The Fate of Mercy Alban (33 page)

At this, the whole house shook. I settled onto the sofa and grabbed an afghan. Usually I loved being at Alban House during a thunderstorm—it was such a solid fortress, I knew that even the worst of nature’s fury couldn’t damage it or hurt me. But this was different somehow. It felt dangerous and confining, as though we were trapped in the house instead of sheltered by it. I wrapped the afghan around me and listened as the wind howled and the waves crashed against the shore.

Matthew joined me on the sofa and draped an arm around my shoulders. “This may sound a little hysterical, but I’m going to say it, anyway,” he began, looking at Carter and me in turn. “None of us is going anywhere because of this storm, including Mercy, and it might be a while before the police get here. We don’t know where the nurse is, but she may well be with her. Or, I hate to say this, she may well have come to harm.”

He paused before continuing. “I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not crazy about this whole situation. Because of that, I think we should all stay right here in this room together. No wandering alone to the kitchen, no going upstairs. And, not to be indelicate, but if one of us has to use the bathroom, we’re all going.”

Carter nodded gravely. “Agreed,” he said. “Neither of you really knows what you’re up against. I do. She is not a harmless old lady. Not by a long shot.”

Matthew moved closer and held me tighter. “Now seems like a good time to tell us what you know,” he said to Carter.

Carter crossed the room, nodding his head, and opened a decanter of scotch that was standing on the sideboard. “I’m sorry to be so bold, Miss Grace, but this calls for a little fortification.” He poured us each an ample drink. “What do they say—it’s five o’clock somewhere?”

He handed Matthew and me lowball glasses almost half full of scotch and sank into an armchair across from us. I took a sip and felt the spicy liquid warming me from the inside as I curled my legs up onto the sofa and leaned into Matthew.

With the wind roaring outside, the rain punishing the windowpanes, and the fire crackling in the fireplace, Carter took a gulp of his drink and began to speak.

“It was just this same time of year, the early summer of 1947. The war was over, and I was a young man fresh off the boat from England. I served in a regiment with a friend of old Mr. Alban’s in the war, that’s how I came to work here, you see.” He smiled a melancholy smile, his eyes focused on the past. “My fiancée had been killed during one of the bombing raids in London, and when the war was over, I just couldn’t go back there. Not without my darling Roz. I desperately needed a new life, away from everything that reminded me of her, and Mr. Alban gave me that.”

I looked at him with new eyes. My whole life, he had just been Carter, our impossibly kind driver. I had never realized he was in the war, or had had a fiancée, or … well, anything. My face reddened with the shame I felt for not ever asking, or even thinking to ask, about his life before he came to us.

He went on. “The girls, Fate and Mercy, were just children then, no more than ten years old. And what scamps they were! Always playing hide and seek, racing around the place like puppies, tormenting their brother. I wanted a new life, and indeed I got it, coming to a house filled with so much love and laughter.” He let out a deep sigh. “But then everything changed.”

He took a sip of his drink, and I saw a shudder pass through him.

“That’s when Mercy fell ill?” I nudged him to go on.

He nodded. “Influenza. A bad strain was going around that year and both the girls caught it. Fate recovered, but poor little Mercy got weaker and weaker until …” He shook his head. “I was in the carriage house when I heard Mrs. Charity’s screaming, a wail the likes of which I hope never to hear again.”

“Jane said Mercy died, Carter,” I said. “But surely that’s not the case … Right?”

He locked eyes with me, and in his, I saw fear. “It is indeed the case,” he said, his voice low and wavering. “The whole household was in mourning. Mr. Alban retreated into his work, Johnny became unusually quiet and withdrawn, and poor little Fate was lost, absolutely lost. But it was Mrs. Charity who scared us the most. She was utterly and completely destroyed. It was as though her own life force had been extinguished when her daughter died. She was but a shadow of the vibrant person she had been.”

