Nightshade

CHAPTER 15

JOAN CAME AWAKE abruptly, sitting up on the sofa in the library and automatically glancing at the clock — almost four! How had it gotten so late? When she stretched out on the sofa at a little after two, she’d only intended to relax for a few minutes, not waste the afternoon sleeping. But now the afternoon was almost gone, and the pile of half-finished work on Bill’s desk — files she barely understood, let alone had any idea what to do with — was every bit as daunting as it had been that morning, when she found herself unable to deal with it at all. Sighing — and feeling as tired as if she hadn’t slept at all — she pulled herself off the sofa and moved toward the ornately carved mahogany desk. Maybe she should just put it off until tomorrow.

“Lazy!” It was her mother’s voice she heard echoing in her memory. How many times had her mother lectured her about putting things off? “Why can’t you be more like your sister? You don’t see Cynthia lazing around doing nothing! She always keeps her room spotless, and her things in perfect order! But you!”

In her mind’s eye Joan could see her mother shaking her head in despair. “All right,” she said, speaking out loud almost unconsciously. “I won’t put it off. I’ll heat up a cup of coffee, clear my head, and start!” She was on her way to the kitchen when she saw Matt’s book bag on the table at the foot of the stairs. As she gazed at the worn canvas, she tried to tell herself that it didn’t mean anything, that he could have skipped football practice for any number of reasons — maybe it had even been cancelled. But her attempt at reassurance sounded exactly like what she knew it was: wishful thinking.

All thoughts of coffee — and the files on Bill’s desk — forgotten, she started up the stairs. “Matt?” she called out as she came to the landing. “Matt, are — ” Her words died in her throat as she saw the door to Cynthia’s room standing ajar. It had been closed this morning. She clearly remembered closing it herself — locking it! — after that terrible moment last night when she’d imagined she heard Cynthia laughing at her. She moved closer to the door, but warily, as if some unseen danger lurked inside.

“Matt?”

No response.

She reached out with a trembling hand and pushed the door wider. “Matt? Are you in here?” When there was still no answer, she reluctantly stepped inside. The room was empty.

Yet he must have been here! Who else could have unlocked the door?

But how had he found the key?

Leaving the room and pulling the door firmly shut again, she walked quickly down the hall to Matt’s room. She rapped softly on the closed door, and was about to rap again when she heard Matt’s voice. “It’s not locked.”

Joan turned the knob and stepped into her son’s room. Matt was sprawled out on the bed, flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He sat up as she came in, and one look at his face told her that today had, if anything, been even worse than yesterday. The pallor in his face had worsened, and the haunted look in his eyes had deepened. Now he had the eyes of a frightened animal, eyes that darted as if searching for a predator he sensed but had not yet seen. As his eyes finally fixed on her, she could see a flame of anger burning in them.

“You called the school,” he said. “You talked to Mr. Wing, didn’t you?”

Joan bit her lip. “I thought — ”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought, Mom!” Matt burst out, his voice bitter. “You want to know what happened today? You want to hear it?” Before Joan could respond, the story came out. Bitter, angry words spewed from Matt. “Someone even nailed a dead rabbit to the shed,” he finished, his voice shaking, his face streaked with the tears he was unable to control.

“A rabbit?” Joan echoed. “What are you talking about?”

Matt pointed to the window. “Go look!” he said. “If you don’t believe me, look for yourself!”

Joan crossed to the window and peered out into the darkening afternoon. Forty yards away, behind the carriage house, she saw the shed Matt was talking about. But there was nothing on it. “You saw it on the shed?” she asked, her voice conveying her doubt as much as her words. “The one behind the carriage house?”

“Is there another one?” Matt demanded, getting off the bed and coming over to stand beside her. “It’s right — ” His words died abruptly as he stared at the shed wall. There was nothing there at all. The dead rabbit was gone, and as he stared at the empty expanse of white-painted siding, he wondered if it had been there at all. Could his eyes have been playing a trick on him? “But I saw it,” he murmured, more to himself than his mother.

Joan remembered, then, a morning more than ten years ago, when she found the pet Bill had given Matt, dead in its cage.

Hanging upside down, eviscerated.

It had been a rabbit — a white rabbit — and Matt was unable to explain what had happened to it.

He’d clung to her then, crying inconsolably, brokenly insisting over and over again that he hadn’t done anything to it, that he’d loved it, that someone must have come into the room in the night and done it. For a moment Joan had wondered if it could have been her mother. But in the end, rather than even talk to her mother about it, she put the dead rabbit in a plastic bag and deposited it in the garbage barrel in the alley. Neither of them had ever spoken of it again. Now, as her son stood trembling next to her, his eyes fixed on the woodshed, she slipped her arm around him.

