Fitcher's Brides (42 page)

Kate glanced away from the view, her eyes brimming with tears. So he knew, he already knew. The spell upon him must have lifted. Her poor father had been deluded in his grief by the persuasion of Fitcher. And by Lavinia. Turning back to the glass, she said her stepmother's name.

Abruptly there was darkness. Trees in tidy rows stood on either side of her. It was the orchard. In the distance were the lights of the village, but no sign of Lavinia. Then she burst into view between the trees, turned, and ran straight at Kate. She was dressed again in her riding clothes, her hair unfurled, fanning blackly behind her. Her face taut with terror, she sobbed between ragged breaths. She looked over her shoulder, as if watching for pursuit, as a gray veil appeared between Kate's view and Lavinia. It fluttered and settled in her path, flexed into an anthropomorphic form like smoke trapped in a human-shaped bottle. Kate cried out, “Lavinia, no, go back!”

As if hearing her, Lavinia faced forward and saw it. She shrieked and tried to run the other way, but the grayness swept right up and embraced her. Lavinia wailed, “Please, Elias, no, let me stay! I'll find you more, I'll find you
new ones
!” Her feet rose off the ground. She was held in the air, and slowly, inexorably, she began to wither. Her scream of agony thinned, became a shrill whistle, her skin wrinkled and collapsed as if everything inside were desiccating. Her bones cracked like kindling taking a flame. Under the crackling sound, the thing whispered to her soothingly, “There, now, give unto me your life, there can be no resurrection for you, my servant, slave. You were judged so long ago.” Kate shivered at the awful slyness of a voice she'd only heard in dreams till now. This was the thing he'd sent to their room, the shade in the wall that had enticed each sister in her turn. It was no spirit, no angel as she imagined angels, no matter what they called it here.

When finally the thing set her down, Lavinia was nothing but a dry skin in a boiled shirt. The skin crumpled into the grass, vanishing as if the earth had absorbed her. The murdering shade slid away between the trees.

Lavinia had been Fitcher's lieutenant, his lover, his jealous procurer. She had delivered his wives—at least, thought Kate, the last three of them. Kate made a silent prayer that God would forgive Lavinia what she had done: She couldn't hate another victim of Fitcher, not even her stepmother. In a few minutes, he would claim Kate's soul as well. That was the plan, of course, and always had been. Lavinia's task had been to find him his perfect flower. No doubt she worshipped him as Kate's sisters and the multitude did—worshipped him and desired him. Now he didn't need her any longer. He had everything he wanted.

On the first floor, the clock struck the first toll of midnight. A roar reached Kate from the yard far below. She'd been absorbed too long. She had to get to her father.

She turned to run but in her haste lurched against a small rail she hadn't seen. She hit it with such force that she nearly tumbled over it headfirst. Her lantern rang against it like a bell. The egg spun out of her pocket. She clutched the rail to keep from going over, and found herself hanging above the stained-glass panel over the slaughter room, over the cauldron. The egg fell straight through the glass, sending cracks in every direction, puncturing the image of Eve. For an instant the window sagged around the hole. Then like the bridge in the gorge, it collapsed. It crashed down as the clock struck its fourth chime. “Vern! Amy!” Kate cried. She raced down the stairs to the room.

Most of the window had landed in the cauldron. The bodies she'd laid out at the side were untouched. The skull was rolling around in the sticky blood on the floor, and Kate picked it up. She stood up the overturned candelabrum and set the skull on top of it, between the prongs.

It was then that she witnessed the unfolding miracle.

The bodies she had assembled were knitting together. Where Fitcher had hacked them apart, skin and bones were rejoining, the awful seams were closing up.

The clock tolled again.

Kate looked up at the refulgent point of the pyramid above her and thought,
Not a Day of Judgment, but one of Resurrection
. Whose power, whose magic, was this? Surely not his, not Fitcher's. His powers delivered only death.

As she watched, dumbfounded, her healed sisters opened their eyes and sat up. Vern looked at herself in wonder. Amy began to cry. Kate knelt and hugged them both. The skull, perched above, seemed to gaze imperiously upon the reunion.

From the floors below came the din of the congregation, sounding more animal than human.

