Demon Child (5 page)

    “If it's an ark that's needed,” Cora said, “you've got thirty-nine more days to build it. Surely you have time for a cup of coffee.”

    “Let me see Freya first,” he said. “Then we can talk. You have been keeping up with her vitamins?”

    “Yes,” Cora said. “She had her tablet with her meal tonight. Just as usual.”

    “I'll be down shortly,” Malmont said. “No, Richard, I don't need a guide. Just have coffee ready. And if Anna has extra dessert, I'll take some, no matter what it might be!” With that he exited the dining room. He moved with quiet grace unusual in a man his size.

    He returned in less than ten minutes, took a seat across the table from Jenny where a plate had been placed. “Is this the niece? It must be,” he said without waiting for answer. “She has the same fairness as her aunt. The Brightens must all be lovely people.”

    “Thank you,” Jenny said.

    Then Anna entered with an extra dessert and coffee. The doctor's attention was directed at these until they were all but gone, the beauty of Cora's niece utterly forgotten.

    “How was she?” Richard asked when Malmont was finished.

    The doctor daubed at his lips with a napkin, rinsed the sweetness of dessert from his mouth with a swig of black coffee. “The same as the other times. I couldn't stir her. Breathing well, all life systems in good condition. I am more certain than ever that it has nothing to do with the vitamin deficiency. They are two separate problems.”

    “Do you think she needs to go to the hospital again?” Cora asked.

    “Good Lord, no!” Malmont said. “That child is fragile, Cora. She isn't a tough number like her brother. They didn't find anything at the hospital before. They won't find anything again. As long as her condition remains stable, with one or two of these spells a week, I think we should be satisfied that the original diagnosis was correct: she is physically well.”

    “What about a psychiatrist?” Richard asked.

    “I would tend-though I know this will upset you, Cora-to recommend a psychiatrist.”

    “You see!” Richard cried.

    “Hold, hold!” Malmont said to Richard. “I was about to say that I would wait a while yet. The child has had a potentially damaging infancy, with a mother who was indifferent to her, moving from hotel to hotel, from one nanny and part-tune governess to another. Much of that time, she was even in different countries where people spoke to her in constantly changing languages. That alone would be enough to disconcert her. I think we should give her a little more time in a stable environment such as this to see whether or not she requires actual professional analysis.”

    It was just the suggestion Cora wanted. She looked triumphant

    Richard merely sulked.

    “I trust I haven't stepped into a family argument,” Malmont said.

    “You have,” Richard said. “But at least you haven't supported this crazy notion of a family curse dating from 1860! If Freya merely needs love and stability, it is to counteract what her mother did to her-it is not to exorcise some wicked demon that has possessed her.”

    “What does it matter?” Cora asked. “Whether it is psychological or a curse-or a little of both. If love cures it, what does it matter?”

    “It matters a great deal!” Richard said. He dropped a fist on the table, made dishes rattle. “We will damage the child by helping her to nourish such superstitious folderol. There is no such thing as a Brucker family curse!”

    Almost as if on cue, the conversation was interrupted by the long, mournful howl of a large wolf…

    

    Jenny had come to the Brucker estate on Tuesday. Wednesday morning, the bad weather broke. The gray clouds tore apart and let the blue sky through around their jagged edges. By afternoon, the blue was dominant over the gray and the night's rain had mostly evaporated from the earth. The air was fresh. The gloom and the sense of impending disaster seemed to flee along with the storm.

    She spent most of the afternoon riding and walking a mare named Hollycross from one end of the grounds to the other. She found every corner beautiful, save for the dozen or so acres near the north-east corner of the Brucker land where limestone sinkholes pocked the earth like scars, where the trees were scraggly and awful and the field grass barely managed to keep a toehold in the heavily-limed soil.

    On Thursday, she rode Hollycross along the east border of the estate, watching the construction work on the superhighway which was not too distant. It displeased her to see nature ripped and destroyed, replaced with concrete and macadam.

