The Midnight Estate #2
The figure in the hallway stepped closer to the grandfather clock, and Marie realized could push him—a poor strategy, but her only chance.
She imagined that he might tumble down a handful of stairs, and by the time he had righted himself, enraged even further and ready for revenge, she could be at the other end of the house.
She would grab Ernest as she ran through and she would drag him into his father’s room, and then she would slam the door shut.
If Silas had the key in his bedroom door, she could lock it straight away but if he didn’t, his heavy dresser was right there.
She could scream for his help and perhaps if she was really lucky he would wake quickly enough to help her secure the door.
It wasn’t much of a plan but it was all she could come up with.
But just as the man stepped around the grandfather clock, the moonlight bounced off a metal blade in his hand and Marie knew
for certain that he hadn’t come to take her home.
Perhaps she couldn’t have found the strength to do what had to be done only to save herself—after all, she’d been trapped in Rupert’s home, unable to escape, even in a town she knew like the back of her hand, even surrounded by a community she’d
been a part of her whole life. But in that moment Marie finally accepted that she really was most definitely pregnant. And
with that realization came another.
If Rupert killed her, he also killed her baby, and she simply would not allow that to happen.
All of the fury and the pain and the frustration of the life she had lived with him surged. All of the humiliation of loving
him and trusting him to help her only for him to trap her. All of the fear and the shame and the panic of it. It all rose
to the surface and Marie ran at him with force and a strength she had no idea she was capable of.
Rupert didn’t tumble down just a handful of stairs and take a few moments to collect himself before he pulled himself up and gave chase.
Instead, he lost his footing altogether and fell, sideways and ungracefully, the knife sailing out of his hands.
The staircase was steep and wide and he had no hope of catching onto the balustrade to steady himself.
He tumbled in a violent, out-of-control somersault, head over feet to the bottom of the stairs.
And perhaps at first he cried out in fury and shock, but by the time he landed, he was utterly still and silent.
From the landing at the top of the stairs Marie stared down at him, too stunned to remember that her plan had been to run
to Tad’s room, to not waste a single second. She found herself holding her breath, willing Rupert to show some sign of life—just
the movement of a limb or the rattling of a breath, just so that she could be reassured that she had not killed him.
But he was limp, his body contorted into angles that should not have been possible. His head was twisted, facing his own shoulder.
One of his arms was bent behind his back. One of his legs kinked forward just below the knee.
Marie sank into a crouch, trying to hide behind the rail at the top of the hallway, trying to shield herself from what she
had done.
“Please,” she said in a choked whisper, although she was not sure what she was asking for. Please wake up so I’m not a murderer. Or maybe, Please don’t wake up because your death is the only way I can be safe and free.
Eventually she sank further, collapsing onto her bottom, then scrambling backwards, until her back was against the wall. She
pulled her trembling knees towards her chest and wrapped her arms around them. A strange, terrible wailing began to echo through
the house.
Silas had never been one to wake quickly.
It had driven his various housemates crazy over the years—first his mother, who constantly had to drive him to school when he missed the bus, and Maeve, who learned to sleep with earmuffs and who, on particularly exciting days like her birthday and Christmas, would sometimes rouse him with a bucket of cold water.
Christine told him once that she used to shake him through the night, frustrated by the volume of his snoring, but eventually realized that it didn’t matter how much she thumped or kicked or shoved him; he would keep on snoring regardless.
By the time she moved out, she was spending as many nights in the guestroom as she did in their marital bed.
He was well accustomed to the groggy feeling of having woken from a very deep sleep, completely unsure how long he’d been
unconscious for. That night as he roused, it slowly occurred to him that something was not right. Silas loved his child like
nothing else in this world, but he didn’t have the same aggressive parental instincts that Christine and even Marie seemed
to have, and it took him a few moments to realize that Ernest was crying. It took more moments still to identify the sound
as a panicked howling.
Finally, belatedly, Silas pulled himself out of bed. Rubbing his weary eyes, he crossed the hallway to Ernest’s bedroom. The
little boy was beside himself, drawing shuddering, desperate breaths, rambling about a bad man hovering over his bed.
“There, there,” Silas sighed. “It was just a dream.”
