the vanity. Choosing a shade of lavender that reminded her of the fuchsias that grew in the pots hanging from her mother’s front porch — her favorite flowers in the whole world — she carefully applied the color to her eyelids.
Next she chose a pot of rouge that would add color to her cheeks, and tried to put it on just the way Cynthia always had, accentuating her cheekbones.
She brightened her lips with a brilliant scarlet that was Cynthia’s favorite, then carefully outlined them.
Just like Cynthia.
In the top right-hand drawer she found the eyelashes Cynthia had loved to collect, and chose a pair of extra long ones that she’d been dying to try on ever since Cynthia showed them to her. Lifting them from their plastic case, she painstakingly pressed them to her eyelids, then applied a coat of mascara to make them look even thicker.
“Pretty,” she whispered, staring at the face in the mirror. “I’m just as pretty as you are!” Her jaw tightened and her eyes narrowed as she heard her sister’s peal of laughter. “Don’t laugh,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare laugh at me!”
The laughter rang out again, and Joan’s anger grew. All her life — for as long as she could remember — she’d had to live with Cynthia’s laughter. But not now. Not anymore. Opening the bottom drawer of Cynthia’s vanity, she took out the gloves she’d taken from her mother a few days ago, the gloves her mother could never wear again, the gloves whose leather would never again scar her face. She pulled them on slowly, stretching them to fit over her larger hands, her thicker fingers. She gazed once more at the face in the mirror.
She saw nothing of the grotesque gargoyle that stared back at her, its eyes painted a hideous purple, its cheeks clumsily smudged with bright red, its lips an open wound the color of blood.
Instead she saw a face that was radiant with youth, and even more beautiful than Cynthia’s had ever been. She looked as if she were ready for a formal dance, complete with perfect white gloves that came to her wrists.
Only one thing was missing — she hadn’t yet put on her perfume. A moment later her fingers closed on the bottle of Nightshade. She shook it, then lifted the stopper from the vial’s neck. As the room filled with the heavy, musky scent — the sensuous aroma that had always been Cynthia’s favorite — Joan dabbed fluid on her neck. The heavy fragrance hanging around her like a cloud, she rose from the vanity and left the room, feeling a tingling sense of eagerness, as if some beau — someone who truly loved her — might be waiting for her downstairs.
When she came out on the landing, she looked down for the man who should be waiting for her, smiling at her, extending his hand toward her.
But there was no man.
There was no one.
There was only Cynthia.
Cynthia, and her terrible, mocking, taunting, cruel laughter.
As it pealed in Joan’s ears, slashing at her spirit, tearing at her soul, she flinched. Then, with decades of suppressed rage boiling inside her, she started down the stairs.
* * *
WHAT LITTLE HOPE Kelly Conroe had been able to cling to was quickly fading. Though she could barely feel her hands or feet, it felt as if someone were slowly twisting off her arms and legs, ripping her limbs from her shoulders and hips. Though she’d managed to scrape the tape from her mouth, it had done nothing more than allow her to breathe more easily, for her throat and mouth were so parched with thirst that she could barely manage to speak, let alone scream. Not that she believed anyone would hear her. Not even Mrs. Moore, who had stopped muttering and hadn’t answered at all when she had finally rid herself of the gag and spoken to the old woman. Kelly had given up imagining what might lie beyond the blackness, given up wondering how she might escape. She was going to die, and even that didn’t really frighten her anymore, for at least it would be an escape from the pain that gripped her body.
Suddenly, a shaft of light appeared from above, and Kelly instinctively reacted like a creature of the dark, trying to scuttle out of the light, to escape from it back into the safety of the darkness. But then her eyes began to adjust to the glare.
The chamber in which she’d been imprisoned was no more than a dozen feet square and eight feet high, and looked exactly as she’d imagined it would — the floor packed earth, the walls rough-hewn wood. Then Kelly caught sight of Emily Moore and her stomach contracted into a convulsive retching. Mrs. Moore lay curled against one of the walls, her back toward Kelly. The old woman’s wrists were bound just as hers had been, but instead of hands, there were hideous stumps of putrefying flesh where the hands should have been. A pool of muck lay around Emily Moore’s lifeless body, and as Kelly realized that it could only be the old woman’s congealed blood, her belly heaved again, and her throat and mouth burned with the acid her stomach ejected.
A sound jerked her attention away from the corpse of Matt’s grandmother, and she saw that a ladder had been lowered through the hole in the ceiling through which the light still glowed.
But a moment later, seeing a figure come down the ladder, her brief moment of hope was extinguished. Then the figure was looming above her, and even though the face was shrouded in shadow, she could see that it was covered with grotesque makeup, and contorted with fury.
The figure spoke, and Kelly knew who it was.
“How do you like it?” Joan hissed. She drew her foot back and kicked Kelly. “How do you like being locked up in the dark?” She kicked again, and as the shoe struck Kelly’s ribs, the girl screamed with agony and attempted to scramble away. But Joan followed her, hissing down at her. “Now you know how it felt! Now you know how I felt when Mother locked me in the cedar chest! And now you’re going to know how it felt when she hit me! See how you like it, Cynthia! See how you like it!” As Kelly cowered in abject terror, Joan raised her hand, and as it hovered in the glow of the light spilling in through the hole in the ceiling, Kelly saw that Joan Hapgood was wearing some kind of glove.
A pale glove that almost looked like —
The hand descended, smashing against Kelly’s face. She screamed and again tried to writhe away, but the hand rose again, and this time, as the light illuminated it, she saw that it wasn’t a glove at all.
It was the skin of Emily Moore’s hand, stretched tight over Joan’s own, the old woman’s cracked and yellowed nails looking like claws.
A second later Kelly felt the nails dig into her cheek, and she screamed from the burning pain of the scratches.
“See how you like it,” Joan hissed again and again as she lashed out at Kelly. “See how you like what Mother did to me. What you let her do to me! See how much of it you can stand!” Joan’s kick sank deep into Kelly’s gut, and more blows rained down, pounding at her until her face was bleeding and she could feel the bruises swelling.
Barely conscious, she only dimly realized that tape was again being pressed across her mouth. I’m going to die, Kelly thought. I’m going to die, and nobody’s ever going to find me…
CHAPTER 24
ON ANY OTHER day, Becky Adams would have gone directly from her final period geometry class to the room in the basement where Mr. Addington taught photography and the darkroom was located. There, she would have either checked out a camera to take pictures for either the school newspaper or the yearbook, or spent an hour or two in the darkroom.
“I don’t understand it,” her father had said when she decided to sign up for Mr. Addington’s advanced class this year after taking a summer school course from him. “Why would a pretty girl like you want to hide behind a camera or in a darkroom?” Though she hadn’t even tried to answer his question, Becky knew exactly why she liked photography: Until now, she’d never felt like she was a genuine part of the school. Everybody else — everybody
