In the Shadow of the Lilac: V: Hollow
Halloween is almost over. . . but the Nightmare isn't.
Welcome to In the Shadow of the Lilac! This is a wholesome spooky serial. Due in part to an unforeseen amount of research, this episode, intended to be the finale, is being cut in half. The actual conclusion for this serial will be dropping on the 15th. If you’d like to receive occasional mysteries like this in your inbox, please be sure to subscribe to the section “It was a Dark and Stormy Night.” Thank you!
Synopsis: When Melody and Zion Holcomb move to Lavender Vale ahead of their parents, they expect the peaceful Gilded Age town to be a breath of fresh air. They can’t begin to guess that a century-old mystery has been lying in wait for them to solve. . . and the answers lie buried in the halls of the Hotel Lilac.
Last seen: A last-minute Halloween masquerade ball - ghosts and spectres at the Lilac - and poison in the makeup.
This is a long post, so it may appear shortened in your inbox. In this event, please read the post in your browser. Thank you!
“Why aren’t you driving to the ER?” Zion demanded as Grant, bearing Melody, kicked the front door shut so hard that the little pumpkins rolled off the porch.
Grant had somehow gotten Zion’s sedan through the still-haunting crowds of children at an unheard of pace, but instead of getting out of Lavender Vale, they were back at the Holcombs’.
“The nearest ER is forty minutes away,” Grant snapped. “If we don’t do something to help her right now, she won’t last long enough to get there in the first place!”
“Why can’t we call an ambulance?”
“We can try, but I can promise you: he won’t let it go through.”
Zion whipped out his phone as Grant carefully nestled Melody onto the tapestried couch in the parlor and locked the front door.
“. . . Dial tone.”
“Called it.”
“What about texting,” Zion muttered, and rattled off a text to his father.
The uploading line dragged out and died with an exclamation mark.
“I don’t get it!”
“No one does. Zion, we’re wasting time. If it’s the makeup, we need to get it off her skin,” Grant said shortly. “It needs to be rinsed off for fifteen minutes - is it on her hand, too?”
“Her fingers are stained red,” Zion reported, crouching beside his sister. “She has a habit of preferring not to use a brush or whatever they use these days.”
“I will always regret Lyle and I thinking we needed makeup for this event,” Grant muttered. “What’s her pulse?”
“It’s up to 115.”
“And she’s going into respiratory distress. Fever, heart rate,” Grant muttered, almost feverish himself. “Zion, get some water to wipe the makeup off her skin. The symptoms are overlapping - it could be hemlock, it could be cyanide, it could be abrin - or a combination of all three. I suspect she breathed it in as much as she got it on her skin. With her heart in the condition it already was, this poison is all the more deadly, whatever it is.”
“WHO NEEDS THREE DEADLY POISONS AT ONCE,” Zion nearly yelled from the kitchen, so loudly it was really a whisper.
“I don’t know. I can do something about cyanide, but there’s no antidote of any kind for hemlock or abrin,” Grant sighed. He sat back on his heels and watched Melody for a moment, biting his lip.
“And yet, something about this doesn’t fit, even considering all three toxins. Somehow I fear there may be even more poisons at work.”
“WHO, in their most insane mind, requires more than three lethal poisons? I thought hemlock is one of the most lethal ever?”
Zion returned and began carefully wiping the makeup from Melody’s skin.
Grant stared at him.
“. . . The more suffering, the more is paid.”
“What?”
“The more – I don’t know, it’s just something I heard once.” He shook his head. “Listen, I grabbed the rouge from the costume room. Maybe it will give us a clue.”
He gingerly peeled back the layer of silk scarf he had wrapped around it to protect his hand.
“Does it have an ingredient list?” Zion hoped, leaning forward to see if there were anything suspicious.
“Powder of roses, safflower, and daisies. . . oil of lavender. . . carmine. . . French chalk, pink pearl dust. . mica. . . no, nothing toxic. Not even lead. And we haven’t got time to get it analyzed anywhere, even if there were a lab closer than an hour away.” Grant rubbed his face, listening to the way Melody’s breath struggled.
“Stay here, Zion, and make sure you finish rinsing off her skin. I’m going to get to Barnard’s, I’m sure he has what I need to treat cyanide. If I cut through the woods, I can be back in time. Lock the door after me. I won’t be surprised if he shows up again!”
