The Dark Closet

by Beall, Miranda

  “The Wighte mantel,” Crossett whispered.

  “The Wighte mantel, the harbinger of another tale of woe in Barrow. Another great family lost to ruin.”

  “But not entirely,” Crossett said looking into his friend’s eyes. “All the other families—the Teilbrights, Wethertons, Herefords—are all gone, scattered, lost. But there is a Wighte left …”

  “Perhaps that is the key.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the story of the Wighte family is not finished. The emerald necklace was not passed on to the next daughter.”

  “You don’t know that, Twynne,” he said. “No one knows that. That’s the crux of the whole legend: Where is the emerald necklace of King Henry VIII to Mary Lamerie Wighte? Jake Hawkins thinks it’s buried somewhere on the grounds, he and a million other fortune hunters. Others think Mrs. Robert Wighte gave it to her daughter just before the Union soldiers arrived, and it was lost when the young girl left the house after the soldiers attacked it.”

  “Conjecture all, Crossett. But what if the necklace was not passed down as it had been for centuries? What if the spirit of Mrs. Robert Wighte has been trying to pass it down for the last one hundred years?”

  The color left Crossett’s face.

  “How did I get involved?” he said in a strained voice, remembering the apparition hovering over Maude, laying her hands upon the child’s neck. Had she been trying to strangle her or was she trying to put something on her?

  “You brought the mantel before which she appears to Winterhurst, and she came with it.”

  “Like The Rambler’s article?”

  “He may have something.”

  “Then the mantel must go back.”

  “It’s not the mantel she wants, Crossett. It’s whatever is behind the mantel, and you know that or you would not have taken it off and looked.”

  “Then I must look now at Wightefield.”

  “It’s worth a try, especially if it all bothers you as much as you’ve been telling me,” Twynne said as he tapped his pipe in an ash tray.

  “I’ll get Lamerie’s permission.”

  Twynne laughed. “Better get Jake Hawkins’s!”

  Crossett looked disgusted. “The house belongs to Lamerie Wighte. She is the only one whose permission I need.”

  “How are the stairs coming?”

  “What?”

  “Your stairs. You said you were having Jake do some work on them so no one breaks their neck on them.”

  “Oh, yes. He’s coming later today to work on them. I’ll give you a call in a few hours as soon as I see Lamerie Wighte. You’re coming with me, aren’t you?

  “You’re going to see her?” Twynne sounded interested.

  “Yes. You coming with me?” Crossett was hoisting his overcoat about his shoulders.

  “You know where she lives?” Twynne called after him as he threw open the paneled front door and a cold rush of icy, damp air swept through the hallway like a glacier. Twynne soberly watched Crossett lunging down the snowy flagstones to his car, the hem of his coat flapping behind him with the alacrity of his stride like a great tweed hand waving its good-byes.

  Chapter 11

  Crossett climbed the cold, gray stones into the Walsall granite apartment building. Ice lay like a fine veneer over the corrugated surface of the hewn steps, lending to the rock a polish it did not ordinarily have. He laid his soles carefully in the ascent, grasping the frozen oyster wall that loomed beside. The acier sky threatened snow, sending on brief reconnaissance missions icy emissaries that pelted the brim of his wool hat with little popping noises.

  The vestibule was no warmer. The comings and goings of the residents had left a cold vacuum behind when the doors had snapped shut after them. Snow lay in slushy pools here and there, not frozen, not melted in the hovering temperature of the hall, immobilized by indecision. His boot indiscreetly caught one, lost its grasp on the ground beneath, and sent him for a brief, giddy skid to the inner door whose brass knob threw itself into his hand like a life preserver. His breath whitened the air as he clung to the knob.

  At first he thought she was not home and was upbraiding himself for not calling instead, realizing now in the first quiet after Twynne’s revelation that it had been foolish of him to come to her apartment with no forewarning. He knew Jake was not home, but it was still a foolish risk. Besides, it would be easier to get her permission over the phone: It would not matter if Jake were home or not; all she would have to say was yes or no and hang up the receiver. He was turning from the gray door when he heard the safety chain rattle and fall from within. The door opened very slowly not revealing any human hand for some time. Then he saw Lamerie, half her face hidden by the door’s edge. Her brown eye hung sadly in its socket, and she looked pale and drawn.

