Demon Child Read online

  "What does it matter?" Cora asked. "Whether it is psychological or a curse-or a little of both. If love cures it, what does it matter?"

  "It matters a great deal!" Richard said. He dropped a fist on the table, made dishes rattle. "We will damage the child by helping her to nourish such superstitious folderol. There is no such thing as a Brucker family curse!"

  Almost as if on cue, the conversation was interrupted by the long, mournful howl of a large wolf...

  * * *

  4

  Jenny had come to the Brucker estate on Tuesday. Wednesday morning, the bad weather broke. The gray clouds tore apart and let the blue sky through around their jagged edges. By afternoon, the blue was dominant over the gray and the night's rain had mostly evaporated from the earth. The air was fresh. The gloom and the sense of impending disaster seemed to flee along with the storm.

  She spent most of the afternoon riding and walking a mare named Hollycross from one end of the grounds to the other. She found every corner beautiful, save for the dozen or so acres near the north-east corner of the Brucker land where limestone sinkholes pocked the earth like scars, where the trees were scraggly and awful and the field grass barely managed to keep a toehold in the heavily-limed soil.

  On Thursday, she rode Hollycross along the east border of the estate, watching the construction work on the superhighway which was not too distant. It displeased her to see nature ripped and destroyed, replaced with concrete and macadam.

  Lunch that day was pleasant, taken on the veranda behind the house with Cora, the breezes crisp. They talked of inconsequential things. The problem of Freya's comas seemed to have receded until Jenny could barely remember the intensity of the fear she had felt on her first night in this place.

  Near three o'clock, she took her nail kit down to the pond and perched upon an outgrowth of limestone near the shore from which she could watch the few, graceful ducks gliding across the placid waters. Her nails were a disgrace. They were chipped and cracked by her unaccustomed exercise of the past two days. She began to file them carefully, soon absorbed in the simple task.

  "You'll just chip them again," a small voice said behind her.

  It startled Jenny so that she let her bottles of polish fall from her lap to the ground. Fortunately, neither had been opened.

  Frank appeared in the corner of her vision, rounding the rocks, Freya came close behind him. They were dressed in blue jeans and white teeshirts. They were perfectly beautiful children.

  "You shouldn't scare old people like me," Jenny said. "I might have fainted on you. Then what would you have done?"

  "Got some lake water to throw on you," Frank said. The idea seemed to appeal to the twins. They both smiled

  "Aunt Cora used to worry about her nails," Frank said. "But if you ride a horse, you can't worry about sissy stuff like that."

  "It isn't sissy stuff," Freya said. It was the first time she had spoken. If there were to be a battle of the sexes here, she knew for certain which side she was on.

  "When Freya grows up," Jenny said, "she'll take care of her nails, and all her boyfriends will be glad she looks so nice. It makes a girl prettier."

  Jenny bent and retrieved the fallen bottles of polish, put them in her lap again. She was glad of the chance to talk to the twins. When she went before a class of twenty-five third graders this fall, she would have to be a little experienced in knowing how to talk with them.

  "Freya takes care of her nails now," Frank said.

  Freya held up her hands, smiling through the fingers. They were both such impishly charming children. Jenny smiled back through her own fingers, then saw that what Frank said was true. Each of Freya's small nails was free of excess cuticle and shaped, though they were rounded rather than elongated in the fashion of a grown woman's nails.

  "She keeps them nice," Frank said, "because she's a werewolf." He watched Jenny solemnly, waiting.

  She was not sure whether he was serious or whether she was being played with.

  She decided to accept it as a joke, and she laughed. Somehow, the rumors had filtered down to the children themselves. She couldn't imagine who would have been so careless as to let such ugly ideas fall on such young ears, but she decided that joking about it was the best thing to do. "Freya isn't a werewolf," she said. "She's just a very pretty little girl with a brother who likes to scare people."

  "No," Freya said, speaking again, her soft voice barely audible. "He's right. I am a werewolf."

