“I suppose we shall have to put her in the vault for good, now,” Pocket said, regretfully. He crouched down beside the body, smoothing his jacket along its contours.
But Ethan barely heard him. He held the two candles up, closer to the far wall. He stepped forward, wondering if he were only imagining things.
“It changed,” he blurted, and wished he had just kept his mouth shut.
“Sir?” Pocket glanced around.
“The words. In chalk. It didn’t say this before.”
There, on the wall, another verse from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott:
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shallot
Just as Ethan had read the last line written in the smudged chalk, someone far below them screamed loud enough to wake the dead.
He recognized the voice a second later.
Chapter Six
1
“Alf,” Ethan gasped. He turned away from the wall, and dashed out of the room as fast as he could go. Constable Pocket called after him, but the screams continued; Ethan could not slow down to wait for the older man. Anything could be happening to the kid. Although some part of him told him that Alf had probably just stubbed his toe or had spilled hot soup in his lap, some instinct kicked in. Something worse was happening. Ethan was sure of it.
He felt as if the stairs and landings were going up instead of down, and nearly tripped as he rounded one of the banisters, but he managed to make it all the way down to the first floor. He followed what had become high-pitched squeals toward the kitchen, his heart racing the whole way.
2
Ethan threw back the door, and heard a strange noise as if a storm blew through Harrow. A heat – like the breath of a wild beast times a thousand—burst from the room.
The kitchen was a madhouse.
What seemed to be ice had formed on the ceiling, but was quickly melting into raindrops that fell to the floor; while a frenetic, almost lightning-like fire burned out of control up the sides of the walls. The window shutters were battering as if in an invisible and constantly repeating wind, and for a split second, Ethan thought he had just stepped into a dream.
3
A sweet, terrible stink came at him, and he felt for a second as if he’d just thrust his face into the torn belly of some great beast. He recoiled at the odor. It was the badsmell again, and it was overpowering. He covered his mouth and nose with his shirtsleeve, coughing. The trap from the stove was open, and fire belched from the belly of the machine; black smoke poured from it; the fireplace also blazed with a yellow-orange tongues of flames; and there, among the brilliant burning and smoke, stood Alf, shivering, broken glass and bits of china around his feet. “Alf? Are you all right?” Ethan asked, taking a step forward. “Alf?” The boy’s body was covered in a shiny coating of sweat; his clothes, soaked through. He looked forlorn and terrified. He had scratches on his face, as if from his own hands. “Get it off me,” he whispered. “Please. Get it off me. They’re all over. They’re gonna bite. They want me.” His voice so small, so terrified.
“Where’s your mother?” Ethan asked, striding forward, toward the boy.
Something in Alf’s demeanor led him to believe that the boy would run like a frightened fawn if there were any sudden movements. He tried to be calm as he went, but the fire was going to be out of control soon, and he had to first get the boy out of the kitchen and then deal with the flames. Ethan glanced at the fire as it licked the edges of the kitchen, and saw the places where it had already burned parts of the wall. “Alf? Alf!”
Alf’s eyes rolled up in his head. Ethan was sure the child was going to faint. A shivering took over his entire body, followed quickly by something that seemed like a convulsion or seizure. Ethan heard a crackling as of thunder, but from within the room. Something else was there. He could feel it. A heaviness in the room, as if the barometric pressure had dropped suddenly, or as if they were underwater…
Then, Ethan knew. Knew from the time he’d seen the little girl on the stairs, felt her coming toward him, into him.
It was the little girl. He was sure of it. She was somehow here.
Present. In the kitchen.
Alf held up his hands, his fingers extended. Small tufts of flame burst from the ends of his fingers, as if they were candles. And then, around his head, a glowing fire.
A scraping sound – Ethan glanced at the walls – now-blackened by the flames – strange markings and symbols scrawled across them as if done by an invisible hand. The markings blurred and became tiny spiders, crawling along the burning walls.
Ethan knew he must act swiftly, but a terror had entered his heart.
Something wanted him to watch this. To watch and remain still.
Something held him there, something beyond fear. It was like he was mesmerized, watching the boy with the hands of fire.
Have to break through this. Have to get him out. Have to save him, the thoughts battered within Ethan’s brain.
“Leave him alone!” Ethan shouted. He felt some crazy laughter come from deep inside him – something was there, something was within him, too. Something held him back.
No. Get out of me. Get out, he thought, and knew it was madness to think it.
Blisters formed on the boy’s face – Ethan ran for him, without thinking of his own safety, fearful that the boy would burn to death in the growing furnace blast of heat. He heard the sound of glass shattering as he came nearer to Alf.
For a second, the room seemed a complete furnace, and he thought he saw others there—shadows in the fire, at least three of them, standing in the blaze along the walls. Yet, he was not burning, neither were the figures that blurred along the fire.
Alf’s eyes had returned to normal, but were glassy as he stared at Ethan.
Finally, a voice came from the little boy’s mouth. A voice that could not have been his.
