Legacy & Spellbound (20 page)

“Yes,” the woman said.

As the nurse drifted away, Holly steadily walked toward the creature. It jutted its bottom lip toward her—it was a brilliant red, as if it were bleeding—and began to growl.

Holly began to intone a protection spell, then realized that each time she prayed to the Goddess, she had to sacrifice a tiny part of her soul; she wondered if this was the price other witches paid, or if this was a cost she bore alone. But knowing it, she kept her mouth shut and decided to deal with the imp—if that was what it was—on her own terms.

She moved toward it; it smiled at her, completely unruffled by her presence.

Holly stared at it, her focus centering on it; then, in a strange juxtaposition of her senses, she was aware of the thrumming of Barbara's pulse, the loud drumming of her heartbeat—
kathum, kathum,
then she was a sight, not a person, careening down the arm and then the fist of the creature, slamming inside Barbara's heart—

The heart of darkness; this is the center of the evil, of the dreams, of the sickness that is killing her …

… all around Holly floated nightmare shapes and tortured landscapes; she whirled around in a circle with her mouth open screaming in silence—

STOP IT!

And then she was back at the doorway, staring at the imp, which grinned back at her and then chittered happily, drawing Barbara's heart clean out of her body and displaying it to Holly. She thought of Hecate, the dead familiar, and how Bast had presented the dead falcon to her and her cousins as a trophy; only now, it was Barbara's diseased heart being presented to her; her heart that was bleeding and in such misery—

STOP IT!

The creature disappeared … but Holly sensed its malevolent presence. Even if she could no longer see it, it was still torturing Barbara.

She rushed to the waiting room, all eyes upon her. “We need to get Barbara out of here.”

Uncle Richard ceased his pacing and fixed his eyes on her. “Sit, rest, I'll take care of the paperwork.” He took off.

She sank into a chair and accepted the coffee that was offered her by Tante Cecile. She was tired, and very worried. The lines were being drawn … across
living bodies and through living hearts.

This is a deadly game Michael Deveraux is playing,
she thought.
And I can't afford to lose it.

Wearily she closed her eyes.

How many generations of Cathers and Deveraux have kept this up? It's got to end. We've got to win.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania: May 31, 1889, 2 P.M.

The lake had risen two feet overnight. The dam at South Fork groaned against the weight of the extra water. The dam was old and in need of repair. No one seemed to care, though. Everyone expected the dam to go on doing what it had always done. Every year after the rains, people would scratch their heads and marvel that it still stood, but they did nothing to help it in its battle to contain the lake.

Fourteen miles below the dam the town of Johnstown sat in a flood plain. The good citizens occasionally made rumblings against the owners of the dam, but the rumblings meant nothing. They were just a way to pass the time, something to speak of besides the weather.

And so, year after year, the town rumbled and the dam groaned and nothing was done. The water pressed harder, the lake rose higher, and in the dam a tiny fracture became a crack.

The crack had been noticed, and several men now struggled to relieve the pressure on the dam. They tried, among other things, to open a new channel to allow the water someplace else to go. Their efforts were too little, too late, though. The dam groaned as it tried to hold back a wall of water sixty feet deep.

Claire Cathers was happy. The thought took her by surprise as she was sweeping her front porch. She stopped and leaned for a moment on the handle of her broom as she stared idly out into the wet street. It was nearly sunset, and the rain had let up for a few minutes. A couple more hours and her husband and daughter would be home.

She smiled at the thought of Ginny. The little girl was beautiful, headstrong, and passionate—a Cathers through and through. Of course, that was to be expected. Cathers blood always seemed to prevail, and Virginia had a double dose of it.

Five years earlier if someone had told Claire that she would marry her third cousin, Peter, the one who had tormented her as a child, she would have called them crazy.

Old Simon Jones stopped before her and tipped his hat. “Afternoon, Mrs. Claire.”

“Afternoon, Simon. How's the day shapin' up?”

“Tolerable so long as the dam holds.”

