Chapter 7

Christmas Eve, 1957.

Snow. It had begun to snow early in the day, lightly at first, like a fine dusting of powdered sugar spilled across the streets and lawns. As the afternoon wore on, the cloud masses hung lower and became a more leaden gray, evenly colored so that one could not tell where the sun lay behind the sky's shroud. By four o'clock, the road crews were plowing and cindering. Those who had dared the city streets to complete last minute shopping were finding it rough going; cars were angled oddly across the pavement as more inexperienced drivers gritted their teeth and cursed themselves for ignoring the weather reports.

Everything at the restaurants checked out as it should. They would be able to serve a record number of Christmas dinners to those who chose not to eat at home as most people did-the elderly whose children no longer thought of them, young lovers not interested in sharing a magic time with parents, single people without family and afraid to remain alone on such a quiet, bleak day. Jacob left the Brass Lantern Inn, the last of the Matherly eateries to be checked out, got his car from the garage and started the weary drive home.

At twenty minutes of six, he pulled into the garage and shut the engine off. No other cars were there. Lee and the boys were shopping. Jerry and Bess had the day off and wouldn't get back until nine or ten, early enough for Bess to start making a few preparations for tomorrow's traditional feast.

When he stepped through the front door, he sensed something was wrong, though everything looked to be in order. For a moment, he remained on the threshold where a backward step would return him to the crisp snow and the cold December wind. Then he swung the door shut and walked to the drawing room where, at that hour, he expected to find Amelia.

She was not there.

“Amelia?”

She did not answer.

In the upstairs back room, the grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. No one had set the seven day time mechanism in motion for more than five years. Who had started it now?

“Amelia!” he called.

Silence.

He looked through the downstairs and found it uninhabited.

He went upstairs.

At the top landing, he was again possessed of that semi- clairvoyance that had forced him to halt just within the front door. Something was very, very wrong.

He wanted to go to the back room to see why the grandfather clock had been started, but he looked, first, into the nursery where the twins, Lana and Laura, lay in their cribs.

Cribs, then.

And the blood.

He did not know what the blood was. From across the room, it looked colorless, a dark substance running along the slats and legs of the cribs, staining the rug under them.

Hesitantly, he walked toward the children. They lay very still in the shadows, far too still.

He called softly, using the names which they could not yet recognize as their own, but names which he cherished.

The children did not whimper, did not move.

Then he was close enough to see the blood for what it was and to stare, morbidly, into the deep gashes of their awful wounds. Time passed. How much time, he was never later able to ascertain. Indeed, it was as if the laws of the universe, the mechanisms of physical Nature, had stopped altogether. He might have been trapped within a bubble of non-time, staring out through the fragile walls of his prison at a frozen landscape. Whenever time began to flow again and the bubble dissolved around him, he let out a low, wild moan that swiftly escalated into a scream.

He turned and stumbled to the corridor.

The floor seemed to shift like the hinged base of a funhouse in a carnival, and it forced him to lean against the wall as he walked, lest he be pitched forward and lose his balance.

He found the room with the grandfather clock. The glass front of the case stood open, smeared with blood. The brassy pendulum was tarnished by years of neglect and by similar crimson stains.

“Amelia!” He thought he called her name. But when he listened to himself, he heard a wordless cry, a scream forced through a dry, cracked throat.

He turned and went back down the corridor, looking into each room, not certain what he would do when he found her. And then he came upon her; she had returned to the nursery and knelt by the cribs, her knees in red puddles.

She did not look at him.

She stared through the bars of Lana's crib, at the lifeless form curled there.

Her hair was in disarray, dangling along her cheeks, frizzled out over her collar as if charged with static electricity. Her clothes were stained and wrinkled, marked with huge patches of perspiration. Whatever long afternoon of madness had possessed her, it had taken quite a toll before culminating in the murders of the twins.

“Amelia,” he said softly, standing in the middle of the room, halfway between the cribs and the door. This time, he did not imagine the call, but truly spoke to her. He was finished screaming. For now.

She looked up. “They wouldn't stop crying,” she said.

The worst of it was her voice. It was perfectly normal. It had not the slightest touch of insanity in it. It was cool, throaty and sensuous, as always. Before, it had been one of her finest characteristics. Now, it was obscene and disgusting.

“You've killed them,” he said.

“If they wouldn't have cried so much,” she said.

He could not think what to say.

“I started the grandfather clock,” she said. “Did you see?” She wiped at a strand of hair with a red-tinted hand. She said, “When the clock was working, we didn't have any twins. Now it's running again, but the twins are still here. I wish they'd go away. I wish things would be like they once were.”

“The clock hasn't run in five years,” he said. It made no sense. He was beginning to sound as deranged as she.

“It's running now,” Amelia said. “And it will be fine in just a little while. Everything will be fine. The twins will be gone and, I'll be happy again, and Lee and I can go places like we used to. Two children are plenty, Jake. Lee will agree. All I did was turn the clock back.”

He had walked the rest of the way to her, though he avoided looking at the dead twins. He said, “You killed them!”

“Turned the clock back,” she countered.

Despite her disarranged hair and the wilted look of her clothes, her face was triumphantly beautiful.

That, too, seemed wrong to him. He wanted to make her understand all this and then watch her grow old and ugly within the instant.

“You stabbed your own children, over and over and over. You're a murderer, Amelia.”

“Didn't you see the clock?”

For some reason beyond his understanding, he had to hurt her and knew that the clock was the avenue of attack through which she was most vulnerable. He said, “The clock isn't running.”

“It is!”

“I was just in to see it,” he said. “It's stopped again.”

“No.”

“Rusted workings.”

“No!”

“The clock won't ever work again.”

She leaped to her feet, her face suddenly contorted. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a wild, wide leer of a smile. Her nostrils were flared. Her eyes were wide and shocked, staring into the distance.

He reached for her.

She stepped back, raised the knife and swung it at him.

He had forgotten the knife or had thought she had dropped it. She had been holding it at her side, half concealed in her hand and by the folds of her dress. He tried to back up, failed to avoid the blow. The blade scored his shoulder and brought an intense pain that dredged up the abandoned scream.

He fell, clutching his arm, feeling blood rush through his fingers. Unconsciousness swooped over him like a great, dark bird. He knew that he must avoid it, or Amelia would murder him while he lay dazed. But the bird was too heavy and too insistent. It settled on his face and blanked out the world.

When he woke, he had lost a cup or more of blood, though the wound only dribbled now. He was alone in the nursery with the corpses, but he was desperate to escape from there, even if it meant summoning Amelia by the noise of his movements.

In the corridor, he staggered toward the stairs and started down them, wary of the dense shadows of the lower floor. But when he reached the bottom, he realized he could stop worrying now. When she had fled from the upstairs, she must have tripped on the carpeting and fallen down the steps. Her neck was broken, and she lay in an untidy bundle on the last riser.

Curiously, aware now that he was in no personal danger and that the nightmare was drawing toward an end when he could get help, he did not react as logically as he should have. He stood there, over the dead body of the mad woman, and for a long while, he screamed, as if the explosion of air and noise carried the despair from him.

Christmas Eve, 1957.

Legacy Of Terror
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