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“Please. Please leave me alone.”
“She is in… grave danger. Help her. Help…” Mr. Bennington said, his voice lingering for a few seconds on the wind, though he had gone.
In the dark of the Bennington basement, Adelaide Proctor worked quickly. There was no time to waste. Her hands, bent by arthritis, were not as nimble as they once were. It was harder to wield the knife, but she managed a cut, hissing as the blood pooled in her palm. She let the cut drip into the bowl. Next she mixed in her herbs. She wrinkled her nose. There was a smell, sickly sweet. Not the herbs. More like a rotted bouquet left in stagnant water. Her weak heart thundered in her chest. She started her incantation, a spell for protection from evil. The smell grew stronger. Addie could not finish her spell for gagging. The lights cut out suddenly, plunging the basement into darkness. In the dark was a voice she had not heard in many years.
“Adelaide…”
A cry clawed at Addie’s throat, but she didn’t dare utter it. Still. Remain perfectly still. Whatever you do, don’t look. Shafts of street light shone through the high basement windows. Behind her lay the elevator doors. Could she make it in time? And if she did, how long before salvation rattled down to her?
Addie gripped the knife in her shaking hand. “What a friend we have in Je… sus…” she sang in a voice fading to a whisper, her mouth too dry to furnish more sound as she moved carefully in the dark, sprinkling salt behind her as she did. He was somewhere in the room with her. “All our sins and griefs to bear…”
The elevator. She was close. Blood trickled down her arm and stained the fine lace cuffs of her nightgown. The salt stung in the wound. She’d made it to the elevator. With a shaking hand, she pressed the button and watched the golden arrow slowly ticking off the floors. Four. Three.
“Oh, please, please!” she whispered. Blood whooshed in Addie’s ears. She was faint with fear. She would not turn around. “Wh-what a f-f-friend…”
The elevator had stopped at one.
“Adelaide…”
Miss Addie gasped. She tried to keep singing. “Our s-sins and g-griefs to bear…”
“You’ve freed me at last.”
She pushed the button over and over.
“And now I’ve come for you, as I promised I would.”
Through the frayed gray curtain of her hair, Addie stole a glance over her shoulder.
Elijah.
Once, he had been the handsomest boy she’d ever known, with hair that turned buttery gold in summer. The thing shuffling toward her had the mummified skin of the grave. It peeled back from his mouth; his yellowed teeth appeared monstrous. Two maggots wriggled from his ears and fell to the basement floor with sickening plops. That once-lustrous hair was nothing more than brittle straw sticking out in clumps. She could smell rot on his breath as he crept closer.
“You made me.”
Adelaide Proctor backed against the wall. “No,” she whispered. Elijah’s feet scraped across the floor.
“Did you forget your promise, my love?”
His voice was cruel, taunting. Not at all as she had remembered.
“Every debt shall be paid now, for the King of Crows brings us through at last. Soon this world will belong to him. And you and I, Adelaide, will be together, forever and always.…”
“No!” Addie screamed, frantic as a child.
The elevator doors opened. With a great cry, Adelaide Proctor fell against Theta. “Go, quickly! Oh, please! Don’t let him get me!”
“Who?” Theta asked, her eyes searching the empty basement. “Miss Addie, there’s nothing there.”
Miss Addie lifted her head from Theta’s side. The lights had come back up. Her dead lover was nowhere to be seen.
But I saw him. He came back.
As the doors slowly closed, Adelaide spied a frayed break in the salt circle mere inches from where she’d stood moments earlier. Something had fallen there: the blackened petals of dead daisies.
A gift to her from Elijah.
A warning.
