American Gothic (20 page)

30

The Graveyard

J
ANET WARRING SLEPT beneath a tombstone carved from Paradise Black Marble, the trade name for calcitic marble quarried in Canada. Her daughter had picked the monument from a catalog at the St. Regis & Eberhart Mortuary. Ophelia’s father had been too deranged with grief to look after the arrangements, so it was up to their only child, then a sophomore in high school, to meet with the mortician and plan Janet Warring’s funeral.

Ophelia chose what the catalog called a “companion marker,” a double-wide headstone with ample room for her parents’ names, birth, and death dates. The funeral director, a sympathetic young gay woman in a navy blue wool pant suit, had approved of Ophelia’s choice of black marble, which she termed “tasteful.” She did not try to talk Ophelia out of buying the largest tombstone available without special order, a monument that was five feet wide, three feet six inches high, and eight inches thick. The price, $6,088, included engraving the stone with the family name, the given names for her mother and father, the dates bracketing their time in the world of the living, and a twenty-five-word “endearment phrase” for each parent. The funeral director had suggested
Beloved Wife and Mother
on Janet Warring’s half of the marker, but Ophelia had something different in mind. She had already decided on a quotation from “Adonais,” Shelley’s ode to the dead poet Keats. The words carved into the rock over her mother’s bones were these:
Awaken’d from the Dream of Life.
Ophelia and her father were still trapped in life’s nightmare, but her mother had “awaken’d.”

The headstone sat on a rectangular marble base in a pleasant, shaded part of the cemetery. When she arrived for her Sunday afternoon visit, Ophelia put a single rose on top of the tombstone before spreading a light blanket on the grass over the grave. She arranged a row of votive candles along the stone base. As she crouched on her knees, the grass felt thick and rich beneath her. When she was at the cemetery, sitting on her mother’s grave, she had nearly the same sense of security that she remembered from when she was a little girl, sitting on her mother’s lap.

Ophelia took out
The Book of Lies
and put it on the blanket in front of her. She liked to read the poetry she was working on to her mother, the same as she had done when Janet Warring was still alive. Tucked inside the journal was a letter with the return address of the admissions office at Smith College printed on it. She took it out and propped it up against the headstone behind the candles. Ophelia’s mother had graduated from Smith. The women’s college had the reputation for being one of the best places for a young poet to spread her wings. Sylvia Plath had gone to Smith, and her journals and handwritten drafts of poetry were part of the school’s collection.

Plath was one of Ophelia’s icons. They had more than a few things in common. Like Plath, Ophelia earned an early reputation for brilliance, had a passion for poetry, and experienced periods of soaring aspirations for the highest levels of success that alternated with bleak episodes of the darkest despair.

And, of course, Plath had committed suicide. Ophelia intended to do the same, when the time was ripe.

She sat cross-legged on her mother’s grave for ten minutes, communing with her mother’s memory, summoning—she hoped—her mother’s spirit from out of the earth or down from the sky or wherever it was your energy went when it was finally freed from being shackled to a dying animal.

“I know you wanted this even more than I, so I waited to share it with you,” Ophelia finally said, indicating the letter from Smith.

“My test scores were good, as you know. And I’ve kept my grades up. I promised you I would. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t all that difficult. Everything is so dumbed down. I haven’t kept up with the extracurricular activities—student senate, the debate team, the volunteering, and the rest of the things I used to do. I haven’t been able to make myself do it. That might make a difference. It’s not enough to be smart; you have to be socially engaged in the politically correct fashion. But maybe I can rest on my laurels. I used to do a lot. But I just couldn’t put up with the hypocrisy anymore. And the futility. What difference does it make if everything you care about can be destroyed, lost, taken away?”

The flames on the votive candles danced as the breeze came up, the only answer Ophelia would get from the beyond.

“I might as well get it over with.”

Ophelia held the letter up to the light so she could see the outline of the paper inside the envelope. Smith was the only school she had even bothered to apply to. Her counselor told her she needed some other options, that she was walking a tightrope without a net. She hadn’t listened, though, which was part of the reason the private prep school she attended had insisted she talk to Dr. Glass. If it hadn’t been for the pain it would have caused her mother’s ghost, Ophelia would have just as soon dropped out.

She tore the envelope open along its narrow end, careful not to damage the letter inside. She pulled the letter out, unfolded it, and began to read out loud.

“ ‘Dear Ms. Warring…’ “

Ophelia folded the letter back up, slipped it back into the envelope, and put the envelope back into
The Book of Lies.

