Emily's Ghost (42 page)

Immediately she felt the
heat. Her thumb, which had been resting on the brass plate of the
locking mechanism, might just as well have been resting on a hot
iron. Shocked and in pain, she dropped her flashlight and the diary
at the same time. In the dark she could see the diary's brass
plate, glowing red.

"Oh, God." She snatched up
the diary and stumbled with it across the room to one of the
casements, opened it, and dropped the diary onto the lawn
thirty-five feet below her. She watched in horror as the little
brass plate continued to glow, a small and evil eye staring back up
at her.

This was not
Fergus.

For a small eternity she
stood at the casement, paralyzed with fear and indecision. Whatever
it was, whoever it was, understood completely that she was an enemy
force come to do battle over the diaries. Whatever was in those
books, they were meant to stay in the manor. And now without
thinking, Emily had violated that territorial imperative. She could
still retrieve the book, throw it back through an open window, and
flee, leaving the evil in the house to reign freely, with the
beautiful and bizarre descendant of Celeste de la Croix Talbot in
devoted attendance.

But what about
Fergus?

Emily closed her eyes and
took a deep breath, then blew it out and went back to the desk.
There were six diaries in the drawer: the locked one, the three in
French, the one she had thrown out the window, and one other.
Calmly, deliberately, she picked up the first and jimmied open the
lock with her Swiss army knife. It was in French and dated 1849,
when Celeste was ten. Emily tested it by holding it to her breast,
laying it over the crystal just as she had done before. Nothing
happened.

She put it back and
repeated the gesture with each of the others she'd looked at. The
diaries remained cool and inert. That left the sixth one. She
picked it up and flashed her light over the first page. It was in
English, dated 1867, the year Celeste was thrown from her horse.
The last entry was in July.

Every day it becomes more
apparent to me, though no one else seems to see it. Yesterday he
flew into a rage after Hessiah went up to Chef and presented him
with her "dear 'ittle kittycat" in exchange for a piece of
marzipan. Everyone else was amused -- the girl is charming in an
outrageous way -- but now this evening the gardener has found the
kitten in back with its neck twisted. The presumption is that a
vagrant with a grievance against Chef was to blame. But I do not
believe it.

Emily flipped through the
pages feverishly, scanning for other telling passages, but it was
hard to read by flashlight, and she was too much in a hurry. She
found nothing specific, nothing incriminating. Her eye fell on
several expressions of unhappiness with John Talbot -- Celeste
thought her husband was "relentless" and "sharp" and "intolerant"
-- but there was nothing about the mayor, nothing that jumped out
anyway. Still, she'd been right about the Talbots' marriage being
loveless. If that was true, then anything was possible.

Slowly, fearfully, she
brought the diary up to her breast and tested it against the
necklace. The heat came at once, of such burning ferocity that she
felt the crystal searing her flesh. She let out a yelp of pain and
hurled the diary across the room. The leather cover, dry and
brittle with years, glowed red hot in the dim room, then erupted
spontaneously into flame. Horrified, Emily stumbled toward the bed
and yanked the coverlet from it, then ran to throw it over the
burning book, knocking down chairs and small tables in her panic.
She grabbed a broom and stomped the coverlet repeatedly, fiercely,
as if a deadly snake were writhing underneath it.

Now the coverlet was on
fire, smoking at first, and then bursting with small, wicked spikes
of flame. Too late she remembered the fire extinguisher in the
third-floor hall. She ran through the door she'd left open, ripped
the heavy red cylinder from its bracket, and ran back to the
coverlet, pulling the pin and spraying the coverlet with almost
maniacal zeal. When the flames were quelled she kept on spraying
anyway, until the cylinder was emptied. Exhausted and dripping with
sweat, she let the extinguisher fall to the floor and cautiously,
gingerly crouched down and lifted the coverlet to see if there was
anything to salvage.

The diary was a charred,
misshapen lump. Emily unfolded her knife and poked it into its
edge, to see if any of the text had survived. Suddenly the lump
exploded into flames again, one of them licking Emily's hair with a
kind of evil deliberation. With a horrified cry she threw the
coverlet down and jumped back, her nostrils filling with the
sickening stench of burning hair and skin. Tendrils of black smoke
began to crawl out from under the sodden coverlet, snaking toward
her.

She took one step back,
then two. "Don't you dare," she whispered faintly. "Don't you dare
. . ."

She didn't know what was
there anymore; she knew only that it lay writhing and curling
between her and the door. There wasn't a doubt in her mind that
she'd never make it past the incinerated diary. The exit window was
boarded up, and the original door led to nowhere. This was it,
then. She was going to die. She looked down and saw a sharply
defined, very black needle of smoke encircling her blue
jeans.

"No!"
she cried, outraged.
"I'm not
finished yet!"

But her knees had turned
to jelly. She collapsed to the floor, overcome by a hideous,
indescribable pain, as if the oxygen were being sucked from her
chest. She wanted desperately to black out and be done with it, but
she was being tortured with continuing consciousness. She tried to
think of what she'd done to deserve this, but she could not, and
that made her think of Fergus, hanging from a rope that should
never have been looped around his neck. "Fergus ... oh, Fergus." It
came out in a dizzying whimper.

When the room began
flooding with light her first thought was that Fergus should not
have come, that the house was empowered. But her second thought was
one of almost sublime elation. He
had
come; he
would
prevail. Even now the pain
inside her seemed to subside to something bearable. But she
couldn't possibly stand, much less run from the tower. She was
caught between two equal and opposing forces of heat and light, and
there was nothing she could do but watch and pray.

