House of Dreams (44 page)

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Authors: Brenda Joyce

BOOK: House of Dreams
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“Tracey! Let her go. Please!” Celia cried.
Alyssa did not want to go, and she balked. Her mother dragged her step by step to the door. “Please,” Alyssa sobbed, “don't make me go.” And she felt herself wetting her pants.
Tracey shook her once. “Didn't you hear what I said?” she cried.
Alyssa nodded, her eyes glued to her mother's beautiful, ravaged face, aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, and her heart pumping in huge, terrifying bursts. Where was Aunt Cass? She prayed she would appear.
“Let her go,” Eduardo cried, hobbling after them. “Señora!”
Tracey adjusted her grip on Alyssa and pulled her with even more force from the room.
“No!” Alyssa cried. She struggled, but it was so useless. Her strength was no match for her mother's. “Eduardo! Celia!” Glancing backward through her tears, she saw their wide, white, frightened faces. “Don't leave me! Please! Don't leave me!”
Celia seemed paralyzed. But Eduardo set his crutches beneath him and hobbled furiously after them.
Alyssa realized her mother was dragging her through the downstairs of the house. Her expression was stretched so tightly, her face seemed to have become a taut clay mask, and her eyes blazed blue. And it struck Alyssa's dazed and shocked mind that something was more than wrong with her mother, but she did not know what. And the next thing she knew, a door was being opened.
Alyssa was confronted with a yawning hole of darkness.
From behind, she was pushed.
Alyssa screamed as she fell down and down, tumbling and tumbling, finally landing in a heap at the bottom of a very narrow flight of steep, slick stone stairs. “Mother!” she whimpered.
There was no answer.
Alyssa cringed where she had landed, afraid to move. “Mother!”
Tracey did not reply. Instead, a door somewhere above slammed shut—the sound resounding and final. And it was followed by a click.
“Mommy! Don't leave me!” she screamed.
For the hundredth time, Cass glanced at her watch. It was almost eight o'clock.
“We'll never find the ravine,” she called out. Antonio had climbed out of the dry stream bed and was walking up a slight hill. “We have to turn back.” She glanced over her shoulder. The house was no longer in sight and the light was finally fading. She knew now by experience that within another forty-five minutes or so, if not less, it would be dark.
They had to go back. Cass shivered. But not because it was cold. She did not know what horrors the night would bring, but Isabel was on the loose, and she could not leave the children alone. She must protect them at all costs.
Antonio suddenly cried out.
Cass jerked, to see him scrambling over the top of the hill, disappearing from sight.
She ran after him. When she reached the top of the knoll, she saw Antonio below in a rocky ravine, and there was no question as to what he was standing beside.
She hesitated. He knelt slowly to the ground.
Oh, God.
This was it. Had they found Margarita after all these years?
Suddenly Cass was torn. A part of her was hoping that the answer was yes, but another part of her was fearing such an answer, too.
She told herself that it did not matter. Antonio needed closure, but whatever his response to it might be, it did not affect her. Their lives had been wrecked by the complications Isabel had brought to them all. There was no chance now of ever going forward. Besides, she didn't even want to. Not now, not anymore.
She had a sister to take care of, and her niece. She would have no time to focus on anything or anyone else.
“Cassandra,” he said hoarsely.
Reluctantly she started down the steep, rocky side of the ravine. There was no stench—because there was no flesh. The bones were dusty and dirty, but clean.
He wasn't moving. Cass approached him from behind. She knelt beside him. Her gaze was instantly drawn to tatters of peach-colored fabric, and then she saw the sparkling solitaire diamond ring.
Antonio stood up. Cass glimpsed his expression, and she knew they had found her. She straightened to her full height.
“We have to go back.” He started climbing back up the ravine.
Cass hurried after him. Without thinking, she grabbed his arm from behind, detaining him. “I'm sorry.”
He finally looked at her. His expression was a mask, impossible to read. “So am I.” He pulled free and started climbing to the top of the knoll again.
Cass stared after him. What the hell did that mean? Did he still love her? And why was she jealous?
A tendril of air wafted around her, like the caress of a breeze, or hair.
The slightest sweetness seemed to emanate from the ground beside her—violets.
Cass's pulse went wild. Isabel was about to materialize, she thought frantically, and she broke into a run—as if she might outpace her. She caught up to Antonio on the way down the other side of the hill, as they hit the stream bed. Cass scanned the area breathlessly. There was no one about, Isabel was not about. Had she imagined that touch?
Had she imagined that scent? She sniffed and could not decide. Briefly, Cass closed her eyes.
She was unraveling, she thought.
Fear would be the death of her
.
Cass's eyes flew open. She wished she had never had such a thought.
Antonio was marching resolutely back the way they had come. Cass started and had to run to catch up to him. As she did so, she saw how
impossibly impassive his face had become. She could not help herself; compassion filled her. “Are you okay?” she asked, hushed.
“No.”
Her temples, which had probably been throbbing for hours and hours, suddenly felt explosive. “It's not your fault.” She had to run alongside him to keep up with him.
He whirled, and she was confronted with raw rage, the likes of which she had never before seen—not in anyone.
“Not my fault?!
She begged me to go home! She
begged
me, Cassandra.
Voices.
She heard voices in the night. She said she had dreams. Not dreams, nightmares. A woman, whispering, threatening her. Threatening her life. She was so damn terrified and I laughed at her fears! Because my work was more important than listening to her, understanding her, and returning to Madrid. So do not tell me it was not my fault! And in the future, goddamn it, mind your own fucking business.”
Cass recoiled as if she had been shot.
Antonio whirled and strode away.
She could not move. She felt as if she had been blasted by a rifle—with both barrels.
Mind your own fucking business?
So this was what their friendship had come down to? Hadn't he told her, just hours ago, that he was in love with her? What was happening to them!
Antonio stumbled and came up short.
They looked at one another. Cass imagined her eyes were as wide and as frightened as his.
“It's her,” Cass whispered. “She's doing this. It's
her
rage. Not yours. Antonio—she's poisoning
your
mind.”
He stared. And then, “We have to get back to the house.”
They ran.
 
