Before Lana had even arrived home, the rumors were already rampant in Wicker. Michael had beaten the young girl, some said. No, it was sexual. No, it was all Lana’s doing. It was voodoo and devil worship and zombification. The people ate it up like soup. They licked their lips at every word.
The big house was quiet after that. Lana and Michael slept in the same bed, but they never touched again. Rebecca’s room was visited daily and cleaned often at first. It was only after Michael left that Lana smashed the room and nearly every toy in it to bits and bits. They both thought that they should move out of the big house to some place new, but neither wanted to be the one to say it. They were too spoiled for fresh starts.
The rumors were working their way into their heads as well. An accidental brush of the hand from either of them was now painful. Michael’s appearance took on a more sickly look with every passing day and he screamed in his sleep. He bled from his marks and sweated in fever. One day, without a word, he moved down to the cottage. Lana watched him from the telescope on the widow’s walk as he peered down into the well every day. Down into darkness.
She rarely saw him after that and had begun to miss him, when, on one restless midnight, she awoke to see him standing at her bedroom door like a detached shadow. She had no idea how long he had been there, but the light from the hallway proved it was Michael by his silhouette. She stared at him, saying nothing, until at last he moved for her with a growl. His were not the moves of a seducer, but those of a rapist and murderer. She had played this scene before in a few films.
She grabbed the lamp on the nightstand at her bedside and bashed him on the head. He stumbled back and fell to the floor, holding his head. Lana rose quickly, running for her bureau and grabbing the small handgun that lay buried beneath her sweaters.
“Is this what you did to her?” Lana screamed, pointing the gun solidly at her husband. “Is this how you killed her?”
Michael looked up at her. She could see his face now, he having fallen into a spill of moonlight near the window. His eyes were wide, petrified. He let loose a moan that grew until Lana thought she might cry herself.
“It wasn’t me!” Michael shouted. “It was
him
.”
Quickly, he rose and ran from the big house. Down the stairs with a tumble and a fall. Out the front door and toward the cottage, screaming and tearing at the air. Only then, as she watched him fade into the night, did Lana begin to shake and mourn. It would be the first of many nights of mourning.
It was that very night that Michael disappeared. She thought he had run off and left her for good. She did not suspect he had killed himself to save her from a demon. Who thinks such things? Screenwriters and novelists. Not sane people. Not
real
people. For years she waited for Michael to return just the same. Whether that be to kill him or love him, she was not certain. She regretted not sharing her grief with him when they were together.
Lana Pruitt regretted many things.
Sybil
She had to get out of the car. What else was there left to do? If whatever was watching her meant her any harm, Chloe assured herself, it would have acted by now. Besides, maybe it had lost interest in her and moved on. She could no longer see the figure, though the feeling of being a fish on a hook had not left her.
The fact was, if she stayed in the car, she was as good as dead anyway. Her layers were insulating, but they had been quickly thrown on. Her teeth were chattering from both the cold and the fear, and her breath was a thick soup in the air.
Chloe needed to get up the hill to the cottage. Something startling had happened while she was on the phone with Ethan. Jeff had woken up, Ethan had seen something, and then everything went dead. She was on edge to find out what was going on. She should never have left Jeff alone. She should have insisted that Ethan go. After all, when Jeff woke up, she was certain it was her face that would be the most comforting. Not his absentee brother’s.
She carefully pulled on the door handle. Broken ice from the door’s edges crackled and fell to the ground. Even
that
noise made Chloe cringe. It rang like cheap Christmas decorations. Once outside, she needed to be ready to run faster than she had ever done. That meant keeping to the trail she had come down on and not being scared from it by a pursuer. Her heart echoed down the creek bed. Her chest ached from its pounding. Her breath sent up signals.
Finally, she gritted her teeth and leapt from the car, not even bothering to slam the door behind her. She felt she was barely moving at all, though she saw covered rocks pass below her tread. She was near the bank of the creek when she heard the clamor of sliding rocks behind her. The sound was enough to break her momentum and jar her attention. Instinctively turning her head in the direction of the sound, she stepped on a loose stone the size of a platter dish. It slid out from beneath her and she fell, unable to protect her head in time from smashing into the creek bed.
She lay there, dazed and fading. What had happened? Things around her dimmed and blurred. Something was chasing her. She had been right. But what was it? Before she passed out, she saw a large dark mass appear in the corner of her vision, and it was getting closer.
***
Lana stood at the door to her library. The book lay closed on its table, expecting her. She had not touched it since that horrible evening with Chloe. How foolish the idea was now. To think that she, as an actress, could play the role of priestess. It was beyond her range. She could admit that failing now. There were certain things she just could not do. Certain parts she could not play.
The house felt different. She noticed it upon entering. Had
it
—that name given to undefined horrors—entered with her? She stared about the room, feeling the prickle on her skin like plucked violin strings. It was as if a dankness had settled into the place. The air was no longer free and clean. And yet she did not feel as pressed as she had been in the cottage, where whatever had followed her most certainly resided. Perhaps it only watched her from the window. She walked slowly forward.
Something inside her said,
It’s all led here. Everything you never did.
And what was that?
she wondered.
What is ‘everything’?
Of course, she knew the answers. ‘Everything’ consisted of Mother, Lover, and Friend. Those roles she hadn’t managed to fulfill quite as notably as the characters she portrayed on film. And the worst part was, now she could not apologize to those she had wronged. Rebecca and Michael were memories in the mind and paintings on the walls.
