blood until they can hold no more and then the blood will rise up and soak the rugs and curtains of the houses. The blood of the master and his mistress and all their progeny shall run. She is closer, the spiller of the blood. I am no more but she is eternal."
"Oh….oh, Edmund," Madeline cried as she regained control of her entire visage.
"Madeline, is it you? What or who in God's name was that?"
"It was the blood spirit. I told you – the blood speaks, though I've never had it do so in that direct and obvious manner before." She paused a long moment, staring at the kitchen table scarred by sharp knives and suddenly her eyes rolled back into her head, showing only the whites and traces of the fleshy plum ligatures and bloody veins that kept them in place. I had learned that this startling motion was a precursor to her visions. She once described it to me by saying that her pupils would turn their gaze inward as though searching her brain for something and then pictures would appear in her pupils for her mind's eye to see. What she saw now was the evisceration of Maria Poule. She screamed with the curdling, high-pitched noise of an hysterical child.
"My god, Madeline, what now? What is it? Tell me what I can do – I can't bear to see you like this," I whined, helplessly." Her pupils returned my gaze as she steadied herself, breathing-in deeply and exhaling fully several times before she recounted what she had seen – the horrific murder of that most unfortunate woman. She then said quietly:
"I know what needs to be done, now. I know what I have to do."
"What do you mean, Maddie? What do you have to do?"
She ignored my question and simply said, "Let's finish our tea in the parlor, Eddie." And so we did and after draining an entire pot, she got up, left the parlor and put on a warm coat in the hallway.
She was already down the stairs when I shouted at her to wait for me but as I advanced, the parlor doors shut in my face & locked – I was astonished as Madeline called back to me her apologies.
"I'm sorry, Edmund," she shouted through the closed door, "but I must go alone."
Where was she going? I wondered as I watched her cross the square – finding her steps by gaslight and the glow of the moon at the close of a dark winter's day – exiting it by way of the arch opposite the house, snow falling from the sky, blood oozing from her touch, the snow erasing the urban scene as gum rubber does a graphite sketch, leaving only the blank white page and it erased Madeline, too. She disappeared – where had she gone, we asked ourselves a thousand times over the ensuing days – it would be weeks before we would discover the unimaginable answer; that as surely as Hatotep had pushed into our own era, so had she been pulled back into his.
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