CHAPTER NINE

"I've made my decision, mother. It's final."

Mother frowns at me, an expression that conveys a distaste so pure it could be distilled and crystallized. "Odd, the decisions you choose to stand behind. You approach cowardice with more bravery than anyone I've ever known."

Her words sting, but I've long ago learned to hide the pain. "There's no cowardice in choosing to be an educator. The world needs teachers."

"The world needs doctors as well, and few people spend four years in school showing such promise as you only to throw away a scholarship to the finest medical university in the world to pursue a career teaching elementary school."

"Perhaps more people should show such humility." I counter.

"Cowardice, Mary, not humility."

"Don't presume to know my thoughts."

I try to keep emotion from my voice, but I can't stop the crack that comes on the last word. She just makes me so angry!

"But I do know your thoughts, dear. You're a coward. You always have been."

She says this with the same casual tone one might use to say, "That is a housecat," but her face drips with scorn.

I wait a moment to allow the sting to pass, then say, "I'm sorry you feel that way."

"What would Annie think, I wonder? Had you not abandoned her, she might be here to—Oh!"

Her face whips to the left from the force of my blow. She stares at me in shock and lifts a hand to her already reddening face. I'm sure I wear the same shock in my own eyes.

I've never struck my mother before, but what's done is done. And the bitch deserved it anyway. "I didn't abandon her, mother. I chose to remember her as she was and not fixate on the horrible fate that might have befallen her."

"You could have spared her that fate, you fucking coward!" she hisses. All pretense of civility is gone from her voice. "You signed that bloody document. It's your fault they stopped looking for her. If she's dead, it's because you let her die."

I open my mouth to continue the argument, then close it. My mother's gone. I'm no longer in her home in Boston. I'm in the forest. The air is bitterly cold, and the trees are devoid of leaves. Their skeletal forms loom over me, reaching for me with bony, grasping fingers. A fog thickens around me, and I remain perfectly still, convinced that if I budge even an inch, they'll reach me.

The hairs on the back of my neck lift. I want to shiver, but even that movement is denied me. My heart thumps thickly in my chest, and my breath adds to the fog in front of me.

Something's behind me. Some one is behind me. I can feel it. I can feel her. She's behind me, and if I turn around, I'll see her; if I turn around, I'll know; if I turn around, it'll all be over, and my sanity will snap, and I'll scream, and I'll scream, and I'll scream, and I'll never stop screaming and God, just please go away, go away, go aWAY!

Something slithers over my shoulder. My eyes turn slowly to my right, and I see porcelain-white fingers moving over me. I lift my gaze up to the owner of those fingers. When I meet the specter's eyes, I open my mouth and—

***

I sit bolt upright and gasp. I am soaked in sweat, but I shiver uncontrollably.

"Oh God," I whisper, a breathy hiss that sounds like it comes from my chest and not my throat. "Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh God."

The terror of the dream leaves me trembling and still for a long while. I wait until my heartbeat calms, then several minutes after. An irrational fear convinces me that if I move, something horrible will happen.

But I'm awake now. This is the real world. I am in my room in Ashford Manor, and there is no one else here.

I throw the covers off and get out of bed. I put on slippers and stalk out of the room. My movements are almost aggressive, and I have to remind myself the household is sleeping. I must be considerate.

As the fear fades, anger replaces it. I haven't had a nightmare like that in years. Not since before my mother died. Now, the night after some foolish doctor tells me I am a recovered mental patient, it comes back? And that memory of slapping my mother to preface it: it's all the fault of that damned file.

Someone falsified it. They had to have falsified it. I am not a former mental patient. Yes, I saw a therapist for years after Annie's disappearance, but I was never hospitalized. I would have remembered that. My therapists would have talked with me about that.

It's Harrow. It has to be. He knows I'm looking into Johnathan's murder, and he wants me discredited. He knows I was protecting Elijah from him, and he's trying to get me out of the way so he can go after him. Is he trying to murder Elijah, too?

I stop and take a deep breath, then release it slowly. I take another, then another, willing myself to calm.

Now I am being paranoid. I'm letting my imagination run away with myself. I don't even know for sure that Johnathan was murdered and now I'm jumping at shadows.

