The Necromancer (36 page)

Daniel And Molly

wide, striking him in the shoulder. Daniel yanked it out, cocked it over his shoulder, and plunged it down again. Edward caught the boy’s wrist, despite the pain of his injuries, and seized his other wrist before he could use it against him.

The boy had enormous strength. Edward didn’t know if it only seemed so because of his weakened condition or if he genuinely possessed such power, but it didn’t matter. The boy was strong and seemed to be getting stronger as he grew weaker. If that didn’t change soon, Edward knew he wouldn’t survive the battle.

Susanna reached the top landing and saw their

silhouettes struggling before the wall of fi re.

“Edward!” She ran to them. She threw her arms

around Daniel’s chest and tried to pull him off, but she could not. He was too strong and heavy.

“Daniel!” she begged. “Let go!”

He released a harsh, cranky grunt, jerking the knife up and down at Edward, coming close enough to nick his face and neck with the tip of the blade.

Susanna swung her arm around Daniel’s neck and

leaned back, hoping to choke him enough to make him stop his attack. She pulled and strained as hard as she could, using all her weight, but Daniel was implacable and wouldn’t be appeased until his intended victim was dead.

Susanna looked up and saw the gun lying on the fl oor ahead. The fi re was rapidly closing in on it. There was no time to think about what to do, only time enough to do it. If she didn’t stop Daniel, he would kill Edward or they would both die in the fi re. She let go of him, staggered over to the gun, and picked it up. It felt heavy and powerful in her hands. She pointed it at her son.

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“Daniel!” she screamed, moving away from the intense heat at her back. “Release your father!”

“He is not my father!” It was not Daniel’s voice she heard, not a child’s voice that said those words. It was Ambrose. An instant after she made that realization, the orange-yellow light that played on his face revealed a glimpse of the boar’s head of the beast that raped her.

Susanna screamed and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked hard against her shoulder with a loud cracking BANG

and fl ash. The ball ripped into Daniel’s face. His head jerked back followed by the rest of his body. The knife left his hand, hit the wall, and clattered to the fl oor.

Daniel threw his hands up to his face and squealed, squirming and thrashing his legs against the wall and the fl oor.

Susanna dropped the gun as if it were something she found disgusting like vermin, and ran to Edward’s side, dropping to her knees.

“Edward, are you all right? Are you all right?”

He raised his head, holding his chest with his hand, and then fell back, his head lolling wearily from one side to the other. Daniel’s thrashing was already subsiding to shivers.

“Edward!” She shook him. “Edward!” But his eyes

rolled under his half-closed lids. He had lost a good measure of blood.

Daniel rolled over onto his belly, his hands still plastered to his face with a thick, oozing sheet of blood.

“Edward,” Susanna said. “Edward!” But there was no response.

Daniel pushed himself up to his knees and elbows, whimpering.

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She caught him rising in the corner of her eye and turned his way. Halfway between them lay the knife.

Edward was completely unconscious.

The enormous heat at her back was almost unbearable.

Behind her, the fi re ate the hallway, crackling as it chewed up the walls and the fl oor and the ceiling, belching out dark clouds of acrid smoke between the jaws of the fl ames. It was hungry, and it was coming for them.

Daniel brought his knees up to his chest and started to rise to his feet.

Susanna looked at the fi re, at Edward, then back to Daniel. He was standing now, one bloody hand still covering his face. He removed it. His nose had been blown apart and was now dangling by a thick but narrow layer of skin just under one of his eyes. The dark chambers of his nose were exposed and bleeding into his mouth and down his chin. He didn’t seem to care. Somehow, he was able to detach himself from the pain. If she had needed any more evidence that he wasn’t normal, this was it. He was his father’s son, a fact she had tried to deny, but which was as inevitable as sunrise.

His head stirred, like a dog trying to shake a wet leaf from its snout. He put his hand to his nasal cavities and blocked one side. Then he inhaled deeply through his mouth and blew through the open side. The ball Susanna had fi red at him popped out in a spray of blood and snot and bounced on the fl oor a few times before rolling into the wall and stopping. Susanna’s face bunched up in revulsion. Daniel smiled a perverted jack-o-lantern rictus, then tore off the loose appendage and tossed it at her. She fl inched, then scrambled over to the knife and grabbed it. He made no effort to stop her or get the knife himself. She rose to her feet slowly, not taking her eyes off him.

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“There is no need, Susanna,” he said. “I will not harm you. I love you.”

“No. You do not.”

“We must go,” he said. “The fi re is close.”

She glanced back. In another minute or so it would be upon Edward. At the far end of the hall, fi ery beams crashed to the fl oor.

She turned back to Daniel. He hadn’t moved,

but something about him was different, yet familiar and compelling. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“You shall always be mine,” he said. “In the blackness of night or the brightness of day, in dreams or in waking you shall always bequeath your love to me, for I am your husband, and you are my bride. Neither the tenuous web of Time nor the moldy bones and dust of Death shall come between us.

I shall teach you enchantment and revelation and the art of regenerating yourself. You shall be forever young, forever fertile. You shall bear me many children and want for nothing.

And you shall always give of yourself freely to me.”

Susanna stood stupefi ed, her glazed-over eyes focusing somewhere beyond Daniel. It was as if she were outside of herself, apathetically watching it all happen as in a dream. All the anger and fear and loathing she felt for him drained away.