“What do you mean, cut through the woods, you said-”
“I said she can’t, I didn’t say I can’t – I live in the woods and I’ve dealt with. . . incidents more times than I can count,” Grant said impatiently. “Now lock the door!”
He slammed it behind him and vanished into the dark line of trees, the grasping spires of which raked the sky like so many fingers determined to scratch out the eyes of the stars, drawing themselves to full height to further swallow the man who entered their shadows.
Zion counted the seconds, as well as Melody’s breaths and heartbeat as she struggled unconsciously.
He could feel the skipped beats rapidly mounting as he held her wrist, and almost didn’t hear Grant pounding at the door.
“Grant, she’s worse,” Zion warned as he let Grant in, the latter winded from his run.
A satchel was slung over Grant’s shoulder, which he hastily unslung and emptied.
“Would have brought the nurse if I could have, but I suspect we have a guest on the way,” Grant muttered, pushing back Melody’s sleeve. “Here, take that,” and he pressed a syringe laden with a clear scarlet liquid into Zion’s hand.
“This isn’t quite how this is supposed to be done, but we haven’t much choice,” he continued, hastily cleansing Melody’s arm with an alcohol wipe. “Precisely five grams intravenously, and it has to be done slowly over fifteen minutes, so count the seconds while I inject it.”
“Nothing has ever taken so long in my life,” Zion growled when it was done, feeling his sister’s forehead. “What about the hemlock, if it is hemlock? And abrin, or whatever else?”
“There isn’t much I can do. There are herbs that can help the symptoms, but I can’t trust that they would work quickly enough. As I said, only cyanide has an antidote, which is the Hydroxocobamalin I gave her, so if it doesn’t start working dramatically, I don’t think there’s anything we can do outside of a hospital.”
“Hydroxo- oh, never mind! You said it’s not an antidote, why are we still sitting here?”
“Because that,” and Grant nodded towards the wall as a scraping sound, as of tree branches scratching the wood, echoed through the parlor. “Our ‘friend’ is keeping his own vigil.”
“And there’s probably the second one lurking somewhere,” Zion muttered. “So now we have to sit here and pray that she wakes up?”
“I don’t know enough of the treatment for cyanide to know if she would wake up,” Grant admitted. “I fear if she doesn’t, that poison will work the way it did for the other ladies and she’ll leave us within the next few days, probably overnight.”
They lapsed into silence, leaving the clocks to tick and Lys to breathe out softly from where he lay on the floor beside the sofa, nosing Melody’s sleeve now and then, tail thumping to the pace of the clock. Rosary beads shifted to the silent recitation of prayer, waiting, waiting, waiting. . . .
Melody still didn’t stir. Twenty-four hours might tell if she would awaken, or forty-eight, or seventy-two, or never.
Every tick sounded like a muffled footstep creeping down the carpeted hall; every tock broke the air like the clattering, running heel of a skeleton garbed in robes of ash. The scraping echoed every now and then, to remind them that they weren’t alone, and that the doors were guarded. Zion still couldn’t get through to anyone on his phone.
“Grant. What is it that haunts this place?” he asked quietly.
“Call it a curse,” Grant muttered, still staring at the pitch-black night, glimpsed between the wavering curtains. “I thought I was free for a while, but he’s back.”
“Who is?”
Grant sighed.
“Avery’s ghost.”
“….Grant, ghosts from purgatory don’t do what these spectres are doing.”
“One spectre.”
“You’re telling me evil ghosts can bilocate. I’ve seen two spectres, Grant.”
“I don’t know what I’m telling you,” Grant said shortly. “I wish I had never discovered him. He’s haunted me since before my childhood. Perhaps Melody discovered that my mother was attacked by the spectre a year before I was born: it was an isolated incident, the first reported in decades. Isolated, until I was about ten.”
He shuddered a little.
“I found him here on vacation one year, and suddenly I saw him every time I turned around. Every time I looked in the mirror, he was standing there.”
“What makes you think it’s Avery? Did you know what happened to the ladies already?”
“He told me his name, but not of what he had done.”
