Chapter 1: Les Tremeres
Antigone Baines awoke with a start, too frightened to move. Her limbs were as stiff as those of a corpse. They trembled slightly as if disturbed by the vibration of footsteps overhead -- a stranger walking upon her grave.
The unsettling image was perhaps a shade too close to the truth. With a shudder, she forced it from her mind. She pressed her body back down into the wrinkled bedclothes that still unmistakably bore the outline of her slumbering form. As if she might sink from sight altogether. To lie unnoticed. Forgotten.
There was a solace in being unnoticed. It was an art that Antigone had long cultivated. There was a face she presented to the world -- the face of a young woman of no more than twenty-eight years. But even she had to admit to herself that it was no more real than the grainy, yellowed photographs relegated to the very last pages of the family album. It may have been her own face once, years ago. But if it were, there was no way to prove it now. And if it were not, there was no one left who might accuse her or say how she might have come by it.
It was a pleasant enough face. Smiling. Some would say pretty. But it wasn't a face you could look at without wondering. Wondering at the lack of color (like in an old photograph) in the youthful cheeks. Or at the eyes. They were old eyes, there was no other way of describing them. Not old like grandmother-eyes, with the skin pinched up around the edges like piecrust. Old like the eyes of serpents are old. Seeing back to the beginnings of things.
Antigone lay very still, alone in the cocoon of the darkness. There was no hammering of blood in her ears, nor racing of her heart to intrude upon the absolute silence. She strained to pick out the sound of the stranger's breathing.
Nothing.
Her body was bathed in blood-sweat. Her hands were clammy with the sweet sticky vitae. The satiny sheets were already ruined.
She forced herself to calm, but those eyes -- those serpent's eyes -- they kept rigidly open, unblinking. They refused to close again upon nightmare; they refused to pick out any details of the shadowy objects in the room. To give them form was, in some inexplicable way, to give them life.
It was some time before she could convince herself that she was safe, within the familiar confines of the novice domicilia. A nightmare, nothing more. For the third night in a row, Antigone had dreamt of the Children Down the Well.
It was always the same -- the faces of the children peering up at her from their watery tomb. Antigone could find no hint of accusation in their glassy unblinking eyes, nor words of condemnation on their cold bluish lips. But the very sight of them sufficed to fill her with unreasoning dread.
Their eyes entreated her, pleaded with her. But their blue-tinged lips could give no voice to their desperate need. She could never wrest from them the secret of what it was they expected of her.
Antigone steeled her resolve. She allowed her eyelids to droop slightly. She knew that the faces would be there still, awaiting her return. Round and bright as moons, smiling up at her from just beneath the surface of the still water. Infinitely patient.
Only they were not there. No children, no well. Only darkness awaited her, damning in its mundanity. Much to her dismay, Antigone realized that the Children's sudden absence was more ominous than even their presence.
Where was the young girl of five years that was always the first to pluck (with pudgy blue fingers) at the hem of Antigone's robes? In her mind, she could see the girl still, could trace the gentle curve of her smooth, unblemished cheek. The child's green eyes were as large and perfectly round as saucers. Her long black hair fanned out all around the bright face like a fishing net cast out upon the surface of the dark waters. Tangled strands lapped gently at the slick side of the well. But now, she was gone.
The faces had never moved nor spoke before. Although they were calm, almost serene, Antigone knew that their deaths had not been quiet ones. They had been drowned, all of them. Cast into the well, abandoned to panic, flounder and sink beneath the chill waters. Lost to sight. Lost to memory.
If only they would stay down.
Antigone had always suspected that the well was secretly brimming full of youth, swarming with bright golden eyes, buoyed up ever nearer to the well's lip by the sheer press of bodies beneath.
She had always imagined that some night soon she might awake to find that they had spilled out over the brink of the well -- crossing the line into the waking world. It was not a comforting thought.
Antigone did not fear death. It was something of a childhood companion of hers. She could remember no fewer than six distinct encounters with death. Seven separate lifetimes. It was easy, really, once you knew how. The trick was in the names. There was a magic in names.
The earliest one that she could recall was Antigone Ruth Scoville, but there was no telling how many more might have slipped past her before she had caught on to how the game was played. Years later she would go back and recheck the birth records at the Scoville Congregationalist Church in Scoville, Massachusetts and find that one Antigone Ruth was born to Captain and Mrs. James Scoville on the twenty-first day of February in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and one.
02/21/1901. Zero plus two, plus two plus one, plus one plus nine plus zero plus one equals sixteen. One plus six equals seven. It was her grandmother (on her mother's side) who had first pointed out that seven was a very important number for Antigone. A magical number. That much had stuck with her.
She repeated the comforting numerology like a mantra. It helped her fend off the yawning chasm of dread that was opening within her. She did not fear her own death, but she did fear the Children, their expectation, their all-consuming need. And she feared that, once again, she would be unable to help them.
From somewhere close at hand, Antigone's straining ears picked out a mournful sound. A single rasping sob. Then the silence settled over her once again.
Only one of the other of the novices, she thought. But the sound was enough. It broke the spell the Children had cast over her. The rigid paralysis. It gave her something to focus on. She swung her feet out over the edge of the bed before she had a chance to change her mind.
Antigone slid her robe over her head in one fluid shrug. Her bare feet squelched slightly on the cool tiled floor. After a few steps, the trail of bloody footprints became nothing more than indistinct red smudges as she padded quietly out of the door of the domicilia. Her feet carried her instinctively along the familiar path down towards the chantry's security control room.
Already, the intensity of the night tremors -- les tremeres -- had lost its hold upon her. With each step, she grew more alert, poised, professional, deadly. By the time she reached the control room, there was little trace of the frightened novice about her. She had donned her death mask, crafted herself into a veritable visitation from the grave.