Kiss Me Deadly Page 21

  ***

  Chauncey could not remember the way.

  Gripping the torch, he splashed through the water pooling at the bottom of the tunnels, swallowing his boots.

  “Jolie!”

  His voice echoed like a disembodied spirit’s.

  With an impatient grunt he forged ahead, letting the spool unravel in his free hand. He came to an intersection, turned left, and a length of thread caught him in the navel, bringing him up short. He’d already come this way. He was creating a web of circles. Around and around, nearer or farther from Jolie, he didn’t know. He leaned back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut, breathing heavily. He had to think. He had to remember. If he could just push aside the darkness and remember the maze.

  “Jolie!” he yelled again.

  He wondered if she would answer. He was the tyrant who had locked her away. She could be down this tunnel, or the next, listening, but hiding in fear.

  “Don’t die on me,” he muttered.

  The angel. He couldn’t stop thinking about the angel.

  Hang Cheshvan! The angel would launch a full-scale war if Jolie died down here. How long had it been? Days and days, but how much beyond that? He’d sent the servants away, and there was no one to ask. And where the hell was Elyce? He was paying her to keep watch. Had the food lasted? Had Jolie stayed warm enough? He’d woken in the cemetery frozen solid, the weather far colder than he’d expected with winter still weeks away. He should have planned better. If only he’d had more time!

  Chauncey turned and turned again, crashing through the tunnels. He came around a bend, and there it was. The door stood at the end of the passageway. The iron bar was still in place, locking Jolie inside. He flung off the bar and threw the door wide. Rats scuttled lazily into the shadows. Two silver trays were overturned on the floor, but the food was gone, replaced by a thick covering of rodent droppings.

  Chauncey saw the body on the cot, but his brain was muddled, unable to make sense of it. He blinked as if he weren’t seeing properly. The girl was covered in a thin layer of frost. Her cynical blue eyes were open, frozen in a stare.

  Elyce was dead.

  Chauncey’s hand flexed on the doorframe. He saw himself as a nine-year-old boy, standing in the cellar beneath the kitchen, stumbling upon death.

  “No,” he said. He blinked again. “No.”

  His legs pushed him toward Elyce. He stood over her, unable to stop staring. He couldn’t seem to see her as she really was, rather as she was supposed to be.

  Alive.

  A flood of memories broke through his mental dam. He didn’t believe in love at first sight. He didn’t believe in love. It was the religion of fools. But the first time he saw Elyce, for one fraction in time, he’d doubted everything he knew. Dancing in a way that outshone the common girls, she stole the stage. Every coin in the room flowed her way. She took something ordinary and made it lucrative. She ruled her own destiny.

  Not once in his life had Chauncey felt understood, but in the weeks Elyce had stayed with him here at the château, the deep gap that had always separated him from the rest of the world narrowed. They were the same, he and Elyce. Calculating, manipulative, and cynical, yes. But also driven, hungry, and uncompromising. He didn’t love her in the way other men loved their women; he loved her in the only way he could—for not leaving him alone in a world that understood him even less than he understood it.

  The only reason he’d cast her out of the château was because of the angel. He couldn’t stand in the same room with her and not hear those words.

  The most magical days of my life...

  He’d hated Elyce for those words, but his anger was misdirected. All blame fell on the angel.

  Lowering himself onto the cot, he pressed Elyce’s hand to his face. His emotions flapped inside him like birds dashing against a glass cage. Who did he have now? He was utterly alone. Utterly misunderstood.

  Chauncey jolted to a stand, believing he sensed the angel nearby. His posture was guarded, but the walls outside the cell shimmered not with the angel’s shadow, but with the spirits of the dead. Chauncey could feel them, trapped and wandering. His body convulsed at the thought of them surrounding him, and he backed further into the cell.

  “Elyce!” he hissed. Down here in the dungeons, he felt certain that death was very far away, and very near at the same time. “Can you hear me? Did the angel do this? Did he?”

  The door to the cell swung shut. Chauncey heard the iron bar drop into place, locking him inside.

  He crossed to the door in two strides. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  There was no answer.

  “Elyce?” He didn’t believe in ghosts. On the other hand, what else could it be? “It was the angel, he killed you,” he said. “I had nothing to do with this.” He glanced back at her body on the cot to make sure it was still there. He’d heard stories of corpses rising from the grave to drink the blood of the living. In the dungeons, he ruled nothing out.

  “Talking with the dead, Duke? Keep it up, and people are going to question your sanity.”

  Chauncey stiffened at the voice on the far side of the door. He made a guttural sound of hatred. “ You.”

  “I hope you like rats,” the angel said quietly.

