Legacy Of Terror (8 page)

Someone, on the other side of the door, turned the knob as far to the left as possible, then cautiously put their weight against the panel. She could see the oak bulge slightly against its frame, and she was thankful that the door was as thick as an old tabletop.

She slid out of bed and stepped into her slippers.

A shattering blast of thunder swept against the house and made her gasp and whirl, as if her unseen enemy had somehow abandoned the door and come in through the window, behind her.

At the door, the would-be intruder twisted the knob back, all the way to the right and, again, applied pressure to see if the lock could be snapped.

She considered screaming for help and realized that might not be the wisest move. How could she, after all, be certain that her scream would be heard by anyone but the man who was trying to force the door to her room? The walls of the old house were thick; the storm further served to cut the effectiveness of a scream. And if a familiar voice answered her scream and told her that everything was fine, how could she be sure that, when she opened the door, he would not turn out to be the killer-holding a knife and smiling at her?

The movement of the door knob ceased.

For a time, there was not the slightest sound to betray any furtive activity.

Elaine stepped up to the door, treading softly, hopeful that whoever it was had given up and gone away. It did not occur to her, at that moment of intense fear, that-if the killer had departed-he might very likely have gone to attack someone else in the house. She never once considered that her own safety might be at the expense of another life. All that mattered was that, for whatever reason, he should leave her in peace.

The roll of thunder was somewhat more distant than it had been, though still loud enough to set her nerves on edge.

The lightning flashed intermittently, like some lone, forgotten, guttering candle.

As she leaned against the door to better listen to whatever was transpiring in the corridor, the thin blade of a wickedly long knife was thrust through the crack between the oak panel and the frame, inches from her face, almost as if the killer had seen her and knew where to strike! As if he might have been watching her through two inches of solid oak!

She leaped back, too terrified even to cry out. She might as well have been a mute, for her lips moved and her throat worked without producing a sound.

The blade withdrew.

And came back.

It worked up and down the tiny slit where the door met the jam, clicking audibly against the mechanism of the lock. She realized, then, that the killer had not seen her, but was merely trying to spring the lock with the blade.

She leaned closer to the door now and said, in a small voice which sounded utterly unlike her, “Who is it?”

The blade continued to work.

“Who is it?” This time, she hissed the request louder.

The blade stopped.

It withdrew.

Silence…

“Are you still there.”

More silence.

She waited what seemed like hours, though only ten minutes passed according to the bedside clock. Even with her ear pressed to the door, she could not hear anything in the corridor beyond.

Had he left?

Should she open the door and see?

As if in warning, the thunder's greatest rage returned, smashing the stillness of the air. In its booming voice, she seemed to hear it cautioning her against unlocking the door.

She retreated to the bed and sat on the edge of the rumpled sheets, leaning against the old-fashioned footboard. Aware that the danger might not yet have passed, she fixed her gaze on the oaken door.

Long minutes passed, and her mind rambled over dozens of memories, as if seeking escape from this ugly moment. She recalled her first look at the Matherly house from the road and the first premonitions of unpleasantness which had possessed her. She remembered, earlier than that, graduation from the University Hospital and the eagerness with which she had packed to leave the dormitory for this job and a new future. And before that: the orphange, the changing nurses and house mothers, the children she had rarely gotten along with. Before that: the social workers bringing word of the accident, trying to break the news of her parents' deaths with the least amount of nasty detail…

Abruptly, she looked up, aware that she had drifted into sleep, slumped against the footboard in an uncomfortable position.

At the door, the intruder was working the knife in the jam again, intent on springing the lock.

She required all her strength to rise up and go to the door and lean against it while he worked, trying to hear some other telltale sound. All she could hear was his heavy breathing which only frightened her more. He sounded like some sort of crazed animal.

“Go away,” she said.

The knife stopped moving but remained thrust through the crack.

“Go away.”

He said nothing.

“I never did anything to you,” she said.

For a moment, she felt as if she would go mad herself, driven into insanity by the simplest of things:

-the silence, deep and foreboding;

-the persistent wind, howling at the windows, pressing on the glass and driving the rain like fingers on the panes;

-the sound of her heart, pounding so fiercely and so loudly that it must surely burst;

-the gleaming blade of the knife, still most of the time but now and then jiggling as his hand twitched…

Minutes passed as if they were cast of lead and given a minim of life, crawling minutes that eventually brought a withdrawal of the knife blade from the door. And then, thank God, the passing minutes also brought the sound of his footsteps as he retreated down the hall. He walked quietly and was soon gone.