“It’s all right, Matt,” she said. “You probably just dreamed it.”

He turned to face her, the anger gone from his eyes; instead, the terrible, frightened, hunted look had returned. “Remember the rabbit Dad gave me before you got married and we still lived at Gram’s?” Joan felt a chill go through her, and knew she didn’t want to hear what Matt was about to say. “What if I killed it? What if I killed the rabbit myself and didn’t remember?” Though he said no more, Joan knew what he was thinking. If he could have killed the rabbit and not remembered, then what about his stepfather?

And his grandmother?

Joan put both her hands on her son’s shoulders. “You didn’t do anything, Matt. I know you didn’t.” But even as she spoke the words, she knew they weren’t quite true.

For the first time, a seed of doubt had been planted in her mind.

It wasn’t until she was about to leave Matt’s room a few minutes later that she remembered why she’d knocked on his door in the first place. “Matt,” she said, turning back to face him, “did you go into Cynthia’s room?” She thought she saw something flicker in Matt’s eyes, but it was gone so quickly that she wasn’t sure she’d seen it at all.

Matt shook his head. “Why would I do that?”

Joan hesitated, but decided to say nothing more. Leaving Matt, she went down the hall to her own room. Bill’s old robe — the one she’d been wearing this morning — still hung from the hook in her dressing room, where she’d left it. But as she reached for the pocket, she paused. What if the key was gone? What would she do? What if Matt had lied about going into Cynthia’s room?

She could think about that later — right now, she simply had to know. One way or the other, she had to know.

She slipped her hand into the pocket of the robe.

The key was still there.

Surely, even if Matt had found the key and used it, he would have relocked the door before he put it back. So Matt hadn’t lied.

But she still had no idea why the door had been open. Then, heading downstairs to find something for their dinner, she heard Cynthia’s voice again. “Maybe I did it,” her sister whispered. “Maybe I opened the door myself.”

Joan jerked to a stop and spun around, as if expecting to see her sister standing on the landing, her mocking eyes sparkling with cruel mischief. “Leave me alone!” she cried. “Just leave me alone!”

It wasn’t until she’d shouted the words that she realized Cynthia wasn’t there at all.

Couldn’t be there.

After all, Cynthia was dead.

Wasn’t she?

“Am I?” Cynthia whispered. “Come and see, Joanie-baby. Come to my room and see… ”

* * *

MATT STAYED BY the window even after his mother left his room, staring down at the blank white wall of the shed. Its emptiness seemed to taunt him. But the rabbit had been there! He’d seen its slit belly, seen its entrails hanging down the wall, seen the bloodstains on the wall itself. Yet now, from his room on the second floor, the wall appeared as pristine as if it had been painted only yesterday. A wave of angry frustration crashing over him, Matt wheeled away from the window and bolted from his room.

A minute later he was standing in front of the shed, staring at the spot where the rabbit had hung. He moved closer, reaching out to touch the siding; there was no sign of any stain whatsoever.

His eyes moved to the storm clouds scudding across the sky. Could the rain have washed away the stains? But it didn’t seem possible: the rain had almost stopped; the ground was hardly even wet. So whoever had hung the rabbit there — then come and taken it away — must have cleaned up the mess themselves.

A thought rose unbidden in his mind: Maybe the rabbit was never there at all.

But if it hadn’t been, that meant —

He cut the thought short. He wasn’t crazy! He had seen the rabbit. And he would find out what happened to it!

He went around behind the shed to the trash barrels and jerked their covers off one by one. Nothing!

Inside the shed?

He reached for the handle of the door, then stopped as he remembered what was inside. It’s only a deer, he told himself. And it can’t hurt you. Grasping the handle, he pulled the door open, and for only the second time since the day he shot it, looked at the animal he had killed. It was exactly as he remembered it: hanging from its hind legs, its belly slit, its head suspended just a few inches above the floor.

Just like the rabbit.

But it didn’t mean anything — it couldn’t mean anything! Yet as he stood transfixed at the doorway, the memory of what had happened the morning of his birthday came back to him.

Again he was staring down the length of his rifle barrel, holding the sight steady on the buck’s raised head.

Again he could smell the musky aroma that had filled his nostrils.

And again there was the voice, whispering to him: “Do it, Matt. Do it… do it… do it…”

But do what? What was he supposed to do? His eyes remained fixed on the deer. Why was it here? Why had they left it hanging in the shed?

Because he’d shot it.

They all knew he’d shot it, shot it just the way his dad had wanted him to.

“It’s time for you to bag your first trophy,” his father had told him when they finally sighted the deer. And he had. He’d circled around the deer, crept up on him, and taken him.

“I did what you wanted,” Matt whispered. “I did exactly what you wanted.” But even as he said it, he knew he hadn’t — not yet. His stepfather had intended that the buck — this buck — be his first trophy.

