Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(96)

“But we don’t know what awaits us at Chapelwood. We don’t know how to save her.” He paused, and then with something like sorrow asked, “James, what do we do?”

Rush in.

My eyebrows aloft, I added, “Where angels fear to tread?” It’d come up once already.

Front door.

“Is that wise?” Simon frowned at the message, then said to me, “It might be some other fiend. Our third try may not be charming in the slightest.”

Front door, the spirit insisted. Facade.

The extra word stopped him from banishing the speaker, at least. “The front is all for show? Then where do they worship?”

Downstairs. Below.

I jumped in. “Is that where we’ll find Ruth?”

Find them all. Save her. Go.

The stick went slack between our hands. The car’s engine coughed and revved, and the headlamps flared—then went dark. The whole world was silent, and so were all the living things that crawled across it. Even us.





Ruth Stephenson Gussman




OCTOBER 4, 1921


I woke up in a room that was mostly dark, except for a handful of candles lit and dripping. One sat on a nightstand beside me, its base resting in a chipped saucer; one was stuck in a shot glass, sitting on a chest of drawers across the room; and one was on a windowsill, high above me. I’m not sure I could have reached that one, even with a stepladder—and that told me I was probably underground, because where else do you see windows set up so high? There was something about the way the place smelled, too, like a basement with a leak someplace.

The bed I was lying on had a summer quilt, but I was on top of it. It was hot in there, and muggy as hell even though it was night already.

I was pretty sure it was night. It was always possible someone had covered up that window to make it dark, but I was tired, as if I’d been asleep for hours anyway. The room was dark and bleak, and the candles didn’t help it because there were all these shadows, all these black corners that the flame light didn’t touch at all.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I was wobbly, and my head was stuffed with cotton, but I was getting clearer and stronger by the minute.

I stood up. My vision went all runny, so I reached out for the bedpost to see if it would steady me. “Stay calm,” I told myself. There was nobody else to do it. “Wake up.”

At least, I thought there was no one else. I’d been wrong before.

In one of those very dark corners, there was a chair with a pile of clothes on it, and the clothes shifted, rearranged themselves, and took the shape of a woman. And then it wasn’t a pile of clothes. It was my mother. Or it wasn’t her, exactly.

She leaned forward, so the edge of her face caught what little light the nearest candle offered. It outlined her: just the shape of her forehead, the curve of her nose, the divot above her lip. She didn’t blink, and her eyes were much, much darker than the muddy green they’ve always been. She was wearing a black robe, so that’s why I hadn’t seen her at first, or I’d mistaken her for part of the furnishings. Even her hands were gloved, I saw when she scooted to the edge of the seat. Her skin was so much whiter than I ever remembered, and her hair was bound back under the hood; you couldn’t see it at all. She was a face floating toward me, and the dim light made her look unreal, or maybe she looked unreal already—and she didn’t need any help from the candles.

“Ruth.” She said my name like a spell, but she’s never been that kind of witch.

I didn’t say anything back. I just stood there, holding the bedpost.

“They’re coming for you, real soon. You’ve got to do what they tell you.”

“I don’t got to do shit.”

She didn’t frown at me, or smile, either. She was unearthly—and I don’t mean she was like a ghost, not precisely. She made me think of something from much farther away than just the “other side.” She didn’t move like a person anymore. She moved like something born with different joints, different muscles, different habits and patterns of motion.

Even if she had been my momma, same as always, it wouldn’t have been any help to me. She never could protest anything or anyone, much less Daddy or anything he had in mind. She wouldn’t have let me out of that room or said anything to comfort me. She was just as bad as he was, and maybe worse—because she let him do whatever he wanted, to me and to everyone else. And she did it with her mouth clamped shut, and a smile, while she looked the other way on purpose.

Funny thing was, I couldn’t even get too mad about it. It’d be stupid to expect anything different from her after all these years.

She said, “I left out a dress for you. Put it on.”

“No.”

“Put it on, or they’ll put it on you. There’s no sense in resisting. You’ll make it harder on yourself than it needs to be.”

“Harder than getting stolen off the street? Getting drugged up, and locked in a dark room?” I didn’t know for a fact that it was locked, but I would’ve bet a bunch of money on it.

“Only if you fight it.” She sighed, at me or the world in general. “You’ve always done this, haven’t you? Got to fight everything, all the time.”

“Somebody has to.” I squeezed the bedpost. It felt good and solid between my hands. It reminded me that I was alive, and in a bedroom, and it was weird—but I wasn’t dead, and nothing too bad had happened yet. I was alive. I was standing.