فصل 49

CHAPTER 49

“Ezra, don’t.” Hal began to back away, but he was between her and the door, and the only place she could go was backwards, back towards the other door, the chink of darkness at the far side of the room. Was it an exit? Or a dead end? She had no way of knowing. “Please. You don’t need to do this. You’re my father, I won’t tell anyone. . . .” But he was coming closer, and closer.

“The others will realize—they’ll know you came back—they’ll see the tracks of the car. Mrs. Warren, she’ll hear you—” But even as she said the words, she knew they were futile. Even if Mrs. Warren was here somewhere, she had covered up one murder by her darling boy.

There was no point in screaming. No one would hear her. But while her brain told her that, her muscles knew that it was the only thing they could do, and she took a huge breath, filling her lungs, and screamed.

“Help me! Someone help me, I’m in ro—”

And then he was on her, like a cat on a mouse, his hand over her mouth, stifling the sounds.

Hal bit down, hard, tasting blood, and with one hand she scrabbled at the bedside table for something, anything to use as a weapon. A lamp. A cup. A photograph frame, even.

Her fingers were clutching, and she heard the crack of breaking glass, and then she had something in her grip, a lamp she thought, and she hit him over the back of the head with it as hard as she could, hearing the smash of the bulb and the crunch of the metal shade.

Ezra let go of her mouth to roar with pain and clutch at her hand, forcing her to drop the lamp, and she filled her lungs again—but this time, before she could scream, his hands were around her throat, crushing it.

She made one last reach for the bedside table—and then she gave up. She couldn’t not. The pain in her throat was huge, a crushing pressure, and every instinct was forcing her to get her hands up, try to prize off his grip.

Fighting was no longer the most important thing. Breathing was.

Hal brought her hands up, digging her nails into his knuckles, trying to loosen his fingers enough to draw a single ragged breath, but his grip was immensely strong, and she could feel herself giving way, giving up, her vision disintegrating into fragments of black and red, and the roaring in her ears was like waves of darkness, and the pain in her throat was like a knife, and she had a brief flashing image of the blindfolded woman on the eight of swords, hemmed into her prison of blades, blind, bleeding, trapped, and as the room fractured into blackness she had time to think, I am not that woman. She is not my fate.

She thought of her mother, of how fast this had been. Seconds only, how strange that life could be extinguished so fast. . . .

Her legs were still kicking, more in instinct than by design, and through her fragmenting vision she could see Ezra’s face, his mouth ugly and square with grief, tears running down his nose.

“I’m sorry,” she heard through the roar in her ears. “I’m so sorry, I never wanted to do this—” Her legs were barely moving now. She wanted to cry out, beg him, but she could not whisper, let alone speak. The pressure on her windpipe was too great, and she had no breath left in her.

Hold on.

She was not sure whose voice it was. Maggie’s. Maud’s. Or maybe it had always been her own—only her own.

Hold on.

But she could not. His fingers were crushing her, and everything was slipping further and further away.

There was no point fighting. He was too strong.

She let her fingers fall from his, stopped trying to pry his grip from her throat.

And as she did, her knuckles brushed something on the bed, something that had fallen from the nightstand in the struggle.

She closed her hand around it, and with almost the last of her strength, she picked it up, and smashed it into his face.

Hal heard the crack of the glass before she realized what it was—the broken photograph frame—and then she saw the spray of blood as a shard of glass dug deep into the bony ridge above his eye socket. He gave a scream of pain and took one hand away from her throat, feeling for the piece of glass sticking out of his brow, the pouring blood blinding him. For a moment Hal stared in horror. She had no idea what she had done—whether the glass had gone deep enough to penetrate something vital. But she could not stop to find out.

She let the picture frame drop, dug her fingers beneath his remaining hand, and then she swung her knee up and into his crotch with all the force she could muster.

And he let go.

Stumbling, gasping, her breath tearing in her raw throat, Hal made for the door at the far side of the room.

“Oh no you don’t!” She heard his voice like a hoarse roar of pure fury, but it was too late to turn back even if she had wanted to.

