Page 66 of The Cruel Dark

“Millie,” he huffed. “Get out of here.”

Another gunshot, close enough to send earth up like a bomb had detonated, but no bullet hit us. I looked up to find Rodney, his face purple, deformed with swelling, and his nose turned crooked on his face. He looked like the fiend he was, and he held a revolver in his left hand. When he spoke, the sound was mulled, slurred.

“She can’t leave, can she? Too drugged up.” He spat blood. “But this is perfect because now you can watch her die and then you can fucking bleed out here on the ground you claim to own. Two birds with one stone. I’ll tell everyone she went berserk and killed you then shot herself. Isn’t that a perfect story, Millie? Especially after what your father did to your poor mother. It’s just all too believable.”

Before he could raise the gun, I used the energy built from the final burst of rage Callum’s pain had inspired in me, and I lunged at his arm, catching his wrist in my hands and biting until I felt the bone crush, his blood filling my mouth in a horrible iron spurt. He bellowed, dropping the weapon, but I was within his grasp now, and he wasn’t going to give up. He took hold of me, and though I struggled, I was no match for him in my current state. He wrestled me in several swinging, dreadful lurches to the edge of the ravine, holding me near the edge to face my death. I stared down into the water crashing over the rocks a full story below us. I knew what that water tasted like, what it felt like in my nose and lungs, how it stung my eyes and pulled me under, and I was afraid.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Hughes,” Rodney said.

A third shot rang through the air, and the groundskeeper gasped, like someone had pinched him, his grip easing. He looked down, and my eyes followed to the wound in his side. He released me to press his hands over the hole as if it would make a difference. I turned my head, finding Felicity, standing with her feet planted wide, both arms still locked straight before her, the revolver shaking in her hands. Her face was no better than her brothers, bloodied and bruised, and full of heartache.

“Felicity?” Rodney asked, confused and betrayed.

I rose to my knees and with a throaty cry, full of all my loathing, I shoved my palms into Rodney’s ribs, the way he’d shoved his into mine two years ago at this same horrible gulch. Time slowed as he flailed his arms wide, trying to stay balanced, to keep his footing on the slick, muddy ledge. At last, the momentum of his upper body carried his feet along, and he slipped headfirst down, crashing against the rocks before sliding into the water, which took him under as though reclaiming something it had lost.

I fell onto my hands, crawling, making my slow way back to Callum. I thought as I went that maybe Rodney had been wrong about how much datura he’d given me. The world was shrinking, my vision cloudy, numbness weeping out into my limbs. Felicity had sunk to the ground and was silent, cradling the gun in her hand like a dead bird. I could hear yelling not too far away, so many voices rising over the rain, which had eased to a drizzle. I crumpled on top of Callum’s body, resting my head beneath his chin. His breath came slower now, in shallow, struggling gasps. His skin was icy, and I willed my fate to match his. If he couldn’t leave this forest with his life, then neither would I.

“I’m Millicent Hughes.” I whispered. “I’m your wife.”

Though his voice was weak, fading, he responded.

“Yes, my love,” he said. “You are.”

Epilogue

Willowfield bloomed into a haven of green and every other color the eye could fathom. The roses grew high, unpruned and unattended, the broom blossomed yellow, and cherry trees pink, carpeting the lanes with their petals. The kelpie pond became a home to a family of ducks, the chicks fluffy and mischievous, unimpressed with the stone monster in their midst. They swam around its flank, nipping at each other’s tails and chasing unsuspecting water bugs.

I sat on a bench in the center of the labyrinth, watching a caterpillar worm its way toward a mushroom in the fairy ring where a haze of chickweed had bloomed. I breathed in every smell, every wonderful scent of spring, and closed my eyes.

Callum had begun searching for me as soon as they’d heard my cry for help at the cellar door, the same time Dr. Hannigan called for the police from a phone that did indeed exist in the parlor I’d never entered. By the time Callum had been shot and Rodney had fallen to his death, the police were already looking for us, headed in the direction of the gunshots. For the second time, I woke up in a hospital bed after being nearly murdered by the same man. The odds of my survival were not lost on me. Callum’s wound had been significant, but thankfully closer to his shoulder than his heart.

Moved by our story, the nurses had granted me permission to spend the first several days of my own recovery lying in his hospital bed as he slept. When he awoke, we said very little, and merely basked in the unlikely third chance we’d been given. When he tried to speak to me about all that had happened, I told him I needed time and he acquiesced.

I returned to Willowfield ahead of him by several weeks, taking to the room I’d inhabited while I was Millicent Foxboro, not ready to face the ones we’d shared. At first Ms. Dillard was the only person I would see, a woman I’d missed so much without ever knowing it. She’d been the entire reason I’d even come to Willowfield that fateful summer when Ms. Reeves waylaid me at the train station and demanded I stay with her and start a new life. By then, her cousin, Ms. Hellen Dillard, had already invited her to visit the estate and I was brought along. In the weeks and months and years that followed, Ms. Dillard became a dear friend and a great confidante with many nights spent playing cards and laughing too loudly into the early mornings. She comforted me when Ms. Reeves passed at seventy-seven, two weeks after the wedding, and she’d been the first to warn me away from Willowfield when things became particularly bad.