“It's the end of the world,” Amy cried.

“Not for us, not if I can help it,” said Kate. “But it will be if we walk out through the front of this house—he'd recognize us and have us torn to pieces. He's out there now with his Angel of Death. And you two, you're drenched in more blood than the angel.”

She paused a moment then, thinking of what she'd seen in the magic glass above. The clock sounded one final time. The fifteenth had arrived. Kate rose and began to undress.

“What are you doing?” Vern asked.

“I'll show you soon enough. Help me now. We have to get to Papa and take him with us.” She undressed quickly, and draped her fancy clothes over the candelabrum. The matches in her pockets spilled across the floor, but she ignored them. She didn't need them now. She began to smear herself with the blood from the floor. They saw what she was doing and joined in. They smeared her and then themselves with it, until all three of them were covered from head to foot in blood.

“Follow me now,” she said, and took them by the hand, leading them out of the chamber and down the back circling stairwell. She emerged on the second floor. It was empty, although the crowd sounded as if they stood on the stairs below. Vandalized belongings were still strewn across the hall. She wanted the mattresses where the surgeons had worked, in particular the expensive ones. Kate grabbed the pickax beside them and used it to rip a mattress down the middle. She stuck her hands into the cavity and flung the contents into the air. Feathers flew around them, settled, and stuck. “They're all expecting signs,” she said as she shook out more feathers. “Demons or angels. They'll let us through, they're too terrified to reason it out.”

Vern nodded, uncertainly but gamely reached into the mattress and threw more feathers at Kate. In a few minutes they were all covered in a layer of feathers, unrecognizable as Fitcher's brides, almost as anything human.

People were milling about on the second floor now. Kate led her sisters to the back stairs and quickly descended.

At the bottom, one door opened to the kitchen and another to the back porch. They went outside. As Kate had hoped, most of the crowd had surged to the front of the house at the stroke of midnight to be close to Fitcher, their savior, and abandoned the makeshift encampment. Many of the tents had been trampled flat. There were bodies lying strewn through the debris. Kate said, “Listen to me, now, Papa is in the village barn. We have to go and bring him.”

“What about Lavinia?” Amy asked.

She replied, “She's gone.”

Vern said, “All right, sister.”

The three girls crept down the steps into the yard, but they hadn't gone more than a few steps when a cluster of people barreled out of a dormitory door and saw them. “My Lord, it's the angels!” They pointed and clung to one another. “The angels are come for us!” The group sprang apart, scrambling in every direction with their announcement. Kate said, “Go, hurry, get Papa. I'll stay here and divert them.” Vern and Amy bolted for the village, running through the night like fabled monsters out of a bestiary.

Shortly, more people came crowding around the sides of the house, rushing to see the angels. Kate reasoned that if they thought she was an angel, she would be an angel. Rather than trying to flee, she stepped boldly to the alarm bell and swung the clapper back and forth. Now no one would pay attention to Vern and Amy.

More people crowded around her. They pressed in, some quivering with terror, some crying, so many that she could not bear their collective misery. They wanted salvation so much that they had lost their wits.

“Listen to me, good people,” she said. “The world has not ended. It was never going to end the way you've been told. You were lied to, deceived.”

“Who?” they cried. “Who deceived us?”

“You deceived yourselves. You let one man promise he could save you, one villain—”

She was grabbed from behind and spun around. Fitcher loomed over her in his black coat, his face blackly furious.

Kate twisted out of his grip and shouted, “Look for yourselves, look at First Corinthians, fifteen-two. You are saved—”

Fitcher hauled her around again. “Where is
He
? Why has He sent you instead? Behold you, and tell Him”—he turned her about again and swept his arm across the gathering—“here they all are, his most ardent worshippers, but they're all mine now, they've given
me
their souls, every one, even the most virginal—” He stopped suddenly and craned his head. “Where is my wife? I want Him to see her especially. She's the purest, the most perfect, but I have her, too. She promised me her soul tonight and I'll have it. Where is she?”

She replied, “I know where she is. I'll show you, devil.”

He grinned. Then he followed her up onto the porch and inside. The crowd moved to the porch but hesitated to go farther. They tried to fathom what the angel had been saying, tried to recall her verse.

