The Vanishing (23 page)

She nodded her head and smiled a knowing smile. They were all smiling at me, their eyes expectant and wide. I didn’t know why they were looking at me when it was Mrs. Sinclair who was supposed to be telling the tale.

I turned to Adrian. “You asked me to listen to the rest of the story,” I said. “I’m listening. If you’re so sure that I was the psychic who conducted a séance at Havenwood ten years ago, which is impossible by the way, then tell me, how did I come to be here? I didn’t even know Havenwood existed until you showed up on my doorstep in Chicago.”

“Bringing you to Havenwood all of those years ago was my idea,” Mrs. Sinclair jumped in, putting a hand to her chest. “If you’re going to blame anyone, Julia, blame me.”

I furrowed my brow. “Why would I blame anybody?”

“For what came after,” she said. “For what happened to you. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I needed something besides the Devil’s Toy Box to re-create Seraphina’s séance. I needed her descendant.”

“Why?”

“Because, my dear, I wanted it to be as authentic as possible. I knew Seraphina couldn’t be here to conduct the séance”—she shot a glance at Drew and chuckled—“obviously, but I had read that these types of gifts, psychic gifts if you will, tend to run in families. I wondered—were there any descendants? If so, did they inherit Seraphina’s gift?

“So, while I was searching high and low for the box, Adrian was on a hunt of his own,” she continued. “We would’ve never found you, never known you existed, if not for that letter. It gave us Seraphina’s real name, her sister’s name, and, from its postmark, an approximate location of where she settled after leaving the world of Spiritualism behind.”

“It wasn’t too terribly difficult to track you down,” Adrian said, “even without the online genealogical sites of today. Goodness, if I had had any of that, I’d have found you in an afternoon. As it was, it took weeks of visiting libraries and courthouses, poring through records.”

“That’s how you came to know my family tree,” I said, remembering seeing it in this very room. That day seemed like lifetimes ago now.

“Not only that,” he said. “Your book had just been released, and it caught our attention because we knew you were Seraphina’s only living descendant. The fact that you mentioned my mother in the acknowledgments cemented this rather odd proposition for us.”

“When we saw the book, we knew it was meant to be that you should come to Havenwood,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Predestined, as if Seraphina herself had sent you.”

Adrian went on. “I paid a call on you in your charming duplex just off Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. Do you remember it, Julia?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “That never happened.”

“Do you remember the duplex apartment, though? At least that? Try, Julia.”

My mind sputtered and skipped. Images flashed before me. A floor-to-ceiling fireplace. A deep porcelain tub. Walks around the lake on warm spring days.

“I do remember the place,” I said, nodding my head slowly, trying to focus my mind into the past at the images that were fading from view. “I lived there for several years.”

“We talked there,” he continued, his voice low and melodious. “About Havenwood. About my mother and your book.”

“No,” I said, once again feeling the beads of perspiration begin to form on my forehead. My pulse seemed to race. “You were never there. The first time I laid eyes on you, it was at my house in Chicago.”

Adrian turned toward his mother. “Is it time?”

“I believe it is,” she said.

“Time for what?” I asked, my breath shallow.

“We’ve been waiting for the right time to show you something, my dear,” Mrs. Sinclair said, rising from her chair and slipping onto the soft next to me to stroke my hair. “I believe it may help you remember.”

Adrian stood and turned toward the door. “Give me a moment,” he said, walking out of the east salon. I listened to his footsteps on the library floor, fading and then becoming louder until he appeared in the doorway once again.

He crossed the room and handed me a book, a book I recognized. My book. I took it from him with shaking hands and laid it in my lap.

“Open it to the title page, Julia,” he said gently. “It will prove to you, without a shadow of a doubt, that what we’re telling you is the truth.”

I don’t know how long I stared at that page, my heart beating furiously in my chest. I could feel my hands becoming cold and
clammy, and perspiration dripping down the back of my spine. I couldn’t take a deep breath and was panting as though I had just run a marathon.

“Julia?” I heard my name, spoken softly in the distance. My vision narrowed, focusing only on those words on the page. The east salon and everyone in it fell away.

I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It was my book. The inscription was in my handwriting. There was no doubt I had signed a copy of my one and only novel for Amaris Sinclair years earlier. I had been to Havenwood before. Everything they were saying was true. And yet it wasn’t. How could it be? I had absolutely no recollection of it, none at all.

Why couldn’t I remember?

To keep my nausea at bay, I closed my eyes and rested my head, which had begun to pound, on the back of the sofa, finally able to take deep breaths. I inhaled and exhaled as I heard the fire crackling in the fireplace and felt it warming my cheeks. Its flames danced and swayed in my mind, sending up shadows behind my eyelids.