That its head be cut off and taken to Mr. Rudman, who would stuff it and mount it on a mahogany plaque with a brass plate commemorating his sixteenth birthday.

The day he’d shot the deer. The day everyone thought he’d shot his father.

“No,” he whispered. “No…”

But how could he prove it? There wasn’t any way.

Then an idea came into his mind. What if he had Mr. Rudman do exactly what his dad had wanted? That would prove it, wouldn’t it? If he’d done what everyone thought — if he’d really shot his stepfather — he’d never want the deer’s head around to remind him of it, would he?

His eyes darted to the bench that ran along the length of the wall. Hanging in its usual place was the skinning knife that generations of Hapgoods had used to dress their game, its razor-sharp blade protected by a leather sheath.

Matt moved closer to the bench, reaching out toward the knife, but hesitating just before his fingers closed on it. Why was he really doing it? What would it really prove?

Then the voice he’d heard before — the voice that seemed to come out of nowhere and out of everywhere — whispered again. “Do it… do it… do it…” Grasping the sheath with one hand, he pulled the knife out with the other. Its perfectly honed blade glinted even in the gray light of the afternoon, and as Matt’s eyes fixed on it, the voice whispered once again. “That’s right, Matt… do it, Matt… do what you have to do… ”

All the anger, all the rage, all the terrible frustrations that had been building inside him for days burst loose, and with a single heave he lifted the buck’s carcass from the hook and let it fall to the floor. Dropping to his knees, straddling the animal’s body, he grabbed the animal’s head with one hand and lifted it, and with the other hand went to work with the knife, plunging it through the deer’s thick hide, then jerking it upward through skin and muscle and tendons. The knife stuck, jammed between two vertebrae. Matt yanked it loose, then attacked again. Nearly congealed blood oozed from the arteries and veins the blade slashed through, but he ignored the gory mess that covered his hands, hacking harder and harder with the knife, struggling to force it through the creature’s spine.

Again he felt the blade strike bone, but this time he twisted it, jerking it one way and then another until he found the cartilaginous disk between the vertebrae. A moment later he lost his grip, and as the stag’s head dropped to the floor of the shed, the knife stuck fast. Grunting, his rage and frustration unabated, Matt attacked the carcass again, the knife flashing as he yanked it free and raised it once more.

Raised it high over the body.

“I didn’t do it,” he cried out. “I didn’t!”

The knife slashed downward, plunging deep into the stag’s chest.

“I didn’t,” he sobbed again, jerking the knife loose and raising it yet again.

Over and over the knife rose and fell, slashing at the animal’s chest and legs and neck. Matt was sobbing, his breath coming in great heaving gasps. Now, as he sucked air deep into his lungs, he could smell the aroma too — the musky aroma that had filled his nights.

His nights, and his nightmares.

And through it all the soft, seductive voice kept whispering to him. “That’s right. That’s a good boy. Do what you want to do.Do what you need to do… ”

* * *

AT FIRST EMILY Moore barely noticed the strange light that glowed in the sky above her. She had been drifting among her memories, but in her mind they weren’t memories at all, for something deep in her brain had finally given up trying to distinguish between the conscious and the subconscious, between what was real and what was not. The darkness surrounding her and the terrible pain in her failing body had at last become too much to bear, and her mind retreated into itself. Memories had become reality, and though her body — stiff and sore — still lay in the darkness, Emily herself was living in the warmth of a summer afternoon…

* * *

THEY WERE ALL in the backyard of the house on Burlington Avenue. Frank — his shirt stripped off — was mowing the lawn. Joan was perched on his shoulders, her little hands clutching his hair as her tiny heels kicked at his chest.

Cynthia, her blond curls bouncing, was chasing after Frank, begging him to pick her up. But Frank ignored her.

Ignored Cynthia the same way he had begun ignoring her.

She knew when it started: the day Joan was born, two years earlier. She had been holding her new baby, and Frank lifted the corner of the blanket to look at his new daughter’s face for the first time. “She’s beautiful,” he breathed. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He was wrong, of course: Joan’s face, framed by more straight black hair than any baby should have been born with, had looked to her like that of a tiny monkey, with a pushed-in nose and eyes that were too big. Not like Cynthia at all. Cynthia looked like a perfect china-doll from the day she was born, and it seemed to her that Cynthia had gotten even more beautiful every day since. But Frank, lifting Joan out of her arms and cuddling her against his chest, had murmured, “Are you my perfect princess?” From that moment, Frank and Joan became inseparable.

When Joan cried in the night, Frank got up to comfort her.

When she fussed about eating, Frank fed her.

Day after day Emily watched as her baby daughter stole her husband’s heart away.

