Blackthorn

Chapter Forty

FORTY

MAVEN

Shaky and sweating, I rise from bed and grab my cell phone from the dresser. I have six missed calls from Ronan but no other calls or messages.

It should still be Sunday, but the date on the screen indicates it’s Tuesday.

I’ve lost two entire days.

Disoriented, I look around the room. Nothing seems amiss. But a sixth sense tells me to look inside the dresser drawers.

When I do, I find all my clothes there, neatly folded.

When I look in the closet, the suitcase and duffel bag I so haphazardly packed are zipped closed and standing in the corner. My purse rests on the nightstand, next to an empty teacup.

It’s just after four o’clock. The sky outside is leaden gray, heavy with thunderclouds.

With shaking hands, I dial the museum’s main line. I tell the receptionist who answers I need to speak with Luce Adams, that it’s a matter of extreme urgency. I’m afraid I won’t be connected, that some dark force will stop me from getting through, but to my surprise, I’m transferred immediately.

“This is Luce.”

I almost weep in relief when I hear her voice.

“Luce! Oh thank God, you’re there. You picked up. I can’t believe it. I’m so happy I got through.”

There’s a brief, confused pause. “I’m sorry, who is this?”

I know my laugh sounds crazed. Clutching the phone, I try to keep my voice calm so she doesn’t hang up and call the police on me.

“It’s May. I’ve been trying to reach you.

Did you get my messages? I’m still in Solstice.

Ezra came to see me, and he said I was fired, but I knew that couldn’t be right.

I knew it was a mistake, so I emailed you, but I didn’t hear back.

I’m not sure about the cell service out here, everything’s a little wonky! ”

My crazy laugh makes another appearance. I realize I’m babbling but can’t stop myself.

“You wouldn’t believe everything that’s been going on. I can’t wait to catch you up to speed, but first please tell me there’s been a terrible misunderstanding, and I haven’t been fired.”

The silence on the other end of the line is cavernous. Then Luce says, “You must have the wrong number.”

A feeling of cold dread crackles over my skin, like ice forming on still water.

Nervously licking my lips, I say, “Luce, it’s me. May.”

“I don’t know a May.”

My voice rises. “May Blackthorn. The head of the Entomology Department. The lepidoptera curator. I’ve worked for you for five years!”

Her voice is tight with irritation. “The head of our Entomology Department is Oliver Underwood. I don’t know anyone named May Blackthorn. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

She disconnects without giving me a chance to argue with her that she’s wrong, she knows me well, she hired me right out of college as an assistant and promoted me four times until finally I was in charge of the entire department, the youngest person ever to hold the title.

Or … was I?

Was I ever really there at all?

Feeling sick, I call the museum again, but this time I ask to be put through to Ezra’s office.

The receptionist informs me the museum doesn’t have an Ezra Scott on staff.

Bile rising in my throat, I close my eyes and swallow it back down. “When did he leave?”

“I don’t have a record of anyone with that name ever being employed here, ma’am. Perhaps you meant to call the Smithsonian?”

The room starts to spin. I drop the phone. It clatters to the floor. When it rings again, I snatch it up, hoping against hope that it’s Luce calling to say she was pulling a prank on me, but it’s Ronan’s number I see on the screen.

I stare at it with my heart palpitating and my sense of reality slowly unraveling, then answer hesitantly. “Hello?”

Bypassing a greeting, he demands, “Tell me you’re all right.”

I close my eyes to stop the lazy tilting whirl of the room. “You remember me?”

“What? What the hell does that mean?”

“Never mind. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” he growls impatiently. “I can tell when you’re upset. You sound strange, and you haven’t been answering my calls. You were supposed to come over to see me, but you never showed. Tell me what’s happened.”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“You might be surprised.”

I laugh, but it’s the deranged laugh again, the one where I sound like I should be institutionalized.

“I don’t know that anything could surprise me anymore, Ronan. Really and truly, I think I’ve lost all credulity. In fact, if you’d like to tell me you’re some kind of ancient fire demon who speaks Latin, has an ass fetish, and fucks like a—well, like a demon, I’m all ears!”

There’s a strange beat of silence, then he says tightly, “You need to get out of that house.”

“As a matter of fact, I did get out of the house. I took a nice little walk in the woods earlier, and before that, I went to church. Church of all things! Me! I can’t believe I didn’t go up in a poof of black smoke when the shadow of the cross fell on me!”

