The Necromancer (35 page)

321

The Necromancer

She padded down the long, narrow hall as if the fl oor were covered with broken glass. As with the other nightmares, she remembered nothing of this last one. But unlike the others, her terror didn’t wane after waking up; if anything, it was worse now. All she could think was:
The children. Something dreadful has
happened to them. I know it has.

She reached the door to Molly’s bedroom. It was open a crack, which was odd since Molly was always too afraid to leave it open at night while she slept.

Susanna eased the door open, holding the candle

before her. As the light from the fl ame illuminated the room, her gaze automatically shot over to the bed. It was empty, the sheets bundled into a heap at the foot of it.

Susanna’s tongue felt like it was made of cotton. She tried to swallow, but could not; tried to move, but could not.

What happened to Molly? Where is she? What is happening?

She tried to call Molly’s name. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her mouth and throat were too dry, her tongue too swollen, her mind too crippled.

Finally, she regained her ability to move and stepped back into the hallway.

Instinct alone brought her to Daniel’s room. His door was wide open. So was his window. White curtains billowed up into the room and were sucked out again by the wind like tormented ghosts forever enslaved to the window. Daniel was not in his room either.

Susanna could hear the sounds of her own labored breathing. Her skin was clammy. Her brain felt like it was swimming around in the hot furnace of her head.

Then Edward cried out.

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Daniel And Molly

Her head whipped around in the direction of the cry.

Down the hall, Edward backed out of Thea’s room. He held the lantern extended before him with one hand and covered his mouth with the other, shaking his head and saying: “No...

No...Mother...No...”

“Edward,” Susanna managed hoarsely.

He turned to her, still shaking his head. She moved toward him, walking faster as she went. He walked to her also, but stopped in front of Roger’s room. His face was all knotted up. As Susanna walked closer and the light of her candle added to the light of the lantern, she saw that he was weeping, his cheeks glistening with tears.

“Edward,” she said again, tremulously, wondering what it meant—his cry, his tears—but knowing it was something wrong and terrible; feeling that something bad did happen.

He stopped her when she reached him and prevented her from entering the room.

“Susanna. No.”

But she had to see, had to know what had happened, regardless of how terrible it was. She pushed past him and plunged into her father’s room.

Her body trembled as she stared, a strangled scream lurching from her lungs to her throat but unable to escape.

Blood was everywhere.

Roger’s throat had been cut in his sleep, his head almost completely severed from the rest of his body. His chest had been butchered savagely into a dark, bloody pulp. Several of his ribs had been broken, a couple of them jutting outward.

Whoever had killed him intended desecration.

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“Father?” Susanna whispered weakly, her high-pitched words almost seeming to ring out in the incredible night quiet that had fallen on the house like a shroud.

“Susanna,” Edward said behind her.

“Father,” she said again, beginning to whimper softly.

She placed the candlestick on the dresser beside the door and ran to the bed, falling on her knees and pressing her forehead against his hand.

“Father!” she cried, her body heaving with heavy sobs now. “Oh, Father!”

“Susanna,” Edward said again, touching her shoulder.

Then she remembered why she and Edward were there, and she realized this wasn’t the end.

“Thea?” she said, looking up into her husband’s face with tears on her cheeks and her father’s blood on her brow.

Edward shook his head with an anguished frown.

“The children,” she said. “Dear God! The children!”

She sprang to her feet, grabbing Edward’s arm for support.

The two of them rushed into the hallway and began checking all the rooms, even checking the closets and under the beds and rechecking Roger’s and Thea’s rooms. But the twins weren’t there.

Susanna and Edward ran downstairs together and

searched for the twins, but they were nowhere to be found.

“Where could they be?” Susanna kept saying. “What could have happened to them?”

“Shh,” Edward said, touching her arm.

“What—”

“Quiet, Susanna.”

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Daniel And Molly

Susanna stopped talking.

“Listen,” he whispered.

Then she heard it. It was faint and far off, but there could be no doubt it was a child crying—Molly crying.

