by Tyrer, D.
“Pay her no heed,” Camilla said, handing me a rustic doll that she named as Corydon. “Cassilda has found herself an imaginary friend who goes by the name of Cordelia, using ‘her’ to emulate our friendship. Sadly,” she stroked my cheek as she spoke, “Cordelia lacks both physicality and wit, the two necessities of pleasant company. A sorry substitute in my opinion.”
“And, who cares about your opinion?!” Cassilda snapped, looking up from her occupation.
“Why, surely you do, sister dear? Have I not always been your bosom companion and most intimate confidant?”
Cassilda averted her gaze back to her dolls and ignored her.
“Tonight, I sleep with Sylvia. Will you sleep with Cordelia? Can she warm your body? Will she be attentive to your needs? Or, will she be silent and unresponsive?”
“Damn you to Hell!” Cassilda snapped and stormed out of the room, flinging her dolls aside.
“Oh, dear! It appears that I have offended my sister! I have not offended you, have I, my darling Sylvia? You still love me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” I told her, “like a sister.”
“Like a twin?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
“Like beings that exist in two separate bodies yet come together as one entity, one mind, one soul – one love?”
The intensity with which she looked at me made me feel distinctly uncomfortable and I realized that she meant me to replace Cassilda in her affections. Not trusting myself to speak, I merely nodded my vague assent.
Her sister didn’t return to the room that night, as far as I was aware, leaving us to retire to the huge bed without her, although Camilla had place a couple of her more attractive dolls in the bed beside us. They were as large as five-year-old children and unnerved me just a little as they seemed so lifelike; I could almost imagine them moving in bed alongside me.
Camilla insisted upon snuggling up close to me and caressing my hair in the darkness. When I felt her hand upon my knee, I had to make comment. She apologized and said she had been groping for my hand under the covers; but, when I felt her fingers stroking my thigh a little later, I realized that the night might be a little more intimate than I had expected it to be. I supposed she desired the comfort of proximity and resolved to tolerate her wandering fingers.
CHAPTER FIVE
We continued our explorations after that – I continued to be amazed at the number of floors the Yellow House contained. We hadn’t even reached the attic spaces yet.
Camilla began by taking me to the portrait gallery where members of our kindred and famous figures of history stared with serious expressions from within picture frames. Here were luminaries such as Caesar and Napoleon, men who had shaken the world. Here was our great uncle, Comte de Castaigne; there father’s cousin, Lord Atheling. In one corner, I even spotted my father, portrayed as a young man. Fascinating, yet somehow blending together into a morass of imagery that I couldn’t quite take in.
There was a vast chamber like a theatre with a stage and wings and chairs for an audience to sit and watch a play. It was a most unexpected discovery – I don’t recall ever hearing of a house, even a grand one such as this, being possessed of a dedicated theatre. Even in the houses of great lords obsessed with such diversions, they usually had to make do with temporary stages in the ballrooms, or visit the grand theatres in the city.
“I believe our grandfather had it built,” Camilla told me in response to my questioning her about the odd room. “He used it to stage but a single performance and, since then, it has sat unused and unloved.”
“I love it,” I told her; which was true, even if the sepulchral silence of the chamber intimidated me.
“Ah, yes, but to love something is not to use it.”
“Well, perhaps someday we shall stage our own performance here.”
“Shall we rehearse it now? Will you play the beautiful princess and I your dashing beau?” She swept me in her arms, tilted my head back and pressed her lips against mine in the manner of a pair of lovers in a melodrama. I must admit that her action shocked and surprised me a little, especially the fervour of her kiss, but it was not entirely unpleasant and I was more surprised that I returned it. I laughed, as much to cover my embarrassment, when she released me.
“There, a fine performance. Would you have thought it, Sylvia: you and I, kissing cousins?” She laughed in her turn.
