Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  “Why not? Are you scared to?”

  “Yes.”

  The frankness of Desdemona’s answer caught Celeste off guard.

  “But it’s not like we’d get caught. Mother will probably be away for a while. Besides, even if she did catch us, we could just say it was your idea. She’d forgive you. You’re her favourite.”

  “I’m not her favourite.”

  “She named you after someone she loved and lost. And Mother’s told me that she and Father had expected you, that they’d tried really hard to get you here. I was an accident.”

  “Don’t twist Mother’s words,” commanded Desdemona. “She said you were a surprise. She never called you an accident. And why?”

  Celeste’s reply was low and mutilated.

  “Why?” Desdemona repeated.

  “Because there are no accidents.” Celeste delivered this statement with a roll of her eyes, this rule of the house which Mother had drummed into them over the years. When she saw her sister rise and begin collecting the dishes, Celeste asked, “So can we?”

  “Can we what?”

  “Go through Mother’s things!”

  “No.”

  “But I had a feeling that we’re supposed to,” added Celeste.

  “For real you had a feeling?”

  Celeste nodded emphatically. Desdemona sighed.

  “I won’t wreck anything, I promise. And if we get caught I’ll tell Mother you didn’t know about it. Okay?”

  “We can look, but that’s all.”

  Celeste jumped from her chair.

  At Desdemona’s insistence, their pace slowed as they crossed the foyer and began their ascent of the staircase, which was spiralled like a vast fossil. Although they moved gingerly upon each step, the fine old wood groaned with their every movement. The daylight that illuminated the foyer through the high turret windows was dull and murky, touching the room with the atmosphere of late evening rather than morning.

  They moved across the stair-head like stage play thieves; tiptoeing, their backs stooped.

  Mother and Father’s room seemed uncharacteristically small and musty. The tall windows were veiled in ivory sheers. The great house was old and draughty, Desdemona knew. But this knowledge hardly lessened the unnerving sight of the sheers billowing out from the panes like sheeted ghosts. Celeste seemed to take no notice of this effect. She was already at Mother’s dresser.

  The top drawer wobbled and squeaked as Celeste struggled to wrest it open. Fearing that it might slide out and injure her younger sister (or worse still, damage Mother’s property), Desdemona assisted.

  Items of silk and lace frothed up like sea-foam from the opened drawer, the sight of which immediately caused Desdemona to regret permitting this peculiar safari. But Celeste appeared unfazed. She plunged her smallish hands into the bundle and began to fish.

  “What are you looking for?” Desdemona whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” cried Celeste before letting out a giggle.

  “Just hurry please.” Her anxieties had a basis. She had enjoyed similar explorations when she was an only child. In Father’s drawers she’d discovered a brittle manila envelope filled with etchings…etchings that had jabbed hooks into her mind and had yet to release her; depictions of people conjoined in ways that made them resemble mongrels, things found only in the strangest fables. Desdemona prayed that her sister would be spared such an ordeal.

  “Found it!” Celeste said triumphantly. Her hand emerged clutching a small crushed velvet pouch the colour of ground turmeric. Immediately she began to tug at the drawstring.

  Desdemona clamped her hand over Celeste’s. “That wasn’t our agreement. I said you could look.”

  “But this is important! My feeling, remember? It was for all of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we need to do some things ‘cos we’re all in this; you, Mother, Father…others.”

  Desdemona released her grip. “Which others?”

  Celeste puckered her lips, which were conch-shell pink.

  When no reply came Desdemona asked a second question: “What things do we need to do?”

  “Wait. First!” Celeste moved to the great four-poster bed and began to shake the pouch violently. A shower of cards splayed across the bed. Desdemona stepped forward and looked upon the array of cards that covered the crisp duvet like vivid scales. Most of the cards were face down, showing only the uniform backing of a Flemish cross and lotus flowers. Some, however, had landed face up, creating a tapestry of celestial bodies, castle keeps, long-faced hermits, Queens, shadow beetles, coins, goblets of radiant wine.

