Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  Maxine’s arm found its way around her husband’s waist. She pressed her hip firmly against his; a silent plea for him to not stray from her, not here, not tonight.

  The party appeared, much to Maxine’s horror, to have divided itself according to fusty traditional roles. In one corner, Xavier’s two elder brothers nursed scotches with their father, who looked every inch the elder statesman with his slender face and tamed white hair and eyes like those of a Siberian Husky. Across the room, meanwhile, the wives were helping Mother set out the last of the serving dishes.

  Maxine had every intention of following Xavier and inserting herself in the men’s corner, but Xavier’s mother just at that instant announced that dinner was served.

  Noting that the place-cards stationed the spouses next to one another brought Maxine a small measure of relief. Xavier pulled out her chair, as did his brothers for their respective wives. Mrs. Whitlock, however, had to seat herself. Maxine found it strange that the father’s outdated views on gender she’d suspected upon entering the room apparently stopped short of chivalry. Both parents assumed the throne-like seats at either end of the table.

  Maxine’s movements as she passed the serving china around were as stiff and unnatural as her smile, but as the evening wore on, she found, to her immense relief, that Xavier’s family was cheerier and looser than she’d assumed. His father asked interestedly about her job in human resources, about her background in drama. Several times the entire group erupted with laughter. Later, the discussion grew sombre and empathetic as the topic shifted to the violent unrest that was intensifying south of the border.

  “Well,” Xavier’s father said, “let us hope the new year we’re ringing in tomorrow night brings better things to all.”

  The party raised their wine glasses to this wish, and then Xavier’s mother began to automatically clear the dishes from the table and onto the wooden serving cart.

  “Let me help,” implored Maxine. There came polite refusals, then polite insistences. Finally, Xavier’s mother half-suggested, half-commanded that Xavier take Maxine for a walk of the grounds.

  *

  Without, the night was cold and clear, which Maxine found refreshing after the house’s warmth and the bounty of food that had been served. Their journey had involved a turbulent flight, an overly complicated car rental at the airport, followed by a white-knuckle drive across the unploughed country roads that wound toward their terminus at the family estate. These factors, along with their unexpected early evening tryst, meant that Maxine hadn’t yet had an opportunity to fully drink in her surroundings.

  The snowfall, which had caused great stress to her and Xavier earlier in the day, was now a source of magic; it padded the grounds like a pristine quilt, it muted what few night sounds there were out here, it even cast off the occasional glitter when the moon shone upon it at just the right angle.

  As she walked arm-in-arm with her husband, Maxine came to appreciate that the care and attention that Xavier’s mother lavished upon the inside of the house extended to the property as well. The perennial hedges were trimmed to symmetrical perfection. The seasonal plants were tidily mummified in burlap, guarding them for the spring to come. The grid of stone walkways that ran through the gardens had already been salted and thus stood out like a maze of black marble laid within the snow.

  This obvious meticulousness caused Maxine to doubt herself once her eyes fell upon the ugly little structure that slumped at the far end of the grounds. It was the size and design of a large wooden shed. Its roof was noticeably stooped, and its lone uncovered window was so clouded with accumulated grime it was as if pollen had been baked into the pane. The abode sat nestled among ugly brambles. Its wooden frame was colourless. It was almost as if it was a great toadstool that had sprouted up from the earth; the kind of magic hovel Maxine had read about in fairy tales when she was a child.

  “Where are you going?”

  Xavier’s voice came from behind, rather than beside her. This alerted Maxine to the fact that she had somehow unconsciously slipped free of her man’s arm and had begun to stray on her own down the sloping lawn toward the strange little dwelling.

  “I wanted to get a better look,” she explained awkwardly, covertly straining her eyes to spy whatever she could through the murky glass. (She saw nothing.) “I’m sorry.”

  He stepped off the walkway and added a second set of footprints alongside hers.

  “No need to apologize,” he said.

  “What is it, a storage shed?”

  “I think it was a gatehouse once upon a time. Not sure why my parents haven’t torn it down, to be honest with you.”

