Stepping over the threshold, into Harrow, Ethan saw a brief flash of smoke along the stairs.
Something was on fire - with all the candles, constantly burning—he was sure something had caught fire while he was out.
He dashed for the staircase, drawing off his wet jacket to douse any flames. As he took the first step up, Ethan saw, not smoke or fire, but what seemed like a frost in the air, or a thickened chalk dust hanging in an unnatural stillness.
In the next second, it was no longer there, and in its stead was a young child - not the boy he had seen running among the trees, but another.
A strange child. A little girl. She looked at him for a moment as if she recognized his face. She had some kindness and giggly look in her eyes, as if she had just seen a bunny or had hidden her mother’s slipper as a game. She opened her mouth wide and a sound came from her throat the like of which he had never before heard -
The frost returned to the air. Ethan felt himself freezing, the place was full of badsmell, too. The foyer filled with the stink of something rotting—of meat left out in some terrible sun—passing through the icy breath along the staircase. The storm outside began howling, or perhaps the child herself howled.
From the corner of his eye, Ethan saw what seemed to be a snow-whiteness gathering, moving toward the girl. He began to feel afraid for her. He tried to reach her, but the whiteness spread swiftly - not a mist, not a cloud, but it was as if some invisible hand were erasing the world in front of his eyes, leaving it pure white. The whiteness traveled toward her, and as it touched her, she, too, began to erase from before him -
And someone whispered in his ear, “Welcome home.” The badsmell grew smothering, and it brought back something, something he had wanted to forget in all those years, something he had found once at Harrow but could not identify, something full of the badsmell, a place within the house, reeking with badsmell, and as a child he had written it in chalk on the walls:
Badsmellbadsmellbadsmellbadsmell, until his father had tugged him back and then the memory was gone.
And whispering to him now, some little girl, whispering something that felt obscene although it was nothing more than those two words, badsmell, repeated in quick succession as if this were some game.
The front door to Harrow slammed shut.
The lock turned - all locks clattered in turning in Harrow at once - all doors, locking - all windows, closing - all candles, snuffing.
A lullaby began playing from some upstairs chamber.
Darkness embraced him.
Chapter Three
1
Here’s the thing about darkness:
It turns the mind inward.
2
The music of the lullaby ended; the darkness grew.
As Ethan stood at the locked door, within Harrow, feeling the chill of winter’s breath, he knew that there was something within himself that had already frozen.
Some shadow within his flesh was locked away, just as the house’s locks had suddenly turned in on themselves.
It was a momentary flash of insight.
What came to him - as a trickle of fear spread into a glacial movement in his blood - was the image of his mother in her wheelchair. She sat at the top of the stairs in the house on the Cape. The voice of the doctor in some distant room, calling her back to him, but not as a doctor would, but as someone else, some other person would call a woman back from a staircase.
For a moment, he had seen his young mother begin to rise from the wheelchair, and then hesitate when she saw her son with his toy at the bottom of the staircase.
In that flash of remembrance, in the uneasy darkness of Harrow, Ethan felt as if he had been haunted since the day he was born.
His own breathing brought him back to the shadows of Harrow.
The shutters had closed on the windows in the foyer. The battering of the storm outside the walls ceased. Everything was night within.
The inhuman squeal of the little girl on the stairs abated, yet he could still hear the words in his head:
Badsmellbadsmellbadsmell.
He heard a thumping sound, as of a ticking clock. He stood as still as he could. Afraid to move. He imagined the touch of insects along his ankles, the gentle tickling strokes of tiny spiders along his hands.
A smell came up - not of anything foul, but of a rich cherry wood, as if it were burning in the fireplace, and then a damp odor, but not the dampness of the rain, but as if there were some drain, clogged with standing water.
Imagining things.
He was tired. Maybe it was the ale he’d had. Maybe it was the threat of some madness, the same madness that his father was sure had been Justin Gravesend’s madness.
The thumping grew louder.
It’s my own heart. It’s the sounds within my body, he realized too soon. He could hear the swoosh of blood as his temples throbbed. His stomach began making noises. The loudness of them - within his body - grew deafening as any storm.
Minutes passed as he stood there. The panting of some great wolf became the sound of his throat. He swallowed, nervously, and it was as if buckets of water had been poured along a tin roof.
It’s in my body. Whatever it is that was here. It’s inside me. I can feel it.
It was warmer than he had expected - the feeling that something had entered him, was perhaps even looking out through his eyes, was counting his heartbeats, feeling his breath, tasting the fear within him.
And then, it all went silent again.
It was as if someone had taken some kind of radio and pressed it inside his body, amplifying the sounds, and then pulled the radio microphone out again, switching it off.
Something was coming down the stairs. It slapped the carpeted stairs like a ball, bouncing against each step, and then continued its noisy descent.
His eyes adjusted a bit to the dark. He saw the edges of things - the light beneath doorways, the paper cuts of lightning beneath the slats in the
shutters, and some kind of low ambience to the house itself. He could only distinguish the shadows of sculpture and furniture.
