Authors: Anne C. Petty
Questions and misgivings swirled in Alice’s mind as they got checked into their hotel room and dressed for the funeral service. Throughout the brief private ceremony in the chapel of the moss-covered Episcopal Church long supported by the Blacksburg family, all Alice could think of was her shifting assessment of Ned Waterston. At the interment, attended by a handful of ageing family friends and Hal’s business associates, an urn containing Suzanne’s ashes was installed in an alcove of the Blacksburg mausoleum beside both her parents. Alice realized Hal was telling her something.
“—here next to her. I’m showing you this just so there’s no confusion when my time comes, which I hope will not be soon.” He said this last with an off-center smile, as if half of his mouth could not decide whether it was an appropriate reaction.
“What? Oh, right. In the slot beside her.” Alice nodded, hoping her face didn’t mirror what she was thinking. Where was the line between sibling affection and unhealthy obsession, and how long had it been since Hal crossed over? The thoughts she was trying not to think made her skin crawl. Was her family completely screwed up on both sides? It seemed lately that the people most important to her were not at all what they seemed.
* * *
That evening, the three of them sat poolside, watching the lights of cruise ships on the horizon. The night sky lit up far out over the water where a distant storm silhouetted the clouds. A stiff breeze was kicking up the surf, silvery dark in the gloom, in stark contrast to the rippling, lagoon-style swimming pool with its golden artificial lighting.
“I’ll drive you to the airport in the morning,” Hal said, “so don’t worry about calling a cab.”
Alice watched the light show behind the growing thunderheads and then finally turned to Hal. “So, I guess now’s the time.”
Hal glanced at Margaret.
“No secrets,” said Alice. “Ned was Margaret’s grandfather. She has as much right to know about him as I do.”
Silence again, and then Hal began. “The family, myself especially, considered him completely unfit for Suzanne. She was bright, educated, had been abroad. That trip to Europe was our gift for graduating from college with high marks. She had ambitions to become an interpreter or teach internationally. Ned Waterston ruined all that.”
“What did he do,” asked Margaret, “get her pregnant or something?”
Alice glared. “No! They were already married when I came along.”
Hal nodded. “That’s true. In fact, you were probably conceived in Australia. We were concerned to learn about the marriage because no one in the family trusted him. Somehow he’d convinced Suzie to move in with him, but we’d hoped it wouldn’t last long. Obviously, those hopes were futile.”
“Where was Ned from?” Alice tried to keep her expression neutral.
“That I don’t know.”
“But you do,” she pressed. “In one of those letters you gave me she said he was from Florida, like her.”
“Well, then, you know as much as I do on that score. I had a background check done on him, just as a precaution. Not only was there no record, the man did not even have a birth certificate.”
Alice was stunned. “But you have to have something, don’t you, to get a driver’s license or a passport?”
Hal shrugged. “Apparently he found a way. I’m just telling you what I know.”
Alice chewed this over. “But there must have been something worthwhile about him, don’t you think? I don’t know what Suzanne was like before she met him, but I just can’t imagine her falling for somebody who was an outright con artist.” There. She’d said what Hal was implying, but it didn’t make her feel any better.
Margaret was watching them closely, and Alice wondered how all this was going down. Almost fourteen, Margaret was savvy in many ways, smart, bratty, with Alice’s stubbornness. There was another inheritance, more disturbing and ephemeral, but the dim trail leading back to its origin was slowly coming to light with the discovery of Ned’s artwork. Margaret experienced what their neighbor Raine referred to as “prescient” moments, which was to say images of future events or details of places she had never been washed across her waking mind. These episodes were often accompanied by headaches or a loud ringing in the ears that persisted for up to an hour. Sitting in the safety and comfort of the Sheraton cabana, Alice faced the knowledge that both she and Margaret were carriers of something dark, something lethal, that came from Ned.
Plus, there was the shadow-shifter that had defined Margaret’s childhood nightmares. She’d seen the Quinkan rock art images in Alice’s Land of Legends exhibit at the museum and looked it up on the Internet where Queensland rock art websites were a dime a dozen. Margaret claimed to have encountered it, physically manifested in the real world, much as Alice had seen it in that terror-filled afternoon in the old church.
“Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge,” Hal was saying, draining his drink. “This tired old man needs his sleep, so I’ll see you in the morning.” He bent over and pecked Alice on the cheek. She smiled back at him, but not as openly as she once would have done, and that hurt. They watched him climb the cabana steps back to the hotel lobby.
Margaret shifted in her chair. “Mom, what do you think?”
“Let’s go for a walk.”
Margaret pulled off her shoes, and together they headed down the boardwalk and past the hotel’s low retaining wall to the sand. The half moon was rising, barely dusting the lapping waves with its pale light. As far as they could see in either direction, the beach was a gray-white ribbon. Barefoot, they walked side by side just at the margin of the surf where the sand was damp, but not mushy.
“What I think,” Alice said, “is that my father was a complicated person. And I think Uncle Hal has … issues that made him not like Ned.”
“I think he liked his sister a little too much and felt kicked to the curb when she fell for your dad.”
Alice nearly choked. Once again, she had misjudged Margaret’s grasp of the adult subtext going on around her.
“For the record, I don’t believe there was anything going on between Uncle Hal and your grandmother. I think he may have been overly devoted to her, especially because of whatever happened in Australia, but I’m sure their life together was platonic.”
“Know what else I think? I bet my art talent came from him … Ned … my grandfather.”
“I’ll agree on that much,” Alice said. They linked arms and walked in comfortable silence, the rising sea breeze at their backs.
Without warning, Margaret dropped to her knees in the sand, doubling over as if in pain.
Alice was beside her in an instant. “What?”
“Migraine coming on,” Margaret said between clenched teeth. “I think I’m gonna be sick. Have you got my pills?”
Alice shook her head. “They’re on the bathroom sink in our hotel room. C’mon, let’s go back. Can you get up?” Gently, she pulled Margaret to her feet.
“It’s not that far. Can you make it?”
Margaret nodded, saying nothing, but holding on as if the whipping wind might blow her mother out of her arms.
* * *
With Margaret safely settled into bed after a dose of phenobarb, Alice locked the sliding glass door to the small terrace overlooking the cabana, and then stretched out on a deeply cushioned sofa, intending to read for awhile. She propped the fantasy novel she’d picked up in the airport on her knees and read a couple of pages without much comprehension. Alice turned another page and yawned. The cushions were so soft. Nestling down into a comfortable position, she began to doze.
Her body was shivering. She’d probably set the air conditioning too high, which meant she’d have to get up out of her warm nest and reset it. Forcing her eyes open, she sat up and gaped at a sky streaked with indigo, purple, and gray-blue storm scud flying eastward over the edge of a ragged scarp. Monumental blocks of weathered red and gray sandstone littered the horizon as far as she could see. A chill wind blew up her back.
The landscape was barren, with a few windblown bloodwood trees stretching out at improbable horizontal angles. Dark red resin oozed from their trunks and glistened as an occasional shaft of sunlight lanced through the cloudbank. A gang of black cockatoos, crests raised, fought for purchase among the branches, their strident calls ripping the air. They hopped from branch to branch, quarreling, and then suddenly the entire mob lifted into the air and flew screeching over Alice’s head, disappearing down into the gorge behind her. She sat, speechless and terrified.
A single small bird sailed down the wind and lit on a branch nearest the ground. Glossy black with a white breast and white patches over its eyes, it wagged its tail at her in nervous twitching jerks, spreading its white eyebrow feathers in an insistent display.
Alice got unsteadily to her feet. She was still in the clothes she’d worn to dinner, but they were torn and soiled, as if she’d trekked miles through the Outback. The willy-wagtail cocked its head at her and chattered its distinctive call.
Alice framed the thought in her mind and then said it aloud: “This is a nightmare. I’m going to wake up now.” In response, a blast of chilled air tore at her thin blouse and skirt. In its wake, a different sound intruded: something was being dragged, scraping over the rocks behind her. Alice turned and gagged.