  “Not a wise move, angel. These are my dungeons. You’ve trespassed on my land. I could have you hanged.” Even as Chauncey said it, he realized how worthless the threat was.

  “Hanged? With what? All this thread?”

  Chauncey felt his nostrils flare.

  “Then I’d better take it on my way out.” The angel’s voice started to fade.

  Panic seized Chauncey’s throat. “Open the door you insolent fool! I am the Duc de Langeais, and this is my château !”

  Silence.

  Chauncey slammed a fist against the door. The angel thought he was clever, did he? Well, he’d just laid the groundwork for his own destruction!

  Slicing his palm open on his riding spurs, Chauncey shook out a few drops of blood. He swore an oath to bring the angel to his knees. He would be relentless. Ruthless. Jolie would grow old and die, but there would be other women.

  Chauncey would wait patiently.

  Behind the Red Door

  BY CAITLIN KITTREDGE

  “Down in the willow garden where me and my love did meet

  There we sat a-courting

  My love fell off to sleep

  I had a bottle of burgundy wine which my true love did not know

  And there I poisoned that dear little girl down by the banks below.”

  —Unknown

  1. July

  The first time Jo Ryan found the red door into Ash House, it was a hot, still day in the middle of July, the kind of day when nothing moved, not even the air.

  She was with Ani and Deirdre, Ani’s girlfriend. They’d bought red slushies from the 7-Eleven on Chestnut Street and were sitting on the hill behind Ani’s grandmother’s barn, mixing the slushies with vodka. Deirdre had a clove, which she wasn’t smoking because it was creeping up on ninety degrees. All of them were sticky with red sugar and sweat.

  “My dad wants me to get a job,” Ani said. “He said I could work for Mrs. Highsmith until school starts.”

  “Cleaning houses?” Deirdre flicked ash into the grass. Matted and green, it was past Jo’s ankles. She dug her bare toes into the cool earth at the roots.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Ani demanded. Ani and Deirdre loved to argue more than the old married couples who summered in Coffin Hollow to escape New York. Jo added another half inch of vodka to her slushie.

  “It’s just so...” Deirdre sighed and stubbed out the clove. “God, Ani. Why don’t we just go live with my sister in New York? This town is like something out of a horror movie.”

  Jo felt sweat drops creep down her back, in time with the buzzing insects in the field beyond. “It’s hotter in New York,” she said.

  “See? I don’t want to sleep on your sister’s floor all summer,” Ani s
aid. “Besides, New York is expensive, and I’m paying my own way after next year.”

  Deirdre rolled her eyes. She was a summer girl, bringing the sweat and smoke of the city with her every June 20th since Ani and Jo were in sixth grade. She’d been the first one in black boots, the first one to cut the necks out of her brother’s T-shirts and wear them over a skirt from her old prep school. The first girl Ani ever kissed.

  “I’m done with watching the cows fart,” Deirdre said. “Let’s go see if my brother has some pot.”

  “You said you’d give me a ride to practice,” Ani said, when Deirdre stood up and brushed grass off her butt. “And that you’d talk to Thom about the shirt designs for the gig on Saturday. I hate how you get when you drive around baked.”

  Deirdre was pretty, Jo supposed, but when her face got that way, all off-balance, like a toddler about to pitch a fit, she was a doll who’d come out of the mold wrong. “Shit,” was all she said, before she slumped back down.

  Ani sucked more of her vodka cherry slushie through her straw. “What should we do?”

  Jo looked down the valley. The field ended at a barbwire fence. Beyond that was overgrown, except for a slate roof poking through the trees. It vibrated in the sunlight, spreading an ache behind her eyes. Like a drop of quicksilver on green glass, the roof blurred her vision. The buzzing of the insects grew louder than PA feedback at one of their shows.

  “We could go look around Ash House.” The words came into her mind like raindrops, spoke from her mouth like ripples. It wasn’t her idea, but it was in her brain like a seed.

  “Yeah,” Deirdre said. “And when we’re done maybe we can tip over some cows and smash a mailbox. God, Jo. You are such a hillbilly sometimes.”

  Ani gave Deirdre a hard punch on the shoulder. “Shut up. It’s not like we have anything better to do.”

  “I gave you a better idea,” Deirdre said. “Go back to my house. At least my room has an AC.”

  Jo stood up and pulled her boots back on. Deirdre and Ani kept arguing. All they did was argue and hook up, when Deirdre wasn’t baked or locked in her room, drawing her creepy pen-and-ink pictures. Bleeding women, vampires, men with raven heads, and children with fish tails. Deirdre’s drawings bothered Jo somewhere low in her stomach, like when her mother had been drinking back in Providence, and dating the guy who liked to open Jo’s door and look at her when he thought she was asleep.