    Lunch that day was pleasant, taken on the veranda behind the house with Cora, the breezes crisp. They talked of inconsequential things. The problem of Freya's comas seemed to have receded until Jenny could barely remember the intensity of the fear she had felt on her first night in this place.

    Near three o'clock, she took her nail kit down to the pond and perched upon an outgrowth of limestone near the shore from which she could watch the few, graceful ducks gliding across the placid waters. Her nails were a disgrace. They were chipped and cracked by her unaccustomed exercise of the past two days. She began to file them carefully, soon absorbed in the simple task.

    “You'll just chip them again,” a small voice said behind her.

    It startled Jenny so that she let her bottles of polish fall from her lap to the ground. Fortunately, neither had been opened.

    Frank appeared in the corner of her vision, rounding the rocks, Freya came close behind him. They were dressed in blue jeans and white teeshirts. They were perfectly beautiful children.

    “You shouldn't scare old people like me,” Jenny said. “I might have fainted on you. Then what would you have done?”

    “Got some lake water to throw on you,” Frank said. The idea seemed to appeal to the twins. They both smiled

    “Aunt Cora used to worry about her nails,” Frank said. “But if you ride a horse, you can't worry about sissy stuff like that.”

    “It isn't sissy stuff,” Freya said. It was the first time she had spoken. If there were to be a battle of the sexes here, she knew for certain which side she was on.

    “When Freya grows up,” Jenny said, “she'll take care of her nails, and all her boyfriends will be glad she looks so nice. It makes a girl prettier.”

    Jenny bent and retrieved the fallen bottles of polish, put them in her lap again. She was glad of the chance to talk to the twins. When she went before a class of twenty-five third graders this fall, she would have to be a little experienced in knowing how to talk with them.

    “Freya takes care of her nails now,” Frank said.

    Freya held up her hands, smiling through the fingers. They were both such impishly charming children. Jenny smiled back through her own fingers, then saw that what Frank said was true. Each of Freya's small nails was free of excess cuticle and shaped, though they were rounded rather than elongated in the fashion of a grown woman's nails.

    “She keeps them nice,” Frank said, “because she's a werewolf.” He watched Jenny solemnly, waiting.

    She was not sure whether he was serious or whether she was being played with.

    She decided to accept it as a joke, and she laughed. Somehow, the rumors had filtered down to the children themselves. She couldn't imagine who would have been so careless as to let such ugly ideas fall on such young ears, but she decided that joking about it was the best thing to do. “Freya isn't a werewolf,” she said. “She's just a very pretty little girl with a brother who likes to scare people.”

    “No,” Freya said, speaking again, her soft voice barely audible. “He's right. I am a werewolf.”

    Neither of the children were smiling.

    They looked at her, waiting.

    Jenny would have liked to catch hold of the inconsiderate adult who had passed these rumors on to the children. Surely Richard wouldn't have, especially since he believed werewolves were only superstitious folderol. Aunt Cora seemed to think there might be a grain of truth somewhere in the rumors, but even Cora would know that no good could come from feeding such frightening fantasies to children. That left Harold and Anna. She didn't know them well, but she doubted that either was that irresponsible.

    “How do you know you're a werewolf?” Jenny asked. Perhaps she could make the suggestion seem as foolish as it really was.

    “I go to sleep for long naps, and the wolves howl and kill things every time.”

    “But if you're asleep, you're not the wolf,” Jenny pointed out.

    Freya shook her head soberly. Her yellow curls bounced. “Yes I am. The ghost in me leaves when I sleep and takes the body of a wolf. Then it hunts.”

    Frank put his arm around Freya in a brotherly display of camaraderie. “She won't hurt
you,
Jenny. Will you Freya?”

    Standing there, the sun gleaming off their hair, their jeans muddy at the knees, their faces freckled, they looked like nothing so much as two typical American children from some Norman Rockwell painting, healthy and alive and as cute as buttons.