She almost laughed, but managed to choke the urge down. She was afraid that, if she once gave in to laughter, she would be unable to stop. She was on the edge of hysteria.

She went back to the bed and crawled onto it and began to lift the sheets to wrap around her. But she saw that was no good. She dare not fall asleep again this night, lest the killer have another change of heart and come back after her. “I never did anything to you,” she said to him. And he had been satisfied with that, apparently. But he might not remain satisfied for very long.

Her hands were sweating. She wiped them on her pajamas.

Her mouth was as dry as sand, but she was afraid even a glass of water would make her ill.

Twenty minutes later, she found herself standing in the middle of the room, swaying back and forth, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing. For a third of an hour, she had lost track of the world, slipped into a self-protective shell.

That was dangerous.

She shook herself, figuratively and literally, and she angrily berated herself for being unable to control her fear. There was nothing to fear. Nothing concrete. Not until he returned, if he did. She had always believed in keeping things as simple as possible, hadn't she? All right, then. The danger had passed. Relax. Don't let your imagination run away with you.

She drew the easy chair to a spot ten feet away from the door, and she sat down in it, facing the only entrance to the room. She would maintain a vigil. And she did. Until she fell asleep, utterly exhausted, two hours later.

It was 9:45 when she woke the following morning, and the knowledge that she was going to be late performing Jacob's morning checkup helped to keep her mind occupied and held the previous night’s terror at bay. When she had showered and dressed and applied what little makeup she required, she found herself hesitant to unbolt the door. But, because she was late and because she was-above all else-professional in the performance of her duties, she overcame that hesitancy in short order.

The corridor was empty; the house was quiet

She unlocked Jacob's door and entered his room to find him sitting over the remnants of his breakfast, perusing the morning paper.

“Ah,” he said, “good morning! As always, you look charming.”

“Thank you,” she said, a bit embarrassed, as she always was when anyone complimented her. “I hope your locked door wasn't the cause of any trouble. I should have been up earlier, but-”

“Nothing to it, nothing to it,” he said, waving away any apology or excuse she had prepared. “Bess unlocked it and locked it after herself.”

“Well, shall we go through the ritual?”

“Get out your infernal devices,” he scowled in mock perturbation. “See if I'm alive or not.”

When everything checked out as well as they might have expected, she said, “Is Lee home this morning?”

“He and Gordon are in the city on business again. If I'd worked myself as hard as they do when I was young, I'd never have lived to earn a pretty nurse!”

She could not understand his cheerfulness or why he had decided to take last night's incident so lightly. He did not appear-except for his insistence that the door remain locked-to fear anyone or anything.

She had hoped to find out what she wanted to know and unburden herself to Lee Matherly. If he was not at home, the next best sympathetic ear was Jacob's.

“Have the police talked to Celia yet?” she asked, watching the old man carefully.

“Yes,” he said.

Then that is why he's relieved, she thought. The girl must have positively identified her assailant as a stranger. Yet, why should he still want his door locked if that were the case?

“What did she tell them?”

Jacob pretended to want to return to his paper, but he did manage an answer for her. “She can't remember it at all. It was too much of a shock to her, poor child. Those last few minutes, from the moment she turned into the driveway, are blank. No memory of them.”

She did not say anything as she considered the consequences of Celia's hysterical memory loss.

“Her doctor is bringing in a psychiatrist to see if he can make her relive those missing minutes,” Jacob explained.

“Do they think he can do that?”

“He uses hypnosis to cause age-regression in his patients, to make them remember traumatic episodes in their childhood. He should be able to regress Celia to the time of the attack.” He peered over the rims of his glasses at a story on the sports page.

“When?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” He looked up, quizzical, as if he had become so quickly immersed in the story that he had forgotten their train of conversation. It was clear that he did not want to consider the subject and that he was putting on an act he hoped would dissuade her from questioning him about it.

“When will the psychiatrist treat Celia?”

“Today, perhaps.”

“Perhaps?”

“Or tomorrow,” he said.

“And Captain Rand is just going to wait?”

“What else
should
he do?” Jacob asked, finally putting the paper down, convinced his ruse was worthless.

“Have you told him what happened last night?”

“Nothing happened,” he said.

She was so surprised by his statement that she could not speak.

“We'll know soon enough,” Jacob said. “When the psychiatrist gets Celia to describe the hitchhiker, they'll round him up in no time.”

“Last night, you didn't think it was a hitchhiker,” she said.

“I had a bad dream last night.”

