Haunt Me Still (26 page)

WE HEADED WEST
through Greenwich Village, winding through tree-lined streets that sprouted at odd angles. At the tail end of a cold night at the edge of winter, the streets that refused to sleep looked either sad or seedy, even in Manhattan, the haunt of garbage trucks and revels gone on too long. At the drive lining the island’s west side, we turned north.

Fonthill, Jamie told us as we drove, had been named in homage to fonthill Abbey, in England.

“A church?” asked Joanna.

Jamie laughed. “Sounds like it, but no. It was a preposterously grand home erected by one of the wealthiest Brits of the eighteenth century. Inherited money from Jamaican sugar—slavery, in other words. Damn near bankrupted himself, though, building fonthill.” She shook her head. “He was one strange dude, was William Beckford. Wrote a weird Gothic novel called
Vathek,
about demons and human sacrifice and the unbridled need to know everything. He said it was a response to some things that happened to him at fonthill one Christmas. So maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising that the Forrests’ little fonthill is at least as much in line with the occult as with the church.”

“Do you think the forrests knew that?” I asked. “Don’t know if Edwin did. But Catherine almost certainly knew. Ran with a Bohemian crowd, when occult investigations were all the rage. She was into Spiritualism later. Trying to contact her dead babies. And she seems to have forged a psychological link with Lady Macbeth. Did a lot of research on Elizabeth Stewart, at any rate.”

Elizabeth Stewart, the original Lady Macbeth.

I pulled my jacket tighter around me. Off to the right, the city’s skyscrapers clawed upward into the sky and then subsided again. The George Washington Bridge swooped off left to New Jersey. Trees lurched up and swallowed the road. In the darkness it seemed as if we were gliding through some primordial forest, in a world made only of road, trees, and the shimmering waters of the Hudson.

The parkway crossed a small, ordinary bridge as it emptied into the Bronx, and the city slipped into view, battling back the trees. After a while, we shot past a long low stone wall edging tall trees to a traffic light, where we turned in. “Welcome to the College of Mount Saint Vincent,” said Jamie. We wound back to a gatehouse, where a guard looked up sleepily from his book, saw Jamie, and waved us on.

The road carved through trees, between brick buildings, mostly dark, and back to a wide expanse of lawn out of which rose a small knoll topped by a castle. A toy castle, next to Windsor or Caernarvon or Edinburgh. But for all that, a castle: octagonal towers of rough-hewn gray stone huddling together, raising battlements like fists into the night.

“
Our sweet fountain on the hill
,” said Jamie. “fonthill.”

The driver stopped the car at a tall pointed archway filled with double doors, and we got out. Wind whistled around the building. Jamie avoided the steps up to the great door, darting off into the darkness to the right. Skirting some rhododendrons, we came to a steep stairway leading down. In the wall, half aboveground, was a door. Unlocking it, Jamie beckoned us inside.

I found myself in a bare hallway smelling of earth and damp, though the walls were a utilitarian white. We went up some stairs and down a hall to find ourselves in a domed octagonal room on the ground floor, lit only by the moonlight drifting down through a skylight far overhead at the dome’s apex. A dark wooden balcony ringed the room at the level of the second story. At ground level, rounded archways led into other rooms. This central room, though, was bare of furniture save for a few stiff armchairs against the wall. At our feet, a cross was inlaid in green and burgundy tile on the floor.

“When he first saw the cross,” Jamie said, “forrest said he thought it looked like he’d built the place for the roman Catholics. And then he sold it to the nuns before he could ever live here. A little ironic. Especially since the cross with equal arms is Greek, not roman.”

“Not just Greek,” Joanna said softly. “Celtic. Babylonian. Pre-Columbian American. Inside a circle, it’s one of the oldest symbols of all.”

“The oculus,” said Jamie. She was staring down at a thick quartz-like slab of translucent glass set into the middle of the cross, where the arms intersected. “Early renewable energy: It’s supposed to light the basement with the sunlight from the skylight overhead.”

“‘Oculus’ is Latin for ‘eye,’” said Joanna with a sharp glance at me.