 
“Mommy, Mommy!” Alyssa wept. “Please come back!”
But Tracey was gone, and Alyssa knew it. Then she froze as she heard a movement above her on the stairs. She began to shake violently, wondering what was up there—a rat? a snake?
She reminded herself that snakes were not inside houses, not even old ones like this, as more tears slipped helplessly down her face.
And Alyssa knew what was up there. It was a ghost.
No, not a ghost—
the
ghost.
The evil woman from her dreams, the one who kept telling her that she was her mother now, the one who had chased her outside last night.
Alyssa shivered and trembled and peed in her panties again.
Something crashed down several steps.
Alyssa screamed, jumping farther away from where she had landed on the stone floor, her back hitting the wall.
“It's me,” Eduardo whispered, and his voice echoed loudly around them.
“Eduardo!” Alyssa cried, overcome with relief. She realized it was a crutch—or both crutches—that had fallen down the stairs.
“Are you all right?” he asked, a quaver in his tone.
“I'm so scared,” Alyssa replied, and then, as she recalled her mother's almost maniacal expression, more tears fell. How could her mother have done this to her? Why had she done this? There was no one, no one, not even her aunt Cass, whom Alyssa loved more than her own mother. But her mother didn't love her. Her mother didn't want to be her mother, which was why Aunt Cass had raised her.
Did her mother hate her? Did her mother want to kill her? Was that why she had put her in this black place beneath the house? So she would die? So Tracey could be free to be beautiful, travelling all over the world and posing in magazines with new boyfriends?
Alyssa's heart felt like it was being ripped apart inside her small body.
Eduardo was coming slowly down the stairs, thump by careful thump. Alyssa suddenly stiffened even more.
“Don't come down, you'll get hurt,” Alyssa cried. “Do you have your crutches? How did you get in here?”
“I have … one … of them,” he panted. “I ran in … before she … closed the door.”
Alyssa's eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, and while the room they were in was utterly dark, she could just slightly make out a darker shadow not far from where she stood. She was still afraid to move. “Do you think there are rats and mice down here?”
“I … don't … know,” he panted, still thumping down the stairs. “But … they will … be afraid … of us, too.”
Alyssa sucked up her courage and inched forward, almost blindly, until her foot struck what she knew was his crutch. “Wait,” she whispered, her voice echoing. “I found your crutch.”
She retrieved it and crept forward, on all fours and using her hands now, until she came to the stairs. “Where are you?” She groped for the second step.
“Right here,” he whispered from above her.
Alyssa extended the crutch, and was rewarded when she felt him take
it from her. Then she hurried up to where he was standing. She hugged him, hard. “Thank you,” she whispered, “for not leaving me alone.”
“It's nothing,” he said nonchalantly. He hugged her even harder back.
“No, it's not. You are a hero, Eduardo, a brave hero.”
She felt him smiling. “Where are we?” he asked.
“You don't know?” She was dismayed. “But this is your house.”
“I've only been here once before—and I don't even remember that time. This must be a part of the dungeons,” he said, low.
Alyssa knew all about dungeons—she had grown up in England, after all. What if there were dead people down there with them? She trembled. “Why did she do this? Why did she do this to me?” She heard her own voice break on her last words.
“I don't know. But don't worry.” Alyssa knew he was smiling bravely. “They will find us. You'll see. My father and your aunt are so smart. They will find us right away.”
Alyssa hoped he was right. “But what if they don't?” she whispered. “What will happen to us then?”
Eduardo did not answer.
Alyssa knew it was because he had no answer to make.
 