Someone was moving obliquely across her field of view, walking in great, long strides. She looked up with irritation. She liked to have the cemetery to herself, which is why she came late in the day on Sundays, when there were no funerals and only rarely other visitors. The man was dressed all in black, like her. He appeared to be in his thirties, but wore his long hair black in a ponytail. He was not too far away for Ophelia to see the sharply drawn features. He had a serious, almost fierce look on his face. The flash of silver on his wrist was not a bracelet, as she first thought, but one of those stainless-steel “sport” watches men with too much money and testosterone wear. If the interloper saw her watching him, he gave no sign, so Ophelia did not bother to look into the basket to make sure the small .22-caliber pistol was close at hand, since a cemetery was a good place to get mugged and raped.

The gun was her father’s. Ophelia had stolen it to keep him from using it on himself, though she doubted he realized the weapon was even missing. Ophelia always brought the gun to the graveyard. She sometimes carried it with her when she went out on the town, though not always. Ophelia knew how to look out for herself, and she didn’t want to become too comfortable with the gun. If her father could use it to put himself out of his earthly misery, she could certainly do the same. If it ever came to that, Ophelia planned to shoot herself in the heart. The thought of putting the barrel in her mouth and then pulling the trigger was too overtly sexual.

The man kept going, up the hill into the older section of the graveyard, a necropolis of mausoleums from the nineteenth century. Ophelia stared at him, hoping to think him out of sight, but he stopped in front of a mausoleum at the top of the hill. He stood there a long moment, looking up at the name carved above the bronze doors, then sat on the marble bench in front of the portico.

Ophelia read from
The Book of Lies
for a little while, but she soon felt herself becoming tired. It was a warm afternoon, and she had been feeling particularly exhausted. Ophelia was having a lot of trouble sleeping. She hardly ever got to sleep until around two, and then she always woke up at three-thirty. She usually had trouble getting back to sleep, and then she would wake up again about the time it started to get light. She lay down on the blanket and closed her eyes and instantly fell into a dreamless slumber. Some weeks the only real rest she got came from these naps on her mother’s grave.

It was getting dark when Ophelia awoke.

She sat up, feeling confused and disoriented, the way she usually did after being asleep. After a few moments she began to blow out the votives and pack them away in the tea tin she used to carry them. She folded up the blanket and put it in the basket, with her journal.

Curiosity made her leave by an indirect route, up the hill past where the man had been sitting earlier. There was no sign of him now. Ophelia decided he must have left while she was asleep.

The mausoleum he’d been sitting outside was a stately Greek Revival structure that might have been patterned after the temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis. Ophelia’s aura began to tingle as she approached it, the way it did when she sensed she needed to be aware of something beyond what the eyes could see. She slowed as the feeling grew stronger until the ominous sensation brought her to a dead stop.

What was it?

The unsettling sensation, like a slight electrical shock, trilled up and down the back of her neck as she strained to reach out with her psychic powers and identify the source of her peculiar sense of danger.

Her eyes found the first solid sign. The doors on the mausoleum, two heavy cast bronze portals that looked like something from the entry of a palazzo in Venice, did not join where they would have met, had they been closed. The right door stood just far enough out from its partner for Ophelia to see a thin vertical line of darkness, a glimpse of the chamber within. The mausoleum had been opened.

The rustling sound of a breeze moving through the trees disguised and almost swallowed the faint sound floating out the tomb door and down the hill to where Ophelia stood in her long black dress, leaning forward with an expression of strained attention on her face, as if she suspected a tiger was hiding just ahead, ready to pounce. At first she thought her imagination was playing tricks on her, but then she knew she was really hearing it.

From within the mausoleum came the unmistakable sound of a man softly crying.

Before Ophelia began to back away, her eyes rose to the name carved in the white stone above the bronze doors, the family name of people who built the crypt a hundred or more years ago:
Peregrine.

31

The Hunter

O
PHELIA REALIZED AT once that she’d been drugged. At first all she could do was lie there, dazed, unable to move or even open her eyes. After a few moments, her eyes opened and she found herself in perfect darkness. Control trickled back into her limbs as the potion used to poison her wore off. She pushed up into a sitting position and took stock. She had too much power to be killed easily, though it might have appeared otherwise to the monsters and perverts who stalked the city in the night. She put her right hand around her ankh to draw extra strength from it. It might have looked like costume jewelry, but Ophelia had used a ritual to fill it with the immortal energy of the ancient Egyptian rulers who had discovered the secret, now mostly lost to time, of transcending death.

She lifted herself up off the floor and—one hand before her, the other around the ankh—began to explore the darkness. She sensed she was alone, but she knew that was only true in a limited sense. The one who had drugged her might not have been in the room, but he was out there somewhere, waiting.

