Chapter Eighteen Frankie
EIGHTEEN FRANKIE
I’d been dreaming of my mother again. I was snuggled up against her while she burned feverishly in her deathbed, her lungs rattling as she struggled to take in air.
She was clinging tightly to me, wrapping her whole self around me like a terrible serpent, crushing me, expelling all the air from my chest, leaving me breathless, while the walls started crumbling and closing in around us.
I sat up with a jolt, gasping for air, my own sheets damp with sweat. I lit the lamp and fumbled for my pocket watch. Someone was pounding on the door.
Quarter past four in the morning.
I’d gotten into bed just four hours ago.
We’d put Emile in Aunt Margaret’s sewing room behind the kitchen.
There was a small bed in there so the room could double as a guest room when we had visitors.
We’d checked on Emile before retiring at midnight, and he was still unconscious.
Uncle Thomas had sewn up the wound on his neck, and we’d managed to warm him with hot water bottles and blankets.
We couldn’t yet determine his prognosis—he’d lost a lot of blood and had been out in the bitter cold a very long time.
Uncle Thomas had applied a salve and a light dressing to Margaret’s abdomen where the hot water had scalded her skin.
As he was tending to her, I noticed the dark circles under my aunt’s eyes, the hollow look on her face.
She looked like she was losing weight when she should be gaining.
Perhaps Uncle Thomas was right to be worried about her.
He’d left me with Emile while he brought Margaret upstairs to give her a sedative.
Since learning she was pregnant, Aunt Margaret had been sleeping on her own in the second bedroom upstairs—what’s to be the nursery when the baby is born.
She’s always had trouble with fitful sleep, and it’s worse with the pregnancy.
She thought it would be better for them both if she slept on her own.
The pounding at the door continued.
I jumped out of bed. My bedroom had once been a storage room. Now it contained a bed and a dresser, a few pegs on the walls to hang shirts and coats. The air was chilly, and I pulled on a pair of pants and a coat over my nightshirt and went to see who was banging on the door.
Uncle Thomas was running down the stairs, Margaret behind him.
“You go back to bed, Margaret,” he insisted. “You need your rest.”
“I’ll come with you to see if it’s anything I can help with,” Margaret said, tying the belt of her dressing gown.
I got to the front door before they did and pulled it open.
Pearl stood there, wrapped in her wool coat, a gust of icy wind blowing in behind her.
“Dear girl! Come in!” Margaret said. “You’ll catch your death out there.”
I reached for her, pulled her inside.
Her hands were bare and icy. She was pale, white as the snowy landscape she’d come out of.
“Is it your mother?” Thomas asked, taking her hands in his.
Pearl nodded, eyes huge and frantic. “Doctor, she got up out of bed.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Perhaps she’s—”
“She attacked my father. Biting and clawing, screaming. She moved so fast, she was so strong. It was like… like she had the devil inside her.”
Margaret gasped. “Clarice? Clarice did that?”
“Where is she now?” Thomas asked matter-of-factly.
“Gone,” Pearl choked out, crying, but trying hard not to. “She’s gone. She ran out in her nightgown, feet bare. She’s out in the snow somewhere.” She was sobbing now. “My father, he went to look for her, but he’s hurt. She got one of his eyes, gouged it badly. You’ve got to come, Doctor. Please.”
“Of course,” Uncle Thomas said. “Give me a few minutes to get dressed and gather my bag and we’ll all walk back together. You try to warm up a little in the meantime.”
“I’ll make coffee and get the surgery ready in case you need it,” Margaret said. “Frances, you stay with Pearl—bring her over to the fire to warm up. I’ll go check on Emile.”
Uncle Thomas swiftly moved upstairs to dress.
I led Pearl to the coal stove in the parlor and stoked it. I took her hands in mine and rubbed them, tried to make her warm. My heart was breaking at the thought of all she had been through the last couple of days. I hated how powerless I felt, unable to give her answers or fix things.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said to Pearl, the words feeling hollow, but I needed to fill the silence. Try to say something comforting. And those silly, useless words were all I had; I regretted them immediately.
