Chapter 7
Gasping, choking, shaking her head to find breath, Catharine came back to consciousness with a convulsive sob that echoed in reverberating waves against the high wooden beams of the attic ceiling. She was lying on the hard floor. Her nude body, curled into a fetal position, was soaked with sweat-as wet as if she had been drowning. As her eyes fluttered open, the first thing she saw was her own pale, shuddering reflection in the mirror.
She lay still for a long time, watching herself come slowly back to reality. The luminous soft round curves of her legs and hips and shoulders against the cold dark floor, the flowing hair gone wild and quivering around her paler face. Her mouth half open, gasping for air. Tremors rippled her skin, up and down the length of her body from her shadowed eyelids to her cold, clenched toes.
Afraid to confront her own eyes, she stared into the mirror at the taut white bones of her knees, her shivering thigh raised to catch an errant ray of sunlight along its long smooth line that rose from the waist and dipped again into the deep hidden valley below her belly. She watched as her natural color began to come back and glow again. The trembling white apparition slowly changed again into her familiar beloved body. Her eyes opened wider, turned at last to the mirror to see themselves. A sigh of relief burst from her lips, and the warm vapor clouded the glass below her wideopen dark violet eyes. She was herself again, and she was alone.
She would not think about what had happened. Not yet. It was too real.
The grandfather clock, behind her, began to gird itself inwardly to strike the hour. When she was little, she used to say that the clock was clearing its throat before speaking. The sound gave her comfort now. And then it chimed. One. Only one. She was supposed to meet Richard at one o'clock.
Catharine raised her eyes from her own image to the other things around her which were reflected in the mirror. All was as it should be. The noon sun high over the house lit her attic with gentle, indirect beams of light that came through the treetops to bathe the huge room with familiarity. There was her daddy's chair, so close she could touch it. Her own white four-poster bed, her wardrobe and her dressing table stood backed up against her daddy's big desk and his leather sofa. Her gaze moved down again, to herself. Beautiful. Naked. Awake. Herself. Catharine.
She rose, finally, and slipped into her robe. Her fingers still trembled, a little, as she pulled at the zipper, but finally she saw herself dressed again, demurely tying her hair back with a ribbon. Her eyes never left the mirror. Her face seemed to her only slightly flushed now, and she drew on a mask of calm to hide the terror still menacing just below the surface of her reflection.
"Good heavens, you gave me a start!" Lisa cried as they almost collided in the hall at the bottom of the attic stairs. "I thought you'd gone to lunch!"
"I'm very late. I need a bath. I ... I've been looking for something. I'm ... all dusty."
Lisa looked at her closely. "What do you do up there in that attic with all those old things all the time? You shouldn't be spending so much time up there, I'm sure your husband wouldn't approve!"
"Oh, Lisa!" Catharine wanted to throw herself in the arms of her old nurse, but she felt unclean, unattractive. "I'm not going up there again, ever. Anyway, I'm leaving in the next day or two for Europe. Oh, did the travel agency call?"
Lisa shook her head. She stared at Catharine curiously, and Catharine turned away from her. "I'll draw my own bath," she said over her shoulder. "Would you ask Abel to have the car in an hour?"
"He's up fixing the drain again."
"Well, it can wait, tell him when he gets down." Catharine went into her bathroom and started to run the bath water. Something at the window caught her eye, and she looked up quickly, but it was probably only a tree branch brushing against the opaque glass. Her nerves were razor-thin. The bath would soothe her, calm her, and help her to forget the nightmare.
Settled comfortably in his secret niche outside the upper story, Abel opened his fly and began to massage himself happily, prepared to dream with Miss Catharine in her bath, but he was disappointed. She washed herself briskly and was wrapped in her huge white towel again before he'd even gotten hard. He almost cried, but folded his big cock back inside his pants, zipped up and started down the ladder to go get the car ready for her.
They pulled up alongside the construction site where Richard was working. He was bent over a drawing board table with two other men, explaining something on a blueprint spread out before them.
One of his subordinates noticed the Lincoln as it pulled up to the curb, and he nudged Richard. She saw the annoyance in his eyes, even from the distance where she sat. She began to tremble again, in the back of the car. Abel had the door open, and after a moment, Catharine stepped out into the glaring sun. Richard strode toward her.
"Lunch was about two hours ago," he said tersely.
Catharine couldn't speak. She buried her head into his leather-jacketed shoulder. He was surprised and embarrassed.
"Hey ... hey ... what's the matter?"
"Richard, something terrible ... something is terribly wrong...."
He put his arms around her. Abel looked straight ahead, toward the deep foundation hole that the bulldozers were excavating.
Catharine slumped against her husband like a child badly in need of comforting. The public exhibition definitely embarrassed Richard, and he pulled her into the car. She threw her arms around his broad shoulders and hugged him tightly.