“No dream, Daddy, no dream,” Ernie kept sobbing. “Bad man. Scary man. He’s going to hurt me.”
But as the last vestiges of sleep cleared from Silas’s brain, he gradually became aware that his distressed son was not the
only problem in the house. There was another noise coming from the hall. Marie was weeping too.
Silas sighed as he scooped Ernest up onto his hip and went in search of her.
Probably, he told himself, the trauma of that last month had finally caught up with the poor girl, perhaps she even wanted to cry in privacy, but given how upset she sounded he felt he needed to at least check in on her.
Silas turned into the hallway, and saw that at the top of the stairs, she was curled up in a little ball, her slim shoulders shaking violently with the force of her tears.
“Come on now,” he said gently. “Let’s go back to—”
“No!” she yelled when she saw him, her frantic gaze switching between the stairs and where Silas and Ernest stood in the hall.
“Don’t let him see . . . don’t let him see, Silas. Don’t.”
Marie was breathless and panicking, and Silas, bewildered, took another step towards her. She scrambled to her feet and held
both hands out towards him, palms exposed.
“Stop, Silas.” Her breath caught on a frantic sob. “Please, you have to stop.”
“What’s going on?” he asked, and he was starting to wonder if she’d had some kind of breakdown. “Calm down, Marie, for goodness’
sake. This isn’t good for . . .” He gestured vaguely towards her stomach. He took another step towards her, and she stepped
back too, bumping into the grandfather clock. She startled, spinning to see what was behind her, and then she wailed again
and slid to the floor in a heap, as if her bones had suddenly disappeared, leaving her limp.
“It’s just a nightmare, Marie,” Silas said. “Let’s go make a cup of hot milk—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head as she looked back towards the stairs. She sucked in a slow, forceful breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was clear and hard. “Silas. Put him back to bed. Lie with him until he goes back to sleep.”
“But—”
“Please, Silas.”
It occurred to Silas that she must have had some truly horrifying nightmare, and that the only way he was going to be able
to calm her down was if he did exactly as she requested. He turned back towards Ernest’s room, but his son began to scream,
throwing his arms and legs out to block Silas from carrying him through the door, his ordinarily fluid speech reverting to
a baby-like babble as he panicked.
“No, Dadda! No my room!”
Linda always used to say a full moon drove some people crazy, and given the way his son and guest were carrying on, Silas
was starting to think his mother had been right.
He took Ernest back into his own room and he lay his son down on the bed. He rubbed Ernest’s back and murmured words of consolation
until the little boy’s shuddering breaths began to ease and deepen and then finally, he was giving soft, adorable little snores.
Perhaps Silas might have fallen back to sleep himself too, except that even from his bedroom he could hear that Marie was
still in the hallway sobbing.
And so finally, once Ernest was asleep, Silas crept out of bed and went to the landing above the staircase. Marie was once
again on the floor, her knees drawn up to her body. He crouched in front of her and she buried her face in her arms.
“I don’t know if I meant to do it,” she sobbed. “What if I wanted this?”
“Hey, listen, love,” Silas said, very gently. “It was just a bad dream. Let’s go make that warm milk. Maybe a little whiskey
to help you sleep?”
She raised her face to his very slowly. The moonlight through the stained glass windows glinted off her tear-stained face.
“You’ve been so kind to me,” she whispered.
“Anyone would have done the same if they were able to.”
“No. That is not true. Everyone back home knew that he was a monster and no one did a damned thing.” Her voice was hoarse, tears still flowing
freely from her eyes. “Most people would have walked away and left me to my fate. My own brother was willing to do that. But
you . . .”
“It’s really not good for the baby for you to be so upset.”
That only made her cry harder, and Silas had no idea why, until she lifted one shaking arm, and she straightened her forefinger,
pointing towards the stairs. He turned around, fully expecting to see the staircase as it always was, ready to reassure her
that whatever she thought she had seen had simply been a dream.
The last thing in the world Silas expected to see was the shape of a man at the bottom of those stairs, so twisted that he
couldn’t possibly be alive.
And for a long moment, perhaps longer than he could excuse with anything other than wishful thinking, he thought he too might