  A wind pushed over the grounds, rattling the settled snow from the tree boughs and the shrubberies. It also rattled Maxine’s bones.

  “Come on,” Xavier said, wrapping his arm across her shoulders. “Let’s get you in front of the fireplace and get a warm brandy in your hand.”

  The offer was music to Maxine’s ears, but her snifter was still half-full when she felt the weight of the day’s travels pressing down upon her limbs and eyelids. She tried to politely hide her persistent yawns with her hand, but Xavier noticed right away and announced that they were turning in for the night.

  Upstairs, the spacious bed felt gloriously supple beneath her tired limbs. She fell asleep before Xavier had switched off his bedside reading lamp.

  Perhaps it was the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, but sleep refused to hold her for anything more than a few short bursts. She reposed, her limbs aching and eyes burning. She listened to the furnace pressing warm air through the floor vents, watched the black kaleidoscope of tree limb shadows as they splayed across the high white ceiling.

  Suddenly there was sunlight.

  Maxine was confused by the impossibility of the golden light that had begun to glimmer upon the ceiling and the far wall. Dawn was still many hours away; a fact that flirted with Maxine’s curious nature. She rose from the bed and moved to the window, shivering at the arctic draft that oozed through the window’s edges.

  The vantage from the mansion’s third storey only deepened Maxine’s already great appreciation of the property, both its scope and its pristineness. Up here, she was able to see the source of the golden light quite plainly: it was pouring from the misshapen shack in the greenery. Seeing now the sheer symmetry of the gardens emphasized how ugly and incongruous the little structure was. It did not belong here.

  ‘Maybe it’s you who doesn’t belong,’ Maxine said to herself, then immediately hushed her doubting mind.

  The golden light suddenly became a backdrop for flickering movements. Black shapes began to flitter in the micro-cabin’s tiny window; shapes that became elongated into a mass of lean, ropy things that pulsed and flexed like characters in a shadow-play, with the pearly snow acting as a screen. Maxine stared hard at the guttering light from the window, wanting deeply, though inexplicably, to see, to know what was occurring beyond it.

  A few moments later she received her answer, or a portion of at it least.

  The amber light shrank and was extinguished, and shortly thereafter a figure emerged from the micro-cabin. It turned and secured the stout wooden door, then made haste along one of the stone paths that led from the gardens to the great house.

  Identification was impossible at first, given Maxine’s distance, as well as the flowing, shapeless garment that the figure wore. But once the figure reached the pooled light from the house’s security lamps Maxine could see beyond any doubt that it was Mrs. Whitlock. The colourless overcoat she wore flapped like a cloak in the frigid night wind.

  *

  “Good morning, my dear,” Mrs. Whitlock said as Maxine entered the sitting room. The warmth in her voice was a quality Maxine had not detected on the afternoon of her and Xavier’s arrival.

  “Good morning,” she returned with reticence.

  “Slept well, I hope.”

  “Very,” Maxine lied. “How did you sleep?”

  “A few hours,
but enough. At my age one doesn’t need much sleep.”

  Maxine’s next attempt to further probe Mrs. Whitlock for answers slipped away when the entire entourage began spilling into the room in procession. Morning greetings were exchanged, and, by the hand of the matriarch, breakfast was served by the fire.

  Only after the meal was done and the other guests were sitting lazily did Maxine manage to attain a fresh clue to the mystery that, for reasons she could not comprehend, was becoming an obsession with her. Her discovery came when she pushed through the swinging door of the kitchen to ask Mrs. Whitlock if she could help in any way.

  At that instant, Mrs. Whitlock was exiting the door that led from the large kitchen to the back gardens. She hadn’t noticed Maxine entering the kitchen, but Maxine had noticed Mrs. Whitlock reaching behind the large china hutch, where she retrieved a key.

  Exhilarated by the extent of what she might learn this morning, Maxine scuttled across the kitchen’s marble floor and crouched at the base of one of the sparkling windows.

