I didn’t stay to watch if he would die.
I scrambled backward on my hands and feet, then spun around to dash off down the hall again on legs wobbly with shock. Still, I ran, almost drunkenly, so fast it hurt, down the narrow corridor that cut straight through the house from front to back.
Finally, I burst out one of the back entrances to the house and fell into the damp night, the air like ice against my moist, hot skin. I stared at the haloed edge of light spilling from the house into the huge abyss of blackness beyond.
There was a sound behind me that spurred me forward like a gunshot at the starting line.
I ran blind, my eyes streaming with tears, my hair a dark cloak behind me the same colour as the intractable night. The dirt ground painfully into the cuts on my feet and shrubs tore at the bare skin of my arms as I pumped them manically at my sides.
Finally, I could make some sense of the dark, enough to realize with dread I felt like a dropped anchor in my stomach, that I had somehow made it into the maze on the east side of the property.
The same maze Noel had just confessed to burying the bodies of his slaves in.
The body of his wife.
My body too, if I didn’t find a way out of the labyrinth.
Frantically, as I dodged around a bend in the hedgerows, I tried to recall everything Alexander had told me about the property and about the elaborate maze.
Constructed by Capability Brown in the late 1700s, it was one of Pearl Hall’s greatest sights and one that had stared at me through the windows of my bedroom during my entire time in captivity. There were two exits, one at either side, with a center spoke where a collection of Grecian marble statues lay. It was a massive maze, thousands of yew bushes used to make up the paths and dead ends in the pattern.
A sob exploded from my panting mouth as I continued to run blindly through the collection of twists and turns, the branches tearing at all my exposed skin, the ground eating away at the flesh of my feet.
I ran, and I bled.
I sweated, and I cried.
And over it all, I heard the distant lilting call of my name.
“Ruthie,” Noel’s voice carried faintly over the wind, and the wet air streaming with drizzling rain. “Ruthie, you little bitch, if you come to me now, I promise not to kill you.”
Fresh panic sluiced through my waning body, kicking my gait into hyper speed. I gritted my teeth, ducked my head into the rain, and ran harder still.
Only moments later, I reached the spoke at the center of the yew wheel and crashed into the back of a statue so hard I saw stars. Reeling, I walked clumsily farther into the middle, at the center of the circle of marble carved Grecian gods, and then fell to my knees as my balance deserted me.
I pushed my damp, clinging hair out of my face and looked at the six places the maze connected to the center, trying to discern which one might lead me to the far entrance and which one I had just stumbled out of, but my mind was scrambled by the crash and overcooked with terror.
“I’m going to die here,” I said to myself and the earth beneath my hands, watching the grim glimmer of my tears falling with the rain to the soft, damp ground.
I curled my fingers into the soil, fighting the urge to tip my head to the heavens and howl like a lost a wolf, crying for the rest of my pack that would never come, crying for the death I knew was close to arriving at my back.
In all my experiences, I never truly thought I was seconds from dying, not like this. I wanted to press my body into the dirt and be swallowed up in the warm embrace of the soil, die at the hands of nature instead of the hands of a monster.
And that spurred something inside me, some insanity that reared its head the more I poked at it.
I started digging.
Alexander
The house was lit up like a beacon, but as empty as a tomb. I slunk through the halls, disturbed by the weight of the silence, how it filled the air like amber, pinning everything in place as if it hadn’t been disturbed since my last visit.
Only when I pushed into the dining hall did I find evidence of life.
Or, I should have said, death.
The dining room table was a half-charred, still smoking mess, and Mrs. White lay in a shroud of her own satin red blood beside it, her face tipped up to the ceiling, the faintly surprised set of her mouth open and scarlet like her head wound.