LIFERS Chapter Forty Five

As Ella watched Marianna sleep, her fingers drummed the arm of the rocking chair at a slow but steady pace. What she’d done to Thomas concerned her little, her thoughts taken up more by what she had planned for herself and the rest of Martinsville's residents over the next hour or so. She reached out to brush aside loose strands of hair from Marianna’s face, and her touch woke her.

Marianna lay still for a half second then shot to a seated position, the bed sheets clutched to her chest. ‘What the hell are you doing to me?’

‘I’m letting you go.’

‘What?’

‘I said I’m letting you go. So get dressed and you can leave.’

‘Why am I not dressed? And what did you do to me?’

‘Calm down, Marianna, I needed to remove your clothing to extract stem cells from you, that’s all.’

She frowned. ‘Stem cells?’

Ella knew then that her granddaughter was oblivious to Alice’s actions in trying to kill them off, had she known about it she wouldn’t have been at all curious with regard to the stem cells, she’d know exactly why they were needed. She rose from the chair and gave Marianna her clothes then wandered over to the window. Once there, and without turning back to the room, she began to put in plain words the truth about her mother.

‘About seventy years ago, when your mother was only sixteen, I helped─’

‘My mother has already told me what you did. How you organised her escape and how you forced her brother to kill those two pregnant─’

‘Stop, Marianna,’ Ella said, and turned from the window. ‘I did arrange her escape, you’re right about that. I gave Hal the keys and made sure no one would be around to stop him getting her out. But let me assure you of one thing, lady, her brother didn’t kill anyone that night. Alice was the one who put the dead girl in her room, Alice was the one who strangled the other two girls, and Alice was the one who placed lit candles under their beds. My only instructions to Hal were to get her to the kennels and to make sure she left, which he would’ve done had he not been almost killed by her in the tunnels before she returned to do those things.’

‘What are you talking about? She loved her brother; she would never have done anything to harm him.’

‘Again, Marianna, you’re right, but only half right, and believe me, I certainly had no intention of telling you what I’m about to tell you. But as you so dutifully seem to insist on your mother’s innocence in all of this … may I suggest you brace yourself.’

Ella moved from the window to the side of the bed, arms across her chest. ‘Alice loved her brother, and hated him at the same time. She hated him because she loved him, and because he wouldn’t love her back in the way she wanted.’

Marianna pulled her blue top over her head and thrust her arms into the sleeves. ‘Are you saying my mother was actually in love with him?’

‘Infatuated would be the nearer of truths.’

Marianna pulled on her underwear and shorts and rose from the bed, she picked her shoes up and started across the floor. ‘I’m not listening to any more of your pitiful lies,’ she said, and tried the door handle. ‘It’s locked, you said I could leave.’

‘And you can, but first, and whether you believe me or not, you’re going to listen to what I have to say to you. Now sit back down.’

Ella waited for Marianna to reach the bed before she returned to the rocking chair. She was about to continue when Marianna spoke first.

‘You gave them up when they were babies, abandoned them, you didn’t want them,’ she said, in a bid to stamp some knowledge of her own on the conversation. ‘So how could you know any of my mother’s feelings?’

‘I may have given them up, Marianna, but I never once abandoned them. I followed them and I watched them grow. Then something in Alice’s attitude made me suspect there was a problem between them; I just didn’t know what that problem was. And just before I was ready to get them out of Martinsville they disappeared. They took it on their own backs to escape.’

‘Are you telling me that the note pushed under my mother’s bedroom door was none of your doing?’

Ella smiled, almost laughed. ‘Of course it wasn’t, your mother’s no fool, Marianna. She knew if she could convince Hal that their time had come he’d do all he could to protect her. He may not have loved her in the way she wanted, but he loved her nonetheless. And that note was written by your mother.’

‘So if their time, as you put it, hadn’t actually come, why were they chased?’

Ella sighed, readjusted her posture. ‘That note wasn’t the only one your mother wrote. Unknown to me at the time, another note was found, one that Alice hid in her adopted mother’s pocket before she and her husband left for the town hall, just before the rain fell on the day they tried to escape. A note that said Harold was forcing her to escape.

‘On arriving at the town hall, Monique DuPont gave that note to Thomas Martins, which Alice knew would happen. It was he who organised a hunt to begin as soon as the rain stopped. But it was the following week they were due to get their injections, and I would have gotten them out had they waited. Thomas had Hal injected and left out there as a punishment for trying to escape. He brought your mother back for other reasons.’

‘I don’t understand; if my mother was no fool, as you say, then why would she jeopardise her chances of escape by writing that second note?’ Marianna shook her head. ‘It makes no sense.’

‘I didn’t know why at the time either, but when I spoke with Hal, after we found him half-dead in one of the tunnels; he confessed to me all of Alice’s feelings toward him. The reason for the second note then became perfectly clear. Sure, Alice wanted to get away from Martinsville, but she needed Hal’s help to do it, so she wrote the first note, and because her love for him went unreciprocated, she wrote the second. Then, while they were out there in Old Liberty Forest, she turned on him. Hal told me after he fell from the hillside he heard laughter, Alice’s laughter. And if I’d have known all of this before I helped her later escape, I’m not sure I would have.’

