Treasure Box (27 page)

"Is it true?" he asked. "Are you dead?"

"Yes," she said. "Poor Mike. He's so worried about his family."

"Listen to her," said Roz. "Pretending to care about the man who killed her. She doesn't care about him. She doesn't care about anything. Except that she
lost!
. She never even knew it was me she was fighting."

Mrs. Tyler turned her head and gazed levelly at Roz. If she felt any surprise, Quentin couldn't see it. But then, could you surprise the dead?

Roz was still gloating. "Always thought it was her own stupid weak daughter fighting her. Look at your daughter, Grandmother!"

Now Mrs. Tyler looked at Rowena, and her eyes softened. Love? Pity, at least.

"There she is, your softhearted daughter, the one who couldn't
bear
the idea of hurting anybody. Well,
I'm
your true child, Grandmother. I have the kind of strength you had—only more of it! What I did to you was nothing but justice! Can you deny it?"

"I don't deny anything," said Mrs. Tyler quietly. "Oh, Rowena, if only you had believed me."

Rowena was looking out the window, tears streaming down her face.

"How sad for the old ladies," said Roz. "All caught up in their little drama. Well guess what, ladies. This isn't about you. You were either tools or obstacles, that's all. Mother was a tool, and I used her. Grandmother was an obstacle, and I pushed her out of the way. Because what I'm doing really matters in the world. I was always too large to live in your little soap opera. I was born bigger than your minds could even comprehend. So stick around and see what power is
for
."

Mrs. Tyler looked at Quentin over the treasure box and gave him a tight little smile.

"Do it, Quentin!" cried Roz. "Open my treasure box."

Mrs. Tyler nodded slightly.

Roz laughed. "Oh, Grandmother, do you
really
think you're still a player in this game?"

Quentin reached out and gripped the sides of the box. He had been in this pose before, but then he had had no notion of what was inside it. Now he felt the nakedness of his skin as he touched the warm, soft wood.

"Lift the lid," said Roz.

This time there was no Uncle Paul to stop him. He lifted the lid a little. For a moment nothing happened. He looked up at Mrs. Tyler. As he did, a long slender red artery snaked out from under the lid and attached itself to one of the veins on the back of Quentin's right hand.

He cried out in fear, not pain. He reached with the other hand to pry it away, but the artery was now a part of his own body, and when he pulled on it, his hand moved with it. Two more arteries snaked out and attached to his left hand.

"Should've kept the gloves," Roz jeered.

Quentin tried to resist, but his hands weren't obeying him very well. He wanted to leap away from the box, but his hands reached for the lid in spite of his strongest effort. His hands flipped the lid open.

It was like opening the inside of a human chest. A lacy network of veins and arteries was attached to the lid and the walls of the box, and more and more of them reached out to attach to Quentin's hands and bare forearms.

Roz started walking toward him, smiling but also terrified. "Good," she said. "Possess him. Possess him."

"Stop it, Roz," whispered Rowena.

"Too late, Mother," said Roz. "Once it starts, it can't be stopped."

With terrified eyes, Quentin looked at Mrs. Tyler. She appeared solemn but not afraid. Watching him.

A huge heart rose up out of the box, drawn up by the arteries now attached to Quentin at a dozen points. It was beating, but not rhythmically.

"Hurry," whispered Roz, coming closer. "Take him."

"The heart only has a couple of minutes," said Mrs. Tyler, her voice as mild as if she were giving an explanation to a class. "Inside the box it couldn't die, but outside it has to have a host. Don't fight it Quentin. Take the heart to your chest."

In an agony of fear Quentin looked at her. It was all he could do to keep his hands from seizing the heart—and now she was telling him to surrender? To let the heart have him?

"Only a couple of minutes, and then it will have to stay where it is," said Mrs. Tyler. "Put it on your chest."

Quentin stopped fighting the impulse. At once his hands flew to the heart, seized it, ripped it from the network of arteries in the box. At once the unused veins withered and shriveled until they looked like last year's kudzu vines. The box no longer throbbed.

Quentin's hands hesitated only a moment. Then they snatched the heart to his own chest, where it clung to the cloth of his shirt, beating, beating.

"Done," said Roz.

"Done," said Mrs. Tyler.

