Cast a Pale Shadow(10)

She pummeled him, then fell back, winding up and hitting again and again and again until her hands felt so weak she thought she could not raise them one more time. And still he pressed down on her, groping her roughly, grimly, as if it were a duty he abhorred, with a touch so harsh it bruised her skin.

A shudder of panic shook her as she realized her strength to fight him was failing. She clawed at the bedspread beneath her, frantically trying to pull herself out from under him. In the folds of the rumpled coverlet, her fingers touched something cold and hard.

The knife! The paring knife. Without bidding them to, her fingers curled around it, and she watched in horror as the knife came up with her flying hand and traced a jagged red line down her father's face and neck.

A shocked, strangled scream emerged from both their throats and they recoiled from each other. Her father's hand covered his cheek but the blood seeped through his fingers. Trissa's vision was awash with it as she scrambled from the bed. A haze of red descended on her, blinding her, fuzzing in her ears, choking off her air. She threw the knife away from her with a force that clattered it against her dresser mirror, cracking it.

"You little bitch! You could have killed me!"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to--" But did she? My God, her heart screamed, she did. She did.

She wanted him dead. She hated him. "No. No. No," she whimpered as she backed away from him then turned and fled. Out of the room. Out of the house. Into the night.





Chapter Three





The cemetery and the railroad tracks marked the boundaries of his meandering that rainy night as Nicholas roamed the quiet side streets sprouting from Trissa's bus route. He had gotten himself thoroughly lost the first time he'd tried blazing new trails from the bus map. He had wandered the streets until dawn that day before he crossed a street that would lead him home.

Since then he had armed himself with a city map and a small flashlight for his quest for Trissa and the dragons that made her so unhappy. But this night he wouldn't need them. All he had to do was walk east until he reached the tracks, turn south along the gravel right of way to the next dead end leading west to the stone and black iron fence of Calvary Cemetery.

Gilmore Street to Switzer Avenue to Robin to Thrush, then Baden to Church to Christian. Brick and frame bungalows lined the streets with tiny lawns and just-budding forsythia. He could imagine Trissa living in one of these houses, maybe behind that half-drawn shade or that lighted dormer.

He wished the weather were warmer. He was sure the folks in this neighborhood sat out on their front porches on balmy evenings, chatting about their gardens or city politics or baseball. Maybe Trissa brought her books to that porch swing to study in the golden circle from the light over the door. Maybe when the work was done and the night grew darker, she just sat, searching for the first star and whispering her wishes.

And maybe he was a damned-fool romantic or, worse, an obsessed lunatic. Questing white knight or predatory beast? Or were they both just the same?

Nicholas kicked at a chunk of blacktop in the graveled embankment along the railroad track and tried to rid his mind of the predator-prey imagery. His motives were honorable, he reminded himself. Rescue, only rescue. He was more Lancelot than Bluebeard. Wasn't he?

Wasn't he?

He shuddered as the face of Cynthia, cold and still, finally and unalterably at peace, floated before him as if in answer to his question. Grinding at his closed eyes with his clenched fist in a vain attempt to rub the memory away, he felt the black shadows descending on him.

This was wrong. He was wrong. It was not Trissa who needed him. He needed her. Driven by his bitter memories of one he'd loved and couldn't rescue and another who'd come to him too late for saving, he needed salvation from his guilt. He needed Trissa to save him from the blackness again. He needed her to guide him from the shadows so he wouldn't be lost.

And as much as he knew he needed her, that was how much he knew he mustn't have her. He must turn away from this madness now before it was too late. Blinded by the swirl of his own shadows, he missed his footing across a rain gully and stumbled to his hands and knees in the gravel. Puzzled, he stared dumbly at the white scrapings on his palms and the beads of red springing up along them.

"Nicholas. Nicholas. Nicholas," came the fluttering whoosh and thump of his blood in his ears as if to remind him who he was and who he was losing. The blackness was broiling up through his veins and would soon fill and drown him. When he managed resurface again, he knew he'd be far away from here and Trissa would be only a memory. The submergence was always swift and unexpected.