  “The one I need should be over…here,” Celeste explained, passing her hand above one particular patch of the bed. In figure eights she moved her arm, until it suddenly halted as though something unseen had grabbed her thin wrist. Celeste slapped the back of one of the cards and turned it over. “That’s it!”

  The card’s face depicted a figure (whether male or female, Desdemona could not tell) lying face-down on a bed of pale earth. A maroon cloak draped the figure’s hips. Its head was turned to face a crepuscular sky. A battery of swords pinioned the body to the ground, having been plunged (wielded by whose hands, Desdemona did not wish to know) through limbs and trunk. Bright flags flapped from the handles of each sword, a different colour for each sword. The border of the card resembled brushed copper. The Latin words Decem Gladiorum. Ruina appeared in a thick black typeface.

  Celeste snatched up the card and charged for the door.

  “Wait! Where are you going with that?” cried Desdemona. She ran after her sister, but youth and determination allowed her to move with unnatural haste. “Celeste!” Her voice echoed through the empty foyer. Desdemona could see that the heavy double-doors of the house’s main entrance had been pulled open. She bounded down the final curve of the staircase.

  The gap between the doors was too slight for her to pass through. As she pressed the doors further apart Desdemona marvelled at her sister’s strength.

  Without, the morning was sodden and cool. The rain had already dwindled to a faint mist that swirled anywhere and everywhere. Desdemona’s dress grew heavy and cold as fresh laundry. She called Celeste’s name. Moving ‘round to the rear of the house, Desdemona scanned the property in search of her sister. The sight of the empty pool caused her heart to plummet. Visions of Celeste charging blindly into the yard, her attention fixated solely on Mother’s card in her hand, caused Desdemona to shudder. How easily she could have stumbled over the edge and landed headfirst in the concrete pit.

  Her steps were sluggish with apprehension. She moved across the wet flagstones and, breath held, peeked over the rim of the pool.

  The base of the pit was empty, but for shallow puddles of rainwater the colour of brandy, and mounds of last autumn’s foliage.

  A leftward glance proved the tennis court to be vacant. Had Celeste gone down to the lake? Desdemona called her sister’s name again as she ran to the shore. It was all so dramatic, she thought; the roiling surf, her frantic cries, her flight from the great mansion on the hill…

  Celeste was not among the stones and tide, which left only one place where she could be, the last place, the most obvious of places; her favourite.

  Desdemona began the march to the family vault. It stood on the far side of the great gardens, in a shaded glen at the very edge of their property. Not once had she ever seen the vault free of shadows, and because of this, the atmosphere that surrounded the vault was perennially cool. The groundskeepers were lax in clearing away the leaves and branches and debris, which made the area littered, even somewhat dank. Desdemona felt that if the world entire had a cellar, its entrance would be that of her family’s vault.

  Celeste was there, hunched over a small patch of dirt at the foot of the vault’s steps. She was labouring intently over…something, all within the shadow and under the faceless gaze of a caryatid, who studied the child through a veil of rippled stone. Desdemona never
had discovered who this sombre carved woman had been designed to commemorate.

  “What are you doing?” asked Desdemona.

  “This is how I’m supposed to do it,” Celeste replied. “Bury it here, right beside the steps, under the Queen.” She was using a sterling silver soup ladle as her shovel, dragging up scoopfuls of mud, forging a pocket.

  “Is this the Queen?” Desdemona pointed to the caryatid.

  “Of course.”

  “Has Father told you the story of the White Queen or is that also something you learned from your feeling?”

  Celeste shrugged. “I never heard that story,” she said.

  Desdemona spent the next few moments watching her sister labour. The sound of the surf was at her back, a susurrus of distant voices.

  “Where is it?” she asked when Celeste appeared to have completed her task.

  The child produced ‘Ruin’ with her left hand.

