December's Thorn Read online

  “I never expected this from you,” she said. “Not you. I know we deceived you. I know we broke your heart. I know you have a right to hate us. But to pretend you don’t even know me at all—I would not have thought you capable of that. Not the Fever Devilin I knew so long ago.”

  She turned oddly, a pirouette, a dead leaf in the bitter wind, a collapsing rag doll, and then flew down the porch steps and into the midnight yard.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, fading into the darkness. “And when I come back, it won’t be to reconcile. It won’t be to apologize. My return next time will be your tombstone. You should have listened to me. You should have heard what I had to say. Now, you’re dead—your life is done. Cold clay, Fever. That is your only future now. That is what I’ll bring the next time I come back: the frozen ground to dig your grave!”

  And she was gone into the night.

  I leapt through the doorway and bounded down the stairs into the snow and wind. I chased after shadows for what seemed an hour, but could not find her. Shivering and soaked, I gave up and retreated to my living room. I was standing over the fire, hands trembling, when I saw the flashing lights coming up the road toward my house.

  3

  To be sure, my life on Blue Mountain had always been strange. As the only child of carnival performers. I’d been on my own quite a bit. A freakish IQ and a morbid interest in ancient worlds had alienated me from most people my age. Aside from Skidmore Needle, who had become the town sheriff, and Lucinda Foxe, who had become my fiancée, I had no genuine relationships there, not even with the ghosts of my father and mother, who still wandered the house.

  I’d thought to escape, at age sixteen, to the university life. That had worked perfectly for a while: I became the head of my own folklore program at the institution from which I’d graduated. But times being what they were at the beginning of the 21st century, there was little undergraduate interest in the perfect construction of a ladder-back chair made with tools a thousand years old, or the flood mythologies of Seminole tribes in certain parts of a swamp.

  So, my program unceremoniously closed, I had little choice but to return to the place of my birth, an empty home on a cold mountain. I was welcomed back to the house, which had sat empty for several years, by a dead body on the front porch. I pulled into the yard to open the house, and there it was, mouth open, legs splayed, dressed in a dirty tan raincoat. It would only be the first of many such grim encounters on Blue Mountain.

  Luckily Skidmore, still a deputy then, had been there to steady me. Since then he had saved my life more than once, and I his.

  Unfortunately, on this particular evening so close to Christmas, he did not believe a word I was saying.

  He hadn’t bothered to dress in his police uniform. He’d pulled on a sweatshirt and hunting clothes. His hair was uncombed and his stubble was evident—a rarity in a man who sometimes shaved twice a day. He sat in the chair nearest to me while I stood over the fire, unable to get warm.

  We had been talking for nearly a half an hour when the headlights of another car pierced the snow-raked darkness, and a second car pulled onto my lawn.

  “That’s probably Lucinda,” I mumbled. “Wouldn’t you think?”

  Skidmore glared in silence while we listened to the car door slam, the single-syllable growl of complaint against the cold, and footsteps on the porch. The door opened very aggressively, and Lucinda Foxe burst into our world.

  She stood, shaking snow from her dark green cardigan and wiping her boots on the indoor mat. She shook her head and muttered. Her hair was wet and she had no makeup on her face. She was astonishingly beautiful, despite her obvious pique.

  At last she said, directly to me, “What the hell, Fever?”

  “That’s the third time she’s cursed tonight,” I said to Skidmore. “I’m glad you’re here. I may need police protection.”

  “Don’t look to me for help,” Skid said, holding up his hands. “I side with her.”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened, or do I have to ask the nice sheriff to shoot you in the foot?” she wanted to know.

  “I’ve just been telling Skidmore,” I began.

  “Start over,” she interrupted. “I want to hear the whole thing.”

  She glided toward the other chair across from the sofa and collapsed into it with such a combination of grace and disgust that I thought she might have practiced it at home a few times before coming over.