I sensed that my memories were floating somewhere in the darkness of my mind. I could see them, in the distance, coming toward me almost in the same way a bottle with a note in it would float from the sea to the shore. The bottle was there but out of reach. As long as it was beyond my grasp, I was safe. But it was drifting closer and closer. I wanted to open my eyes, or do something, anything, to keep myself away from whatever horrible truths that bottle held. But I could not. The truth finds its way into the light, no matter what you’ve done to contain it. There was nothing I could do but brace myself for it to overtake me.

Images—dark, strange, nightmarish scenes—flashed in my mind, one after another after another like a slide show, and little by little, they melded into one horrific whole.

At first, my memories of this long-ago séance were distant, as though I were watching them unfold on television. But then they
became stronger and larger until I was so engulfed by the memories that it was as though I was reliving the moments, in terrifying detail.

I saw Adrian, Mrs. Sinclair, and a woman I knew to be Katherine, along with a few others, sitting around the table in the east salon. Candles flickered, their delicate yellow glow illuminating the room and all of us with the type of soft, magical light I usually associate with late afternoon on a sunny day. The box was sitting in the middle of the table. We clasped hands and I began calling to the spirits of the dead.

I wasn’t quite sure why we were even going through the trouble of having a séance to summon them. Havenwood was filled with ghostly figures that floated through the corridors and peeked out of the paintings. All we needed was to walk down one hallway and we’d meet more spirits than Scrooge did on Christmas Eve.

But the famous author wanted her séance, so a séance we would hold. I had never conducted one, and had told Adrian as much when he made the invitation, but he was unconcerned about that. As long as I was able to communicate with the dead, that was all that mattered to him. And that had never been a problem for me. Ever since I was five years old and figured out that the grandmother who had been tucking me in each night was not exactly alive, and hadn’t been for decades, I was surrounded by spirits. So I agreed to his request, not knowing what I was getting myself into.

I should have known something was wrong at the outset when I realized there were no spirits in the room with us. That was a first. When I called them, they came, hungry as they are for communication with the living and so rare is it for them to find a conduit such as myself. Usually I had a backlog. But not that night. There was no one whispering in my ear about last wishes and hidden wills, no one wanting to give the living hope that there is indeed a life everlasting, no one wanting revenge for wrongs real or imagined. The room was as silent as an empty grave.

But then I heard something, a clattering and scratching, coming from the box in the middle of the table.

“It’s working,” Mrs. Sinclair whispered, her eyes glowing in the candlelight. “Open the box, Julia! Open it!”

I had never heard of anything like that box sitting in the middle of the table. But what could it hurt? It was just a box. So I did as she suggested.

All at once, a great whoosh of air extinguished the candles. I could see my breath in front of me as my teeth began to chatter despite the warmth of the fire blazing in the fireplace just feet from the table. What I can only describe as a great torrent of air circulated around us, and on it, I could hear the deep, dark, low growls and snarls of something, I knew not what. But I knew a sense of evil had filled the room the likes of which I had never before experienced.

I sensed a heaviness on my chest that was pushing me backward in my chair, and before I knew it, I hit the ground and slid, chair and all, toward the opposite wall, as though something was pushing me. I knocked my head so hard on the wall that the room spun around and around, the stars blinding me.

I struggled to my feet, my head pounding.

“Get away from me!” Katherine screamed, pushing at something that was not there, or, rather, not visible. Blood oozed from scratches on her face.

Drew burst into the room, throwing the double doors open so hard they hit the walls behind. Three enormous malamutes bounded in behind him, snarling and growling.

Before Drew could say anything, I watched as he flew across the room and was pinned against the opposite wall, his eyes bulging, his face contorted, his feet not touching the ground. “Adrian, help!” I called out. I tried to run toward Drew, but the dogs kept me at bay. They didn’t want me anywhere near what was happening there.

“I command you to let him go,” I bellowed, not quite understanding why I was saying the words. It was as though someone—Seraphina perhaps?—was taking over. “In the name of God the Father Almighty, I take authority over you and command you to let him go.”

Drew dropped to the ground. His face was red and he was shaking, but at least he was breathing. I turned to see Mrs. Sinclair on the floor, her white dress now crimson, Adrian kneeling at her side.

I took a few steps toward her—was she hurt? It was then I noticed she was wiping her hands on the front of her dress.

“No matter how many times I try to wipe them, I can’t get the blood off my hands,” she muttered to Adrian. “It keeps coming back.”

Then I caught sight of Katherine, whose expression seemed even more frightening than anything I had just witnessed. She was standing stock-still, staring at the opposite wall, her eyes wide, her face a mask of terror.