Her mind was empty.

Daniel stepped toward her and took her hand.

“Susanna.” It was Edward calling to her, fl oundering on the fl oor. The fl ames were creeping up on him.

“Susanna.” His voice sounded like a faint echo in a mountainous valley far away.

“Hand me the knife,” Daniel demanded.

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Her fi ngers loosened a little, but she didn’t let go.

“The knife. Hand it to me.”

“No. Susanna.”

“Mother!”

A tremor shook through Susanna’s body upon hearing the small, distant voice calling her urgently again and again.

“Mother!”

It was Molly’s voice. A sweet, tender little voice laced with panic and fear.

Susanna came back to herself. Molly stood at the other end of the hall, crying. Daniel still held her hand, the jack-o-lantern face turned up to her expectantly, his free hand held out to her palm up. She looked down at her other hand, at the knife. Her fi ngers tightened around it until her knuckles went white.

“The knife,” Daniel said in Ambrose’s deep voice.

“Hand me the knife.”

She shook the last remnants of his infl uence over her off.

“Here!” she yelled and slammed the blade into his chest up to the handle, making a dull thumping sound. He fell back gasping, his mouth and eyes wide with surprise. He hit the fl oor with the knife sticking out of his chest and fl opped around grabbing at it with both hands, but he couldn’t remove it. He thrashed and twitched.

Edward’s hair was on fi re. Susanna rushed to his side, beat down the fl ames, and dragged him away from the fi re, coughing.

“Go, Susanna,” he said. “Save yourself and Molly.

Leave me here.”

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“No. I will not let you die.”

“Nothing can prevent that now,” he said.

“I am not leaving without you.”

The look on his face acknowledged he knew she

meant it, and she helped him sit up.

“Mother!”

“Go back, Molly! Go back outside to where I told you to stay!”

“But I am affrighted.”

“Go!” Susanna yelled. “Go now. Your father and I will be behind you. Go!”

Molly turned and ran back down the stairs. The fi re and smoke were everywhere now. Daniel rolled around on the fl oor, still unable to remove the knife from his chest. Susanna and Edward coughed and cried as the smoke burned their lungs and stung their eyes. She helped him to his feet and they hobbled past Daniel to the stairs under a ceiling of fi re and creaking beams.

Susanna hesitated. She turned her head and looked back one fi nal time before descending the stairs. Daniel continued to struggle on the fl oor. Beyond him, people appeared out of the fi re, their silhouettes deepening, becoming more substantial. And they moaned. They moaned like only the dead could moan if they were able. But these people were dead. They were able. And they had come for Daniel.

Susanna turned and helped Edward down the stairs.

Halfway down they heard Daniel scream—part his voice, part his father’s, part something else. They stopped for a moment, startled, then continued onward.

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The fresh air felt cool on their faces when they left the house and trudged over to where Molly stood waiting for them under the elms.

Susanna helped Edward sit down on the grass. The fi re multiplied on itself now, throughout the remainder of the second fl oor, cremating the remains of Roger, Thea, and Daniel. Flames burst out the windows and worked their way up the clapboards of the outer walls up to the gables as the lambent amber light began to brighten in the windows of the ground fl oor.

Molly put her arms around her mother as they stared silently at their home and watched it burn.

*****

Edward, Susanna, and Molly rode back to the inn

where they were staying until Edward could fi nd another home. The inn was located about a mile upstream from where their house had been. The cemetery was only about two miles farther than that. They arrived back in time for lunch, but none of them felt very hungry, not even Molly, who always had an appetite.

“Are you sure?” Susanna asked, removing Molly’s

bonnet and placing it down on the seat of a chair.

“Yes,” Molly replied. “I think I shall just go to my room.”

“As you please, dearest.”

Molly turned and walked down the narrow hallway to her room.

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“She seems to be coping well,” Edward remarked.

“As well as a girl her age could, I imagine. Should I brew a pot of tea?”

Edward nodded.

“I am concerned though,” he said.

“What about?”

“Well... To be blunt: Who is to say Molly will not attempt to murder us in our sleep as Daniel did?”

“No.” Susanna shook her head. “It was different.

Daniel was Ambrose.”

“For God’s sake, Susanna. They were twins. They were both his.”

“Molly is not that way. She could never be that way.”

“Ambrose was her father.”

“And she is my daughter.”

“Daniel was your son, but he still killed our parents.

He would have killed me if you had not stopped him.”

“He was...different. Molly is nothing like him. You saw how she behaved. If she were like him, she would have helped him. She would have...”

She turned away from him suddenly. Tears fl owed from her eyes. He walked over to her and put his arm around her shoulder.

“I did not mean to upset you. I simply feel uneasy about what has happened. You understand?”

She looked at him and nodded, sniffl ing.

“I love her, Edward. I do not want to lose her. Not like Daniel. Not again.”

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“I know, Susanna. I know. I love her also.”

He held her close while she wept against his chest.

They stayed like that for a long time.

*****

the river. A warm, light breeze caressed her face and blew strands of her dark hair from her forehead and back over her shoulders. The high sun was burning away the overcast.

“I think it will be a beautiful day today, do you not think so too, Elizabeth?” Molly asked, turning to the doll in the white dress sitting in a far corner of the room.

The doll blinked and nodded.

Molly turned back and looked out over the river again.

She smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “A most beautiful day.”

THE END

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