The Devil's Scribe Read online

  He took me completely by surprise. It never occurred to me that a man would pay so much attention to a woman except to get her into his bed. At the same time, I was relieved to hear that all he wanted was a story—even though I couldn’t tell him this story. I couldn’t share this secret with anyone. Which is precisely why the prospect of finally telling someone, especially a stranger, was tantalizing.

  Edgar must’ve had the power of the devil in order to change his countenance so drastically. His dark eyes fastened on me. “You have a great secret inside you, Lanore, and that’s irresistible to a man like me, a lover of puzzles and secrets. I tried plying you with wine to loosen your tongue, then opium, without success. Can you not see how badly I want to hear your story?

  “Think about it: I was only in Baltimore for a meeting, a bit of business, and was supposed to head back home that same evening to New York, to my wife—yes, I lied to you when I said I was a widower. I’ve a wife, and I’ve left her waiting without a clue as to what’s happened to me. What’s more, she’s very sick and it troubles me greatly to have told such a lie to you, as though I might be tempting fate to take her away from me; but I have been helpless in the face of this secret of yours. That is how dearly I wish to hear your story. So I hope, Lanore, after all I’ve sacrificed, that you won’t deprive me of it.”

  He wouldn’t let me escape his stark stare. And I began to ask myself where the harm was in telling him. He was a heavy drinker, and should he attempt to tell my story to someone else, he wouldn’t be believed. He might not even believe what I had to say: mine was an impossible tale.

  I waited to see if he would get impatient and give up, but he continued to stare at me, over dinner, over wine, over coffee. . . . When I stood up, he knew that I had relented. He helped me into my coat, shaking with anticipation, though I was the one who should’ve been trembling.

  Owing to the hour, the streets were empty and most of the houses dark. We started in a hackney cab, and I had the driver take us on a long ride through several neighborhoods, so that Edgar might become disoriented and be unable to find the house without me later. Then, on foot, we walked up one street and down another without a word to each other, me in the lead with Edgar following. I tried to move as noiselessly as possible so that the sound of our footfalls wouldn’t wake anyone. Edgar was as quiet as a ghost behind me.

  Finally, when I felt Edgar was confused enough, I led him to my destination: the old mansion where I had lived twenty years earlier. Although every window was dark, it was obvious that the house was occupied. Lace panels hung in the windows, and the rosebushes in the front yard were well tended. The house’s foundation had been built into a hill, and the house itself loomed above the sidewalk like a giant empty skull staring back at me, as though it knew why I was there.

  The house had been built onto in the years since I last saw it and was now enormous. I tried to circle the building, but the back end was blocked off by a stockade fence. It would be impossible to get beyond the fence without destroying the latch to the gate.

  I hugged close to the walls, running a hand along the stone as though feeling for something. I was reminded of the fairy tale in which a pea is buried under twenty mattresses and can be detected only by a princess of great sensitivity. Here, too, was a case in which something was hidden that could be detected by only one person: me. Edgar followed a few steps behind, observing me as I circled the house like a thwarted tiger.

  “What are we doing here, Lanore?” he asked at one point when I paused in my pacing. He seemed unconcerned that we were casing a house like a pair of thieves. “What are you up to?”

  I already felt half mad for daring to tell my secret to someone, and decided to ease my way into the story. “I’m looking to see that the foundation stands firm and that it hasn’t been disturbed.”

  He blinked at me. “The foundation of this house? I don’t understand.”

  “I used to live here, you see, but I left something behind when I moved away. I left something . . . buried.”

  “What might that be? A doll, a favorite toy?” he asked, impatient.

  “Nothing so benign, I’m afraid.” I took a deep breath: the time had come to unburden my conscience. “There’s a man hidden in the cellar of this house. Bricked up in a wall. I put him there.” My words did not come out as I’d expected: not giddy and triumphant, not small and ashamed, but somewhere in between. Spoken tentatively as though I was lying, and I was anything but lying.

  Edgar staggered backward a step. “I—I don’t think I heard you correctly. I thought you said—”

  “That I sealed up a man in this house. That is what I said.” Both my palms were pressed against the stone now, as though I could feel the heartbeat of the trapped man on the other side—as though his heartbeat had become the heartbeat of the house—but I felt nothing. Nothing.

  Edgar didn’t move from the spot. He leaned away from me slightly but held his ground. He continued to cast his inquisitive gaze over my face, looking for a sign that I might be deceiving him, while at the same time eager for every morsel of my tale. “You made this house his crypt! How . . . macabre of you. Tell me, Lanore, how you came to kill him. Did you shoot him? Or perhaps you poisoned him. They say poison is a lady’s weapon. . . . Or had he passed already and you found his body in bed?”

  I didn’t want to answer him directly and indict myself, but I was seized by the desire to confess, as though he were capable of granting me absolution. “No, he hadn’t died in his sleep. It wasn’t peaceful at all. You see, he was alive when I sealed him in his tomb.”