  “I fell asleep on the sofa,” I told them both, feeling I had said the words at least a hundred times, “there was a knock on the door. I answered it. A woman, a total stranger, came into my house, told me she was my wife, apologized for something but I don’t know what, then wanted Skidmore to kill her mother, then decided she would come back later to kill me—with potions. And then she vanished into the wintery midnight.”

  I sighed, realizing that my little speech sounded more like a dream than an actual event.

  “Could this be any sort of after-effect of the coma?” Skidmore asked Lucinda, as if I weren’t in the room.

  “Could be,” she said, a little more gently than she had spoken before.

  A year ago, I’d been shot by an intruder in my own home. I’d been in that coma in the hospital, where Lucinda was the head nurse, for three months. So December was shaping up to be something of an uncomfortable month for me in general.

  “Fever,” Lucinda said very softly, “is there any possibility that this could have been a bad dream? When you were in the hospital, you had lots of dreams that seemed real, remember?”

  “Yes,” I said, a little more impatiently than I wish I had, “I remember, but this was nothing like that. Every time I woke up from one of those dreams in the hospital, I always realized they were dreams. I’m awake now—or if I’m awake now, which I think I am, then what happened was real. It was as real as this is, anyway—this conversation I’m having with you. I mean, you didn’t hear her in my kitchen? She was the one who hung up the phone the first time!”

  “He’s still not awake,” Lucinda said to Skidmore.

  “He’s not awake?” Skid asked, leaning forward.

  “I’m awake,” I protested. “Damn. Come into the kitchen, I’ll show you the teacup she had in her hand!”

  “I’ve done some research,” Lucinda went on, ignoring me, “and I’ve talked with Dr. Nelson a number of times. Fever hasn’t really been completely right all this whole year. Dr. Nelson reminded me about something called a fugue state, where a person can move around and talk but they’re not completely aware of the real world. Sometimes it’s a result of a partial seizure. Sometimes it’s associated with trauma or even some generalized medical condition.”

  “What’s it called again?” Skid asked.

  “Fugue state,” I answered, increasingly irritated. “And it’s not what’s happening to me. I haven’t had a dissociative pathology or memory loss or a personality change. What I had was a strange woman in my house who wanted to kill me.”

  “I thought you said on the phone that she wanted to kill your mother,” Lucinda said calmly.

  “No,” I snapped, “she wanted to kill her mother. She wanted Skidmore to kill her mother.”

  “And then she wanted Skidmore to kill you?” Lucinda pressed.

  “No! Damn! She got upset with me when I told her that I didn’t know who she was, and she said that she would cook up potions to kill me and no one would ever know.”

  Skidmore and Lucinda stared silently. It seemed an evening for a lot of that. Skidmore shook his head.

  “But this woman vanished,” he began. “You chased after her, but she was gone.”

  I hung my head. “I realize how this all sounds.”

  Lucinda reached into one of the side pockets in her cardigan. “I brought you a little shot, sugar,” she began, “and I’ll stay here with you tonight.”

  I’m not certain why I reacted so badly, but I nearly jumped backward, and felt an instant panic.

  “I don’t want a s
edative,” I said sharply. “I wouldn’t mind if both of you stayed with me for the rest of the night, but I want to be wide awake.”

  Lucinda held the syringe in her hand, not moving. “You don’t think you need your sleep?” she asked. “You know you haven’t been sleeping well for a while.”

  “I’ve been sleeping just fine,” I assured her.

  But it wasn’t true. I’d had vicious bouts of insomnia since coming out of the coma. So much so that I’d fallen asleep on the sofa more times than I wanted to think about because I hated the idea of going to bed—to a sleepless, angst-ridden bed.

  “Fever.” That’s all Lucinda had to say. But in those two syllables were a soliloquy, a declaration of love and care, and a clear testament to her absolute conviction that I should take the shot she’d brought me.

  “I can barely stand to climb the stairs and face my bedroom,” I admitted. “What did Ahab say about sleep? ‘That bed is a coffin, and those are winding sheets. I do not sleep, I die.’”

  “What’s he talking about?” Skidmore whispered to Lucinda.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” she said.

