As he ate and as he sipped the cabernet, he studied the photo of the blood-filled amulet that hung from a gold chain in Maddison’s Rock Point Lane bedroom, which earlier he had printed on glossy photographic paper.
Ever since he had seen that strange pendant above her bed, the previous day, it had troubled him because it stirred an echo in his memory, resonated off an event in the past that he couldn’t recall.
At first it had seemed to be an icon with some sacred meaning, akin to a crucifix, but David was not able to sustain that simple interpretation.
If you were superstitious enough to believe in vampires, you might hang a clove of garlic over your bed. But what creature would you intend to ward off with an ampule of blood?
It’s too dangerous for both of us . . .
He became aware that darkness pressed at the windows. He got up to lower the pleated shades. Sometimes he failed to set the alarm at night, and he never employed it prior to going to bed. Now, however, he crossed the room to the security-system panel next to the back door, and he pressed the button to engage the at-home mode.
After he finished eating and rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, he poured the last of the cabernet and carried his glass and the photograph into his study. He emailed the picture to Isaac Eisenstein with a short message inquiring if he’d ever seen anything like the pendant, if it suggested a cult of any kind. He didn’t say where it had been hanging when he’d seen it.
Because he had drunk the bottle of wine over three and a half hours, he was only mildly inebriated. Maddison had not returned his calls, and he suspected that she was in all ways out of his life for an extended period. What if forever? He wasn’t usually a man who, when despondent, drank to excess, but he was that man tonight, for he knew he would not sleep, even to dream of her, if he didn’t have the assistance of cabernet.
He opened a second bottle, only for one last full glass. He sat at the kitchen table to drink, watching the candles gradually gutter in their crystal cups, their lambent glow lapping the velvet petals of the deep-red roses, which seemed to swell with pleasure at the gentle licking of the light.
| 60 |
The door to the underworld is in an ordinary kitchen, a two-inch-thick slab of local oak hung from sturdy iron hinges. No fiery-eyed hounds with serpent fangs guard the entrance, because everyone who wishes to descend may do so unimpeded; such is the all-welcoming nature of Hell. The wood stairs speak his footfalls to the realm below as he makes his way down through the rose-colored light and through the open steel-bar gate into the receiving room. Hades, the god of the underworld, is nowhere to be seen, but the bargain has already been made, and there are no papers to be signed either in ink or blood. If he can find her, he will be allowed to lead her out, out and up into the world of the living, although if he once looks back at her while they ascend, she will be lost to him, lost forever. Through narrow winding corridors that might have been eaten from the earth by some monstrous maze-making worm, he seeks Emily, softly calling her name, softly, softly, so as not to summon other presences that might tear out his soul, like smoking sweetbreads, and greedily consume his immortality. With increasing urgency, he searches these tunnels of rose light, passing doorless rooms like aneurysms swollen off the artery through which he moves, catacombs where bodies should lie in wait of resurrection, but there are no bodies, neither dead nor living. Urgency becomes a frantic exigency, panic, for though this place should be outside of time, he feels time running out. Then in answer to his calling of her name, he hears his name spoken—“Davey”—and he stops, turns, discovers that she has heard, has come, is following him. The Egyptian windings have begun to unravel from her, revealing her eyes, her mouth and chin. Even from what little he can see of her, he knows that before him stands Emily, vivid and uncorrupted after all these years, her luminous blue stare beseeching him to rescue her. Now that he has found her, he must never look back at her again until they have ascended to the world of the living. That is the bargain. He hurries forward through claustrophobic wormholes, serpent tunnels, in a mist of rose light that is a mockery of romance, trusting her to remain behind him. It seems that he will never find his way through the labyrinth, but at last he comes into the receiving room, passes through the steel gate without glancing back. He begins to climb the steep plank steps, although an enormous weight presses on him, as if he is a deep-sea diver making way under a thousand feet of ocean. On the third of twelve steps, a voice speaks to him from within, that voice of doubt that lives in every human heart and labors to deceive: “Is she still close behind you or have you moved too quickly for her to keep up?” But he does not look back. On the sixth step, the voice inquires, “Is she truly Emily, or have you mistaken another for Calista’s daughter?” His gaze remains fixed on the open door at the stairhead. On the ninth step, the voice warns, “If she is Maddison, then you have left Emily among the dead forever.” He answers that they are one and the same, Emily and Maddison, and if they are not one and the same, nevertheless he loves them both. But that is not an adequate justification for such an error as the one of which he’s being accused. On the twelfth step, with only the landing ahead, the voice within his heart asks, “Is it not a betrayal of your Emily, yet another betrayal, to mistake Maddison for her, leave her among the dead, and embrace her imposter, all in the interest of your own happiness?” Ten gravities pin him to the final step, and he can’t lift a foot to the landing, can’t reach the threshold at the open door while unsure of whom he’s led this far. He turns his head. The interment windings have continued to unravel. She stands further revealed, two steps below him, and she is Emily, no doubt of that, Emily unique. But before his eyes, ten years of death, until now held at bay, abruptly take their toll, and as corruption seethes through her flesh, she says, “I loved you,” and she falls away from him, a figure of such horror that his scream comes from him as a silent cry.