Grant’s hands were tellingly twisting the rosary in his hand as he and Zion gazed at the clock.
“The last four years were fairly quiet,” Grant said finally. “I thought that my research into Avery had cleared up who he was and fully taken the spectre out of my imagination - I had already grown out of seeing his reflection when I was fifteen or so. Everything was quiet, until this past summer.”
“What happened this past summer?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that as the tides ebbed lower, I started running into the spectre again, and I had to go back to my pranks from years prior to keep anyone from getting hurt. I tried to keep everyone from running into him. I kept hoping the spectre Melody was seeing was just a riff off my own costume. Yet, even without the spectre, I knew the woods were haunted. You can go into them,” Grant told Zion, “and never come out. You can go in, and never remember what you were doing while you were there. There have been ten people who have gone missing in the woods, just in the last seven years, and there were another nine in the thirteen before that. He’ll frighten away or drive insane anyone who lingers too long in the hills, that is, anyone who is open and gentle enough for him to hate; he tears out any wildflower he finds in the trees; and he can erase memories.”
Zion let the silence be while he considered Grant’s theory. It didn’t make sense, not as a ghost. A dark spirit, possibly, as far as the woods went - but he was still convinced that the two spectres they had encountered were men.
Even Grant agreed with him that in most of the incidents with Melody they must have been, and still wished he’d had the chance to scout around the vale for similar costumes. Whoever they were, they must have discovered the same history as Melody had regarding the deaths at the Lilac.
Another fifteen minutes ticked by before Grant took Melody’s pulse again. He dropped her hand with a sigh.
“Her pulse has come down some, thank God. But she really needs to be in the ER. If we can’t get her on oxygen support soon, I’m not sure there’s much chance of her waking up.”
He rose and listened to the rattling dragging along the outer walls.
“Get ready to make a break for the car with her. It’s only the one spectre, unless I miss my guess, and I can distract him long enough for you to get her out of here and out of Lavender Vale. I’ll meet you at the ER in Barnstable.”
He caught the look on Zion’s face in the mirror.
“Don’t worry. I’ve had random sparring matches with him and dealt with a boatload of creepy pranks, too. Come on, take the keys and Lys, and be ready to head out the front door as soon as I’ve gotten off the back porch. I’ll make sure he sees me and thinks you’ve gone ahead into the woods.”
Zion waited, knuckles white against the keys in his hand, Melody’s head on his shoulder as he held her and waited. Grant slipped to the back door, holding it ajar with his hand on the light switch, waiting.
The scratching was rattling from the far side of the house now, faint but growing as it moved from the driveway towards the front door.
Even Zion’s nerves wanted to believe that the sound was coming from inside the house, and that it was not human. Still he stood, Melody limp in his arms.
The rattling and a shadow crossed the front door’s shaded window.
“I have a suggestion.” Grant’s voice came softly through the door.
“Suggestions are extremely welcome!”
Grant leaned back inside.
“There’s a little road, if you turn at the church. It’s not used often, because it’s a hassle to get onto any main road from there. Our ‘friends’ may not expect you to take it in an emergency, and in this case, the long route would cost you less than the short.”
The rattling reached the corner of the house.
Grant snapped on the porch light, banged the door shut, and shouted after the hypothetical Zion who had made a break for the trees. The rattling stopped and Zion dashed madly for the front door, not daring to see whether Grant found one spectre or two.
Fumbling with the keys, he nearly tossed Melody into the back seat as Lys leapt into the passenger side, and Zion floored the car in reverse, the headlights latching on black tatters as the sedan peeled out of the driveway.
“This is insane, this is insane -”
Logically, Grant would be fine and would probably even catch up at the church, or on the road not far after.
Zion slowed down and let the car slide into the town’s streets, which were comfortingly well-lit and still busy with families and teens. But the stars were being veiled, and it was beginning to drizzle on every trick-or-treater’s parade. Thunder was rumbling in with the distant tide.
Zion crossed himself half-consciously as he eased the car past a cluster of miniature saints in front of the church. He wasn’t used to nightmares, much less being in one. He glanced in the rearview, wondering whether he expected to see a spectre at the wheel of the station wagon behind him. It was just a tired mother with her four fairy princesses in tow.
