Bloodstone (15 page)

No need to fuck around, is there, babe? Those are the
facts. Sharon dies, life goes on
.

Except her husband had done it. The same man who had lost his job and turned into a mean drunk, and finally a thief. The same man who had probably pushed his own father down a flight of stairs.

Next to the article about Sharon’s murder was a blurred photograph of Ronnie Taylor. The black and white photo showed a man with straight black hair, a hawk nose, and thin lips. The look of a man who had worked hard for a living.

But it was the eyes that fascinated her. Even in the grainy newsprint they held a strange sort of power. Set back in his head, beady and heartless. The eyes of a predator. And yet she recognized something in them; something horrible, and yet strangely hypnotic and familiar. She pictured Ronnie Taylor watching the broom handle come up and down, again and again, watching with the cold mindlessness of a lizard as his wife’s skull cracked and her jaw shattered.

She flipped back to the article about the break-in, read it again. Read the follow-up article, then printed more copies of all of them. A feeling of dread was growing in the pit of her stomach and it felt razor-sharp. There was something at her fingertips that might explain everything. But what was it?

Why don’t you ask me, babe? Haven’t I always helped
you out in the past? You wanted to line us up like a couple of
used cars, see which one could whip the other. Which one’s
got the bigger engine? Now you got a case of the chills. Let
me tell you something, honey. I can tell you about evil. This
one, you don’t want to check under the hood
.

A noise from behind her. She jumped, whirled around in her chair.

Annie Arsenault stood in the doorway, her wild white hair floating around her skull. She wore a yellow nightgown that hung oddly on her emaciated frame, giving her body the appearance of being not entirely solid. Angel rose from her chair, her mind whirling, shifting gears. Since that day on the square she had been dreading another encounter with this woman. She did not do well with people who were mentally unbalanced; they frightened her, especially the loud ones.

But Annie was not the same woman she had been on the square. There was something in her eyes now that hadn’t seemed to be there before. Annie took several shuffling steps forward, stopped, and cocked her head to one side.
She looks
like a bird, hopping along on the grass. Just before it pounces
on a worm
.

“So you have finally come,” Annie said, her voice high and thin and sharp. “I have been waiting for a very long time.”

“Excuse me?” Angel took half a step back, felt the table against her thighs, and stopped.

“You want to know more about the Taylor family. You understand nothing yet. But I will tell you what I know.” Annie extended a long, bone thin arm as if to touch her. Her skin was translucent, blue veins crisscrossing just under the surface. “Come along with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Come.” Angel found herself following the old woman against her better judgment. They left the records room and
passed through the dark hallway, Annie moving quickly and almost silently across the carpeting. Past another closed door on their left, photographs on the wall, a long, narrow table. At the end of the hall on the right an open door led down into darkness. Annie paused at the top of a flight of steps, and began to descend.

Angel went to the open door, hesitated, and took a deep breath, looking down. From the bottom of the stairs came the flickering glow of candlelight. Annie was no longer in sight. A faint, mossy smell came drifting up to her from the cave-like depths, the smell of old leaves after a rain.

She took the stairs cautiously, feeling her way with her hands against the close walls on either side. At the bottom the space opened up and she found herself in a dimly lit, furnished basement apartment.

Furnished, in a way. She felt like she had just stepped back a hundred years in time. The floor was bare, cold stone. Along both walls ran high shelves filled with hundreds of books. Further along the books gave way to dusty jars containing things she could not bring herself to look at too closely; vague, foggy shapes that suggested old lab specimens swimming in formaldehyde.

The flickering light came from a pair of candelabras placed on a solid wooden table at the far end of the room. To one side, thrown in like an afterthought, was a narrow bed. The arrangements of the little furniture in the room implied some sort of ritual space in the center.

Annie stood swaying over an open book on the table. She was muttering softly, and the sound sent an icy chill down Angel’s spine. What had she gotten herself into, going down into the basement of a crazy old woman mad with grief over the loss of her son these past forty years or more?

