The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding, Page 3

  There’s this feeling you get when you know someone has their eyes on you, like they’re jabbing two needles into the base of your skull. I turned, glancing over my shoulder, only to see my aunt quickly look away, staring into her wineglass. Beside her, my uncle did the same, only he turned toward the portrait of Silence Redding on the wall and acted like he was trying to start a conversation with her.

  The creaking of the house’s old bones was drowned out by the high wail of the violinists (second cousins once removed) in the foyer. Each note seemed to slice against my skin. I started to slip out of the room, but there was a sudden, hard poke at my back—hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and back toward my great-aunt. Great-Uncle Phillip. His white fluffy mustache twitched, still wet from his cider. One matching overgrown eyebrow arched up as he jabbed two sharp knuckles toward me again and nodded toward his wife, who was so still so mesmerized by the ceiling she hadn’t noticed my escape.

  “—to be a true replica of Versailles, though, Mrs. Redding”—Mrs. Redding is what everyone called Grandmother—“…well, she would have to do what Lilly Belle—you know, from Southern Comfort? She would have to do what Lilly Belle did and install mirrors. Panels of them. I haven’t the slightest idea why she refuses to keep any.”

  Well, the reporter from New England Architecture had wondered the same thing. Dad had only shrugged and explained that the house had never had mirrors because of our town’s weird—excuse me, unique, as Grandmother insisted—superstition about ghosts and bad luck. Something like, if you didn’t cover your mirrors when the sun went down, it was inviting a whole host of evil to come in. Believe it or not, plenty of people in Redhood, the old families especially, still covered what few mirrors they had at night.

  As I glanced around for an exit strategy, my eyes found the stranger again.

  He crept along the back of the room, moving around the busts of dead poets and ancestors and shelves of old books. Whenever the trays of food skirted close enough to him, one bony hand would reach out and snatch a snack off it. Then he’d disappear into the shadows again. Poof.

  “Oh, Bertha, I wanted to thank you again for the work you did on our gazebo—” A second cousin caught my great-aunt’s elbow and turned her away from me. I didn’t miss my chance. I ducked my head and all but ran out of the room, dodging furniture, annoyed looks, and serving staff.

  Where was Prue? I’d lost track of her when we’d come in, Grandmother pulling her off to the side to brag to her sister about Prue’s latest achievement. Every now and then I’d think I’d see her, only to realize I was seeing Heart2Heart advertisements and framed magazine covers of her.

  I got no more than five feet into the hallway when my aunt caught the collar of my blazer and tugged me back into an awkward, rose-perfume-soaked hug. That was a first.

  “Now where are your…darling”—her mouth twisted as she choked out the word—“parents off to this time?”

  “China,” I said. “They’re setting up the charity’s office there.”

  “How positively…charming.”

  Don’t sprain your arm reaching for that compliment, I thought.

  “Doesn’t it bother you,” Aunt Claudia began, licking her fingers to smooth down the back of my hair, “that they’re spending all of your money on other children?”

  “I’m sure there are a hundred dictionaries in this house if you need to look up the word charity,” I muttered, pulling out of her reach. I’d had ten thousand variations of this conversation before. My parents gave most of their money away, which automatically labeled them as deranged to the rest of the family.

  “Yes, well, charity is a sickness not easily cured,” came Grandmother’s voice behind me, “but one day your father will see that. Oh—there you are, Prudence. Don’t you look precious.”

  I followed her gaze up, to where Prue had appeared at the top of the curved stairway’s second-floor landing. She had changed into a long black velvet dress with a lacy white collar and was totally aware of how stupid she looked. Her face matched the color of her hair.

  I tried to get her attention, but Grandmother clutched my arm and all but lifted me onto the first step. “Up you go, Prosperity. I’ve laid out a change of clothes for you too. And do wash your face, please.”

  For the first time in almost an hour, I finally squeezed out the words I wanted to say. “Are we going to Main Street together? The parade’s going to start soon.”