"Catharine ... honey, look, I know you've been up set lately. That's why we decided to take a second honeymoon, isn't it? Only a few days..."
"Richard," she said, lifting her head from the hollow of his neck to look at him, "I ... I want to leave sooner...."
"Yes, darling," he said, puzzled. "You're going on ahead and I'll meet you, as we planned."
"No, I must leave now, right away! I've already called the agency. They're trying to get me on a flight for the day after tomorrow. Is that all right?"
"Sure, honey, if you want to," he said. "I don't understand, but if you're in a hurry to get away, there's nothing to keep you here. It'll be good for you to have more time on your own. Okay?"
She nodded, trying to smile.
"Did you eat anything today?"
She shook her head.
"Come on, I'll take you to lunch."
"But ... but you already had your lunch break." She sniffled but did not allow tears to come. She knew her brave little smile would please him, and it did. He pulled her back against him briefly, and she hugged him tightly again, to absorb his strength. He leaned out of the open car door to shout to his workmen.
"I'll be back in about an hour. I want that yardage marked off by then!" He nodded to Abel, who shut the door and went around to the driver's seat.
Over lunch, holding Catharine's hand, Richard said, "Of course I want you to go. You're not going to worry about what those silly gossips say, are you? You know I trust you. And you trust me, I hope."
She smiled at him. "Of course I do."
"You can do all the shopping you like, in Paris, and I'll be there before you know it. We'll both be the better for it, you'll see."
"And Jennifer ... I think she's annoyed at me, but she'll be all right, won't she? I've never left her before."
"I'll pay a lot of attention to her. I'll give her extra time, extra love while you're gone. I promise you. Don't worry about a thing," Richard said. He raised her slim hand to his lips and kissed each tapered finger, as he used to a long time ago.
"And we'll meet at the hotel, as soon as you can get there."
"Yes."
"I know I'm being silly. I can't ... I can't explain why I feel this way, but I know I have to get out of that house right away. Silly, isn't it, when I've never wanted to leave before, even for our honeymoon . . , remember?"
"Sometimes I think I married you too young. You weren't really ready to leave your daddy yet. It was so soon after your mother ... oh, well, that's all in the past now. We'll have a real honeymoon this time. No breaking it off to hurry home to your daddy."
"No ... I'll never go back up there."
The odd words hung in the air between them for a moment, and then the waitress brought their coffee and they sipped in silence, still holding hands.
"What I meant is..." she began. "What I meant..."
" ... is that you're grown-up now," he finished for her. "It's time to leave the nest. I understand. You'll have a whole new perspective when we get back."
"Yes," she murmured, trying not to think of her morning's nightmare.
"You look frightened, suddenly," Richard said with concern.
"Frightened? What would I be frightened of?" she said, and launched quickly into a list of things that she wanted to do in Europe-whatever tourist things popped into her head, nothing she really cared about one way or another.
By the time she got home, the horror had almost left her, lulled into dormant lurking, easy to ignore. The bright daylight, the normalcy of the house, Richard's reassuring attentions and the anticipation of all the things she had to do made Catharine feel quite herself again. Jennifer ran to meet the car as it turned into the driveway.
"Lisa's got your suitcases outl Can I help you pack, Mommy? Can I?"
"Yes, darling, of course you may."
They went upstairs together. Catharine gripped Jennifer's thin little shoulders as they walked, and her own trembling finally stopped completely. She was happy, after all, with a daughter as beautiful as herself and a husband who loved her above all else, and a fine home and all the things life had always promised for her. Everybody had fears, imaginary or real, and hers were silly, silly, silly. Was she to be run out of her own house by her own memories? It must be true, she needed a change, that was all. She hugged Jennifer to her and they entered the bright yellow bedroom together, laughing and excited.
Several unopened boxes lay on the bed next to the open suitcases. Catharine rang for Lisa and then began to open them. She held up her new dresses, one by one, and Jennifer admired them with tomboy whistles and girlish sighs.
"Yes, Miss Catharine?"
"Lisa, do you think we can start right in on these things? I may be leaving on Friday."
"Okay."
Catharine stepped out of her dress and hung it in the closet. "Tell you what, Jennifer," she said over her shoulder. "Why don't you start putting the lingerie in that small bag?"
"Oh, goodie." Jennifer opened her mother's lingerie drawers and ran her little fingers over the fine silks and satins, the lovely lacy panties and bras and slips and the softly rolled, flesh-colored stockings.
Catharine slipped one of her new dresses over her head. Lisa knelt down on her knees to begin pinning the hem.
Jennifer held up a pair of black panties. "Mother, how come you can see right through these?"