“Help the Lady of Shalott,” a man said, and although Ethan knew the voice came from Alf, it seemed to echo all around him. It was a bestial, horrible voice, and one that was neither loud nor soft. And then a woman’s voice came from Alf, “You can’t help her. No one can. She is one of us. She is one of us,” and then the voice was a boy’s, another boy, not Alf, but a boy with a strange accent, “Seven was too many, too many, too many for the chapel. Seven. Seven. Seven. The cross of the chapel took the ritual and he brought it to himself,” Another voice emerged, overlapping with the first, “And moving through a mirror clear that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear.” A whisper grew louder, “Shadows of the world appear, shadows of the world appear,” and even within these whispers, he heard what sounded like a monk chanting in Latin, and then a language he had never before heard, it was like the wind and the sound of wild tongues. A man’s voice began singing a strange nursery rhyme, “Mary Anne, Annie, and Elizabeth you know, they are all such pretty maids in a row. Catherine and Mary Jane would like to join the dance, Annie and Fairy Fay they all want some romance, and my knife’s so nice and sharp, I think I’ll get a chance, will you won’t you will you won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”
Ethan felt spellbound as he stood there, and no longer noticed the heat or the flames. He was aware that glass burst somewhere nearby and he could hear it shattering against the walls; somewhere, behind him, he could hear the sound of a woman weeping.
But the voices within the child were like a puzzle, and they seemed to move into his mind and take root. “Mary Anne, said Catherine, will you wait upon the lane, your heart belongs to someone else, and you are soaked with rain. Catherine, said Mary Anne, you’re in some sort of trance, will you won’t you will you won’t you, won’t you join the dance? We are waiting on the shingle, will you won’t you join the dance?”
The boy rose up slowly from the floor, his arms spread, the tongues of fire spurting from his fingertips, his eyes bloodshot, an
d his mouth sagging open while the multitude of voices poured from him.
He floated there, less than a foot above the ground.
Plaster from the ceiling began falling like snow all around them. The voices were all clashing together until it was all unintelligible and began to sound like the lowing of bulls and the squealing of pigs.
Above the roar that Ethan could not block from his head, he saw the angel from the statue garden, just the vision of a woman standing beside Alf, and he felt a strange comfort despite the terror that froze his heart.
Then, the vision of the angel became the fire, and Ethan felt his senses returning. Quickly, he grabbed Alf, who fell into his arms. Ethan lost his balance, and, still holding Alf, fell backward to the kitchen floor. He felt glass beneath his shirt, and sat up quickly, clutching the boy close.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” he said, relieved. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
It stopped.
The fire was gone; the wall, unburned; the plaster intact; and the only sign of struggle was the broken glass all around the floor.
Ethan looked at the boy’s face. The scratches were clearly visible.
His lips were parched, and the stench remained, an indescribable smell that was both sweet and rotten. A memory of a smell: fallen apples in November, the last of the yellowjackets that had survived summer; yellowjackets, fallen and twitching, around the brown rotting apples.
A terrible silence ensued, just as the silence had been that Ethan had experienced when he’d seen the little girl in the front hallway.
Ethan felt something heave within him, and a shuddering began. Tears blurred his vision; he rocked back and forth, holding the boy; he felt an overwhelming sadness and loss with Alf’s small body against his shoulder and chest. It felt as if Alf were his own flesh and blood. He felt something pass from his hands, something like an iciness. He held Alf close.
Ethan felt confused by the emotion that had come over him, so suddenly. Not the fear or terror he’d just felt, but a curious calm mixed with sadness. The poor child. The poor child. What happened?
What could have happened here? What’s in this house? What spirits occupy this space? What nightmare did my grandfather create within these walls?
And then, in his gut, he knew why he had the sadness.
He looked at the boy again, at his eyes, at his sagging jaw.
Alf was dead?
Dead. Lifeless.
No, he thought. No, you’re not. I know you’re not.
Ethan brought the boy’s face up close to his. No, you’re not dead.
You can’t be dead. You won’t be dead.
Then, Alf opened his eyes, but his jaw remained slack. Ethan wiped at the tears across his own face. A melting joy returned to him, as he saw the life in Alf’s eyes, and then the blush return to the little boy’s face. Ethan cradled him, supporting his head in his hands.
Alf closed his mouth slowly, as if it hurt, and then opened it again. He said, in a growling whisper, a voice that was distinctly female but also low and heavy, and for a second Ethan was put in mind of a nun, “Stet Fortuna Domus. Stet Fortuna Domus. Stet Fortuna Domus.”
From behind him, Ethan heard Pocket say, “Good Lord. Good Lord.”
Then, Pocket blurted, “Where’s his mother?”
Alf shivered. He whispered something. Ethan leaned nearer to him—turning his ear to the boy’s lips.
“Alf?” Ethan asked.
The boy whispered, his voice weak, “The house ate her.”
PART TWO
MAY THE HOUSE'S FORTUNE STAND
“In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.”
—From Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Chapter Seven
1
Now I will step back in here, for it seems that the time has come to tell you more about myself.
