When Elaine returned to the Matherly house, she looked in on Jacob and found the old man asleep, resting comfortably by the look of him, taking a late-afternoon nap to prepare him for the rigors of suppertime and the long evening ahead. In sleep, the stroke-affected half of his countenance was far less imposing and ugly than it appeared when he was awake. She did not interrupt his sleep, but closed the door quietly and walked down the hall to her own bedroom.
She locked her door.
She undressed and showered, letting the hot water pour over her for long, long, exquisite minutes. She did not know which of the two things she was trying to wash from herself: the Bradshaws' envy and the hatred of the Matherly household which they so clearly, even fanatically, evidenced-or the gruesome account of the Christmas Eve murder of the Matherly twins. She felt numbed, terribly old and maybe paralyzed as Jacob was. She neglected the soap, neglected everything as the steaming water cascaded over her and drove out some of the evil that seemed to have seeped into her.
She slipped into her pajamas and flopped upon the bed, drew the sheets up to her chin. She found that the ordeal of the afternoon had thoroughly exhausted her. She had done little but go for a walk and listen to the story of Amelia Matherly's madness. It was not the walk which had exhausted her, but the listening. She wanted only to sleep, sleep until she could wake up and find a world as simple and uncomplicated as she desired.
She did not dream, so deep was her rest.
Paul Honneker came to the supper table ten minutes late, while the others were beginning the main course. His hair was tousled, his eyes quite bloodshot. His face had lost nearly all its color, except for a bruised and ugly bluish cast beneath his eyes. He stopped in the dining room archway and stared at each of the diners, one at a time, moving around the table, and he seemed somewhat incredulous to have found them here. He wiped at his face with a large hand and made his way round the table to his chair. He did not sit down, but fell into it, hunching forward over his plate as if he might not be able to retain consciousness.
Elaine looked down at her plate and tried not to see. But with the absolute silence from the others, she could not help but look again.
Paul was sitting straight now, though he had made no effort to spoon food onto his plate from the serving dishes. It was almost as if he did not want any supper but could not bring himself to break the ritual by not showing up at all.
You've been drinking again, Lee Matherly said. His face was hard, stern lines tracing across the unhealthy pallor he had had ever since Celia's scream.
What if I have? Paul asked. It was meant to be a belligerent response, but there was no anger in the man, only defeat.
You know what it leads to.
I can hold my liquor, Paul said, suddenly defensive. He did not seem any older than fourteen, his mouth drawn up in a pout, his face sullen and unresponsive.
You can't, Lee said.
What makes you think you-
Lee said, Did you break your mirror yet? When Paul didn't reply, he said, You can't hold your liquor, Paul. You break mirrors and windows and dishes, anything that might cast a reflection.
Paul sulked.
Lee watched him for a moment, undecided, then allowed his face to soften. Paul, he said in an utterly different tone of voice, an almost fatherly voice, please do me a favor; please do not start drinking heavily now, not now, not at a time like this.
Paul looked at his plate, as if something were written in the white china, something important.
He said, This is the best time to drink. I can't think of a better time, in fact.
It can't help Celia, Lee said. And it certainly doesn't do the rest of us any good, worrying about you.
Paul gained fire from some unseen source. He raised his head and stiffened his backbone. His words were still heavy with drink, but they came with more power and assurance now. Do you know what they're saying in town?
Who cares? Lee asked.
I do.
People will always talk, Paul. We've all grown used to that, we've all learned to cope.
I haven't, Paul said. They're connecting Celia's stabbing to-to the other-to Amelia. His dead sister's name required effort; it lay before him, spoken but leaden and still.
Lee winced, as if someone had struck him. We'll be above that sort of silliness and-
Paul interrupted and said, Everyone stares at me. People I thought were friends of mine-they weren't. Lee, they think maybe I stabbed Celia!
Nonsense.
You haven't heard the talk. They're saying the Honneker blood is tainted, that Celia's attacker lives here, in this house.
Ignore them.
I hate suburbs and small towns, Paul said. I hate living where everyone knows everybody else's business and the women go around looking for topics of gossip.
Still and all, Lee said, drink won't help.
It helps
me!
Everyone was silent for a long moment. Only the clink of silverware against the plates was audible.
Aren't you eating? Lee asked Paul Honneker.
I can't eat.
Paul, the doctor thinks her chances are fifty-fifty. The longer she holds on, the better it looks.
Paul said nothing.
I talked to Captain Rand just a while ago, Lee said. He had shoved his own food aside, as if he too had lost what little appetite he had brought with him to the table.