She chuckled good-naturedly at the joke. The dam had been the subject of much concern, talk, and humor for as long as she could remember. Still, the old structure held.

The sky darkened perceptibly, and a few fat drops of water splatted on the ground.

“Have a good evening, Simon,” she called after his retreating back.

“Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise. Well, at least not more than it has.”

She smiled. Life was good. In fact, it had turned out altogether differently from what she had expected. Her mother had died when she was very young. Her father had always been a sternly disapproving man. In most matters he always acquiesced to his two older sisters, and he had taken that frustration out on Claire. He had taught her to act like a lady, and that meant being humble and submissive; matter of fact, they had been married an entire year before she could bring herself to look Peter in the eye.

Peter was a salesman. Most Cathers were, and had been as long as anyone could remember. They were all smooth talkers and quite persuasive, but none was quite as silver-tongued as her Peter.

For all that, though, he was a gentle and loving
man. He had vowed to her on the day she gave birth to Ginny that he would raise his daughter differently than her father had raised her. He had kept his promise. He always said to little Ginny that a woman was the equal of a man. Even though she was tiny he took her everywhere with him. He even took her on sales trips like the one they would be home from soon.

Claire pressed a hand tight against her stomach. Tonight when Peter arrived home she would have another surprise for him. She smiled as she prayed that God would give her a son. The local midwife had given her some herbs to put under her bed, that she might have a boy. Claire protested that she didn't believe in such superstitions. She had put the herbs under her bed, anyway, though, she wanted a son so badly.
God willing, maybe I will have one.

The skies opened up and the rain began again. Claire, having swept the debris and excess water from her porch, hurried back inside. She added more wood to the fire in an effort to battle the chill damp in the air. The streets were flooding, an annual occurrence in Johnstown.

Everywhere businessmen were transporting their wares to the second stories of their buildings. Husbands and wives were carting furniture and food upstairs in their homes. Claire had already moved
upstairs everything they would need earlier that day.

She glanced back outside at the sheets of rain pelting the street and for a moment felt uneasy. Something didn't feel quite right, as though there was a strange energy in the air. She shrugged it off with a whispered prayer for the safety of Peter and her little girl. She began to wonder if she would see them both within the hour or if they had stopped along the road, seeking shelter.

Then two young men ran down the street, shouting, “Dam's breaking! The dam's breaking!”

The taller of the two ran into the blacksmith, who threw up his hands and said, “Heard that before, young feller!”

“It's true, it's happening!” the shorter lad said. Then they raced on, bellowing at the top of their lungs, “Dam's breaking!”

“Must be foreigners,” the blacksmith said to Claire. “Crazy boys.”

She nodded vaguely, not really listening. Her ears were attuned to another sound: a strange, distant roar, like that of …

… of what? An ocean?

Then she saw the wall of water raging down the hillside. Its immensity shocked her into incomprehension; she had never imagined such a flood in her life; never seen such a thing as the vast, churning waters as
they mowed down trees as if they were dandelions. For a moment the sight made no sense to her; she stood in her everyday gingham dress and her second-best white apron, staring. “My God!” she screamed, and she began to run.

She raced past houses where families were scrambling to their second stories; a tree shot through the gully to her left, bounding through a gush of water. She heard the flood behind her, and directly before her stood a house with an open door. She headed toward it, not sure why she did; in her panic she could no longer think clearly.

From behind her she heard screams, heard thunder, and then …

“My God, no!” Peter Cathers cried.

He stood at the rim of the canyon, looking down on the destruction of Johnstown. Swaying with disbelief, he held his child in his arms and screamed for his wife as the waters engulfed everything in their path, then spread out in all directions with grasping, merciless tentacles. Rooftops poked above the raging waters, then disappeared. Whole tracts of trees shot down the hills and slammed straight through buildings.

Bodies of people and animals floated like corks.

“Claire! Claire!”