Crossing the foyer, Kate watched Fitcher as he followed her. Clearly he did not recognize her. She dismissed it as more proof of his madness, until they passed the large girandole mirror on the side wall and she caught a glimpse of herself and her husband. Her reflection glowed. Her feathers looked more like a gown, and nothing like how she saw herself. To him and to the Fitcherites, she had been transformed.

Kate led him up the main stairs. People on the staircase fled before them and scurried onto the second floor as they continued to climb. Fitcher jabbered insanely behind her, “He makes me walk among them, these bovine golems of His. How easily I could collect them, every one, and He'd have nothing. He must let me in now, or I'll smash His little world.”

At the top floor she stopped and pointed down the hall. “There she is. She's waiting for you.”

Fitcher saw his wife in the bloody chamber. The door was thrown open and candles set on the floor burned all around her. She faced him, fearless it seemed, standing her ground. Her hands gestured, waved him forward, invited him in. His eyes narrowed. “So, Katherine, you, too. Daughter of Eve. You lie like all the others, you're all the same, every
one of you
!” He strode hard, faster and faster down the hall. Kate ran after him. The doors of the rooms had closed. The silent men were gone.

Fitcher burst into the bloody room and swiped at the enticing figure. His fingers caught the dress. It tore away from the frame of the candelabrum. The skull spun into the air and struck him. One of the glass thorns gashed his forehead. Underfoot, glass crunched, and he looked down at it, then up to where stained glass leading hung empty and contorted. His mouth opened—it seemed to Kate in fear. For the first time, he was afraid.

Decayed fingers crawled wormlike out of the cauldron and grabbed on to him.

“What is this?” he cried. He realized he'd been tricked and struggled to fight off the clawing hands, but more hands reached out from beneath the cauldron and took hold of his ankles. He faced Kate.

In the doorway she replied, “Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel, and there is no secret we can hide from thee!”

The hands drew shards of broken glass, shattered pieces of Eve and Adam, and drove them through his feet and his hands. The cauldron trembled and frothed. One disembodied skeletal hand pushed a long thin blade of crimson glass through the back of his neck and out between his teeth. Mouth pushed wide, Fitcher howled inhumanly and stretched out his impaled hands to the sky. His fingers writhed like snakes, curling, uncurling, grasping for power.

Kate slammed the door on him. The keys were still in the lock where she'd left them. She turned the latch, then broke the glass key in half. With a loud
crack
it snapped off in the lock.

She raced for the stairs. As she ran down them she yelled at everyone ahead of her to get out of the house. Before the charging, feathered avatar, the Fitcherites fled shrieking. She could see the glow of herself reflecting on every polished surface.

They stumbled, crawled, and ran out the front doors ahead of her. She stopped upon the portico and surveyed the melee below. The crowd became aware of her. They turned, pointed, and fell silent, both inside and beyond the fence. Torches were raised. Perhaps three dozen smaller lights glowed among the crowd—candles, lit so that they might not meet their maker in darkness.

As they beheld Kate, there was movement at the side of the house. The throng parted and Vern and Amy appeared, like creatures woven of light themselves, leading Mr. Charter and the group who'd been with him in the barn.

“Open those gates,” Kate cried. “Let everyone
out
.” She went down the steps and snatched a torch from one of the men nearby. She carried it back to the front door and threw the torch inside, against the stairwell. It broke apart, scattering flames into the green drapery. Flames caught the dried flowers between the stairs and climbed angrily up the huge wooden cross.

The crowd was bewildered—ordering them to be let out suggested that they'd been locked in and not the other way around. They looked at the sky, at the stars scattered above them, and at all the people pressed against the outside of the fence: people who had not perished. Midnight had come, and no one had perished.

A man with one of the large tallow candles approached the front of the house. He sidled past Kate, then threw his candle into one of the tall windows. The glass shattered and the curtains burst into flame. Someone yelled, and as if it were a signal, a horde rushed the building. Candles, lamps, and torches sailed into the air, through the windows, into the parlors. Within minutes, the fire spread to the upper floors. Flames danced at the windows and caught the siding.