These are not things that I knew before my time at Harrow—after my grandfather’s death. In fact, the night that Alf cried out his obscenities and nursery rhymes in the inferno of a kitchen, some door within myself had become undone, off its hinges. Something within me opened. But seeing him there, pitching in a fever of some mysterious influence, I remembered myself as a boy, after I’d been nearly stung to death by yellowjackets in my grandfather’s garden. You know I was born Esteban Gravesend, and I soon acquired the name of Ethan. You also know that I came to inherit my grandfather’s estate. From what I’ve remembered here, you know how serious I have been about the haunting at Harrow. It was—and is—very real.
It was like breath on a windowpane on a steamy day. It was like the smell of smoke after a candle has been snuffed. It was there, always, even when the manifestations did not take over a little boy named Alfred Barrow. Even the previous twilight when I felt the little girl approach me, a ghost come to investigate the intruder to her domain.
I mentioned, in my telling of my life, that when I was a boy, visiting my grandfather at his estate, I had a singular feeling that something warm surrounded me. In the garden among the statues.
Something that hummed with its own life swirling about me as I stood there, looking up at my grandfather who waved frantically to me from the window.
Of course, I had stepped into a nest of yellowjackets, but there was more—for I felt her presence, a woman who I had begun to feel was my guardian angel, right then, as a child.
I was not protected from the bites of the yellowjackets, and when I next awoke, I was in the bedroom in the East Wing of Harrow that had been dedicated to my brief and all-too-infrequent visits.
2
It was a room that was lush, from the velvet of the heavy curtains at the window, to the thick bed on which I slept nightly—piled three mattresses high.
The room was papered in gold. I felt as if I were the Sun King at times, sleeping in the glories of a lost empire. A chiffonier—what my nursemaid Mrs. McCutcheon (who never came to Harrow on these trips) called a chiffarobe—stood in one corner, with its tall, curved mirror, and a bowl and pitcher for water.
My grandfather still believed in chamber pots in every room, and the one beside my bed was big enough for me to sit down in and pretend I was in a boat; I never used it for its intended purpose, and I’m not sure that I knew what it was used for at all, since I had no problem walking down the hall to the water closet.
The room was my world of dreams.
My rocking horse stood in the corner, a gift from my grandfather years earlier, and on the wall, portraits of various children. One of them was me as a baby, one was probably my father, although I did not know which one, and one was my grandfather as a baby; there were others. Recuperating from the stings, I lay in a feverish state for a full day, during which time a nurse came to my side to keep watch over me.
She was a less than handsome woman even by the standards of Watch Point—her hips were broad and accommodating, her breasts boxy and well formed, and her uniform starched and stiff. She looked as if she’d been cut from local quarries and filled with cement. She was a substitute mother for those few days as I recovered from the stings—she placed plasters and salves on me, and brought me soups and the dreaded steamed cabbage, which, she told me, would heal me as well as any medicine.
I did not like her at all, nor did I fancy the food she brought—I began to think of her as a witch trying to poison me. This grew into a mania, which prevented me from devouring some perfectly good meals by the second day of my fevered incarceration.
I pretended to eat, and slipped the food instead to my right, beneath my pillow. It piled up into an awful stink there, which I further corrupted by pushing it beneath the first and second mattress when my witch-nurse wasn’t looking. She must have had no sense of smell, for the pungent odor of quickly rotting cabbage grew, and she never seemed to notice.
She told me her name was Hildy, and that she was from Beacon, but had moved up to Watch Point when she met her husba
nd. She told me too much about her marriage – about how her husband worked with the railroad, but was studying one day to work in bonds down in the city. She began to feel like a very lonely sad woman to me, and by the second night, I had developed sympathy for her. I told her that when her husband was very rich in New York, that he ought to buy her a cottage by the sea like the one I lived in. She enjoyed this kind of fantasy, and that evening, made plans for her future as the wife of a rich man.
Hildy began recounting her tales of Harrow, as she called them. She thought of it as a very spiritual place, and it was then that I noticed her ever-present rosary, and the cross around her neck. She told me that she felt she had seen one of the saints one night when she was working many years before in the house; that she was told by the saint to serve the Lord through her service to Harrow. She even laughed about this, for, she told me, she only half-believed in the vision.
“My faith is unwavering,” she said, pawing at my forehead with a cool cloth, “but my eyesight is another story.”
She asked me if I had any playmates, and I told her that I didn’t, although I had once had a pet rabbit with whom I spoke. “And I think I saw an angel.”
“Sometimes God shows us His face in our minds. In fever,” she added, nodding to herself. “Shall I get you some more mustard for your chest?”
“No,” I moaned, not wanting the poultice or the plaster or whatever infernal and stinky concoction she would create in that hellish nurse kitchen of hers. I grew curious, watching her. She had not blinked at my mention of my angel. She was an odd woman. Not like my mother who told me that angels were part of the Bible and not life. Curiosity got the better of me. “Tell me about angels,” I said.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 10