  Mrs. Whitlock marched briskly along the stone walkway. When she crossed onto the snow, she revealed that she was carting the kitchen’s dustbin with her, lugging the cumbersome thing by its rim. Maxine watched this elegant woman plunk the dustbin down onto the snowbank. The matriarch began to struggle with the cabin’s door. Perhaps the old lock had shrunken from the cold and thus was refusing Mrs. Whitlock’s secret key, but eventually it gave. The old woman took up the dustbin and disappeared inside the shack.

  Maxine sped to the sitting room, shoehorned her slight frame onto the sofa next to Xavier, and then shoehorned her way into the conversation. When Mrs. Whitlock re-entered the room some time later, she did not appear to suspect that anything was amiss. But the old woman’s face was flushed. Now and again she reached one of her tapered hands to adjust the bun in her hair, which was visibly looser than it had been at breakfast. Mr. Whitlock took no notice of his wife’s rather haggard state, nor did any of his sons, or their spouses. This fact pained Maxine. It saddened her to think of the endless, exhausting chores Mrs. Whitlock must have faced daily in order to keep the great house in such gleaming condition.

  Greater than her empathy, however, was Maxine’s thirst to uncover why the old woman went to such lengths to keep the tiny cabin a secret.

  Her opportunity to discover this secret did not come until much later in the day. The guests and Mr. Whitlock had frittered away the afternoon on board games (‘Bored games,’ Maxine had joked to herself) while Mrs. Whitlock laboured over a pork loin dinner in the kitchen. It was a little after four when she came bursting into the sitting room. She was nearly frantic over the fact that she had forgotten to buy both the heavy cream and the chicken stock required to make the loin’s herb sauce.

  “Well, we’d run out and get them for you,” Mr. Whitlock began, “but I’m afraid we’ve all had a few.” He held up his whiskey glass as evidence.

  “Never you mind, I’ll go,” replied Mrs. Whitlock. “But I’d better leave now. The stores are all closing early for New Year’s.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on the loin if you like, Mrs. Whitlock,” volunteered Maxine. She stood and stepped away from the gaming table.

  Mrs. Whitlock puckered her face. Was this tiny gesture (which Maxine had given for wholly selfish reasons) truly enough to drive the woman to tears? She reached out and clutched Maxine’s left wrist and thanked her profusely.

  Maxine entered the kitchen and pretended to hear Mrs. Whitlock’s whirl of instructions, when Maxine was simply waiting for her opportunity.

  It came the instant she saw Mrs. Whitlock’s sleek car verging off the winding driveway and onto the road toward town. Maxine abandoned her charade of stirring and fussing in favor of searching behind the china hutch. She caught sight of the dustbin, which now stood empty by the corn whisk broom in the corner.

  Turning her attention back to the task at hand, Maxine found the key dangling from a small brass hook that had been screwed into the back of the hutch. She snatched it, then paused to listen to the boisterous laughter from the players in the sitting room. Assured that they were too engrossed in their game to check on her, Maxine slipped out the back door.

  The sunbeams must have been melting the snow for some time, for the gardens had lost their smooth carpet of white. They were now a shoddy, patchwork place. Lumpy mounds of mud and matted grass jutted up in between pockets of dirty slush. The stone walkways hosted puddles where twigs and old leaves floated, resembling pools of loose-leaf tea.

  Before she crossed the muddy slope to reach the cabin, Maxine checked over both shoulders. She was petrified of discovery.

  The planks of the narrow porch were twisted and caused Maxine’s ankles to wobble as she strained to find her footing. The little square window was at her shoulder now, inviting her to partake of its view at last. She cupped her hands on either side of her face and squinted to gain a preview of the space she planned to invade.

  Through the foggy glass Maxine was able to discern a single stout room. A small pallet mattress lay on the floor, framed by brittle leaves. A canvas tarp had been draped over whatever else was stored inside. Maxine could just make out a tall sheeted form, like a ghost in a children’s storybook. The sight of it unnerved her, and she wondered if this was why the image of the shrouded figure endured throughout the ages. Perhaps there is some profound quality in the shape seen-and-yet-unseen, a quality that touches us at our core.