  “We’re having a family reunion of sorts first,” was her low reply. Her fingernails dug into my sleeve. “This is a very special Founder’s Day. Now, be a good boy and…”

  The young new maid, Mellie, appeared at Grandmother’s side, fiddling with the edge of her black uniform.

  “What is it?” Grandmother snapped.

  “Ma’am, it’s the phone again. Your son says it’s mighty urgent that he speak to one of the children—” The maid cut herself off when she saw me. The shade of white that washed over her face made her look half-dead with terror. Grandmother’s face hardened until she looked like one of the gargoyles on the Cottage’s roof.

  “Is that so?” she murmured through a tight-lipped smile. “Kindly inform him that we’re busy, won’t you?”

  It wasn’t a request, it was an order. One I was definitely going to ignore.

  The two of us took off at the same time. The maid headed back toward the kitchen, but I bolted up the stairs. I’d only have a second, maybe less—

  I threw the door to my granddad’s old study open and dove across his enormous dark wood desk for the old phone.

  I gulped down a deep breath when I heard, “—sorry, sir, she says they’re busy—”

  “Can you at least tell me why they aren’t answering their cell phones?” I had never heard my dad sound that way before. His voice was higher than normal, like he was barely keeping himself from yelling. I leaned back from the edge of the desk, patting around my pockets, only to remember I had left my phone in my schoolbag. There was a shuffling on the other end of the line, like he was about to hang up.

  “Dad—Dad?”

  “Prosper?”

  Mellie blew out a deep, shuddering breath. She knew, I guess, what Grandmother could do to any hope she’d have of working again in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, never mind on planet Earth.

  “Mellie, I won’t tell,” I swore. “Just let me talk to him, please.”

  The girl’s voice dropped to a low whisper. “But Mrs. Redding…”

  “I’ll handle her,” Dad said. “You won’t lose your job.”

  I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a rare gleam of silver in the dark office. A framed photo. In it, my own dad was proudly holding up his new diploma from Harvard. My aunts had hooked their arms through his. It was embarrassing, but just seeing Dad’s grinning face made me feel a little better.

  But there was something weird about the photo. Aunt Claudia had her other hand on another boy’s shoulder. This one stood off to the side of the group, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a Harvard cap pulled down over his head. He had been photographed from the side and his face was turned down, but it could have been…it could have been my uncle.

  The line clicked as Mellie hung up the phone in the kitchen. Before I could ask him what was going on, the words flew out of Dad’s mouth.

  “Prosper, listen to me—you have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now. Right now. I can’t believe she’d do this, that she’d be so—” The connection flickered. “Mom and I are trying to get home, but—”

  A milky-white light flooded the room as the door behind me was thrown open. I dropped the phone in shock, which gave Grannie Dearest an opening to scoop it up off the floor and slam it back down on the receiver.

  “Hey!” I protested. “I was talking to—”

  My grandmother stood staring at me for a moment, her chest heaving and her face flushed with rage. “You,” she began, hauling me out of the office with surprising force. “You have been the s
tone in my shoe since the day you were born.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re no diamond either, Grannie.”

  Dad read a mythology book to us once that had a story about a monster called Medusa, the one with a nest of snakes for hair that could turn any person into stone with one look. Well, she might have lacked the snakes, but the fury burning in my grandmother’s eyes turned my limbs into cement. I couldn’t even swallow.

  “I only hope it’s you,” she hissed, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and dragged me toward the stairs.

  Rayburn, the Cottage’s spidery butler, met us on the landing between the first and second floor with Prue. His cane stomped out an impatient beat on the rug, right by her foot. For a guy that personally raised three generations of Redding kids and saw—literally—hundreds of Reddings come and go, he had a surprising amount of hate for anyone under the age of forty.

  He had been opening the front door for so long that no one knew which came first, the house or Rayburn. He didn’t work in the Cottage—he haunted it.

