Emma gasped as the cold rain hit her, and she was soaked to the skin before reaching the terrace steps. Tucking her chin to her chest, she fought her way across the lawn, blinded by the driving downpour and slipping on the sodden grass until they reached the relative sanctuary of the ruins, where the wind’s roar became a moaning chorus as it swirled and eddied through empty hearths and gaping doorways.
Trailing fingers along the rain-slicked walls, Emma sprinted down the grassy corridor until she reached the banquet room, where the constant strobe of lightning showed a scene of utter chaos. Stakes and leaves and flattened stalks littered the graveled path, and vines streamed from the arbor’s dome like pennants in the wind. Derek tried to rush ahead, tripped, and sprawled, but Emma hauled him to his feet, and together they staggered forward to the far end of the room and the corridor beyond.
They left the green door banging on its hinges as they stumbled down the chapel garden’s stairs. Waterfalls spilled from the raised beds’ low retaining walls, and the flagstone path was a mire of clinging mud. Emma longed to reach the stillness of the chapel, to slam the door on the storm and catch her breath, but although Derek strained against it, the chapel door refused to budge. Teeth chattering, Emma darted forward to add her weight to Derek’s, and the door slowly gave way, moving inward inch by inch, until the gap was wide enough for them to slip inside.
Emma paused to wipe her glasses, then gazed about in stark confusion. Peter’s orange emergency lantern lay on its side on the granite shelf, pointing toward the back door. The back door had been left wide open, and the force of the wind that ripped through the doorway had shoved the benches askew and held the front door shut against them. The old wheelbarrow had been wedged into the gaping doorway, and a rope stretched tautly from its wooden handles into the seething darkness.
“What the—” Derek turned to Emma, but she was already tugging on the rounded door, held fast once more by the roaring wind.
“Don’t touch the barrow until we’ve had a look outside!” she shouted. “We don’t know what that rope is holding!”
Derek seized a pitchfork and used it to lever the front door open. It banged shut again behind them as they raced up the stairs and out of the chapel garden. Together they ran along the garden wall, but when they swerved into the rocky meadow, the wind slammed into Emma and drove her to her knees.
“Go!” she screamed when Derek stopped to pull her up, and he barreled ahead, while she groped blindly for the wall on hands and knees, searingly aware of the long fall that lay only a few yards away.
The knuckles of her flailing left hand scraped rough stone and she struggled to her feet. Hugging the stone wall, she stumbled forward until she reached the corner, rounded it, and saw the faint pool of light outside the chapel’s rear wall, where the rope stretched, glistening, over the edge of the cliff and straight down into the devouring darkness. Derek was almost there, the rope was almost in his hand, when Peter’s lantern faded and winked out.
“No!” Derek’s anguished cry rang out above the roaring wind, and Emma froze, paralyzed by fear. Then, through her rain-blurred glasses, Emma saw the air begin to shimmer.
The glow was all around them. It came from nowhere and from everywhere and grew brighter by the minute, until the rain glittered bright as diamonds, bright as Peter’s tears, streaking downward like a million falling stars. Emma saw her bloodied knuckles, saw the blades of stunted grass, saw each rock and leaf and puddle as clearly as though it were midday.
Derek saw the rope. He lunged for it, and Emma leapt to help him as he dug his heels into the rocky ground, hauling fiercely, hand over hand, his muscles straining against his rain-drenched shirt. The rope bit into Emma’s palms and fell in coils behind her, but she looked only at the point where it slithered slowly over the cliff’s edge.
All at once, a hand came into view, white-knuckled, clinging to the rope. Then Peter’s face appeared, and as his shoulders rose into the light, Emma saw that he was tied fast to the limp and pallid form of Mattie.
Derek eased them onto solid ground, then flicked his penknife open and cut the rope. As the light began to fade, he hugged his son, kicked the wheelbarrow aside, and shoved the boy toward Emma, who swept him into the safety of the chapel, where she held him at arm’s length, scarcely believing that he was alive and in one piece.
Peter wobbled slightly on his feet, blinked dazedly, then stiffened. His mouth fell open and he tried to raise his arm to point, but his eyes rolled back in his head and he tumbled, fainting, into Emma’s arms. Emma glanced over her shoulder as Derek stumbled in, carrying Mattie, and in the last fluorescence of the fading light, she thought she saw the lady in the window, clad in white.
22
The moment Derek closed the back door, Grayson, Gash, and Newland came barreling into the chapel. They’d been struggling with the front door for some time, their efforts hampered by flapping slickers and the blankets they were carrying.