Oh? Paul looked so mournfully hopeful that Elaine had to look away from him. She realized, suddenly, that Paul Honneker half believed the rumors he had heard in town, half wondered if he hadn't been the one to take a knife to Celia. The mad often encompassed periods of amnesia, after all, in which anything could be done and later go unremembered
Rand says that they had several reports about a hitchhiker on the highway, just down from here, shortly after the murder. Three people have come forward since the newspaper story broke, and two of them collaborate well. A large man, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six, dressed in jeans and work-shirt, carrying one suitcase."'
But they can't be sure, Paul said.
Not until they find him.
Paul said, If they ever do.
Elaine wanted out of there, but she did not know how to graciously depart. She did not want to hurt anyone's feelings, but she could not take this self-recrimination of Paul Honneker's much longer. Could not take it, chiefly, because she did not know whether or not to believe it was based in truth.
If you can't eat, Paul, you don't have to remain, Lee said. He spoke gently, calmly, soothingly, as if he had had a great deal of experience with the other man's moods.
Come on, Uncle Paul, Dennis said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and shoving back from the table. I'll show you the painting I just finished. It's my best so far, I think.
Paul Honneker accepted the invitation with the first expression of pleasure he had shown since he had arrived at the table. He seemed to like the older Matherly son. Elaine supposed that the irresponsible people of this world attracted one another.
When she had checked Jacob Matherly's blood pressure, temperature, and heartbeat for the evening and had duly recorded her findings in the note folder which the doctor had provided, the old man said, So someone has told you about Christmas Eve.
She said, Have they?
It shows in your face.
Unconsciously, she raised a hand to her cheek, as if she might feel the change.
You're still quite pretty, Jacob said. But there's a weariness there, a coldness. It happens to anyone when they have to face a story like that one.
He did not seem to be excited over the memory any longer. The events of the last several hours had forced him to dredge it up and examine it from every angle, and it no longer frightened him.
She said, The Bradshaws told me.
Those vampires!
Despite herself, she laughed. Aren't they just?
Money will never do them any good, because they'll never be satisfied that they have enough of it to be happy.
She agreed.
He said, Sit down, Elaine. I want you to hear it from me.
Christmas Eve?
He said, Yes.
Do you feel you should talk about it?
The memory hurt me for a while, Jacob admitted. But that was only because I'd tried to force it out of my mind. I hadn't fully succeeded, of course, but over the years I had managed to dull the memory. Now, it is back, sharp and clear, and I've learned to accept it again. It'll help if I tell you; it'll unburden me a bit. Besides, I want to be sure that you hear it the way it was, not embroidered by the Bradshaws.
Christmas Eve,
1957.
Snow. It had begun to snow early in the day, lightly at first, like a fine dusting of powdered sugar spilled across the streets and lawns. As the afternoon wore on, the cloud masses hung lower and became a more leaden gray, evenly colored so that one could not tell where the sun lay behind the sky's shroud. By four o'clock, the road crews were plowing and cindering. Those who had dared the city streets to complete last minute shopping were finding it rough going; cars were angled oddly across the pavement as more inexperienced drivers gritted their teeth and cursed themselves for ignoring the weather reports.
Everything at the restaurants checked out as it should. They would be able to serve a record number of Christmas dinners to those who chose not to eat at home as most people did-the elderly whose children no longer thought of them, young lovers not interested in sharing a magic time with parents, single people without family and afraid to remain alone on such a quiet, bleak day. Jacob left the Brass Lantern Inn, the last of the Matherly eateries to be checked out, got his car from the garage and started the weary drive home.
At twenty minutes of six, he pulled into the garage and shut the engine off. No other cars were there. Lee and the boys were shopping. Jerry and Bess had the day off and wouldn't get back until nine or ten, early enough for Bess to start making a few preparations for tomorrow's traditional feast.
When he stepped through the front door, he sensed something was wrong, though everything looked to be in order. For a moment, he remained on the threshold where a backward step would return him to the crisp snow and the cold December wind. Then he swung the door shut and walked to the drawing room where, at that hour, he expected to find Amelia.
She was not there.
Amelia?
She did not answer.
In the upstairs back room, the grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. No one had set the seven day time mechanism in motion for more than five years. Who had started it now?
Amelia! he called.
Silence.
He looked through the downstairs and found it uninhabited.
He went upstairs.
At the top landing, he was again possessed of that semi- clairvoyance that had forced him to halt just within the front door. Something was very, very wrong.
He wanted to go to the back room to see why the grandfather clock had been started, but he looked, first, into the nursery where the twins, Lana and Laura, lay in their cribs.
Cribs, then.
And the blood.
He did not know what the blood was. From across the room, it looked colorless, a dark substance running along the slats and legs of the cribs, staining the rug under them.
Hesitantly, he walked toward the children. They lay very still in the shadows, far too still.
He called softly, using the names which they could not yet recognize as their own, but names which he cherished.
The children did not whimper, did not move.
