Charon's Crossing

Kathryn nodded again.

"Sweet Jesus," he muttered. "One hundred and eighty-four years..." His hand fell from her shoulder. "It cannot be!"

"It is."

"Nay! So many years cannot have passed."

"I can't help it if you don't want to hear the truth. There's a calendar in my checkbook. Do you want to see it?"

"Your check...?" Matthew shook his head. It mattered not that she was speaking in riddles again. All that counted was the sudden realization burning inside his head: "But if I have been... if so many years have passed, then you cannot be... then you cannot be..."

"Your Catherine."

He nodded. "Yes."

Kathryn's eyebrows lifted. "I'm not. I tried to tell you that, remember? But you wouldn't listen."

"But you are her image," he whispered...

Except that she wasn't. She was not Catherine.

Oh God!

Matthew took a step back, his eyes riveted to her face. There was surely a resemblance. A striking one. But that was all it was. A resemblance, nothing more. And, in his heart, he had known it all along.

She was not Catherine.

For days, for eternity, he had planned an act of vengeance he had hoped would bring him release. Now he realized that his plans had been for naught. Vengeance was as useless as love in this godforsaken horror in which he was trapped.

He made a sound midway between a groan of despair and of fury. Questions whirled in his brain like whispers of madness. If she was not Catherine, if she was not here so he could bring their ugly little morality play full circle, why was this happening?

Why had he been called out of the blackness that had contained him?

Was it all some hideous game, played by a cosmic jokester? Had he been drawn out of the darkness so he could wander the halls of Charon's Crossing forever, a doomed prisoner of Catherine's perfidy and of the moment of his death?

He shook his head sharply, forced his gaze to focus on her. Her face was pale, her bottom lip was caught between her teeth.

"Why are you here, then, if you are not Catherine?"

"Because I inherited this miserable house!"

"Nay. It cannot be so simple." She flinched as he slammed his fist on the counter beside her. "I cannot have been called from the darkness for no purpose!"

"Listen, I don't know why you've been—"

"Who are you?" he said.

"My name is Kathryn Russell, but with a K. K-A-T-H-R-Y-N."

Kathryn. Not Catherine. Kathryn.

"You are her progeny."

"Her descendant. Yes." She tried to smile. "Several generations removed."

He remembered that last instant of his life, that second when he had felt his blood draining away. His own words, borne on his dying breath, echoed in his ears.

May you rot in hell, Catherine Russell, he had said, may neither you nor your issue ever know love or peace...