-like, swirling burst, soaking the floor at the threshold. And then she went down the stairs toward the crypt to retrieve her backpack, and the journal that would destroy the spirit of the man who had become everything that mattered to her.

Compared with the darkness of the graveyard, the light was harsh as she descended into the crypt. Hester squinted and put her hand up against the glare of the bulbs. She kept her eyes down to avoid looking at the pastor’s body. She concentrated on her next worry: Ezra’s death and the form it would take. The long scar she had discovered on his chest flashed through her mind, and she remembered the feelings of loss that had coursed through her when she touched it. How unbearably cruel was it to inflict that injury on him again? How long would he live after it opened? What pain would he be in? Would his spirit react with the same violence that Linnie’s had?

As she came down the last step she decided she didn’t care if he raged. It would be an understandable reaction, and she had no choice but to face it. She wasn’t frightened of dying anymore. Her only concern was for the pain it would cause Malcolm, Nancy, Sam, and Peter if she were killed.

Even from the crypt, she could hear the howling of the storm outside. She realized now that it was Noo’kas: the hag finally understood that Hester was two-thirds of the way through her grisly task, and on her way to taking Ezra. Hester wondered if the storm could become strong enough to prevent her from unpinning Ezra’s spirit. She had little physical strength left, and faced with losing Ezra, her conviction was as fragile as it could be.

As she bent to pick up her bag, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Before she could react, she was tackled to the ground and being clawed and punched by a raving madwoman.

Chapter 43

H
ESTER TRIED
to roll away, but the woman had straddled her. She was not only strong, she was stout, too, and Hester was hopelessly trapped.

“Stop! Please!” Hester shouted as the woman smacked her face once with the back of her hand.

“You hateful sea monster!” the woman said, lifting Hester’s torso by the shoulders and shaking her. “I have waited too many years to avenge Olaf.”

“I’m not a sea monster,” Hester cried, realizing at once that she sounded as crazy as her attacker.

The woman pushed her face into Hester’s, and spittle flew out as she said, “I won’t grace you with the name ‘mermaid.’ You are no maiden—you whore!” She pointed toward Pastor McKee’s lifeless body. “Your legs fool only the feebleminded, like that useless idiot, McKee. I see what you are! You killed my husband, and I know how you did it. It is divine justice that I have been given, by your own act in murdering me, the physical strength now to do the same to you.”

She thought Hester was Syrenka! But where had Hester heard the name Olaf?

The woman slapped her face with each hand, one after the other.

“You’re Eleanor!” Hester blurted at last. “Eleanor Ontstaan.”

Mercifully, calling her name had the effect of stopping the beating, as least for the moment.

“You’re not a
stupid
monster then, are you. Just a vicious, heartless one.”

Panic rose in Hester. Another pinned spirit! Why hadn’t Pastor McKee warned her? How could he have left her so defenseless? She had nothing to use against this ghost—no object from the past. Her heart raced, and her breath became quick and shallow. Why hadn’t she thought of it on her own? It was right there, in the
Old Colony
newspaper: Eleanor Ontstaan died in the crypt. Eleanor’s drowning was the reason Hester had met Pastor McKee to begin with. Why had she embarked on this plan to unpin them without thinking it through?

“You took a good Christian man from this earth—nay, the best. At long last God will punish you, and He shall use me as His weapon.”

“Oh, God, why didn’t McKee tell me?” Hester screamed, turning her face away from Eleanor’s horrid mouth, which, unlike the other three ghosts, spilled putrid fumes of over a century of rot.

“He forgot about me, the old fool. It is as simple as that. They all forgot about me after they suppressed me. They cowered from my wrath in those early days—though I was justified in my anger—and they pushed me down, the three of them together. If he hadn’t been senile, that worthless man might have recalled that it took them all to hold my spirit down.
One
is not enough, not even one as clever as your heathen lover.” She grabbed Hester’s chin with her left hand and forced her to face forward, raising her right fist to strike her. “Look at me while I kill you!”