But the ball - for that is surely what it must have been - kept bouncing down toward him, toward the bottom of the stairs. The sound echoed through the hall.
And then, another break into silence.
He again heard the crack of thunder outside Harrow, beyond the shuttered windows.
It’s over, the thought came to him.
Whatever this was, it’s over now. His own thoughts seemed to whisper outside of his body.
I am alone.
It’s gone.
The thought came: She’s gone. She was here, whoever she is. She was here at the stairs, and she’s gone.
He stood there in the darkness. Relief and warmth flooded through his being. He felt as a man who had been pushed to the edge of some precipice, and now could step back from it.
He had not moved from the bottom of the staircase the entire time.
Perhaps only ten minutes had passed.
Something reasonable and logical within him told him that this was some brief collapse of reality projected outward. The candles had gone out because a draft from the storm had swept through the house. This was possible.
Wentworth had no doubt shuttered the house, knowing of the oncoming storm.
Perhaps even Maggie Barrow had doused the candles at some point. Maggie might even be in the kitchen for all he knew, cleaning the range or upstairs, dusting the bedrooms.
You’re exhausted. You’ve had a hellish year. Your circumstances have changed.
Everything has changed. Family memories are coming back. Things you’ve forgotten. Things you wanted to keep buried within your childhood. This is why you thought you saw this.
He thought of calling out to Maggie (She might be here, and she might be upstairs working on some room, and she might laugh at you for being scared of the storm and the dark, and this would feel good), but some instinct kept him silent.
After a brief mo
ment of getting used to the sounds of the rain outside, and the silence within Harrow, Ethan coughed.
As if an alarm had been set off, suddenly the locks in the doors clicked, and the front door flew open. All the shutters opened at once, and began beating against the windows. The doors all around the house opened and closed against the doorframes. The sound of the beating doors and shutters was unbearable, and he wanted to scream.
Don’t scream. It wants you to scream. It wants to see you be scared. Don’t let it see you be scared.
In a flash of lightning, he saw the little girl, standing so near him she could touch him.
3
Her eyes were bloodshot and wild. Her hair, a tangle of mud and weed. Some torn and filthy cloth wrapped around her small body. She lifted her face to his, and parted her cracked lips.
A howl came from her throat.
Her breath froze mid-air, a cold wind in a cave, and she reached out to touch him, but when she did —
4
It was over.
He felt a brief nausea; his eyes burned as if sand had been pressed into them; his tongue was dry; and his hands itched as if with the pinpricks of falling asleep.
The light came up on the wall sconces; the lamps seemed to find their small blue flames again. The door behind him remained open as it had been when he had crossed the threshold, letting rain pour in, as it must have for several minutes, because the front entryway was covered with water.
He wasn’t sure - and he would never sure, he told himself - but it seemed as if there was some kind of shifting that had gone on.
It was like a magic trick he had once seen on the streets of Manhattan, some kind of shell game. A coin had been put beneath one shell and appeared, after some manipulations on the part of a magician, under another shell. It was as if a sleight of hand had been introduced into his consciousness.
He’d felt the shift, from the feeling of the little girl standing near enough to touch him, to this moment of evening and rain and the open door behind him.
As if the house itself were a magician, moving the shells.
5
“Perhaps you imagined it,” Maggie Barrow said when he told her.
But that wasn’t until later the next day.
6
Ethan had opted to spend the night at a local inn, rather than sleep in the curtained bed at Harrow.
He was, after all, as he told himself, rich now, and could afford the best room at the local place. The inn was not fancy, nor was it expensive, but he got what was called the Honeymoon Room “with two hot water bottles” for less than the price of dinner in Manhattan. The following morning was less than luxurious, with a breakfast that was mostly burnt. After coffee and eggs that tasted like they’d been mixed together, he realized that he was too old to be worried about some hallucination - some imagining - that might’ve been brought on by Watch Point’s famous sassyfrass tea, after all.
As the hours passed, he became less and less sure that he’d seen what he had thought he’d experienced. He’d spent the morning hiking the along the hills above the river, and then returned to find Wentworth in a mood, once again.
She did not want to hear about what he had gone through the previous night. She did not want to discuss anything about any possible strangeness in the house. She was halfway between heartbroken and furious, and she managed to stop up his mouth with her own tirade about how the dishes had all broken in the china cabinets.
“The good china dishes, the china that my Badger brought back with him on his trips. The china,” she added, her eyes narrowing. “That he meant for me to have, if only he’d lived long enough.”
Wentworth words pelted him like stones, and she could not be calmed in any respect. She kept having fits about the dishes, and about the beautiful crystal glasses that had been haphazardly piled “like wood for the fireplace!”
“My god,” Ethan had said to the empty kitchen after Wentworth had stormed out of the house, nearly in tears for her broken china. “My world is now reduced to Wentworth.”
