Sisters of Sorrow (27 page)

Shadows moved through the haze, moving toward Donny.

Anna grunted with exertion, aiming the pistol where she hoped the mercenary’s foot would be. Her arm trembled, her hand, and the gun in it, shook.

“Hold still and be quiet!” the mercenary growled into her ear. His voice was ice. “What are you…” Then he yelled a word Anna had never heard, and lunged for the revolver. Anna tried to spin away from him. The revolver came up, just enough for her to get her other hand on it, get one more finger on the trigger.

The gun roared. The concussion of its deafening blast threw the revolver out of her hands, tearing skin from fingers. It flew past her, dangerously close to her face, skipped off the wall behind her and disappeared into the swirling water.

The mercenary howled. Anna couldn’t hear it, but saw it in his contorted face. His left knee, the one closest to her, bent inward, toward his right knee, in a way that no knee should ever bend. The sight of it made Anna’s stomach jump up and swirl like the water around her. As he toppled over his ruined leg, Anna saw that the bullet had also torn a hole through his right calf.

In the small space under the stairs, the gun’s blast felt like someone had clapped their hands hard over both of her ears. The din of the storm and the bell and the waves at the door was gone. A squealing whine took its place, it slipped back and forth inside her head, from ear to ear, like marbles on the deck of a storm tossed dinghy.

The mercenary writhed and splashed in the nook. Anna staggered away from him, her stomach lurching. The whole room seemed to roll. Four steps from the nook, Anna fell sideways into the water.

Anna rolled over and sat up. The huge oak doors buckled inward, admitting a spray of storm surge. Foaming swill burst over the tops of the doors as well as through the crack between them. Beams and braces splintered. The hinges of both doors had detached and now flapped uselessly from the jambs. A few meager beams were all that remained of the reinforcements, were all that held out the sea.

The floating fire had nearly burned itself out. Only a few patches of the kerosene still burned atop the water. But the pyre blazed. Donny hacked furiously at the ropes on Dolores’s wrists. Fire licked at his pant leg, caught. He slapped it out, then went back to work on Dolores.

Anna struggled to her feet. The ringing in her head felt like fluid. She moved through the water, fighting for balance with each step. Her sight constricted, narrowed. She saw only Donny and Dolores and the fire. Her peripheral vision faded to black, she waded, as it were, through a tunnel.

As she neared, her shin barked against Donny’s pail. Anna scooped it up and flung water at the fire. The squealing in her head faded to a loud hum, allowing a few other sounds through. Donny screamed her name. Anna threw another bucket of water toward the sound of his voice. Steam obscured her vision, revealing only shadows against a wavering yellow glow.

“Get Dolores down from there!” Her voice sounded hollow and weird. “I’ll keep the fire off you, just get her down.”

Donny burst from the mist. He jumped out of the steam and threw his arms around her and cried, “Anna!”

She hugged him back, at first just to keep from collapsing under him, but once her arms were around him, she couldn’t let go. She felt his courage. She felt hope. Donny had not been injured. He still had energy, still had fight left in him. His presence here meant that her girls were safe. It meant she had won. She had saved them, her sisters of sorrow.

Only one sister remained to be saved. A subtle confidence invigorated Anna. With Donny here, they could rescue Dolores and get out alive.

She released him. “Donny, cut her down. Hurry, we need to go!”

He stepped back from her. “You got it!” he said, turning and leaping two bounding steps back to the pyre. His eyes were burned red, but his smile was radiant. “Already cut all the ropes, just gotta drag her down. Throw some water up.”

Anna remembered telling Donny
smiles like that don’t last long where we’re going,
and regretted it. A grin formed on her lips, in spite of herself. She grabbed the bucket and stooped to fill it. A shadow loomed out of the thick haze behind Donny, something bulky and tall.

Anna screamed, “Donny!”

Donny twisted to look at her, turning his back to the advancing shadow. Sister Eustace materialized out of the gloom, just over his shoulder. For an instant, Anna saw both of their faces at once, Donny’s innocent, honest concern – Eustace’s unbridled malicious rage. Then, an ax handle whistled through the mist. Eustace swung like Roger Conner swinging for the bleachers.

The handle shattered across the back of Donny’s head with a sick splintering crack. Donny’s head snapped forward. He dropped, as lifeless as a stringless marionette, landing on the edge of the heap.