  The milder day allowed the key to fit into the lock much easier for Maxine than it had for Mrs. Whitlock that morning. Maxine knew that her time was limited. For all she knew, Xavier was calling for her from the games table, or perhaps he was standing in the empty kitchen at that very instant, worried or furious over her absence. But she would not allow her fears to dissuade her. Instead Maxine stepped into the cramped cabin and shut its door.

  The first thing Maxine experienced inside the cabin was heat. It was the kind of arid, leeching warmth given off by cheap electric heaters. She could feel the static electricity building on her clothing, feel the sweat developing under her arms and at the back of her neck. Being in here put Maxine in mind of a hothouse, but instead of offering her the fragrance of orchids, this space assaulted her olfactory sense with an appalling stench.

  The air within was not simply stale, it was thick with the stink of accumulated filth. Dust had not merely gathered here, it seemed to have been cultivated. Great grey mounds of it stood in the corners and along the baseboards. Spiders had been left to weave their silk freely; their creations hung in sweeping cascades from the low ceiling like fishnets. Particles of dust rode in on Maxine’s breath. She felt them lining her nostrils. She sneezed loudly several times.

  Was this Mrs. Whitlock’s grand secret, the fact that she used this cabin as a receptacle? Maxine felt disappointed, but also faintly empowered. It was strangely reassuring to realize that all the matriarch’s obsessive cleaning meant that she simply shooed every speck of her family’s filth from the great house to here. This shack was the proverbial rug under which Mrs. Whitlock swept everything she did not want others to see. But if dirt was the worst thing the old woman was hiding, Maxine felt ashamed for suspecting something worse. What was dirt anyway but tiny specks of the past? The hair and skin and other substances of the living, ones that time flenses from us with metaphysical patience, pecking away at us until we ultimately become…nothing.

  The morbidity of this line of thought weighed heavily on Maxine until she heard someone sigh inside the cabin. At that instant, her melancholia slipped into icy fear.

  It was a low, protracted sound; less an expression of despair, more a moan of great release.

  ‘I am alone in here. I am.’

  The tall shrouded object now haunted Maxine’s peripheral vision. She felt herself shudder. She had to will her head to turn and face the thing head-on.

  It was a lumpy, shapeless mass whose height equalled her own. She looked to the filthy floor and discovered a pair of wooden claw-f
oot carvings poking out from beneath the tarp’s hem.

  Entranced, titillated, she reached out and peeled back the tarp, revealing a pair of slender wooden posts. Lifting the covering further still, Maxine found herself facing a blurry reflection of herself.

  What was hidden beneath the tarp was a floor-length standing mirror. The glass was tapered too sharply at one end and was too swollen at its base to be a true oval. Its shape was nearer to a teardrop. The frame and legs were of cherrywood and had been carved in a highly baroque style, with undulating C-scrolls and voluted forms. The frame seemed to seethe with energy, to pulse and throb. This illusion was aided by the wavy looking-glass, which appeared like a heaving sea that was frozen mid-wave.

  But the illusion quickly became palpable. Maxine could see movement. Something was shifting in the room behind her. In the mirror she saw a great shape rising from the dust. It distended and stretched. Its bulk quickly darkened the sullied pane of the cabin’s only window. Again, there came a deep moan of release.

  Enflamed with panic, Maxine flung the tarp back across the standing mirror and flung the cabin door open. She’d accidently left the key in the lock; a mistake for which she was now grateful, for it meant less time fumbling to fill the slit. Snapping the lock, she held the key in her fist and ran wildly for the great house.

  Once back inside the kitchen, Maxine’s terror was slightly abated when she found the dinner just as she’d left it and heard the gamers laughing in the sitting room. She returned the key to its hook and joined her husband. A few moments later she spotted Mrs. Whitlock’s car creeping up the driveway.