Midnight Voices

EPILOGUE

“This is crazy, Mother,” Caroline heard Laurie say, her voice as clear as if she were sitting next to Caroline rather than back home in New York. “Why are you doing this? You’re not going to find anything.”

Caroline gazed out at the scenery beyond the train window as she wondered if there were any answer at all that would satisfy Laurie. Probably not — she still had a perfect memory of the expressions on her children’s faces when she told them what she was going to do. It was the ‘Mom’s really lost it this time’ expression that she’d seen more and more frequently over the last few months, and every single day during the two weeks since she’d announced that she was going to Romania. “Jeez, Mom,” Ryan had groaned after he and his sister had exchanged one of those looks that constantly pass between children once they realize they know much more about everything than their parents ever could. “Romania? It sounds like some dumb Dracula movie! Why can’t you just leave it alone? If we can get over it, why can’t you?”

Because I’m your mother, she’d wanted to say. I’ll never forget, and I’ll keep searching until I find Anthony Fleming and know exactly what happened! But when she’d answered him, she’d made certain to temper her words. “If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll give up,” she’d promised. And maybe she would. Laurie would be starting college next fall, and Ryan his last year of high school. For them, what had happened five years ago was already starting to seem like ancient history. But there hadn’t been a day in those five years when Caroline hadn’t thought about the events that had unfolded after their father had died. Even when the horror that Anthony Fleming had brought into their lives was not at the forefront of her mind, it was lurking somewhere in her subconscious. Sometimes it manifested itself in small ways: since that fateful day when Irene Delamond had sat down next to her in Central Park, she had found herself turning away from strangers, especially strangers that showed any interest at all in her children.

More often the horror was there in far larger ways, such as the fear she still felt about leaving her children alone, even for a few minutes. That was the hardest thing she’d had to conquer when she’d finally decided to make this trip, leaving the children to be looked after by Mark Noble and Kevin Barnes. That, too, had earned her a scornful rolling of the eyes. “It’s not like we’re babies,” Ryan had protested. “We’ll be fine by ourselves.”

“But I won’t be,” Caroline had insisted. “So you’ll stay with Kevin and Mark, and that’s that.”

The attention of the city, of course, had inevitably shifted away from the sudden disappearance of everyone who had lived in The Rockwell — even the police had given up the search. “It’s as if they never existed at all,” Frank Oberholzer had told her the last time she’d spoken to him.

“What do you mean, never existed?” she’d said. “They were there — I knew them. I married one of them, for God’s sake. You talked to them!”

Oberholzer nodded. “And I have no idea who they were, where they came from, or where they went. Except for the Albions, there’s nothing.”

“But you found something about them?” she pressed, her voice reflecting her eagerness to find any scrap that might finally let her know the truth of what had happened. But the hope in her voice was crushed as quickly as it had arisen.

“Only that the real Max Albion died forty-seven years ago in Kansas, age four. And the wife’s maiden name, according to the marriage certificate, was Alicia Osborn. There’s one who died fifty years ago in Iowa, age three months. Copies of both those kids’ birth certificates were sent to Fleming’s office on 53rd within a couple of weeks of each other. And that was nearly twenty-five years ago. It gave them enough of a background to get them past the foster care people. But for the rest — including Fleming — there are no birth records, no social security records, no voting records, no driver’s licenses, no nothing.”

“But that’s not possible, is it?” Caroline protested. “I mean, they owned their apartments—”

“There aren’t any records of any of them ever either owning or renting apartments in The Rockwell,” Oberholzer broke in. “In fact, nothing in The Rockwell has ever changed hands — a Romanian corporation built it and still owns it.”

“Romanian?” Caroline echoed. “But that used to be part of the USSR. How could—”

Once again, Oberholzer answered her question before she’d finished asking it. “Everything’s paid out of a Swiss bank. And I mean everything — taxes, maintenance, utilities, the works. Nobody in that building ever paid directly for anything.”

Caroline shook her head. “That’s not true — Irene Delamond gave me a check—”

“On an account that traces back to the same Swiss bank. They all had checking accounts and they all had credit cards, but all of it traces back to that one bank, and — needless to say — they’re invoking Swiss banking law. When you get right down to it…” His voice trailed off, and then he grunted in disgust. “When you get right down to it, I just don’t know.”

And that had been the end of it.

As weeks had turned into months, and months into years, the story had slowly faded from the city’s consciousness, though a couple of the tabloids still tried to revive it now and then, especially around Halloween.

And The Rockwell still stood empty, year after year. For the first year, Caroline had refused even to get close enough to the building to see it. Indeed, when the city had been blanketed by an early snow the very day after everyone in the building had vanished, Caroline’s first impulse had been to get out of the city entirely, to move away to someplace where it was warm, and she knew no one, and there would be no memories.

No memories for her, or for Ryan, or for Laurie.

