79
Liz made her way down the passageway, which reeked of the smell of death. She knew those corpses were in here somewhere. At least now, with all the damage left by the storm, there was some light let in from the outside to guide her: she had no idea where her phone was. Liz just needed to find a place where the damage was so severe that she could step out onto the roof.
She had to hurry. She could hear footsteps behind her now. At least some of them had come into the passageway after her.
A few feet down the corridor she spotted another corpse. Paul Delacorte, his dead eyes still open and staring at her. “Scum,” she spit as she stepped over the body.
Up ahead, the light was greater. That was because the entire wall on the right side was gone, along with a huge chunk of the ceiling. Stepping through the debris into the light, Liz realized that she was leaving the secret passageway and returning into the main house. As she glanced around, she saw something else: she was stepping into her own room.
The place was soaked with water and strewn with plaster and broken glass, but her bed, along an interior wall, was just as she had left it not so many hours earlier. Her bureau remained remarkably untouched, with bottles of perfume still standing upright. But only a few feet away the entire exterior wall was gone, exposing a sheer drop down into the gardens. Liz saw with some shock that they were now nothing more than brown, glistening pools of mud.
Only then did Liz spot Nicki’s suitcase. Her heart broke. Her friend—who had come down here to support her. Liz thought she might dissolve into a blubbering mass of tears right there on the spot.
I’ve got to stay strong, she told herself. They’ll be in here after me at any minute. I’ve got to find a way down to the ground.
Her plan to escape via the roof hadn’t panned out. There’d been no way to get out there that Liz had found. Maybe she would have found some way if she’d gone in the opposite direction. But the only route out of the passage that she’d found had been through the broken wall that led into her own room. For a second Liz imagined Dominique moving through that passage in the weeks previous.
I heard her. I smelled her.
I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t hysterical.
It was all real.
Liz glanced down through the broken wall at the remains of the gardens. The drop was too high for her to jump. She’d surely kill herself, or break her leg, leaving her helpless against Hoffman and her minions, who would quickly descend upon her. Liz studied the broken beams and plaster. Was there a way she could shinny herself down? If she had time, she might have tied bedsheets together to form a makeshift rope to lower herself to the ground. But she didn’t have time. She could hear them coming for her now. They were running behind the walls. She had been a fool to try to go out this way. She should have risked going downstairs.
She looked again out the window. The only way was to jump . . . she’d rather take the leap and hope for the best than be snatched back by those monsters. Maybe the mud would cushion her fall.
But it was too late. A hand gripped her shoulder.
“Jumping would be a terrible mistake.” It was Roger. “Accidents like that could severely mar your pretty face.” He turned her around to face him and cupped her chin in his hand. “Look at what happened to Dominique when she fell off that boat and got caught in its rotors.”
“Don’t touch me,” Liz said, pulling away from him and standing precariously on the edge, poised to jump. She noticed Roger was alone; Naomi Collins had let him go; and none of the others had followed him in here. Still, he was as bad as all the rest of them. “I’d rather break my neck than die at the hands of you lunatics,” she said.
“But you see, darling, that’s why I’m here,” Roger said. “They agreed to let me reason with you. You can become part of us.”
“You’re lying to me. Not that I’d ever join your loathsome little group, but you’re talking bullshit. No way would Hoffman allow me to live. If I live, Dominique doesn’t come back.”
Roger leaned in conspiratorially. “After Hoffman ran off, we all decided that we didn’t need her. Variola was right. We’ll do things our way. We’ve learned plenty. Hoffman isn’t the only one who can call up a spell. We’ll overthrow Hoffman. It was my plan all along, and it can still come true.”
Behind him, Liz spotted movement. The door to her room was opening slowly, carefully, as if to not make a sound. Liz’s first impulse was to cry out, but something made her hold her tongue. She gave no indication of what she saw to Roger.
“I was always very reluctant about this idea of bringing Dominique back,” he was saying. “I went along with Hoffman only begrudgingly. But she had certain things on me, and so she made me do things. You know how she can be.”
“What did she make you do?”
“I had to kill those poor girls for their blood. I wasn’t happy about it, darling. Don’t think badly of me.”
“Audra . . . Rita . . . you killed them . . .”
“No, darling, just Audra’s friends. And then some tramp I picked up at a bar. It was Dominique who killed Audra. She was angry about her affair with David. That was how we learned that the blood is the life. Dominique tasted Audra’s blood, and we saw the effect it had on her. Ever since Variola had reclaimed her body from the sea and breathed some measure of life back into it, she’d been a mindless zombie. After she made a meal of Audra’s blood . . . well, some understanding returned to her eyes. Some intelligence flickered there. That’s why it was decided that we needed to find more blood for her.”