 
Once again, the front door of the house was ajar—when they had deliberately left it closed. Cass and Antonio exchanged glances, hurrying into the house and then down the hall. They both heard Alfonso groan at the same time.
They rushed into the library. Antonio cried out just as Cass saw Alfonso sitting on the floor, with Celia, who was holding a wadded handkerchief to his head. He was so white she thought that he might pass out at any moment. Celia was equally pale. And the rest of the room was empty. The children were gone.
Cass rushed past Antonio. And even as she spoke, she knew she should not be accusing them—she knew, somehow, that Isabel was to blame—but the words spilled forth of their own volition. “Where are the children?” she cried furiously. “Why aren't they here?”
Alfonso shrank away from her, beginning to explain, babbling in the language she could not understand.
Cass moaned, holding her head, pacing, her pulse exploding in her chest, too many horrible images of the children to even count wildly tumbling through her mind. As Antonio sank down beside the older man, Celia cried, “Miss de Warenne, it was your sister!”
Cass whirled. “What?!”
Celia was so grim that something inside Cass sickened with dread. “She came in here and asked Alyssa to go with her. When Alfonso tried to bring her a bowl of soup, she struck him down. I begged her not to go, to stay here in the library with us. She did not even seem to hear me. Alyssa did not want to go with her, but she gave her no choice.” Celia seemed about to cry. “The little boy ran after them, bless his soul.”
Cass's heart stopped. When it started again, she could not breathe. “She would never harm her own daughter.”
Celia inhaled, hard, as if about to speak. But she was not given the chance.
“She is not Tracey anymore!” Antonio said, his eyes flashing. “You do not know what she is capable of.”
Cass backed away. “You saw her twenty minutes ago. She was fine. Fine. Damn you.” She started for the door; he caught her wrist, whipping her back around.
“She isn't fine. She lost her memory and someone killed that electrician. Just like someone killed my wife!”
Cass trembled and pulled free. “Tracey certainly had nothing to do with your wife's disappearance and death.” She felt a savage satisfaction as she uttered the words, a satisfaction that she knew was somehow wrong.
“She almost killed my valet,” Antonio raged. “He's bleeding and he will need stitches!”
Cass had no answer for that. “I'm sure the children and Tracey are in the kitchen or the courtyard. I'm going to find them.” She ran for the door.
“Miss de Warenne!” Celia cried.
Cass didn't want to hear whatever it was the Celia had to say. Ignoring her, she ran into the hall. She could hardly think, her thoughts were jumbled, incoherent, crazed.
Antonio caught up to her. She did not stop. “Alyssa!
Alyssa!
Where are you?” she shouted.

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