Fallen Stones (46 page)

Across the room she saw Marie, dressed in a night gown, which was wet and splotched with mud and what appeared to be smears of blood. She stood before a full-length mirror, the same one which was now stored in the attic of the farmhouse. But as with the other furnishings, this version of the mirror appeared new. In Marie's reflection Stephanie could see the woman was looking down at her own hands, which were covered with deep scratches. The blood in the gashes seemed to have dried and was no longer flowing. The front of her white gown was stained with even larger smears of blood, which must have come from the gouges obtained during her struggling with the boys. Marie was looking into the dressing mirror, and seeing a face, which she apparently did not recognized as her own. Her hair was a mess and her cheeks glistened with the tears yet her face wore an unexplainable expression of ecstasy.

 To Stephanie's surprise, Marie picked up a large hairbrush and began delicately stroking her long tresses, never taking her eyes from the eyes of the woman in the mirror. It was like she was locked in a gaze with a person she had never met before, but with whom she was completely fascinated. The bizarre look of calm and the insane, inappropriate smile never left her face, even when the door to the bedroom exploded behind her.

Chapter 32

 

In a shower of splinters and shattered wood, Dwight Livingston burst through the bedroom door. His business suit, which once hung neatly from his muscular frame, now was in disarray. He still held tightly to his walking stick, with its wolf's-head ivory handle, but now he gripped it less like a means of support and more like a weapon. In the bright light of the oil lamps, Stephanie was amazed at just how much Dwight Livingston resembled Jason, with his dark brown hair and wire-framed glasses, although she had never seen Jason wearing such a look of anger. And she was equally perplexed by how much Marie looked like herself. It was as if she were watching a movie drama in which she and Jason were actors, playing the roles of the Livingstons.

Dwight's eyes brimmed with tears and were wild with rage as he stormed into the room. His breath hitched heavily in his chest, as he struggled to ask the question he obviously wished he would never have to ask, "What the hell did you do, Marie? What in the name of God did you do to our boys?"

Marie slowly turned away from the mirror, looked directly into her husband's eyes.  Her calm and relaxed demeanor took him by surprise. His wife smiled and replied, "Me? I did nothing my husband. It was all of your doing."

"M...m...my...my doing?" Dwight stammered, scarcely able to form the words. Then his anger returned. "Of what do you speak, woman? Was it not you who killed our children?"

She hesitated for a moment then admitted with no apparent signs of regret, "Yes, Dwight. I carried out the deed which needed to be done... I was the one who drowned our boys in the well, but it was entirely your fault… It was all because of you… You see, my husband, I had no choice… The boys… well… they were so, so much like you… They worshiped the ground you walked on… They even looked like miniature versions of you… I had no doubt that if I didn't take some sort of action…if I allowed them to grow into men…they each would surely have become the same kind of unfaithful whoremongers just like you have become."

"But...but..." Dwight exclaimed, still unable to completely take control of the situation, "Buy why, Marie? Why would you murder our two innocent babies?"

"Not our babies, Dwight. YOUR babies," she shot back. "They may have come from inside of me but they were the result of your rotten demon seed; the fruit of your damnable loins. And what do you care, anyway? You'll just go out and find one of your trollops and make another baby, or maybe two or three more. For all I know you may already have a dozen other little bastards running about, besides that little bitch I learned about. Oh yes, Dwight, those boys were more yours than mine, and because they were, they needed to die, just like you must die."

With that, Marie pulled the butcher knife from behind her back and held it in front of her, determined to stab her husband to death; to allow him to join what she now thought of in her broken mind as his demon spawn offspring. At last she would get the final bit of her revenge. Holding tightly onto the handle, she thrust the knife at his stomach.

But Marie was not prepared for Dwight's quick reaction. He was much faster than she had anticipated. Before she had a chance to strike, he slammed the ivory wolf's head handle of his walking stick into the side of her skull. Marie collapsed to the floor in a heap, falling down directly in front of the mirror. The knife skittered across the floor out of reach.