The turn beyond the church’s little parking lot led onto a country road, mostly dirt and gravel, scattered by the falling bark of the pines and petaled by gilt and crimson maple leaves, like some bridal path.
“Stay out of the woods, he says,” Zion muttered. “What am I doing taking this turn?”
He flicked on the high-beams and drove on. The little road led gradually up the low ridge that formed Lavender Vale before dipping down into grottos and glades, as the land flattened out into forest and field. The trees speared the air, seeming to leap into the road, jutting in at the roots and forcing both road and driver to swerve around.
He was nearing the hill’s crest now, and the downpour really started, rain dragging leaves down from the trees to plaster to the windshield.
“This is not what I ne-”
Zion slammed on the brakes so hard he had a close encounter with the steering wheel and his window.
A tree had collapsed across the road, leaving no space for the car to inch around it.
“We didn’t need this, either,” he breathed with a prayer, ducking out into the rain.
He had thought it was a birch across the lane, but now that he was grasping at the branches, he realized that the whiteness was the kind of cotton webbing halloween-enthusiasts draped over bushes. It came away easily and he slowly wrapped it around his hand, eyes searching the trees surrounding him for any clue as to why.
In the middle of the woods?
That was when he heard the car door click through the splattering rain. His heart sank. He turned.
“Put her down!”
The spectre stood still, head cocked leerily, the tatters drifting lazily, water rolling off like oil. Melody’s head hung back over its arm, the rainwater drenching her hair.
“I said,” Zion took a menacing step towards them, eyeing the nearest piece of fallen branch. “Put. Her. Down.”
The mouth only split in a silent laugh.
“Hey-!”
Zion grabbed the arm that was thrown around his throat from behind.
“It’s – about time,” he rasped, and twisted the second spectre off of him. They grappled, Zion holding off the ghastly enamel face that never lost the sardonic smile. Zion bit back a curse at himself and smashed his fist into the spectre’s face, feeling the mask splinter against his hand with a satisfying crack.
“Awfully solid for a ghost, aren’t you-”
In response, the spectre slammed his elbow into the soft spot of Zion’s shoulder, loosening his grip, and he crashed to the ground.
“Lys! Lys, attack!” he yelled at the dog, who finally, instantly wriggled through the carseats and out the open door, only to leap up and bite the arm of the spectre grappling with Zion.
“Fine, take him and I’ll take the -”
Zion scrambled to his feet.
The first spectre had disappeared into the trees, not a trace of violet glow giving him away, nor did the sound of the rain lighten to give a hint of his footsteps.
Melody, whose life might only have precious minutes, was gone – with the one who wanted her dead.
“Lys, Lys! Find Melody!”
The dog barked and charged off into the rain, leaving Zion to crash through the brush after him, the Ave slipping through his lips the way the beads would have slipped through his fingers – the way Melody and the spectre had.
Take the turn at the church – what kind of good advice was that?
He wanted to believe that it was a nightmare. The only bright spot was that Grant, if he were in one piece, would be driving up the same road and would find the abandoned car. He might be the only chance of getting Melody away from both spectres.
The flashlight’s beam bounced haphazardly across the rigid trees, feeling like a fence closing in on him.
He had known better! Why hadn’t he just floored it and taken the main road? Surely his sedan wouldn’t have been the only car exiting Lavender Vale. The spectre wouldn’t have had a good chance to take Melody, would it?
Lys’ barking faded for a moment, leaving Zion struggling to follow; the sound came back, louder now, somewhere to his left, higher up among the rocks.
He found the dog sitting in the hollow of the dramatically twisted, exposed roots of a large pine, a veritable woven net, and with a happy bark, Lys dug at a something in the mud and debris. It was a copper maple leaf, dingy with age.
Zion picked it up and followed a leather tether a few inches down into the leaves.
“Good dog! This wouldn’t be why we should fear the woods, would it?” he murmured, stooping to brush away the leaves and twigs from the trap door.
Seizing the tether, he gave it a heave, and found that much of the debris covering the door was sewn to dark brown mesh. The door gave a creaking groan as it lifted, revealing a narrow set of stairs, comprised of wood and packed earth, leading down a few yards into the gloom.
“Lead the way, Lys!” Zion left the trap door wide open, should someone such as Grant come along.