  “Wait!” Desdemona cried when she saw her sister lowering the card into the ground. “You can’t actually bury it! Mother will find out.”

  “It’s okay, really. She’d want this.”

  Desdemona sighed resignedly, and knelt beside her sister. The shadow of the Queen was a concentrated version of the rest of the world. Down here was eclipse-dark and cistern-cool. Desdemona reached out and helped her sister place the card in the pit. To not have a hand in the proceedings would have felt strangely improper.

  “It has to be buried upside down,” Celeste explained as she ladled on the first clumps of earth. When it was over she patted the fresh mound and asked her sister if they should say a prayer.

  “I don’t know any prayers,” said Desdemona. Her sister’s disappointment was clear. “We should get back to the house. We left an open door.”

  Celeste gathered the ladle and Desdemona gathered her and together they retreated to the great house. An uneasy feeling flourished when a queer, misplaced gust of wind passed over the sere land, bringing with it powerful, inexplicable scents: jasmine and sage, tar and the leaves of poorly-stored books. Like the persistent misting rains, this wind seemed to press in on them from every direction.

  As they crossed the great yard, Desdemona noticed that the lake had now assumed the abyssal blue of winter midnights and that its surface shivered with countless tiny waves.

  *

  Their retreat to the great house and the re-securing of the main doors brought Desdemona no relief. Though it was only a shade past midday she was already drained, yet there was still much to do: the foyer’s marble floor required mopping to clear away the rain that had invaded through the open door, Mother’s cards had to be replaced and all traces of their robbery erased, and then there was the matter of the remainder of the day and what to do with Celeste.

  By the time these tasks were completed Celeste was complaining of hunger. Desdemona found them a platter of Mother’s ham, along with two cups of cold tea. They had been laid upon a mahogany dining cart, which Celeste then insisted be wheeled into the dining hall. The cart’s sides were carven with Old World images of the harvest: men slashing wheat with immense sickles, bent women shuffling down the crooked steps of a fruit cellar, bonfires, frothing cups of wine.

  “Why did you draw the curtains?” Desdemona asked before serving the bounty.

  “I want to pretend it’s night-time. Look how dark it is!”

  “Yes, I see how dark it is. I can barely see you sitting there, so let’s open the drapes again, shall we?”

  “Let’s light the candles instead!”

  Desdemona sighed.

  “Please. Please…” Celeste’s tiny hands were clasped like those of the devout.

  “Just for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll go get the matches!” cried Celeste.

  “No, you will not. I will get the matches and I will light these candles. You will eat your lunch.”

  “You sound exactly like Mother.”

  Desdemona found her sister’s observation oddly insulting. She slipped into the scullery and collected the matches and lighted the finger-thin tapers, and sat down and ate. Their meal nowhere near equalled the fullness of the harvest carvings on the serving cart, whose figures had now become faintly animated in the guttering candlelight.

  Now sated, they spent a few silent moments watching the tapers spit hot wax onto the tablecloth. Desdemona set her empty teacup down onto its saucer. “We shouldn’t have buried it. We had no right,” she uttered. Her words lacked the full wind of conviction and thus travelled jerkily at half-sail.

  “We did it, so that must mean we have the right.”

  “That’s a very childish way of looking at things.”

  Celeste threw up her hands breezily. “The only things you shouldn’t do are the things you can’t do.”

  “It’s that simple, is it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. Is there any cake?”

  Desdemona nodded. “It just so happens that Mother left a bit of slab cake in the parlour.”

  Celeste moved from her chair, from the dining hall. In her absence the room grew strangely brighter and far warmer. Desdemona looked sourly at the bands of golden light that brightened the edges of the heavy drapes. The dining hall had become a great oven, airtight and stifling. Today’s drizzly respite was now being overcome. It was turning into the kind of day she detested; breathless and gnawingly still. Days like this enabled her to see the dust on the windowsill, hear the thick tongue-cluck of the grandfather clock on the landing. Days like this were awful because they squeezed her through the tedium of a day in the life of a young woman with no purpose.

