She closes the door and washes her hands in the snow.
Inside she warms herself by the fire. Her hands are stiff, and she moves them over the flames. Her work this night is not finished.
Alma stands in the hall, in the doorway facing the sleeping Doctor.
- Comes the time
He is slow to stir and so she makes her voice stronger, undeniable.
- Justin Gundry comes the time to join Mother
Her voice, after so many seasons of silence, mutes Doctor Justin Gundry with a fear he has not known, but already he is rising from his bed. He is on his feet quickly, then hesitating, unsteady. Alma is forced to bring the silver blade to use sooner than planned, but she is not yet concerned. He lunges. Alma has grown tall and strong but the old Doctor is stronger. In the struggle that ensues between the master quarters and the hall where the black maple banister curves all the way around, Alma is pushed back even as she employs a life of hatred and rock-hard strength to plunge the knife into his belly and up, up, under the breastplate. He gasps, spewing spittle in her face. She rolls him aside calling his name over and over to place her judgment and for Mother.
- Justin Gundry Justin Gundry Justin Gundry
Justin Gundry the mortally wounded falls, but not before clutching his orphaned child Alma to tumble with him. Together they descend to the main floor foyer and the sound of Alma's neck is as loud and small as a sapling birch in winter. He is on top of her, her hand still clutching the handle of the blade, the point of which the fall has driven into his spine. As he breathes his last, his gray eyes bore down and Alma releases the knife to take him by the throat. She crushes the bones under the flesh until his gray eyes run to black and rupture as he passes from this life into that which lies beyond.
In the deep of the house the child called Chesapeake cries out for its mother, for any mother, to mend her young heart.
Alma rolls the Doctor off her. She cannot feel beneath her waist, but she can move her arms. She claws at the floor and begins to drag herself to her lil'un. Her cries echo all around her, and she cannot find the way down. She uses the last of her strength to lift her head, straining like a serpent there upon the floor, until the cords stand out and flex and the last splintered bone severs under the pressure and there is no more pain.
Alma's body abandons its functions even as her spirit, this indomitable inside of her, lashes out for the new life it has always desired, staining the floors and walls and stones as it joins the Other Mothers who have given a life to have a life.
Child Chesapeake's cries go unanswered. She perishes in the stone walls that hide their secrets until another Great War passes and the new people of faith come bearing hope for a new life. Only then are the Daughters of Eve, the All Mother, awakened, ready to usher in new Life and Its unending need into the birthing house.
The world cuts.
40
Time became once again a thing he could sense, and the room smelled of medicine. He was warm, floating in a womb of weightlessness, surrounded by dim sounds and occasionally rocked as in a crib. He regained physical sensations of soft cotton wrapping his naked body, but still he remained heavy with sleep.
He was too weak to rise but in the darkened room there was warm flesh and the pressure in his mouth. When the cool button slipped between his teeth at first he resisted, but his hunger was stronger and so he fed. During the feedings he experienced the last of the visions that weaved her history, and he came to understand that he had been feeding this way all through the long long night.
The last he remembered was the fight, and chasing his wife up the stairs so that he could apologize to her. There were flashes of her fall that came after, but nothing beyond the stairs. He knew that he was missing an important detail from the very end, but whenever he tried to remember his wife's face it escaped him. When the pain in his stomach flared up like an umbilicus of fire, she would come again, hovering over him, feeding him, filling him up as he had filled her during the lonely nights. He did not know how much he had healed, but he felt better after, full of her.
The pain was still a fire inside of him, but he was driven from bed by the need to know. He looked under the moist cloth around his waist and saw the purple-black thread where she had sewn him up. He was able to walk, slowly, and he moved down the stairs over the better portion of an hour. He shuffled around the main floor and checked every room. He looked behind the doors in the bathroom and the kitchen pantry and in the foyer. When the dogs began to follow him he stopped to feed them and nearly fainted bending over the bowls.
He went down the stairs into the basement. He shone the flashlight on the stone foundation walls and stood in the spot where Luther had been growling and bleeding. He stared at the foundation and traced the stones with his eyes until they fell upon the one that was loose. He was too weak to remove the stone to see what lay inside, but he need not bother. He already knew what secrets the little piggy kept.
If there had been any doubt, it vanished. Not doubt that he had lost his mind, for he knew that he had. He had fallen prey to loneliness and delusions brought on by guilt and the emotional, if not completely physical infidelity with Nadia. But if any doubt remained that Alma had been real, as real as his wife, this before him ended all such doubt.
A single loosened stone. He had not noticed it when he searched before. But his dog Luther had noticed it, and knew something inside these stone walls was not right. He was for a moment, but only for a moment, relieved at the sight of it now. Because it allowed that he was not a murderer. He knew he had lost track of time - the time between Nadia leaving his bed and Jo discovering her in the garage - but he had never believed he was a true savage, a killer.
But he was guilty.
What had Laski said about hauntings?
It happens to good people, because even good people got problems. And problems is what your haunted house feeds on, son. Just like a one of them payday loan stores. So it goes, and sometimes it goes to murder. Conrad knew that he was responsible. Alma may have performed the ritual removal of Nadia's unborn, but what had given birth to Alma? Had he not fed Alma as he had fed Nadia? As surely as the girl's pregnancy and hopes were fed by his domestic duties in the kitchen, so too was Alma fed by his yearning, his desire to be a father. From his first days under her roof, he had left the door open for her return.
She had always been here, but now she was loose, reclaiming her place among the living and breathing.
He had to do something about that.
He exited the basement through the wooden door to the yard. The night was cool and he walked slowly down the path toward Our Eden.
He stopped when he reached the grave. The dirt was fresh, bulging obscenely above the grass. A small cross made of sticks had been set on top, tied with string, just as the Doctor had taught her more than a century before.
He was about to start digging when self-preservation kicked in again.
The Grums. The police. They would have scoured Eddie's trailer. They could have evidence linking him to the crime scene by now.