"That's just the way they're made, Jennifer."
"That's super. Can I have some like this?"
"No, sweetheart."
"Why not? You wear them."
"Put them in the suitcase, Jennifer."
"Will you please stand still, Miss Catharine," Lisa said, her disapproving mouth full of pins.
Jennifer folded the panties and placed them neatly in the bottom of the scented case. She unrolled a pair of sheer stockings and held them against her own straight, little-girl legs. The suggestive curve of the stockings and their length trailing on the carpet only pointed out how long Jennifer had yet to wait before she would be ready for such things.
The skirt was pinned, and Catharine turned around before the mirror to check it. Lisa and Jennifer both watched her silently. She could see the approval she needed on both their faces. "Pretty, isn't it?" she asked, and her child and her maid both nodded solemn agreement.
She took off the dress and stepped into a long flowing skirt. "Too wide, needs to be taken in just a bit, right here," she said. Lisa's hands brushed the bare skin at Catharine's waist as she tucked the material back for a deeper pleat. Catharine's mind flashed back to her dream/orgy. Lisa and Abel ... crouched under the horrible feast, doing things to people ... she remembered the look of Lisa's gaping snatch, running with juices from Abel's exertions and her own....
Catharine's skin suddenly began to perspire, and her face reddened.
Lisa looked up. "Why, Miss Catharine, you're sweating! Are you all right?"
Catharine stared at herself in the mirror, her eyes deliberately avoiding Lisa's and Jennifer's questioning stares. "I'm fine," she said. "Hurry up, Lisa. I want these things ready by tomorrow. I can't go without them."
Lisa grumbled, reinserted the wicked-looking pins in her mouth and furiously resumed work. Jennifer turned back to the drawer and its delicious grown-up promises.
"Oh, and Lisa ... don't let me forget ... I mean, would you run up to the attic when you're finished here and bring down my silver mirror and hairbrush-the set my daddy gave me. I just can't travel without them."
"That door's kept locked, Miss Catharine."
"The key is in the enameled egg on my writing table."
"I'll get it, Mother," Jennifer said. She ran from the dresser to the writing table. "No!"
But Catharine was too late to stop her. Jennifer had the key and was skipping down the hall toward the attic. Catharine started after her, but Lisa gave the new skirt a hard tug.
"Will you stay still!" she muttered, almost swallowing a pin. Catharine settled back, but her thoughts were with her daughter and an indefinable wave of sadness swept through her. She closed her eyes against the sight of herself as she stood obediently still.
Jennifer raced the steps three at a time, and fumbled impatiently at the forbidden door. It swung open into a enchanted half-lit world where all her Mommy's and Grandpapa's things were jumbled together.
It was like entering a place that a spell had been cast onto, like one of the stories in her favorite book.
She tiptoed soundlessly to the corner where her mother's old dressing table stood next to the oval mirror she dimly remembered. She opened the door of the wardrobe that stood next to her mother's white four-poster bed. Her hands ran lovingly over the costumes, the exotic colors and fabrics. In the drawers alongside, all the fine white underwear, more her size than her mother's. She held up delicate lace panties, and then a camisole meant more for budding breasts than full ones. like her own. She ran her fingers lightly over all the neatly folded things, and turned around again and again to gaze in wonder at all the promises of this place.
The great big oval mirror, she remembered that. She used to stare into it when she was very little, when it still stood in her mother's room. She would see a child and dream about the woman she would become someday.
Now as she looked at the mirror, it seemed to radiate with a glow all its own despite the sun that dipped obliquely into the room. Transfixed, Jennifer moved to stand directly in front of it. She slid her fingertips over the glass, and moved back a step to sit in the throne-like chair that was drawn up to face the oval.
Next to her, a table held a profusion of bottles and decanters and vials and pots and jars and her mother's silver hand mirror and matching hairbrush. Jennifer was so excited that she touched each thing in turn. She picked up the hairbrush and lifted it to her own golden head. Slowly, she began to stroke her long, straight, shining hair. She watched herself in the mirror as she brushed. She smiled and pouted, held her chin this way and that, brushing all the while with luxurious care, staring in fixed hypnotic admiration of what she saw.
Downstairs, Catharine stared at herself in the modern beveled four-way mirror. She was extremely agitated.
"I wonder what's keeping that child?" she said angrily. "She should be down here by now."
Lisa, pinning the third garment, nodded her head wearily.
"I told her ... I didn't want her to go up there."
Lisa's head was bowed, and her voice sounded gruff and strange through the battery of sharp pins. "I'll get her," she said. But it was not Lisa's voice, it was the voice of the demon on the other side of the mirror in Catharine's nightmare.