It had never taken this long before. He had never struggled this hard against it.

"Let go," he heard the murmur in his brain. Was it his voice or someone else's? "God take you, Nicholas!" he heard the deep, masterful command, and he felt himself sinking into blackness.



*****



Trissa counted the railroad ties as she walked them and had reached one hundred and twenty-seven before it didn't matter to her anymore, before it didn't help to keep the tears from falling or her heart from slamming against her ribs like a bird trying to escape its cage. Though the rain had stopped, she was cold, having fled the house in only her cotton blouse and wool skirt, but that didn't matter much either. She could no longer determine whether the pain of the cold came from without or within.

Still and chilling, the night pressed her, urged her on toward anywhere, nowhere, as long as it was away from where she had come. Through the thin clump of woods to her right she saw the winking headlights of the cars parking along Calvary Drive. How many summer nights had she watched them from her hidden spot among the trees, wishing she were in one of them. They were hope to her back then. A sign that somewhere love or something like it went on.

But now she knew with dreadful finality that she would never be one to find love there. Or anywhere. That would not be her future. There would be no future.

She felt the faint hum of a distant train through the soles of her shoes and it filled her with a shiver of anticipation. Peering down the tracks to where they disappeared round the bend into the darkness of the night, she let her tormented mind make the decision her heart was too torn and ragged to make.

She couldn't see it yet, but she collapsed to her knees and waited. Now the hum became a pulsing throb and then a numbing rumble that gently rocked her soul into acceptance. She closed her eyes and swayed on her knees then bent to press her cheek against the rail. The icy steel wrenched one gasping sob from her. Then only the thunder of the train and the wailing cry of its whistle rent the night as she waited.



*****



A sound lurched Nicholas into awareness. It was not the steady roar of the train or the piercing shrill as it trumpeted its approach round the bend, but something closer, softer, something that reached into his soul and shook it out of its slide into eclipse. His muddled mind told him it was Cynthia, and he remembered how he used to hold her as she whimpered in her sleep, unaware that he was close and that he ached to save her from the sadness that made her cry through her dreams.

He spoke her name but it was less than a whisper, the sound of it enough to make him see it was impossible. Not Cynthia but someone. Someone, something, a child, an animal huddled on the track less than twenty feet above him.

The train. It couldn't see the train. Or maybe it was trapped. He scrambled up the embankment, kicking the churned-up gravel out behind him.

The whistle sounded again and the growing beam of the train's headlight illumined her face, her eyes clamped shut and her features set tightly in a determined grimace as she hugged the track.

"Trissa?" he mouthed in wonder then "Trissa!" he shouted as he hurled himself at her, tackling her and hurtling them both off the track. He tumbled with her in his arms down the embankment on the other side and he heard her soft moan as she settled into stillness just as the train thundered by.

"Trissa, my God, it is you." His hands trembled as he gently straightened her crumpled body, examining her for injuries, alarmed at the chill of her skin and the deadly paleness of her face. There was a spattering of blood on her blouse but he could find no source beyond the gravel burns that marked both of them.

"Please, Trissa, please be all right. I'm here to help you. I'll take you to help." From where he stood, he could not see the houses on the street below the raised berm of the tracks, and he tried to recall whether any of them showed lights and life.

He heard the grind and sputter of an igniting car engine and turned to see the line of cars parked along a road on the other side of a clump of trees. Some of them had their lights on and their engines idling. It was obvious what the purpose of their drivers' parking in such a deserted spot. It didn't matter. Nicholas was thankful for their presence.

Trissa groaned again as he lifted her. "I'm sorry, Sweetheart, it won't be long now." He sheltered her head against his shoulder as he trudged through the weeds and the low hanging branches of the thicket. As he emerged, he was all but blinded by the headlights thrown on by the driver of the car immediately ahead of him.