“It was more than that.”

“No,” he said. “A nightmare.”

She realized that, again, the old man was fighting against the acceptance of the truth. He wavered between rationality and an almost absurd degree of head-in-the-sand ecscapism. Right now, he was playing his ostrich role.

She decided that it would be useless to tell him about the nightlight bulb having been unscrewed. And he would probably flatly refuse to accept her story about the man who was trying to pry open her door with the blade of a knife. He didn't want to believe, and therefore, he would not She would have to wait for Lee Matherly and tell him everything. He would know what to do. He would, most likely, call Captain Rand at once.

“Well,” Elaine said, “I think I'll see if Bess has anything to serve a late breakfaster.”

“You run along,” he said. “I'll be just fine.”

“I'll check in on you after lunch.”

As she opened the door, he leaned forward in his chair, folding the paper haphazardly against his lap. “Lock the door, please.”

She turned and faced him, wondering if his facade of cheerfulness was about to break down. “Why?”

“I'd feel better.”

“Why?”

The old man looked pained, as if he were confronted with a child he loved, but a child intent on being nasty with him. His face was drawn tight, holding back a flood of emotions. His eyes were filled to brimming with a sadness that had been nurtured for a long, long time, a sadness that had become as deep as his soul. He clearly could not bear to offer her another reason. And if he were forced to tell the truth, to explain the nature of the fears he wished to deny, he would break down and he would cry-and he might very well suffer another attack of his crippling illness.

She felt that she was his friend, which meant she could not permit the tears. And as his nurse, she could not permit the attack of angina.

“All right,” she said.

She closed the door and locked it, tested the knob, then hurried down the steps and along the narrow first floor corridor toward the kitchen.

As she pushed open the kitchen door, Bess wailed as if she had been struck; a short, sharp wail of pain.

For the first time in many years, Bess was both at a loss for words and incapable of functioning. Usually, the white-haired, jolly woman was vivacious and talkative, abustle with the chores of her position as if she were a wind-up machine that could not stop until its mainspring wound loose again. Now, however, her ruddy complexion had turned a gray ash, sickly and defeated, and her almost nervous abundance of energy had drained from her and left her wilted, sagging.

“I can't believe it,” she said to Elaine, though she seemed mostly to be speaking to the wall in front of her.

“It's all right now,” Elaine said. “It's over with now; there isn't anything you can do.”

“I should have known,” Bess said, accepting the glass of water the nurse gave her but not bothering to sip of it. “He was missing this morning. I said to Jerry, I said, he wouldn't have gone out before we got up and fixed his breakfast, now would he. And if he'd gone out sometime during the night, he should have come back. Unless something happened to him.” She shuddered uncontrollably and blinked tears from her eyes. “And something did, didn't it?”

Elaine had often handled situations where children needed comfort at the death of parents or where parents were deeply grieved by the loss of a child. That was hospital duty that every nurse learned to cope with, though she might not like it much. But this was the first time she had run across grief over a dead pet, a black and tan mixed- breed cat.

“Bobo was with us for eight years-until last night,” Bess said. “He has a little hatchway in our front door that he can use to go in and out whenever he feels like it. With all this going on with the Matherlys, though, I should have locked his hatch. I should have.”

“You couldn't have known,” Elaine said, taking the old woman's hand and patting it. “No one could expect you to-”

“I should have,” Bess said. “I should have known. After Miss Tamlin, I should have been careful even with Bobo.” She looked up at Elaine with very clear, blue eyes and said, “Bobo was a skitterish cat. He wouldn't have gone to anyone unless he knew them. You know what that means, Miss?”

“You think someone in this house killed him?”

Bess looked very sober, and her eyes were lined with fear. “In a manner of speaking, Miss. In a manner of speaking, it was someone from this house that did it.”

Elaine thought of the feline corpse which she had seen lying in the garbage bag. It had been stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife, then slit down the stomach as a final gesture. It had lain in that plastic sack all morning while Bess made breakfast, concealed by other pieces of trash which had been neatly wrapped around it. If the blood had not soaked through and collected in a puddle in the bottom of the bag, and if Bess had not noticed it and begun to empty the sack to discover its source, it would never have been found.

She did not know whether it was a good thing that Bess uncovered the cat's corpse or whether it would have been better all around if the cat had simply disappeared. It proved, in a gruesome way, that the killer was indeed a member of the Matherly household -if one could make the police see that there was a connection between the attempted murder of Celia Tamlin and the brutal slaying of the cat. On the other hand, having seen the mindless violence vented upon the cat, how could any of them think clearly enough to deal with a crisis if one should arise? Any fears that already plagued her-she knew-had begun to grow like cancerous cells, and she imagined the same would be true for everyone in the house.