Catharine stared at her old nurse's reflection. Lisa's face was turned downward toward the skirt hem, but her hands-her hands! They were the green scaly devil hands that had pulled her down. The fingers were covered with jewels that flashed blindingly as they worked around the fabric of the skirt and brushed against Catharine's leg. She pulled away, wondering if she were going to faint.
At Catharine's sudden movement, Lisa looked up, startled. Her face was worried, tired, familiar. They stared at each other in the mirror's reflecting glass.
Behind them, the bedroom door opened and Jennifer stood there with the hairbrush set in her hands.
"I got your things, Mother. I saw all-"
"Jennifer, I don't want you up there ever again!" Catharine's anger covered a swarm of other emotions that buzzed and fluttered to get out.
"But Mommy..."
"You heard me, Jennifer. Now, please, leave me alone. You, too, Lisa."
"Miss Catharine, I'll never finish..."
"Don't worry about it!"
Jennifer opened the door slowly, her eyes narrow with disappointment. Lisa took up the clothes with a loud "harumph" to indicate her annoyance, and left the room. Jennifer stood there, watching Catharine as she slumped into a chair.
"Mother ... are you all right?"
"Yes ... I only ... I need ... I'm sorry I yelled at you, darling. Forgive me."
Jennifer's eyes widened again, innocent and instantly forgiving. She smiled at her mother and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.
I think I am going mad, Catharine said quite reasonably to herself. What shall I do?
Her head whirled. She had seen it, she had. It was not a dream, not a nightmare. She knew now that she had not been asleep in the attic that morning, she had known it all along. It was real. Whatever was happening to her was either real or ... help me, she mouthed silently, to no one. Help me.
Her arm brushed the cold plastic of the telephone and she stared at it for a moment. Then she picked up the receiver and began to dial. She dialed automatically, Richard's number.
"Good afternoon, is Mr. Burgess in? Oh, hello, Sally. Yes, just fine, thank you. Yes, she's fine, too. Oh ... I forgot. Of course, he's out at the construction site. How silly of me. No, there's no message. It's ... it's not important. Thank you, Sally. Goodbye..."
She let the receiver fall back into its cradle, and her slim fingers slid of their own accord down to the top drawer. They closed around the small vial of capsules. Her trembling hands almost dropped the little bottle as she fumbled to open it, but finally she got one out. She poured a glass of water from the thermos pitcher and gulped down the capsule. She slumped back against the chair, waiting for the pill to work. Her eyes fell on the photograph of herself and her daddy.
He was a huge, overwhelmingly handsome man, with the kind of enormous confidence and ready charm that drew people to him, what they called "charisma" these days. He wore a business suit in the picture. He had his arm around his daughter. She was wearing the same white party dress that now hung upstairs in the attic.
In the photograph, the thirteen-year-old girl was looking up adoringly at her daddy. But his dancing eyes looked straight ahead, staring out at the camera, at her-the woman she was now. Was his glance still proud, did he still adore what he saw in her? She leaned forward to peer closely into her daddy's eyes, trying as she always did to read the true expression in his eyes.
"Daddy," she whispered. "I was your own and only princess, wasn't I?" She closed her eyes and let the gold-framed picture fall into her lap.
There were voices, a young girl's and an older man's voices, in the room with her. She couldn't make out what they were saying. She opened her eyes wide, and saw no one. But she could still hear them, farther away now. The young girl was laughing and teasing, the man spoke in loving, strong monosyllables. But she couldn't hear the words.
Catharine was confused for a moment. Was it the capsule, making her dream again? But no, the voices were real. Richard must be home. He and Jennifer were talking, that was it. They must be just outside, in the hall. With a relieved laugh, Catharine jumped up from the chair and ran to her bedroom door.
"Richard?" she called as she opened it.
There was no one in the hall. The voices were louder now, though still indistinguishable.
"Richard, is that you? Jennifer?" Catharine moved toward Jennifer's room, but the young girl's laughter and the deeper murmurs of the man seemed to be coming from the opposite end of the long hall. Confused, she turned around and called again. Only silence answered her, and then she heard them once more.
The voices were coming from the attic.
"Richard! Jennifer! Are you up there?" Catharine started up the attic stairs. She heard them more clearly now. Why were they up there? She had just now expressly forbidden Jennifer to go up there. But, of course, if her daddy ... that is, if Richard told Jennifer it was all right, she would do it ... but why would he go up there? Richard never went up into the attic, never. The voices grew louder, and then stopped as Catharine flung open the attic door.
It wasn't Richard and it wasn't Jennifer. It wasn't even the attic room now. She had opened the door onto her own girlhood bedroom, just the way it used to be. And the little girl was herself. And the man was her daddy. They were oblivious of her presence in the doorway.
Paralyzed, unable to move or speak, she watched them begin the night that had changed her whole life forever.