Legacy Of Terror

are plenty, Jake. Lee will agree. All I did was turn the clock back.”
    He had walked the rest of the way to her, though he avoided looking at the dead twins. He said, “You killed them!”
    “Turned the clock back,” she countered.
    Despite her disarranged hair and the wilted look of her clothes, her face was triumphantly beautiful.
    That, too, seemed wrong to him. He wanted to make her understand all this and then watch her grow old and ugly within the instant.
    “You stabbed your own children, over and over and over. You're a murderer, Amelia.”
    “Didn't you see the clock?”
    For some reason beyond his understanding, he had to hurt her and knew that the clock was the avenue of attack through which she was most vulnerable. He said, “The clock isn't running.”
    “It is!”
    “I was just in to see it,” he said. “It's stopped again.”
    “No.”
    “Rusted workings.”
    “No!”
    “The clock won't ever work again.”
    She leaped to her feet, her face suddenly contorted. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a wild, wide leer of a smile. Her nostrils were flared. Her eyes were wide and shocked, staring into the distance.
    He reached for her.
    She stepped back, raised the knife and swung it at him.
    He had forgotten the knife or had thought she had dropped it. She had been holding it at her side, half concealed in her hand and by the folds of her dress. He tried to back up, failed to avoid the blow. The blade scored his shoulder and brought an intense pain that dredged up the abandoned scream.
    He fell, clutching his arm, feeling blood rush through his fingers. Unconsciousness swooped over him like a great, dark bird. He knew that he must avoid it, or Amelia would murder him while he lay dazed. But the bird was too heavy and too insistent. It settled on his face and blanked out the world.
    When he woke, he had lost a cup or more of blood, though the wound only dribbled now. He was alone in the nursery with the corpses, but he was desperate to escape from there, even if it meant summoning Amelia by the noise of his movements.
    In the corridor, he staggered toward the stairs and started down them, wary of the dense shadows of the lower floor. But when he reached the bottom, he realized he could stop worrying now. When she had fled from the upstairs, she must have tripped on the carpeting and fallen down the steps. Her neck was broken, and she lay in an untidy bundle on the last riser.
    Curiously, aware now that he was in no personal danger and that the nightmare was drawing toward an end when he could get help, he did not react as logically as he should have. He stood there, over the dead body of the mad woman, and for a long while, he screamed, as if the explosion of air and noise carried the despair from him.
    Christmas Eve, 1957.

Chapter 8
    Elaine closed the door to Jacob Matherly's room and leaned against it for support. She had managed to sit through the grisly story of the Christmas Eve murders and had waited with Jacob until the night's sedative had taken effect and he had fallen asleep. In all that time, she had tried to keep in mind that her own actions were not important. What mattered was making Jacob feel at ease and giving him no need to worry more than he had. He was, after all else was considered, her patient, her very reason for being here, the center of her new life. So she had commiserated with him and tried to soothe him, had done much tongue-clucking and hand-patting, all the while forcing her fear deep inside where he would not be able to see it. Now, out of the old man's sight at last, the fear rose up and bubbled through her darkly.
    What was she doing in this house?
    Oh, yes, there was the job, the money and the room and board-and the feeling that she was getting ahead for the first time in her life, standing on her own feet. But that was not enough to keep her here, was it? She could as easily obtain a job in a happier home, away from the brooding evil that hung like a pall over the Matherly place. First of all, there was that fifteen-year-old double-murder and all that such a nightmare left behind it, the residue of insanity which no one would ever be able to cleanse from these rooms or from the minds of those people who had lived through the aftermath of the killings. And, much closer to home, there was Paul Honneker's drinking, which disturbed her more than she had realized. She had never liked being around drunks, for they were unstable, cut off from reality, too prone to fantasize. And