Well, it's that damned doctor's fault! How could they believe I was delusional for burning my hand?

My education tells me that my anger is a manifestation of my fear, and my urgent need to find someone to blame is an attempt to shift blame from myself. Knowing this and being incapable of unknowing it makes my emotions all the harder to deal with.

I close my eyes and press my fingers to my temples. I am not a vulgar woman, but the words that run through my mind are vulgar indeed. Were someone to wake and discover me leaning against the wall with my head in my hands, whispering curse words that would embarrass a sailor, I would no doubt be committed once more.

No! Not once more! Damn it, I am not a mental patient!

Absurd as it is for a woman of my age, I feel a scream bubbling up in my throat. I stride forward purposefully and open the door in front of me.

I enter a room I've never seen before. That, in and of itself isn't surprising. After all, I've only been here a few days. The house is absolutely massive, nearly thirty thousand square feet, and I believe I've explored barely a third of that.

This room appears to be an art room. I recognize the silhouettes of statues and the outlines of paintings hanging from the walls. One painting appears to rest on an easel that faces the opposite wall.

I flip on the light switch and stiffen.

The statues—there are three of them—are statues of three women: a mother and two daughters. The mother is of medium height, thin with a severe look on her face. One of the daughters is tall and beautiful, with a perfect figure and noble features. The other is shorter and somewhat thicker, with a kind face; pretty, but hardly anything special.

I know that many families appear this way, but after the dream I've had, it's hard not to feel that the statues aren't of my mother, myself and Annie.

I look at the paintings, hoping to find some relief, but they provide none. The images I hope to find of the typical portraits of ancestors or landscapes of sunsets or meadows are nowhere to be found.

Gray. They're all gray. There's so much bleak gray.

The paintings appear to be of the grounds, but none of them show the house, and all the trees are the blackened, skeletal husks that now stand outside of the manor. The garden is replaced by an expanse of sickly gray grass. The pond is a pallid black-brown, and the bird that sits perched on the nearest of the charred-bone trees is very much not a duck.

The vulture is painted with red eyes, and those eyes seem to point straight at me.

The air in the room seems to thicken. I draw in deep breaths, but I can't seem to transport the oxygen to my lungs. It sticks in my throat, and the more I gasp, the less air I obtain.

I need to leave. I need to leave now before something horrible befalls me.

I start to walk, but not out of the room. No, I'm not allowed that mercy. I walk through the mausoleum of my own life while revenant trees and specters of my past watch me, led by that demonic vulture.

It's a dream. It's a dream, that's all it is. I'm dreaming, and I'll wake up soon. It'll be all right.

I tell myself this, but I know it's not true. I know as I walk to the final painting, the one on the canvas facing the opposite wall, that when I look to see what's depicted on it, I will be regarding an image as real as my own body.

I reach the painting and turn in front of it. My eyes slide toward the painting even as my mind pleads with me to stop.

When I see the image, my jaw goes slack. My shoulders slump, and my knees start to tremble.

The painting is of the same forest I see in my dream. Barren trees grasp at the figure in the middle, a pallid gray woman, shorter and slightly thick, with a kind face, pretty but not anything special.

My face.

Fog wraps around the woman, and her eyes stare into mine with a fright just as great. Her jaw is slack, but her lips remained pressed together, as though she fears the scream she'll release if her lips part.

It's not this that frightens me, though. It's the other figure in the painting, the one whose porcelain-white fingers caress the shoulder of my doppelganger almost lovingly.

This figure is as bright and ghostly as the other's is gray and bleak. Its face betrays no emotion even as it turns its head to look down on the frightened woman.

I realize as I look at this figure that I expected its eyes to be red, like the vulture's in the painting of the grounds.

Instead, two empty black holes draw me into the abyss.

The next thing I know, I'm in my bed with the covers pulled over my head, and I'm sobbing uncontrollably.

I try to tell myself that I just woke up here, that it was just another nightmare, but I can still hear my footsteps pounding down the hall, can still hear the door slam behind me, can still feel those porcelain white fingers burning into my shoulder, and I know that what I saw was nothing so harmless as a dream.