“Oh, Jeremy, if only you had come to Scotland with me,” she uttered as she slipped into bed and drifted into an uneasy sleep.
* * *
A distant echo mingling with the waning cry of the wind startled Katherine out of a fitful slumber. Had someone called her name? She sat up to listen. Then it came again, a voice like her mother’s voice, soft and dreamy. Katherine rose to locate the source of the call and slowly opened her bedroom door. But it hadn’t come from the hallway. It seemed to come from outside, from the garden below her window. Donning her robe, she parted the drapes to look down on the garden. But only empty evening-tide greeted her. As she started to leave the window, a pale blue glow moved ever so slowly past the gazebo. It floated down the walk and into the fields.
“Momma?” she whispered, knowing as she did that it couldn’t possibly be her. Yet Katherine, in her sleepy state wasn’t thinking right. She only knew that she hadn’t been with her mother when she died nor had she attended the funeral. She was simply told that her mother had died and had been buried. Could they have lied to her? Could she have been alive all this time? The last time Katherine had seen her mother she was wearing a pale blue robe and standing in the doorway of the cottage waving goodbye.
With shaking hands, she lit a candle and inched out into the hallway with it. The draft pushed the flame flat until it was almost extinguished. Cupping her hand around the flame, she moved to May-Jewel’s door and tried the latch. But the door was locked, and she didn’t hear anything from within.
“Katherine.”
Startled, Katherine spun around. But not seeing anyone, she moved further down the corridor to the railing at the top of the stairs and peered over. The call seemed to come from the shaft of waning moonlight that pushed through the partially opened front door.
But Katherine didn’t see anyone by the door nor in the great hall beneath her. Cautiously she made her way down the stairs. A belch of cold air rushed through the chandelier causing the crystals to sound. Over the soft tinkling of the crystals, she again heard her name being called again.
“Katherine.”
It had come from outside the manor. Someone was calling her.
Now standing in the doorway, she strained to hear. This last time her name was called, it sounded like the maid’s voice. The idea that it could be Selina unsettled her. What did she want with her? Was she another one of Sir Robert’s lovers who had been hidden away like Katherine’s mother?
Curiosity normally had no part in Katherine’s guarded world. Hers was a world filled with squares, each square having its own purpose and that purpose had to be fulfilled before she would advance to the next, and so it went, on and on through the years, one sure and steady step after the other. Katherine’s neat and orderly existence had been played like the game children played on the sidewalks of the city, a configuration of squares to be hopped in and out of. It took great tenacity for her to learn to jump in and out of her squares without stepping on the lines, and one of those lines was curiosity. And yet…
“Katherine.”
Suddenly and unexplainably, ignoring the tightening in her stomach, Katherine moved through the door and down the steps of the manor. Following the direction of the call, she took the path that bisected the garden. She traveled around the gazebo and toward the cottage. The thin gray line of predawn pushed at the black horizon as she approached the weed filled yard of her childhood home. Shivering from the dampness and from the rising portent in her spirit, she stood as if awakened from a dream. How stupid of me to have come here, she thought. But as she turned to retrace her steps back to the manor, the call came again. This time she was sure it came from her childhood home.
The cottage was shrouded in the voice as her name was called. Katherine was unable to tell if it were coming from the inside or from the very fabric of the bungalow itself. Her heartbeat quickened. Terror hooded her mind and smothered her reasoning. But she moved closer. The cobwebbed door groaned open. Through no control of her own, Katherine was drawn into the rank darkness of the cottage. The floor moaned with each step that she took as she haltingly inched into the center of the room.
Suddenly from the fireplace there came a loud noise. She turned just as scores of black birds were belched from its opening. As they flew above her head and drove her to the floor, the candle fell from her hand. Diving and twisting in a voodooistic dance, their beaks and claws ripped through her gown and at her flesh. Her screams became muffled in the fury of their fluttering wings.
As quickly as the attack had begun, it ended. The feathered darkness squeezed through the open portal and disappeared