“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Kevin Barnes had said when she’d told him what she was thinking of doing. “You can’t run away from memories, no matter how hard you try. And what are you going to do? At least here you have a job, and a place to stay, and friends.” He’d gone on to catalog everything else she would be leaving behind, and by the time he’d finished, she’d all but abandoned the idea. Still, as the winter closed in with even more snow and cold than that first storm had presaged, Caroline had wondered more than once whether she shouldn’t change her mind again. But as Laurie had regained her strength and both she and Ryan had returned to school, they had all begun to settle into a pattern that, even if not what she might have wished for, was at least giving a structure to their life.

She found an apartment on the East Side, closer to the shop, one that at the beginning she could barely manage to support on the money she was making at Antiques By Claire. But all through that first fall and into the winter, her business had grown, and though at first it had been nothing more than the morbid curiosity of a certain class of women whose motivation was more to milk her for gossip about The Rockwell than to seek advice on decorating, it was her skill that kept bringing her new customers even after that first interest in the mystery died down.

Finally, two years ago, Caroline found herself walking across the park to stand at the corner of 70th and Central Park West to gaze at the building whose denizens had nearly cost her children their lives.

It stood as it always had, brooding darkly, its turrets etched against the sky, its windows curtained, its stone as black with grime as ever.

Yet even despite its grime, there was none of the look of an abandoned derelict about it. Rather, it appeared to be in some kind of suspended animation, as if whoever lived in it would soon be coming back.

Since that day two years ago, she found herself going back again and again, sometimes only glancing at the building, but sometimes lingering for half an hour or more, gazing at it, trying to fathom what might really have been happening inside its walls. What had happened to those people who had seemingly come from nowhere, and vanished as utterly as if they’d never existed at all.

But they had existed, and they still existed, and as the years had passed, her determination to discover the truth about them had sometimes flagged, but never disappeared.

There had been so little to go on.

A Romanian corporation.

And a man named Anthony Fleming. “Of course he’s got no more background than the rest of them,” Oberholzer had said. “And I’d bet my badge Fleming wasn’t his real name anyway.”

But it was all she had to go on. She’d tried to find out more about the corporation that owned The Rockwell, but gotten no farther than the police. Every letter she’d sent had disappeared as completely as the man she’d married. Finally she’d given up writing letters and hired a lawyer, and it had cost her nearly a thousand dollars in legal fees just to find out that the lawyer could accomplish no more than she.

After that she’d begun haunting the libraries and the bookshops, but had no idea of what she might be looking for, and at last she’d turned to the Internet, spending more hours than she was willing to admit even to herself searching every database she could find for something — anything — that would point her in the right direction.

And finally, two weeks ago, she’d found something.

She’d been at one of the genealogical sites, using its search engine, typing in the last names of the neighbors one by one. The combination she’d been searching was Burton AND Romania. There hadn’t been much, and most of the occurrences of the name used another spelling: Birtin.

By the time she read through half the entries, it had become clear that most of the ‘Birtins’ listed had originally been named something else, but had come from a small town in northern Romania — Birtin — whose simple spelling had apparently been far easier for the clerks at Ellis Island to master than the polysyllabic surnames many of them had received from their fathers. Each name had held a link to a family web site or bulletin board, and Caroline had followed every single link.

Most of them had proved utterly useless — nothing more than genealogical trails that dead-ended at Ellis Island. But near the end of the list she’d found the link that had eventually led her to the train that was now moving slowly north through the mountains of Eastern Europe. That link had connected to a family forum bulletin board that had held a strange message:

The heading was milesovich OR milesovici from birtin? followed by a message:

“I have part of a letter to my great-grandfather, Daniel Milesovich, from his sister-in-law, Ilanya Vlamescu, who lived in a village called Gretzli, outside a town in Romania named Birtin. She wanted to send her son and daughter to America because of something that was making children die. Does anyone know anything about this? It would have been after 1868.”

Caroline had read the message over and over again, telling herself it meant nothing, that it was undoubtedly an outbreak of plague, or smallpox, or influenza, or any of the other epidemics that had swept back and forth across Europe over the centuries.

But it didn’t say plague, or smallpox, or influenza, or any other sickness.

Just something.