Her hand found the wall. She followed it to the corner, paused, then turned ninety degrees, knowing that eventually there would be a door, although whether it would be unlocked was a question she would address when the time came. The toe of her boot bumped against something solid but without substance. She knew what it was even before she knelt down to lightly touch the body with her fingertips. She hadn’t sensed it because it was dead. Corpses did not register a psychic signature with her, though the ghost that went with the body would have been another matter.

Judging the distance around the body, Ophelia stepped around it, careful where she walked in the dark room. For all she knew, there could have been a gaping pit inches from her feet, but she did not think so. The person who had done this to her had something different in mind, and she had a pretty good idea what it was.

The door was just on the other side of the body. Her hands found the knob. It turned freely, the lock clicked, and the door came open toward her. A dull light shined through the dirty window at the end of the hall. Ophelia guessed she was in a hotel. It might have been a dormitory or hospital, but somehow she knew it was a hotel. She began to move slowly down the hall, listening for a sound, a tingle of intuition, anything that would alert her to the presence of the one stalking her. The doors were off most of the rooms. Some of the windows were broken out. The place was abandoned, probably slated for demolition, which would make it easier to dispose of the bodies. She smiled to herself in the darkness. He was a clever one.

When she got to the end of the hall, she was able to look out the window. She was up a dozen stories. She didn’t recognize any of the buildings. It could have been any city in the Western world—San Francisco, London, Prague. There were trucks and bulldozers below, the equipment vaguely foreign looking. There was no traffic on the street in front of the building. Except for the rats scuttling in the walls and the one who brought her there, Ophelia was completely alone.

Water dripped somewhere in the distance, a hollow echoing sound, like condensation dripping in a cave. She heard the scrape of shoe leather at precisely the same moment her psychic alarm shrieked
danger.

Ophelia glanced at the elevator. There was no point in even trying it. The power to the building had been shut off long ago. She dashed into the stairwell and began to run up the stairs two at a time, holding her long skirt in her hands. It was a classic error—running
up
the stairs in a building, where there would be no hope of escape except out a window or off the roof. But it was too late to change her mind because she could hear him coming after her.

It was just plain too late, Ophelia thought, feeling suddenly weary.

He was gaining on her, close enough for her to hear his heavy breathing. Instead of continuing the futile race, she slammed through the fire door at the next landing and ran down the hallway as fast as her feet could carry her, hoping there were no obstructions to trip her. She flung herself into the first room and stopped, listening.

Though it made her lungs burn, Ophelia held her breath at first so her panting wouldn’t give her away. She could hear him coming down the hall, looking into the rooms one at a time as he went.

Enough light filtered through the boarded-up window for her to see that the wall where the bathroom was had been torn out, leaving splintered plaster, laths, and exposed pipes. The only place to hide was the closet, which didn’t have a door but stood at a right angle to the door and at least afforded concealment. If he was careless, there was a chance he wouldn’t see her.

Ophelia pressed her back against the closet and tried to be perfectly still.

He was at the doorway. She could hear his breathing and feel his presence. She could even
smell
him, for her nose was very sensitive.

He stepped into the room. He
knew
she was there. He was taking his time, enjoying it, probably hoping she’d whimper, maybe even beg him for mercy.

With the sound of a quick shuffle he filled up the closet doorway, blocking her only escape. He was tall and muscular, with a goatee. She knew the type well enough. The ones who chose that form were all sadists at heart. He intended to kill her, but not until he made her suffer. The crude tools of an apprentice were in his hands: a butcher knife in his left hand (he was left-handed, Ophelia thought), and an old milk jug in his right. He would torture her, kill her, and carry her blood back to his vampire master in the jug to curry favor. If he served his sponsor well enough, he would one day be made a vampire, too, as his reward.

“There is no use struggling, though I will be disappointed if you don’t.”

“You’re right. There is no use struggling.”

Her hand shot out and grabbed him by his ponytail. Ophelia could sense his surprise give way to horror as she sank her teeth into his neck and tore out a huge chunk of flesh. She drank his steaming blood in great gulps and then hurled his dying body to the floor.

“You fool!” she jeered. “You thought you were stalking a mere sorcerer’s apprentice. You will have to learn to recognize a master vampire when you see one if you ever hope to become one!”

Ophelia moved the mouse up to the program menu and selected
Quit,
disconnecting herself from the Internet.

“What an idiot,” she said to no one in particular, pushing herself back from the desk in her bedroom where her computer sat. Her opponent clearly had some experience at the Ravening, but not nearly enough to even think about taking on Ophelia. It would be a long time before her newly killed adversary amassed the power and skill required to become a vampire.

Ophelia got the tarot cards out of the box on her dresser where she kept them. She shuffled them on her way back to the desk and dealt the first one, faceup, as she sat down again. It was the Fool.

“Ah,” Ophelia said to herself.