Anna’s mind went blank. Someone screamed Donny’s name, but she had no idea who it was. The floor fell out from under her and, though she continued to stand, she plummeted in place. That cold numbness she had felt in her arm now oozed up from inside her, spreading through her body the way the kerosene had spread across the surface of the water. Bile climbed her throat, she may even have vomited, as if the coldness inside pushed everything else out.

Donny lay on the heap, one eye half open, a trickle of blood running from his ear. Eustace advanced toward her, but Anna could not pull her eyes from Donny.
Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead…
His eyelid moved, just a twitch, just a languid blink.

Eustace held the fractured ax handle up before her, examining it. It was too short now to make a good club, but the broken end terminated in a vicious spike. Eustace eyed Anna across the tip of her weapon and grinned. Rationality was gone from her eyes, only madness dwelt there now.

Anna staggered backward trying to think.
If I can find the revolver
, but even as this thought occurred she rejected it. Eustace paced her, leering, deliberating as to exactly where to impale Anna on the splintered handle. Anna’s dress hung loose on the right side where the mercenary had ripped it. Her right hip pocket now dangled to her knee. Something was in there, something hard and heavy. It thumped against her knee as she back peddled.

She jammed her hand into the pocket and drew out the key. If Eustace saw it, she made no reaction. Anna thrust the key at Eustace, trying to remember the way the key had felt in her hand when she stabbed Joseph in the eye, that crazy wave of terror for Donny and rage against whoever harmed her friend. She tried to evoke those emotions, but she was so tired, so spent. The only thing she felt now was a cold blackness, as if her heart and lungs had been replaced with the stagnant water from Joseph’s cistern.

Eustace closed the gap between them. She lowered the ax handle, preparing for an underhanded, stabbing thrust. Her eyes burned into Anna’s midsection. Anna could feel the spot on her belly where Eustace intended to strike.

She pointed the key at Eustace’s chest. It did nothing. It was just a blackened piece of dead metal.

Eustace stepped forward, drawing the handle back in a low arc. With her next step, she would swing it up and drive it through Anna’s liver. Anna thrust the key forward again, knowing it could not stop her attacker.

Bright red blood bloomed across the white breast of Eustace’s habit. She continued moving toward Anna, but her feet had stopped. Anna just barely had time to roll to one side before the enormous, dead, ex-nun splatted into the murky water where Anna had just been standing.

Something began to unravel inside Anna’s head. She stared at Sister Eustace, dumbfounded. The woman bobbed face down, just below the surface. Blood seeped from a hole in her back, rising and drifting like smoke from a dying fire.
Fire
, and
dying
resonated through Anna’s mind, they meant something, something important, but she couldn’t quite catch their significance.

Anna realized that she had no idea where she was, that she didn’t want to know where she was. Just some odd room full of smoke and water and thunder. There was a dead nun at her feet, and that was good, but she really didn’t wish to know why.

I’m in the drainage room, under the factory
.
I just released the floodgates and drowned Sister Elizabeth.

But that wasn’t right. This nun was much bigger than Sister Elizabeth. And the factory was…gone.

Why is it raining inside?

Then a voice brought her back, a tiny, desperate, voice crying, “Donny, wake up! Wake up!”

“Maybelle?” Anna said.

The little girl lay across her brother’s fallen body, stroking his face with her left hand. She looked as out of place in this gloomy hell as would a rainbow or a bouquet of white lilies. In her right hand was Hattie’s flintlock.

“Maybelle?” Anna said again. “What are you doing here?”

“Momma said Donny can’t never leave me!” Maybelle cried, her words tumbling out of her like lost marbles. “She said just ‘cause she’s in prison don’t mean we don’t have to mind her, and she told Donny he always has to stay with me, and I
told
him that, but he tried to leave me in the woods, but we gotta do what momma said, so I came with him so he won’t get in trouble, I followed him, only he don’t know it.”

Anna’s mind reeled, trying to make sense of Maybelle’s story, trying to maintain her own fragile grasp on reality. She could feel the gaps in her thoughts, as if her mind had simply chosen to discard bits of information, pieces of memory it found distasteful.

But she
needed
those bits and pieces. A voice in her head told her so.

She managed, “And you shot the nun?”

“She hurt Donny!” Maybelle wailed, “and now he won’t wake up!” Then she screamed, with startling ferocity at Eustace’s corpse, “You don’t hurt my brother!”

Anna looked at Donny again. It hit her like a punch in the gut. It was impossible to even hope he was still alive. The wood his face rested against pushed it askew. His jaw hung open like the mouth of a dead fish. None of Donny’s life shown in his half-opened eye.