“Perhaps we should call Captain Rand,” Elaine said.

“Won't do no good.”

Bess dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

“But you said that someone in this house was responsible. It seems very possible that the same person took a knife to Celia, someone deranged enough to-”

“I said it was someone in this house,
in a manner of speaking,”
Bess corrected her.

“I don't understand.”

“It wasn't no one
living
here,” Bess said.

Elaine could not understand what point the old woman was trying to make. “Just the same-”

“Let's go tell Jerry about Bobo,” Bess said. “He'll feel just so terrible awful about it.”

It seemed to Elaine that they should call the police first, but she was a nurse who always put the values of her patient first-and Bess had become a temporary patient in her grief.

Jerry and Bess lived in an apartment over the garage, separated from the house by only a few steps. At the top of the outside stairs that led to their back door, Jerry came out to meet them.

Inside, while Bess tearfully related the tale of the discovery of Bobo's mutillated body, Elaine looked about the large, poorly lighted front room, fascinated by, at first, the singularly odd collection of furniture and, later, by the unusual volumes which filled the wall-sized bookshelves behind the sofa. The chairs were a mixture of padded, reupholstered monsters with heavy arms and high, deep backs, and heavy, unpadded rocking chairs which bore the scars of long use. All the lamps were floorlamps, the last having been bought no later than the late 1940s, a silk-shaded thing with gold tassels hanging around its rim, catching the light like hair and diffusing it. Some of the other pieces were Victorian, some early American and some in styles she could not identify. The room had the look of an auction platform in the country or perhaps the look of a room wherein each piece holds family memories and has been handed down from generation to generation for sixty or eighty or a hundred years. She supposed this last was true, since Bess and Jerry were surely paid enough to afford whatever they might wish. Obviously, they spent a handsome sum of money on books. And such strange books…

She walked along the shelves, her head tilted as she read the titles:
The History and Practice of Magic
by Paul Christian,
The Paganism in Our Christianity
by Arthur Weigall,
Natural Chiromancy
by Rampalle, the two Pennsylvania Dutch hex books,
The Long

Lost Friend
and
The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses,
a number of collections of unexplained, possibly supernatural events edited by Frank Edwards or Brad Steiger,
The Study of Palmistry
by Saint Germain…

She looked up suddenly, aware that Jerry had addressed her.

“Excuse me? I was absorbed in looking at your books.”

“I asked if you were aware of the ghost,” Jerry said.

He was standing beside his wife where she had settled into the musty embrace of a large and utterly unattractive easy chair.

“What ghost is that?”

“The Matherly ghost,” he said.

“Amelia's ghost,” Bess added by way of further clarification.

“I don't believe in ghosts,” Elaine said.

The old couple looked knowingly at each other, then looked back at Elaine-as if they pitied her ignorance.

“No, really,” Elaine said. “When you're a nurse and you've had to study medicine and biology and chemistry, and when you've read lightly in the other sciences, it just isn't possible to believe in things like that any more.” She wanted to say more, but she restrained her impulse to lecture.

She realized now that she should have expected something like this from the moment that she had seen the nature of their library. This was not the first couple she had ever met who professed a sincere belief in the occult, in supernatural goings on, curses and hexeroi and ghosts. At one time, she had gotten angry and had tried to argue the superstitious out of their silly beliefs, but now she understood that such a task was Herculean, all but impossible. After all, not everyone looked upon the world quite so sensibly as she did. She would always have to tolerate the most fanciful of philosophies in other people-but she did not have to like it. And she did not. Usually, when she saw that scenes like this were inevitable in any relationship with other people, she excused herself. The discovery of the dead cat and all the previous tension of the Matherly house, however, had dulled her perceptions a bit.

“We've educated ourselves, too,” Bess said defensively, though Elaine had not meant to imply that they were poorly educated. Even the best educated and the most intelligent people became involved in occultism, searching for some reassurance they apparently did not find in their daily lives or in their regular church attendance.

“We haven't delved into the sciences which you mentioned-medicine and biology and such,” Jerry said. “But we have read and studied the sciences of the occult.”

“They're hardly sciences, though,” Elaine said.

“Some think they are.”

Elaine did not answer, and she felt much better for having held hen tongue. She liked both of these old people and did not wish to become involved in some petty and bitter argument about something so silly as the existence of demons and witches and-ghosts.