    “No,” Freya agreed. “I won't hurt you. Just rabbits.”

    Unaccountably, Jenny felt cold here on the sunbaked rock. Did she really believe this nonsense about curses and wolves? Could she, even for a moment, believe that part of this darling little girl went out at night and tore the throats out of rabbits? It was laughable, wasn't it?

    Yet, she remembered the warnings in those dreams:
Beware the unknown. Expect the unexpected..
.

    “Who told you all of this?” Jenny asked.

    “No one told us,” Freya said. “We just know.”

    Jenny wasn't to be sidetracked so easily. “Someone must have given you the idea,” she persisted.

    “No.”

    “You must have overheard Cora or Richard-”

    With that impulsive energy and short attention span that only young children have, Frank grew bored with the matter at hand, took his sister's arm and tugged at it. “Let's race to the stables! Maybe the pony wants to go out!” He pulled Freya away from Jenny. Together, they ran around the rim of the pond, startling the ducks who made squawking protest. They grew smaller and smaller as they ran until, at last, the shadows around the stables swallowed them.

    Her perfect mood had been destroyed. What
was
wrong with the child? What
would
a psychiatrist say il he were able to study her? Who in the Brucker mansion had been filling the twins' minds with such ugly, primitive fears?

    She finished her nails, trying to lose herself again in the monotony of the task at hand.

    It didn't work.

    

    That night at dinner, Richard was late to the table. When he finally did arrive, he took his place without speaking or looking at anyone. He filled his dish almost mechanically.

    Jenny could tell that he was angry, though it did not occur to her why. She focused her attention on her own plate and said nothing. She wished Richard had not lost the pleasantness she remembered from seven years ago.

    When he had filled his platter with a helping of everything, he raised his head for the first time and stared down the length of the table at his stepmother. “Freya is having another spell, Cora. Harold ought to go up and sit with her. God knows, though, what good sitting up with her will do!”

    Cora laid her fork down, took a drink of ice water from her goblet. “She had her vitamins at supper. I made certain of that.”

    “Cora,” he said, his tone not respectful in the least, full of scorn and anger, “Freya's comas are not connected with her vitamin deficiency. There's no escaping the fact that the girl requires psychiatric help!”

    “We've already discussed that,” Cora said.

    “I've discussed it,” Richard replied. “But I don't think you've even listened to one goddamned word of it!”

    “Richard!” Cora said. “Please never speak to me that way again.”

    He pushed his chair back, rose from the table and left the room without asking to be excused.

    What have I gotten into? Jenny asked herself.

    She felt things closing in, building to an explosion. She didn't want to be around when the fuse burnt clear down to the keg of powder. She could not control the rapidly deteriorating circumstances in this house, which meant that she was at the mercy of them.

    Cora did not seem anxious to talk through the remainder of the dinner. Neither of them were really hungry any longer, either.

    

    Later that night, Cora came to Jenny's room. She was dressed in a lovely yellow lounging robe which contrasted with her dark beauty and her cultured dignity to make both those qualities even more evident. Jenny secretly hoped that, when she was Cora's age, she would look as feminine and sophisticated as her aunt.

    If I reach her age, she amended. And immediately, she wondered why she always had to have such negative thoughts.

    “I'd like to talk to you about Freya,” Cora Brucker said. She sat on the edge of the bed. hands folded on the yellow robe. For the first time, Jenny noticed the weariness in her aunt's dark eyes, the dark circles below that indicated bad sleeping habits.

    Jenny had been trying to interest herself in a mystery novel, but she had been making very little headway. The print seemed to run together, and her mind wandered over the tragedies of the past. She put the book down on the covers and sat up straighter in bed. She said, “I feel so sorry for her. She's such a sweet little girl.”

    Cora nodded. “And I think she'll be all right. We know that it isn't anything physically wrong. She's had the best doctors. She was in the city for a week with two of the best doctors on the staff there.”