Read Online American Gothic by Michael Romkey - Free Book Online Page B

light at the edge of the gypsy’s mouth became the serpent’s teeth, appearing from beneath her upper lip.
    Peregrine had not discovered what he’d come to the house on Chestnut Street to learn, but it no longer mattered to him. The bliss enveloped him, erasing all memories, cares, and intentions. He had long since ceased participating in life except insofar as it allowed him to pursue vengeance against the people who murdered his family. This final act severing him from the world would be but a formality, the formal ending to something that in actuality had been over a long time ago.
    “What will you give me as a memento mori to remember you when you are dead?” she said in his ear.
    Their lips touched briefly before she lowered her face into his shoulder. The ecstasy crashing into him seemed without limit. No wonder Evangeline and Mrs. Foster had gone to their deaths moaning with delight. Who could resist pleasure a million times more powerful than anything that came out of an opium pipe?
    Her nimble fingers had opened his tunic and were drawing down the collar of his shirt, her lips parted against the skin of his throat. Peregrine closed his eyes, waiting for it, wanting it, anxious for her to possess him completely, and for the peaceful nothingness that would follow.
    The ugly hiss destroyed the moment, breaking the spell as completely as a rock thrown through a windowpane. Peregrine felt himself thrown roughly back. Disoriented and staggering, he saw the gypsy push herself up from the table, her upturned face contorted with rage at an apparition on the ceiling she alone could see.
    Peregrine’s hands came up defensively, but she flew past him and was gone, leaving one bookcase turned out into the room at an angle. Through the opening, Peregrine saw the revelers still circled around the piano. Behind them, sprawled across the settee like a discarded doll missing a shoe, was Mrs. Foster’s dead body.

9
    Les Vampires
    T HE CORPSES HAD accumulated in the mansion during the brief time Peregrine was sequestered within the hidden library. No one seemed to notice him as he walked through the music room, stepping over the body of a young man stretched out between the two parlors. Behind him, the pianist began to play Mozart’s
A Little Night Music.
    The foyer was deserted, without a doorman or servants to bring him his cloak—or to dissuade him from leaving. The double glass doors remained open, with only the screen outer doors separating him from escaping into the night.
    Peregrine did not move. He stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, trying to make up his mind. He was in a house of death, and he had no more illusions about being able to control his future if he stayed there, beyond seeing himself become one of the monsters’ next victims.
    But
she
was in the house. He knew it without knowing quite how he knew it. Surely she had brought him there for some reason. Peregrine did not think it could have been to kill him, or he would have been dead already, at her hand, or the gypsy’s, or one of the other blood drinkers. Why engage him in such a living game of chess, moving and countermoving herself and her deadly chess pieces, unless she was building to something more than Peregrine being slaughtered—or allowed to walk out the door?
    A cool breeze blew in through the screens, flowing past Peregrine as he stood rooted, like water dividing around a boulder in the stream. During the intermittent pauses between the phrases of Mozart from the farther room, Peregrine heard the faint sound of bamboo wind chimes. It reminded him of something, although he wasn’t sure what. And then it came to him, the connection to chimes he’d heard that night in the opium den, a sound like the clicking of finger bones laced together with thread.
    Peregrine tilted his head, straining to hear the sound. There was more than an overwhelming sense of remembrance or an unnerving moment of déjà vu. A chill of cold sweat