Dark Homecoming (32 page)

L
iz couldn't quite fathom what she was seeing. Here, in this small room in the servants' quarters, in the middle of a hurricane, were gathered a group of people. Chairs were placed in a circle, and candles were burning. She knew the people: Mrs. Hoffman. Mrs. Delacorte. Mr. and Mrs. Merriwell. Mr. and Mrs. Clayton. Karl, the assistant from Roger's gallery. And the artist, Naomi Collins. They were all looking at her. It was like some sort of strange dream, the kind where random people are thrown together in the most surreal of circumstances.

Except this wasn't a dream. The rainwater dripping down from the ceiling onto Liz's face was proof of that.

There was someone else in the room as well, seated on one of the chairs. A woman, it appeared, from the look of the long dark hair flecked with gray. She was wrapped in a gray robe and her face was down. She was drinking from a goblet.

“You fool,” Roger was saying, approaching Mrs. Hoffman. “This was not what we had agreed upon.”

“We agreed on nothing,” Mrs. Hoffman said, turning her back on him.

“What is going on here?” Liz asked.

The darkness of the room had at first prevented her from seeing what else was in the room. But now she discerned Variola on the floor, cradling what appeared to be a body . . .

“Where is Paul?” Mrs. Delacorte was asking. “Where is he?”

“He's dead,” Roger spit at her. “And he deserves to be.”

“No!” Mrs. Delacorte screamed, dropping into a chair, covering her face with her hands.

“What is going on in this house?” Liz screamed. “We have got to get out of here! This whole floor is going to get blown away!”

As if to underscore her point, a ferocious gust of wind hit the side of the house. Both of the small windows in the room were shattered, pieces of glass flying through the air. Liz managed to duck, but a large hunk sliced into Mrs. Clayton's neck. Blood spurted out from the wound as if from a faucet.

“Blood,” Mrs. Hoffman said, rushing a goblet to collect what she could before Mr. Clayton pushed her away, doing his best to attend to his wife.

Liz was horrified. “What is all this?” Her heart was racing as she looked around. “What sort of ceremony were you conducting here?”

Roger steadied her, taking hold of her forearms. “My darling, it's not what I planned,” he said. “This is wrong. Please believe me. I had a much more glorious vision for us. It's all Hoffman's doing. She's mad.”

“Mad, am I?” Mrs. Hoffman asked, a quiver of triumph in her voice. “Tell me if this is madness.”

She gestured to the seated woman in the robe.

“Rise, my darling,” Hoffman commanded.

The woman set aside the goblet she had been drinking from, and did as she was ordered. She lifted her face. Liz gasped.

It was the woman who had attacked her. Her face was still bloated and scarred, but her hair was no longer gray. Now it tumbled lustrously over her shoulders and blew around her face in the wind . . . dark, shiny, locks . . .

Liz knew that hair . . . she had seen it in the portrait. . .

“Dominique,” Roger said, his voice low and breathy.

Dominique took several steps toward them. They were steady, graceful steps.

“How is it possible?” Liz asked.

“You would have let our precious Dominique rot away, wouldn't you have, Roger?” Mrs. Hoffman asked. “Your plan instead was to bring your darling little Liz into this coven. You would have made that simpering little fool our new figurehead. You would have denied Dominique her rightful place!”

“Yes,” Roger shouted. “And when David was executed for killing Rita, I would have married Liz myself, and taken this house for my own, my father be damned.”

“You milked our coven for all it was worth,” Hoffman said, shouting over the driving wind. “You have been cashing in quite nicely from your deal with Papa Ghede. But it's over for you now, Roger.” She smiled, or, rather, adjusted her lips in a way that passed for a smile on that plastic face. “Dominique is back, and she isn't pleased.”

“Dominique isn't back,” Roger said, laughing derisively. “You can make her walk. You can restore her hair. But what about her
mind
, Hoffman?” He took a step closer to Dominique. “Go ahead, woman. Speak to me.”

Dominique's lips moved to form words, but produced no voice. The only sound in the room was the wind howling in through the broken windows.