“You’re too bright a light to belong in a house like this, Millicent. Callum should sell the estate to the university, and you should both find a nice home in town with fewer dark corners and ancient memories.”

I’d thought her silly then.

When I inquired about her frigid way with me upon my return, she confessed that she hadn’t trusted herself not to dissolve or embrace me in a way that might agitate my healing mind. It was better, she said, to stay away. Callum had tried a similar method, steering clear of me to the best of his ability for as long as he could, all the while knowing he wouldn’t be able to keep a professional distance forever. And he hadn’t, much against the wishes of Dr. Hannigan, who’d come across me in Boston by accident. Having recognized me immediately and finding that I didn’t know him, he’d organized the entire ruse, telling Callum to bring me back to the house and surround me with the people and things I would be familiar with in hopes it would bring me around. He gave explicit instructions for everyone to let me move at my own pace.

I grappled with my anger over these secrets, despite their good intentions, and confessed to Dr. Hannigan when he came to check on me that I didn’t know if I would ever conquer it.

“Perhaps you won’t, my girl,” Dr. Hannigan said, as tender as he’d always been with me since the first day we’d met at Willowfield’s famous summer fete. “I think all of us who have had deep hurts in our life never escape the anger it inspires. It simply melds into the people we become, and sometimes takes the shape of something new and unexpected, like courage.”

He predicted it would take a month for the poison to leave my system completely. It had been building up in me so long that the effects were lingering. For the first many days, while Callum remained at the hospital, I still saw my own ghost running through the halls, but she no longer clawed and crawled her way. She was as free as I was and didn’t bother me. The hallucinations of my mother’s voice were taking longer to fade, but I subscribed to a hope that over time even those echoes would be too quiet to mind.

The Terrances had dropped in to visit me for a short while, phoning first to ask if I was well enough. With tears in their eyes they embraced me, Lottie reminding Burt to handle me gently as I was still recovering, but in truth, Lottie’s hug had been the tightest. While Mr. Terrance took to the business of monitoring the gardens, making notes for Callum as he was indisposed, Mrs. Terrance had fussed over me for several hours, helping me order new clothes for the spring, as well as new perfumes and makeup at the company discount.

The police had come and gone, having uncovered the basics of the wild story that unfolded at Willowfield, ever more dazed and surprised at the turns. At the violent behest of her brother, Felicity had slowly poisoned me with datura leaves mixed with the powdered sugar she’d dusted on Ms. Dillard’s sweets. The tea had been just that. Tea. A special blend Dr. Hannigan had made for Callum to give to me to help me sleep. It was chamomile, jasmine, and strawberry leaf. That was all. Felicity had adamantly maintained that she’d never wanted to hurt me, that she’d done everything she could to frighten me away with talk of ghosts, of Callum being dangerous, anything to have me leaving on my own so that Rodney couldn’t harm me further.

She was currently on trial for attempted murder, but at my request, Callum acquired her a fine attorney, and Dr. Hannigan gave professional testimony that she’d been driven by abuse. She was expected to be given a light sentence at a women’s center in Pennsylvania, likely free in a few years with a trade to help her by. Though I hoped to never lay eyes on her again, I wished her the healing I myself had found and a life free of her own darkness.

Margaret had finally come clean regarding her affair with Rodney, and his threats to reveal them if she didn’t participate in my downfall by exacerbating my fears with talks of demons. She claimed she never knew he was trying to kill me, only that he wanted me to leave Willowfield. Callum’s contempt and her seemingly honest concern for me had driven a spiteful return at the dinner party, where she tried again to frighten me away with lies, but discovered enough empathy in herself last minute to be concerned she’d reveal too much and harm me. She was never arrested, but Jack filed for divorce, and that was the best we would ever get.

As for Rodney, Felicity testified that he’d acquired the datura from a patch he cultivated in his cottage, drying and crushing the leaves to a fine powder that he mixed with the sugar. He’d left his sister to carry out his dirty work, except on the night I’d discovered the nursery. Tired of waiting for me to expire, he’d dumped a handful of the poison into my teacup himself and followed Felicity to my room. When I later emerged, ill and hallucinating, they trailed me through the shadows, tracking my delirious wanderings to make sure the drug was doing its job. As an extra act of cruelty, Rodney had taken the unexpected opportunity to lock me in the nursery wardrobe, hoping the shock would kill me. But he was the one who was dead. Dead as a doornail and without any doubt. His body had washed up not much farther down the gorge, with a gunshot wound in his gut, a fractured skull, and several broken bones in his face.

Though my memories of Willowfield had returned, they had come back as fuzzy as a dream. When I’d first arrived, Callum’s parents had recently passed, and he was grieving in his own way, immersing himself in work and trying to maintain the estate and the perfumery while also teaching at the small private college in town. When he could no longer do all three, he was granted an early sabbatical to write his book, and figure out his next steps. I’d discovered some notes of his, forgotten on a garden bench, and returned them with questions. In six months’ time, we would be married. Following my believed death, Callum withdrew from his tenure track at the college and closed his books, opening them again only for the scheme that would bring me back.

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