“Outside,” Edward said.

He opened the front door and grabbed a rifl e. They left the house, following Molly’s sobbing out to the backyard and the woods beyond overlooking the river. The crying grew louder as they followed it through the trees and dew-laden shrubs.

They came upon a clearing, in the center of which stood Molly, weeping with blood around her mouth and nightshirt. At her feet lay a dark lump in the grass.

“Molly?” Edward said.

“Daddy!” She ran to him and threw her arms around his waist. “He made me...” she said. “He made me eat. It was...

horrible, Daddy.”

Edward looked back at the dark lump in the grass where Molly had stood. A burning heat rolled up the back of his neck. He pulled Molly off him and Susanna knelt down and hugged her as he stepped toward the lump. He crouched down, shined the light on it, and gasped. It was a partially eaten human heart.

“Oh...no...” he uttered. “Oh God!”

He turned aside and set the lantern down. He felt dizzy.

“Edward? Are you all right?”

“Stay where you are, Susanna. Please stay where you are.”

He rose slowly to his feet and turned to Molly.

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“Who...Who made you...eat?”

Molly let go of her mother and turned to Edward.

“Daniel,” she said, still weeping heavily. “He...He had one also. He said...He said we both had to eat. I did not want to, but he had a knife. He said he would cut me if I did not eat.

It...tasted bad. It was terrible, Father.”

“Where is Daniel now?” Susanna asked.

“I know not. He told me he would be back, but that was a long time ago.”

“We must get back to the house,” Edward said.

“Edward, what is happening?”

“I know not. But I feel we all would be safer inside.”

“But Father and Thea—”

“They were sleeping, Susanna. They had no

opportunity to defend themselves.”

*****

The front door was open wide, as they had left it, but it was uncomfortable to look at—the darkened house in the night with that door open to anyone or any thing which might be inclined to cross its threshold and ferret around within. It looked abandoned, like something so terrible had happened there that the owners couldn’t risk a moment more behind its walls. Despite this foreboding feeling, which all three of them felt, they mounted the porch stairs.

They stopped at the doorway.

“You two wait here. I shall go in and look around fi rst.

When I know it is safe, I will come back for you.”

Susanna nodded, holding Molly close, and Edward

went inside.

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Daniel And Molly

The crickets and other night sounds gave way to the uneasy quiet of the house as he stepped inside and proceeded to look around. He walked silently through the rooms of the fi rst fl oor, not wishing to draw Daniel’s attention if, in fact, the boy had become deranged. He didn’t fi nd him, so he walked up the stairs to the second fl oor, the lantern held out before him, the rifl e propped up against his shoulder.

It was almost inconceivable to Edward that the child should have gone berserk and killed Roger and Thea as Molly’s testimony indicated. But she didn’t seem to be lying; she was too upset. Why would she lie, anyway? She and Daniel had always been so close. Of course they had their occasional squabbles and disagreements but never had either of them laid false blame on the other. No, Molly wasn’t lying. There could be no other explanation. For whatever reason, Daniel had decided to get out of his bed in the middle of the night, while everyone in the house was asleep and vulnerable, and slaughter them.

Edward shuddered.

His own son... But Daniel wasn’t his son. The twins weren’t his children. It all seemed so long ago he had almost forgotten. It was easy to forget. Aside from the fact that they were more intelligent and mature than other children their age, the twins appeared to be perfectly normal, and very lovable, very charming. It was easy to forget they weren’t his, easy to forget that their father—their natural father—was...

If Daniel did kill Roger and Thea, what made him do it? And if it had something to do with his father, what about Molly? Would she become homicidal as well?

As he reached the top of the stairs, he thought he caught a glimpse of something moving down at the end of the hall near his mother’s room, but the light thrown by the lantern played with the shadows and he couldn’t be certain.