I turned in the direction she was staring and saw her daughter, little Audra, suspended high in the air. How had the child gotten into the room in the first place? She had been asleep in her bed when we began the séance. She was simply floating there, as if held aloft by unseen hands. Her arms dangled limply at her sides, and her head was back, as though she was looking into the heavens. But I knew heaven had nothing to do with this. The dogs were crouched beneath her, snarling and growling at whatever it was that had her in its grip.

“Adrian!” I shouted, and when he looked up, he let out a cry so horrific that I thought it would knock me to the ground. He rushed over to Audra and tried to reach her, jumping, to no avail. By this time Drew had scrambled to his feet and was pushing a chair under her.

And then we heard the laughter, dark and low and menacing. It was coming from Audra’s angelic face.

Somehow, I found my voice. “I command you to release this child,” I bellowed, loud and strong, with much more force than I possessed, or felt. “In the name of God the Father Almighty, I take authority over you and order you to release this girl.”

Audra’s head sprang back into position and she gazed down at me, her sweet face now distorted with unspeakable evil.

“
Mary had a little lamb,
” she said in a singsongy, feathery voice. “
Its fleece was white as snow
.”

“Release the girl! I command you!”

“
Sing a song of sixpence / A pocket full of rye…
”

Katherine’s strangled screams pierced the air as she fell to her knees. “Do something, Adrian!”

“Give me the girl!” I demanded.

“
Jack and Jill went up the hill…
” The voice wasn’t coming from Audra anymore, not really. It was coming from near the fireplace.

And now the back of the room. “
Old King Cole was a merry old soul…
”

And now just above her screaming mother. “
Four and twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie…
”

That was enough. This had to stop. I had to do something. I was the only one who could. “Take me instead,” I shouted. “Release the girl and take me!”

With that, Audra dropped into her father’s waiting arms, and the next thing I knew, I was on the other side of the room against the wall, a great force bearing down on my chest.

The scream came from somewhere deep inside of me, radiating outward until it engulfed me.

The last thing I saw was Mrs. Sinclair standing in front of me with arms outstretched, her white dress covered in blood. “Julia,” she was saying. “Julia.”

And then that was all there was.

My eyes fluttered open. I was lying in my bed at Havenwood under a nest of quilts. Rays of sunlight were peeking around the edges of the thick curtains. I lay there for a moment, trying to get my bearings. How had I gotten here? The last thing I remembered was being in the east salon talking with Drew and Mrs. Sinclair and Adrian… I shook that thought out of my head. I didn’t want to think about the last thing I remembered.

Drew was sitting in the armchair by the fireplace, his feet on the ottoman, his head resting against the back of the chair. He was wearing light sweatpants, a T-shirt, and slippers. I rustled around in bed and his eyes popped open.

“You’re awake!” he said, his voice heavy with sleep. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My head is fuzzy. How did I get up here?”

“Adrian gave you a sedative.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Do you…?” I could tell he didn’t even want to say the word.

“Remember the séance? I do.”

I remembered it all—Adrian’s visit to my apartment on that unusually warm spring day in Minneapolis, his offer to come to Havenwood to re-create a famous séance, and much more than that. The unspeakable things that happened as a result.

“I was so terrified last night,” Drew said, his voice soft and low.

I closed my eyes to try to block out the memories, but it was no use. They were with me to stay.

“I was, too. Like I said, I remember the séance, I remember being here before, but I’m still really confused about a lot of things.”

“What sorts of things?” Drew asked.

“Well, like what happened after that night. It’s all a big blur until Jeremy and I got married.”

“I think we can shed some light on some of that,” he said. “But how about we have some breakfast first?”

I pushed myself up and glanced at the clock. It was well past nine.

“We’ve missed it,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

He smiled. “You can have breakfast any time you bloody well want it. I’ll call down to Marion and order us up a feast.”

So many questions remained unanswered. Not only about my life after I left Havenwood that first time, but my life since I returned. It all seemed like a muddle of confusion. As soon as I felt strong enough, I knew it was time to straighten it out.

So, that is how, several days hence, all four of us gathered again after dinner, this time in my favorite room in the house, the west salon, for a conversation that I fervently hoped would have a better conclusion than the first.

The floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the landscape outside, the moon reflecting off the snowy whiteness and casting a soft glow. A fire blazed in the fireplace, and we all were equipped with our obligatory, standard-Havenwood-issue after-dinner drinks.

“I suppose we should start where we left off, my darling,” said Mrs. Sinclair, who was standing next to the fire, her long gown, covered in jewels, flickering with the flames.

I took a deep breath and nodded. And we began.

