by Sharmon Gazaway
He strides in and a shiver runs down my tightly laced back. Framed in the parlor’s gaslight, he is not tall; too stocky to be elegant. He takes the liberty of pinching and sniffing the cedar garland draping the archway. He surveys the room with a glance that annoyingly conveys ownership, and fondles a red satin sash tied about his waist.
Clearly, he’s been here before. I know this man—somehow.
The room hums with our guests’ hushed conversation around the crystal punch bowl, their heads bent in some bit of gossip.
I rise from the divan, and my brother joins me.
I touch my pearl choker, my breath constricted. “Giles, who is that man?”
“Who do you mean?” He gazes about the room, eyes blank.
“Him. The coarse one.”
He smiles patiently. “Come, Sister. Let’s sit by that lovely fire. I’m quite chilled.”
Giles coughs, and eases a finger between his cravat and ashen throat, exposing an ugly bruise.
“Alice, you’ve gone quite pale,” he says, brows pinched together.
“I—I’m fine.” But the room seems to lurch, the chandelier’s gas flames mere shadows of themselves.
The stranger looks up sharply at the large portrait of Giles and I above the mantel. His face is filled with …gloating?
As he strides toward us, I raise my chin, square my shoulders. Yet he brushes past us as if we don’t exist, the bay rum scent of his hair tonic sickeningly familiar.
“My dear new friends,” he says, “raise a glass to the new owner of Brantley Hall. You are very welcome. Enjoy the cheer of the season and many happy returns.” He lifts his glass high, and tips it ever so slightly toward our portrait.
New owner? Not only is he coarse, but presumptuous and rude. As if we’d ever part with Brantley.
The trussed and starched crowd raise their cups, few sip.
“Such poor taste,” whispers a tall whiskered man.
“You’d think he’d at least remove the portrait,” his young wife murmurs.
The coarse man wraps the red satin sash round his hand absently, like a talisman, oblivious to the gossip.
“They never found him, you know,” says the wife’s friend. “They searched and searched. The man is still at large.”
Glancing at our portrait, the husband says, “Such a pity! They were so young, so full of promise.”
“A bitter shame. Strangled in their beds while they slept, up those very stairs.” The wife’s friend nods toward the great hall. “First, the brother. Then the sister—they say she put up quite a struggle.”
My ears ring so, I can’t hear the rest. A cold shiver takes me.
Giles takes my elbow and leads me to the blazing yule log. “Let’s warm ourselves, Sister.”
I stretch out trembling hands, feel no warmth from the flames. I unclasp the pearl choker, and clutch it in my fist. A fist with five broken nails. And yet the ache round my throat is relentless.
SHARMON GAZAWAY’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Forge Literary Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Enchanted Conversation, New Myths, Metaphorosis, Breath and Shadow, and elsewhere in speculative and literary publications. You can also find her work in the anthology, Love Letters to Poe Volume 1: A Toast to Edgar Allan Poe, and in Rhonda Parrish’s anthology, Dark Waters. Sharmon writes from the deep south of the US and lives beside an antebellum cemetery haunted by the jungle-wild cries of pileated woodpeckers.