I don’t know if it’s my zany cackle or the unhinged tone of my voice, but he can tell I’m completely losing it.

“I’m coming over there to get you and Bea.”

“Wait—let me ask you something. Did you lend me twenty grand?”

“Yes. Why are you asking?”

“Just checking to see how much of my brain has been eaten by rot.”

“Maven—”

“The empty graves!” I shout, panic spilling from every pore, gurgling up my throat to choke me. “Did you hear about the empty graves at Pinecrest, or did I make that up, too?”

“I’m coming over,” he repeats through gritted teeth.

I put a shaking hand to my forehead and close my eyes, whispering, “Is my grandmother even dead? Or maybe I’m dead?

Or in a psychiatric facility? Or maybe I was never born in the first place.

Maybe I’ve been asleep for a thousand years, a slumbering giant buried deep in the bowels of the Earth, waiting for the right alignment of the stars to wake me! ”

Ronan roars, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I drop my hand from my forehead and open my eyes.

I can feel my pulse in every part of my body, the rushing thrum of blood through my veins.

I feel dizzy and disoriented, dropped out of my own time into another dimension to land on a hostile planet teeming with all kinds of nasty creatures that want nothing more than to dine on my flesh and suck every bit of marrow from my brittle bones.

I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I suspect that whatever’s on the other side of this moment, it will change me permanently. If I even survive it.

I need to tell him the truth.

“I’m sorry for everything, Ronan. But mostly I’m sorry I never told you I loved you. Because I always have. I still do. And I always will. If I never see you again, just know that I’ve loved you my whole life. There’s never been anyone else for me but you.”

Strangled with emotion, his voice breaks over my name. “Maven. I love you, too, baby. So much. So fucking much.”

Hearing him say those words pierces my heart. Then the plaintive wail of a child crying somewhere deep in the house refocuses my attention.

Bea.

“I’m coming to get you, baby. I’m coming for both of you right now—”

Ronan is still talking when I disconnect the call.

I’m about to run from the room when I glimpse the shadow.

Moving sinuously from behind the curtains at the windows, it slithers across the bedroom wall like an ink stain, spreading rapidly until it’s unnaturally long, shifting and spilling onto the ceiling.

Its dark surface rippling like wind over water, the shadow stretches to encompass the entire room, undulating menacingly around the furniture, coiling on the ceiling as if readying to strike.

In the center of the coils, an angular outline of a head is distinct against the pale plaster.

So is the fork in the tongue that flickers out.

I squeeze my eyes shut and chant, “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real, Maven. You’re imagining it.”

When I open my eyes again after several long moments, the shadow has vanished.

Outside, the howling wind grows louder. The floorboards in the hallway make an unsettling groan, as if an invisible foot is treading on them. Somewhere downstairs, a door slams shut.

My phone rings again. It’s Ronan. I don’t answer, setting the cell atop the dresser and turning to leave the room.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. Instead of a swarm of flies this time, I see only my normal reflection. Pale face, green eyes, long hair unbound. All the black dye has worn off somehow, leaving my hair its natural vivid red hue.

On the side of my throat are two small puncture wounds, as red as drops of fresh blood.

Around my neck hangs the rosary Father O’Brian pressed into my hand.

With trembling fingers, I touch the tender bite marks first. Then I touch the crucifix dangling at the end of the rosary beads. Both seem real, but the line between reality and fantasy has blurred for me drastically, leaving me in a purgatory where I have no proof of what really exists.

I have no proof I exist.

I might be a figment of my own twisted imagination.

The cry of a child that I hear echo through the house sounds real enough, however, and it jolts me into action.

Running out into the hall, I take the stairs two at a time, calling for Bea.

I half expect to see her in the great room, her nose buried in a book, but it’s empty, the unlit fireplace looking like a gaping black maw of some terrible ravenous creature.

The room is uncommonly cold, full of shifting shadows that slink up the walls in a serpentine fashion.

The sickly sweet scent of something rotting hangs in the air, so potent, it makes me gag.

My panic rising again, I run into the kitchen. It’s deserted as well. On the center of the scarred wooden table sits a bowl overflowing with fresh pomegranates.

According to mythology, they’re the only fruit that grows in hell.

A gust of wind rattles the windowpanes, then the rain starts, pelting the panes with fat drops that sound eerily like skeletal fingernails tapping the glass. Something outside trying to get in.