Pearl looked up at me, her eyes bloodshot. “The woman… who did this, she wasn’t my mother, Frankie. Not anymore.” She began to sob again and I pulled her close, holding her, rocking her, not caring if my uncle or aunt came in and saw.
“Tom!” Margaret cried from the kitchen. “Come quick!”
I released Pearl and we ran to the kitchen. Uncle Thomas hurried back down the stairs, feet bare, shirt half buttoned and untucked.
“Is it Emile?” he asked when we all got into the kitchen. All the oil lamps were lit. Aunt Margaret’s face was pale and frightened, ghostly in the flickering light.
“He’s gone,” Margaret said in disbelief.
“Gone?” Uncle Thomas was beginning to lose his composure.
He and I rushed into the sewing room, saw Emile’s torn shirt and coat, his boots on the floor. But there was no sign of the man.
The four of us searched the house. We opened every closet, looked under every bed.
“He must have gone outside,” Pearl said miserably. “Into the snow like my mother did.”
“I don’t understand,” Margaret said. “Why would he leave like that? Go out there without clothes or shoes?”
“It seems to be part of the sickness,” I offered weakly. I rubbed my temples, where a dull ache had started.
“But it’s so cold.” Aunt Margaret turned to Uncle Thomas. “Where will he go? Where do they all go?”
“I don’t know.” Thomas was staring at the wall now.
He looked lost standing there half dressed, his hair uncombed, dark circles under his bloodshot eyes.
“My mother’s out there,” Pearl said, looking blankly out the window at the blackness beyond.
“We’ve got to look for them,” Margaret said, getting closer to Thomas’s face now.
“We will. First, Frankie and I will go with Pearl and see what shape her father is in. Then we’ll organize a search party to look for Clarice and Emile.”
“And the knackerman,” Margaret added.
Thomas nodded. “And the knackerman.”
“You’ve got to find him first, Tom. You and Frankie.
If the men from town find him, they’ll shoot him.
People in town, they’re saying… they’re saying such terrible things about him.
That he isn’t human. That he’s the one who made the horses sick.
That he’s—” Aunt Margaret’s voice trailed off.
She looked at me, took my hand. “Promise me, Frances,” she pleaded.
“Promise me you’ll find that poor man. It isn’t his fault all this happened.
He doesn’t deserve to be hunted down like an animal. ”
“We’ll do our best,” I promised. I looked from my aunt to Pearl. “We’ll find them all—Emile, Pearl’s mother, and the knackerman.”
But what would we do then? Even if we found them and managed to drag them back to the house, what could we do to help them?
Keep them sedated until the madness passed, until the sickness ran its course?
And what was its course? Were they doomed to succumb to fever, to drown in their secretions like so many who’d caught the flu had last fall?
And if they died, would they then come back, rise up from their beds and slip off into the woods like terrible phantoms?
I reached up, touched the eye charm I wore on a leather cord around my neck, tucked safely beneath my nightshirt and coat. I remembered Charlotte Albone placing it over my head all those years ago, promising, “It will keep the bad dreams away. It will protect you from evil, waking or sleeping.”
“I’ll come with you,” Margaret continued. “I can help look. Let me get dressed, put on my coat.”
“No,” Uncle Thomas said firmly. “We need you to stay here. Get things ready like you said you would. Make coffee. Stoke the fires. We’ll be back soon.”
I went to my room to dress properly. My uncle gathered supplies from the surgery.
We all met up in the front hall, pulling on coats and boots; Pearl was pacing, eager to get back to her father, to continue the search for her mother. Uncle Thomas held his black medical bag. I carried a satchel with extra bandages and supplies in it.
“Margaret.” Thomas’s tone was grave now. “When we go, I want you to lock the door behind us. Don’t open it for anyone but me or Frankie, do you understand?”
“But, Tom, what if someone needs the doctor, what if—”
“No one but me or Frankie,” he cut in, taking her face in his gloved hands, stroking her pale cheeks. “Promise?”
“I promise,” she said. “No one but you.”