Within a second, Dwight was on top of her. He reached down and wrapped his strong hands tightly around her throat squeezing with all of his might. His eyes blazed like fiery embers in his skull glowing with a level of insanity, seeming to surpass even that of his mad wife. The furious Dwight continued to grip Marie's throat ever tighter as her eyes bugged wildly from her skull. Stephanie could see blood begin to trickle down the woman's neck where Dwight's fingernails dug deep furrows into the flesh of her throat. He throttled her back and forth as her head bobbed helplessly to and fro, until eventually with a sharp crack, Stephanie heard the woman's neck break. A moment later the woman who was Stephanie's great grandmother, Marie Louise O'Hara Livingston collapsed to the floor in a dead heap.

Dwight sat on the floor weeping and cradling the dead woman in his trembling arms. With the madness now completely gone from her lifeless eyes, Marie looked even more like Stephanie than she previously had. In fact, it was almost as if she had actually become a doppelganger of Stephanie. As Dwight sat sobbing, Marie's corpse shifted slightly and her arm flopped down, hitting the floor with a sickening thud.

As Stephanie watched in terrorized silence, Dwight reached slowly into his suit jacket pocket and withdrew a long ivory handled straight razor. Now seeing the razor, she realized it actually was the very same razor Jason had found. This realization repulsed Stephanie to no end as chills of disgust and revulsion raced down her spine. She knew what this razor was going to be used for from the newspaper article she had found and wanted to turn away in horror, but was forced to watch the terrible tableau unfold in front of her.
 

However, unknown to Stephanie as she watched in horror, not only was the razor the exact one used by Dwight almost a century earlier to commit his atrocious act, but it was also used by Emerson Washburn to butcher himself earlier that same year.

It was the same razor, which set in motion the series of events, which would eventually bring her and her family to the property. It was the cursed talisman which allowed Marie and Dwight Livingston to venture beyond the confines of their own place of eternal damnation to begin planning for their one chance to escape from the confines of their torturous hell.

Dwight slowly and calmly lifted the straight razor to his left arm and made several deep horizontal cuts across his wrist. Blood pumped from the wounds and streamed onto the body of his dead wife. It trickled along the length of her arm and eventually began to puddle on the floorboards. Some of the blood beaded on the surface of the floor while the rest of it seeped down into the cracks between the boards.

A moment later, Dwight brought the bloody razor up to his throat and sliced a gaping wound from just below his left ear and continued it over across to his right. It was as though he was unable to feel the pain of the blade. With his head raised and his throat extended, the incision split open up like a cavernous fleshy mouth, exposing all of its musculature inside and allowing blood to pour down his arms and the front of his suit, drenching his dead wife's face and torso with gore. From her point of observation, Stephanie bellowed a silent scream, as she could not stand to see any more.

Within a split second, Stephanie found herself standing in the field behind their property. It was early in the morning on an overcast winter's day and a heavy fog seemed to enshroud everything around her. She saw a woman standing on a rectangular area of the property behind a low wall of stones. She was dressed in a long heavy black woolen coat and wore a matching dark fashionable hat and scarf.

The area looked quite familiar to her, as if she had seen it before and not just because it was part of her property but also because she believed something significant might have happened there which she could not immediately recall. Stephanie turned to her left and saw the familiar hexagonal shape of the spa building in the distance and understood she was standing at the back of her property near the spot where her children had stood staring on the first day they had come to see the house. She wondered how she had gotten outside and why she was at the back of her land.

She looked again at the spa building, noticing how much different it looked, realizing she was looking at the building, as it appeared when it had first been constructed ninety years earlier. Stephanie heard a sniffling sound and saw the woman, standing behind the low wall was crying. She turned slightly in Stephanie's direction and Stephanie immediately recognized the woman as Amelia Miller, Dwight's sister. From behind Amelia's legs, a small girl dressed in winter coat and hat stepped forward slightly and looked down at something on the ground behind the wall.

