Silence for the Dead(100)

He stood, panting, and looked down at me. “You’re lucky you’re one of the strong ones,” he said. “And you’re lucky I’m out of time. Otherwise I’d use these, just as I did on your friend.” He reached into his pocket and held up the bottle of Jack’s pills.

I screamed past the stocking, and it came out a pitiful, muffled sound. If he’d given those pills to Nina, she was as good as dead. I was so bloody helpless. I felt more tears on my face. I kicked my legs, but he stepped easily away.

“I only gave her three,” he said. “I made her take them. I didn’t want to kill her any more than I want to kill you, but she’ll sleep a good while, I think. She won’t be much use to anyone even when she wakes up. I was saving the others for you, but I can tell you won’t swallow them, even at knifepoint. And I don’t want to take that stocking out of your mouth and hear you scream again.”

He put the bottle in his pocket. He looked down at me, and in my haze I wasn’t sure whether he spoke again. And then he was gone, and I was tied up on the floor, alone.

Seconds ticked by like hours. Time blurred. The rain pattered on the window. No one else came. Nina was still.

I closed my eyes. Something was happening downstairs; I was sure of it. I hoped Jack and Mabry were ready for it. I hoped the patients had been moved. I thought, incongruously, of Syd, the way he’d looked on the day he came to see me, in his wool suit and new hat. The way he’d smelled. My own brother, who I’d thought dead, coming to get me. Hitting me. I lay back and felt the bitter sting of the stocking in my throat and wept, there on the floor. My anger had faded into black helplessness. It seemed I would always be fighting with men, always wondering when they’d pin me down to get their way. Only Jack touched me with gentleness. And why would Jack ever love someone as worthless as I was?

There was nothing but the sound of the rain on the window, the numbness in my hands, the tight pain in my wrists, and the ache in my arms. My lower back hurt, and my elbow from where I’d cracked it fighting Creeton, and my ribs and legs ached. After I stopped crying I was just this, a body, a collection of varying aches and pains, my heart pushing blood through me as I waited.

Then I heard a creak in the corridor, and a quiet footstep.

I stayed still at first, listening. If it was the shirtless ghost of Mikael Gersbach, I didn’t want to see it. I would stay still, and maybe he would go away.

Another footstep, closer this time. Someone had come through the door of the nursery and was crossing the floor toward me.

I didn’t feel a flash of cold, and I didn’t hear the pipes begin to moan in the walls. I opened my eyes and craned my neck, but the angle was wrong and I couldn’t see who was approaching. It was someone tentative, almost tiptoeing. That meant it couldn’t be Jack or Mabry. Creeton had finished with me and left. Who was tiptoeing around Portis House?

I heard a rustle of skirts, and gooseflesh broke out on my arms.

She came into my line of vision at last. She was wearing the same dress I’d seen her in before, though it was dusty and bedraggled. Her blond hair was pulled back into a simple braid. She was thin and pale, but she was real, and she was alive. It was the girl from the picture in Maisey’s locket. She came forward and knelt next to me.

“Hush,” she said. “We must be quiet.”

I blinked up at her, amazed.

The girl pulled out a pocketknife and motioned toward my ties. “I’m here to help you,” she said. “My name is Anna Gersbach.”

? ? ?

“I don’t even know where to start,” I said when she had pulled the stocking from my mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her accent was flavored with French and something upper class and Continental. “I don’t mean to startle you. I’m one of the family who used to live here.”

“I know who you are,” I said, watching as she sawed the blade of her pocketknife against the stockings around my wrists. Up close, I could see that her hair was coming loose from its braid and her fingernails were caked with dirt. A sour, unwashed smell came off her. “I’m Kitty Weekes. I’ve seen you before. Outside. You aren’t dead.”

“No,” she said simply, straining as she cut.

“What about your mother?”

“She is dead,” Anna replied. “Just three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks? Where have you both been all this time?”

She glanced at me. “It is a long story. I don’t know if we have time to hear it now.”

“I believe I know most of it,” I replied.

She gave me an assessing look, then returned to work on the stocking. There was something removed about her, something a little unnerving, as if she were looking at you through the glass of a lens you could not see.

The stocking gave way and I slumped to the floor. It felt as if someone had shoved wires into my arms. I lay gasping for a long moment, tears of pain rolling down my face, and then I slowly rolled to my side and looked at her again. “Why are you here?” I asked her. “What do you want?”

“I will help your friend,” she said as she moved over to Nina and started cutting again. “This man,” she said as she worked. “With red hair. He is mad, of course, but it is more than that. Perhaps you’ll think I’m mad as well, but my father has him. My father’s ghost, that is. He’s taken the man’s mind.” She glanced at me. “I realize this makes no sense.”