The Dark Blood of Poppies (58 page)

Read The Dark Blood of Poppies Online

Authors: Freda Warrington

BOOK: The Dark Blood of Poppies
12.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

The night before the funeral, Madeleine crept in and sat with her, as if they were holding a wake. In a way, they were: for their father, and for Charlotte’s lost humanity. She put her arms around Maddy’s thin shoulders and consoled her.

“It’s only for Henry,” said Charlotte. “Only for legal reasons.”

“Then why’s everyone so upset?”

“They don’t understand what I am. I didn’t mean to disturb them so badly. Please don’t be afraid, Maddy. No need for nightmares.”

“I had enough nightmares about Karl,” Madeleine whispered. “I’m past all that now. But they won’t actually bury you, will they?”

“Of course not. David will weigh down the coffin with a rug or something and they’ll bury that. It won’t be real.”

Madeleine seemed content with that. Charlotte stroked her hair, breathing the lovely fragrances of shampoo and soap and perfume, forcing herself to ignore the pulse of her blood. At least she could reassure Maddy. It was too late for the others.

When Madeleine left, there was silence. The clocks had stopped without her father there to wind them.

But what would it be like
, she wondered again,
to be buried?

She was going to go through with it. To punish herself for the pain she’d caused her family. To atone, a very little, for Fleur’s death.

She heard cars outside. It would be a modest, private affair, as befitted a fake funeral. No flowers.

Under the shroud, she wore a dress of coffee-coloured georgette, so she could discard the shroud afterwards. They’d wanted to know how she would escape. Anne suggested that they screw down the coffin lid before the undertakers arrived. The idea of Charlotte being shut in the coffin seemed to horrify her family more than anything.

But she said, “No, I want them to see me as they fasten me in. So there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind. We’ll sew lead weights into the corners. As soon as the lid’s fastened, I’ll escape. I can walk through walls and vanish. Nothing can go wrong.”

But now the undertakers in black were here, sliding the lid over her, turning the screws, she experienced wild panic. Her heart, which she’d stilled, began to beat madly. She nearly gave herself away, on the verge of screaming, “No, don’t shut me in!”

That would have felled them all with heart failure.

She mastered herself and lay like stone. Petrified.

“She hardly weighs a thing,” said someone, as her wooden cocoon swayed into the air. “Shame, when they go so young.”

A short car journey. She was lifted and carried again, set in place. She heard the service, but sensed no one in church beyond the minister and her immediate family: Elizabeth, David, Anne, Madeleine. No one cried. It was a drear and depressing sham, like her supposed marriage to Henry.

In the cemetery now. She was being lowered in short, jerky stages; it felt like falling backwards, out of control. The priest’s voice receded. Eyes closed, she was aware of the lid barely clearing her forehead, wooden walls confining her. She braced her hands as if to push the coffin sides apart, to brake the downward motion.

The air turned clay-cold. Scents of soil and decay wormed in. When the coffin came to rest, there was terrible stillness.

Opening her eyes, she saw dim woodgrain above her nose. Her eyes were attuned to wavelengths beyond the visible, so the interior was not quite pitch-black… but dark enough. She thought,
What if I can’t enter the Crystal Ring from here?
Faint panic.
I should try now, if it’s not too late…

When the first clod of earth hit the coffin, she jumped. Her mind stretched out instinctively for Raqia, touched only blunt nothingness.

What if the Ring doesn’t extend underground? I can’t escape!

Her heart, which she’d halted again by willpower, exploded into a wild rhythm. She pushed frantically at the coffin sides. It seemed the lid was made of glass and she saw black walls of soil, an oblong of daylight high above, the figures in black looking down. Then one leaned over her, screaming, “
You can’t bury her! She’s not dead!”

She forced the hallucination away.
Keep still. Wait until they’ve all gone.

There were no screams above her, only a murmur of voices. Anne whispered, “She can’t still be in there, can she?”

Somehow she forced her panic to subside.
I must see it through. This is my penance.

