Mary Robb - Down the Rabbit Hole

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity

of regarding everything I cannot explain

as a fraud.

CARL JUNG

We’re all mad here.

LEWIS CARROL

The dead were his business.

Over the years, he’d built a tidy fortune—though it was never enough, never quite enough —exploiting the dead and those who loved them.

He loved his work, reveled in it, and all the bright and shiny things his efforts amassed. But over and above the profit, or at least running through the dollars and euros and pounds, was sheer glee.

A man who didn’t laugh himself sick seven times a day didn’t know how to live.

One of his greatest amusements—and in truth he had so many—but one of his greatest was when the time came around to turn the living into the dead.

That time had come around for Darlene Fitzwilliams, she of the ebony hair and haunted blue eyes. Such a pretty creature. He’d thought so on their first acquaintance, and had thought the same a number of times over the past five months.

He might have kept her longer, as he did love pretty things, but she had committed the greatest sin.

She’d begun to bore him.

She sat now in the cluttered, colorful parlor of his cluttered, colorful house, as she had once every week for four and a half months. She called him Doctor Bright, one of his many names and as false as all the rest.

“Doctor Bright,” she said after sipping the tea he always provided, “I had a terrible argument with my brother this afternoon. It was my fault—I missed an important appointment with the lawyers regarding the estate. I just forgot. I was distracted, knowing I’d be coming here, and I forgot. Marcus was so upset and impatient with me. He doesn’t understand, Doctor Bright. If I could just explain . . .”

Bright lifted his dark, dramatic eyebrows. “What did your father say, dear?”

“He said it wasn’t time.” She leaned forward, all that hope and faith (and how tedious that had become) glowing on her face. “I’m so anxious to talk to him and Mama again.”

“And you will, of course.”

He sipped his tea, smiled at her. “Drink your tea. It will help open you to communications.”

She obeyed, biddable, boring girl.

“It’s hard not to tell him. And Henry.”

The tea made her talkative, a little giddy. The effects had amused him initially. Now he saw her as an excitable little mouse, scurrying everywhere at once. And he wanted to whack her with a hammer.

“I’m going to meet Henry tonight,” she continued. “He wants to set the date, and that’s something else I want to talk to Mama and Daddy about. They were so pleased when Henry and I got engaged. And then . . .”

“Transitions, a journey.” He played his fingers in the air as he spoke, watched her watch them dance. “Nothing more.”

“Yes, I know that now. It’s just . . . I want to share this with Marcus, and with Henry.”

“But you haven’t.”

“No. I promised you, and my father. You said I’d know when it was time, and I feel it is. I hate not being honest with the people I love, even for people I love. If Henry and I set the date tonight—that’s a kind of journey, too, isn’t it? Marriage.”

“And do you feel ready for that journey?”

“I do. Coming here, all I’ve learned, it’s shown me there aren’t any ends, just other paths. Before I came to you, everything seemed so dark, so final. And now . . .”

She beamed at him, her eyes wide and bright, and just going glassy. “I can never repay you for all you’ve given me.”

“It’s my gift to give. Regrettably, at a price.”

“Oh, of course.” She laughed—giddy, yes giddy, primed by his tea party. Opening her bag, she took out a thick red envelope.

Always red for Ms. Fitzwilliams, with cash (he only took cash) in the amount of nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars sealed inside. He’d told her red protected the offering, and nine was a number of power.

In truth red was his current favorite color (though it was about to be supplanted by purple), and he found all those nines amusing.

Darlene set it, as she’d been instructed, on the silver tray on the tea table.

“And the tokens?” he prompted. He wouldn’t touch or count the money. The lovely Ms. March would see to all that. But when the biddable girl took two red pouches from her bag, Bright’s fingers itched.

These he took, these he touched, these he stroked.

The desk clock was old, heavy crystal, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Its monetary value Bright estimated in the low thousands, but it was worth so much more to him.

He could feel Gareth Fitzwilliams’s energy shimmering on it, and his father’s before him, and yes, even generations back. So many hands touching, so many eyes marking time.

He opened the second pouch, took out the slim, antique ladies’ watch. A tiny diamond butterfly perched above the twelve, and pretty diamond chips circled the face.

Yes, Bria Fitzwilliams had worn it often, choosing it in lieu of more stylish and practical wrist units, clasping it on thinking of her own mother, her mother’s mother, and back five generations.

Time marked again, birth to death, death to birth and round and round.

“You chose well.”

“They’re favorites.”

“Strong energy. Strong connections. Are you ready?”

He slipped each pouch in a pocket so he could take her hand, lead her from the room. He could feel the vibrations—excitement, fear? Wasn’t it all too delicious?

He led her up stairs he liked for their zigzagging climb, down a corridor he enjoyed as the paint and wainscoting he’d designed gave it the illusion of a slant.

The girl weaved like a drunk, so he had to stifle a quick giggle.

He took her into what he called the Passage Room, where lights glowed blue. She took her seat—a good girl—in the high-backed armchair on the raised platform. The height would keep their eyes level, an essential element to what came next.

“Breathe deep,” he told her as a blue mist swirled around the chair. “Slow and deep. Hear my voice.”

Behind him a white spiral formed on the wall, began to spin. Lights flashed, strobing colors.

“Open your mind.”

A hat seemed to float down, to settle on Darlene’s head, its long, red feathers swaying. For a moment it banded tight around her skull, caused discomfort, then that eased, and colors washed the room. She smelled flowers, and her mother’s perfume.

“Mama.”

“A moment more.” Pleased with her quick response, he stepped over to a cupboard, opened it, and chose a hat for himself out of the dozens stored there.

A top hat in bold red, for young Ms. Fitzwilliams.

“Into my eyes, into my voice. Follow both to the threshold.”

Her eyes were glass, pinned to his. Helpless, he thought, and this time he did giggle.

He slipped into her mind—so easy now, like sliding on ice—and saw as she saw.

A sun-drenched meadow under perfect blue skies. Birds twittered; a warm breeze fluttered the flowers spread everywhere over the ground.

There, under a tall tree spreading dappled shade on a pretty slope, stood Gareth and Bria Fitzwilliams. Young, smiling, he handsome in his white suit, she lovely in her flowing white dress.

With a happy cry, Darlene ran to her dead parents and embraced them.

Touching, Bright thought, so very touching. He dabbed a mock tear from the corner of his eye and gave her nearly twenty minutes to walk in the meadow.

It was never enough, of course, and she was protesting, reaching out, when the blue mist swirled over the flowers. But it was all he could spare her this time—this last time.