The Unloved (43 page)

“Upstairs,” she said. “Our guests are waiting.”

Her heart beating wildly, Julie let Marguerite guide her to the bottom of the stairs to the third floor.

What guests?
she asked silently.
What is she talking about? There’s no one in the house but us
.

But it wasn’t true.

Her father was in the house somewhere, and so was Kerry Sanders. And they were both dead.

Her aunt was going to kill her too. She knew it now, knew it with a calm certainty that seemed to drain the panic out of her body. Unless …

Unless she did exactly as Marguerite told her to do, and acted as if nothing were wrong.

She started up the stairs, her eyes fixing on the closed doors to the ballroom.

She was vaguely aware of something on the stairs, of a reddish smear on the floor of the ballroom’s foyer. But she refused to look at it, refused to risk losing the strange composure—born of pure terror—that had come over her.

“Open the doors,” Marguerite commanded.

Julie reached out, pushed gently, and the doors swung silently open on their heavy hinges.

Beyond the doors, the ballroom was pitch black.

“There are candles on the piano,” Marguerite said. “Light them, my dear.”

She handed Julie a small box of wooden matches, and Julie obediently took them and moved through the darkness, toward the piano. Keeping her back stiff and doing her best not to let her fingers shake, she began lighting the tapers in the enormous candelabra that sat on top of the piano. As she worked, she sensed Marguerite moving around the perimeter of the room, and slowly, as both of them continued to light candles, the room began to glow with light.

“Now turn around,” Marguerite told her when the last candle was lit. “Turn around and greet our guests.”

Steeling herself, Julie slowly turned away from the piano.

And a scream, unbidden and uncontrollable, tore from her throat. High-pitched, agonizing, it echoed through the room,
bouncing off the walls to crash back into her own ears, deafening her.

Against the wall, four corpses were seated grotesquely in four red velvet chairs.

Kerry, his body pinned upright on the first chair by the knife that was still protruding from his chest, stared at her with sightless eyes. His mouth hung open, and a few drops of blood still dripped from his chin onto the crimson stain that covered his chest.

Next to him was Ruby, her eyes bulging, her flesh swollen around the red silk sash knotted around her neck. Her legs splayed out in front of her and her arms hung at her sides, her fingers curled into gnarled claws.

Jennifer Mayhew was beside Ruby. A dark bruise was spread over her forehead, and more bruises stained her cheeks. Her lower lip, half torn from her face by Marguerite’s vicious kicks, had left her mouth no more than a bloody pulp, but her eyes, too, were open. They seemed to stare directly at Julie, and there was something accusing in their dull lifelessness, as if somehow what had happened to her might have been Julie’s fault.

And finally she saw the body of her father. Covered with blood, his body was slumped over in the fourth chair, almost as if he were asleep. And yet there was a stillness to him, a devastating look of abject defeat, that would have told Julie he was dead even without the bloodstains on his clothing.

Her scream died away, and the icy chill in her fingers spread through her body, numbing her. Her mind seemed to close down, and when at last she heard her aunt’s voice once more, it came from a great distance away.

“It’s time,” Marguerite told her. “Time to dance for our guests.”

She heard the piano then, the first notes of a familiar melody whose title her numbed mind refused to remember, and even in her shock, she felt her legs and arms move into the first position.

It was a nightmare—it had to be. They couldn’t all be dead—it was impossible. Her mind rejected what her eyes beheld, and she barely felt her body moving from one position
to the next. She rose up on her toes, oblivious to the pain from the tight slippers, and spun into a pirouette.

The beat of the music picked up, and she whirled across the floor, her arms moving by pure instinct and years of training.

And she could feel the dead eyes on her, following her every move, watching her, reaching out to her.

They’re not dead!
the voice in her mind screamed.
I’m going to wake up, and they’re going to be here, watching me, smiling at me
. She kept dancing, afraid to stop, afraid that if she stopped, she would find that the nightmare had not ended at all, that everything around her was real.

And then, as she danced close to Jennifer Mayhew, she suddenly saw her best friend move.

She froze in mid-step, her eyes watching in fascination.

And slowly Jennifer’s body moved again, leaning forward as if she were trying to stand up.

The motion speeded up, and Jennifer fell face forward, sprawling out on the floor, her right arm outstretched, her finger reaching toward Julie.

Julie’s shock broke then, and she screamed once more, covering her face with her hands as she staggered toward the door of the ballroom.

Abruptly, the music stopped, and an eerie silence fell over the room. Julie got to the door, jerked it open, and lurched into the foyer at the top of the stairs. She was at the stairs themselves, clutching at the banister to keep from collapsing, when she heard her aunt’s voice once more, rasping with the furious anger of her grandmother.

“Do you think you can leave?” the raging voice demanded. “Do you think I’ll let you throw away everything? All my life I’ve depended on you. I’ve trained you, loved you! I’ve driven you on—made you practice every day! I’ve taught you everything! And what are my thanks? You, wanting to run away with that filthy young man. Giving yourself to him, like a whore in the streets!” Her voice rose, screaming into Julie’s ear. “Well, I won’t have it! You’ll never leave me! You’ll stay with me forever, do you hear me?” And then, as she cowered away from her aunt, Julie felt
Marguerite’s hand against her back and felt the violence of the shove that threw her off balance, twisting her hands loose from their grip on the banister.

She screamed once as she began the long tumble down the flight of stairs, then the pain in her body cut off the scream in her throat, and she was silent as she rolled over and over, her head striking some of the stairs, her spine twisting violently as she struck first the wall, then the posts that rose from each step to support the banister. At last she came to a stop, sprawled brokenly at the bottom of the stairs. The last thing she saw as blackness began to close around her was her aunt’s face, looming above her, her lips twisted into an evil smile.