  Neither of the children were smiling.

  They looked at her, waiting.

  Jenny would have liked to catch hold of the inconsiderate adult who had passed these rumors on to the children. Surely Richard wouldn't have, especially since he believed werewolves were only superstitious folderol. Aunt Cora seemed to think there might be a grain of truth somewhere in the rumors, but even Cora would know that no good could come from feeding such frightening fantasies to children. That left Harold and Anna. She didn't know them well, but she doubted that either was that irresponsible.

  "How do you know you're a werewolf?" Jenny asked. Perhaps she could make the suggestion seem as foolish as it really was.

  "I go to sleep for long naps, and the wolves howl and kill things every time."

  "But if you're asleep, you're not the wolf," Jenny pointed out.

  Freya shook her head soberly. Her yellow curls bounced. "Yes I am. The ghost in me leaves when I sleep and takes the body of a wolf. Then it hunts."

  Frank put his arm around Freya in a brotherly display of camaraderie. "She won't hurt you, Jenny. Will you Freya?"

  Standing there, the sun gleaming off their hair, their jeans muddy at the knees, their faces freckled, they looked like nothing so much as two typical American children from some Norman Rockwell painting, healthy and alive and as cute as buttons.

  "No," Freya agreed. "I won't hurt you. Just rabbits."

  Unaccountably, Jenny felt cold here on the sunbaked rock. Did she really believe this nonsense about curses and wolves? Could she, even for a moment, believe that part of this darling little girl went out at night and tore the throats out of rabbits? It was laughable, wasn't it?

  Yet, she remembered the warnings in those dreams: Beware the unknown. Expect the unexpected.. .

  "Who told you all of this?" Jenny asked.

  "No one told us," Freya said. "We just know."

  Jenny wasn't to be sidetracked so easily. "Someone must have given you the idea," she persisted.

  "No."

  "You must have overheard Cora or Richard-"

  With that impulsive energy and short attention span that only young children have, Frank grew bored with the matter at hand, took his sister's arm and tugged at it. "Let's race to the stables! Maybe the pony wants to go out!" He pulled Freya away from Jenny. Together, they ran around the rim of the pond, startling the ducks who made squawking protest. They grew smaller and smaller as they ran until, at last, the shadows around the stables swallowed them.

  Her perfect mood had been destroyed. What was wrong with the child? What would a psychiatrist say il he were able to study her? Who in the Brucker mansion had been filling the twins' minds with such ugly, primitive fears?

  She finished her nails, trying to lose herself again in the monotony of the task at hand.

  It didn't work.

  That night at dinner, Richard was late to the table. When he finally did arrive, he took his place without speaking or looking at anyone. He filled his dish almost mechanically.

  Jenny could tell that he was angry, though it did not occur to her why. She focused her attention on her own plate and said nothing. She wished Richard had not lost the pleasantness she remembered from seven years ago.

  When he had filled his platter with a helping of everything, he raised his head for the first time and stared down the length of the table at his stepmother. "Freya is having another spell, Cora. Harold ought to go up and sit with her. God knows, though, what good sitting up with her will do!"

  Cora l
aid her fork down, took a drink of ice water from her goblet. "She had her vitamins at supper. I made certain of that."

  "Cora," he said, his tone not respectful in the least, full of scorn and anger, "Freya's comas are not connected with her vitamin deficiency. There's no escaping the fact that the girl requires psychiatric help!"

  "We've already discussed that," Cora said.

  "I've discussed it," Richard replied. "But I don't think you've even listened to one goddamned word of it!"

  "Richard!" Cora said. "Please never speak to me that way again."

  He pushed his chair back, rose from the table and left the room without asking to be excused.

  What have I gotten into? Jenny asked herself.

  She felt things closing in, building to an explosion. She didn't want to be around when the fuse burnt clear down to the keg of powder. She could not control the rapidly deteriorating circumstances in this house, which meant that she was at the mercy of them.