  “...And I’m not going to poke around that place and break my damn neck,” Deirdre’s voice rose. “Besides...” her voice slid into that mean, petty register that always reminded Jo of a blade going into something soft. “You know it’s haunted as shit, right? They hanged a guy in the front yard, vigilante style, old Wild West shit. Like, a hundred people have died in there, I bet.”

  “That’s just kid stories,” Ani said. She’d had more of the red drink than anyone. Her plastic mini-mart cup was almost empty, and her words were slower than the heat.

  “There’s nothin’ in there. Rats and spiders maybe.”

  Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. “I dare you to go in. Put a mark on one of the upstairs windows.”

  Ani looked sick. Ani hated spiders, had as long as Jo had known her.

  “Forget it,” Ani said. “Let’s stay here. Jo and I have to get to practice soon anyway.”

  Deirdre opened her mouth to say something else, shrill and nasty as a New York taxi, and Jo spoke instead. “I’ll do it.”

  Deirdre stretched, her skinny arms flexing under her tattoos. She’d drawn them herself—an angel with black wings on one arm, a goat-legged satyr on the other, prone girls blond and brunette at their feet, the blood from their wounds running down her arms in dark red ink. “Well,” she said, “you may be a hillbilly, but at least you’re not a pussy.”

  “Jo, this is stupid,” Ani muttered.

  “Yeah, probably,” Jo said. She was walking down the hill, though, her boots sinking into the high grass. The barrier between Ani’s property and Ash House was a rusted fence, and she stepped on it to get over. It wasn’t like anyone was going to yell at her for letting the livestock out. Ash House had been abandoned for years, probably since the forties, which was when Ani’s grandmother had moved to the farm to marry Ani’s grandfather when he got back from France.

  The house appeared and disappeared, peeping through the apple trees and scrub oaks.

  The undergrowth wasn’t just grass. Blackberry vines scraped along Jo’s bare legs, drawing blood. Wild roses coated her with pollen and scent, petals sticking to her skin.

  She’d look like hell when she came back out. Her Stiff Little Fingers shirt was damp all along the spine, and she peeled it off, going down to her bra. Hell, it was more than Deirdre wore, most summer days.

  The orchard ended, fewer and fewer trees, and Jo was no longer walking through brush but a long-forgotten lawn, Queen Anne’s lace and daisies brushing the blood from her thighs.

  Ash House was all at once no longer a mirage but solid, tall and black, nearly blotting out the relentless sun. Jo stopped, standing in the tall grass, and wiped sweat off the back of her neck with her shirt.

  Ani and Deirdre were probably watching her. She’d be a tiny white figure in the green. The little girl lost. That is, if Deirdre hadn’t gotten bored and gone back to picking fights with Ani or taken her busted-ass Dodge Dart and gone home to smoke pot, which was how Deirdre’s temper tantrums usually ended.

  Jo had liked it much better when only Ani would have been watching her from the top of the hill.

  Ash House waited, while all around her the insects hummed, air vibrating with their song, sweat and dirt pressing against Jo’s skin.

  All of the broken windows stared at her, the biggest insect of all, refracting a thousand tiny, shirtless Jos back into the wilderness beyond the panes.

  She picked her way along a pitted path, bricks strewn across the lawn, some upright like tiny headstones, some buried in overgrown grass. Big, shaggy bushes that she guessed had once been topiary animals cluttered the lawn. She could still see a leg and a head, a tail. She’d come up on Ash House from the rear, and when she set foot on the sagging wraparound porch, boards cracked like rifle shots.

  The back door was nailed over with plywood, a no trespassing sign turned to metal lace still attached to the center.

  Jo picked her way along the side of the house. It was covered in dead leaves and spider webs, but she didn’t see any of the usual stuff—the beer bottles, food wrappers, used condoms—that usually drifted up around an old abandoned place. The town cemetery, most of which was disused and ancient, was littered with the stuff. Ani and Deirdre had hooked up on one of the cool, flat granite sarcophagi that sat above ground in the far corner, back by the woods.

  The far edge of the same woods crowded Ash House, at this angle blocking her view of the hill. All she could see were twisted trunks, scrub, and glossy green leaves like beetle shells.

  The front of Ash House looked down a winding drive. Once, it had been white abalone shell, but now weeds had erupted, turning it into a ribbon of wildflowers and green amid the vines and brush. A bridge at the foot of the drive forded the Acushket River, here just a narrow stream with steep banks and a current that could knock your legs out. The Acushket ran down and widened and powered mills to the south, but here it was just background to the insects and the whispering leaves.

  The roof of the porch was sky blue, paint peeling in long fingers, hanging almost down to Jo’s face like Spanish moss.