while the black stars burn (13 page)

She heard footsteps and the rustling of robes, and through her tears she saw a regal iron boot beneath an ochre hem embroidered with the tiny white bones of birds and mice.

“You’ll do,” the figure said in a voice that made her want to drive spikes into her own brain. “Yes, you’ll do.”

She felt the terrible lord touch her head, and it was like being im
paled on a sword, and suddenly she was falling—

—Caroline gasped and the bow slipped and screeched across her strings. Blinking in fear and confusion, it took her a half second to realize she was still onstage, still performing...or she had been until her mistake.

“I’m—I’m so, so sorry, I don’t know what happened,” she stammered, looking to her lone audience member in the back of the theatre. But all the seats were empty.

“It’s quite all right.” Professor Harroe hurried onstage from the wings, beaming. “You did wonderfully, just wonderfully.”

“I...I did?” She blinked at him in disbelief. “But...I messed up, didn’t I?”

“Oh, a mere sight-reading error...I’m sure you’ll play straight through to the end next time!
And
. Your new benefactor has requested that you perform tomorrow evening at the St. Barnabus Church on 5
^th
Street. 6pm sharp; don’t be late!”

“Oh. Yes. Okay.” She set her violin down on her lap, and the pain in her hand made her look at her palm. Her scar had split open during the performance, and her sleeve was wet with her own blood.

*

When Caroline tried to sleep on her narrow bed, she fell almost immediately into a suite of nightmares. She was onstage again, and the notes of her father’s sonata turned to tiny hungry spiders that swarmed over her arms and chewed through her eyes and into her brain. Predatory black stars wheeled around her as she tumbled helplessly through airless, frigid outer space. And then she was back in the strange land with the twin suns, but now she was a tiny mouse pinned to a flat rock, and a masked man in yellow robes told her how he would flay her alive and take her spine.

She awoke sweating and weeping at 3am, and in a moment of perfect clarity, she realized that she wanted no part of whatever was happening at St. Barnabus in 15 hours. There was not enough money in the world. She quickly dressed in her secondhand pants and sweater, threw a few belongings into an overnight bag and grabbed her violin case. The Greyhound station was just a mile walk from her apartment building, and there would be a bus going somewhere far away. Maybe she could go to Boston, find her mother’s people and learn to make shoes or whatever it was that they did. Shoes were good. People needed shoes.

But when she reached the pitchy street and started striding toward the station, she realized that the city was darker than usual. Tall buildings whose penthouses normally glowed with habitation were entirely black. She scanned the sky: no stars or moon, nothing but a seeming void.

And then, she saw something like a tattered black handkerchief flutter onto a nearby tall streetlamp, blotting it out. She stood very still for a moment, then slowly turned, beholding the uncanny night. Tattered shadows flapped all around. She started running, the violin case banging against her hip. The tatters moved faster, swarming around her on all sides. Soon she was sprinting headlong down the street, across the bridge...

...And realized the other side of the bridge was lost in the ragged blackness. No trace of light; it was as if that part of the world had ceased to exist, had been devoured by one of the stars from her nightmares.

She looked behind her. More utter darkness. The city was blotted out.

“I won’t do it,” she said, edging toward the bridge railing. She could hear the river rushing below. “I
won’t
.”

The jagged darkness rapidly ate the bridge, surging toward her, and so she unslung her violin case and hurled her instrument over the edge into the murky water. The darkness came at her even faster, and she crouched down, covering her head with her arms—

—And found herself sitting in a metal folding chair in the nave of a strange church. In her hands was her old violin, the one she’d played as a child. Her father’s sonata rested on the music stand before her, the notes black as the predatory stars.

“I won’t,” she whispered again, but she no longer ruled her own flesh. Her hands lifted her instrument to her shoulder and expertly drew the bow across the strings. The scabbed sign in her palm split open again, ruby blood spilling down her wrist, and she could see the marks starting to shine darkly as they had in the dream. Something planted in her long ago was seeking a way out.

Caroline found her eyes were still under her control, so she looked away from the music, looked out the window, hoping that blinding herself to the notes would stop the performance. But her hands and arms played on, her body swaying to keep time.