  “Not in the novel, maybe,” I said in a misguided attempt to explain myself, “but it’s in the movie, that quote. With Gregory Peck.”

  Lucinda stood up. “I told you,” she said to Skidmore. “He’s not completely awake.”

  I took another step backward, away from her.

  “Look,” I said. “I do have significant anxieties— I mean, in general. I do have sleepless nights, and the coma was definitely a traumatic phenomenon in my life. But I’m not in a fugue state right now and I’m not dreaming, and I’m not out of my mind. I have to stay awake.”

  Skidmore stood, too. “Well,” he said, closing a small notepad that he’d been holding. “I have a description of the woman. She won’t be hard to spot. Lock all your doors. Lucinda’s going to stay with you. I’m going home to bed. Because I don’t have trouble sleeping—except for certain people calling me in the middle of the damn night.”

  He pocketed his pad, pulled his coat around him, and headed for the door.

  “You don’t think we should go look for her now?” I asked, a little weakly. “She’s out in this weather, not dressed for it, no car or shelter—shouldn’t we be trying to find her?”

  “Are you afraid of her,” he asked me without looking back, “or worried about her?”

  He pulled open the door.

  “Both,” I answered, as if that should have been obvious.

  “Good night, Fever,” he said, stepping onto the porch. “I’ll talk with you again in the morning.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  “Look,” Lucinda said in her best nurse’s voice, “I’m not going to wrestle with you to make you take this shot. But it’s the same sedative we’ve been giving you since you started this insomnia business. Couldn’t you use a good night’s sleep, for once, sweetheart? And I’ll be right here with you when you wake up in the morning.”

  I looked at the doorway where the strange woman had stood, and the spot on the sofa where she’d sat. I glanced into the kitchen at the dish drainer in the sink where her teacup was drying. Already I was forgetting exactly what she looked like, and the sound of her voice. Was it possible that she was, in fact, some sort of dream-state hallucination?

  Then my eyes met Lucinda’s.

  “Okay,” I said softly, rolling up my sleeve. “I guess I could use a good night’s sleep at that.”

  “There you go,” she said, moving my way, taking the cap off the syringe. “Everything looks better in the morning. It always does.”

  I don’t remember a thing that happened after that, not walking up the stairs, not getting into bed, not sleeping, not dreaming. Nothing. I slept like the dead.

  4

  The next day was blinding. Snow was everywhere outside. Someone had opened the bedroom window, the sun was pouring in, and my eyes were entirely unable to focus.

  I was alone, but I could hear voices downstairs. As my head began to clear and my eyes became accustomed to the searing light, I realized that someone had straightened up my room. Lucinda usually left things as they were when she stayed over, but apparently she had thought to wrest order from chaos—or at least to try.

  The chair beside the window, usually drowning in books and papers, was vacant. The shelves were tidied. The curtains were tied back, artfully, and the window shade was all the way up. That much light revealed that someone had swept and dusted my otherwise spare and simple quarters.

  None of this cleanliness was typical of Lucinda, or anyone I knew, so I listened a bit more attentively to the voices down the stairs. They were in the kitchen. Two people talking—possibly Skidmore and Lucinda, but they were keeping their voices down. This was also uncharacteristic—of either. The final disturbing factor was the clock on the bedside table. It seemed to say that it was two o’clock. The sun was obviously out, which would suggest that it was two o’clock in the afternoon, but that was clearly impossible. I had never slept past seven in the morning in my entire life.

  Then, slowly, I began to remember some of the events of the previous evening.

  I threw myself out from under the covers and found that I was still in my clothes, sans shoes.

  I had no recollection of coming up the stairs, getting into bed, but I did remember that Lucinda gave me a shot.

  I checked my arm. There was a red, swollen mound where I’d had a slight reaction to the injection. I felt very odd. Unaccustomed to what might have been twelve hours of continuous sleep, I couldn’t quite trust anything I saw. Everything looked strange.