Nearby was a corridor that brought me even more surprise. As we entered it, I heard a soft rattling sort of sound, a kind of chucka-chucka-chucka, growing closer. Around a corner came the figure of a white-faced woman dressed in a golden gown that trailed behind her, as did her long golden hair. It took my breath away as I realized that it was not a living person, nor a ghost, but a life-sized puppet. For one brief moment, I was utterly perplexed by it, then realized that it hung from fine strands that rose to tracks in the ceiling. It was not, in fact, that dissimilar to the mechanism that animated the puppets in the twins’ little theatre and, although impressive, was not, once you grasped its means of propulsion, quite as impressive as their skating dolls which, truly, appeared to move freely of their own volition.
The puppet seemed almost to sense us, slowing and its blank-faced head inclining ever so slightly towards us. That did impress me, although it was clear some mechanism was involved, directing that controlled its motions, meaning it was rather limited. Then, it went on its way and was gone around another corner.
Camilla seemed unable to explain who had installed such an ingenious but, ultimately, impractical, if aesthetic, device or the nature of its circuit. That was the only time we entered that curious corridor, so I was never able to expand my understanding of it. I had the impression that Camilla feared or disliked it for some reason, but she would not be drawn.
There was also a study of sorts that had an otherwise bare desk with a typewriter sat upon it, a sheet of paper in it and two piles of paper beside it, one either side. The sheets in one pile were all pristine, ready for use; those that comprised the second pile had been typed upon, whilst what was in the typewriter had been half-typed. The typing consisted of just three words repeated over and over again: He is come. The only other furniture in the room, other than a plain, straight-backed wooden chair, was a bow-fronted wooden filing cabinet which proved to be full of more of the typewritten pages.
“Crazy, eh?” Camilla said, tossing a few sheets aside.
“Whose is it? Who typed it all?” Whoever it was, I could only imagine they were a little mad. That thought made me scared. I hadn’t felt scared when I was with Camilla, no matter how strange the house was.
My cousin shrugged. “I have never seen anyone in here, and there is no name I can see on any of the pages.”
“How odd.” It was like the gramophone.
As we left the room, her hand held tight in mine, I could almost imagine I heard the sound of typewriter keys tapping away behind us. In that house, it was easy for one’s imagination to wander freely. That was likely why I had been having nightmares almost every time I fell asleep.
We also spent some time in the library. It was a fine place to visit together and talk as we looked through the volumes together, and I think Camilla rather enjoyed being able to shock me by reading those many volumes that were rather risqué. Probably, I wouldn’t have looked at those books which were of an immoral or abnormal sort if it wasn’t for her, but she delighted in my reaction to their content, and I couldn’t quite help but thrill at the illicit readings she gave.
Not everything in the library was offensive, of course, but it did seem the tastes of my aunt and uncle ran that way. There were numerous plays – Camilla delighted in reading passages from one which had characters that shared the names of her and her sister, saying they had been named for the characters by their parents – a few general novels such as those of Dickens and the three Bell siblings, poetry and history.
Camilla delighted in those books that would shock, and loved to share them with me. She would rea
d to me the most disgusting passages from books with titles such as The Erotic Awakening of N and The Training of Sappho, laughing at my discomfort, or would thrust beneath my nose an open scrapbook filled with newspaper cuttings graphically depicting the violent nature of war – ashen-faced refugees on shell-pitted roads, eviscerated bodies torn by gunfire, the aftermaths of battle and firing squads – sights that none needed to see. If I had to suffer either, at least the former offered some entertainment and enlightenment, even if I didn’t care to admit it to her.
I found myself looking through an atlas trying to locate the lakes that Camilla said she and her sister had named their skating dolls after and, failing that, examining the environs of the Gobi, a place that seemed as if it ought to be of some relevance to me. Camilla was busy taunting me with one of her favourite erotic novels.
“See, why don’t I use our names for the characters? How about this? ‘Camilla pressed her lips against Sylvia’s, her tongue probing the recesses of her mouth as Sylvia responded by-”
“Camilla!” The way she would look at me when she read such things was bad enough.