As she flung herself against the door it gave way beneath her weight and she found herself falling, tumbling, down cold steps, until she stopped with a crunch at the bottom.

• • •

IT WAS EXTREMELY DARK. HAL’S head throbbed with the old bruise, where she had hit it before, and her throat screamed with pain from Ezra’s near throttling.

The fall might have killed her, she thought, were it not for the fact that she had fallen against something soft and yielding.

It was only when she put her hand down to try to stand, and felt soft hair beneath her palm, that she realized what it was, and when she did she had to stifle the whimper that tried to escape her bruised throat.

It was Mrs. Warren. And, as Hal’s fingers traced across her face, her glasses, her open mouth, Hal could tell—she was dead and completely cold.

But she had no time to find out more. Above her, she could hear Ezra moving with lumbering ferocity like a wounded animal, crashing into furniture as he staggered towards the open door. He would be down here in a moment, and then she would be dead—wounded or not, he was far, far stronger than her, and his blinded eye was not much disadvantage in this inky black.

She must be in some kind of cellar beneath the house. The only question was, was there another exit?

Hal put her hands out in front of her, and began to stumble cautiously through the penetrating darkness, feeling the shift and slither of things beneath her feet—the clank of bottles, the sharp pain where she hit her shin against some kind of box.

Back there in the darkness was Mrs. Warren’s body, and as a shaft of gray moonlight pierced the blackness, and she heard a hoarse panting, she knew that Ezra too had found his way to the door, and was stumbling down the stone steps.

“Hal,” he called, his voice echoing in a way that made her think this cellar must be large, much larger than she had at first thought. “Hal, don’t run from me. I can explain.” Her throat was too hoarse and bruised to have answered, even if she wanted to—but there was no way she was going to give away her location down here. She stopped, pressing herself back against the wall, listening for his harsh breathing. It sounded as if he was facing the wrong way, and she edged quietly along the wall, holding her breath.

In the disorienting darkness she had completely lost all sense of direction, but the cellar seemed to stretch out in two directions, in front of Hal, and to her left. Mrs. Warren’s body, and the steps upwards, lay to the right. Ezra seemed to be in front of her, venturing deeper beneath the house, so Hal continued her slow, painful edging along the wall, feeling the wetness of damp bricks at her back. There was hot blood on her hands, and she thought she must have cut herself when she hit Ezra with the photograph frame, though she had no memory of having done so.

“Hal!” His voice boomed, echoing back and forth beneath the vaults. Then there was a scratching rasp, and far away to her right Hal saw a flame ignite in the darkness, and the yellow glow of a lighter as Ezra held it above his head, surveying the darkness.

Two things happened in the instant before he extinguished the flame.

The first was that he saw her, she knew it from the way his face turned towards her, a hideous Pierrot mask that slashed his face into one half of white skin and another half painted in dark blood, black in the shadowy darkness.

But the other thing was that Hal saw the layout of the cellar—the clear path between the rows of dusty bottles and vaulted columns leading to the garden door at the far end.

For a moment she froze, each of them looking at the other, caught in the lighter’s glow.

And then Ezra’s face split into a terrifying grin, and he dropped the lighter, and ran.

Hal ran too.

She ran without seeing, barely knowing where she was going.

She ran, tripping over discarded bottles and mousetraps, hearing the crunch of small skeletons beneath her feet, and the splash of water. She fell, and she picked herself up, all the time hearing behind her Ezra’s triumphant panting breath, for he knew this cellar, this was his house, his domain, and she remembered him saying how he and Maud had played hide-and-seek down here as small children.

This was his home.

But he was half-blind, and Hal was not, and she had a head start, and now she could see the faint glimmer of moonlight coming through the crack of the garden door ahead of her, and she put on a burst of speed and prayed—prayed to gods she did not believe in, and to the powers she had decried all her life, prayed for deliverance.

And then the cold metal knob of the door was beneath her hand and she was trying to turn it, with fingers that slipped with blood, and she could hear his pounding feet and his panting breath coming closer, and closer . . .

