Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [96]
“And then there was the dark multicolored marble of the desk, and the simple iron frame that bore the marble’s weight.
“A squatter with taste, and intellectual interests! But how did he or she get here, and what had this to do with the attacks of dizziness I had felt as I proceeded? What had this to do with anything but trespassing, as far as I knew?
“I gazed about me at the open windows. I saw the stains of rain on the floor. I saw the flickering greenery. I felt faint again and batted at a mosquito that was trying to drive me mad.
“ ‘Just because this character has taste doesn’t mean he’s not upstairs waiting to kill you,’ I reminded myself.
“Then, going to the interior stairs, I called out:
“ ‘Hello the house!’
“There was no sound above. I was convinced the place was deserted. If the mysterious reader had been here the books would not have been so swollen.
“Nevertheless, I called out again, ‘Hello, Tarquin Blackwood here,’ and I went up slowly, listening for any sound from above.
“The second floor was much smaller and tighter than the first, but it was made of the same firm planks, and light came in not only from the barren arched windows but through the cupola above.
“But those details I scarcely noticed. Because this room was markedly different from the one below it in that it contained a loathsome and hideous sight.
“This was a set of rusted chains attached to the wall opposite the chimney, chains which obviously had no other purpose than the chaining of a human being. There were handcuffs and ankle cuffs on these chains, and beneath these idle witnesses to some abomination there was a thick dark syrupy-looking substance and the remnants of a human skull.
“I was disgusted beyond imagining. I was almost violently sick. I steadied myself. I stared at the black residue, this seeming tar, and at the skull, and then I made out what seemed like the disintegrating whitish powder of other bones. There was also the evidence of rotting cloth in the morass, and something glinting brightly though it was caught in the dark viscid tar.
“I felt a cold stubborn rage. Something unspeakable had happened here. And the perpetrator was not on the premises, and hadn’t been for several months, but might at any moment return.
“I approached this tarlike substance. I knelt down beside it and I picked out the glinting fragment and discovered it with no surprise to be one of the earrings which Rebecca had worn when she came to me. Within seconds my trembling fingers had found the mate. And there, in the nauseating substance, was the cameo Rebecca had worn at her throat. I collected this too.
“I was paralyzed with excitement, but that didn’t keep me from seeing that a fifth chain, a chain quite separate from those which must have once bound wrists and ankles, also dangled from the wall, and at the end of it was a hook. This hook was caught in the dark filth, and the dark filth contained fragments of fabric and fragments of hair.
“It was this fifth chain that horrified me more than anything else.
“Chills ran over me. My head was swimming and I suffered a loss of balance, and a sense again of Rebecca speaking to me, Rebecca whispering to me, Rebecca crying; and then her voice rose, distinct in the buzzing silence of the house: You can’t do it, you can’t!
“ ‘Not Rebecca,’ I whispered. But I knew that she had died here, I knew that for a century her bones had moldered here, I knew that even now, before my eyes, the tiny creatures of the swamp were eating at what was left of her—I could see them at work in the ugly residue—and soon there would be nothing at all.
“She had sent me here. I had a right to touch the skull, and as I did so it disintegrated before my eyes. It was no more now than a heap of white powder along with all the other bones. I should never have touched it! But it was too late.
“Quite suddenly I flew into action. I stood up. I secured the earrings and the brooch in my pocket. I pulled out my hunting knife—the kitchen knife