She’d left a reply asking for further details, and two days later had received an email from a woman named Marge Danfield, who lived in Anaheim, California. “I don’t know much more,” Mrs. Danfield had written. “The date on the letter is illegible, but my great-grandfather immigrated in 1868. The letter is in Romanian, and the handwriting isn’t good. I’ve attached a copy of the translation, but I don’t know how accurate it is. Frankly, it sounds like my father’s sister was a little crazy, which wouldn’t surprise me at all — my mother always claimed the Romanian side of my dad’s family must have been Gypsies because they tended to be superstitious about everything. I don’t know much more about my father’s great-great aunt than what’s attached. According to a family bible, she was widowed when her children were babies, and married a man named Vlamescu, who I assume is the ‘Anton’ in the letter. As far as I know she never sent her children, and after this letter, no one ever heard from her again. I’ve also attached a copy of a picture that may be of Ilanya, probably with her second husband, though there is no way of telling for certain. If you find out anything more, I’d be very interested.” After finishing the email, Caroline had turned to the attachment, which held a scanned image of the page of the letter, along with the translation:

… Ilie is twelve and Katya thirteen, the age the other children were. The doctor doesn’t know what makes them sick — they start to die… six children last year… two boys and four girls… Anton says not to worry, but I am frightened. The stories about the graves scare me, and my neighbor says she hears things in the forest at night… I have no money, but Ilie is a strong boy and can work hard…

Please, dear brother — I don’t know what to do.

After reading the translation once more, Caroline clicked on the second attachment. An image of an old-fashioned formal portrait appeared, cracked and faded, with a white line across the middle where it had obviously been folded, or perhaps even torn. The woman in the picture looked to be perhaps thirty, and she was standing with her hand on the shoulder of a man a few years older than she, who was seated in an ornately carved wooden chair, large enough that it almost could have been some kind of throne. Behind the couple was an obviously painted backdrop of an outdoor garden, against which the throne-like chair looked ludicrously incongruous. But it was neither the chair nor the backdrop nor even the woman that gripped Caroline’s attention.

Rather, it was the man seated on the chair, upon whose shoulder the woman’s hand rested.

She was almost certain it was the man she had known as Anthony Fleming.

The train slowed to a stop in the town of Birtin, and as she wrestled the luggage off the rack above her seat, Caroline searched the platform for the man who should be waiting for her. She had found Milos Alexandru on the Internet; he ran the largest of the antique shops in Birtin, specializing in the carved wooden furniture for which the region was famous, and had assured her through email that while he couldn’t identify the people in the portrait, he could most certainly identify the chair. It had been made in a village outside Birtin as a wedding chair, and was now in a museum in Birtin itself. Caroline had told him nothing of the letter, preferring to talk to him in person. Now she saw him — she was certain it had to be he. Milos Alexandru was a small, birdlike man, dressed formally in a wool suit and necktie, peering as anxiously at the train as Caroline was at the platform, and when she got off the car he instantly hurried toward her.

Two hours later, after Alexandru had gotten her settled into the hotel, let Caroline buy him lunch, and insisted on showing her everything in his shop, she was at last in the museum, gazing at the chair in the old photograph. “It was made in Gretzli,” he explained. “They were famous for wedding chairs all the way up to the end of the last century. The nineteenth century, I mean to say. Every one of them was different, carved for the town where it was to be used. That one is considered the finest they ever produced — even after three hundred years, there’s not a flaw in it. No checking at all — the wood must have been dried for a decade or two before a chisel ever touched it. And the workmanship! Notice the angels on the arms, blowing on trumpets — you can almost hear them, can’t you? And the panels that make the back of the chair — did you ever see such workmanship?”

In the thick oak of the chair’s back an arboreal scene was carved in deep relief, the trunks of the trees cut so perfectly she could almost feel the bark, the leaves so detailed she almost imagined them rustling in a breeze. But as she studied the carving, it began to take on a feeling of familiarity. Then, when she saw a tiny figure — a figure of a demon — clinging to one of the branches, she knew. The scene carved in perfect relief on the back of the wedding chair was identical to the scene that had been painted in equally perfect trompe l’oeil on the ceiling of the lobby in The Rockwell. Her eyes were still fixed on the carving when she heard Alexandru sigh heavily.

“Hard to believe it is all that is left, is it not?” Caroline looked at him quizzically. “The town,” Alexandru went on. “Gretzli — that chair is all that is left.”

Caroline was certain she must have misunderstood. “You’re not saying the town isn’t there anymore—”

The antique dealer’s head bobbed. “That is exactly what I’m saying! They burned it! Burned it themselves, over a century ago. Except for the wedding chair and a few other pieces, everything is gone.”

“But why?” Caroline asked, but even as she formed the question, the strange words in the letter from Ilanya Vlamescu were already echoing in her mind.

“No one knows, actually,” Alexandru replied. “Oh, there are all kinds of stories, but none that one can believe if you know what I mean. There were rumors of vampires, and some sort of epidemic that killed all the children. And then there were the grave robberies.” Warming to his subject, he made a dismissive gesture. “Just medical students, of course — there was a lot of that sort of thing going on back then. But they were a superstitious lot out in Gretzli, and one story led to another. Then, when the children started dying, people began leaving. Just loaded up carts and went away. That only made things worse, and after awhile the few people who were left turned on each other. Finally one night a house caught on fire. It seems as if they should have been able to put it out, but apparently they could not.” He shook his head sadly. “By the end of the night, the village was gone.”