The image of my father on the horrible day when he realized Jake and Jimmy were dead swirled through my mind. And it hit me how much grief this house had seen over the years. So much suffering, so much death, family mourning loved ones over and over again. I thought about my conversation with Harris the night before, and I could see why people believed my family was cursed. The tableau of grief seemed to play out the same way for every generation. We were all haunted by tragedy.

“We laid poor Mercy to rest in the family crypt,” Carter continued. “And life went on. Mr. Alban, especially. Even Charity seemed to be perking up, coming out of it, and we were all so relieved. We had no idea her change in mood was because she had put a plan in place. If we knew about the evil she was preparing to invoke we surely would have stopped it.”

As he lifted his glass to his lips, a crack of lightning sizzled across the sky and lit up the room with its flash. I noticed his hands were shaking and his face had gone white.

Matthew shot me a look. “What type of evil are you talking about, Carter?” he asked.

Carter sighed and shook his head, a faraway look in his eyes. “This goes back to Mrs. Charity’s family in the old country,” he began.

“The family Jane and her mother worked for?” I asked, remembering her history.

“That’s the one,” Carter said. “I got this straight from Jane, so there’s no speculation here when I say that Mrs. Charity came from a long line of women who had …”—Carter seemed to be searching for the right words—“… rather special abilities.”

He looked from Matthew to me, as though we would understand. But I was still confused.

“You’re saying they were—what? Healers? Medicine women?” I asked.

“Healers, psychics, witches, whatever label you want to attach to them fits,” Carter said. “They practiced black magic, the lot of them. They passed the art from mother to daughter, right down the line.”

I squinted at him and noticed Matthew was shaking his head, a look of disbelief on his face. I wondered how his strong faith would dovetail with a story like this, and I sensed we both were thinking the same thing: this was veering off into the realm of fairy tale and legend. “That’s what Jane told you?” I asked.

“And what her mother told her,” Carter said, nodding. “They saw it all when they worked for Charity’s mother, I’ll tell you. But when Mr. Alban married Charity and brought her here to his home in America, Jane and her mother with them, they believed that was the end of it. Charity hadn’t seemed interested in the family ways, so to speak, and was more than happy to move far away. She was more interested in being the lady of this fine manor, being a good wife to the husband she adored and raising the children she doted upon.”

“Until …?” I prodded.

“Until she lost one of those children,” Carter said, shaking his head and taking another sip of scotch. “Shortly after Mercy died, Charity’s mother and grandmother traveled to Alban House for a visit. Charity had summoned them. And when they arrived, they were carrying—I saw it myself—an ancient-looking book.”

I snuggled closer to Matthew. He shook his head, a small, almost imperceptible movement that told me he wasn’t buying this fantastic tale.

“Jane’s mother was terrified, I don’t mind telling you that,” Carter continued. “She said it was
the spell book
, and she had seen it before. She knew full well that the three of them were coming together for a dark and evil purpose. She nearly took Jane away from here the night they came, but we all convinced her to stay. She was needed here by the other children and Mr. Alban, and even Mrs. Charity needed her.”

I took a moment to let all of this sink in. “Does this have anything to do with the old legend—the one that says my great-grandfather cut down a witch’s wood to build this house and that he got her spirit in the bargain?”

Carter smiled. “That silly tale was just that, miss. A tale.”

It didn’t sound right to me. “But I’ve felt it myself, Carter,” I protested. “I’ve always felt this house hummed with a life of its own.”

“I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’ve experienced,” he went on. “I’m saying the tale about the witch’s wood is just a legend. It sprung up, as legends tend to do, from a grain of truth, from the women who have always been ladies of the manor here at Alban House. Until your mother, of course.”

My mind felt fuzzy and fluid, as though I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. It didn’t make any sense to me. “But Carter, my great-grandfather John James Alban the First built this house. He was the son of refugees from the Potato Famine; he made his fortune and went to Ireland to find his bride and—” My words stopped cold when I realized I had just uttered the answer to my own question.

“Exactly, my dear,” Carter said. “He went to Ireland to find his bride. Emmaline. She’s the witch he brought back to this country, not some silly story about a witch imprisoned in the wood. A real-life, flesh-and-blood witch. I’ve no doubt that you’ve felt her presence here, miss. Once they infest a place, they never leave it.”