“
Under the watchful eye of heaven,
” I murmured, glancing from the skylight to the floor. I knelt down. The oculus fit tightly into the floor. There seemed no way of prying it loose. I sat back on my heels, thinking. And then I rose and hurried back downstairs. The others followed.

At the end of the dank white basement hall was a thick metal door. On the other side, the building morphed into a cave. It was lined with furnaces that probably hummed all day, but at night the room, was silent and cold, colder than the night outside.

“Carved right into bedrock,” said Jamie.

The eye in the ceiling lit the room with a faint greenish glow. A little off to the side, what I’d taken at first for a table wasn’t: It was an immense slab of bedrock like a bier. The entire room seemed to have been chipped out of rock. If Catherine forrest had hidden something at fonthill,
under the watchful eye of heaven
…you’d think it would be there. But where? There seemed no way of hiding anything underneath the eye.

I trotted back up the stairs, glancing morosely at the eye, and then turning to take in the whole of the room. On the walls were four carvings in shallow bas relief. Joanna was standing before one of them. “Strange art,” she murmured. It showed Macbeth staring horrified at hands curled like claws, dripping with gore. In the background, Lady Macbeth disappeared through a doorway, a dagger in each hand. Gilt letters beneath picked out a quotation from Shakespeare:

I moved to the next scene. It was Othello the Moor, eyes starting from his head, his hands around Iago’s neck; Iago’s face, twisted away, wore a cruel smile. In the background, a young woman walked alone in a walled garden, a handkerchief on the ground, her maid bending to pick it up.

I looked back at Macbeth. His face had the same features as Othello’s, though not the same expression.

“It’s forrest,” said Jamie. “They’re all portraits. His favorite roles,” she added.

“They’re all eyes,” said Joanna. “Hamlet’s across the way, attacking his mother in her bedroom, turning her eyes into her black and spotted soul.”

The fourth scene wasn’t a tragedy. It was from
Twelfth Night—
one of the great comedies. Dressed as a boy, the young heroine Viola faced the gaunt and priggish hauteur of the steward Malvolio, pointing at a ring lying on the ground between them. Malvolio’s whole body seemed to be pointing—long finger, long nose…he had even extended a leg with pointed toe at the offending ring. But what seemed suddenly strangest was that he wasn’t a portrait of forrest—either in body type or in facial features.

“Three for forrest,” said Jamie. “One for Catherine. That’s pretty much how their marriage seemed to work, even when it
did
work.”

“So it isn’t him?”

“Not Forrest, no. At least, not
Edwin
forrest.” She pointed at Viola. “But that’s Catherine as Viola. A role she never played onstage, though she maintained it was her favorite.”

It was everybody’s favorite. Viola was one of the greatest roles ever written for a woman, full of sexual passion for both a man and a woman, romance, hilarity, and music. Longing and fear, too. I looked at Mrs. Forrest’s face. She was beautiful. Fragile somehow, with high cheekbones and small pursed lips.

But it was the gilt inscription beneath the scene that caught me. Not poetry, as the others were, but prose, all run together on one line:

Malvolio’s words to Viola, or Catherine’s to her husband?

I looked down at the oculus, the eye in the floor.
If it be worth stooping for, there it lies, in your eye.
I turned back. The ring was very nearly life-sized, in deeper relief than the rest of the carving.

I put a finger into the ring. Nothing happened. I pushed, and faintly, I heard a grinding noise and an exhalation of breath long held. I turned to see the oculus lowering and sliding under the floor.

Would it still be there—whatever Catherine had found? Was she right? Was it—could it be—a version of Macbeth? Whatever she’d found, she’d thought it evil.

Crossing to the hole in the floor, I dropped to my knees. The green stone had moved down, leaving an open space between the floor and the ceiling of the basement below. Sitting on a ledge in a coat of dust a century and a half thick lay a small packet tied in faded ribbon, addressed with two words in a woman’s hand:

Be it his that finds it,
I thought. With shaking fingers, I pulled it out, dust cascading down through the open hole onto the stone and into the basement below. The ribbon crumbled as I touched it, but the wax seal was intact, pressed with what might have been a signet ring. Two trees. One for Catherine and one for Edwin. A fine and private forest.

I broke it open. Scrawled on the inside of the cover sheet was a letter in handwriting I’d seen before. I glanced at the signature to be sure.
Catherine.
I handed it to Jamie.