Yes. At the window. She could see a vague form there if she did not look directly at it. If she turned her head slightly to one side, she could see it, a spindly thing, waiting and watching her. When she sat down in front of the book, she glanced up once to see if she could catch a proper view of her haunter, but saw nothing. Yet the fear climbed inside of her. She was not quite so easily lost to this spirit.
There was a specific spell she had seen in the book. It was a long time ago and she had passed it over with a quick glance. She remembered that the spell had troubled her even then. That was the reason she had not dwelled for too long on the page. Her stomach had grown queasy, and she had quickly turned to view others.
But now she needed it and the hours were fading. Jeff, she was certain, could not keep fighting. He was nearly beaten already from the look of him. And after that, who knew what would happen. Jeff would no longer be the man she had met just weeks earlier. He would not be the man Chloe had married. He would not be a man at all.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Lana had played a possessed woman in a film once. One of her box office disappointments. The script had looked good, but the director had slaughtered it. He had edited it to pieces in the manner of a music video. The character Lana had played, instead of being a woman in a crisis of faith, became a bloodthirsty whore.
As she flipped through the book of spells, she was reminded of the many horror scripts she had been sent over the years. A woman reaches a certain age and over half of the film scripts sent to her are horror. The films she’d agreed to do weren’t particularly well-received when they were made, but they paid lucratively. And Lana could act the hell out of a horror script. Even a bad one.
“If you can’t give them Clytemnestra, you give them camp,” she always said.
And this book…
This
script. She could get an award for it. She
would
get an award for it. But my, it was thick! How would they ever get it finished in time?
She looked to the director for assurance. At the window… the window…
She massaged her eyes. She wasn’t on a film set, and the reality of the situation bit her like the wind. She was in her very own library, and this was all happening.
“Keep looking,” she said. “You are the heroine here. Not the victim. You’ve never been good at playing the victim.”
***
Chloe felt herself being dragged over the creek bed by her arms. Her body slid along the iced-over rocks with ease. Her eyes flickered open intermittently but never long enough for her to see where she was or what was happening to her. Her own breath echoed inside her and sounded to her as if it were being broadcast on a loudspeaker. Whatever was dragging her held tight. She heard a faint voice, but that only let her know she was in the company of another human being. It did little to calm her semiconscious apprehension. She could, however, ascertain it was a woman’s voice. Deep and abrupt, the voice pitched and stressed certain syllables as something of utmost importance was imparted to Chloe. Something she could not understand.
The dragging stopped and Chloe felt herself being pulled and lifted upward. The woman was very strong, and Chloe’s cheek rested momentarily on a thick pelt. A fur coat. She heard the squeaking of leather seats and realized she was back in Ethan’s car. The woman was still speaking, but Chloe could not make sense of the words. Instead, their rhythm lulled her into a deeper state of detachment and, finally, sleep.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the cottage, though not in any form she had known it. She was standing by the uncovered well, only it wasn’t winter. The snow had all melted away. Leaves were in the trees being rustled by the breeze and birdsong filled the air. The sky was a faded blue—too tired to go any deeper than that. The wind was gentle and played rather than bit. There was no stone near the well and the barn was freshly painted in bright blood red.
Beside the cottage, waiting for Chloe to notice her, was a woman Chloe had never seen before. The woman’s face showed signs of distress. Dirt marked her cheeks and forehead. Her hair was twisted into an untidy bundle and dark circles outlined her darting eyes. She wore a simple dress like those worn by farmer’s wives in decades past. It was stained and torn by time and use. In her hands, she held a length of chain.
She took the stone away from the crawl space beneath the kitchen and, with a nod, gave Chloe permission to follow her. She disappeared under the house with the chain rattling alongside her, kicking her way in the dirt like a lizard. Chloe followed the woman into the dirty dankness without thought or control of her actions.
Curiosity is bait for the dreamer.
Chloe crawled through the dirt, past foundation posts and cobwebs. Over rocks and archeology. The woman had vanished from sight, wriggling invisible somewhere in the dark. Chloe pressed on. There was still a pinch of light coming from the entrance through the crawl space, allowing Chloe to see an obstruction in silhouette just ahead of her. The dreamer’s curiosity took over and she reached out for the object.
Bones. Those of the woman, with one hand chained to a foundation post, the fingers frozen in a gesture of agony. Chloe recognized the ordinary pattern on what she could see of the dress and was thankful she could not see the face with more clarity. She began to inch slowly away. To crawl backward with her eyes still on the dead woman. But the woman’s free hand rose swiftly and grabbed her before she got very far. The woman held to her tightly, the bones of her hand crackling with the grip. Half of the face could be seen now. Flesh still rotted there, but the woman’s tired eyes were long gone.
She moaned in self-pity. “I did what I could,” she said.
The frightened voice made Chloe itch.
This was the mother!
This was why Chloe had felt a familiarity with the woman. They had shared her body at Lana’s ill-planned séance.
“What I thought was good. He cannot have us if we bind ourselves to death. He wants… he wants… he wants more flesh.”
At that, the woman loosened her grip on Chloe and lay back in her original position of agony in the dark, as if she had not moved out of that pose. “At night I hear him dance above my head. Dancing in my kitchen, so glad that I am dead.”
“Who?” Chloe asked. “Who does this?”
“Why, it’s my Elling, my spawn, my little dish, and never an angel child more devilish.”
“Who’s Elling?” Chloe asked. But the woman did not speak again, her rhyme now having gone the way of her reason.
Chloe reached out and shook the dead woman, but only darkness came. “Who’s Elling?” she repeated.