Now Callie saw Marta as a young woman arguing with Rose.
“Why did you tell me that?” Rose demanded. “You accuse them of unspeakable things.”
“You need to know what they are doing in your house. For the sake of the child.”
“You mean what you are doing!”
Marta stared at her.
“They told me. It was you who called yourself Goddess. You who first brought men to them.”
“No, I swear! I never…” Marta insisted.
“Get out of my sight,” Rose said.
Strike.
Marta holding Leah’s hand, guiding her through a series of dark enclosures, then a long dark tunnel to the spa. “Are you sure Finn said to meet him here?” Marta turned. Leah saw the flash of a blade.
A slash; blood everywhere. Marta pushed Leah’s lifeless body into the sea well.
Strike.
Glint of a blade. Three final slashes. The crevasse and the bloody, still-costumed bodies below.
Strike.
Marta looked around to make sure no one saw her entering the Left Hand Path. She unwrapped a cloth and handed Susan’s white hair and a patch of skin to the old witch.
The witch looked at the hair, then the skin. She looked at Marta. “What have you done?”
“Nothing,” Marta said, but the witch knew better.
The witch took a step backward, away from the trophies.
“I’ve given you what you demanded and more,” Marta said. “Now give him to me.”
“I cannot.”
“Yes, you can.”
“You must leave this place. Or be discovered.” The witch stared at Marta, seeing all that she’d done. “The older one sees what you’ve become.”
“I’ve become only what he’s forced me to become,” Marta said. “Now give him to me as you promised. Or I will confess that you helped me. Because you wanted these.” She pointed to the trophies.
“I cannot,” the old witch said.
“What?”
“He will marry the one who is with his child.”
“I’ve taken care of her. He will not marry her.”
“No,” the old witch said, looking shocked as she scried and envisioned carnage. “She lives.”
“Impossible.” Marta shook her head.
“You have killed the wrong rivals.”
Strike.
The music of the lash became another kind of music then, the sound of waves beating on the ledge below. Marta stood on the cliffs at Hammond Castle looking out at the searchlights, watching as they pulled her father’s lifeless body out of the water. The Whitings were there as well, not with Marta and her mother, but standing on the opposite side of the cliff: young Finn standing with his mother and father, his arm around a young and pregnant Emily, a large wedding ring on her finger.
Finn’s eyes met Marta’s across the divide. Then he looked away.
As she watched her husband’s lifeless body being dragged from the water, Marta’s mother began to keen, an otherworldly sound that echoed across the cliffs and down to the water’s edge. She pointed a finger at the Whitings and, in a voice not her own, intoned: “God will give you blood to drink!”
Callie gasped, choking on seawater that tasted like human blood, the curse of Sarah Good echoing in her ears. The music was unbearably loud now, not music anymore but pure noise. Callie tried to summon the calming notes of the solfeggio scale that she had heard in Matera, but the music was bound, just as Dagda’s harp had once been.
Callie was floating in a viscous pool of warm seawater and human blood somewhere between life and death. She could feel her mother and the other Goddesses, who she now knew had ended up in the sea well with Leah, but when she reached for them, Callie grasped only bones. Then, from her mother, she heard one tone, lower and under the noise: “Ut.” Just the first note of the ancient scale, but it was there.
The sound started softly, mournful at first, as if it contained every drop of sorrow that had ever existed in the world. She opened her mouth to join the tone, letting it echo through her, building the vibration. Time shifted and stretched. And in these eternal moments, as she came face-to-face with Marta, she saw the others who had died in the wake of this great sin that had been kept alive through the generations. Time stretched to encompass them all, then vanished completely, leaving them trapped in the abyss: accused and accusers together. Floating in a liquid that was more blood than seawater now, the blood of the living and the blood of their ancestors. The harp began to play.
And Callie could see that the abyss, the nothingness that she had been faced with, was not nothing but everything: every possibility that had ever existed in the world and every choice made. She felt Marta’s pain as if it were her own. And in that moment Rose’s last words came back to her: Sometimes the only healing is death.
The sorrow Marta felt, the anger that had consumed her, now turned to something else, something Callie had heard only once before. It was far louder this time, its sound pitching higher and wilder as it circled, swirled, and shrieked, pulling them both inside its vortex of fury.
It was the lightning strike that finally freed the trapped and much changed goddess. In a stunning act of self-sacrifice from which recovery was not possible, the oak gave up its own life to save the banshee.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
Moving his hands along the wood, through cobwebs, Rafferty searched for an opening. He knocked on the sides of the coffin, hearing a hollow thump at the far corner. Running his hands upward in the darkness, he located a latch, and, as he unhooked it, the bottom of the coffin swung open into another, slightly larger one.
He moved into the second coffin and realized it was a closet. Beyond it was another, and, past that, yet another. The closets were empty, just wide enough to stand in, and linked one to another, bottom to corner, forming a chain of tiny upright rooms. Stepping sideways through the openings, he moved forward. Each room was slightly larger than the last until he found himself on the backside of a real closet, something heavy blocking its opening.
He threw his full weight against it, forcing the door to yield, and found himself standing amid a pile of papers and books that had spilled from the bookcase propped against the outside of the door he’d just forced. He recognized where he was from the strong smell of port that had permeated the walls over the last century. He was inside the speakeasy.
He unlocked the door to the hallway, and, as it opened, the sound rushed at him like a hurricane siren, driving Rafferty to his knees. It felt as if all the rage he had ever experienced was contained in the sound, every affront, every inhumanity. He pressed his hands over his ears as the shriek shattered all the wine bottles in the racks. Then it stopped, taking with it all possible sound and sucking the world into a silence so pervasive that Rafferty was momentarily uncertain he had survived the banshee’s rage.