"Roz, don't!" cried Rowena.

"And now to make you mine," said Roz. She came closer. "Bend down, Quentin, so I can kiss you." Suddenly she was transformed into Madeleine. "Kiss me, Tin. Kiss me one last time."

She was close to him. In front of him. He could see Mrs. Tyler behind her. With her hands she mimed prying something free of her chest. He understood at once. But did he have the strength to do it?

Alone he didn't. If the beast hadn't wanted to go to her, he never could have done it. But it did want to go. And because of Grandmother's hair between Paul's disfigured heart and his own flesh, the last remnants of her power had been there to help keep the beast from taking full possession of him. Quentin reached up his hands, took hold of the heart, and ripped it away from his body. With Madeleine right in front of him, the same motion pushed it into her chest.

In that instant she changed back into Roz, only where Madeleine's chest had been, there was the naked skin of Roz's face. The heart was already attaching to her in a dozen, in scores of places. And the veins were dropping away from Quentin's hands. He backed away, free of the thing, but unable to stop watching what was happening to Roz.

The heart slid down her face, under her jaw, to her neck, and down inside her shirt. Roz was terrified. "Mother!" she cried. "Help me! Mother!"

"Now you know," Mrs. Tyler said to Rowena. Her voice was thick with bitterness. "Now you know why I did what I did."

"Can't you stop it?" Rowena whispered.

"I already did, once, when it possessed my little boy," said Mrs. Tyler. "But at present, inconveniently, I'm dead."

"Mother!" Roz's voice was more frantic. "Mother!" she screamed. And then the voice became a gurgle.

Roz stumbled, fell to one knee. Her shape began changing. Her arms shriveled and drew up inside her sleeves and disappeared. Wings broke the fabric of her blouse, tearing it open across the back; they spread wide, a ten-foot, then twenty-foot span, lithe as black silk, thin as paper. Quentin could see the light of the window through a wing. Her head rocked back, her jaws opened. A huge serpentine tongue flicked out once, twice, and then her face collapsed into a new shape. The head of a dragon. It opened its jaws to reveal a vast array of teeth, and roared.

Into the roar there came another sound. A popping sound. One. Two. Three.

The dragon shape collapsed. It was Roz again, only there was a bloom of blood on the side of her head, and another on her belly. She looked over her shoulder at her mother with terrified eyes. "Mommy," she whispered.

Rowena fired again, knocking Roz down to the floor. Only the girl's torn clothes showed how the dragon had transformed her a moment ago. The heart hung limply throbbing at her throat. It was feverishly trying to get away, but it was weak now. Rowena fired into the heart.

"Don't waste bullets on that thing," said Mrs. Tyler. "It already had possession of Roz's body. That's the body that has to die."

Sobbing, Rowena sent her last two bullets into her daughter's head.

Eyes open, Roz rocked onto her back and died.

"You had to do it," said Mrs. Tyler. "You had no choice. You can live with this, Rowena. I know you can, because I did."

Rowena, her eyes dead, turned to Quentin. "Get out of the house. Get out or die."

Only now did Quentin realize that the beast had not gone. It didn't have a living body now, but it still had some power to move things in the physical world, as it had when it was in the box. The floorboards under Roz's body buckled as if some immense gopher were burrowing there. The rippling moved like a wave under the pedestal; the box fell and crumpled. The wave passed under Quentin and threw him off his feet. Now the walls were rippling, as paintings leapt out and fell to the floor, as plaster split away in chunks and slid down the wall.

"Get out," said Mrs. Tyler. "Both of you."

Quentin got up, tried to take Rowena's hand to help her. She shoved him away. "I just killed my baby," she whispered. "I'm not leaving her."

With the room bucking like a horse, Quentin staggered for the door and hurled himself into the entry hall.

If anything, it was worse out here. The foot of the stairway had come loose and was now pawing at the ground like a cat's foot, daring him to try to get past without being caught and crushed. There was no way he could reach the front door.

He ran for the library. Books were flying from the walls, smacking him like a flock of suicidal birds. There was no passage there. The dining room. The stairway snatched at him as he passed, but he made it inside. But as he stood there, panting, the dustcover on the table came to life and fluttered toward him as if to engulf him in a net of fine embroidery. It blocked all doors leading from the room. So Quentin ran for the tall window and threw himself through it like a high jumper, back first, shattering glass around him into shards like icicles.