I stared at him. “But you were talking about Charity, my grandmother. Surely—”

“Emmaline sent your grandfather, her son, to the old country to find a bride, just as his father had done,” Carter said. “Charity wasn’t a relation to Emmaline, but she and her mother were a part of the same coven. Jane can attest to this.”

Matthew and I exchanged confused glances. This story was getting more and more outlandish by the minute.

“Okay, Carter—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said quickly. “But you haven’t heard what comes next. I think you’ll change your mind when you hear what happened.”

“We were talking about Mercy, and I think we got sidetracked,” Matthew offered. “So she fell ill—”

“We didn’t get sidetracked and she didn’t just fall ill,” Carter said, slamming his glass down on the table with a thud. “Listen, man, you of all people should understand that there are things in this world beyond our comprehension, beyond our sight, and beyond our ability to believe. Isn’t that, essentially, what you spend your life doing? Asking people to believe a fantastic, rather supernatural story that happened two thousand years ago involving a man who could walk on water and turn water into wine?”

Matthew smiled at him. “That I do, Carter,” he said. “You’ve got me there. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you this—in my church, we don’t put a whole lot of stock in the occult. We think all of that stems from the most evil source there is, so that’s where I’m coming from. But I promise you, I’ll listen to the rest of your story with an open mind.”

“That’s good,” Carter said. “Because Mercy is creeping around in this house right now, and both of you need to hear this, loud and clear.”

“So,” I prodded, “Charity’s mother and grandmother arrived with a spell book. Then what happened?”

“They were huddled together, poring over that book, for days,” Carter said, picking up his glass again and swirling the scotch around. “Until one night. I was in the carriage house and could see it all clearly. The three of them, dressed in flowing white gowns, down by the lakeshore.”

A chill ran through me. “Dancing around a fire ring?”

He nodded. “That’s exactly what they were doing. Dancing, chanting in a language I didn’t recognize. They were reciting an ancient Celtic spell, invoking an evil force.”

“How do you know that’s what they intended?” I asked him. “Maybe—”

“No maybes about it, dear girl. I know because that very night, Mercy rose from the grave. The women had opened the door of the crypt, and I saw it with my own eyes, little Mercy walking out of there on her two legs in the dress she was buried in, as though she had simply been hiding in the crypt all that time.”

Matthew held my gaze and I couldn’t tell whether he thought Carter, along with Mercy, was a candidate for a psychiatric hospital or whether he was entertaining the thought that this fantastic story was true.

“Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother greeted her with tears and wails and cheers,” he said, his eyes looking deeply into the past. “They took her down to the lakeshore, where the four of them danced and chanted and sang until the sun came up. By that time, Mercy was exhausted, and Charity carried her into the house and placed her in her bed, waking Fate so she could see that her sister was home now to stay.”

“But,” Matthew began, “how could she possibly have explained this to her husband and to all of you? People don’t just rise from the dead. It doesn’t happen.”

“She didn’t have to explain,” Carter said. “It was the three of them, Charity, her mother, and her grandmother. They stood together and told all of us, Mr. Alban included, to not question these events and, furthermore, to stay silent about them. There was a horrible mistake, they said, a misdiagnosis of death, and Mercy was alive after all. End of story. And we were to leave it at that.”

“And you believed them?” I asked.

Carter let out a snort. “Of course not. But you don’t understand what kind of force they—three witches together—put out. It was as though we were standing in the very presence of evil. We knew better than to question anything.”

Carter took another sip of scotch as the wind and thunder roared outside and the fire flickered. “Fate saw it first,” he continued. “A few days later. It was a look in Mercy’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. Then Johnny noticed it. And then we all began to see it. A strange sheen in her eyes. A knowing smirk on her face. Something was just not right with that child. She was not a little girl anymore. She was something else. Something monstrous and hideous and evil was lurking behind the angelic mask of a child.”