Just to make sure that everybody understands what has to be understood: Carol and I were the only ones involved when Tiffany died. Carol found her in her carrier seat, set up on the long table in the hall. Ginny wasn’t there at the time; I don’t know where she’d gone. It was my idea to dedicate her to the Goddess, to baptize her in blood. Carol and I were both going to cut little notches in our wrists, and sprinkle the blood on Tiffany’s head, and make her ours instead of Henry Holborn’s God’s. We took her out to the side terrace near the dining room. Nobody ever goes near there anymore, except to eat when we have formal dinners, and there is an altar there that Dinah and Stelle set up a couple of months ago. After that, I’m not entirely sure what happened. We have a chant we sing that Carol found in an old book in my grandfather’s library. You can find it in there if you look, laid out on the desk near the fire, with a brown leather cover. I forget what the name of it is. We had the chant to sing and we sang it, and then everything seemed to get out of control. I’m not sure I could tell you what happened after that, except that after it was over, Tiffany was dead.
There is nothing on earth that can sober you up like holding the corpse of an infant in your hands. We were standing there on the terrace with a dead baby, and for a while we didn’t know what to do. That was when we decided to put it up in the clearing, near the circle of stones. That was a place that belonged to the Goddess. That was a place where we thought the baby would be at peace. We wrapped Tiffany up in a blanket and started up the hill toward the clearing, going around the back way. There were dozens of people in the study by then and in the living room, too, and we didn’t want to be seen.
Nobody in their right mind would have been out in that weather, but Ginny was, in the woods, just popping out at us where we didn’t expect it. Carol screamed when Ginny ran into us. She was holding the baby and she dropped it. When the baby fell she twisted in the air. The blanket fell off. When Ginny saw the baby hit the ground, she jumped on her, and that was when I first realized we had cut her up. There was blood everywhere, I don’t know where it came from, we all seemed to have too much of it on ourselves. Ginny was just nuts, and I was frantic. I pushed her out of the way and grabbed the body and ran. I went up into the woods as far as I could go, but it wasn’t as far as I wanted to go. I kept thinking that if I could only make it to the circle of stones, everything would be all right. God only knows why I thought that. In the end, though, I could hear Ginny coming back, and David and the others. I couldn’t see much of anything in the wind and the rain. My clothes were soaked through and there was hail coming down. I dropped the baby and started running back to the house. I wanted to be away before they could find me, even though I didn’t think then that they would suspect me of anything.
After that, there isn’t much to tell, except, of course, that I killed Carol, because she was so nervous and because she wanted so much to confess. Yesterday, I still thought that mattered. I still thought I could go on with my life as if nothing at all had happened. Now I realize that I don’t even want to go on with my life. Sometimes I lie in bed and listen to the voice of the Goddess speaking to me, but it is a wicked voice, and I don’t want to talk to it anymore.
You have to be careful, I think, about what you let into your soul, more careful than I have been. Henry Holborn would say that, the way things have been with me, I will spend the rest of eternity hearing the voice of the Goddess, but even at this late date and with everything that has happened, I don’t think he’s right. God or Goddess, Christ or Satan, it all works out the same for me. After this there is nothing but blackness and the rest that is the obliteration, finally, of even the will to move. That’s what I want to be part of now, and that’s what I will be going to, and no matter how anybody reading this may feel about it, I am very glad.
Ginny Marsh had nothing to do with any of this. Her only real crime was to panic so badly that she didn’t know who she was seeing and what she was doing, and under the circumstances, that seems entirely natural to me.
—Zhondra
Gregor put the little stack of papers into a neat pile and stuffed them back into their small square envelope. Clayton Hall was staring at him. So were the women on the terrace. In the background, he could hear the shrill wailing of sirens. Any minute now, the house would be full of people. Gregor knew they had to get to work before then.