Yet there was little to
see, because she was blinded by the light, and little to do,
because she was powerless. She felt a great pulsing and shifting of
energy back and forth through her, as if the cosmos were expanding
and contracting. Even in her brutalized, victimized state she felt
a sense of awe for the sheer power of the forces involved. Wave
after wave advanced through her, then retreated, until finally she
felt that she had been broken down into the smallest possible
particles, like sand on a beach. Then, gradually, the fury began to
subside. It was over.

And she knew that Fergus
had won, because she was able to breathe again, and stand up again,
and swallow without pain. But at what cost to him? "Fergus," she
said in a frightened, tentative voice. "Fergus?"

But he did not answer.
When Emily turned around she realized that although Fergus had
destroyed something terrible, he'd left intact the handmaiden to
that terror: Marie Grissette. She was standing in the open doorway,
tall and thin and poised, surveying the destruction that had gone
before. Behind her -- unless he was an apparition -- stood Lee
Alden, alert, watchful, calm.

The three of them stood
frozen in an eerie, silent tableau for what seemed like a small
eternity. To break the spell, Emily suddenly lifted the blanket and
flipped it aside, revealing the burned lump that was all that
remained of the last year of Celeste Talbot's life.

Maria understood instantly
what had happened. Emily was prepared for just about anything, but
not for the speed of the horrifying transformation in the woman.
Maria let out a scream that was not of this world and charged at
Emily, her arms outstretched before her, her fingers curled into
talons. Her face was stripped free of its serenity, twisted with
rage and pain.

She clawed at Emily and
began pulling her down, but Lee jumped between them, using all his
considerable strength to drag the madwoman away. Emily had all the
fight of a rag doll left in her; when Maria let her go she fell
hard into the corner of a nearby dresser. And then everything went
much blacker than it had ever gone before.

****

When she regained
consciousness, she was being loaded into an ambulance, and Lee was
alongside, getting directions from the driver to the
hospital.

"Wait ... wait," she said
rather stupidly, trying to sit up. "I'm fine. And I left my bag."
She was thinking of the diary, lying in the wet grass somewhere
next to the knapsack she'd left there. "Let me up. Right now,
please. I must insist."

"Easy does it, Emily," Lee
said with a shaky laugh. "These guys are bigger than you are; don't
give 'em any trouble. I'll get your bag for you and bring it along.
Where'd you leave it?"

"In the grass, by the
tower." She grabbed the lapel of Lee's suit and pulled him close.
"There's a diary somewhere around it," she whispered loudly in his
ear. "Bring it. I don't think it can hurt you. It should be cool by
now. If it's not, leave it. I know who it was anyway."

Lee gave her a baffled
look, and dopey but pleased with the presence of mind she was
showing, she fell back on the stretcher. The paramedics lifted it
to the floor of the ambulance. "Wait ... wait," she cried
again.

Lee murmured something to
the driver and in a voice of gentle reason asked Emily, "What is it
now, darling?"

"Maria -- where is
she?"

The interior lights of the
ambulance threw a ghastly pallor over Lee's face. "She's inside,"
he said tersely. "They're with her now."

He refused to say any more
than that. Before she could question him further, Emily was being
whisked away to New Bedford General, the sounds of sirens screaming
directly over her head. Once or twice she said Fergus's name, with
no response. She was still a little groggy -- but not, as the
paramedics speculated, because of a possible concussion. "It's been
a rough night," she said with an apologetic smile to the paramedic
beside her. Another thought occurred to her. "Is there a BMW
following us?"

The paramedic looked out
the rear window and came back to her. "Yeah, he's right behind us."
He sat silently for a little while, then looked out the window
again. "Still coming. Right through the red light. I guess he can
get a ticket fixed easy enough," he added, chuckling.

Emily smiled gamely, but
she wasn't about to let him engage her in chitchat over the
senator. She closed her eyes and played dead until they wheeled her
into the emergency room. When she got there she was examined by a
staff physician who checked her out and said, "How do you
feel?"

"Fine. I'm a little tired,
but otherwise I'm fine," Emily answered.

He smiled in a kindly way
and said, "Good. Someone will fix up that burn for you." Then he
left her for a while, and when he came back he had her knapsack
with him. Emily tore it open and saw that the diary was inside,
completely soaked—it must've rained while she was in the tower—but
still in one piece.

"I think we're going to
keep you overnight for observation," the physician said. "You got
conked pretty good."

"What? No. I can't. It's
out of the question. I feel perfect. You can't make me stay, can
you? No. Really. I can't." She looked around, distracted, fully
intending to run for it if she had to. "Is the -- the man who gave
you this still around?" she asked.

"He's very definitely
still around, which is one reason you're staying, young lady. Do
you think I want to butt heads with a United States
senator?"

"May I speak with him for
just a moment, please?" she asked, clutching her
knapsack.

In two minutes a nurse
ushered Lee into the examining room, and they were alone. Emily was
a mess, with her patched-up chest and her burned-out hair, but she
tried to put on a bright face. "Hi!" she said in an absurdly
chipper voice. "I hear you're trying to have me locked
up."

Lee didn't smile at all.
He looked haggard, in fact, which made her feel a little better. At
least he wasn't any more presentable than she was. "Give it a rest,
Emily," he said. "For once in your life, stop seeing every little
thing as a battle of wills."

"That's not it at all,"
she lied. "I know you're concerned, but I really am fine. I want to
go home."

"What happened in the
tower?" Lee asked. "Did he show up after all?"

"He was there," she said,
less chipper now. "I'm not sure what happened, but I know the house
has been purged. There's nothing there anymore. I -- I don't think
I'll be seeing Fergus again," she added, her voice catching in her
throat. "I think whatever force he had, whatever energy -- he used
it up fighting the horror that was in there. And it was my fault,
Lee," she said mournfully. "He warned me away from Talbot Manor.
Now I don't know what's happened to him." The tears began to roll
freely; she did nothing to stop them.