Annie turned around, her hair lit in a fiery halo by the candlelight, the outline of her scarecrow body now plainly visible through the thin material of the nightgown. She seemed to float several inches off the floor. “A crazy old woman, out
of her head with grief. I suppose that’s what they’ve been feeding you, these people that
watch over me
. I should be grateful that I didn’t end up in a home.” Her mouth was lost among the shadows that held her face. “They see what they want to see, as you do. And they are holding the secrets of this town very deep within themselves. It would not do them good to have those secrets come out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And yet you come here looking for answers to bad dreams and night sweats. Your loved ones come back to you in your dreams, eh? Back from the dead? But they are not as they were, they are something else, something evil.”

Out of the corner of her eye Angel saw something move in one of the jars, twitch once and be still. A trick of the light. It had to be.

The old woman took a shuffling step forward, deepening the shadows across her face. “All your life, everything in its place, everything rational. Science is your religion, seeking to explain the world and everything in it, and by doing so, closing doors on other worlds. But now you have come looking for answers. Seeking out the reason for the unexplained urges you have felt, the needs that have begun to consume you. The world is not as you have known it. There are other worlds. There are things…” She paused, cocked her head as if listening. “Even now, they are looking for you.”

“Who?”

The woman shrugged. “The dead.”

Angel took a deep breath, the fear making her shudder. And then suddenly it became clear to her.
Of course
. “You lost your son in the falls long ago. It’s a terrible thing. None of us could have handled—”

“You want to see, and yet you are blind!” the old woman said. Her wrinkled face seemed to dart out of the darkness, like a snake about to strike. “This town and everyone in it is sick. You and Billy Smith are a part of it, as you have always
been. Only now are you beginning to feel that sickness, but it has always been there. It will get worse, until you are both dragged down into the darkness with the rest of us. A darkness of the spirit. Pure evil. That’s difficult for you to understand, isn’t it? You’re raised to think there’s a reason for everyone’s actions, no matter how vile. But I am telling you now that there are higher powers at work within human beings, and larger things at stake than you can know.”

No
. Annie Arsenault was obviously a very old, very confused woman. The drowning of her young son had unbalanced a mind that was perhaps already on the edge, sent it tumbling down into a world of magic and sorcery and witchcraft. A world that did not exist.

And yet, hadn’t she opened her mind to just this sort of possibility? Hadn’t she slowly been convinced, by the vivid dreams, and the coming of Billy Smith, and finally that horrible place below the falls, that there were things she didn’t understand? Unseen powers that could, and did, affect her life?

“Why didn’t you tell us this before? If all this is true, why did you wait so long?”

Annie’s face seemed to crumple. She turned away to face the jars, and seemed to search for something within them. “I am not so strong anymore,” she said softly. “I am in great danger even talking to you now. They would take me if they could.”

“Who?”

“The dead,” she said again, simply. “They are restless, don’t you see? They are watching us, even now.”

A whisper of breeze from some unseen crack in the walls made the candles flicker, throwing moving shadows about the bookshelves and dusty old jars. Things moved and slithered about in the darkness. Angel suddenly felt as if she were standing on the edge of a hole so deep and wide she could not see the bottom. An image of her brother’s face came to mind, not the way he looked when he was alive, but
the way he looked in her dreams, the disease rampant in him, bloated and purple with seawater, his flesh slowly sliding away from his skull. His mouth a deep round hole, lipless, opening to speak, his jaws grinding with sand, and then…nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I…I don’t…”

Annie Arsenault was at her side in a flash, holding her in a grip that was surprisingly strong. Her flesh was dry and cool. The old woman led her over to the narrow bed and sat her down on it, then busied herself for several moments among the strange bottles and jars, moving from the desk to the shelves and back again. A moment later she returned with a small clay cup. “Drink this,” she said. “It will help.”