‘As you said, all of this was seventy years ago, so what does it have to do with me, and more to the point … my stem cells?’

Ella rose and walked over to an old cabinet which stood in a corner of the room. She pulled open the top drawer and produced a manila envelope with the courier company’s label “UPS” adhered to it. She handed it to Marianna.

‘Inside that envelope is a letter from your mother, the contents of it outlining a proposition that, in her words, I’d be foolish not to accept.’

Marianna took the envelope, but before she extracted the letter, she studied the peculiar way it had been addressed.

Miss Ella Adams,
C/o Martinsville police station,
Latitude: 36° 41' 29" N
Longitude: 79° 52' 22" W

She pulled the letter from inside to find it sealed in cellophane in order to preserve it; she then began to read to herself.

“Dearest Mother,
I do hope I find you well. Although that can hardly be said for poor Mr Ward now can it, whom, I admit, does deserve to be where he is, though you know just as well as I do, on only two counts of murder, the other nine belonging to you. But that’s by the by. The reason for my contacting you out of the blue like this is both simple and complex at the same time.

Allow me to elaborate, I have a proposition to put to you, one I’m sure will interest both you and the rest of your people.

So here’s the simple part first. I own a business whose primary undertaking is the distillation of donor blood, it comes in, we clean it, and it goes out again. Simple, just like I said. Oh, I’m sorry, did I mention blood? Well, at least now I have your full attention.

And now the complex part. I want you and the rest of your clan to stop taking and killing young girls. In return, I will personally see to it that all of those living in Martinsville will receive a regular supply of blood from my company. And as I will be the only one outside Martinsville who will be aware of our little deal, I will personally deliver the consignment to you each and every month, the exact details of which we can arrange when we meet. So, can I take it that you agree that this is an opportunity you would be foolish not to accept?

On the back of this letter I have included my contact details; so if I haven’t heard from you within the next seven days, I will take it you do not wish to take up my offer.

Sincerely, your daughter,
Celia Brontrose

P.S. Be wise and destroy this letter after you have read it, as it could very easily incriminate both of us, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen.”

Marianna turned the letter over to see the contact details on the reverse; they were indeed those of her mother and the signature looked authentic enough, but that, along with the handwriting, was not beyond forgery. She slipped it back into the envelope.

‘I still don’t understand the significance of me being here.’ she said.

Ella sat once more. ‘I accepted Alice’s proposition purely on the basis that it would save lives. I’ve never liked what we have to do to survive here, Marianna, but it’s a necessary evil none of us were aware of until it was too late, and now we have no choice but to live with it; or starve to death without it.’

‘You do have a choice; you have the choice of using blood taken from cattle. Mother has it delivered to her company on the pretext of using it for research, it does her no harm.’

Ella scoffed. ‘Really, Marianna, your mother has indeed led you a merry dance your whole life. I can assure you that once we get a taste for human blood there is no going back, and furthermore, blood from cattle is certainly not what your mother ingests.’

Marianna looked to the floor, the realisation evident in here eyes of just how deep her mother’s deceit actually went. She lifted her head. ‘You said it was you who accepted the deal but mother told me that Thomas Martins was the one in charge here?’

‘I accepted it becauseThomas would never have agreed to any outsider knowing what goes on here.’

‘Mother isn’t that much of an outsider, this was her home once.’

‘As far as Thomas Martins knew, your mother perished in that fire, so I kept the whole thing from him. The letter, the blood, and where it came from.’

‘But surely he’d find out where it was coming from sooner or later?’

‘So far he hasn’t, and now it’s too late.’

‘Too late?’

‘Yes, Thomas has always been somewhat reclusive; he’d rarely venture beyond his chamber and would refuse to see anyone but me; so all the blood he ingested had to be taken to him. We’d drain it from one particular girl over the period of about a month and store it in refrigerated flasks. So when he was given the blood your mother supplied to us, he suspected nothing.’ Ella shook her head, afforded herself a knowing smile. ‘But I’d forgotten just how devious Alice could really be, and somehow she contaminated the blood she delivered to us. Last month alone over fifty of us perished, all infected with leukaemia, and now Thomas has it, and that’s the reason you’re here.’

‘So that’s what all this is about, you kidnapped me as some kind of sick revenge for what you claim my mother did to you?’

‘No, Marianna, you were taken to help Thomas recover, and with the replication of your stem cells he would then save the rest of us.’

Marianna handed back the envelope. ‘I want to get out of here, right now.’

Ella rose from the chair. ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘But I want you to keep hold of that letter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because now you have a decision to make, a big decision, and only you can make it.’ She unlocked and opened the door. ‘I have a feeling that the authorities are going to be here soon and I intend to surrender what’s left of Martinsville over to them. I have no idea if it’s possible or not, but perhaps someone out there can help us. So when you see your mother again, you can tell her she finally has her wish, Martinsville is finished. Now, put your shoes on and join me downstairs.’

Down in the front hall, Ella removed a thick wooden beam from across the front doors and was about to push the key into the lock when another dull boom, followed by more rumbling, stopped her. She entered the kitchen and descended the steps to the basement to find more dust floating about. And again she wondered what the hell that stupid man was playing at.