Liz glanced over at the door, careful that Roger did not notice. A small hand was coming around from the other side of the door
“And I didn’t kill Rita either,” Roger went on. “I don’t want you thinking I did.”
“Who did kill her then?”
Roger smirked. “You still fretting over David? Forget him, Liz. He’s a loser. How easily he was manipulated by all of us. Dominique had him under a spell for months, and during the time she’s been indisposed, Mrs. Hoffman took care of it.”
“You’re all mad. You’re all sick!”
“They are, darling. Not me. I got into this to be a successful art dealer, not a murderer. I refused to do any more of Hoffman’s dirty work after those first two girls, and only under great pressure did I agree to bring her poor Lana.” He smiled wistfully. “I didn’t even get to fuck her first. Oh, boy, when she found out I was a Huntington, she thought she’d hit the jackpot. I told her to meet me upstairs in that last room on the left. I wanted time for a little quickie with her before I slit her throat and drained her blood, but Hoffman was very insistent that Dominique was getting too difficult to control. Her body had grown stronger. She kept escaping from her room. We saw her that day, didn’t we, darling, in the sculpture garden? But her mind remained as weak as ever. She needed another transfusion. So . . .”
The hand grabbed on to the door and pushed it slowly, silently, into the room.
“I know I sound awful, darling,” Roger said. “But once we’re married, I won’t play around anymore. I promise.”
“Married.” Liz spit the word out like poison on her tongue.
But Roger’s eyes were far away and filled with madness. “Once Dominique promised she would marry me, too. She would divorce David and marry me. That was our plan. But no!” His face went dark. “How she taunted me! She knew I loved her! She knew that I wanted her to be with me forever. But still she taunted me with other men. She was always flirting. Always taking lovers . . .”
Liz could see the rage roiling in Roger’s eyes.
“David always got everything he wanted,” he seethed. “Everything! The best grades, the best positions on athletic teams, the leading parts in the school plays. I was always just in the background. All the teachers liked David and hated me. He even got the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife! But I wanted her! She and I could have been so powerful together.”
“Her coven made you rich,” Liz said calmly.
“I still have a deal with Papa Ghede,” Roger replied, his eyes twinkling.
“Variola always said that deals made with Papa Ghede for selfish reasons will backfire.”
Roger snorted. “Variola was a weak-minded fool! She never realized what greatness she could have achieved through her abilities.”
Behind them, the hand was followed by an arm, and then a bloated, twisted face. Liz saw it was Dominique.
She suppressed an urge to cry out as the once-beautiful woman slipped into the room. Dominique’s eyes were sparkling, but her face remained twisted and broken. She was not looking at Liz, however; her gaze was trained on Roger. Instinctively Liz sensed it was in her best interests not to warn Roger of Dominique’s presence. At this particular moment, who was to say who was Liz’s greater foe?
“We will destroy them,” Roger was telling her. “Come back with me now. They will all fall behind me when I give the word. Naomi, Karl, the Merriwells, the Claytons, Mrs. Delacorte . . . they are my friends, not hers. That’s why they let me go. They hate Hoffman, too. They will gather around us and we will destroy Hoffman once and for all.”
“And Dominique?” Liz asked, as the woman with the wild eyes slowly and silently made her way across the room. “What will you do about her?”
Roger laughed. “I killed her once before. I’ll kill her again.”
“You—?”
“That’s what Mrs. Hoffman had on me, darling.” He smiled almost comically. “You see, it was I who was on the boat with Dominique, not David.”
“But . . . the captain said he saw David . . .”
Roger gave her that dazzling grin of his. “We look an awful lot alike, my brother and I. You’ve said so yourself. Captain Hogarth saw me from up on the bridge, and just for a fleeting second. It was only natural he’d think I was David.” He laughed. “And convenient, too. Once this is all over, my love, we’ll pin Dominique’s death on David, too, when he’s tried for the murder of Rita.”
Behind him, Dominique suddenly revealed the knife she’d been concealing in the folds of her robe. Liz couldn’t muffle her horror any longer and let out a gasp. Roger turned around, but it was too late. Dominique lifted the knife over her head before bringing it down savagely, stabbing Roger in the back.
He let out a cry and staggered off to the side. Liz backed away from him, her hands covering her mouth, watching as one more unspeakable terror unfolded in front of her eyes. Dominique yanked the bloody knife out of Roger’s back. It made a horrible suction sound. Roger tried to speak, to say something to Liz, but he couldn’t form any words. A little sound burbled from his throat, and then he collapsed to the floor. Dominique, almost gleefully, leapt upon him. Her knife went in and out of him over and over again, blood spraying everywhere.
Liz turned. She knew she’d be the madwoman’s next target. The only choice left for her now was to jump.