  “Madam.” His voice was hoarse and crackled with age. “The others will meet us downstairs.”

  Prue, who had been watching the line of family members shove their way down the hall below, whirled around. “What’s going on?”

  Prosper, listen to me, Dad had said, you have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now.

  I could grab Prue and we could run. Sure, she was bigger than me, but I wouldn’t need to carry her. Everyone was heading toward the back of the Cottage, but we could head out the front door. It would be easy, but I needed to get her attention—

  The stairs behind me creaked as Great-Uncle Bartholomew and Great-Uncle Theodore came down behind us. Granddad’s brothers might have been in their sixties, but they were tall, with the huge shoulders of former football players. Bartholomew held out his arm to Prue, who—stupid, stupid, stupid!—took it without question, and began chattering with him as he led her down the stairs.

  I started down after her, my feet thundering down the first two steps. I tried to squeeze between them, stretching out my hand as far as I could to catch hers. But I was moving too fast, and my balance was all wrong. I gripped her fingers hard and yanked both of us back to keep from stumbling forward into Bartholomew. My vision flashed to black as we fell against the stairs in a tangled mess.

  “Sorry,” I gasped out. “Sorry, but, Prue—”

  She pushed me off her and stood, her face bright pink with anger. “What’s your deal? I don’t need you to hold my hand anymore—I don’t need your help. God, can you just grow up?”

  I took a step back, feeling the sting of her words right down to my guts, but she only glared and turned away. My whole body jerked as Great-Uncle Theodore wrapped one arm around my shoulders, squeezing me hard enough to make my spine crack. I sagged against him, looking at the family-crest pin he had on his ivory jacket instead of the back of Prue’s hair.

  Which was why I didn’t notice we were heading to the dungeon until we were already there.

  When I was little, I used to think the Cottage had its own secret voice. One that would slither up to you when the lamps were switched off and you only had a night-light to protect you from the darkness. It whispered about the people who had lived within its bones, died in its beds; it groaned under the weight of the centuries it saw. Come downstairs, it would hiss, come down, and down, and down, and down… Down the hidden servant passages, down past the darkened kitchen, down to the basement where things were left to be forgotten. Down to the heavy door that was locked every day, every second, always.

  To the dungeon.

  It was supposed to be a joke, but why did it have to stay locked all the time if it was just for storage? What did Grandmother put down there that she didn’t want the rest of us to see? In the long, long, long life of the Cottage, I wondered how many people had actually been down there, and how few had ever held its heavy iron key.

  Rayburn had a weird sixth sense about that locked door, and he had the totally terrifying habit of jumping out of the shadows whenever anyone got within breathing distance of it. And even if he wasn’t there, there were four—count ’em, four—steel locks on the door, each needing a different key. David liked to tell me about all the torture devices that were down there that Grandmother was only waiting to use on me. She’ll pop you into the armor that’s filled with spikes. She’ll see if you can lie down on the bed of nails without them sinking into your guts. She’ll strap you in and turn a wheel until your limbs are ripped off and blood is splattered across the walls—

  I really hated the Cottage. And I extra-hated David.

  Great-Uncle Bartholomew grunted as he shoved me through the door. I tried to catch the frame with my arms, but he was way bigger and way heavier, and I didn’t want my arms pulled out of my sockets. I might need them in the near future.

  The steps were uneven and slippery soft, like they’d been ground down by a steady stream of feet. But that didn’t make sense, did it? Unless—unless…this was part of the original foundation of the house. Back when it was growing from just a little seventeenth-century cottage to what it was now. The simple candle sconces on the wall seemed to back up that guess. No electricity. Or heat, apparently.

  The damp chill passed through me, icing my bones. As we reached the landing, voices rose from below, flickering in strength like the candles on the wall. My throat felt swollen with the smell of wax and dust and something else—something like rotten eggs—I was gulping down. My thoughts scattered through my mind like spiders, too quick to catch.