“Where was Gretzli?” Caroline asked ten minutes later as they were leaving the museum.

Milos Alexandru pointed toward the north. “Not far — no more than five kilometers. But there is nothing to see, really — everything burned. Everything except the wedding chair. Someone pulled it out of the church and left it in the middle of the road. Thank God for that, at least.”

It was late in the afternoon and getting cold when Milos Alexandru pulled his tiny Yugo to a stop in a narrow lane that wound through the trees. “Gretzli was right up ahead,” he told Caroline. “I can not drive any further — there is a rock in the middle of the road. But if you like, I can walk with you.”

“It’s all right,” Caroline assured him as she got out of the car. “I’ll just be a few minutes — I just want to see it.” Leaving the old antique dealer in the warmth of his car, she set off along the road, and just past the rock he’d mentioned she came to the place where once had stood the village of Gretzli. Alexandru was right — all that remained of the town was a clearing in the dense forest, and even that was beginning to disappear as young trees had taken advantage of the opening to the sky. Here and there vestiges of the ruts that had once been the village’s main road were still visible, as were a few low mounds that might once have been the foundations of small houses. For almost half an hour she prowled through the area, looking at everything, but seeing nothing.

Indeed, she wasn’t even certain exactly what it was that she was seeking.

Then, as she was about to start back toward Milos Alexandru’s car, a sensation of déjà vu came over her, a sensation so strong that she turned back, half expecting to see something familiar, something clearly recognizable.

But there was nothing. Nothing except the forest, and the sky, and—

The forest, and the sky!

She looked up, and it happened again — the certainty that she’d seen this before. But this time she knew it wasn’t déjà vu she was experiencing at all.

It was as if she was back in the lobby of The Rockwell, gazing up at the ceiling and the trompe l’oeil that spread across it. The trees and sky looming above her induced the same terrible feeling of foreboding that had chilled her when she’d entered the building for the last time, and for a moment she almost imagined she could see the demons lurking among the branches, waiting to seize the scraps from the feasting men who were sated with blood.

The same demons that had been carved into the back of the massive oaken chair in the museum in Birtin.

As the sunlight began to fade, a faint aroma tickled Caroline’s nose, and she recognized it as the same smell of death that had filled The Rockwell the last time she had been inside its walls. The odor seemed to reach out to her, drawing her closer, closer to the woods.

Finally, when she felt as if the scent were about to overpower her, she knelt, and touched the ground.

Beneath the soft mulch of rotting leaves she felt something cold and hard. Brushing away the mulch, she uncovered a stone tablet. Though it was stained and worn by time and the elements, she could still make out the letters carved deep into its surface:

Lavinia Dolameci

1832–1869

Her pulse quickening, she groped the ground around her and found more stones, all of them laying flat, all of them covered with a layer of decomposing vegetation.

And all of them bearing names. Names, and dates.

Elena Conesici

1821–1863

Gheorghe Birtin

1824–1867

Mathilde Parnova

1818–1864

Parnova! Tildie Parnova? Then the other names began crashing through her mind:

Elena Conesici… Helena Kensington.

Gheorghe Birtin… George Burton.

Lavinia Dolameci… Lavinia Delamond.

She dug more frantically now, digging her fingers deep into the earth, tearing it away as she searched for more of the ancient grave markers.

Now the scent was beginning to boil up out of the ground, and as it grew stronger and stronger it reached deep into her memory and tore the scars from every wound that had begun to heal during the last five years. The stench of death nauseating her, she dug still deeper, her fingers bleeding, her nails tearing, until at last she found the gravestone she knew was there.

This gravestone, though, bore not only a name, and a date of death, but a portrait as well, a portrait cut as perfectly as the angels that had been carved into the arms of the wooden wedding chair and the demons that had been concealed by anyone who sat in it. Caroline recognized the person in the portrait instantly, for his eyes were every bit as dead in stone as they had been in the flesh of the man she had married.

Anton Vlamescu.

Anthony Fleming.

As the chill of death settled over every cell in her body, Caroline rose from the ground above her husband’s empty grave and turned away, but even as she started away from the empty clearing, she could feel eyes still watching her.

The eyes of the demons in the trees above.

And the eyes of the dead, who no longer dwelt in the graves below.

“No,” she whispered. “It won’t happen. I won’t let it happen!” The cold of death suddenly transmuting into the heat of fury, she reached down, grasped the headstone that had once stood over Anthony Fleming’s grave, and raised it high over her head. “No!” she howled, and this time the word erupted from her throat, resounding through the forest as she hurled the grave marker downward and smashed it onto a granite bolder. The headstone shattered into a thousand pieces as her single scream of rage died away.

The forest fell silent, and when Caroline looked up once more, the trees were empty.

The demons, and all they represented, were finally gone.