"Flushed another one, did you?"

The old woman's voice came from very close, but her eyes were still closed and her lips hadn't moved.

Geraldine peeked out from behind the door, gripping it in her bare hands, her fingers almost entirely black, smiling with her tiny teeth.

On the edge of delirium, Sheila turned from the woman at the door to her doppelganger in the bed.

"You're just like her, aren't you?" Geraldine said at the door. "Your mother's daughter. She would have flushed you too, if dear old Daddy hadn't set her straight."

Sheila couldn't hold it back any longer. She screamed.

As the woman in the door and her twin on the bed began to laugh in tandem, Sheila turned and bolted down the hall, through the sitting room where a third Geraldine sat casually sipping tea, and out the front door, running from the cottage in the woods as fast as her legs would carry her.

15

A Trail of Blood

IT WAS A somber Wednesday morning as everyone from the Savage house attended the funeral of Ruby St. John.

Martin sat beside his mother in the small church, shifting uncomfortably in the black suit he'd worn to prom, let out a size wider by Norma. Sheila wore one of his mother's black dresses that probably hadn't seen the light of day since the mid-1940s, with frills on the shoulders and sleeves, a pair of black stockings and Oxfords belonging to Norma, two sizes too big. All she missed to complete the outfit was a pair of black silk gloves.

He wasn't concerned about his ill-fitting suit or the fact that a woman he'd been intimate with was dressed in his mother's clothes. Three people had died within three days, each at least tangentially connected to him. A solipsistic part of him wondered if the child would have survived if he hadn't gone to Sinjin's that night.

Death and disaster followed him like a shadow. A trail of blood, just like Barclay had promised. Could it all be a coincidence? Or had he been touched by something beyond the realm of the known world? His encounter with the deer that night, followed by what he'd found in the old book of fairy tales, the death, the running, not to mention the frightening, almost definitely hallucinated encounters with some monstrous nightmare version of mother... all of it had taken a toll on his already troubled mind.

Sheila tried multiple times to get him to open up since the tragedy. But he couldn't speak to her about Nadine or Tish or Ruby St. John without bringing up the rest. He'd seen enough of the White Place to know he didn't want to end up there himself. And mental illness ran in families.

So he said nothing.

Sheila had her own struggle to deal with, wondering whether or not she should tell Martin what happened at Geraldine's house. Or what she thought had happened. Because she had to have hallucinated it. Helen's tea had a psychedelic effect on her. What would she tell him? That an innocent old woman drugged her and read her mind? If she told him that, she'd have to tell him about the baby booty and the fetus she thought she'd flushed down the toilet. She definitely wasn't ready to—breech—broach that subject, especially with Martin.