“It’s hard,” Mr. Baker said. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Then, please … don’t talk.”
He looked at me, his gaze watery. Something in there was sharp though, as if he guessed at my fears. Guessed that I didn’t want him to talk—didn’t really wish to know any more awful truths. I let his hand drop. There was a small, hard object in my palm, which I looked at dully. My mind was far away.
“We can just sit here quietly,” I said.
“I haven’t got long. I’ve got to tell you. I’m dying. It is now or never.”
All this talk of death was making me uncomfortable. He didn’t know. How could anyone know they were to die?
“Rest. If anything is going to make you better, it is peace and quiet,” I murmured.
“No. You deserve more.” He paused and drew another shuddering breath. “Understand this, Kit. I never told you the one important thing. It’s all about Tabby.”
A jolt of something like fear made my body go rigid. I didn’t move a muscle. Since he’d said it in the desert, that name had been constantly in my thoughts.
“Ta …” I began slowly.
“Tabby. Tabitha. Your mother. You never really knew her.”
“Oh yes, I did. I was seven, nearly eight, when she—”
“A child.”
He drew in a deep breath, making a visible effort. I could see the muscles of his chest contracting and the tendons in his neck standing out. It made the speckled black snake, above his heart, move like oil on water.
My mother. What did this man have to do with my mother? Her smiling presence. Her vivid eyes. I never thought of my mother, tried not to, because it all came back to the same thing. She was gone. Would always be gone.
“My brother and I grew up near Huntsham, on Exmoor,” Mr. Baker continued. “A lonely place. Bleak, windswept, home only to heather and lichen. Our father was a servant, a butler, at the big house on the hill. Can you imagine the life of a servant? I believe not.”
“Of course I can. I’ve met—”
“Oh no, I don’t think you could. Not really imagine it. Not really inhabit a servant’s soul. You see, Kit, you are different to me. It was all given to you—the house in Oxford, the servants, the carriage.”
“We’re not rich. We don’t have a carriage,” I interrupted. “Or servants. Apart from Mrs.—”
He talked over me: “For my brother and I, one emotion dominated everything. Envy. We used to visit the kitchens sometimes when the family was away. They were like palaces compared to our home. The shining silver, the fine bone china. I remember I left a smudge on a plate and my father told me off. Shouted. I couldn’t believe it. The wealth, the ease, the lovely things. Then and there I vowed I would have it all—and more. My brother felt the same way, because, of course, we were as one.
“We wanted it. All of it. Money, horses, lovely things. We wanted footmen bowing as we entered our mansion. Elegant ladies hanging on our every word. But how were we to get it? As the children of the footman, who later became the butler, we were tolerated about the place. But there was an unbridgeable gulf between us and them.
“Us and them. We were beneath them, you see. Even when Tabby played chase with us through the stables and hay barns, we always knew that she was above us. She denied it, of course—Tabitha was a hothead—but we knew.”
“You knew my mother? As a child?” I broke in.
“Of course. Aren’t you listening? We were best friends. Playmates. Cecil hoped for more. He was violently in love with her—but she laughed him off.”
“That was nothing to do with—you know—that Cecil was the son of a butler,” I said. “I know my mother was from a wealthy family, but she married my father, for heaven’s sake. He’s not a millionaire—or anything like it. She obviously just didn’t like your brother—no offense meant.”
He looked at me—a smile twitching his lips. “None taken.”
“I just doubt if a man like your brother was the kind of person someone like my mother would fall in love with. It’s not a snobbish thing. Even if he was the son of a duke!”
“Cecil didn’t see it that way. He believed it was his position in the world that made her reject him. And he never forgave Tabitha. He threw himself into money—and made a mint of it. And then when we were rich—very, very rich—he came back for Tabitha.”
“When was this?” I asked, speaking past the lump in my throat.
“Oh—she was married, if that’s what you’re inquiring about. You were just a little thing. We kept tabs on all that … Well, I won’t go into exactly what Cecil did. Suffice to say, he was thorough about the thing. He saw hypnotists, criminals, sorcerers—all sorts of practitioners of the dark arts. Finally he found a very old and extremely evil Frenchman who had dabbled in witchcraft and alchemy. He hoped to use the dark arts to win her forever.
“The plan went wrong. And your mother died.”
“She died in an accident. That’s what I was always told.”
“That’s what they said. It was all hushed up. Your father went a little mad after her death. We kept tabs on that too. And Cecil decided that if he couldn’t have your mother he would have you.”
I drew back from the table, shrinking away from the sight of this wretched man. This pale sack of decaying flesh. He thought it was fine to talk like this. About killing my mother—and wanting me, in some strange way, in her place.