  Cora did not seem anxious to talk through the remainder of the dinner. Neither of them were really hungry any longer, either.

  Later that night, Cora came to Jenny's room. She was dressed in a lovely yellow lounging robe which contrasted with her dark beauty and her cultured dignity to make both those qualities even more evident. Jenny secretly hoped that, when she was Cora's age, she would look as feminine and sophisticated as her aunt.

  If I reach her age, she amended. And immediately, she wondered why she always had to have such negative thoughts.

  "I'd like to talk to you about Freya," Cora Brucker said. She sat on the edge of the bed. hands folded on the yellow robe. For the first time, Jenny noticed the weariness in her aunt's dark eyes, the dark circles below that indicated bad sleeping habits.

  Jenny had been trying to interest herself in a mystery novel, but she had been making very little headway. The print seemed to run together, and her mind wandered over the tragedies of the past. She put the book down on the covers and sat up straighter in bed. She said, "I feel so sorry for her. She's such a sweet little girl."

  Cora nodded. "And I think she'll be all right. We know that it isn't anything physically wrong. She's had the best doctors. She was in the city for a week with two of the best doctors on the staff there."

  Jenny realized that Cora wanted to justify her own reluctance to bring in a psychiatrist.

  "If it's a psychological problem, love will handle it. I know it will, Jenny. That's what neither of the twins ever had before they came here. Lena was-well, not much of a mother for them."

  Jenny just nodded agreement. She sensed that Cora did not expect her to reply yet. She only wanted a sympathetic ear to which she could talk for a while. It might seem odd, to some people, that an older and more sophisticated woman would wish to confide to a sympathetic, unexperienced girl. But, darn it, they were both women. And there were certain times, certain feelings that a woman could only explain to another woman, regardless of their respective ages.

  "They were shunted around like furniture," Cora went on. "They weren't given affection except, maybe, by passing governesses who changed as fast as Lena got angry with them. And Lena is always getting angry with someone."

  "You give them plenty of love," Jenny said. "They'll be far happier here. From what I understand, there's little chance of Lena wanting to take them back full time."

  "Very little," Cora agreed. She stared out the one uncurtained window at the darkness beyond. After a few minutes of silence, she said, "Do you think Freya should see a psychiatrist?"

  "I could hardly say," Jenny said. "I haven't been around long enough to tell."

  "She's such a fragile child. She cried every night in that hospital. I don't think it would be best to have a stranger probing at her, trying to tear down her defenses."

  "She's very quiet, sort of shy," Jenny said, remembering that Frank had done most of the talking that afternoon while the little girl had watched and listened like an outsider.

  "Exactly," Cora said. "She opens up with me. But it has taken nearly a year to get her to. If I can have a few more months to love her and make her feel wanted, I think the fainting spells will pass. I think this is what she needs-love."

  Jenny smiled and took one of the older woman's hands. "Then it really isn't a curse?" she asked, trying to inject a bit of humor into this, to lift some of the gloom.

  But the question had exactly the opposite effect. Cora paled and shivered all over. "I've long been interested in the occult," Cora said. "I would never refute any possibility. Even a curse. It's possible. And if you could have seen the dead rabbit that was found on the front porch-and the blood on the window where the thing must have stood, looking in..."

  "Just because there was a wolf lose on the grounds doesn't mean it was anything supernatural. There must be lots of wolves in woods like these when-"

  "That's just it," Cora interrupted. "There haven't been wolves in this part of Pennsylvania for almost twenty years. They've been killed off by bounty hunters, just like most of the mountain lions."

  Run, run, run, Jenny.,.

  Cora shook herself, squeezed her niece's hand and let go of it. "Never mind me. I just wanted to let you know that I do care about Freya. And I wanted to tell you not to hold Richard's ways against him. He has only been so surly because he, too, is concerned. He loves the twins. He wants the best for them. We just disagree on what is best, that's all. He's a fine boy."