“I called an ambulance as quickly as I could get to the phone,”
Mrs. Sinclair said. “You were incoherent, Audra was… well, darling, she seemed to be dead. Katherine was bleeding and I was covered with blood. The others in the circle that night, household servants, were unhurt, but they left that very night and never returned.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, my skin tingling. “Audra didn’t die?”

“No, thank God,” Mrs. Sinclair said, taking a sip of her Dubonnet cocktail.

I turned to Adrian. “But I thought you said she
was
your daughter. It sort of implies that she’s gone.”

“She is gone,” Adrian said, his shoulders slumping. “She was in the hospital for weeks, not waking up from whatever it is that happened to her. When she finally did, she was in a psychiatric hospital for months after that. And when she finally came back to herself, much like you, she didn’t remember anything. She didn’t remember me. Or her grandmother. Or anything about this house, or the life she lived here. Katherine had divorced me by that time—she never came back to Havenwood after leaving it that horrible night with our daughter—and she convinced me that letting her go would be the best thing for her.”

“Oh no,” I said, looking from Adrian to his mother and back again. “That can’t be. You two are so loving and wonderful! How—” But his eyes, filled with tears, stopped my words.

“Think about how it felt, just a few days ago, for you to remember that night,” he said softly. “Now think about how it would feel if you were a child.”

My breath caught in my throat. “But ten years have passed,” I tried. “Surely…”

He just shook his head. “I watch out for her, in my own way,” he said. “My ‘business trips’? I’m looking after her, from afar. When she turns twenty-one, she will receive a check from an anonymous benefactor, who will take care of her every need for the rest of her life.”

“I’d argue she needs a father more,” I said.

“She has one,” he said, brushing away the sadness that had escaped from his eye. “Katherine remarried. He’s the only father Audra knows. A good man, all in all. Believe me, I’ve checked him out. No, Audra disappeared from my life that night forever. I had a daughter that meant the entire world to me, and then she vanished. In the blink of an eye.”

Mrs. Sinclair muffled a sob into the handkerchief she was holding up to her mouth.

“I am so sorry,” I said. We remained in silence for a while, respecting the grief they were both feeling.

But there was more of the tale to tell. And soon, Mrs. Sinclair took it up again.

“And as for me,” she said. “You can see, now, why I refused to write another word. The horror of that night was too much to bear. My greediness for more and more, my insatiability for fame and all the trappings that came with it, caused me to unleash real evil in this house, not something from my imagination, but real, unspeakable evil. Coming face-to-face with that will take the horror novelist right out of you. At least, it did for me. And the aftermath. We lost Audra, the light of our lives. As soon as I realized that, I was finished with writing, with fame, with anything related to it.”

That was all well and good, I thought, but what about the mental institution?

“Vanishing from the public eye completely was the only way to go,” she went on, winking at me. “You must realize that by now. No questions, no reporters. You’re free.”

She did have a point. Still, I wondered if she was going to tell me the whole story or not. She seemed to be glossing over the part where she wound up in an asylum.

“And that all brings us back to you,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Obviously, you remember the séance. Anything else after that? Have any other memories come to you?”

I tried to cast my thoughts back, but that same brick wall stood in the way. I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Where did you meet your husband?” Mrs. Sinclair asked.

An odd question, I thought, but when I opened my mouth to answer it, I realized I had no idea. “College?” I offered. “Through friends, maybe?”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I shook my head, my mind in a jumble. Where did I meet Jeremy?

Mrs. Sinclair crossed the room and sunk down onto the sofa next to me, taking my hands in hers. “Are you ready to hear it all?”

“I am,” I said, my voice a bit louder than I intended it to be. “I want to know everything, so I can move forward.”

“You left here that night on a stretcher, Julia. You were in a catatonic state for months. You were sitting up, your eyes were open, but you did not speak. You didn’t answer when people talked to you. It was as though whatever happened to you that night during the séance, your body and soul simply couldn’t handle it.”

My mind was swimming. Not me. This couldn’t possibly be about me. She was talking about herself, wasn’t she? What about the phone call I had heard between Adrian and her psychiatrist?

“You shut down,” she went on, patting my hand. “And who could blame you? You saved Audra’s life, of that I have no doubt, and put your own in jeopardy in the process. You were willing to sacrifice yourself for her. None of us ever forgot that, Julia.”

I shook my head. It couldn’t be.

“You had been at Havenwood for several months before that night,” she continued. “We took to you then just like we did now, darling.” She winked at Drew. “All of us. Some more than others. And, of course, after that accursed séance, we felt responsible for your care.”