“We could act it out. Why don’t you—”
“No!”
“You’re blushing! Just like ‘Sylvia’ in this novel...” She leant in and kissed my check. I didn’t immediately recoil – after all, I told myself, we were cousins and a friendly peck on the cheek is surely fine between cousins – but, I did when she tried to kiss me on the lips and felt her fingers squeezing into my leg.
She pouted at me as I pulled away. “Oh, honestly! What’s wrong? It is entirely natural – I can read you a thousand examples...”
“No, thank you.”
With an exaggerated sigh, she found herself another book, which proved to be a photo album, and proceeded to show me a series of photographs that illustrated some of the acts that had been described in the pages she had read to me.
“You see, they are doing it. Why can’t we do that?”
I blushed furiously and tried to ignore her.
“Oh, look! I do believe this one is of my father and mother. And, yes, this is my mother, I’m sure; but, I don’t know who they are. Oh, and how about this one? Maybe I’m wrong – if that was my mother, I’m sure I’d have a brother who was a centaur!”
“They are most vile!” I tried to ignore her by locating Hastur on the map, but the city evaded my gaze and I couldn’t quite get the images out of my mind.
“Yet, you looked!” she smirked. “Maybe we ought to try this one out – are you as flexible as her, do you think?”
“Camilla, please!”
“Oh, dear, have I pushed you too far? Broken you like the proverbial butterfly on a wheel? Sorry. Still, I’m sure I can bring you around to my way – if you’re flexible enough!” With a grin, she snapped the album shut.
The next book she showed me was not, as I had half-feared, half-hoped, further smut, but a volume of séance transcriptions.
“Perhaps chatting to a ghost is more your thing? Or, how about a disembodied mind from another world? Or, maybe an aethereal being?”
I shuddered as she read me a little of its contents, the atlas forgotten on my lap. Of course, I found such things of doubtful veracity, but the notion could still chill me, in the same way that the house made my imagination leap.
“Wait,” I said as she reeled off one account. “What was that last name?” I had recognized it, or so I thought, from the atlas I had been studying.
But, I didn’t receive an answer as she lunged in and kissed me. Caught by surprise, I didn’t resist. I am ashamed to say I may have returned her kiss with as much force as she offered. The atlas slid from my lap and fell to the floor as our limbs entwined and I imagined that we were being photographed for the album; I wouldn’t have cared. Kissing cousins, indeed!
CHAPTER SIX
I evaded Camilla after that, feeling a burning shame at what we had done, which mingled in my dreams to once more make her my killer in bloody nightmares, images of her crimson-stained grin haunting me just as her hot kisses haunted me. Keen to avoid her, I lost myself high up in The Yellow House on floors we had not yet visited together.
Here, the architecture of the house grew stranger, as if the designer’s imagination had been allowed to run wild. Amongst the oddities was a staircase to nowhere which ended up against a blank wall of mustard yellow. Similarly, a door that, when opened, proved to reveal only more of the wall in which it was set, not ingress to some chamber. Then, there was a tiny, yet fully-functional door, only six inches tall, set in the wall of a corridor – from what little I could make out, peering through it, it opened into a rather pleasant-looking drawing room; for which I never did find another entrance. Or, I could mention that curious corridor that was divided up, for no discernable reason, by a dozen cheap panel doors. And, of course, there were a myriad of other rooms, bare, mundane or otherwise uninteresting.
There was also the picture gallery. That was the most interesting room I discovered without Camilla. There were a number of those strangely fascinating ‘yellow pieces’ painted by Steven Scott, from the seemingly random, yet strangely suggestive, splotches of yellow, through not-quite-uniformly-yellow canvasses to landscapes and abstracts done entirely through the use of different gradations of that one colour. I remember my father being an admirer of his work, and it was an entirely suitable collection to have in The Yellow House, I am sure you will agree. Indeed, there was even one painting that reminded me of the house. In addition to that dominant collection, there were other works, landscapes and still lifes. There were a couple that particularly attracted my attention. The one was of some lost and ruined city, all angles and jagged edges, the sort for which encyclopedias reserve use of the word ‘cyclopean’ to describe. I could imagine some bold explorer in a distant desert discovering such a place and being struck by its immensity and age. The other was of a misty lake, impressionistic and yet unmistakably that which lay behind the house and absorbed my attention when in the nursery.