And then the door gave, and she was out in the moonlight, running, and running, and running in the blessed light of the waxing moon, almost as clear as day.

Her feet were taking her downhill, and she was halfway there before she realized, with a terrified lurch, where she was heading. She glanced behind her, but it was too late, he was out, he had seen her. If she doubled back to the house he would catch her. There was nowhere else to go, and maybe . . . maybe, a little still voice inside of her said, maybe it had always been meant to lead back here. Back to where it had started, and ended. Back to the boathouse.

Ezra was almost halfway across the lawn, his footsteps great slithering gashes in the white snow, when Hal broke into the cover of the little copse and began the slow fight through the brambles, tearing at her hands. She had no thought in her head apart from putting as much distance as possible between herself and Ezra—but perhaps, if she could somehow circumnavigate the lake and get to the other side, she could make it to the road, flag down a passing car. . . .

She crashed out of the brambles, her legs torn and bleeding, and found herself in a patch of moonlight at the shore of the lake. Behind her she could hear Ezra beginning to forge his own path through the undergrowth, and he was making better time of it than she was. She had already pushed aside the worst of it—all he had to do was follow in her path.

“Hal,” he panted. “Hal, please.”

And there was something so desperate in his voice that a part of her almost wanted to say, It’s okay. I’ll stop. I give in. Oh God, she was so tired. . . .

In front of her the lake was a black slick, dotted here and there with patches of white. And as Ezra came plunging out of the undergrowth, Hal knew she had nowhere else to go.

“Hal,” he gasped. He looked half-destroyed, his face dark with drying blood, the wound above his eye still wet and raw. His clothes had been slashed by the brambles, his arms and legs streaked with cuts, and looking down at herself Hal might almost have laughed, had she not been so terrified and exhausted.

“Stop,” he said. He held out his arms. “Stop running. Please . . . please, just stop.” She wanted to answer him. She wanted to scream at him, to berate him for what he had done to Maud, to Maggie, to Mrs. Warren. She wanted to cry for the hopes she had had for her father, and for what she had found.

But her throat was too raw. As he came towards her, step after slow, careful step, his arms held out like the promise of a grim embrace, she could only shake her head, the tears running silently from her eyes, down her cheeks, and hold herself, as she would never let him hold her.

“Hal, please,” he said again, and she stepped backwards, onto the frozen surface of the lake.

It cracked, but held, and she stepped again, seeing his face change in an instant, from cautious pleading to a kind of impotent, terrified rage.

“Please, don’t,” he managed. “It’s not safe.”

You are the danger, she wanted to say. I’d be safer out here, beneath the ice, with my mother, than ever I would be with you.

But she could only shake her head, and step backwards, and backwards, expecting each time she did to hear the snap of breaking ice, and feel the frigid waters of the lake envelop her.

Each time she did, the ice creaked and groaned, but it didn’t break.

“Hal, come back,” he cried. And then, almost laughing, “What are you going to do, for Christ’s sake? Stay out there all night? You’ll have to come back.” And again she stepped back. She was almost to the island now. And from there it was just another short crossing to the far shore, and the boundary of the property.

“Hal!” he bellowed, and above her she saw the flurry of wings as the startled magpies woke and took flight, cawing and wheeling in alarm, sending little patters of snow falling all around them in the quiet of the woods. “Hal, get over here now.” But she only shook her head for the third and final time—and then he stepped onto the ice.

It held. And Hal felt a wash of hot horror flood over her, and then a great coldness as he looked down at his feet, and then up at her, grinning at the realization of what this meant.

“Oh, you,” he said as he began to walk towards her. “Oh, you little—”

But he never finished.

There was a tearing, rending crack, and the surface of the lake gave way. And Ezra plunged through, cracking his head on the ice at the edge of the hole as he went, and slid beneath the black surface.

“Ezra,” Hal screamed, or tried to, but her torn throat would make only the smallest of sounds, a whimper, barely even recognizable as a name. “Ezra.” There was a languid flowering of bubbles on the surface of the water for a moment . . . and then no more. The lake was still and silent, and nothing moved. Ezra was gone.