Heart banging against my rib cage, I sprint back through the great room and follow the winding hallway that leads deeper into the house. The walls seem to press close as I run. My footsteps echo off the ceiling then die abruptly as if the house is swallowing the sound.

The corridor becomes a twisting labyrinth leading me farther and farther away from where I began.

A mocking laugh rings in the distance. Though I’ve walked these halls a hundred times, I soon grow disoriented.

It seems as if the house is shifting, doors opening into bricked walls where once there were familiar rooms, the floor rising and falling as if the house’s lungs are breathing.

“Bea! Bea, where are you?”

I stop abruptly, struggling to hear the faint answering cry.

It comes from somewhere far below my feet. I look down at the floorboards.

The cellar.

As soon as the thought crystallizes in my mind, it’s as if the house knows and makes accommodations for me. The shadowed corridor brightens slightly. The pressing walls seem to fall back.

I move ahead, my ears straining for the cries that are growing steadily louder. I burst through a door that drops off abruptly to a steep staircase, almost launching myself into space from momentum.

I grab the wooden rail in time to save myself from breaking my neck in a fall and scramble down, down, down into darkness.

I don’t need light now. I know where I’m going.

At the bottom of the staircase, the floor is dirt.

The heavy wooden cellar doors are set flush into the floor a few feet beyond.

The faint draft seeping from them is warmer than the surrounding air and scented with the distinctive, smoky, resinlike essence of myrrh, an herb commonly used in various ritual practices.

Like sacrifices.

My nerves raw and screaming, I grip the heavy, round iron knobs of the cellar doors and throw them open.

A blast of hot air hits me. My hair billows away from my face. Then something hard kicks me between my shoulder blades, and I tumble forward into pitch blackness.

I hit a hard surface. The breath is knocked from my lungs at the same time my forehead cracks against unyielding stone. Stunned, I groan as stars explode beneath my eyelids. Pain floods every cell, paralyzing me.

I’m rolled onto my back. My wrists and ankles are gripped by unseen hands. I’m lifted and carried for a while, my throbbing head hanging down, my hair dragging along the floor. Then I’m deposited onto a cold, hard surface.

I hear the clank of metal as heavy chains are fastened around my arms and legs.

When my vision finally clears, I look up to see a tall figure standing over me. Dressed in a long black robe with a cowl covering the head, the figure is haloed in light, red and flickering.

The light comes from the bonfire on the stone floor of the middle of the cave I’m in.

The cavern is massive, with ceilings so high, they’re lost in shadow. Multiple passageways lead off from the main space, their openings pitch black. I’m in the center of some kind of underground maze of tunnels, a complex I sense stretches far beyond the borders of Blackthorn Manor.

And far, far below.

A naked man is chained to a large rectangular stone across from me. The stone is crudely shaped, rising directly from the cave floor, rough-hewn but with edges worn soft from long use.

Its sides are streaked with ominous, rust-colored stains.

The man’s stomach is painted with red marks, strange symbols drawn directly onto his pale flesh. He appears drugged, his eyes closed and his head lolling from side to side. Helpless moans work from his throat.

He’s lost his thin-rimmed glasses.

It’s Ezra.

The stone he’s lying on is an altar.

Littered around the altar are fragments of bone, strewn carelessly about as if kicked away.

All around the cave, in fact, remnants of bone are strewn.

The floor is crowded with them for as far as I can see, a grotesque white carpet that stretches to the mouths of the tunnels.

Some bones are charred, others broken, and some are perfectly intact.

There must be hundreds of skeletons in here. Thousands.

The tiny baby’s skulls are the most horrifying. Their hollow eye sockets stare at me accusingly.

If I had to guess, I’d say all those little baby skulls were male.

Mingled with the bones are translucent, tubelike shapes of various sizes. Their surfaces are scored in an intricate mosaic of diamond patterns. The one nearest the altar is at least a hundred feet long, indicating the enormous size of the creature who shed it.

The snake who shed it, rather.

All the delicate papery shapes are molted snakeskins.

The figure in the black robe moves closer, withdrawing a knife from within bell-shaped sleeves. The edge of the curved blade glints wickedly in the flickering firelight. I can tell by the shape of the hand that the person beneath the cloak is female.

She pushes the cowl off her head, revealing the mass of fiery red curls tucked beneath.

Davina smiles affectionately at me.

“Welcome to the party, darling. We’re just about to get started.”