Time no longer had any power over an immortal like me. But it still found ways to punish me. Repetition seemed to be one of its most potent weapons and, if you live long enough, your sins always come back to haunt you, as it did on one cold autumn night.
It was 1972 and I was in my study, bored and miserable when a noise, that of someone moving around outside the gates of the mansion, reached me. They were still now and all I heard was breathing and a heartbeat. I was in no mood for trespassers and I dipped into the ether, meaning to frighten the hell out of whoever was there.
I materialised outside the gates, a few metres from the person. An icy chill pressed itself against me, rendering me frozen in terror.
A flame-haired child was standing at the gates with her back to me. My heart seemed to stop with a sharp twist and that awful night in the woods from so many years ago came flooding back.
Fearing a ghost had come back to exact its vengeance, I took a step back. The noise made her spin around. I was expecting to see the same face and it was a few seconds before it registered that I was looking at a completely different child. She had long red hair, but it hung loose instead of in bunches. She was thin, pale, dirty and had cuts on her legs. She shivered in the moonlight. Fear contorted her features and she stumbled away. I stood there as she disappeared into the gloom and it was a few moments before I regained my senses. I disappeared and materialised a few feet from her. She screamed. But before she could run away, I grasped her arm and reached into her mind to soothe her.
Her screams faded away and she stood breathing heavily in the night air. I picked her up. There was no resistance. She was slack and pliable as the other red-haired child had been when I drained her blood. The difference between then and now was that I was shaking as much as she was as I took her back to the mansion.
I was so shaken I could not speak. I placed her in front of the fire with a blanket over her tiny form. Then I made her a sandwich and a warm drink. I got myself a large brandy before I sat down in front of her. Then I did what I was dreading and read her mind to find out what she was doing alone, in the middle of nowhere, at night. Thankfully, she wasn’t a ghost. But what I discovered was grim.
Her name was Mallory and she was nine years old. A week ago she awoke to find her mother cold and lifeless in bed. She tried to wake her and eventually gave up, and merely laid in bed beside her. When the little bit of food left in the house run out, she left the house to look for help, finding her way to the mansion.
There was no need to control her fear now as the warmth of the mansion, along with the food, had calmed her down. She ate half of the sandwich before pointing to the other half, staring up at me. I saw her thoughts clearly. She wanted me to go back home with her and give her mother something to eat.
I sighed and rubbed my forehead.
“Mallory...I...she...she’s dead, Mallory.”
She shook her head vehemently and crossed her skinny arms over her chest, tears springing to her eyes.
No. She stood up and took hold of my wrist, trying to pull me toward the door.
The image in her mind was not of the corpse I had seen when I searched her thoughts. It was of a live woman.
She’s sleeping, she insisted.
Not knowing what to do, I picked her up. Perhaps she needed to see the dead body again.
I took her back to her home, an impoverished little house miles from the nearest neighbour. She remained silent as we stood over her mother’s bed, still holding the sandwich she had wrapped in tissue. The putrid scent of the corpse filled my nostrils, flies were already gathered in the tiny room.
How she had stayed here for so long confounded me and it chilled me to see empty packets of biscuits on a table by the bed.
“She’s gone, Mallory. You have to say goodbye to her. She’s gone.”
There were no tears on her thin, drawn little face as she stared at the dead body. Nothing at all from her thoughts. After a few moments, she got down and placed the sandwich by the corpse. She came back to me, and when I picked her up, she merely lay her head against my shoulder.
She was fast asleep by the time we returned to the mansion. I entered her sleeping mind and made her forget those harrowing days in that house alone with the dead body. I also made her forget me. Then I drove her to the nearest police station and left her in their care.
A few days later, I called the authorities and made enquiries about her well-being. She was fine, physically, I was told, but had still not spoken a word to anybody. According to neighbours, she had distant relatives in Texas that they were trying to trace, and she had been placed in a foster home in the meantime.
I put the phone down, still deeply shaken by finding Mallory outside the mansion. The face of the other red-haired girl never left my mind during the remainder of that week.
Two weeks later, I was awakened from my daily slumber by movement outside the mansion. I already knew what I would find, but the sight of Mallory sitting outside the mansion peering through the gates still brought a chill over me. And it was hard to dismiss the insistent and irrational thought that she was a ghost come back to haunt me for my past sins.
When she turned and saw me standing a few metres from her, she bolted to her feet and tried to run away.
“Mallory. Wait!”
The sound of her name brought her to a stop and she stared at me quizzically, fear in her light brown eyes. I reached into her mind and released the memory of me I had locked away. The tension melted away from her face instantly and she ran toward me. She stopped short just before she reached me and merely stood staring at me.
Inside the mansion, she went straight to the chair by the fireplace where she had sat before. Once the fire was lit, she settled back into the chair and fell asleep. I telephoned the authorities. They were having trouble finding her relatives and she was not settling well into the foster home.
I watched her as she slept in the chair. Whether the decision I came to was made out of loneliness or guilt, I decided I would look after Mallory.
It was easy to manipulate and deceive the authorities into believing I was one of the distant relatives they had been trying to trace, and a few days later, she came to live with me. I hired a childminder who was to have sole responsibility for her.
In the beginning I kept my distance from Mallory. Every time I laid eyes on her, a chill came over me, the other child I had murdered in the woods over two hundred years ago quick to come to the surface.
Whenever I arrived home in the mornings, she would be waiting by the stairs biting her nails, her pale face devoid of emotion, her eyes dark and serious. The moment I uttered a good morning, she disappeared down the hallway and a twinge of anguish found its way into my heart. In the evenings, she often came to whatever room I was in and stood by the door watching me. Whenever I faced her and tried to make conversation, she darted out of sight.
Soon she began greeting me with a shy smile, and in the evenings she did her homework in the study whenever I was there. Before long, when I arrived at the mansion at dawn, she would be standing on the stairs in her pyjamas waiting for me. Joy flushed through me and I laughed with pleasure when she ran into my waiting arms. I would make her breakfast whilst she hovered around me, her little fingers tracing words in the air, often struggling for the right sign (as she was still learning sign language.) But more often than not, she spoke to me through images in her mind.
I took her to school every morning before retiring for the day, making sure I was awake to get to the school gates on time to collect her. We were seldom apart before long, and without my even being aware of it, she had taken away some of the loneliness that had come with Luna’s absence. I still thought of Luna daily, but I no longer let hatred mar those thoughts, although I was still very angry at her. I also began to think of the other red-haired child less and less.
Another pleasant and unexpected effect of having Mallory with me was that the bitter bile that arose whenever I thought of Onyx and the second heartbeat, soon faded away. And in this way, the world once more began to be open to me and life pulled me into its tender bosom once more.