And there through the window she saw the glow of buildings on fire, and in the sky she saw a burning version of the symbol in her palm, and the air was rending, space and time separating, and as the firmament tore apart at the seams she could see the twin suns and black stars moving in from the world of her nightmares.

And she wanted to weep, but her body played on.

And the people in the city cried out in fear and madness, and still it played on.

And the winds from Carcosa blew the fires of apocalypse across the land, and still it played on.

The Abomination of Fensmere

On a Saturday exactly one month after her mother died in a car wreck, Penny heard a strange car slow down outside her house and stop. She put down her Nancy Drew novel—
The Moonstone Castle Mystery
, which her mother had bought her only an hour before her death and which Penny kept reading over and over as if somewhere in its pages was the solution to human mortality—and peeked through her second-story bedroom window to see who had arrived.

A gleaming black two-door Oldsmobile F-85 sedan crouched at the curb. Her stepfather took her car shopping the day after the funeral, but she’d refused to take a test ride with him, preferring to sit in a chair at the dealership and read her book. Still, she’d overheard the men’s auto talk and knew the model on sight.

A tall balding man in an old-fashioned suit unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, pulled an old leather briefcase from the back of the car, and began striding toward the house. He was about her stepfather’s age, and had angular features she might have found handsome if it were not for the unsettling intensity of his pale blue eyes and the unpleasant downward cant of his mouth.

He doesn’t look like a kind gentleman,
she thought.

Penny quietly slipped out of her room and stood just out of sight above the stair landing, listening, watching the dust motes dance in a beam of light from the hallway window. In the distance, her little brother and sisters shrieked and whooped as they played Cowboys and Indians. The doorbell rang.

“Penny, can you get that?” her stepfather called from his first-floor study.

She went perfectly still, not breathing.

“Penny, are you there?”

The stranger rang the bell again, and she heard her stepfather curse under his breath and go to the door.

“Dr. Farrell?” The stranger had a deep voice like a radio announcer.

“Yes?” Her stepfather sounded cautious, tense.

“My name is Ezekias Haughton,” he replied smoothly in a peculiar accent. “And I am your stepdaughter Penny’s second cousin.”

Cousin?
Penny wondered. Her mother hadn’t ever mentioned any cousins. Or aunts and uncles, for that matter. Until that moment, all the extended family she knew were her stepfather’s relatives.

“You have my condolences on your wife Edna’s recent tragic death,” Haughton continued, “I come here as a representative of her family. I wish to discuss with you certain arrangements for her daughter that will have a salutary impact upon your own finances.”

“Salutary...what do you mean?” Her stepfather sounded skeptical. But curious.

“Is the girl here?”

“I think she walked down to the corner store.”

“Is there someplace we can chat where we won’t be interrupted by your children?” Haughton asked.

“Certainly...come this way to my study.”

Penny knew where all the creaky boards in the upstairs hallway floor were. She also knew that if she crouched down in the corner of the upstairs linen closet, she could hear everything anyone so much as whispered inside her stepfather’s study. Quickly and quietly, she hurried down the hall and sequestered herself in the sweet spot on the closet floor before the men had settled. She could hear the squeak of her stepfather’s office chair and the scrape of the guest chair being pulled out on the other side of his desk.

“I’m sure your wife’s death was a dreadful blow to poor Penny,” Haughton said, his voice oiled with sympathy.

“It was. It’s been a terrible time for all of us.” His tone was guarded.

“Girls at her age go through so many difficult changes, even at the best of times. It’s hard to be a good father, especially when the girl isn’t your own.”

“I’m the only father Penny’s known, and I’ve raised her just like my other children,” her stepfather replied.

“Please, take no offense, Dr. Farrell! You are an upstanding gentleman and a fine
pater familias
. But, as they say, blood is thicker than water. And adolescent girls are enigmas wrapped in sullen mysteries. No one can argue that.”

Penny frowned in the dark, wanting to argue it. While she didn’t mind being thought of as mysterious, she disliked it when men lumped girls together as though they were all fish in a can of sardines or cakes on a conveyer belt. Further, she suspected that what Haughton took as girls’ mysteries were his own investigative failures.

