Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  Pocket called out to me from the previous chamber, but I continued on – I would find Maggie.

  In the next chamber, the ceiling sunk low, and I had the sense that I was nearly beneath – or beside – the house as it grew from these roots into its towers. The line from the poem came to me: “Many tower’d Camelot.” That was Harrow: a legendary castle, and I walked the island of Shalott.

  Something was in the air here – an incense? A fragrant smoke that held the air captive? It made me feel dreamy, even sleepy. I glanced across the chamber, but it was darker than the last, and all I could make out was a well at its center. I went over to it, and found at its edge, a dagger. I held this up and examined it. It was shiny and black, and put me in mind of a stone like obsidian. I left it there – after all, what weapon could be used against the dead? I could not see far enough in front of me to go on. I glanced back down the narrow, low corridor from which I had just come.

  I could just make out the small orb of torch that Pocket held in the distant chamber behind this one.

  And then, I felt it.

  The shiver of dread.

  The iciness of something that was there without being seen. Of knowing something without being able to picture it or describe it or even intellectually understand it. It was an animal instinct, one that I suppose we all possess, but have buried within ourselves for these thousands of years of human existence. Perhaps our ancestors living naked in the wild knew this. Perhaps when they buried their dead, they had been more sensitive to the ways the essences of spirits lingered and the forces of life that did not dissipate when the bodies of their brethren stopped moving. I felt it, I tell you, and it was as if I were feeling with my eyes a warm wet velvet curtain, and with my flesh the rippling of water all around me, and with my nostrils, the smell of flowers and incense and some drug burning in some cup.

  I remembered the laudanum mixture my mother had taken when I was a very little boy, on those days when the pain for her was great, the opium and alcohol mixture that she told me had helped her grandmother, that helped her handle her life. This was what I imagined this drug in the air must be – a mist of laudanum sprayed to take away the sense of dread and terror that grew further in me.

  You see, I had forgotten Maggie. I beheld the grandeur of my grandfather’s creation, and I traveled through it like a great adventure through a foreign land, but I had forgotten why I had come. And I had forgotten that the horror of life was here, inside this place, pushing at both the constable and myself.

  4

  I saw her, Matilde, the manifestation of evil and of innocence, the child and the woman, but without my eyes, for at the moment when the shivering was most intense, my torch went out completely. I stood in absolute darkness, the yellow-orange point of what could only be Pocket’s distant torch providing a single jot of light in what now seemed an endless night.

  She was there.

  Matilde. I saw her as an outline in darkness: a corona of imagined light splayed around her form.

  She was merely form then – shape in darkness, curves and lines, and dots of purple-blue sparks that slowly swirled in the black. I imagined her, perhaps, or I had closed my eyes and could only see within my own mind, because, in the dark, that was all that could be.

  How could a man see without light? Or with that small point of torchlight at a distance – Pocket was there, somewhere down the corridor behind me, and his light moved, barely a flyspeck now.

  But she was the dark. I realized this as if I had known it all along. She was not going to be found in the candlelight of the house. She might travel there, she might even play her games in the house.

  But the darkness was her gown. Her voice was soft and warm when she spoke.

  “Esteban,” she said. “I have waited so long for you to come to me.”

  I replied to her. I said something aloud that felt true. It was something that I could not know in the light of day. Something that I could not have guessed as a child. Something within my instinct of darkness, that had only just begun to emerge within this place, my legacy, my home.

  The shivering within my body was ferocious, like a lion tearing at my flesh from within, like an earthquake erupting from my very soul. All that I knew of life was torn asunder then and there; all that I had learned of myself was destroyed; I thought my father and mother as they had raised me, of my sickly mother with her doctor lover, of my father with his distance from me and the inexplicable way that he could not bring himself to touch me or even hold my hand; and of the warmth of my grandfather’s hand as he held my small one in his, the absolute love and companionship I felt from that man, and the feeling of having “come home” by just visiting him in the house called Harrow. And seeing him at the window of the tower room, signaling something to me, when I was a child. The yellowjackets surrounding me, biting me, but the warmth they held within their bites, the love of what seemed to be a stone angel, the love of some entity of Harrow, the love without barriers or conditions that I had felt in that great and awful moment.

  Within my blood I knew.

  Within my soul.

  She herself was a kind of magic. She was what they had been afraid of, wasn’t she? She had ability – true psychic ability. She could throw herself, she was spirit from both within and without flesh, she was trapped within the house within a house as a child, and she was able to move through it like spirit, even when alive. She was Alice who had been trapped behind the Looking-Glass. They had once thought her possessed, when she was a little girl, and had tried to cast demons from her. They had thought her insane and full of voices, but they had not understood.

  She was many. Within herself.

  It had never mattered – probably least to her – that she had died, walled into the tower room. She had already harnessed the way out of her body years before.

  She showed me there in the dark.

  Showed me without image.

  Showed me without light.

  She showed all to me.

