The Seeing

Chapter Twenty-Six

When the pain struck her shoulder, Maud Griffith was walking along the corridor to Jessica’s bedroom. The ornate gold candelabrum she carried sent leaping lights and shadows in front of her, the reflections glowing on the chinoiserie wallpapers and rich carpets.

The electrical storm had knocked out the power at Easter Hill only minutes before. Benny had tried to activate a generator in the cellar but reported that the auxiliary power source had also been shorted by the lightning marching brilliantly from Skyhead down to Easter Hill and on toward Ballytone.

As the needlepoint of pain pierced the flesh below her collarbone, Maud gasped involuntarily. Her straining nerves were dangerously close to the breaking point. Her high heel caught on a fringe of carpet and she lost her balance, stumbling against the wall. The impact caused a spray of hot, beaded candlewax to fall across the backs of her hands. She cursed softly but violently, a mindless fear in her voice.

Placing the candelabrum on a hall table, Maud brushed the hardening wax from her hands, trying to fight back a rising panic. She felt close to tears, frightened by the surrounding darkness and the feeling that came with pain — a terror brought on by her body’s weakness. The smothering blackness in the old house caused the memory of her dreadful dreams to resurface, the cage of musty garments, the sound of her pleading screams, the suffocating fear of impending death.

That presence seemed closer to her now than ever before, persistent and attendant, a spectral finger touching her shoulder with a streak of pain.

There would be no sympathy from Eric. He was furious enough without the burden of her concerns.

Picking up the candles, she walked on to Jessica’s room and unlocked the door. “Come with me, dear,” she said, raising the candles to illuminate the room.

Jessica turned from the windows and looked steadily at her aunt, her eyes gleaming with opaque fire. “Do you think it’s wise to give me orders?”

“Please, Jessica.” Maud was suddenly alarmed by the intensity in the girl’s expression. But this was nonsense, she thought. She was just a child. How could she harm them?... Maud forced herself to meet Jessica’s stare directly. “It’s your Uncle Eric. He wants to talk to you. Do come along.”

“Yes, and I want to talk to him,” Jessica said.

They walked to the head of the stairs, Maud holding the candelabrum in one hand, the other firmly on Jessica’s arm.

Lighted candles stood in holders in the great hall. The yellow flickering illumination fell in shadowed beams into the open doors of the dining room and library.

Maud ushered Jessica into the library. Eric stood at the fireplace, a strange and disturbing smile on his lips.

Jessica’s heart lurched when she saw the crumpled figure on the hearthstone, Kevin O’Dell, his face battered and swollen, a trickle of blood running from his parted lips. Kevin’s eyes were closed and she could hear his labored breathing above the crackle of the logs.

Eric said pleasantly, “Your conspirator doesn’t look quite so formidable now, does he, my dear?”

With easy strength, Jessica pulled herself from Maud and ran to Kevin’s side, kneeling and taking his bruised head in her lap.

“It seems he had a little accident, Jessica,” Eric’s voice sounded strangely muted and distant to her, as if he were speaking from the far end of a tunnel. “Took a nasty fall climbing down from the roof.”

“You are lying! He’s been struck and beaten, just like Mr. Brown was!”

Eric shrugged and said, “You may be right at that. But we need a simpler story for your yokel Constable.”

Footsteps sounded in the great hall. Tony Saxe and Benny came into the library, dressed for travel, Saxe in a top coat and hat, Benny wearing a leather jacket and driving gloves.

“Get-away day,” Saxe said to Eric. “But we still got a loose end.” With a nod at Kevin’s unconscious figure, he said, “We better find out just what the little bitch told him.”

Jessica’s eyes swept across all of them, an arc of flashing contempt. “You are all brutes and murderers and thieves!”

Eric said, “That may be true but it’s beside the point, which is: Did you spill all that to your playmate here?”

“Get out of my home!” Jessica suddenly shouted the words at him.

Eric glanced at Tony Saxe. “Maybe that’s all we’ll get for an answer.”

“Now hold it,” Benny said. “I ain’t collecting any more scalps unless there’s a damn good reason to. Maybe lover boy climbed up to her room for the usual reasons. He sure as hell knew the way.”

“We can’t take a chance on it,” Saxe said. “If that was his only game, he wouldn’t have put up the fight he did. So no more talk. Come on, Benny. O’Dell rides with us part of the way...”

“No, you can’t move him! I won’t let you!” Jessica said, in a deep, quiet voice.

“Be sensible, dear,” Maud said, and pulled Jessica to her feet, locking her arms behind her in a grip that forced a cry of pain past the girl’s lips.