Cyril was looking up at the ceiling now, away from me. He was talking to himself. “You see, once he had all the money in the world, Cecil became concerned for his soul. He decided he needed you.”
“What did he need from me?”
“Your soul, Kit. It was Tabby’s daughter’s soul he craved.”
“So …” I paused and drew breath. “That’s why you—and your brother—never had me killed? I was useful to you?” I found my voice had risen in my indignation.
A strangled laugh escaped from Baker’s throat. “My dear, it took considerable self-control for Cecil not to kill you. The temptation was fairly strong sometimes. Not to mention your friends. I personally had to intervene several times to stop him having Waldo quietly knifed.
“For some reason, Waldo particularly got on his nerves. There’s his youth, his looks—and you must admit he’s rather arrogant.”
I wasn’t really listening. I was too shocked by what Cyril Baker had just told me. About the repulsive twins having been my mother’s childhood playmates. About my mother, lovely, headstrong, dead—unwittingly behind their hideous schemes for money and power. So Cecil Baker had killed my mother, and now he wanted me. I was caught like a bug in a sticky web of witchcraft.
My whole being cried out against it. But at some deep level it all made sense. Why had the Bakers always been so interested in me? Not in lovely Rachel, or Waldo, or Isaac. It was always me. Now Cecil Baker was stalking me, with the snake of death gliding up my arm, toward my heart.
I can’t pretend my thoughts were clear. My head was spinning with it all. The other objects that Baker had sought: the Egyptian book of immense antiquity; the sacred waters of Shambala in the Himalayas, which he believed would bring him immortality and which instead had cursed him; the bones of the sage in China. Now this.
He had lost those other treasures; did he hope to make it all up by finding this sacred Anasazi tablet?
Why? What did he hope to achieve? But I was strong. I would fight him with all I had.
“I am scared for you, Kit,” Cyril rasped. “I’ve been thinking it over. You shouldn’t go to the Grand Canyon. What he plans there—”
“I am not afraid of death,” I interrupted.
He gave a cracked laugh. “Death? You think it’s your death I’m frightened of? What my brother plans for you, dear Kit, is far, far worse than death.”
Silence hung between us for a bit as I brooded on his words. My mother. Something worse than death. The Grand Canyon.
I looked down at him, my gaze arrested by the snake moving over his chest. It had stopped. Its head had disappeared, as if it had begun to burrow downward.
The snake had begun its descent to Baker’s heart.
“The snake?” I asked. “What is it?”
His eyes locked on mine. They had a faraway look, as if they were gazing beyond me, Kit, to something only he could see.
“Don’t you understand?”
“No.”
“The snake is the disease in our souls. I am marked, as are you and my brother, Cecil. It is all the ugliness, the greed, the envy, the desire for more and more and more. The waters of eternal life in Shambala created this grub of sickness. Eventually it came to the surface of our skin, a foul snake. Oh, why didn’t we listen to the guardian of that mountain paradise? She said we shouldn’t drink, that we shouldn’t even be there. But we paid her no heed. Now the snake searches for a way back in.”
“Back in?” I echoed, my voice quavering.
The long speech had exhausted Baker. He collapsed and stared at the ceiling. “Back into our heart,” he said, finally. “It’s rather ironic, Kit, for, you see, the Black Snake is also the name Cecil gave to our organization. Not the official one that handles our business affairs, but the secret society dedicated to the dark arts.”
His breathing was shallow and furious, the red patches on his pale cheeks crude daubs, like the make-up of a clown. His eyes roved around the room for a while, as if he was seeking something, and I let him be, brooding on what he had said. Black snakes. Snakes crawling up the skin. Black snakes in the land of the white sun.
“Kit!” Baker’s voice was panicky as he reached up to clutch me. “Don’t let my brother have my body. Make him leave it alone.”
“What can you mean?”
Baker’s lashes fluttered, his pale eyes burrowing, like a snake, into mine.
“Bury me. No burn me. As quick as you can. Tomorrow. No—”
“You’re going to be well. Please, Cyril …”
But his hand dropped away, sudden as a stone. The agonizing movement of his chest slowed, then ceased.
His eyes were still locked on mine. Even from beyond, they were holding me to account.
I leaned over to him and gently closed his lashes. To my surprise my eyes were wet.
Just at that moment, as I felt his skin burning under my hands, Aunt Hilda came bounding through the door. “It’s all arranged,” she boomed. “We’ve got a stagecoach to take Baker to Chloride City and then, if need be, on to Vegas, if there’s no help to be had there. We’re going to …” She stopped mid-sentence as her eye fell on Cyril’s body.
“Oh—I see I am too—”
“Yes, Aunt Hilda, you’re too late. Cyril Baker is dead.”