But Jerry was not satisfied. He said, “Perhaps if you heard about the Christmas Eve murders, you'd believe in ghosts after all.”

“I've heard about them.”

“From whom?” Bess asked. “Jake?”

“Yes. And the Bradshaws.”

“Neither of them would tell it all,” Jerry said to his wife.

“Course not,” Bess agreed.

Jerry said, “They wouldn't have told you about the knife.”

“I heard that, all the terrible details,” Elaine said.

“But did the Bradshaws or Jake tell you that the knife Amelia used was never found?”

Elaine recalled the story as Jacob Matherly had told it. Amelia had killed the twins and then had stabbed him. She had fled the room and had broken her neck on the stairs while fleeing from-whatever a mad woman might imagine was chasing her. The knife should have been found alongside her or somewhere between the nursery where she wounded Jacob and the spot where they had found he body.

“A mystery, isn't it?” Bess asked.

She seemed to have recovered from her grief for Bobo, and she leaned forward in her chair, her eyes bright and her lips curved in a gentle smile.

“She hid it somewhere,” Elaine offered.

“Why would a madwoman take the time to hide a knife when her guilt was plain enough without it?”

“Why would a madwoman do anything?” she replied to Bess by way of another question. “She had lost all her reason, remember. She was not behaving logically. You can't try to reason what she did and why.”

“What you say may be so,” Jerry offered. His voice was breathy with expectancy which Elaine found unsettling. “But, then, why didn't a search turn up the knife?”

“Who searched for it?”

“The police.”

Bess said, “They gave us all a hard time for a while when they couldn't find the knife. Especially Jake, poor man.”

“Why especially Jake?” Elaine asked.

“Fools!” Jerry said, shaking his head at the very thought of the police.

“The police had some notion or other that Jake might have-might have taken the knife to the children, pushed Amelia down the steps and then cut himself to make it look like he'd been attacked.” Bess clucked her tongue. “You know Jake. Could he ever have done a deed as black as all that?”

“No,” she said. “I can't see how.”

“Cops finally learned about Amelia's grandfather being in a place for the insane, and they quit poking around.”

Elaine felt a bit dizzy. She wanted a breath of fresh air and some light-neither of which this tightly sealed, dimly lighted room could offer her.

Jerry continued the argument for the existence of a ghost. “Then, it was about a year after the murders that we began to hear the wailing of a child, late at night. It carried through the house, into most every room.”

“Gordon and Dennis were children then.”

“This wasn't like that,” Bess said. “It was an
eerie
wailing, not like a baby wanting water or comfort. It was one of the dead children calling out to us, is what it was.”

A little fresh air. Yes, that would be all she needed.

And some light, of course.

“And then the cards,” Jerry said. “The cards told us that the ghost would come back some day.”

“Cards?” Elaine asked. She hoped that, by hurrying them along, she would be able to leave sooner.

“Jerry and I went to a reader in Pittsburgh,” Bess said. “Janey Moses was her name. You heard of her?”

“No.”

Jerry said, “She was one of the most famous readers in the East, and maybe
the
most famous. Her mother and father were gypsies. Her mother was an Albanian, and her father was Polish. Her mother's mother was a white witch who cured ailments to earn a living after her husband died. And her brother Leroy was the seventh son of a seventh son-and he died in Janey's arms.”

Bess wanted to tell some of it. She twisted in her chair and said, “Janey Moses was only part of her name, the easiest part to say. She laid out the cards and read them to us, and she said that the knife hadn't been hidden at all. She said that the ghost of Amelia Matherly, when it rose from her dead body, had carried the knife away. And she said that was a sure omen that the ghost meant to return some day. And she was right. It has returned.”

“After all these years,” Jerry agreed.

Some light, away from these shadows…

A little air…

That was all she needed.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I really ought to check in on Jacob and see how he's doing. It's really past time for that.”

The time had not passed, really, but the excuse worked well enough. A moment later, she was hurriedly descending the stairs to the lawn. She rushed back toward the kitchen door of the main house.

She stopped on the threshold, however, suddenly aware that the house was no better a place than the darkened living room of the old couple's apartment.

Bobo lay dead in that kitchen.

And, somewhere in the great house, the knife which Amelia Matherly had used on the children lay hidden where her bloodied fingers had placed it just before her death…

Elaine turned away and hurried out into the sunshine that spilled across the well-tended lawn. She was not certain where she was going, but she knew she had to be alone for a while, to think this thing out.