But, there was one picture that truly caught my attention, so much so that I took it with me and hung it on the wall of my bedroom. I felt a little bit guilty about that, but it isn’t stealing when the item doesn’t leave the house, is it? The picture was one of Steven Scott’s paintings. In fact, it was the only one of his ‘yellow pieces’ that was a portrait. Well, I say portrait; it was very abstract and vague, yet it was clear to me that it was the portrait of a woman with long golden hair and wearing a yellow summer dress. I was fascinated by just how much he could suggest by use of a single colour. The image called Camilla to my mind and that was why I took it. I admit I couldn’t decide upon my feelings – love and loathing warring within my soul whenever I called her to mind. Perhaps it was perverse to torture myself by taking the painting so that it would constantly call her to my mind, but I couldn’t help myself.
It should, thus, come as no surprise that, when I heard a knock at my bedroom door the next night, I rushed to open it, hoping it would be her, as if summoned by the painting, come to beg me to forgive her, to be friends once more. I longed to be. For a moment, I thought it was her – then, I realized my visitor was Cassilda.
She punched me in the face and I must have blacked-out as the next thing I knew, I was sat in a chair, bound and gagged, Cassilda looming over me, her face contorted in anger. She looked so much like her sister that it hurt to see that expression on her face. It was, also, scary to see in light of the way in which she had struck me without warning or preliminary word. Cassilda was full of rage and it was directed at me. I had no idea what she might decide to inflict upon me.
Noticing that my eyes had opened, she struck me without saying a word; then struck me again. The poorly-tied gag slipped from my mouth.
“You bitch!” she spat, flecks of spittle striking my face. “First, you took Camilla away from me – then you upset her! I am going to make you pay!”
“But—” she punched me, my jaw slamming down on the tip of my tongue. I ta
sted blood.
Then, she drove her fist into my stomach and I felt bile rise from the blow. She picked up my hairbrush and took a swipe at my head. I yelped with pain from the blow and wondered just how far she intended to take this. I wondered if Mrs. Hawberk or Chambers would come if I screamed.
She punched me, again, using the hairbrush handle to direct the blow.
It was at that moment that Camilla entered. I can only imagine she had been in the nursery next door and heard what was happening.
“Cassilda, no!”
Her sister paused, looked at her. “But, she hurt you...”
“Leave her alone – I love her!”
“But...”
“I upset her. It was my fault. Leave her alone.”
Cassilda glared at her sister, but dropped my hairbrush, turned and stalked out of the room.
Despite her admission, it seemed Camilla couldn’t help herself but kiss me, drawing away with blood on her lips. Then, she untied me, apologizing, for what exactly I wasn’t sure; I was merely grateful to be released from my bonds. She hugged me, but quickly let go again.
“I’ll make sure she doesn’t bother you again,” she told me, then left, leaving me alone with my thoughts and more than a little dazed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
That brought us back together and we resumed our exploration of the house. Things were not quite as easy between us, for a day or two, as they had been – Camilla seemed somewhat wary of getting close to me, lest she upset me – but, we began to get on again after that.
We were exploring higher up, the same areas that I had visited on my own; bordering, as far as I could tell, upon the attic space of the house. She showed me another door that opened only onto a blank wall. It was impossible to tell whether such features were due to restructuring at some point, due to some error in design, or a deliberate oddity.
She led me up a narrow staircase – so narrow that I felt as if I needed to breathe in to make my way up it – to a long, empty gallery that appeared to run the length of the house and was clearly in the eaves. Camilla produced a small rubber ball, bright yellow in colour, and asked if I would like to play a game.