  She stood. "Even if it is a curse," she said, "my plan should work best. I've read a great deal on the subject. Before- Before this happened to Freya, and since. And I know that many curses can be broken by love, by a great deal of love." Then she smiled vacantly and left the room.

  Jenny had trouble sleeping that night, thinking of poor Freya in her coma, fighting off real or imagined demons. Twice, on the verge of sleep, with restful blackness closing around her, she was awakened by what sounded like the distant, mournful howling of a lone wolf. But she could not be sure...

  When she finally did sleep, she had bad dreams. She was in the cemetery again, before the tombstones. Again, her dead parents and Grandmother Brighton warned her to run, to escape. Again she heard footsteps on the flagstone walk. The only difference was that she could see her pursuer this time. It was a great, black wolf with red eyes like hot coals, a slavering tongue that flicked across the sharpest, whitest teeth she had ever seen...

  She woke from that dream, muttering deep in her throat. Even when the dream had left her, she sat in bed, heart thumping, short of breath. Beyond the window, the Friday morning sky was mostly covered with flat, gray clouds, though the sun managed to burn its way through the covering most of the time. She opened the other curtain which had remained closed since her first night in this room, letting as much light as possible into the room.

  She showered, brushed her hair dry, dressed for riding and went downstairs.

  There was no routine for breakfast. Though the others had been up and around for some time, Anna wanted to make her eggs and bacon. She managed to talk Anna into letting her have just a roll and orange juice, and the cook lectured her on the importance of a good breakfast while she ate her meager one.

  Outside, though the sky was overcast, she felt better. It was as if the nightmares were locked in the house and only her optimism was permitted to come outside with her.

  She took her time on the long walk down to the stables, absorbing the fine country morning. Birds wheeled across the sky, settled into trees, chirped loudly from their hidden perches behind clusters of leaves. A squirrel paused on the rough bark of a sycamore tree, something held tightly in its jaws so that its furry face was swollen. It pretended to be a statue until she had passed by.

  When she finally did reach the stables, she saw that Hollycross' door was wide open. It was a latching half-door, and the lock was stiff. She always made certain it was properly latched, but it looked as if she might have forgotten to double-check it yesterday.

  She hurried forward, afraid that the animal had br
oken loose during the night. Richard had told her what a rugged game it was to catch a runaway horse, even when it could not go beyond the fenced grounds of the estate. She didn't want to be responsible for putting him through an ordeal of that nature.

  When she reached Hollycross' stall in the line, she stepped through the open half-door, calling the horse's name.

  The animal lay in its straw.

  For a moment, Jenny thought it was ill.

  Then she saw the blood.

  In the dim light of the stables, with the smell of crisp straw in her nostrils and with birds singing somewhere behind her, she saw the ruined throat of the once-proud mare. It had been clawed and chewed open. Blood had dried in the chestnut coat.

  The eyes were open and staring.

  There were other signs of violence. All of them had been made by teeth and claws. It looked much as if a large and cunning wolf had trapped the mare and had worked its evil temper on her.

  Before she could realize what she was doing, Jenny had back-stepped out of the stall and was screaming at the top of her voice...

  * * *

  5

  Aunt Cora had wanted her to try to nap until they could reach Dr. Malmont and fetch him to the house, but Jenny would not take the sleeping tablet offered her. In sleep, there were nightmares. She would not even drink the drollop of brandy which Harold wanted to give her, for fear that she would grow drowsy under its influence. It was just not the proper moment for sleep.

  Not after seeing Hollycross crumpled in the straw in the dimly lighted stall.

  She would not permit the room to be darkened, but kept both windows uncurtained and kept the reading lamp burning as well. She never again wanted to be anywhere that there wasn't enough light. She hoped she would not ever again have to go out at night or sleep without a lamp burning.

  In darkness, things could creep up on you without your knowledge, surprise you unpleasantly.