  Then, unfortunately, of all things, I remembered a sensation from the previous evening: the fear that I might somehow have been shifted to an alternate reality, one wherein I was kempt, married, and accustomed to sleeping twelve hours in my clothes. That fear threatened to expand to terror, so I called out.

  “Hey!” I stood up. “What time is it really?”

  The voices downstairs stopped talking for a moment, then both people laughed.

  “So,” Lucinda called, “you’re awake.”

  Lucinda’s voice—thank God.

  “I’m awake,” I answered, slipping into my boots and moving unsteadily toward the door, “but I might need to be carried down the stairs. What was in that shot?”

  “You big baby,” she called out cheerfully. “I gave you a tiny little bit of zaleplon, that’s all.”

  I stumbled through the bedroom door and into the bathroom. Moments later I managed my way to the top of the stairs. I stared down at the living room, which had also been straightened up. Hand on the banister, I began to descend. The staircase looked a hundred yards long.

  “The stuff you gave me, what is it?” I mumbled loudly.

  “Lord.” She came through the double archway to the kitchen and stood at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s a non-benzodiazepine hypnotic. Makes you sleep.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, lumbering down the stairs. “It certainly does that. I don’t think I’ve slept for twelve hours straight in—ever.”

  “You needed it,” she said.

  “You cleaned up every room in the house?” I asked groggily.

  “Yes. Come on in the kitchen, I’ll set you up with some of that espresso you drink as if it’s water.” She disappeared back into the kitchen. “You should probably consider how that might affect your ability to sleep, all that espresso every day.”

  “It doesn’t affect me the way it does other people,” I growled.

  I eked my way unsteadily down the steps and achieved the more stable floor portion of the lower level of my home with some difficulty. I rounded the doorway into the kitchen and was about to hold forth on the virtues of espresso when I caught first sight of the person at my kitchen table. It stopped me in my tracks.

  “Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t, momentarily, think of anything else to say.

  The woman at the kitchen table would have taken anyone’s brea
th away. Her hair was completely white, a perfect match for the snow outside. Her face was astonishingly beautiful: clear dark eyes, vaguely olive skin, high cheekbones, soft features—the kind of face that always seems to be smiling in addition to whatever other expression it might be wearing.

  “This is Dr. Nelson,” Lucinda said, fussing with my espresso machine. “You have company. That’s why I cleaned up.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman at my kitchen table, and her gaze was equal to mine. She was dressed in a weathered, rust-colored jacket and sturdy khaki pants tucked into what looked like Russian military boots.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “God. Yes. Excuse me,” I stammered. “Hello. Sorry.”

  “You should sit down, sweetheart,” Lucinda told me gently.

  “Nurse Ratched, here, dosed me with horse tranquilizer last night,” I explained, wheeling my way to a chair at the kitchen table, “and I’m not entirely certain about— about anything, actually.”

  Lucinda turned around, cup of espresso in hand. “Probably the wrong way to start off with the head of psychiatric studies at a certain state institution.”

  I think I blinked. “What?”

  “I’m Ceridwen Nelson.” Her hand shot out. “I’m a psychiatrist, and I’m sort of in private practice now, actually. Lucinda called me.”

  I took her hand, absolutely perplexed. “I’m sorry, your name is…?”

  “Ceridwen,” she repeated, “with a hard C. It’s Welsh or Celtic.”

  “I know,” I assured her. “Ceridwen is a fertility goddess, a poetic muse, and even, sometimes, considered to be the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian cycle.”

  She tightened her grip on my hand reassuringly. “Even groggy from the Sonata, your command of your discipline is impressive. Lucinda told me that would be the case.”

  “Sonata?” I answered weakly, letting go of her hand—with a bit of reluctance.

  “That’s the company name for the hypnotic I gave you,” Lucinda said. Then she took a seat at the table and set my cup of espresso before me.

  I stared down at the cup for a second, uncertain how to proceed. Then it came to me: drink the espresso. Maybe a few gears in the broken engine of the brain will engage and something will make sense. So I drank it down in one gulp.