  I had seen a child ghost when I was a child, but she was alive then, wasn’t she? Alive and still a child in spirit. She had not physically murdered the gathering of my grandfather’s spiritualists. It was the others within her mind, the child that had never been exorcised from her, the girl of sixteen (she whispered in my dark night) who had fallen in love, the shattered young woman of nineteen who had lost two loves in a short period of time and whose splintered mind had splintered even further –

  This, the darkness told me, told me through brief visions and flashes of shadows in the dark and through some inborn knowledge of my own. I knew it all then. I knew it from within and without. She had tried to show me when she pushed into my body my second night in Harrow, pushed into me and held there for a second, to show me how it could be done, how spirit could invade matter, how I could see from her eyes and she could see from mine.

  Even as a child, with the swirl of yellowjackets embracing me, I could feel her, and she was there, buried alive within the house, and still surrounding me, loving me in the way she knew.

  Within my mind, the knowledge blossomed in the dark as I watched her manifest into a shiny being of firefly-light in the blackness.

  “Esteban. Esteban. The nights I’ve wept for you. The nights I knew I would never again see you. Esteban. You have your father’s eyes. You have your father’s eyes.” She knew my secret name. My real name. The name that I had been given, according to my parents, from a promise to a midwife. The name my father despised, although I had assumed then that it was because some foreign woman had named his son against his own will.

  But now, I knew who had named me.

  I said it to her, knowing who she was.

  At last.

  “Mother,” I said. “Matilde.”

  5

  I found the truth of it, not in daylight or in a well-lighted room, but in the absolute darkness of the house-within-the-house that my grandfather had built for his daughter.

  You may think I am mad for belie
ving this, but it was like the moment when you discover who you are in the world and what you are meant to do on this earthly plane – or the moment when you know you are in love, or the moment when you understand your destiny as marked somehow in some book, or across the heavens, or within your own heart.

  I was the son of Matilde Gravesend. I was not Ethan Gravesend, the boy who had grown up in a distant and unfeeling household, the boy who had done everything in his power to make his father pay attention to him.

  That boy was never meant to be. He was a figment of my father’s imagination. He was the unfulfilled dream of a man who probably could not sire any children, let alone a son.

  And my mother—my false mother—she had known. She had understood who I was, had even allowed the name “Esteban” to remain—and had taken to me for want of love, for surely my father had never truly loved her, nor she him.

  I had always known of the distance between them, and of my false mother’s ailments, all of which seemed neurotic and carelessly constructed on her part.

  If she had a defect of the heart, it concerned my father and the life they had created around themselves, and the lies. She had been wheelchair-bound only as a way of avoiding duties—for I had caught her, hadn’t I? Along the rocky beach, standing—perhaps even running – toward her lover? I stood in that darkness, and remembered it all. It seemed as if it were a dream, and I knew that the life I felt then in the dark of that chamber was more of a life than any I had ever known.

  Matilde Gravesend was my true mother.

  She had brought me into her womb, here in the subterranean passages of Harrow.

  She was my angel.

  She was my blanket of yellowjackets. She had let her child-spirit sleep beside me in my illness as a child, not to frighten me, as I had thought—but to tend to me and protect me. She had called me back in some way, as if the umbilical cord between us were a slender spider’s web of thread that had never left my navel, had never been cut between us.

  I was Esteban.

  And my father?

  That was the only mystery left to me, but it was enough that she was there, with me, and had always been.

  Her so-called insanity at her been her way of surviving in the monstrous world she had lived in— hidden from the world, brought out for my grandfather’s shows and his guilt and whatever else had riddled him.

  Yes, I had loved the old man, and yes, I had happy memories from Harrow as a child.

  Now, I was nearly thirty years old, and I felt like a child again.

  Her warmth surrounded me. The badsmell gushed up my nostrils and choked my throat, but it no longer seemed like a terrible thing. I welcomed it, as I welcomed the feeling of my mother’s embrace.

  Shutting my eyes, I could see her in the clean light of imagination, as she must’ve been when she had given birth to me—a teenager, weeping over the child that had been torn from her, little more than a child in a woman’s body, understanding the fate she had been cursed with, the powers of mind and psyche that sprang from her like water from an eternal fountain, understanding the love that she would have locked within herself. The love for her son. Her only son. The jealousy perhaps at her brother and his wife for taking her baby, the anger at her father for drawing the child from her arms, and— the father? Who could my father have been? Who among Harrow was unaccounted for? What lover had come to her in the night and held her and brought the two of them together in love and made, between them, a child who was by society a bastard, but by their love, sanctified and perfect?

  I opened my eyes to the dark.

  And then, she was gone. I was alone in the midnight place. A moment of pure silence and the crystal inner vision of saneness and sense overpowered me.

  I heard three startling shrieks of a woman from some part of the darkness, and I heard Pocket crying out like a lamb about to be slaughtered by a wolf.

