“Okay,” she said finally. “Thank you.”
“Do you know what to do with those things?” Mack asked. “The ring and the stuff in the paper?”
“Yes.”
Mack stood, put a hand to the door and wished he could say something more to ease her apparent grief.
“Goodbye, Liv,” he whispered, and slipped back down the stairs.
Chapter 30
Liv
Liv lay curled on her side. She’d dreamed vividly the night before. Not prophetic dreams, but the textured dreams of childhood memory.
In her dreams, she and Stephen ran barefoot through the woods, laughter ringing out as they escaped from Murphy’s orchard with armloads of apples. Liv had never stolen food. Despite her family’s poverty, she understood the farmers needed every apple they grew.
But Ben Murphy was a mean man who threw the fruit and vegetables he grew away when the families he sold them to were short of money, or if he perceived one of them to be acting out of line. The month before, he’d taken a basket of apples meant for the Holtz’s, a family with six kids who lived in a shack not far from Liv’s, and dumped it in the river when their oldest boy mentioned he didn’t want to go off to war.
Liv and Stephen had stolen enough apples to share with the Holtz kids, and a few for themselves too.
When Liv woke to the drab light of early morning, she could still smell the ripe apples she and Stephen had carried in their arms.
Across the room, the metal grate slid open.
Liv watched Stephen’s slender hands push a tray of food into the attic.
“How are you sleeping, Liv? The bats aren’t giving you trouble, are they?”
She could not tell if he meant the comment cruelly, but what difference did it make?
She stood and shuffled to the food, her back aching from the thin cot.
“Tell me how it works, Liv,” Stephen continued.
He pushed something against the grate, and she saw the hag stone she wore around her neck. He must have taken it the night he abducted her.
He swung it back and forth like a pendulum.
Liv took a bite of soggy cereal, watching the white stone sway from side to side.
“I keep trying to see,” he continued. “But there’s nothing there. I mean, nothing extraordinary. Do you remember the first time I looked through the stone, Liv? The world shifted. I saw energy pouring out of everything, light and dark and a thousand colors I didn’t know existed. Now, there’s nothing. Not so much as a speck of dust drifting in the sun.”
Liv did remember that day. Those memories felt like impostors. They appeared to portray a friendship, a growing love, when really, they were merely a foundation upon which to build a house of horror.
“You’ll never be able to see, Stephen. You’re weak. You’ve always been weak,” she fumed, biting back tears.
Stephen said nothing, but the hag stone disappeared from the grate.
“Maybe I should just drop it on the floor and crush it beneath my shoe,” he told her, tapping the stone against the cement floor.
Liv looked away. She didn’t fear his threat. Stephen coveted magical items more than anything else in the world. He was a slave to his desire for such things.
“Go ahead,” she muttered. “If I look through it, I only see darkness.”
“You’re lying to me, Liv. Lying is my pet peeve. You should know I’m not below making you talk. And these days — well, let’s just say I have new instruments at my disposal.”
“You’re sick, Stephen. All those years ago it wasn’t your fault, but now…” she trailed off.
His voice came again, closer, as if he’d pressed his mouth to the grate.
“You know what I think, Liv? I think you’re angry that I did it. I became what George envisioned for you. I am the master of my universe. I have access to power you can’t even dream of.”
Liv sat up. She took the folded parchment Mack had slipped beneath the door. It contained a silty black powder.
“The nightmare has gone on long enough, Stephen. It’s time to wake up,” she said, and she poured the powder into her hand. Leaning down, she blew it through the grate.
She heard the sharp intake of his breath, and then his cough.
He scrambled away from the door and the cough continued.
He swore, and she imagined him brushing at the powder clinging to his eyelashes and coating the fine hairs in his nose.
“What was that? What did you do?” he hissed between coughs, but she didn’t reply and after another minute, she heard the clap of his footfalls as he receded down the stairs.
Stephen
Stephen washed his face, leaning into the mirror and searching for the remaining particles of black dust.
His nose and throat burned from the silty powder. He’d breathed it deeply and knew he could not remove it from his bloodstream. It had traveled into his nose. But he’d stripped Liv before putting her in the straitjacket that first night. He’d emptied her pockets and taken the hag stone necklace.
She didn’t have the powder, so where had it come from? Something she’d concocted in the attic. A mixture of dust and bat droppings, meant to unnerve him?
He glanced at his watch and swore under his breath.
He had to meet Dr. Strickland in twenty minutes.
The door swung open into the bathroom.
“Occupied,” he snarled, but when he glanced behind him, no one stood in the doorway. The door was firmly closed.
Dabbing his face with a towel, he cast a final glance in the mirror and froze.
George Corey stood behind him in the bathroom. Bones poked through his yellowing flesh. His eyes blazed black and furious. The man snatched the knife embedded in his chest, reached back, and flung it at Stephen.
Stephen yelped and dove sideways, crashing into the little wooden table stacked with washcloths and soaps. He landed hard on his side, twisting around to face the man and holding up his hands to block the knife attack.
He wheezed; his breath painful beneath what were surely bruised ribs.
No knife fell upon him.
George Corey did not occupy the space at all.
Stephen held his aching side and climbed slowly to his feet.
Liv
The crow landed next to Liv, perching on the brass of her bed frame. She held out a sliver of bread, and he nipped it from her fingers.
Beside her on the white sheet sat the poison ring Mack had retrieved. She slid her pinkie into the ring and lifted it up, tilting it to and fro in the light that filtered through the small windows near the floor of the attic.
The musty room grew thick and warm as she sat, but when she tried to walk to the window, her legs wobbled beneath her. She sagged onto the bed, and the crow took flight, soaring around the shadowy ceiling before landing on a wood beam above.
She lifted her hand and watched it weave and bob, blurring and refocusing.
“He drugged me,” she croaked, looking toward the bowl of applesauce. She had not intended to eat it, but her stomach’s rumblings had gotten the best of her.
The room grew fuzzy and indistinct.
The poison ring fell from her pinkie and clattered to the floor. She watched the dark ruby fade into darkness.
Stephen
Stephen sat impatiently in an overly soft chair in Dr. Strickland’s sitting room.
The man watched him through clouded, yellow eyes.
“I’m hardly a young man anymore,” Strickland wheezed, drawing an oxygen mask to his face and taking several raspy puffs of air. “But the other doctors in the brotherhood find you difficult to speak with, Stephen. You’re bitter and cruel. They fear your retaliation if they speak up.”