John Saul - Nightshade

Then she felt the woman’s hands clutching at her hair, pulling her head up.

“Do you understand?” Cynthia screamed. “You can’t have him!” She slammed Becky’s head onto the floor, then raised it. “I won’t let you have him!”

Again she slammed Becky’s face into the carpet, and a howl of pain and terror erupted from the girl’s throat.

“No one can have him!”

She smashed Becky’s head against the floor again.

“He’s mine… he’ll always be mine… I’ll never let anyone take him away again.”

When Cynthia’s fury was finally spent, Becky Adams lay still on the carpet.

HALF CARRYING, HALF dragging Becky Adams, Cynthia made her way down the stairs into the basement. She didn’t like the basement — it was far too dark and dirty for her tastes — but it didn’t hold the terror for her that it held for Joan. But Joan had always been a fraidy-cat, screaming the moment she’d first been put in the cedar chest in the basement of the house on Burlington Avenue all those years ago. Cynthia had almost felt sorry for her the first time their mother did it, but she knew that if she did anything — even said anything — she would be the one her mother locked up.

It had actually happened once, when she was very young. She couldn’t even remember anymore what her infraction had been, but remembered that after her mother was finished slapping her — hard — she was taken down to the basement and put in the cedar chest.

Then the lid was closed.

Cynthia had been terrified, not only of the dark, but of the awful feeling that the box might actually crush her.

But she hadn’t let herself scream.

She hadn’t even let herself move. Instead, she’d forced herself to lie perfectly still and close her eyes and pretend she wasn’t in the box at all. And she made up her mind that no matter what she had to do, she would never let her mother slap her again.

She would never let herself be put in the box again.

And she would get even.

Some day — some way — she would make her mother feel the pain and fear she herself had felt that day.

From then on, Cynthia said whatever she had to say, did whatever she had to do, to keep her mother from punishing her.

She didn’t let herself get slapped.

She didn’t let herself get put back in the cedar chest.

For a while it had been hard — she had to be so careful about what she did that most of the time she just didn’t do anything at all — but after Joan was born, it got a lot easier. As soon as Joan was old enough to crawl, Cynthia began blaming things on her; she was already a good enough liar that her mother always believed her. From then on, it was Joan who took the punishment for whatever Cynthia did — and screamed through every minute of it.

Now, as Cynthia dragged Becky across the floor to the trapdoor that was the only entrance to the old root cellar, she wondered what would have happened if Joan had summoned up the courage to come down here — or, even worse, if Joan had managed to regain control before she had finally become strong enough to take over completely.

Maybe Joan would have been happy, seeing what she’d done to their mother. But probably not; for some reason — some reason that she had never been able to understand — Joan kept loving their mother. It never seemed to matter how cruel the old woman was, Joan always managed to make excuses for her.

Weak. That’s what Joan had always been — just plain weak!

Heaving the trapdoor open, Cynthia peered down into the black pit below. Her nostrils filled with the putrid odor of rotting flesh mixed with urine and feces, but she paid no attention to the vile stench as she pushed Becky through the opening, barely waiting for the girl’s body to drop to the dirt floor before closing the trapdoor and returning to the bright rooms upstairs.

Climbing to the second floor, she went to the guest room to clean up the mess Joan had made. Most of the clothes would be all right — she could find a seamstress to fix the damage, and after they were cleaned and pressed, they would be almost as good as new. But as she tried to put the pictures back together — the wonderful images of herself that she’d always kept on her walls, and in frames on her desk, and next to her bed — her anger toward Joan grew stronger than ever.

The pictures were ruined!

She remembered, then, the album her mother kept hidden in the drawer of her nightstand. The album that was filled with copies of every picture Cynthia had, and dozens more. Leaving the guest room, Cynthia went through the bathroom to the room next door. Her mother’s nightstand was gone! She felt a flash of panic. Was it possible that every picture of her — every image of her beauty — could be gone?

No! Of course not! The nightstand wasn’t here, but her mother would have saved the album.

Frantically, Cynthia began searching for it. Beginning with the dresser that stood against the wall opposite the foot of the bed, she pulled open one drawer after another, scattering their contents across the floor until the rug was strewn with a jumble of nightgowns, underwear, sweaters, and stockings — things her mother hadn’t worn in years, but had refused to give up.

Finally, in the third drawer of the bureau that stood next to the window, Cynthia found it. The album was covered with cheap leatherette that had long ago worn away to reveal the cardboard beneath, but Cynthia handled it with as much care as if it were a Gutenberg Bible. Lifting it from the drawer, she laid it carefully on a table, opened it, and began turning the pages.

They were all there. Every photograph she remembered, from the first one, taken when she was only a month old, to the last, taken just before she had gone away to New York. Even though the baby hadn’t been showing yet, she could see the radiance in her eyes the day the photo was taken. It was a lovely photograph — far too lovely to be hidden away in her mother’s old photo album. It should be downstairs!

Cynthia knew where she wanted it to be. Not just this one, but all of them. She took the album downstairs and into the den. Rummaging in the top drawer of Bill’s desk, she found a pair of scissors, then carefully set to work.

One by one she removed the photographs that sat on top of Bill Hapgood’s desk — photographs of his wedding, and his wife, and his family — and carefully cut out the images of Joan. Then, equally carefully, she cut her own face from the photographs in the album.

For the formal portrait taken the day Joan and Bill were married, she chose a photograph of herself as homecoming queen, taken during her last year of high school. The dress she’d worn had been white, its panels and bodice embroidered with rhinestones. It had looked almost like a wedding dress, and as she carefully placed it over the cutout where Joan’s image had been, Cynthia knew the image of herself was finally in its rightful place.

“It should have been me anyway,” she murmured as she slipped the altered photo back into its frame. Standing it up, she stepped back, cocked her head, and gazed at her work with a critical eye. From only six feet away, the picture looked totally genuine.

Not only genuine, but right.

Then she moved on to the photographs on the desk, replacing the cutouts of Joan’s face and figure with images of herself from the album until all the photographs on Bill’s desk had been altered.

Bill and Cynthia at their wedding, their son standing next to his mother.

Cynthia and Matt, on the Eiffel Tower, gazing out over Paris. Looking at the picture, Cynthia could almost see the view herself, as clearly as if it she had been there instead of Joan.

Bill, Cynthia, and Matt, riding horses five years ago.