“You see,” Roger said. “She's still nothing more than a mindless zombie.”

“This is all madness,” Liz said, backing away from them. “It's obscene!”

From across the room, Mrs. Clayton, on the floor in her husband's arms, made a gurgling sound. “She's dead,” Mr. Clayton cried.

Liz gazed over at the dead woman on the floor, surrounded by all this insanity and greed. She couldn't help but think, even in the midst of her terror:
It's a long way from Miss Porter's.

“We've got to get to safety,” Mr. Merriwell was saying. “We'll all be killed up here . . .”

“You'll do as I say!” Mrs. Hoffman declared, her voice straining to be heard above the high-pitched shriek of the wind.

“No,” Roger said, and Liz saw him withdraw his pistol from his belt. “You'll do as
I
say.”

He pointed the gun at Dominique.

N
ever had Maria Martinez ever encountered anything like the force of this wind. The rain felt like solid walls of water she had to run through as she made her way to the street. A couple of time she was literally lifted off her feet by the wind. She was terrified of being sucked up into the hurricane and then dropped miles from here to her death.

She reassured herself that she didn't have far to go. Just to the next house on the street.

But the gate at that house was closed and locked. There was no use banging or calling to the residents. No one would be able to hear her from the street, and surely the intercom wasn't working. The sound of the wind was so loud it felt to Maria as if she were caught in the engine of an airplane. She thought her hearing would never be the same after this.

Providing she lived through it.

Maria hurried to the next house, running from post to post, clinging for dear life each time. A small prayer of thanks escaped from her lips when she spotted an open gate at the next driveway. Running up to the house as fast as she could, Maria had to jump over fallen palm trees, not an easy task for a woman of fifty-nine. Finally she reached the front door and threw herself at it with a thud. “Please!” Maria called. “Please help me!”

No one answered. Maria despaired. They were probably huddled safely in the basement. Or maybe they had fled farther inland before the hurricane struck.

She was having a difficult time breathing. The wind and rain were so strong it wasn't easy to take a breath. Maria stumbled off the steps back toward the street. She would have to try another house. But she wasn't sure how long she could last out here.

Hurrying down the street, she was utterly drenched. Her hair was plastered to the sides of her face. She could barely see two feet in front of her.

Suddenly, amid the driving rain, she spotted a light ahead of her. A dim, flashing blue light in the middle of the street. Her hopes lifted. “Hello!” she attempted to shout, but the wind devoured her voice. Maria began to run.

But just as she did so, the wind caught her. She felt her feet lift off the ground. Maria felt weightless, powerless. She struggled, but her arms and legs thrashed uselessly through the air. She felt herself losing consciousness just before she was sucked up into the hurricane.

“D
o you have reception on your phone?” Detective Joe Foley asked Aggie, both of them crowded into the basement of the police station with the other detectives.

“Intermittent,” she replied. “Just enough for one text to get through from my husband, telling me they're all okay.”

“Good to know,” Joe said, staring down at his phone. “Looks like I got a call at some point over the last hour. I never heard it ring, though.”

“Gee, I wonder why?” she asked with a smirk. “It's been so
quiet
around here.”

“Guess who the call was from.”

“The governor, declaring a state of emergency.”

“Guess again.”

She smirked. “FEMA, asking what they can do for us.”

“Nope. Liz Huntington.”

“Did she leave a message?”

Joe shook his head. “I suspect she got cut off. There was enough reception for the call to come through, but then it got dropped.”

“Maybe she has information about her husband.”

“So she called to tell me about it in the middle of a hurricane?”

“Does seem odd. But maybe it was very important.”

Joe was staring at Liz's number in the list of missed calls on his phone. “I tried calling back, but I can't get through,” he said.

“Maybe it was a pocket dial,” Aggie suggested, “as she was hurrying down to the storm cellar.”

“Possibly,” Joe said.

But he knew it wasn't. He had a hunch. And his hunches invariably were right.

He'd learned that the hardest way possible many years ago.

He kept staring at the phone.

“Soon as this thing is over,” he said, more to himself than to Aggie, “I'm going over there.”