  “Aw, it’s not working anymore,” Celeste said mopily from the doorway.

  Desdemona flinched. “You startled me,” she confessed.

  Celeste made a “tsk” noise with her tongue and said, “It doesn’t look like night in here anymore. It’s all bright and hot.”

  “The sun’s back out,” Desdemona said. She was looking at her sister, who stood in the archway of the dining hall, a small plate from Mother’s tea set balanced on her chubby palms. A wedge of slab cake sat ringed in crumbs. Desdemona then noticed the manner in which Celeste’s expression began to change. She had drawn her lips back and her cheeks blushed. It was the kind of face she’d seen the child make when she’d been embarrassed or been caught being mischievous.

  “What?” Desdemona asked. Receiving no response, she turned back in her seat and followed her sister’s gaze, to the heavy draperies that were now haloed in burning light. What she saw there stirred in her feelings that were far removed from Celeste’s puckish amusement; hers were feelings of raw terror.

  Staring out from the gap between the curtains was a lone eye, bulbous and milky with lifelessness and hanging too low on the withered cheek of the face. There may have been a hint of a nose, perhaps even hair, but little else to see. The mouth hung open like a cavern. Brilliant light shone through the flaking lips. Was this merely a mask hung upon the window frame? How else could the sun seem to radiating from inside the head itself?

  But masks do not speak. What filled Desdemona’s mind was a voice, as raspy as raked gravel, its tone overwhelmingly mournful. There were words, but only in the broadest sense; grunts of a nascent language, too new to fathom or too ancient to recall.

  It came and it went.

  For Celeste the apparition was a delicious thing, a miraculous thing, and its vanishing restored the room’s heat and brightness.

  For Desdemona the vision was an ordeal, one that ceased not with the return of the light but with a flood of darkness. She did not even feel her body sliding limp from the dining chair.

  *

  Celeste roused Desdemona by using far too much water that was far too cold. Desdemona sat up on the dining hall floor, sputtering, coughing. She pushed the dripping hair from her face.

  “I did it! I brought you back from beyond!”

  “I only fainted, you fool,” Desdemona gasped.

  “Are you okay?”

  �
�I…I think so. I’ll be fine, just help me up.”

  Celeste did what she could to help her sister to the sitting room, where she stretched out on the plush settee.

  “Can you unlace my boots?” she asked. “I didn’t realise how muddy they are. I don’t want to stain the furniture.” After Celeste knotted the laces rather than loosen them, Desdemona simply wrenched the boots from her feet. She laid down until her senses felt relatively restored. “Celeste…what do you think that was?”

  “What?”

  “The face in the curtains.”

  When the only reply was silence, Desdemona propped herself up on one elbow and gave her sister an interrogating gaze. The child was grinning, her delight verging on giddiness.

  “You’re not going to play this off as a joke, are you?”

  “Well…not exactly,” she returned.

  “Then what exactly was it?”

  Celeste shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno.”

  Desdemona sat up fully. “Celeste, you saw something. I know you did. It was written all over your face.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  She reached out and gripped her sister’s bicep, much too firmly. Celeste winced. “Are you responsible for this? Was this some kind of trick?”

  “I didn’t do it,” cried Celeste, wrenching her arm free as she spoke. “And I didn’t see anything either!”

  “Then why were you grinning like a fool when you came back into the dining hall? Why were you staring at the window that way?”

  “Because something told me to.”

  “Something told you to.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you say ‘something,’ do you mean one of your feelings?”

  “Not really. It was a voice, a sad voice.”

  Desdemona reached for her sister, gently this time, but no less urgently. “I heard a voice too, but I couldn’t understand what it said. Did you?”

  “Of course I could, silly.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said for me to stop and listen and not be sad, because it couldn’t come to me just yet, but that it would be with me again soon, as soon as it was brought all the way back.”