“You’ll never leave me,” she heard the voice mutter once again. “You belong to me, and I’ll never let you go.”

And then, blessedly, Julie slipped away into the comforting darkness.

Hal Sanders edged his car out onto the causeway, abruptly braking to a stop as a cresting wave broke against the rock levee, then surged across the road, draining away to the north. “Damn!” He uttered the word loudly, his fist slamming in frustration against the hub of the steering wheel. There was a sharp rapping on the side window, and he rolled it down to see Will Hempstead, a large flashlight in his hand, shaking his head.

“Not gonna be able to make it for a while yet,” the police chief said. “But the storm’s passing and the water should settle down pretty quick.”

“Pretty quick might not be good enough,” Sanders replied, his voice bitter. His eyes squinted as he peered through the windshield, straining to see through the blackness and the drizzle. His headlights glared brightly, but the rain quickly diffused their beams, and he could see no more than a few yards. But then the drizzle eased off, and Hal clicked the beams to the high position. As a blue light glowed softly on his dash, the headlights shone out the length of the causeway, and for just a moment Hal thought he saw movement at the other end. But in a second it was gone. The drizzle turned heavier, and once more the lights dissolved into a hazy brilliance. But Hal was already out of his car.

“You got a searchlight, don’t you?” he demanded, striding toward the black and white hatchback Subaru parked a few yards away from his Ford.

“Sure do,” Hempstead replied.

“Turn it on,” Sanders said. “I saw something over there.
It was just for a second, but I’m sure there’s something on the island.”

Inside the small squad car Frank Weaver snapped on the powerful searchlight mounted on the roof and began playing it out over the water. Its halogen beam cut through the rain with a white brilliance, and a moment later they could see the tops of the pine trees on Devereaux Island.

“Lower, damn it,” Sanders shouted, his eyes searching the opposite shore. “For Christ’s sake, Frank, if anyone’s out there, they aren’t going to be climbing trees!”

“Give me a chance, will you?” Weaver muttered, twisting the control knob on the roof of the car. It moved jerkily for a moment, and the beam shot skyward, losing itself in the clouds, then came back down to sweep the water. Then he steadied it, and found the end of the causeway. For a split second there was nothing, then a figure appeared in the beam, waving frantically.

“That’s Jeff!” Will Hempstead shouted. “What the hell—” He fell silent as the distant figure, still waving, started moving forward, out onto the causeway. Snatching at the microphone that hung from the radio, Hempstead switched on the bullhorn mounted just behind the spotlight.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted. “Don’t try to come over here!”

But even as he spoke, he saw a wave flood across the causeway, and a moment later the small figure of Jeff Devereaux disappeared.

Jeff had seen the headlights pull up to the opposite end of the causeway, and began jumping up and down, waving his arms and shouting at the top of his voice. But his voice sounded like no more than a whisper even to himself, and he was almost certain he couldn’t be seen in the misty glow of the headlights. Then the spotlight beam came on and a moment later found him. Shouting again, he waved frantically and instinctively ran toward the beacon of light.

The wave hit him at the same time he heard the faint sound
of a voice calling to him through the bullhorn. He lost his balance, stumbling, then went under. He felt himself being carried off the roadway, dragged over the rough rocks and hurled into the channel beyond. He thrashed wildly in the water for a moment, then his feet found the bottom and he pushed up, his head popping through the surface a second later. Treading water, he twisted his head around, searching for his bearings.

A second wave washed over the causeway, and a cascade of churning foam broke over him for a moment. But then he saw the spotlight shining on the trees beyond the road, and struck out for the shore a few yards away. Though the sea was choppy here, he was on the lee side of the causeway and the fearsome waves to the south couldn’t reach him. A moment later, with both his shoes lost in the channel, he scrambled out of the water and back up to the mud of the road.

“Jeff!”

He heard his name plainly, turned to wave to the car on the opposite side, then realized they couldn’t see him, for the beam of the searchlight was playing over the channel now.

“I’m here!” he screamed. “I’m on the road! Over here!” He waved frantically, but the seconds ticked by as the spotlight crisscrossed over the choppy water. Suddenly it moved up and raked along the road, passing right over him. A second later it was back, full on him, and he began waving again.

“Stay where you are!” he heard a metallically amplified voice shout. “Don’t try to come across! You can’t make it! We’ll get to you!” There was a long pause, and then the voice came again. “Jeff, if you hear me, stop waving. Stop waving, count to three, then wave again, just once!”

Jeff hesitated, struggling to control himself. Then, in the glowing illumination of the searchlight, he stopped waving.

“One … two … three …” he said out loud.

Almost tentatively, he held up one hand and waved. A moment later his hand dropped back to his side, and, sobbing, he collapsed into the mud of the road.

*      *      *

“All right,” Hempstead said as they watched Jeff drop to the ground. “Let’s get going. Hal, move your car out of the way.” As Sanders hurried back to his car and began backing it away from the end of the causeway, Will Hempstead slid into the driver’s seat of the squad car and jammed the transmission into low gear. He was just starting to move forward when the back door was jerked open and Hal Sanders scrambled in.

“Don’t even try to argue with me, Will,” Sanders said. “My son’s out there somewhere, and I’m going with you.”

Hempstead said nothing as he moved the car into position at the end of the causeway. “Play the light out to the south,” he finally told Frank Weaver. “I want to see what’s coming.”

They watched the water for five long minutes, gauging the force of the waves, searching for a pattern.

“Looks like the fifth one’s the worst,” Weaver finally said. Hempstead nodded in silent agreement, then waited for the next large wave to break.