Stephanie stepped closer and noticed behind the wall was a small cemetery; a family plot similar to those she had seen on occasions while driving past family farms in rural Pennsylvania. As she approached the two figures, she recognized the young girl as Sarah Livingston. Stephanie followed their gaze downward and saw two small gravestones marking what appeared to be two fresh graves. She also noticed other small gravestones scattered about the place, but their inscriptions had been weathered away by time and the elements making them illegible.

Focusing on the two newer stones Stephanie read the inscriptions "Matthew James Livingston, June 12, 1916 - December 19, 1922" on the first and the second one said "Charles Edward Livingston July 2, 1918 - December 19 1922". She realized she was looking at the grave markers for the boys she had just seen murdered. Each of the stones also had an identical inscription below the dates. Stephanie could barely make them out through the morning fog, but looking closer, she could see they read "Taken From Us Too Soon, By The Hand Of Evil."

Then Amelia spoke, as if addressing the dead boys, "Poor little Matthew and Charles. That miserable witch did this to you and all because of the misdeeds of my own brother. He was so very wrong in what he did and he should have been made to pay for his indiscretions. But there was no reason why you two innocents should have suffered for his mistakes, and most certainly not with your young lives. Although I couldn't have stopped your father and his sinful ways, I was aware of what he was doing. Perhaps I too am guilty; perhaps I should have tried harder to dissuade him. But I did not and I will be sorry for the rest of my days for what happened to you." Then the woman wept openly. Little Sarah clung to her leg, but said nothing.

"But don't you worry, boys," Amelia sobbed, "I promise you with all my heart, I will take good care of your little sister, Sarah, and will raise her as one of my own children. I can only hope you boys have found peace on the other side."

Sarah raised her head slightly as if looking at something else in the graveyard. Stephanie followed her gaze and could see two shapes forming in the morning mist. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized what she and Sarah were seeing appear before them were the images of Matthew and Charles Livingston. Amelia did not seem to see the manifestation, as she showed no signs of reacting in any way.

The boys stood side-by-side, still dressed in their nightclothes, holding hands looking directly at their little sister. Their pajamas appeared to be sodden. The boys were pail as milk, their skin a dusky blue-gray and their large hypnotic staring eyes were sunk deep in their heads, surrounded by dark circles. They seemed to still be covered in a thin skin of ice, which gave their mottled flesh the slightest blue glow. The little child, Sarah, looked out at them with a beatific smile and silently mouthed the word "boys".

Stephanie suddenly flashed back to the first day they had come to the property and recalled that same expression on Sammy's face as he stood in front of what she now believed was this same plot of ground, only almost one hundred years later, wearing that very same expression and mouthing that same word, "boys". Sammy was special, both Stephanie and Jason knew that but they previously had no idea why. But now Stephanie could see her own grandmother as a two-year-old, looking like a miniature version of Marie Livingston, seeing with the same sight beyond normal sight. Now she knew where the gift had originated. Sammy was part of she and Jason, and they were both descendants of Dwight Livingston. This special sight which Sammy seemed to have must be a genetic predisposition handed down through the generations.

Neither she, nor her daughter Cindy had never shown signs of having such a gift and to the best of her knowledge neither had Jason or Jeremy. It must have taken the combining of their similar, but different genetic makeup to allow some recessive gene, which controlled such a sight to come forward in Sammy. Then Stephanie was distracted suddenly hearing Amelia's voice in her head.

Amelia was looking off in the distance to the far left, unaware of the two ghosts watching her.  , "Over there is where we put the bodies of your parents.” She was silently speaking in her mind to the two boys buried beneath her feat.  “I am sorry that I forced you to lie in the same ground with strangers, but I could not allow those two heathens to be buried on the same hallowed ground where you now rest.   To bury them here would be a blasphemy to God and an injustice to you both as well. You are better off finding your way to paradise together without your parents” Then speaking to herself she said, “I sincerely doubt they will ever be joining the boys in Heaven. I suspect they will be spending their eternity subjected to the tortures of Hell, at least that is my personal wish for them."