She tasted blood. She had bitten her lip.
Mama…
Mama had done this to her. Mama had sent her down here, knowing there were spiders. Why was Mama always so quick to deal out punishment, so eager to assign penance?
Overhead, a beam creaked, sagged. The kitchen floor cracked open. She felt as though she were staring up into Hell. Sparks showered down. Her dress caught fire, and she scorched her hands putting it out.
Mama did this to me.
Because her palms and fingers were blistered and peeling, she couldn’t crawl on her hands and knees any longer, so she got to her feet, although standing up required more strength and determination than she had thought she possessed. She swayed, dizzy and weak.
Mama sent me down here.
Laura could see only pulsing, all-encompassing orange luminescence, through which amorphous smoke ghosts glided and whirled. She shuffled toward the short flight of steps that led to the outside cellar doors, but after she had gone only two yards, she realized she was headed in the wrong direction. She turned back the way she had come—or back the way she thought she had come—but after a few steps she bumped into the furnace, which was nowhere near the outside doors. She was completely disoriented.
Mama did this to me.
Laura squeezed her ruined hands into raw, bloody fists. In a rage she pounded on the furnace, and with each blow she fervently wished that she were beating her mother.
The upper reaches of the burning house twisted and rumbled. In the distance, beyond an eternity of smoke, Aunt Rachael’s voice echoed hauntingly: “Laura… Laura…”
Why wasn’t Mama out there helping Rachael break down the cellar doors? Where in God’s name was she? Throwing coal and lamp oil on the fire?
Wheezing, gasping, Laura pushed away from the furnace and tried to follow Rachael’s voice to safety.
A beam tore loose of its moorings, slammed into her back, and catapulted her into the shelves of home canned food. Jars fell, shattered. Laura went down in a rain of glass. She could smell pickles, peaches.
Before she could determine if any bones were broken, before she could even lift her face out of the spilled food, another beam crashed down, pinning her legs.
There was so much pain that her mind simply blanked it out altogether. She was not even sixteen years old, and there was only so much she could bear. She sealed the pain in a dark corner of her mind; instead of succumbing to it, she twisted and thrashed hysterically, raged at her fate, and cursed her mother.
Her hatred for her mother wasn’t rational, but it was so passionately felt that it took the place of the pain she could not allow herself to feel. Hate flooded through her, filled her with so much demonic energy that she was nearly able to toss the heavy beam off her legs.
Damn you to Hell, Mama.
The top floor of the house caved in upon the ground floor with a sound like cannons blasting.
Damn you, Mama! Damn you!
The first two floors of flaming rubble broke through the already weakened cellar ceiling.
Mama—
PART ONE
Something Wicked This Way
Comes…
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks,
whoever knocks!
—Shakespeare, Macbeth
1
ACROSS the somber gray clouds, lightning followed a jagged course like cracks in a china plate. In the unsheltered courtyard outside Alfred O’Brian’s office, the parked cars glimmered briefly with hard-edged reflections of the storm light. The wind gusted, whipping the trees. Rain beat with sudden fury against the three tall office windows, then streamed down the glass, blurring the view beyond.
O’Brian sat with his back to the windows. While thunder reverberated through the low sky and seemed to hammer on the roof of the building, he read the application that Paul and Carol Tracy had just submitted to him.
He’s such a neat little man, Carol thought as she watched O’Brian. When he sits very still like that, you’d almost think he was a mannequin.
He was exceedingly well groomed. His carefully combed hair looked as if it had received the attention of a good barber less than an hour ago. His mustache was so expertly trimmed that the halves of it appeared to be perfectly symmetrical. He was wearing a gray suit with trouser creases as tight and straight as blades, and his black shoes gleamed. His fingernails were manicured, and his pink, well-scrubbed hands looked sterile.