Then he was close enough to see the blood for what it was and to stare, morbidly, into the deep gashes of their awful wounds. Time passed. How much time, he was never later able to ascertain. Indeed, it was as if the laws of the universe, the mechanisms of physical Nature, had stopped altogether. He might have been trapped within a bubble of non-time, staring out through the fragile walls of his prison at a frozen landscape. Whenever time began to flow again and the bubble dissolved around him, he let out a low, wild moan that swiftly escalated into a scream.
He turned and stumbled to the corridor.
The floor seemed to shift like the hinged base of a funhouse in a carnival, and it forced him to lean against the wall as he walked, lest he be pitched forward and lose his balance.
He found the room with the grandfather clock. The glass front of the case stood open, smeared with blood. The brassy pendulum was tarnished by years of neglect and by similar crimson stains.
Amelia! He thought he called her name. But when he listened to himself, he heard a wordless cry, a scream forced through a dry, cracked throat.
He turned and went back down the corridor, looking into each room, not certain what he would do when he found her. And then he came upon her; she had returned to the nursery and knelt by the cribs, her knees in red puddles.
She did not look at him.
She stared through the bars of Lana's crib, at the lifeless form curled there.
Her hair was in disarray, dangling along her cheeks, frizzled out over her collar as if charged with static electricity. Her clothes were stained and wrinkled, marked with huge patches of perspiration. Whatever long afternoon of madness had possessed her, it had taken quite a toll before culminating in the murders of the twins.
Amelia, he said softly, standing in the middle of the room, halfway between the cribs and the door. This time, he did not imagine the call, but truly spoke to her. He was finished screaming. For now.
She looked up. They wouldn't stop crying, she said.
The worst of it was her voice. It was perfectly normal. It had not the slightest touch of insanity in it. It was cool, throaty and sensuous, as always. Before, it had been one of her finest characteristics. Now, it was obscene and disgusting.
You've killed them, he said.
If they wouldn't have cried so much, she said.
He could not think what to say.
I started the grandfather clock, she said. Did you see? She wiped at a strand of hair with a red-tinted hand. She said, When the clock was working, we didn't have any twins. Now it's running again, but the twins are still here. I wish they'd go away. I wish things would be like they once were.
The clock hasn't run in five years, he said. It made no sense. He was beginning to sound as deranged as she.
It's running now, Amelia said. And it will be fine in just a little while. Everything will be fine. The twins will be gone and, I'll be happy again, and Lee and I can go places like we used to. Two children are plenty, Jake. Lee will agree. All I did was turn the clock back.
He had walked the rest of the way to her, though he avoided looking at the dead twins. He said, You killed them!
Turned the clock back, she countered.
Despite her disarranged hair and the wilted look of her clothes, her face was triumphantly beautiful.
That, too, seemed wrong to him. He wanted to make her understand all this and then watch her grow old and ugly within the instant.
You stabbed your own children, over and over and over. You're a murderer, Amelia.
Didn't you see the clock?
For some reason beyond his understanding, he had to hurt her and knew that the clock was the avenue of attack through which she was most vulnerable. He said, The clock isn't running.
It is!
I was just in to see it, he said. It's stopped again.
No.
Rusted workings.
No!
The clock won't ever work again.
She leaped to her feet, her face suddenly contorted. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a wild, wide leer of a smile. Her nostrils were flared. Her eyes were wide and shocked, staring into the distance.
He reached for her.
She stepped back, raised the knife and swung it at him.
He had forgotten the knife or had thought she had dropped it. She had been holding it at her side, half concealed in her hand and by the folds of her dress. He tried to back up, failed to avoid the blow. The blade scored his shoulder and brought an intense pain that dredged up the abandoned scream.
He fell, clutching his arm, feeling blood rush through his fingers. Unconsciousness swooped over him like a great, dark bird. He knew that he must avoid it, or Amelia would murder him while he lay dazed. But the bird was too heavy and too insistent. It settled on his face and blanked out the world.
When he woke, he had lost a cup or more of blood, though the wound only dribbled now. He was alone in the nursery with the corpses, but he was desperate to escape from there, even if it meant summoning Amelia by the noise of his movements.
In the corridor, he staggered toward the stairs and started down them, wary of the dense shadows of the lower floor. But when he reached the bottom, he realized he could stop worrying now. When she had fled from the upstairs, she must have tripped on the carpeting and fallen down the steps. Her neck was broken, and she lay in an untidy bundle on the last riser.
Curiously, aware now that he was in no personal danger and that the nightmare was drawing toward an end when he could get help, he did not react as logically as he should have. He stood there, over the dead body of the mad woman, and for a long while, he screamed, as if the explosion of air and noise carried the despair from him.
Christmas Eve,
1957.