  I stepped forward, and stumbled across stones in the path, and my head hit the side of the wall. An enormous pain exploded where my scalp had scraped rock. I felt a gash open along my ear, and touched the stickiness of my own blood, and cursed myself for it, and nearly laughed at myself. I laughed, and I laughed, and I felt completely sane there in the darkness.

  And then, a shot rang out.

  A flash nearly blinded me coming from down in the other end of the corridor.

  But it was too late, I was helpless—I had begun to black out, and no matter how I tried to fight it, I felt the sickening dizziness inside.

  Just as I reached up to press my fingers to the side of my head to stanch the flow of blood, I heard Maggie’s voice screaming for me.

  6

  My senses shut down, and I lapsed into unconsciousness.

  I dreamed what Harrow wished me to dream; what my true mother wished me to dream. I saw her: a young girl, trapped within rooms that spread to other rooms.

  An entire labyrinth of rooms existing on the other side of mirrors within the house. As she grew into a young woman, she watched from her mirror windows as the world went by. She watched others live their lives while she remained among the ancient walls and altars of the dead.

  I awoke, feeling something moving across my face.

  7

  Insects crawled along my cheek and lips. I wiped at them – beetles? Cockroaches? Some form of subterranean life.

  I remembered where I was, and the shock of throbbing pain along the side of my head continued.

  I reached up and touched the sticky blood. It was not a deep wound.

  After several seconds, I found I could sit up. I felt a hand along my elbow, trying to lift me.

  I had the distinct impression of a young girl standing there, doing her best to get me to stand. It was her.

  It was Matilde.

  I felt the warmth and rose petal of her breath, mingled with the smell I had come to think of as bad, but which was rich, like just-turned moist earth. It was the smell of the grave, perhaps, but in this context of darkness, it seemed comforting. The badsmell, the stink of death, had become perfume.

  I wanted to ask this spirit so many questions, but I felt an urgency in her touch.

  I rose with knees shaking, and a lurch in my stomach. Some noise echoed through the corridors – a series of high pitched screams? A squealing and bleating as of animals being slaughtered? —

  I could not tell what kind of beasts could be making such a racket.

  I remembered Maggie’s cries, and my heart beat faster.

  And then, a strange luminescent orb, that had been at some distance, began to grow in size.

  It was Pocket’s torch, which he carried, hurrying down the corridor toward me.

  8

  When Pocket arrived nearer to me, I tried to say something, but the air seemed to have left my lungs and all I could manage was a hiss as I stood up.

  He stopped, not three feet from me, nearly dropping the torch. And I knew. I felt it.

  “You see her,” I said.

  Pocket said nothing, but continued to stare at me. His eyes went wide, and he had to be watching the shadow of the spirit as it passed into me.

  “Tell me you see her,” I said. “You see Matilde.”

  “It’s insane,” Pocket whispered. “This has all been insanity. Your grandfather raised the Devil here. And it’s you,” he gasped, pointing at the swarm of darkness that was my mother as she curved around shoulder.

  And then, I felt her press against me, just as she had before.

  She was trying to possess me. She was trying to invade. I had to resist, but I wanted the closeness. I wanted it, I tell you, because I had never felt close enough to anyone who had ever loved me.

  Her invisible hands pressed against my side like some new Eve reopening Adam’s wound to return to my ribcage, to push into my flesh. I began to see the stone chamber as if it were made of flesh and blood. Beneath the stones, I could nearly see the veins and yellow fat of a living, breathing entity.

  For gasping seconds, I entertained the thought that
this place had been somehow brought to life through my grandfather’s ancient rituals, through entreaties to gods and creatures he could not even know truly existed.

  He had, with his daughter and a host of spiritualists, called forth the beating heart of life itself within stone, and that nothing was Harrow but it was alive and frothing with fertile life.

  And then, I saw her again: the angel from the garden, the one I’d seen as a child.

  It was Matilde, it was the face of all that was Harrow, it was the guardian and protector of this place. She was inside me, and she was everywhere. She was the eternal mother, trapped within this stone. She was my flesh and I was her flesh, and she was all. She whispered her love to me within the warmth of yellowjackets and nightmare. I felt her arms go about my waist as she said, “Esteban, Esteban,” and it was not some foreign personality, nor was it the trickle of a child’s voice. This was the woman who had died in the tower room, thinking of her only son, wanting to bring him back to her womb, this house. I knew in my heart I had failed in my mission. I knew that what I had come here for—to understand my past—and why I was now in the heart of the beast—to find Maggie—was not as it seemed.

  Matilde whispered to me: We have her now. We will have you, too.

  In the breath of my mother, I smelled the earth and the shallots and the cats and the lizards and beetles – death and life both were mingled. My mother held the doorway open between the finite and the infinite within this Looking-Glass house that reflected nothing but the shades of those who had once dwelt in the flesh.

  I felt my own mother’s spirit as it possessed me. The ache was delicious. Dare I describe the sensation? For it was not painful nor was it as uncomfortable as I would have expected.