There was a silence. “Why are you here, Haughton?”

“A girl Penny’s age needs a strong maternal presence in her life so that she can grow up to be the fine lady we both know she should be. Her mother’s regrettable decision to cut ties with her own parents has meant that Penny has thus far grown up without knowing most of her own kin. I propose that we remedy both problems.”

“How?”

“Penny’s aunt Morinda wants to have the girl over for a visit at the family home in Fensmere, Mississippi this summer. Say until August.”

Her stepfather paused again. “Starting when?”

“I hoped to take the girl back with me today.”

“You can’t be serious. I’m not handing my daughter over to some stranger who just walked in off the street.”

Penny heard the sound of the briefcase’s latches popping open. “I have my identification here, and a copy of Morinda’s birth certificate, along with your wife’s. As you can see, although Morinda is fifteen years your wife’s senior, they had the same parents and were born in the same hospital. I know you’ll say such documents could be forged, so I have a collection of photographs and newspaper clippings from the town paper that Morinda kept. Look there; your wife was an accomplished pianist in her youth. She and Morinda even played a concert together at the governor’s mansion; there’s a picture here.”

For several minutes, Penny heard nothing but the distant shuffling of paper and photos. She drifted into daydreams as she imagined a younger version of her mother playing to an adoring audience on
American Bandstand
.

“All right,” her stepfather finally said. “I believe you are who you claim to be. But it’s ridiculous to think that Penny could leave for such a long stay on such short notice!”

“I do realize it’s sudden, and an inconvenience, but Morinda wishes to compensate you for your trouble.”

There came the sound of a weighty packet dropping on the desk.

“What’s this?” her stepfather asked.

“It’s enough to cover the debt you owe to...certain parties in New Jersey.”

Her stepfather inhaled in surprise. “How do you know about that?”

“Oh, dear Doctor, please don’t look so alarmed. Every man has his vice, and many gentlemen gamble. You simply had a run of poor luck. Family of Penny’s is family of ours, and family secrets are safe with us. Your patients and neighbors will never have to know of this unfortunate footnote in your life, nor about your somewhat
unsavory
dalliances with the carnival boys...provided my dear young cousin can leave with me late this afternoon.”

Penny shivered at the threats swimming like hungry sea monsters beneath the surface of Haughton’s voice. She couldn’t sort out what Haughton meant by “unsavory dalliances,” but she was not in the least shocked to find out that her stepfather had not been spending all his time at his downtown office as he’d claimed. Her mother’s tone and manner were strained on the evenings he was late, and when he got home he was just too nice to everyone. She’d known all along something was afoot.

“What...what do I tell her? How do you expect me to explain this?” Her stepfather’s voice was tight as a violin string.

“Her fourteenth birthday is next week, is it not? Tell her that summer vacation at her long-lost aunt’s house is a surprise present. Tell her she will be greeted there with cakes and the freshest peach ice cream. Girls love peaches.”

Penny almost vowed to hate peaches from that moment forward on general principle. But then she remembered how much she liked Peach Melba and abandoned the idea.

There was another long pause.

“All right.”

“Excellent. There are a few papers I need you to sign to ensure that Morinda can act
in loco parentis....
”

Penny’s heart beat loud in her ears, drowning out Haughton’s voice. Part of her told her to grab a few books and clothes, duck out the window, climb down the tree and run away. But where would she go? Her only good friend at school, Susan, was already off at summer camp. Any of her stepfather’s relatives would surely just hand her back to him, as would the neighbors.

Another, louder voice in her mind reminded her that staying at home promised a long, tedious summer of nothing much to do but babysit her little half-siblings while Dr. Farrell worked or indulged himself. And besides, there were enticing mysteries afoot. What was her Aunt Morinda like? Was she anything like Penny’s mother? Did she have a nice house? If she was paying her stepfather a lot of money, it
must
be a nice house. Penny briefly imagined herself sliding down the banister in some grand old manor and wandering in a rose garden, searching for clues to some family mystery.