Seeing him that way destabilized her. For as long as she could remember, she had been walking a tightrope between what was real and what she needed to believe to survive. The bubble of blood forming at Donny’s nostril, inflating, bursting – that stupid, vacant stare of one-half eye – they rocked her tightrope, and now she would fall.

Her mind begged her to fall on the side of fantasy, to just forget again, about Donny, about her little brother, to forget about ever wanting to see the ocean, forget about the chaos around her. If she was just standing alone in a room of smoke and water, that would be good. Her body just cold, dark water. Her mind just thin, white smoke.

And why not, what does it matter now?

Reality, the other side of her tightrope, had only one argument in its favor. The iron key Anna still held in her hand. It anchored her to the here and now, and try as she might, it refused to let her slip away.

She had been given this key twice. Both times, upon receiving it, the key had unlocked her secret reserves of hope. Both times, she had been elated, overwhelmed by joy or relief. And the key had brought her to this place.

Joseph had given her the key. He was here somewhere. And Dolores, that silly, lunatic nun – no, fake nun – or witch or whatever she was, she had also given Anna this key. Whatever happened to her?

You know damn well what happened to her.

Anna grasped the key so hard that her nails dug into her palm. Reality crashed over her like a six-foot wall of surf. Dolores’s words, from so many lifetimes ago, spoke calmly inside her head, guiding her return to the present,
That was a brave and noble thing you did.

Maybelle stared up at Anna, her head on Donny’s chest, her eyes huge and streaming. Anna wanted to tell her that Donny would be okay, but that was fantasy, so she said nothing. Instead, Anna looked up the pile to where the witch burned.

The buckets of water she threw had slowed the fire, had most certainly prolonged Dolores’s life, but the fire had reached her at last. Flames clung to her shoes, crawled up one stocking, licked at the fringes of her dress. Dolores was oblivious. She sat rigid and strained, chanting endlessly.

She is
in
the storm
.

Donny had told her he cut all the ropes. She hoped that was true, Donny’s knife had disappeared under the swill after Eustace hit him. Anna inhaled deeply. Smoke burned her throat. She held the breath and climbed to the top of the pyre. She hooked her arms under Dolores’s from behind, clasping her hands together across Dolores’s chest, and dragged her backward down the pile.

Dolores’s feet continued to burn. She chanted on in hoarse whispers. Anna’s torn dress slipped off her shoulder. Flames licked at its tattered hem and caught. Her bullet wounds screamed with the exertion. Anna knew these things, accepted them as reality. She also accepted the reality that she could do nothing about any of it just now.

When they reached the water at the bottom of the pyre, the flames on Dolores’s feet hissed out. Dragging her down the steep pile had been difficult. Anna doubted she would be able to drag her up the flight of stairs.

No
, the other Anna’s voice was grim,
if we are going to be accepting reality now, it is impossible for you to move Dolores to the balcony, let alone drag her all the way through the kitchen, down another flight of stairs, and across the grounds to the woods. That isn’t going to happen, no matter how bad you want it.

“Dolores! Snap out of it!” Anna yelled, to no effect. Anna shook the woman violently. Dolores slumped into the rising water. Anna lifted her shoulders and propped her against the heap. “Please, Dolores, I can’t carry you. Please wake up!”

Anna looked to the nook where the mercenary had held her. Flames and lightning illuminated the room, but the smoke grew denser with each passing minute. Anna could not see whether he still lurked there. She scanned the room and saw that the other staircase had a similar nook beneath it.

She placed her hand on Maybelle’s shoulder. “Maybelle, honey, we need to hide, okay? I’ll bring Donny with us, then I’ll come back for Dolores. We’re going to hide under those stairs. Do you think you can get yourself over there?”

“Only if you bring Donny,” she whimpered.

“I will, I promise.” Anna stepped toward Donny.

Dolores’s hand shot out, quick as a striking adder, and grabbed Anna’s wrist. Anna yelped and jerked away but Dolores held fast. Her grip became painfully tight.

“I’ll come back for you…” Anna started.

Dolores pulled Anna to her knees beside her. The witch’s chanting quickened, intensified. Her lips flew, her head bobbed.

“Dolores, you’re hurting me. We must leave, please…”

“Anna!” Abbess McCain’s voice, sweet as poisoned honey, drifted through the haze. “There you are. We’ve been looking all over for you.”