Charon's Crossing

Matthew had watched from the attic window as the old man who'd brought her to Charon's Crossing left the house. The old man had not returned, and now the day had drawn to a close.

It was time to stop savoring the anticipation of revenge and take it.

He could have settled the score many times already. While she'd strolled through the house. While she'd unpacked her luggage or when she'd dawdled among the books in the library, or made herself dinner in the kitchen. He could have simply reached out, put his hands around her slender throat, and ended it all with one quick twist.

But there was such sweetness in the imagining.

He had waited for this moment. He could wait a bit longer. There was no rush.

Time had no meaning for him; the sun rose and set and he saw it do both but it was as if he watched a painter making brush strokes upon a canvas. What were the meanings of sunrise and sunset to a man who was dead?

But Catherine was not dead. She was very much alive. How many times had he wished that she would return to this house? Wished? That was far too simple a word. He had yearned for her return, prayed for it...

And his prayers had been answered. How she had come to be here was beyond his comprehension, but then, nothing that had happened to him since that last terrible night in the garden made any sense.

Besides, what did it matter? She had come back, come to him and to Charon's Crossing. He could do with her as he pleased. And what he pleased, he thought with a cold smile, was to destroy her as she had once destroyed him.

His life had been ended by Lord Waring's blade that warm June evening in 1812.

But it was Catherine who had truly killed him.

He knew just what would happen when he revealed himself to her. How her eyes would widen with terror. How she would try and deny his existence.

Eventually, she would have to accept the truth.

Oh, then she would plead for mercy! She would weep and beg to be saved from the damnation that had been his lot since she had betrayed him. She would promise him the moon and the stars, just as she had before. And they would be promises she never meant to keep and that would be as it had been before, too.

Matthew smiled thinly. He would relish all of it. Her fear, her pleas. He would let her sob while he laughed and told her that there was no logic in asking compassion of one to whom she had showed such cruel duplicity.

He would put his hands around her neck and press his thumbs into her flesh and squeeze and squeeze until her eyes, those beautiful, lying eyes, turned opaque and filled with death.

Then, at last, he would be free.

And that was why it was a moment worthy of delay. The slow anticipation was half the pleasure.

That was why he'd been content to observe her as she walked through the house and familiarized herself with the things that had once been hers, though watching had given him a moment's pause.

Time had lost all meaning for him so that he had not thought overly much about the condition of the mansion. But seeing Catherine's reactions to the dirt and the ruin, it struck him that many, many years must have gone by.

How could that be, when she was still so young? Her hair was as he remembered it, black as midnight and shiny as silk. Her eyes were as blue and as unchanged as the sea. Everything about her was still beautiful.

He puzzled over it, but not for long. One did not dwell on things for which there were no answers, for in that direction lay insanity. He had learned that the hard way, after he had fallen, dying, at Lord Waring's booted feet.

After that, there had been only... Only what? How did a man identify something that was beyond definition? How could he describe the nothingness in which he'd found himself? The Sunday preachers of his childhood had warned of the afterlife that awaited sinners. Now he knew they'd been wrong. Yet, the fires of hell could have been no worse.

It was safer for his own sanity to remember only that he had eventually awakened and found himself adrift in a place where there was only darkness. There'd been no dimensions. No walls or windows, floors or ceilings.

No escape.

There was only blackness. Blackness—and, at length, his awareness that he was not completely alone.

There was Something Else out there. He sensed a presence of some sort, not inside the blackness with him but just beyond it. It was not there all the time but when it was, he could hear the sounds it made. He could smell the stink of its evil and he knew instinctively that it searched for him.

The Thing terrified him. Whenever he sensed its nearness, he curled up within himself, holding his breath until it was gone.

But that reaction hadn't lasted long.