A pencil-thin figure with no neck and no discernable features in its knob-shaped head was pulling an inert human form toward a flat rock not far away. The creature was as tall as the leaning bloodwood, and its shoulders were rounded as it bent to hoist its prey up onto the boulder. Its sticklike limbs were the same color as the tree resin and glistened, slippery wet, in the failing light. Darker drops of red came from an area of its head where a mouth might have been, and then Alice saw that it had been feeding on the body flung across the rock.
In dream paralysis, Alice could only watch as it bent down, arms and legs akimbo, and tore at the throat of the body, which she now saw was a human child. Mingled with the dark crimson of its blood was a lighter red. Hair, matted and tangled. The creature flipped the body over onto its back and Alice screamed with her entire soul. The face of the child belonged to Margaret.
Alice fell to her knees, heart pounding out of her chest, and felt soft carpet under her hands. Looking around the darkened room, she realized she had rolled off the sofa.
“What the hell …?”
Staggering up, Alice went to Margaret’s bed. Her daughter slept deeply under the Sheraton’s blue satin coverlet. The world she knew was back, but that other place clung to her; she couldn’t see it, but she could feel its tendrils brushing her face and arms.
Trembling, Alice went to the bathroom and washed her face and hands. In the bright lights over the sink, nothing seemed amiss. Her clothes were just a bit rumpled. But her face in the mirror wore a look she’d seen before—controlled terror.
Lightning split the clouds as she came out of the bathroom. The storm they’d seen on the horizon was blowing in. With sudden fury, rain lashed across the hotel with enough force to send long rivulets pouring down the glass door and pooling around the sill. Thunder boomed in hollow thuds that rolled out over the ocean. Alice watched and shivered.
Dread settled into a tight knot in her stomach. She’d had no trouble of any kind for nearly a year, but now she was reliving that terrifying rain-soaked afternoon where she’d been cornered in the abandoned church whose bell Cecil Rider had been reluctant to sell stupid Milton Crouch. The demon Harrow had come out of the shadows near the belfry staircase, a darker shadow in his black parson’s coat and hat, his mud-spattered riding boots echoing across the plank floor. At his heels trotted the soot-black dingo, tall as a Great Dane. It glared at her with one flickering red eye; the other was blind.
Trembling, she remembered how the dingo had morphed into a salamander the size of a Komodo dragon. Even now she could see its mottled skin pulsing dark muddy red as it flicked a forked tongue over rows of needle-sharp teeth. Muscles along Alice’s back spasmed as rain fell across the hotel pool in torrents.
And she remembered what the hellspawn preacher had breathed into her ear as he’d held her fast with fists of ice. “The shifter and I are bound to you.” Alice shuddered. She couldn’t get the guttural, strangely accented voice out of her head.
Watching cabana patio chairs tumbling in the storm’s onslaught, Alice allowed herself to remember the worst Harrow had said. It had been about Margaret.
“Perhaps she’ll do what your father and you apparently cannot.”
Memory brought back in fine detail how those black eyes, soulless in his weathered brown face, had frozen her, filling her with a deep-space cold that stopped her brain and heart.
“One day, we’ll conclude this business,” he’d said and vanished in a spiral of dust motes where sunlight from a high window hit the staircase. Since then, she’d talked herself into believing the encounter had been delusional, brought on by the high stress of mounting her first museum show and fueled by the menacing content of the exhibit, the Lightning Man himself being the central image on a floor-to-ceiling mural. Namarrkun. The name rumbled through her mind.
Margaret coughed in her sleep and turned over. Watching her, Alice racked her brains for an explanation she could accept. Ned had been painting the ancient Outback landscapes Alice saw in her visions. How was that possible? Thunder crashed outside.
“Mom?”
“I’m here.”
“Why are you still up? What are you looking at?”
“Just watching the rain. A bad dream woke me up, that’s all.”
“I was dreaming, too. What was yours about?”
Alice went to Margaret’s bed and without undressing and slipped under the comforter. She related the dream in a general way, including a few details like the black cockatoos chased away by the small black bird with the white breast, but omitting the final scene. She wasn’t putting that image into words.
“Weird,” was Margaret’s only comment. “I had a chase dream. I kept hiding and running away and hiding again. It scared me awake. Can I have a glass of water?”