Legacy Of Terror

sensed something was wrong, though everything looked to be in order. For a moment, he remained on the threshold where a backward step would return him to the crisp snow and the cold December wind. Then he swung the door shut and walked to the drawing room where, at that hour, he expected to find Amelia.
    She was not there.
    “Amelia?”
    She did not answer.
    In the upstairs back room, the grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. No one had set the seven day time mechanism in motion for more than five years. Who had started it now?
    “Amelia!” he called.
    Silence.
    He looked through the downstairs and found it uninhabited.
    He went upstairs.
    At the top landing, he was again possessed of that semi- clairvoyance that had forced him to halt just within the front door. Something was very, very wrong.
    He wanted to go to the back room to see why the grandfather clock had been started, but he looked, first, into the nursery where the twins, Lana and Laura, lay in their cribs.
    Cribs, then.
    And the blood.
    He did not know what the blood was. From across the room, it looked colorless, a dark substance running along the slats and legs of the cribs, staining the rug under them.
    Hesitantly, he walked toward the children. They lay very still in the shadows, far too still.
    He called softly, using the names which they could not yet recognize as their own, but names which he cherished.
    The children did not whimper, did not move.
    Then he was close enough to see the blood for what it was and to stare, morbidly, into the deep gashes of their awful wounds. Time passed. How much time, he was never later able to ascertain. Indeed, it was as if the laws of the universe, the mechanisms of physical Nature, had stopped altogether. He might have been trapped within a bubble of non-time, staring out through the fragile walls of his prison at a frozen landscape. Whenever time began to flow again and the bubble dissolved around him, he let out a low, wild moan that swiftly escalated into a scream.
    He turned and stumbled to the corridor.
    The floor seemed to shift like the hinged base of a funhouse in a carnival, and it forced him to lean against the wall as he walked, lest he be pitched forward and lose his balance.
    He found the room with the grandfather clock. The glass front of the case stood open, smeared with blood. The brassy pendulum was tarnished by years of neglect and by similar crimson stains.
    “Amelia!” He thought he called her name. But when he listened to himself, he heard a wordless cry, a scream forced through a dry, cracked throat.
    He turned and went back down the corridor, looking into each room, not certain what he would do when he found her. And then he came upon her; she had returned to the nursery and knelt by the cribs, her knees in red puddles.
    She did not look at him.
    She stared through the bars of Lana's crib, at the lifeless form curled there.
    Her hair was in disarray, dangling along her cheeks, frizzled out over her collar as if charged with static electricity. Her clothes were stained and wrinkled, marked with huge patches of perspiration. Whatever long afternoon of madness had possessed her, it had taken quite a toll before culminating in the murders of the twins.
    “Amelia,” he said softly, standing in the middle of the room, halfway between the cribs and the door. This time, he did not imagine the call, but truly spoke to her. He was finished screaming. For now.
    She looked up. “They wouldn't stop crying,” she said.
    The worst of it was her voice. It was perfectly normal. It had not the slightest touch of insanity in it. It was cool, throaty and sensuous, as always. Before, it had been one of her finest characteristics. Now, it was obscene and disgusting.
    “You've killed them,” he said.
    “If they wouldn't have cried so much,” she said.
    He could not think what to say.
    “I started the grandfather clock,” she said. “Did you see?” She wiped at a strand of hair with a red-tinted hand. She said, “When the clock was working, we didn't have any twins. Now it's running again, but the twins are still here. I wish they'd go away. I wish things would be like they once were.”
    “The clock hasn't run in five years,” he said. It made no sense. He was beginning to sound as deranged as she.
    “It's running now,” Amelia said. “And it will be fine in just a little while. Everything will be fine. The twins will be gone and, I'll be happy again, and Lee and I can go places like we used to. Two children