Then it was no longer Press laboring over me, and I felt a sharp pain deep inside. The man wore the same mask, but the hand that gripped my shoulder so violently felt icy and thin. Thinner than that of any other human on earth. Below the mask, the face was mottled and scarred. The lips were nothing but two faded, cracked lines of gray flesh.
Behind the mask, the eyeholes were empty. There was no life there, no humanity. There was nothing. I opened my mouth and screamed.
I retreated inside myself as deeply as I could in that lifetime of minutes. Far, far back to a time that was made up mostly of stories I told myself about my mother. I was in her bedroom, lying on her bed, playing with the cat that had been hers when she married my father. What was the name? The name? The sounds, the pain were bleeding through and I tried to remember the cat. Fredo? Frederick? No, it was Alfredo. Creamy white with azure marble eyes and a tail nearly as long as my arm. My mother kneeling near the bed, petting the cat, talking to it, telling it to be gentle with me. And another day, the cat had scratched me, and I heard my father’s voice, loud, as he pitched it across the room, angry. No, not that day. I needed another day to block out the sounds and the hideous smell of the grave.
So much pain! Those eyes, the empty eyes stared back at me, even when my eyelids were closed. I would see them forever. I tried to think of the back yard, playing in the grass, waiting for my mother, the sun on my face, the rough surface of the patio bricks beneath my small hands. Looking toward the driveway and the garage. The garage door was open. No!
There was no safe place for me. No escape from the thing that had been Press ill-using my body. Digging into my shoulder, splitting open the inside of me as though he would stab me until I bled.
I opened my eyes once again.
The thing’s mouth was slack beneath the mask, its putrid breath a fog between us in the frigid room, and I finally recognized it.
My tongue worked inside my mouth, dry and thick. I thought of water. Clear water.
My voice came, but it was only a whisper.
“Olivia. Please, Olivia.”
The creature didn’t seem to hear when the house groaned again. (I knew what it was. Who it was. I had seen him/it before, hadn’t I? He was worse now. More decayed, barely more than articulated bones hung with rotted flesh. He was no longer human, if he had ever been.)
My shoulder ached where he gripped me and my insides felt as though they were on fire.
Then came the scent of roses. Olivia.
I had never had a truly murderous thought until that moment. It was a thought wrapped in the heavy, languid scent of early June roses, the bower of white and red and yellow of Olivia’s garden. With the scent, I felt the blood flowing back into my limbs, and my revulsion for the creature panting above me grew, and I stopped being afraid.
At the edges of my vision, I saw climbing rose vines chasing from the pedestal where I lay. They ran over the carpets, blooming, blooming, blooming, their petals a violent white against their thick green leaves and snaking vines. They ran to the corners, crowding, fighting to cover the walls, the windows, the floors. They were my hope: both innocence and death. I knew they meant death as well as salvation. Finally the room was engulfed, the scent overpowering. It was only then that I realized that the vines were coming from my own hands—a strange and terrifying gift.
As the roses grew, the demon above me flickered and faded away and there was only Press. The grimace on his face, though, was nearly as hideous as the creature’s. Perhaps it had been Press all along, and in my fear I had hallucinated Randolph/the creature.
If God is truly merciful, He will someday let me forget the moment I chose to kill my husband. To punish him for letting our daughter die, and for every act of cruelty he’d committed since Olivia had died. With my blood freed from whatever numbing drug that Jack had used, I could lift my hands, and they were no longer my hands, but leafy vines studded with thorns. While my husband stared, horrified, into my eyes, I raised my hands to his powerful neck and pressed them against his skin. At that moment there was mercy, for I felt nothing as I did it—neither the piercing of the thorns nor the pain of killing someone I loved. As he screamed, the light in the eyes behind the mask flared, then dimmed. Blood erupted from him, raining down on me.
I might have dropped my hands at that, but I found myself filled with a sense of something—someone—who was not me. Neither was it Olivia or Eva. Something to do with the ballroom, the hundreds of images of Japanese women. No. Just one woman, over and over. And the strange, sharp scent of chrysanthemums. Why chrysanthemums? There were cherry blossoms on the ballroom walls. Whoever it was overwhelmed me with their rage, and that rage flew from me, propelling Press across the big room and crushing his body high against the wall of thorn-covered vines.
He fell.
As I watched, the vines covering the room melted away like snow under the noon sun. Press lay slumped on the floor, unmoving.
Chapter 43