Madness. And I pulled my family into my craziness with me, because I love them and – being a vampire – my love can only suck them dry and leave them insane.

Soon she sensed a massive weight of earth building up. The mourners had gone. Once the gravediggers finished their task, they, too, left. She imagined twilight gathering between gravestones, dew silvering the grass. And now she almost dared not try to escape, in case she truly couldn’t.

She relaxed, concentrated. She felt the wooden prison dissolve, soil holding her like concrete. She moved upwards with ghastly slowness, like an earthworm floundering through the sticky embrace of clay. At last she broke free into the mauve, dully glittering landscape of Raqia’s lowest circle. Gravestones and winter trees were warped ghosts of themselves.

Suddenly aware how very cold she felt, she wrapped her arms around her waist. A shock, to see her own form transmuted by the Ring: her arms snake-slender, the shroud a webbing of black strands. As if she’d been so far out of her mind that she’d forgotten this would happen.

Shivering so hard she could hardly move, she began to walk. Two human auras appeared, large and small: a mother and child, placing flowers on a grave. As she passed, she heard the child exclaim, “Mummy, that lady!”

“There’s no one there, dear,” replied the mother.

Charlotte looked up into the firmament. She saw charcoal clouds moving across darkness. All light had bled from the skyscape. No heart-lifting sapphire blue voids, or dappled bronze hills rising into towering ships of the air. All was stormy. Malevolent.

The Crystal Ring doesn’t want me
, she thought with a rush of terror.

She was wholly unhinged now. Possessed. Something had made her act out this grisly charade of death, a grim tendril of the Ring crawling into her mind and loosening the bonds of reason. Forcing herself to the macabre journey’s end, taking her family with her, had achieved nothing good. No, it had been an act of pure evil, sealing her insanity.

There must be something of Lilith in me.

She threw off the shroud and watched it billow away, as if it had a life of its own.

She began to run, her teeth chattering.
I can’t go home. I’m not Charlotte any more. I can’t take this gibbering shell back to Karl.

Charlotte rose through Raqia, caught by stormy currents. All her thoughts and memories were streaming away. She was a ragged skeleton. The only way to keep her psychosis at bay was to flee as hard as she could, an ice-thread lost between infinite walls of cloud.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

O
ne morning, in the winter-light of dawn, Robyn realised that she was dying.

She was alone in bed, Sebastian out bringing death or nightmares to some victim in the dark. For the past two days, she’d been too ill to get up.

They had been making love far too often over the past weeks. She knew Sebastian took as little blood as possible – how much was that, she wondered, half a pint, a few sips? – but even those small losses were too much. Repeated nearly every night, how could her overdrawn system possibly keep up?

They both knew, but gave in to their insatiable obsession anyway.

She was cold.
Get up and stoke the fire
, she told herself. She tried to sit, only to fall back, dizzy. Hammers pounded inside her skull.

She lay shivering. After a time the spasm passed and she lay impassive, eyes half-open. The bed canopy, the fireplace and the walls hung dimly across her vision, seeming to blur and shimmer.

She was even losing her eyesight.

There were ghosts in the wallpaper, whispering to her. They peeled themselves off the wall and danced around the room.

Sebastian hadn’t touched her since her condition worsened. He was solicitous, but seemed frightened by what was happening to her. He sat with her constantly, except when he went out to feed. He brought her endless supplies of tea, soup and food to tempt her failing appetite.

“We must build up your strength,” he would say, incongruously, like a doctor. “Rest and eat, and you’ll soon be better.”

They both wanted to believe it.

Only this morning, with no particular emotion, had Robyn realised it was too late. She couldn’t eat or face more than a few sips of tea. Anaemia and starvation compounded each other. She had a cough, too, an infection she couldn’t shake off.

Perhaps a blood transfusion would have saved her, but even that seemed pointless. It would only delay the inevitable.

Spectres wove and fluttered in the walls. Robyn lay on her side, staring into the malevolent shadows, her teeth chattering. This room wished her ill, but there was nothing she could do. Only lie here in quiet despair. Sinking down into the cobweb dark.