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He walked down the hall toward Thea’s room, his

breathing shallow. He passed the twins’ rooms, briefl y shining the lantern in at them and giving a cursory examination to each. Each appeared to be empty. He would look through them further if his suspicions turned out to be nothing more than suspicions.

Edward slowed down when he came to Roger’s

room. Remembrance of the horror of Roger’s mutilated remains had taken him aback, even more so now that he knew the poor man’s heart had been robbed from his body. That remembrance, in turn, reminded him that the same fate had befallen his mother.

He felt his head run cold and light as the blood in his veins fl ed down his body. He stopped, his arms drooping down to his sides, leaned back against the hallway wall, and drew a deep breath. He closed his eyes, trying to push away the pain and not quite succeeding, and took another breath. He opened his eyes.

He pushed off the wall and looked into the room.

Flies buzzed around the dead man’s body now, but otherwise nothing had changed. Daniel wasn’t here.

Edward tried not to stare at the body, but he couldn’t help himself. It was hard to imagine that it had been mere hours since he last spoke with Roger, and now he could hardly recognize him. He retched once, feeling nauseated, and turned out of the room.

Now the task set before him was no easy one. He

loved his mother very much. It was unbearable to think she had been so brutally murdered, yet he had seen her himself not long ago: the blood dripping down her knotted fi ngers from her hand, which hung limply over the side of the bed. The open mouth and blank expression. The mutilation. The blood.

Her throat had been cut in exactly the same manner as Roger’s.

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Daniel And Molly

Her chest displayed the same fl aps and chunks up uprooted fl esh as his. Edward knew if he had courage enough to look closely, he would fi nd that her heart too had been taken from her.

He eased up to the doorway hesitantly. He didn’t want to go in. He didn’t want to have to see her like that again. He wished he had never seen her like that, like he knew he would see her in his memories and nightmares for the rest of his life. He wished he could remember her only as she was when she was alive, without this desecration: Kind. Gentle. Smiling.

Happy. Those memories were ruined for him now, forever tainted by the eternal vision of her murdered body lying bloody and mutilated in her own bed.

He forced himself to raise the lantern and peer into the room with the rifl e poised and ready, but the only person in the room was Thea.

“Oh, Mother,” he said morosely, choking on his tears.

He backed out of the room, lowering the lantern and gun, shaking his head, unable to withstand it anymore.

“Mother,” he sobbed.

He turned and saw Daniel standing before him with a bloody knife in his hand and a twisted smile on his face.

Edward’s mouth fell open. Daniel leaped up and plunged the knife high into his stepfather’s chest, and yanked it out.

Edward fell back groaning and fell sprawling to the fl oor, the gun and lantern fl ying from his hands. The gun skittered across the hallway fl oor and stopped; the lantern crashed into the wall by the window at the far end of the hall and exploded, painting the wall with fl ames.

*****

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The Necromancer

Susanna heard Edward cry out as she stood at the threshold of the front door. Molly clung to her side, tugging on her nightgown.

“Edward!” she called anxiously into the house.

His answer never came. In its stead, she saw the lambent yellow glow of the spreading fi re refl ecting off the dark woodwork of the banister and the hall at the top of the stairs.

“Edward!”

Again, no answer.

She pried Molly’s fi ngers from her nightgown and crouched down beside her.

“Go stand over by those trees, darling,” Susanna told Molly, pointing to a small grove of elms some distance from the house. “And stay there till I come for you. Do you understand?”

Molly nodded.

“Go, Molly. Go now!”

Molly ran to the trees and Susanna watched to make sure the child was safe. When Molly reached the trees she stopped, turned around, and simply stood there with her arms by her sides staring vacantly back at her mother. Susanna turned, ran into the house, and stormed up the stairs.

*****

The knife wound knocked the wind out of Edward,

but it was too high to be fatal, having entered just under his left shoulder. Daniel was upon him a moment after he hit the fl oor, exhorting a screaming growl as he dove at him with the knife, putting all his weight behind the coming blow. The knife rushed toward his face. Edward jerked away and the blow went 330