Inside was another sealed packet, the paper darker and finer, its seal already broken. It had no address.

I heard a small squeak behind me. “
Be it his that finds it,
” said a deep voice.

I turned to look. A man was standing just inside the room with one arm around Joanna’s neck, clamped over her mouth. With his other hand, he had a gun to her head. He was gaunt, his hair white and close shaven.

Lucas Porter.

“
HOLD IT UP
,” he demanded. “Where I can see it.”

I did as he asked, my eye on the cold hard lines of the gun.

He skimmed the page, his lips moving as he read. Caught in the crook of his arm, her face wide with fear and fury beside him, Joanna’s eyes flickered. She was reading along. Reading what? “Next,” snapped Lucas, and I shifted the pages. “
Ha!
” he burst out, and then his voice fell to rhythmic chanting echoing around the room.

“Then it’s the
Macbeth
manuscript?” Without realizing what I was doing, I stepped forward.

His grip on Joanna tightened. “Get back,” he growled. Joanna’s brow pinched, and ever so slightly she shook her head. I stepped back.

“Stay there,” he ordered, and went back to reading. “The key lines are there,” he crowed after a few seconds. “The heart of the witches’ ceremony.” His voice cracked in exultation. “The collection of parts around it in the first folio, that’s rubbish. Ghoulish nursery rhymes, not to mention cliché. But
Double, double
…that’s different. What, for instance, do you suppose that it means? What’s the double toil?”

“Can’t you just let me see it?” I pleaded.

“Maybe in another life.
What’s the double toil?
”

“Nobody knows,” I said shortly. It was the truth, but it was also the answer he was looking for, I surmised. He wanted to talk, it seemed. I wanted him gone and the rest of us safe. Mostly, I wanted the damned manuscript I held in my hands. A
Macbeth
manuscript, for Christ’s sake.

Tightening his grip on Joanna, he laughed drily. “Sex and death, Kate. The two great rites of passage. Death and birth. Or at least conception. They’re very powerful moments. Make them simultaneous, for one man, and you create a whirlwind of energy, a dark vortex, allowing a spirit to drain, like Odin’s, into the underworld, while making a channel through which it can veer back directly.”

“What are you talking about?” I was watching him for an opening, the least moment of dropping his guard.

“The deed without a name, Kate. Putting a man back into the womb.”

“
What?
How?”

“That’s the great mystery, isn’t it?” he chortled. He was
enjoying
this, the sick bastard. “But I’ve worked it out, with a little help from Shakespeare and Ovid. Did Janet tell you that I used to beat her and her bearded fool of a husband at auction from time to time? Once, I scooped a copy of Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid out from under them.
The Metamorphoses.
”

Possibly Shakespeare’s favorite book. He’d mined it for plots and subplots, for themes and vocabulary and phrasing. Golding’s Ovid was laced through Shakespeare.

“It wasn’t the Ovid I cared about,” said Lucas, “so much as a single note in the margin next to the story of Medea.
A deede without a name.
In a hand that looks like Shakespeare’s.”

“How do you know what that looks like? All we have is six signatures, for Christ’s sake. And those are all different.”

“It’s his phrase and his hand. I had it confirmed.
Which suggests that the missing and unnamed deed, you see, was based on the rite next to that notation.
The witch Medea slitting an old man’s throat to pour his blood into a cauldron, from which he springs forth young again.”

“That’s not what happens,” I said. “She puts in an old ram and pulls out a lamb, but it’s pretty clear she’s pulled a bait and switch. What makes the old man young again is the liquor she brews up, poured back into his empty veins.”

“It’s a mythic substitution, and a sexual myth at that: an old man’s life spurting into a cauldron, from which he emerges as a youth. The old man dies, to be born again.” His eyes glittered, his voice dropping to a half chant. “The blade for the death, the cauldron for the birth.”

“And the mirror?”

He shrugged. “So much crossing rips a wide passage between the living and the dead, and those with the gift of sight or the power of calling can summon other spirits through the void. Especially at Samhuinn, when the veil between life and death is thin to begin with.”

His voice was eerily calm. Coupled with images of Sybilla and Eircheard dead, his serenity suddenly seemed obscene. “You don’t have the cauldron,” I said hotly.