* * *

He was unaware that as his little daughter closed her eyes to the horrors, her world within telescoped into a strange world of gray mist, rolling across an image: a sailing ship, sails bursting with wind, and a little girl—

—She looks like me!

—tumbling over the side into the ocean.

And a woman on deck shrieking, held back by sailors, as she struggled to free herself and leap into the sea after the girl.

The mists roiled and thickened, then rolled away, and Ginny heard the thoughts of that woman, as if she were standing next to her, speaking directly to her:

Now we are three, we “Cathers.” I have no daughter to carry on the family line, but the boys have at least some magic. Mayhap 'tis just as well. Perhaps it is a sign from the Goddess that House Cahors is truly dead … and that the magick should die with me.

Then two little boys rushed up to her, shouting and throwing their arms around her knees and her waist. The smaller of the two stared straight at Ginny; in her mind, he opened his mouth and, in an eerie, otherworldly voice, said directly to her, “Virginia, I am your ancestor.”

Then Ginny's eyes snapped open and her small
child's hands grabbed up lanks of her father's hair as she buried her face against his shoulder and sobbed, “Papa, Papa, the lady is scaring me!”

And then little Ginny saw another thing: a letter, and it read:

Know this then, Hannah, my darling wife, we did not hang them all in Salem. Some—and I am so ashamed to say this—we ducked some, as they did in the Olde World. That is to say, we tied these poor women to stools, and put them in the river. And if they sank, we declared them innocent. Aye, if they drowned, I mean to say, we consigned their souls to God… .

Then Abigail Cathers showed us true witchr'y, and I knew we had murdered innocent women who had no more knowledge of witchcraft than you or I

God have mercy on me, I cannot bear this guilt any longer.

Adieu.

Jonathan Corwin

Then in her mind she saw her own mother bobbing in a room with many chairs, and a table, all underwater. Her mother's eyes were open, and her hair blossomed around her head like a halo.

Ginny burst into tears and moaned to her father, “Mama has drowned, Daddy. She has drowned!”

At Johnstown, ten thousand were said to have lost their lives. Though Claire Cathers's corpse was never found, she was declared dead, and Peter Cathers decided to go West, to take his daughter from that place of watery death and find the driest country that he could.

The things that Ginny had seen, she never spoke of again, and in due time, she forgot.

California proved not to be the place for fortune; Cathers father and daughter determined to go north, to Seattle, a place said to be rich in everything but men.

They loaded a wagon with their belongings, mostly mining equipment they no longer needed, for there had been no gold for them in California, and began a long journey toward the Pacific Northwest. Ginny was almost nine then, and considered by all who knew her to be of keen intellect, and a beauty to boot.

Stopping one evening in an encampment, where there was beef stew with real beef and potatoes and onions and carrots, the rough men there spoke of Dr.
Deveroo, a seller of patent medicines that could cure what ailed a man.

“He's comin' tonight with his travelin' show,” one of the miners told Peter while Ginny scooped up the last of her beef stew with a hardtack biscuit. They sat side by side on long trestle tables beneath a canvas canopy strung above their heads. The place was lit with lamps, and Ginny thought it looked like a fairy land. “First there's fine entertainment, and then he sells his patent medicines.” He gestured to Ginny. “She looks a bit peaked. She might could use a few spoonfuls.”

Peter shrugged. “We'll see.”

“Oh, Papa, can we see the fine entertainment?” Ginny begged.

Peter smiled indulgently. “I suppose, Ginny.” He picked up his tin cup of coffee and sipped it appreciatively. “There's no charge for the entertainment, I take it?” he asked the miner.

“None, sir,” the man replied. “Deveroo sells his elixir; that's how he affords the rest.”

About an hour later, as two brightly painted wagons pulled into the encampment, a cheer rose up around the camp. Peter put Ginny on his shoulders so she could see.

“He's got black hair and black eyes,” she reported.

“Black hair and brown eyes, I reckon,” her father corrected her.

“No, Papa. They are black as coal. And he's staring right at me.”