But then, there was Maggie. She was a little less concerned with the china than with the idea of a ghost.
“But it’s crazy,” he said, nearly wringing his hands, pacing back and forth on the Persian rug.
Maggie busily washed out the great fireplace in the study. She had passed him a rag. (“If you’re going to jabber at me while I’m cleaning, you may as well be of some use,” she’d told him.) She wore a long dark work dress, covered by an apron much too large for her. Her red hair fell thickly along her shoulders, curling like tongues of fire, he thought.
“You should always wear it down,” he said, forgetting that he had said it aloud for a moment. “Your hair, I mean. It’s…nice.”
“If I were smart,” she replied, “I’d chop it all off and sell it as a wig and quit this job once and for all. Now, tell me again. You saw our ghost, and she did what?”
“She howled. She said things. It’s a jumble. I can’t remember how it went,” he said, nearly stammering. Then, he added, “Our ghost?”
Maggie sat back, her apron blackened with soot. “You’re not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking. People have seen spirits here before. Harrow’s haunted. Everyone in the village knows it.”
7
Ethan asked her what must’ve felt like ten thousand questions, although only one really stuck out for him later: he was not the first to see spirits within the house that his grandfather built. There was a history of people finding psychic disturbances there? How was he to know this? His father had never told him. While alive, his grandfather had never hinted at that sort of thing. Ethan didn’t even believe in ghosts one bit. Even “seeing” was not believing for him. Still, he listened to what Maggie told him, her brogue dimming every now and then where the English side of her family had taken hold.
“The little girl,” she said. “She might be little Matilde, your grandparents’ daughter who had died while young. She was buried out in the crypt along Bald Hill, and it was said - by the few who had seen her, including that wild man Palliser -“
“The caretaker,” Ethan confirmed.
Maggie barely missed a beat. “That she returned to the house now and then to look for her parents. It’s really rather a sweet story.”
Ethan found this thought less disturbing as Maggie talked on and on about what the villagers said of Harrow, and of Justin Gravesend.
“People in the village said your grandfather was evil. Well,” Maggie snorted derisively. “He was not evil, like they said. He had a lot of love within him. He had secrets, as well. Even Mrs. Wentworth warned me not to work for him, for he had shipments for years from foreign ports - the India, and Africa, and even Jerusalem.”
“Jerusalem?” Ethan asked.
She nodded, laughing. “I never saw any of this. It was merely what I was told. All I’ve seen are the wash pots and the kitchen for the most part. I’ve never even see our ghost.”
“You keep referring to it as ‘our ghost’,” he said. “As if it’s a joke. Do you believe in ghosts?”
She became quite serious on this point. “I do. I believe in spirits.” And then she began laughing until her face was red.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “It’s just something someone dear to me told me once.”
“My grandfather?”
“All right. It was about how all the servants working here have been scared off over the years. All except me and old Wentworth. He said it was because Wentworth was greedy and wanted treasure.”
“And to what do you owe your longevity?”
“I’m an outcast,” she said, half-smiling. “I’ve got nothing to lose.” Then she picked up her mop bucket and went toward the door to the kitchen. She truly looked fetching with the clop clop clop of her work shoes and the way she moved - like she didn’t give a damn if a man stared at her or not. “I’ve only been working here for a year. I haven’t met the ghost yet.”
> 8
“And the key, Maggie?” he asked her just before she was to leave for the afternoon. She had taken her apron and skirt and thrust them into her wholly unattractive black stockings (wrapped about wholly attractive calves), and kept scrubbing the upstairs bath because she claimed that “someone’s left a ring of filth in it from his bath.”
“The key, Maggie,” he repeated.
“What key?” she snapped. “And I told you - I’m not Maggie to you, sir. I am Mrs. Barrow and I expect to be treated with some respect even if I do wash your dirty linens.” The sweat on her brow made her pale skin shine, and she looked nearly ferocious with her lips curled. “If you’re going to interrogate me, then here,” she passed me yet another wet rag. “Wash the basin.”
“That basin?”
“The sink,” she said, as if he were the dumbest man she had ever met.
Ethan looked at the rag with its drippings of soap rinsing across his fingers, and then looked at the sink. He shrugged.
Since he was so used to cleaning his own bathroom at the dingy little apartment down in the city, he had been feeling nearly embarrassed to watch Maggie on her knees, half-bent over the tub, scraping away at dirt he’d left in it from the day before.
“Keys, is it? The Keys to the Kingdom of Harrow, one would suppose.” She noticed his lackluster washing around the sink, and she let out a gentle laugh. “I suppose that passes for washing in the smart set.”
Once Ethan had begun scrubbing a little harder with the mixture of soap she’d brought from the cellar, she muttered something as if it were like spitting poison.
“Didn’t catch that,” he said.
This time, she nearly roared. “You’re talking about Wentworth if you’re talking stolen keys.”
“She said you were the one sticky with keys,” he blurted, and then wished he could force the words right back into his mouth again.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 5