“Too literal, Kate,” he sniggered. “A quirk that got Macbeth into trouble. The cauldron is a vessel, but not one of silver or bronze. A woman. And we’ve had her all along.”

Lily?
“Where?” I cried hoarsely. “Where is she?”

“Back where it all began.” He smiled at my confusion. “fifty years ago, Janet Douglas walked out on me. Destroyed the film that was to be my magnum opus.
Macbeth.
”

“There are other actresses.”

“Not like her. She denied me her body and my children her bloodline.” His mouth twisted. “Did she tell you? She’s a direct scion, mother to daughter, of Elizabeth Stewart, the Countess of Arran. I plucked Janet from nothing when I discovered that, dreaming of my seed mingled with a bloodline of great power. Catherine Sinclair was another of Stewart’s offspring, did you know that? No doubt why forrest wanted her.”

Beside me, Jamie stirred. “Everything else I did with Janet was dry rehearsal for
Macbeth.
And then she left, on the eve of filming. I swore then that one day I’d take what she’d denied me, and now I am…. Taking Lily is a grand revenge, you have to admit. Worthy of Dante or Dumas.”

“It’s insane,” I whispered. “Cold, logical, perfectly rational, I assure you. If the magic works, I die and return, my blood mingled with hers. If not, then I take my revenge and go out with a marvelous bang.” His laughter sputtered around the room.

I’d been so focused on Lily, I’d ignored the other half of his rite. “It requires a death,” I said.

“We all owe one. In my case, quite soon. I am dying of pancreatic cancer. So I have nothing to lose. And everything to die for.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “You mean to die—”

“Just as I come. The great death and the little death converging. One spirit draining into death, another rising into life at the same time.” He was leaning into Joanna, as if he were imagining it already. Joanna closed her eyes.

“And how will you do that? Will your heart to stop?”

“That wouldn’t contribute much to my grand revenge, would it?” he said softly. “No; I’ll get Lily to kill me. And I’ll get the whole thing on film. Do you see the beauty of it? Lady Nairn will find losing Lily to prison in some ways worse than losing her to death…. Now fold up those papers and set them on the floor.”

I did as he asked, as slowly as I could. Somehow, I had to keep him talking. “I was bringing the manuscript to you. Why go to the bother of stealing it?”

“I didn’t want you to succeed.” He laughed at my surprise. “Carrie Douglas is almost as single-minded as I am. Not quite, or she’d be standing here in my place. But if she gets hold of that, she’ll use it. And I have no intention of scrapping my script for anyone else’s, not even Shakespeare’s. Now turn and walk to the wall, please.” He nodded at Jamie, too. “Both of you.”

I had to pull her along with me. Knowing we were fast running out of time.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “if I have the manuscript, Carrie will do exactly as I please, in order to get it. For the length of one ceremony, at any rate. But that’s all that matters. They’ll have other chances. I won’t.”

He sighed. “She’s made things difficult. You, now, you’d be easy to control. With Lily, for starters. But I can also tell you what you want to know….
Guilty or not guilty?
”

Of course. He’d been there. “Anybody can tell me,” I said bitterly. “Can you make me believe it?”

His eyes were wide in the darkness. “I filmed Sybilla’s death.”

I started and stilled. He’d made snuff films before. He was planning to direct his own death, for God’s sake. Why shouldn’t he have filmed Sybilla’s?

“I don’t want you to think me ungenerous,” he said. “Ask me one question.”

Guilty or not guilty? I thought of my hands on the hill, smeared with dark blood, and the revulsion on Ben’s face as he looked up at me from Sybilla’s body. I thought of Lily.

“Where is she?” I asked quickly. “Where’s Lily?”

He laughed aloud. “Altruistic to the last. Optimistic, too. Admirable, but also delusional, in this case…. Like I said, she’s where it began. On an island in a boiling lake. Now, say good-night to the light, Kate.”

Next to me, Jamie let out a sob.

I’d turned my head slightly, so I could just see him. The instant he pulled the gun from Joanna’s head, I dove, pulling Jamie with me, hurtling as hard as I could into Lucas. A shot boomed through the space, and all four of us crashed to the floor.