  I had wanted to tell someone the truth for a long time. The secret had been an inescapable weight on my chest that had grown heavier every day. And what had I risked in telling Edgar, really? Very little. He knew nothing of me that mattered. He wouldn’t be able to lead the police to me. He was my momentary confessor. He’d asked me to share my secret with him, implying silence in exchange for the privilege. I’d poured my guilt into him and now he was obligated to carry this awful secret inside his head, and by doing so I’d unburdened myself by a small measure.

  His dark eyes swept over me uncertainly. “There are easier ways to kill a man. To put him in the wall while he is still alive . . .”

  To this, I could say nothing, for what he said was true: there were easier ways to kill a man. To go to such lengths to snuff out a man’s life could only be seen as the height of cruelty. Of course, there was a reason for it, but I could not share that part of the secret with Edgar.

  I watched as he riffled through a series of questions in his mind, unsure if I was playing a trick on him or if this was the first sign that I was not in control of my senses. “Please, Lanore, assure me that you had good reason to do something so . . . extreme. That you were in fear for your life, that he was a brute . . .”

  “Rest assured, he was a most deserving victim.”

  “And you came all the way from Europe to make sure that your secret hasn’t been discovered? The house stands, your secret is safe—and yet you are still uneasy, more so than before we came to this place.” He puzzled over this for a moment longer. “You are still afraid. But afraid of what? Surely, the man’s been dead for years now. You have nothing to fear from a dead man.”

  My gaze flicked to the hard stone wall and back to Edgar. I was still afraid. I’d imagined I’d feel liberated once I spoke the truth aloud, but that wasn’t so. I hadn’t found peace or absolution in either making the journey or unburdening myself to a stranger.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, comprehending that much.

  What was hidden behind that wall was more frightening than even a practiced storyteller such as Edgar could imagine. Edgar thought I was a mere murderess, when in truth I was far worse. What would he have done if he knew I’d sentenced a man to an eternity trapped in a cell not much bigger than a coffin? That is wh
y I found no peace after admitting my deed to Edgar: my greatest fear was not that someone would learn of what I’d done. My greatest fear was that anyone heartless enough to condemn a man for eternity had no right to freedom. I deserved to be entombed behind a wall, too.

  Edgar observed me with such dread—coming to grips with the fact that he might be in the presence of a monster—that I had to squeeze his hand hard to break his stupefaction. “Forget what I’ve told you, Edgar,” I rushed to say. “I’m afraid I have frightened you! I was only telling you a story, thinking that I could match your cleverness, but I’m afraid I haven’t your skill at storytelling and have gone too far.”

  Edgar managed a crooked smile but I could tell he wasn’t fooled. He projected the unease of a man who’d gotten more than he’d bargained for. He laughed, weakly. “Has it all been a game? My hat’s off to you, then, my dear, for you had me fooled.” His false cheer didn’t work on me. He knew I’d told him the truth. Now the question was what he’d do with this knowledge.

  It was time for me to take the matter in hand and bring our encounter to a close. “All right, then, Edgar. I’d prefer to see you leave the premises first, if you don’t mind. And I’ll be checking out of the hotel forthwith, in case you think you might try to find me later. This is where we part.” He had his story; I’d delivered on my promise, as much as I’d ever share with anyone.

  He listened to me with a queer smile on his face, a look of pleasure and cunning, and tipped his hat to me one last time. “Good evening, Lanore. I thank you for your story. It is a far more precious gift than you can imagine,” he said before turning and walking away calmly, disappearing into the twilit night. I was glad to be rid of him, for there was something truly odd about him. He could be pitiless, in his gently insistent way.

  Once Edgar was gone, I turned back to the house, facing the part of the stone foundation not buried behind earth. The niche in which I’d walled up my tormentor was toward the back of the house and beyond my reach. He had to be there, behind a stone wall a yard thick, for the house and grounds were too pristine to have been disturbed. Indeed, the place was so still and lifeless, I wondered if the man inside could possibly be dead.

  He and I had been apart for so long that occasionally I forgot how miserable I had been with him, and standing there, shrouded in fog, I began to think twice about my betrayal. I stepped very close to the wall, removed my hat, and leaned forward to press my face against the stone, placing my cheek on the rock in the same way that I used to rest my head on his bare chest.

  At first, the wall was only rock, cold and unyielding. But then it changed all at once, becoming as soft and warm as human flesh, and as peaceful as those times when I’d lain next to him while he slept.

  Then I felt a sharp jolt, coldly electric, as though he had woken suddenly and was aware of my presence. The feeling was so strongly malevolent that I jumped back from the wall. That direct, threatening presence broke off immediately, but my cheek now throbbed as though I’d been bitten. I stifled the urge to cry out and stumbled through the rosebushes and away from the house, reminded vividly of what he was capable of, and desperate to once again put as many miles between him and me as possible.

  My story didn’t end that night, though I would not see Edgar again. I checked out of the hotel without incident and caught a train for New York. From New York on, I took a more leisurely route, as I would not be leaving America for another month, having made plans to meet up with companions in Europe later in the year.