Strange to turn over the Fool first, for the Fool was the first card in the tarot deck. She recognized herself in his figure. The Fool in his motley was slightly ridiculous in his dress. He carried all his meager possessions tied up on his back, set out for his journey through the world. The Fool could be a hopeful figure. The possibilities were wide open for the Fool, if he would only decide to unpack his things and make a go of it. But the nearby cliff indicated the possibility of disaster should he take a misstep. Ophelia was never sure whether to regard the small dog barking at the Fool’s heels as being there to warn him of danger or harry him into plunging to his death.

She reached for the next card, using the edge of her black-lacquered fingernail to separate it from the deck.

The High Priestess.

Two power cards in a row—extraordinary. There was energy in the room. Ophelia could feel it. It made her aura tingle. She lit a pair of black candles on the desk and turned out the lights before coming back to ponder her future.

The High Priestess was an enigmatic figure. She came shrouded in darkness but filled with secret, occult knowledge. She was one who could see behind the curtain, who could reveal what was hidden, illuminating the future.

Ophelia sat back in her chair and closed her eyes to meditate on the matter. She would have liked to believe that
she
was the High Priestess, but she knew it was only too obvious that she was the Fool. It came up again and again, no matter how she read the cards. So who was the High Priestess? It had to be someone who had recently come into her life, or was about to enter it. Otherwise, Ophelia couldn’t think of a single person who could help her unlock the possibilities for a future she had all but decided to forgo by swallowing the bottle of pills hidden under the doll her mother had given her.

Dr. Glass?

Ophelia started to smile, but the left side of her mouth went up higher than its opposite to form a smirk. She was too intelligent to put any faith in psychiatry. Besides, she had seen him staring at her tits. He sat there all the time she was on his couch, fantasizing about fucking her. Ophelia didn’t have to be psychic to know
that.

Putting the question aside for the moment, she turned over the next card. The picture showed a half god, half goat at the foot of a black mountain, surrounded by chained people indulging in their earthly desires, slaves to their obsessions. The Devil card, powerful and dangerous. The card was for someone powerful and wanton, someone who could be impossible to resist, not because he was too charming but because he refused to take no for an answer.

The card was a warning.

Ophelia reached for the next card, but looked up when a light came on outside her window. She rose from her chair and moved to the window in a crouch, as if not wanting to be seen by anybody who might be looking up at her window in the dead of night.

A light had come on downstairs in the house across the street, illuminating the ferns and heavy antique furniture. Looking in through the open draperies, she saw an oversize Chinese vase beside the marble fireplace, over it some kind of landscape painting. It was odd to see the lights on like that, for the house was always dark at night. Even when the security patrol was checking on things, Ophelia could never remember them turning on more than a light in the hall. Tonight, the downstairs was ablaze, as if the house was wired so that a single switch turned on every light on the first floor.

She could see someone moving in the parlor, not enough of a body to see if it was a man or a woman, just a bit of motion masked by the furniture and by the angle of vision from Ophelia’s bedroom. She was thinking about going downstairs for a better view when a man walked to the bay window at the front of the parlor.

Ophelia crouched down lower, but it would have been almost impossible to see her there. The candles on her desk threw off only enough light to see a dull golden glow and shadows from across the street.

It was a man, and he stood holding his arms behind his back, looking down at the street.

Ophelia’s eyes grew wide.

It was the man from the cemetery.

He shifted his weight and looked up the hill, glowering, as if he saw something that displeased him greatly, though Ophelia was sure the displeasure on his face was the sort that came from somewhere within.

He looked up at her.

Ophelia threw herself down in the window seat, pressing her face into the silk pillows. She knew he couldn’t have seen her there, but she had an uncanny sense that he had anyway. She stayed hidden for half a minute before daring another look.

The man was no longer standing in the window.

Ophelia let out a long sigh of relief.

A masculine silhouette appeared in the door across the street. It opened and he came out, shutting the door behind him but not locking it, moving down the stairs with so much deliberation that Ophelia was sure he was going to come across the street and pound on her door, demanding to know why she had been watching him. But at the sidewalk he turned and began walking down the hill, toward the bay.

Ophelia grabbed her cloak off the bed and flew out of her room.

He was still in plain sight when she moved outside, keeping in the shadows. She went down to the street and, staying opposite him, followed at a distance of several blocks, certainly enough to be discreet.

In a Jaguar sedan parked up the street, a man sat with his face bathed in the blue light reflected from his iBook computer, which was hooked into the Internet via a wireless network card. He had about given up hope of luring Ophelia back into the game, but now that she had come out of the safety of her house onto the street, it would be even more fun.

Dr. Glass closed the notebook computer and put it on the passenger seat. He opened the door, closing it quietly, pushing the remote lock as he set off down the hill after Ophelia.