It was late in the afternoon and getting cold when Milos Alexandru pulled his tiny Yugo to a stop in a narrow lane that wound through the trees. “Gretzli was right up ahead,” he told Caroline. “I can not drive any further — there is a rock in the middle of the road. But if you like, I can walk with you.”
“It’s all right,” Caroline assured him as she got out of the car. “I’ll just be a few minutes — I just want to see it.” Leaving the old antique dealer in the warmth of his car, she set off along the road, and just past the rock he’d mentioned she came to the place where once had stood the village of Gretzli. Alexandru was right — all that remained of the town was a clearing in the dense forest, and even that was beginning to disappear as young trees had taken advantage of the opening to the sky. Here and there vestiges of the ruts that had once been the village’s main road were still visible, as were a few low mounds that might once have been the foundations of small houses. For almost half an hour she prowled through the area, looking at everything, but seeing nothing.
Indeed, she wasn’t even certain exactly what it was that she was seeking.
Then, as she was about to start back toward Milos Alexandru’s car, a sensation of déjà vu came over her, a sensation so strong that she turned back, half expecting to see something familiar, something clearly recognizable.
But there was nothing. Nothing except the forest, and the sky, and—
The forest, and the sky!
She looked up, and it happened again — the certainty that she’d seen this before. But this time she knew it wasn’t déjà vu she was experiencing at all.
It was as if she was back in the lobby of The Rockwell, gazing up at the ceiling and the trompe l’oeil that spread across it. The trees and sky looming above her induced the same terrible feeling of foreboding that had chilled her when she’d entered the building for the last time, and for a moment she almost imagined she could see the demons lurking among the branches, waiting to seize the scraps from the feasting men who were sated with blood.
The same demons that had been carved into the back of the massive oaken chair in the museum in Birtin.
As the sunlight began to fade, a faint aroma tickled Caroline’s nose, and she recognized it as the same smell of death that had filled The Rockwell the last time she had been inside its walls. The odor seemed to reach out to her, drawing her closer, closer to the woods.
Finally, when she felt as if the scent were about to overpower her, she knelt, and touched the ground.
Beneath the soft mulch of rotting leaves she felt something cold and hard. Brushing away the mulch, she uncovered a stone tablet. Though it was stained and worn by time and the elements, she could still make out the letters carved deep into its surface:
Lavinia Dolameci
1832–1869
Her pulse quickening, she groped the ground around her and found more stones, all of them laying flat, all of them covered with a layer of decomposing vegetation.
And all of them bearing names. Names, and dates.
Elena Conesici
1821–1863
Gheorghe Birtin
1824–1867
Mathilde Parnova
1818–1864
Parnova! Tildie Parnova? Then the other names began crashing through her mind:
Elena Conesici… Helena Kensington.
Gheorghe Birtin… George Burton.
Lavinia Dolameci… Lavinia Delamond.
She dug more frantically now, digging her fingers deep into the earth, tearing it away as she searched for more of the ancient grave markers.
Now the scent was beginning to boil up out of the ground, and as it grew stronger and stronger it reached deep into her memory and tore the scars from every wound that had begun to heal during the last five years. The stench of death nauseating her, she dug still deeper, her fingers bleeding, her nails tearing, until at last she found the gravestone she knew was there.
This gravestone, though, bore not only a name, and a date of death, but a portrait as well, a portrait cut as perfectly as the angels that had been carved into the arms of the wooden wedding chair and the demons that had been concealed by anyone who sat in it. Caroline recognized the person in the portrait instantly, for his eyes were every bit as dead in stone as they had been in the flesh of the man she had married.
Anton Vlamescu.
Anthony Fleming.
As the chill of death settled over every cell in her body, Caroline rose from the ground above her husband’s empty grave and turned away, but even as she started away from the empty clearing, she could feel eyes still watching her.
The eyes of the demons in the trees above.
And the eyes of the dead, who no longer dwelt in the graves below.
“No,” she whispered. “It won’t happen. I won’t let it happen!” The cold of death suddenly transmuting into the heat of fury, she reached down, grasped the headstone that had once stood over Anthony Fleming’s grave, and raised it high over her head. “No!” she howled, and this time the word erupted from her throat, resounding through the forest as she hurled the grave marker downward and smashed it onto a granite bolder. The headstone shattered into a thousand pieces as her single scream of rage died away.
The forest fell silent, and when Caroline looked up once more, the trees were empty.
The demons, and all they represented, were finally gone.