“I’m not who you think I am,” Hester pleaded. “I’m not Sarah Doyle. Sarah is long dead.”

“Your magic does not blind me. It never has. I see your soul, monster.”

“But mermaids have no souls!”

It was pointless to argue logic with a furious spirit. The blow came down hard, and Hester felt her nose break as her head was slammed to the side. Blood spattered and beaded on the dusty floor beside her. She felt as if her face had exploded.

She was going to die here. Killed by a ghost that no one else could see, no one could even imagine. It would be another tragedy to compound the one so long ago. Her parents would spend the rest of their lives trying in vain to find her killer. Ezra would be tormented for all eternity by his isolation, and by Noo’kas. The spirits of McKee and Linnie would never be freed. She had failed.

“I know how you got your soul, witch,” Eleanor said. “You got it when you tore out my husband’s lungs, which is how you are going to die now.”

She grabbed the front of Hester’s collar and ripped open her shirt. The buttons popped off and flew in every direction. Hester felt a burning sting across the back of her neck, as if she had been slashed with a knife.

Eleanor paused, with wide eyes. She hovered above Hester, teetering for an agonizing moment, and then fell to her side, crumpling half on the floor and half on Hester’s torso. Hester shoved her off and scooted wildly away, kicking her legs frantically to disentangle herself. What had just happened?

Still lying on her side, Eleanor looked at the necklace in her hand, which she had ripped off Hester’s neck. She pulled it to her heart.

“Marijn,” she gurgled, with her body going into convulsions.

Water began pouring from her mouth, as if from a spring. She gasped horribly between gushes in the flow, trying to get air, aspirating the water, choking, and then unable to make any noise as a geyser of water spewed from her mouth. Her body shook with spasms for more than a minute. Then they slowed, the flow of water ebbed to nothing, and soon she was completely still.

She had drowned on dry land.

Great clots of blood oozed from Hester’s nose. She put her hand up and pinched the bridge to stanch the flow. Her nose had already swelled, and it was throbbing with every heartbeat, but she didn’t care. She was alive. She counted in her head to one hundred twenty, her entire body trembling violently. Two minutes was all she could devote to recovering her wits, catching her breath, and, she hoped, slowing the bleeding. She did not take her eyes off Eleanor’s body. It remained still and lifeless.

When her time was up, she stood and approached the body cautiously. The necklace dangled from Eleanor’s closed fist. It had saved Hester’s life. Now she knew that Eleanor, Marijn’s first foster mother, had given the necklace to baby Marijn, beginning the tradition of women in her family passing the necklace to their daughters, until Hester’s own mom had given it to her before she died. There was no way she was leaving it behind.

She reached out and tugged on the heart and the chain together. To her relief, the necklace slid out without her having to touch the body. The clasp was broken, so she put the necklace safely in her pocket, in case she survived the next step. She didn’t worry that the body would attract any notice; no one but her could see it or touch it.

She secured her backpack as well as she could to keep the rain out and walked up the stairs. No matter how tumultuous the storm was, it was time to go to the beach.

Chapter 44

T
HE RAIN PELTED
H
ESTER
, and the wind was so strong she had to lean her body against it to make progress down the hill. Thunder rumbled—she knew it was Noo’kas threatening her, but she didn’t care.

She felt Ezra reaching out to her, and she could hardly bear it. He must know why she approached. He must have felt the loss of the others. And still he wanted her.

How could she live without him?

She held the wall as she went down the stone steps. It should have been low tide, but the waves crashed onshore, making the beach treacherous. She saw Ezra waiting, seemingly oblivious to the storm surge, his eyes locked on her. She slid her backpack off her shoulder and tucked it on a top step, close to the wall. She wanted one moment with him—one last moment—without harming him. She left her shoes on to protect her feet. She ran down the rest of the steps, plunged into the waves at their base, and ran into his arms.

“Your face,” he said over her shoulder, holding her close, his voice heavy with concern. “You’re bleeding.”