For a while, she thought she was home in Boston. The bright cosiness of her own bedroom… Alice and Mary to attend her, admirers at the door with gifts. Showered with love, she’d responded with contempt… but her needs now were as simple as a child’s.
To be home, Alice holding my hand.

Then she roused from the hallucination, and saw where she was. This dark, empty, freezing, godforsaken house!

Drifting in fever-dreams, Robyn had no concept of time. At some stage she became aware of a figure beside the bed.

Fear shook her to a higher state of awareness. Not fear of dying, which she’d overcome, but the abstract terror of a nightmare.

“Oh, Robyn,” a voice murmured. The figure fell onto its knees beside her. A slight shape under a veil of black hair.

Robyn thought this was Rasmila, come to impart some dreadful revelation.

“Sebastian?” she cried, her voice almost gone.

“Why do you call him for help,” said the voice, “when he’s the one who brought you to this? Oh, God, Robyn, I could –”

The stranger rose and moved away. She lit a candle on the bedside table. As the light flared, hurting Robyn’s eyes, she saw that the visitor was Violette. The dancer looked far from gentle.

“Why are you doing this?” Violette’s voice was a serpent hiss. Rage turned her face bloodless, like opal with white fire burning inside. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“What?” Robyn painfully lifted herself onto her elbows.

“Embracing death like a lover! Why have you let him do this?”

A surge of adrenaline came to Robyn’s aid. She sat up, head spinning. “Because I love him.”

“Don’t make me sick. Even I would never have used you like this! Love, what love has he shown you?”

“You’ve no right –”

Violette’s hands flew down and pinioned her. “It’s not because you love him, it’s because you hate yourself. Your obsession is to punish
yourself
.” The dancer’s face was livid, terrifying. “Don’t fight me, Robyn. I see right through you. You think you’re punishing men, but really you’re only hurting yourself, because in your heart you still believe everything your father and husband told you. You believe you are worthless and evil!”

Robyn was shaking uncontrollably, fighting for air. Suddenly she felt very much alive.

“I’ll cure you of ‘love’!” Violette snapped. She opened her mouth. Her canines, fully extended, were thin, wet and sharp.

“Don’t!” Robyn cried. All she could think was how Sebastian would feel, when he came home and found her dead.

“Why not?”

“I can’t die without seeing him one last time.”

With a moan of anger, Violette attacked.

She flung back the bedcovers and leapt onto Robyn, welding herself from breasts to ankles. Violette’s body in the soft black dress felt divine, almost weightless, yet it also felt leech-like, sucking Robyn’s life from every pore.

The dancer’s breath was hot, scentless. A veil of black hair brushed Robyn’s face and its perfume was exquisite: roses, lilies, rosin dust. She would never forget that scent…

Then came the pain.

Savage pain, like thick needles driving through her neck, exploding in her skull. She thought she was used to it, but this wasn’t Sebastian’s gentle bite. This was a lamia in the throes of demonic rapture.

Robyn couldn’t breathe. The pain sang coldly on, but the slender body against hers was warm, vibrant.

She felt herself falling backwards. She clawed at Violette’s arms, clinging on for safety.

They fell together, locked, sobbing.

Light erupted between them. Searing diamond light.

As it faded, leaving Robyn in a different universe, she saw an overblown vision in crimson and black; a phantom of herself, drawn in rippling ruby light, being born from Violette’s mouth.

The ghost-Robyn dropped softly to the ground, still attached by a red string that went from its throat to the dancer’s lips: a grotesque umbilical cord. Violette stood facing the blood-red shape, her hands on its shoulders.

Other books

The Secretary by Brooke, Meg
The Boys of Fire and Ash by Meaghan McIsaac
Mary Jo Putney by Dearly Beloved
Delta de Venus by Anaïs Nin
This Thing Called Love by Miranda Liasson
Gold Medal Rider by Bonnie Bryant