He landed in leafless bushes, prickly and thorny, but it was kinder than the glass would have been. Scratched and bleeding, he pulled himself free and ran around to the front of the house. Ray Duncan was standing in the open door of the Lincoln, staring horrified at the house, which was trembling and, here and there, bulging with the passage of the invisible beast.

"What's happening? What's happening?" he demanded when he saw Quentin.

"Get in the car and drive!" cried Quentin.

"Rowena's in there! Roz! My little girl!"

"Roz is dead and Rowena won't come out. Come on, man! Save yourself!"

"Roz!" cried Duncan. "Rowena!" He ran up the stairs to the porch.

The moment he reached the front door, the front wall suddenly burst as the stamping foot of the stairway lunged out, knocking him down, then smashing him, again, again, his lifeless body flopping under the stairs like a mouse under a cat's paw.

Quentin left the Lincoln and ran to his own car, got in, started it, backed it all the way out to the highway. Then he stopped. "Lizzy," he said. Roz had said they brought Lizzy's prison with them.

He tried to drive back into the property, but the wheels spun and his car slid sideways. He stopped, got out of the car and ran, slipping and sliding on ice and snow, toward the house. As he ran, he plunged his right hand—still bloody from the veins that had been attached to it—into his jacket pocket and pulled out his cellular phone. He punched in 911, pushed
send
. "Tell the Mixinack police to get down to the old Laurent house! I don't know the address, they'll know where it is! The Laurent house. Send fire trucks. Ambulances! No, I can't stay on the line."

He jammed the phone back into his pocket as he reached the Lincoln. The house was shuddering on its foundations. The top story collapsed into the third floor. Glass burst and flew out in all directions. He reached in through the driver's door and fumbled to remove the key from the ignition. Got it. He ran back to the trunk and opened it. Then he flung the key toward the porch, where Ray Duncan might have dropped it as he ran for the house.

There was only one suitcase in the trunk of the car. He yanked it out, flung it open on the snow, and pawed through it. Only a few articles of clothing, a few kit items. A champagne bottle. Had Roz really been that certain of having a celebration afterward?

He opened every zipper compartment. He found only a couple of boxes, one holding stationery, the other some gold chains and pearls. There was nothing else that could hold a relic of Lizzy's. Roz lied. She didn't have Lizzy's prison with them.

Then he looked again at the champagne bottle. Picked it up. Could some part of Lizzy possibly fit inside?

Suddenly Mrs. Tyler was standing before him.

"Get away while you still can."

"I have to set Lizzy free."

"Get away."

She was gone.

Quentin got up from his knees, still holding the champagne bottle, and ran down the lane toward his car. Behind him, the roof of the house fell through the last three stories until they were all pancaked on the foundation. The first of the police cars wailed toward him. He waved them into the lane, but they hadn't even emerged from the trees before the house burst into sudden explosive flames. Fire leapt out and engulfed the Lincoln, the suitcase lying open in the snow. The roof collapsed one last time, falling into the foundation. Flames, sparks, and debris flew into the air and settled back down in burning pieces all over what had once been the lawns and the drive. The police drove in, followed by firetrucks. They set to work subduing the blaze, but clearly there was nothing left, no possibility of survivors.

Quentin broke the champagne bottle with a stone. In the broken glass he saw it: The shriveled, skeletal hand of a teenage girl. "Lizzy," he whispered.

She sat in the snow in front of him, leaning against the car. Tears streamed down her face. "Thank you, Tin," she said.

"Lizzy, she had you—"

"Good work, Tin. I'm free and the beast is gone."

"Are you sure? It had control of the house, it was—"

"Only as long as there was still life in her body. Now that she's dead, the beast lost its connection to the world. Mrs. Tyler found me and told me everything. She knows so much, Quentin."

"Yes, but she's dead. And Roz's parents are dead, and what good did it do? The beast will just come back somewhere else."

"Not till someone invites it," said Liz. "Maybe not for a long time. You've done all you could. You stopped it here, before it could get a foothold. That's all that anyone can ever do."