The passage was exceedingly narrow, shored up by old timbers as in a mine. The rainwater was trickling through the roots that cut through and wove overhead, occasionally catching at Zion’s hair and jacket; the water ran down the sandstone walls and gathered in rivulets along the floor, drawing with it the smell of earth and flaking, dampened pine.
The tunnel, too, curved around deep roots and buried boulders, but it hadn’t gone far before it began to split off from itself into wider shored passageways.
Zion’s flashlight kept catching on streaks set within the stone walls, the gleam of silvery-blue and pearl, and tints of thriving green algae.
He wasn’t sure he’d fancy making a habit of traveling through these passages, as the spectres seemed to. Who had built these tunnels, and when, was a question that came to mind, for they seemed far older than the spectres could be.
Was it an abandoned mine? Why else would one dig secret tunnels here?
Zion broke off from staring down one dark maw when Lys continued trotting on around the bend, clearly certain which track to follow. It cut deeper into the rock, westward, as Zion’s phone informed him.
Without warning, the tunnel began to narrow, just wide enough for him to walk comfortably, and the floor was cobbled. At the end of it was a timber door, well-aged but carved and framed until it resembled a dutch door.
Zion put his hand to the latch. It wasn’t locked – perhaps it didn’t need to be. He slipped it open just a sliver, praying that its hinges were well-oiled and wouldn’t give him away.
That open sliver was bright with warm lamplight, and he could hear a voice, an angry one.
It was familiar, too. Zion flicked the flashlight off and put his eyes to the crack.
Beyond was a cabin: not just any cabin, but the quirkiest one he had never imagined. The beams bracing the roof were carved as tree branches, painted with stylized vines; the floor was patterned in a mosaic of stones interrupted every few feet by painted planks in lilac, cream, and polished mahogany. Faded rugs that matched those at the Lilac were cast before the fire and beside the bed. The many windows were decorated by insets of purple crystal that formed lilac sprigs, and the windows themselves were rimmed by rounded stones, some pink sandstone, others milk-white with a dull blue shadow. It was a fairytale cottage, as much as this evening was a nightmare.
“Heaven help me, why you felt the need to cause all the drama with the Holcomb girl, I don’t know; that kind of publicity these days will bring K-9’s down on our necks, as I found out,” Lyle complained, crossing the room to kick a stray coal back into the fire.
The hood of his costume now draped behind him carelessly, the mask discarded; he began to peel apart the hooks that criss-crossed the front of the robe beneath the tatters.
Throwing the robe aside, Lyle stormed back to the spectre that stood beside the bed, and that was where Melody was, her face tilted towards Zion. Even at that distance he could see how white and still she was.
“Well, now that you started it and Grant interrupted it, you’d better finish it,” Lyle sighed. “I suggest you find something creative and get on with it before we have to deal with an investigation. At least we know she didn’t get quite far enough to have any evidence against us.”
The spectre nodded in agreement, reaching for Melody’s throat.
Zion kicked the door open.
“I wouldn’t touch her again, if I were you.”
Lyle’s surprise turned to amusement.
“So you found me, or should I say, us. Welcome to the cottage, Zion. Regretfully, that means you won’t be leaving, either.”
The spectre moved forward. Zion jumped aside.
“Lys, attack!”
Lys didn’t attack, only growled softly.
The spectre pushed the door shut behind Zion and locked it. Lyle’s pistol, now pointed at Zion, wasn’t helping.
“Who are you, anyway,” Zion asked the spectre wearily, slowly following the beckoning of Lyle’s gun.
“Oh,” Lyle smiled. “Allow me to introduce you to my partner-”
The spectre reached up and peeled both mask and hood back from his face.
“-Wilder. Avery Wilder.”
There, wearing Avery’s characteristic smirk from the photograph, was Grant.
Read the previous chapter here.
Find other chapters and themed playlists here:
Thank you for reading! Windflower is fully supported by its audience. Please consider supporting my work. Instead of buying me a coffee, you can leave a donation which will go towards the purchase of fabric for interactive projects, where you’ll be able to vote on what historical dress or film costume I’ll recreate! Donations also help to continue creating Windflower’s content and to support the local Latin Mass.
Please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends. Thank you, and God bless!