  But in the end, the dungeon was just an empty, windowless room with nothing more than a small table and fifty of my relatives. With so many people crammed down there, there was barely room for shadows, never mind me and Prue. I watched, my heart thumping painfully in my chest, as one of my great-uncles, the creepy one who never stopped smiling, helped her forward. He cleared a path through the tightly packed room. Great-Uncle Bartholomew nudged me forward until I was directly behind her. I tried to ignore the press of everyone’s eyes, the flicking of their fingers as they twisted away to avoid so much as brushing me.

  Get out, get out, I thought, I need to get out—

  A small, velvet-draped table had been positioned at the front of the room. I turned back toward the rest of the family, trying to read their faces. The warm orange glow of hundreds of candles caught on the white clothes around us. If I’d had the time to draw the scene, I would have sketched them in lightly, like ghosts floating at the edge of your vision.

  Prue elbowed me hard in the ribs to get my attention and pointed to the strange lump on the table in front of us. The silky black fabric could have been a spill of ink.

  Oh, crap, I thought, trying to take a step back. My family really is a cult.

  That guy with the website had been right.

  “Now,” Grandmother began. “Our family’s tradition has long held—”

  “Just get on with it!” Great-Uncle Bartholomew snarled behind her. “We all know why we’re here. There’s no sense in putting things off any longer.”

  “Perhaps you would like to hold your tongue while I cut it out for you?” she hissed. The raised blue veins on the back of Grandmother’s hands pulsed as she moved her fingers over the black cloth. “No? Then be silent.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Our family’s tradition has long held,” she began again, her voice colder than before, “that we would be called upon to do a great service to the world. This evening we take the first step toward doing just that.”

  Grandmother yanked the cloth off the table. I took a startled jump back, bringing Prue with me. I kind of expected whatever was under there to pop up and eat my face.

  But…it was only a book.

  A really, really old one, and much bigger than any I used in school. The brown leather cover was cracked and stained with age. At one point, it looked like there had been some kind of a lock on it, but that had been cut away. The stench of smoke ros
e from it, as if the pages breathed out a memory of fire.

  “Grandmother?” Prue couldn’t seem to decide where to look, and neither could the others. Great-Uncle Theodore was sweating behind me. I felt a drop fall on top of my head.

  Grandmother used both hands to carefully lift the front cover of the book and set it aside. The binding was coming apart. There were hundreds of heavy yellowed pages inside. Most of them were loose.

  “Prudence, child,” Grandmother said, “please read the first page.”

  My hand came up to tug at the collar of my shirt. The room had become sweltering. The longer I stood there, the faster my heart beat, until it was galloping.

  Prue leaned forward, so close to the page that her hair brushed against it. Her face twisted like she was upset. I stood on my toes to look over her shoulder—and just about fell over.

  I rubbed the sweat out of my eyes, then rubbed them again. The page, at first blink, was blank as a new sheet of paper. Now blots of crimson ink were rising to the surface of it like they were soaking up through hundreds of pages. Rivulets of the ink slid around like tiny snakes, twisting around each other. The stains squirmed and stretched, one end finding another as they formed cursive scrawl.

  Spirits of Wickedness, ye Devils of Night,

  Shall bear no Entry to this Book of Might.

  “But…” Prue began, looking up at our grandmother. “It doesn’t say anything. It’s blank.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, reaching over to turn the book toward me. “Look right here, it says—”

  There was a sharp pain in my chest, like someone had stabbed me straight through with a burning rod.

  A shrill scream, half pain, half fury, pierced my ears. I reached up to touch my throat, stunned. It hadn’t come from me; my lips hadn’t moved. The hurt in my chest changed. The air choked out of my throat. It felt like I was being ripped down the center, bones tossed to the relatives nearby, panting like dogs. I fell onto my knees hard, knocking my head against the edge of the table. The whole world jerked, rocking the Cottage around me. There was another scream, this one louder. I forced my eyes up.