Page 26 of One Last Lie

But I’m awake now. This is the real world. I am in my room in Ashford Manor, and there is no one else here.

I throw the covers off and get out of bed. I put on slippers and stalk out of the room. My movements are almost aggressive, and I have to remind myself the household is sleeping. I must be considerate.

As the fear fades, anger replaces it. I haven’t had a nightmare like that in years. Not since before my mother died. Now, the night after some foolish doctor tells me I am a recovered mental patient, it comes back? And that memory of slapping my mother to preface it: it’s all the fault of that damned file.

Someone falsified it. They had to have falsified it. I am not a former mental patient. Yes, I saw a therapist for years after Annie’s disappearance, but I was never hospitalized. I would have remembered that. My therapists would have talked with me about that.

It's Harrow. It has to be. He knows I'm looking into Johnathan's murder, and he wants me discredited. He knows I was protecting Elijah from him, and he's trying to get me out of the way so he can go after him. Is he trying to murder Elijah, too?

I stop and take a deep breath, then release it slowly. I take another, then another, willing myself to calm.

Now I am being paranoid. I’m letting my imagination run away with myself. I don’t even know for sure that Johnathan was murdered and now I’m jumping at shadows.

Well, it’s that damned doctor’s fault! How could they believe I was delusional for burning my hand?

My education tells me that my anger is a manifestation of my fear, and my urgent need to find someone to blame is an attempt to shift blame from myself. Knowing this and being incapable of unknowing it makes my emotions all the harder to deal with.

I close my eyes and press my fingers to my temples. I am not a vulgar woman, but the words that run through my mind are vulgar indeed. Were someone to wake and discover me leaning against the wall with my head in my hands, whispering curse words that would embarrass a sailor, I would no doubt be committed once more.

No! Not once more! Damn it, I am not a mental patient!

Absurd as it is for a woman of my age, I feel a scream bubbling up in my throat. I stride forward purposefully and open the door in front of me.

I enter a room I’ve never seen before. That, in and of itself isn’t surprising. After all, I’ve only been here a few days. The house is absolutely massive, nearly thirty thousand square feet, and I believe I’ve explored barely a third of that.

This room appears to be an art room. I recognize the silhouettes of statues and the outlines of paintings hanging from the walls. One painting appears to rest on an easel that faces the opposite wall.

I flip on the light switch and stiffen.

The statues—there are three of them—are statues of three women: a mother and two daughters. The mother is of medium height, thin with a severe look on her face. One of the daughters is tall and beautiful, with a perfect figure and noble features. The other is shorter and somewhat thicker, with a kind face; pretty, but hardly anything special.

I know that many families appear this way, but after the dream I’ve had, it’s hard not to feel that the statues aren’t of my mother, myself and Annie.

I look at the paintings, hoping to find some relief, but they provide none. The images I hope to find of the typical portraits of ancestors or landscapes of sunsets or meadows are nowhere to be found.

Gray. They’re all gray. There’s so much bleak gray.

The paintings appear to be of the grounds, but none of them show the house, and all the trees are the blackened, skeletal husks that now stand outside of the manor. The garden is replaced by an expanse of sickly gray grass. The pond is a pallid black-brown, and the bird that sits perched on the nearest of the charred-bone trees is very much not a duck.

The vulture is painted with red eyes, and those eyes seem to point straight at me.

The air in the room seems to thicken. I draw in deep breaths, but I can’t seem to transport the oxygen to my lungs. It sticks in my throat, and the more I gasp, the less air I obtain.

I need to leave. I need to leave now before something horrible befalls me.

I start to walk, but not out of the room. No, I’m not allowed that mercy. I walk through the mausoleum of my own life while revenant trees and specters of my past watch me, led by that demonic vulture.

It’s a dream. It’s a dream, that’s all it is. I’m dreaming, and I’ll wake up soon. It’ll be all right.

I tell myself this, but I know it’s not true. I know as I walk to the final painting, the one on the canvas facing the opposite wall, that when I look to see what’s depicted on it, I will be regarding an image as real as my own body.

I reach the painting and turn in front of it. My eyes slide toward the painting even as my mind pleads with me to stop.

When I see the image, my jaw goes slack. My shoulders slump, and my knees start to tremble.

The painting is of the same forest I see in my dream. Barren trees grasp at the figure in the middle, a pallid gray woman, shorter and slightly thick, with a kind face, pretty but not anything special.

My face.

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