“I
mean it, Hoffman,” Roger said. “I have no compunction against shooting you through the heart. The cops would call it justified, after they see what you have done here.”

On the floor, Variola was barely able to lift her head.
Yes
, she thought.
Shoot her! Kill her! Then the power will flow back to Variola
.

Mrs. Hoffman only smiled. “Such a foolish man,” she said. “You always were.”

Variola watched. Suddenly Roger let out a scream of pain and dropped the gun, as if it had suddenly become scalding hot in his hand. Of course it was hot: Variola recognized again how well Hoffman had learned her lessons.

“Take the gun,” Hoffman ordered Naomi Collins, who obeyed swiftly. She aimed it at Roger, who was rubbing his burned hand. Not so long ago, Naomi had been the toast of Roger's gallery. Now she might be his death.

“It's your choice, Roger,” Hoffman said. “You can either rejoin our coven and herald the return of Dominique as our supreme leader, or you can die right here.”

Variola watched as Liz grabbed Roger's arm. “They're all mad! Can't you see that?”

Roger shrugged her off. “Very well, Hoffman. You've won. Let the games begin.”

“Give her to us,” Hoffman said.

No
, Variola thought.

Roger shoved Liz forward. “Sorry, darling. Nothing personal. You'd do the same to me if you had the barrel of a gun pointed at you and a coven of angry witches ready to take off your head.”

Liz screamed. Mr. Clayton grabbed her by her left arm, Karl by her right. They pulled her toward Mrs. Hoffman, passing Variola on the floor as they did so. Liz looked down and saw the dead body next to Variola was that of her friend.

“Nicki!” she shrieked. “Oh, Nicki, what did they do to you?”

“The same that we shall do to you now, my dear,” Mrs. Hoffman said. She held a bloodstained knife in front of Liz's face.

I've got to stop this
, Variola thought.
I've got to summon the strength . . .

“Where is Martinez?” Mrs. Hoffman suddenly barked. “Where has she gone?”

They all looked around. “I didn't see her leave,” Naomi said, still holding the gun at Roger.

“The despicable coward,” Hoffman grunted. “If she thinks she can survive out there in this storm, she's wrong.”

Even as she spoke, the wind stopped. The furious, incessant howling and moaning of the storm ended, and its cessation—the eerie sudden silence—was even more startling than any of the noise it had made. They all looked up. The air was still. Outside the broken windows, the sun was even breaking through the dark gray clouds.

“The storm is over,” Mrs. Merriwell said.

“No,” Mrs. Hoffman replied, her eyes dancing in the plastic mask of her face. “We are in the eye of the storm! This is the moment of greatest power. We should have known. This, finally, is the opportunity we have been waiting for.”

A deathly stillness settled over the room, broken only by Liz's terrified sobs.

“Prepare the ceremony,” Mrs. Hoffman announced. “We don't have much time. Who knows how long the eye will last. And if Martinez returns, she may bring company back with her.”

“What will we do if she brings the police?” Mrs. Merriwell asked, distraught. “We all have reputations in this town, you know . . .”

“Silence, you old cow. Dominique will take care of everything once she is brought back to her full power.” Hoffman clapped her hands. “Bring the goblets!”

Once again she waved the knife in front of Liz, who stood before her restrained between Mr. Clayton and Karl, struggling and crying.

“You will provide the life to bring Dominique back. How fitting that is. You thought you could replace her. But in fact, you will be the means of her restoration.”

She placed the tip of the knife against Liz's throat. Liz stopped struggling and stood stiffly in terror.

“Not for you the mercy I showed your friend,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “Not for you a single clean cut across the throat. For you, death will come by a thousand cuts, as they say. You will bleed for Dominique, and you will watch as your blood restores her.”

I must stop this
, Variola thought again, but she was so weak she could no longer even move the fingers on her hand.

Mrs. Hoffman giggled like a teenager. “I've wanted to do this since the first day you arrived,” she said.

She swung the knife and sliced into Liz's forearm. Liz let out a yelp.

“The goblets!” she cried.

The blood flowed freely.

And Dominique drank.