The liquid inside the cup was black and smelled faintly earthy like a strong tea. It was not an unpleasant smell; after a moment Angel closed her eyes and drank it down, and to her surprise the taste was quite sweet and spicy.
Apple cider
, she thought,
it tastes like warm apple cider
…

The old woman had pulled the chair from the desk over to the side of the bed, and now she sat perched on it. Angel felt a momentary dizziness, a smooth and powerful rushing sensation in her head, and then everything became curiously clear and sharp. She began to see more details in the room, as if the candles had gotten brighter, and her mind focused all at once. It was as if her insides had been given a thorough cleaning, top to bottom. She began to pick up faint signals from the woman across from her; not quite thoughts, but subtle images and shapes.

“Better?”

“Yes. It’s as if I can tell what you’re thinking.”

Annie nodded, seemingly pleased. “It is one of the effects of the drink. We all have the ability, but in most it has been repressed to the point of uselessness.” She nodded again. “In you that ability is strong, as it is in your…friend. You only need to learn how to draw it out.”

“How do you know all this, Annie? Who
are
you?”

“You were right in one way about my son. His death changed me, made me see things in a new light. He had been taken by something I could not hope to overcome, that much I already knew. I felt it strongly. But what could I do? I turned to the church, and then when that did not comfort me enough, I studied my mother’s books. I taught myself how to contact the dead. These are disappearing arts, scorned by modern society, just as hundreds of years ago they were feared. Years ago, one of my relations was hung for her beliefs. Now, I am simply ignored. Which is better? In the end, there is no difference; nobody listens.”

I didn’t listen
, Angel thought, and suddenly she felt shameful and so very, very ignorant. All these things that had been happening to her, all the conversations between Billy and herself, how they had promised each other they would believe, and fight, when what they were really doing was engaging in disbelief. Constantly questioning, wondering, skeptical.
Who
says there aren’t such things as ghosts?
she wondered now.
Or demons, or witches, or any of those things we laugh at
these days? Maybe they’ve just been waiting silently, patiently,
for their time to come
.

She was picking up stronger signals from the old woman now; satisfaction, acceptance, relief. Annie Arsenault seemed to understand the change of heart in her young guest. She smiled, nodded. “When I contacted them, I found them to be different than I had thought…hungry. But once I had made contact, I could not turn them away. I have been haunted by them ever since.” She shrugged. “Most are harmless, some are not. One, in particular, is very powerful. And he has found you. You have to understand. This place, it attracts them. The ground is ripe for it. And when they find a focal point, a way to get at the outside world…” She shrugged. “They will not stop.”

“What can I do?” Angel whispered. “You must tell me why I’ve been brought to this place.”

“That is not an easy thing to see or explain. There is a great
division inside of you, and inside the man as well—a struggle for control. Your coming has been planned for a very long time; and yet, up until a few weeks ago I was not sure whether you would come at all. There are things that even my books do not explain, and things that are better left a mystery.”

“But you said you would tell me what you know.”

“You visited the place below the falls?”

“Yes.”

“And it frightened you? Sickened you?”

“That’s right.”

“That is where the ground is at its worst. Terrible things have happened there, bloody things, but even before these things it was evil. The ground seeks them out and calls to them, the sick, the weak, and makes their sins fester and grow.”

“You’re talking about the murder,” Angel said. “Ronnie Taylor murdering his wife.”

The old woman stood up abruptly, moving toward the table. She picked up the book, studied it for a moment, and placed it gently on the table again. Next to it was a small flat dish, covered with a scattering of small bones. She scooped these up and tossed them down again, staring for a long time at the pattern they made on the white surface of the dish.

When she turned back and approached the bed her eyes were burning with intensity. “Ronnie Taylor was one of the most vulnerable, always searching for something to believe in. He fell into the hands of something he did not understand— and being feeble-minded, did not have the strength to fight it.
But he was not himself
. That you must understand, above all else. The dead had taken him.”