  It wasn’t until November that I was on the train to Baltimore, on my way to catch my ship. Lying innocuously on the seat in my compartment was a discarded copy of a magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, and by some strange coincidence Edgar’s name was on the cover. I flipped past the fashion illustrations and poems until I came to his story and, settling deeper into my seat, began reading.

  “The Cask of Amontillado.”

  Curious to learn why Lanny was forced to flee Boston over twenty years ago?

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  THE TAKER

  Book one in Alma Katsu’s enthralling trilogy!

  To discover how it all began. . . .

  True love can last an eternity . . .

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  the

  Taker

  ONE

  Goddamned freezing cold. Luke Findley’s breath hangs in the air, nearly a solid thing shaped like a frozen wasp’s nest, wrung of all its oxygen. His hands are heavy on the steering wheel; he is groggy, having woken just in time to make the drive to the hospital for the night shift. The snow-covered fields to either side of the road are ghostly sweeps of blue in the moonlight, the blue of lips about to go numb from hypothermia. The snow is so deep it covers all traces of the stumps of stalks and brambles that normally choke the fields, and gives the land a deceptively calm appearance. He often wonders why his neighbors remain in this northernmost corner of Maine. It’s lonely and frigid, a tough place to farm. Winter reigns half the year, snow piles to the windowsills, and a serious biting cold whips over the empty potato fields.

  Occasionally, someone does freeze solid, and because Luke is one of the few doctors in the area, he’s seen a number of them. A drunk (and there is no shortage of them in St. Andrew) falls asleep against a snowbank and by morning has become a human Popsicle. A boy, skating on the Allagash River, plunges through a weak spot in the ice. Sometimes the body is discovered halfway to Canada, at the junction where the Allagash meets up with the St. John. A hunter goes snow-blind and can’t make his way out of the Great North Woods, his body found sitting with its back against a stump, shotgun lying uselessly across his lap.

  That weren’t no accident, Joe Duchesne, the sheriff, told Luke in disgust when the hunter’s body was brought to the hospital. Old Ollie Ostergaard, he wanted to die. That’s just his way of committing suicide. But Luke suspects if this were true, Ostergaard would have shot himself in the head. Hypothermia is a slow way to go, plenty of time to think better of it.

  Luke eases his truck into an empty parking space at the Aroostook County Hospital, cuts the engine, and promises himself, again, that he is going to get out of St. Andrew. He just has to sell his parents’ farm and then he is going to move, even if he’s not sure where. Luke sighs from habit, yanks the keys out of the ignition, and heads to the entrance to the emergency room.

  The duty nurse nods as Luke walks in, pulling off his gloves. He hangs up his parka in the tiny doctors’ lounge and returns to the admitting area. Judy says, “Joe called. He’s bringing in a disorderly he wants you to look at. Should be here any minute.”

  “Trucker?” When there is tr
ouble, usually it involves one of the drivers for the logging companies. They are notorious for getting drunk and picking fights at the Blue Moon.

  “No.” Judy is absorbed in something she’s doing on the computer. Light from the monitor glints off her bifocals.

  Luke clears his throat for her attention. “Who is it, then? Someone local?” Luke is tired of patching up his neighbors. It seems only fighters, drinkers, and misfits can tolerate the hard-bitten town.

  Judy looks up from the monitor, fist planted on her hip. “No. A woman. And not from around here, either.”

  That is unusual. Women are rarely brought in by the police except when they’re the victim. Occasionally a local wife will be brought in after a brawl with her husband, or in the summer, a female tourist may get out of hand at the Blue Moon. But this time of year, there’s not a tourist to be found.

  Something different to look forward to tonight. He picks up a chart. “Okay. What else we got?” He half-listens as Judy runs down the activity from the previous shift. It was a fairly busy evening but right now, ten P.M., it’s quiet. Luke goes back to the lounge to wait for the sheriff. He can’t endure another update of Judy’s daughter’s impending wedding, an endless lecture on the cost of bridal gowns, caterers, florists. Tell her to elope, Luke said to Judy once, and she looked at him as though he’d professed to being a member of a terrorist organization. A girl’s wedding is the most important day of her life, Judy scoffed in reply. You don’t have a romantic bone in your body. No wonder Tricia divorced you. He has stopped retorting, Tricia didn’t divorce me, I divorced her, because nobody listens anymore.

  Luke sits on the battered couch in the lounge and tries to distract himself with a Sudoku puzzle. He thinks instead of the drive to the hospital that evening, the houses he passed on the lonely roads, solitary lights burning into the night. What do people do, stuck inside their houses for long hours during the winter evenings? As the town doctor, there are no secrets kept from Luke. He knows all the vices: who beats his wife; who gets heavy-handed with his children; who drinks and ends up putting his truck into a snowbank; who is chronically depressed from another bad year for the crops and no prospects on the horizon. The woods of St. Andrew are thick and dark with secrets. It reminds Luke of why he wants to get away from this town; he’s tired of knowing their secrets and of them knowing his.