52. The Ghost
The Ghost
Leo is dead and Mariane doesn’t cry. I think she is all out of tears. Or maybe she is pretending she has a mask of her own to hide behind.
Mallary and Desmond don’t waste a second feeing the room. It is just my mother and I, alone, for the first time in… forever.
She won’t look at me. She stares at the body of her husband. He might still be alive. He looks dead enough.
“If it’s any consolation,” I say, “you probably couldn’t have avoided this.”
She doesn’t even blink, her gaze trained on the writhing floor.
I always imagined this day would come, in some form or fashion.
I dreamed about it, especially in the beginning—making them hurt just as much as I did.
Those first few months, understanding there was something decaying inside of me, and my imprisonment was my atonement.
I could not hurt anyone if they trapped me behind a locked door. At least, that’s what they said.
“For a while, I tried.” My voice is too loud, echoing in the otherwise empty room. “I tried to be good. To be what you wanted. I really did.”
Leo’s crumpled form stares with unseeing eyes up at the gilded ceiling. Surrounded by opulence that couldn’t save him. Hours ago, this room filled with those he called friends, and some who were enemies.
The snakes coil around his limbs, tongues darting out to a chorus of hissing. Pity he didn’t get to make his choice.
“Can you blame me?” I say it out loud, maybe by accident. He’s lucky I didn’t strangle him in his sleep sooner.
I reach down and let one of the snakes wind around my wrist. Its scales are soft like silk.
This is another thing I thought about—when you are relegated to a small decaying room with a locked door, you have nothing else to do but think. And over the years I’ve thought long and hard about what I would say to them. What I would do.
I figure I am blameless in my revenge.
The moment is here. Now. And watching the life leave Leo’s eyes…
I hum at the wave of stillness inside of me. It’s like all the noise has been dialed to ten my whole life, and now, it’s down to seven. I didn’t realize just how obnoxious it was. Only a little more to go.
Still, Mariane is silent.
The snake curls around my bicep, over my shoulder, before I hold it up in the air. Both of us, predators, one staring at the other. Its tongue flicks out. Can it sense my next victim’s dread in the air? The animal hasn’t eaten, so it writhes with hunger, wanting to search the room for prey.
“You knew this was coming, didn’t you? Maybe you’ve thought about how you could get out of this. Maybe now you’ve realized you can’t.”
Mariane doesn’t react when I turn toward her again.
“You made me,” I say. “Would it have been better if I were a doll? So you could prop me up for your friends to stare at, and then forget me at night? Neglect me for days but tell everyone you were the doting mother and father, and isn’t your heir so great, what a talent, he’ll make Beauchene a household name.
” Each word punctuated with another step closer, and still she won’t look at me.
I reach for the rope and yank, and then she’s finally reacting, choking when she’s jerked nearly a foot into the air and back down. Her eyes finally snap to mine then. “Bastien, listen—”
“No, listen to me!”
She jumps when I shout, another lone tear tracking down her cheek.
“You’ve had fucking years to say what you want.
It’s your fucking turn to listen. None of this blood is on my hands.
It is on yours. You never cared when you fractured my mind.
You never cared when it led me to kill. You never cared.
You never stopped it—you never stopped me.
And now you want me to listen while you beg for your life?
When I have wanted so badly to take from you what you took from me?
” My patience has already worn thin. “Get up.”
Her eyes widen in horror, and then she’s shaking her head as if to plead for mercy.
Mercy.
She only finally decides to listen when I tug on the rope again, threatening to cut off her air. And then she babbles. She tells me how sorry she is that she failed. That she wasn’t the mother I needed. That she let everything else get in the way. That she didn’t care enough.
Maybe if she had said these things long ago, I could have forgiven her.
No, Leo never would have let me out—he never ever planned to let me out.
She wouldn’t have fought him about it. She never did.
Instead, she turned her back for a decade, and waited to repent only when Death is staring her right in the face. Of course she’s sorry now.
I tighten the slack of the rope until she’s forced onto the tips of her toes. Snakes are already curling around the legs of the stool.
She says my name, over and over, begging me to listen, to look at her, to give her one more minute.
But I told Mallary five minutes, and the clock is running out.
In my pocket is an old automatic lighter. I found it in Leo’s desk. His father’s once upon a time, for the cigars he’d smoke only in his study and nowhere else, like it was some secret.
And now it’ll be used to burn down the very house they worked so hard to build. It’ll burn away their mark so nothing is left but ashes and ruins. The entire legacy, gone up in smoke.
The flame wobbles after the snick.
Mariane sobs. She knows her pleading lands on deaf ears and yet she still begs for her life, even when her husband is dead at her feet.
It’s easy to get the flame to catch. The curtains are gauzy and go up like kindling. The paper decorations around the room won’t last long, either. At each jumping spark, the snakes’ hissing turns fervent.
I have no doubt they’ll find a way out. But Mariane doesn’t know that.
I stand before her once my destruction is underway. The inferno starts small, but it’ll grow into something inescapable, something bright and purifying and clean.
Defeat sags her shoulders. I let myself watch her cry as the heat from the flames inches closer. The snakes skate across my boots.
“The fire will eat all the oxygen in the room.” Already sweat beads at my forehead. “You can let the smoke choke you, or you can kick the stool. Choice is yours. Though, the snakes might not wait for you to choose.”
Marianne says she’s sorry one more time.
It’d be pathetic if it wasn’t so… poetic.
How many times did I cry, only for it to go unheard? How many times did I bang on the walls and beg to be let out? How many times did I have to say I was sorry before I realized no one was listening?
Only when I put the scene behind me, letting the heavy doors of the ballroom slam shut, do I hear one final, shrill scream within. Maybe it’s my name, I don’t know. I’m not listening.
The rest of the house is empty. Every staff member sent away, every resident dead or running. The front doors are wide open, snowflakes drifting in, so that the floor of the foyer is covered in a dusting of white.
It will take a while for the fire to truly catch. I wouldn’t put it past Maxim to send an anonymous tip to the authorities, especially once the smoke is visible from the sky.
The deed is done. I stand on the front step, looking out at the estate, at the long winding drive that leads to the gate somewhere in those woods down the hill.
Tire marks litter the snow, more debris from the party scattered about.
I have to give it to Desmond, he cleared the house fast. It’s as though they all fled from some great disaster, dropping everything where they stood and running.
When half the party is drunk on substances heightening their paranoia, the other half nearly knocked unconscious by the drugs, their drivers made quick work of fleeing the estate, if only to keep their masters from making fools of themselves.
It’s quiet. The snowflakes whisper as they touch the ground. The chill seeps into my skin. I don’t remember the last time I could see my breath fog in front of me. It’s so quiet my ears ring, a long droning sound, a discordant funeral peal.
And Mallary is nowhere to be seen.