Day after day, Cynthia watched as her baby sister stole her daddy’s heart away.

As Joan and Frank grew closer, so also did she and Cynthia.

Now, as she watched Joan cling to her father while he worked, pressing herself close to his bare flesh, resentment seethed inside her. It’s not natural, she told herself. She shouldn’t cling to him like that, and he shouldn’t let her.

But he did let the child touch him, did let the child put her hands on his flesh.

And he liked it — she could see that. He liked it in a way he shouldn’t.

In a dirty way.

When Frank was finished mowing the lawn, he went in the house, carrying Joan with him. She and Cynthia stayed outside, sprawled in the sunshine, but as the minutes ticked by, she began to wonder what Frank was doing in the house.

What Frank was doing with Joan.

Getting up, she went in the back door. For a second she heard nothing, but then heard Joan giggling.

She didn’t hear Frank at all.

Moving silently through the kitchen to the hall, she followed her baby daughter’s laughter upstairs to the bedroom.

The bedroom she shared with Frank.

Joan, naked, lay on her back, her little legs spread, her little arms waving.

Frank stood over her, his hands caressing her skin.

The way they had once caressed her skin.

He was smiling down at Joan.

The way he had once smiled at her.

The seething resentment that had been building in her as she watched her daughter ride her husband — ride him like an animal, rubbing her crotch on the back of his neck while she cried out with pleasure — suddenly erupted. “Get out!” she screamed, shoving Frank away from the bed and snatching Joan up so quickly the tiny child screamed with fright.

Frank pretended to be shocked by her sudden outburst, but she knew better. Before he could come up with some excuse — claim he had been doing nothing more than changing her diapers — she turned her wrath on him. “Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing? Do you think I haven’t watched the two of you? Well, it’s over. Get out, Frank. Get out, and don’t ever come back.” He tried to argue with her, but when she told him she’d call the police, he changed his mind. Finally, he packed a suitcase and left.

Then she’d turned her attention to Joan.

It was as much Joan’s fault as it was Frank’s — she was as sure of that as she was sure that Frank had been getting his pleasure with his baby daughter. Frank was weak, and it had been easy for the little girl to seduce him.

She glowered at the child she knew had stolen her husband away, stolen Cynthia’s father away.

“Evil,” she whispered. “You’re an evil child, and you must be punished.”

She’d slapped Joan then, slapped her hard enough to make her cry. “Be quiet!” she told her. “That might have worked on your father, but it won’t work on me!” But Joan kept crying, kept crying until she could no longer stand it. She picked Joan up then, and took her down to the cellar and put her in the cedar chest that stood beneath the dark chamber’s single tiny window. “You want to cry?” she asked. “Then cry in there!”

She closed the lid, plunging Joan into darkness. Joan had screamed, and pounded on the sides of the chest, but she refused to hear it. After a while, though, Joan stopped crying.

And she went back out into the sunshine, to be with Cynthia…

* * *

NOW THE STRANGE light in the summer sky was disturbing Emily’s memory, and bits and pieces of reality slowly began to intrude upon her consciousness.

It wasn’t a summer afternoon at all. It was a night so dark and endless that she couldn’t remember how long it had gone on. But now the darkness was receding.

Light!

She could actually see light!

She tried to turn her face toward it, but pain shot through her arm and her leg, pain so sharp that a scream of agony rose in her throat.

But all she heard was a strangled gasp as the scream died before leaving her lips.

Her mouth!

She couldn’t open her mouth!

The pain in her shoulders grew worse, and she realized she could no longer move her arms. And her hands felt cold and numb.

Then, in the shadows beside her, she saw a flicker of movement. Someone was there!

Cynthia! It was Cynthia, come at last to help her, to take her away.

She tried to speak her daughter’s name, but again nothing escaped her lips and the words died in her mouth.

She grunted as she was suddenly jerked up from where she lay. Why was this happening? Why wasn’t Cynthia helping her?

What was —

Her thought was cut off by a sound.

Thunk!

It was a familiar sound — one she was certain she’d heard a hundred times before. But it was a sound she couldn’t quite place.

Then she realized that though her arms still hurt, her hands no longer felt cold or numb.

They didn’t hurt at all.

And on the floor beneath her legs she could feel something warm, and wet.

What was happening? Why couldn’t she feel her hands?

Then, in a flash, it came back to her, and she knew where she had heard that familiar thunk before.

She had indeed heard it at least a hundred times.

It was a sound she’d made herself, working in her kitchen.

Preparing the meals to feed her family.

It was the sound a cleaver made as it sank into a butcher block…

As the shock of the blow slowly wore off and the pain from her severed wrists began to penetrate her mind, Emily sank once more into the darkness of unconsciousness.