“That’s just not possible,” I protested, looking from one to the other. “
You
were in a catatonic state, not me. Isn’t that right? That’s
the reason you dropped out of sight and stopped writing. Isn’t that so?”

Mrs. Sinclair took my hand and brought it to her lips, kissing it a few times before continuing to speak. “Darling,” she said gently. “No.”

My thoughts were muddy and vague, as though I were trying to remember a movie I had seen long ago, not something that really happened to me. And then images began to hover in the corner of my vision—flashing lights, a small white room, a lawn filled with sweet-smelling grass. Could it be…?

“You were in the hospital in town, at first,” Mrs. Sinclair went on, seeming to choose her words carefully. “After that, a psychiatric hospital. When you came out of the catatonic state, we were all overjoyed. But then we realized you didn’t remember any of us. You had long-term memories, but not short-term ones. We visited, but…” Her words trailed off into a long sigh, and she dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

I shook my head. Catatonic state?

“The doctors thought it would probably be better if we just let you recuperate on your own,” Adrian took up where she left off. “Our visits would agitate you. We made you suspicious and afraid, and you’d retreat even further into your own world. They believed, and we came to believe, that you were associating us with that night. We were actually hindering your recovery.”

“I fully intended to simply take you out of the hospital and bring you here to Havenwood, with a full-time nurse if that’s what you needed,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “But we couldn’t. Your doctors advised against taking you back to where it happened; they were adamantly opposed to it. And as dear as you were to us, you weren’t a relative. Our hands were tied. So in the end, we had to let you go.”

My head was beginning to pound. “This is a lot to take in,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Why did you mention Jeremy?”

“That’s where you met him, my dear,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “The psychiatric hospital. He was a patient there as well.”

My mind reached back to my earliest memories with him: long walks on the lawn, afternoons by the lake, our wedding day. It might have been in a hospital chapel, for all I knew. I just wasn’t sure.

This caused my stomach to turn. “What was he in for?”

“We were never able to find out,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “But with everything that happened later…”

A light went on. “The police told me he was a sociopath.”

“He was released before you were. He married you and, as next of kin, took you from the hospital.”

I could see it, then, in my mind. A car pulling into a circular driveway. Jeremy standing there. Me running into his arms. What they were saying started to make a sick kind of sense.

“You had total amnesia about the séance and some time before and after it, much like people who are in auto accidents lose whole days,” Mrs. Sinclair went on. “Your stay in the hospital didn’t do anything to improve that. In fact I gather it never improved until you came back here to Havenwood.”

“But…” My mind was running in many directions at once. “If all of this is true, how did you find me? In Chicago, I mean.”

Adrian cleared his throat. “Because we weren’t family, nobody notified us that you had left the hospital. You married this man, he changed your name, and you basically disappeared into the fabric of the world. Goodness knows how he managed it. Connections with organized crime, perhaps. He was certainly a criminal, based on what came after. We had no way to track you down.”

“A decade passed, Julia,” Drew said. “We looked for you, but it was as though you disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Until the scandal,” I said, remembering the newspaper articles and television coverage.

Adrian smiled. “I despised the man who took you from us, but I came to love him for the notoriety. When I saw you on the
news, I couldn’t believe it. There you were! A decade later, we had found you! If you had been living a happy life, we’d have been glad for you but stayed away. From the news reports, however, we knew you were in trouble, and even in danger. And so it was our turn to rescue you, just as you rescued Audra.”

They were all smiling, but this time, unlike the other day, it warmed me. These people were looking out for my best interests. They truly were my family.

“When I arrived on your doorstep that day, I didn’t quite know what to expect,” Adrian went on. “When it was clear you didn’t remember me, or us, or anything that had happened, I knew we’d have to tread carefully with you.”

“So you concocted the story about wanting me to be Mrs. Sinclair’s companion.”

“We did that before I visited,” Adrian said, nodding. “We knew that if you didn’t remember us, you’d need a reason to come to Havenwood. It seemed like the only way to get you to leave with an absolute stranger.”

“We got in touch with your psychiatrist,” Mrs. Sinclair added. “He gave us further advice and monitored what was happening here.”

“But why would he talk to you at all? You’re not family, and he opposed you taking me back to Havenwood initially.”

Adrian smiled. “Let’s just say he was persuaded. The threat of a lawsuit on your behalf and all the publicity that would surround it convinced him to cooperate with us. All we wanted was for you to regain your memories. Or barring that, we hoped you’d fall in love with Havenwood all over again. Our main concern was helping you, Julia. You needed rescuing. We were not about to leave you alone to deal with the situation your husband created. You deserved much better.”

I sighed and leaned back against the sofa. It all seemed to be tied up into a neat bow. Except it wasn’t.