As she struggled, helpless for an instant, Saxe and Benny Stiff picked up Kevin O’Dell and carried him from the library.

Familiar, brilliant lights began exploding with painful clarity inside Jessica’s head. Without being aware of it, she had undergone a radical revision of temperament in only a few brief and bitter days, a subtle metamorphosis of character since the ugly reality of Eric and Maud Griffith had poisoned her life. But even as she felt the sadistic strength in her aunt’s hands, Jessica was aware of another shift in her own being, a physical change as significant as the alterations in her mental attitudes. A power was flowing through her slender arms and legs, a transcendant energy that seemed to take its own source from the elements of sea and wind and fields beyond Easter Hill.

In a strange fury, in a rage that was in league with the storms outside and inside her, Jessica cried out, “You will all die for the evil you have done! You are doomed and terrible! You won’t profit a farthing from your schemes!”

“Shut up, you little fool,” Maud said, tightening her grip so that Jessica flinched and arched her back against the pain.

“Those men will die—”

“Shut up, I tell you!” Maud cried. “Shut up, Jessica!”

“—in pain and fire,” Jessica said, the pictures blazingly clear in her mind, terrible and final — a kaleidoscope of leaping flames, patterns glowing like neon, and other colors that were smooth and pale, a curve of white-hot ivory arching above the picture like a poised scimitar.

Jessica heard the front door slam and felt a stinging pain as Eric slapped her across the face. The lights in her mind splintered and receded and Jessica stared with growing anger at her uncle.

“Frankly, I don’t believe you,” Eric said. “You’re just trying to frighten your Aunt Maud...”

From the driveway, they heard the sound of an engine starting up, then a staccato noise as the car headed out the curving driveway.

Eric regarded Jessica with narrowing eyes. “But since you’re so free with your malicious information, supposing you tell us how they’re going to die.”

“Benny Stiff dies in a cage of steel and fire—”

The change in Jessica’s voice had become so pronounced by now, low and rolling and defiant, that Eric felt a stir of fear.

“I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Maud said shrilly, a tic pulling rhythmically at the corner of her mouth. She tightened her grip on Jessica’s wrist, determined to silence her. But the girl wheeled, breaking the grip with a burst of numbing strength, hurling her aside with an almost effortless swing of her arm. The older woman staggered back, her face drained of color, collapsing into a couch as her knees struck the edge of a coffee table.

Jessica drew a deep breath, her presence filling the room, the luminous glow in her eyes matching the pictures in her mind.

“And Mr. Saxe can’t escape,” she said, and her voice was so vibrant that Eric could feel it shaking the floors of the old library. “None of you can escape... after Mr. Saxe breathes his last on the tusks of an elephant!”

This sudden, improbable announcement galvanized Eric to action. He always looked for the coward’s advantage, to attack from behind or from shadows, striking then without mercy, for something in him quailed at the thought of an adversary striking back at him.

And when Maud gasped in terror and the child turned swiftly to her, Eric whipped off his ascot scarf and slipped it powerfully about her throat, tightening it until Jessica’s face flushed and she sagged against him, inert and unconscious after a helpless struggle...

Eric said to Maud, “She was obviously bluffing, the business about the elephant’s tusk. If she’d come up with something reasonable, I might have gone after them and warned them.”

He looked down at Jessica’s slack body, face and hands white against the floor.

“We’ll just make bloody sure she doesn’t hurt anybody with these temper fits.” Caution stirred in him as he remembered his first sudden fear of the child. There was something here he didn’t understand, but he was cunning enough to respect it. “And get one other thing into your silly head,” he said to Maud. “Don’t listen to her anymore. Don’t even talk to her. For some damned reason, she seems to get to you...”

Later that evening, Father Malachy left his parish rectory and crossed a walk to the ivy-dark church whose doors had not been locked shut for more than two centuries. Kneeling in a rear pew, the priest made the Sign of the Cross on his lips and began a prayer for the repose of the soul of Capability Brown.

Vigil lights glowed near the altar. There was the scent of incense on the cold air.

Old Brown had fought for his country, the priest was thinking, not intoxicated with the heavy anodyne of flags and martial music but in fields and woods and back streets, hunted like an animal by Ireland’s enemies, and now he was gone. God rest his soul.

A draft of cold air stirred about his head. His housekeeper’s slippered footsteps sounded on the stone aisle. The old woman leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

“Dear, merciful Christ!” Father Malachy said, and repeated the Sign of the Cross on the breast of his black cassock.

“Do come quickly, Father,” his housekeeper said. “It’s a scene from Hell itself...”