  “May I come in?” Crossett attributed her reticence to dismay at seeing him unannounced in her doorway. She slid back from the door frame like a wraith.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call but I had something very important to ask you, and I, well, I really didn’t stop to think what would be the best way to go about it.” He threw his hat on the table as the door clicked closed behind him. “I need to go up to Wightefield, if you don’t mind, just to look at something—“ He turned to face Lamerie and halted his discourse. The bruise on her face was just beginning to show traces of yellow, indicating that it had been there for a few days already and had not yet completed its tenancy. She made no motion to cover it or hide it and her small frame drooped beneath her simple dress.

  “I must leave him,” she said simply. ”I’ve waited too long.”

  How she had been chastising herself for that! The opportunities to leave the house on an errand and not return had been manifold, but she had lethargically remained within the prison walls of the little Walsall apartment, dreaming of Wightefield in its heyday and how a pauper might regain its beauty and grace. And fighting Jake all the while for dominion over it. What sense had it made? How lazy could she have been and how stupid for not seeing the inevitable, that Jake would take what he wanted one way or another, subdue her in order to acquire Wightefield and pose as its master. All those useless conversations with Crossett over how to maintain control of the manor house—there was, of course, only one way. Divorce Jake. But what had she done instead? Taken a lover, a decision that accomplished absolutely nothing, did not even relieve the loneliness she had sought to conquer. How could it? Crossett was not hers and Jake did not want her. She would think that with two men she would come out with something: Surely what one lacked the other might give. But keeping the flesh company did little for the soul, and it was, ironically enough, the soul that would have to pay the price. She knew she could not extricate herself fully from either man, neither in this life or the next.

  Crossett stood speechless. Unaccustomed to such naked, basal violence, he could not quite grasp the significance of it. In his world people perpetrated against one another a violence of the mind, not the body, using words as weapons, not hands and fists. They orchestrated changes in lives and set little traps; they imprisoned one another in contrived circumstance and then walked away. They never raised a hand or pointed a gun or bared the ugliness of human nature with their teeth. The prettiness of the façade was always maintained at whatever and often great cost, but preserved it was. He was not familiar with this primeval lack of control and was at a loss as to how to react to it. Perhaps that was why he was 4F when he went to enlist for the second world war. Perhaps that was why they told him he was not emotionally fit for battle.

  “I’ve married by cousin.” Her hand involuntarily covered her mouth as she gasped. Tears welled in her eyes. “His great grandfather, Shadrack Hawkins, raped my grandmother during the Union occupation of Wightefield. She had a son … my grandfather.” She hesitated.

  “He wanted the necklace and silver but couldn’t find them.” Her mouth quivered. “Just like Jake,” she whispered.

  “Why are you still here?” Crossett ask
ed in his usual blunt manner with her.

  “He watches me.”

  “Well, he’s not watching you now. He’s at my house repairing a staircase.”

  Her face lightened a little. Crossett’s hand dipped deep within his pants pocket and brought out a bundle of bills. He counted out several.

  “Here. This should take you far enough away from here.” She wondered if it mattered to him if she were far away or if it had all simply been a matter of convenience. He would never say, of course. Not to her, not to anyone, not even, she was sure, when God Himself asked.

  “I don’t want to be far away from here. I must stay near Wightefield.”

  “Then use it for what you want.”

  She looked into Crossett’s large, brown eyes. Such a soft brown they were. It was his eyes that had seduced her five years ago, and she would miss them, but they were not windows to his soul. No, she could vouch for the inaccuracy of that old saying. Crossett Mainwaring’s eyes were far softer than anything that lay beyond them.

  “Thank you.”

  “I need to go to Wightefield, Lamerie.”

  “You have my permission to go to Wightefield, but Jake goes up there nearly every night waiting for trespassers. He carries a gun.”

  “I know.”

  Outside, Jake measured Crossett’s steps as he watched him go down the icy apartment building steps and pick his way along the gelid patches of the cobbled sidewalk.

  Chapter 12

  The dwindling light was already casting the long shadows of bare, spindly trees like crooked black snakes over the white snow when Crossett turned off the ignition and he and Twynne sat silently before the great vacant front windows of Wightefield. They loomed like black portals to the underworld, yawning in the crystalline snow that had piled itself along their frames and at their bases. A light wind groaned softly about the eves, creaking the old gutters and gently tapping an outside door at the back of the house.

  Like Aeneas, like Odysseus, it seemed to Crossett that he had to traverse the Underworld to ask of the shade of one who had gone before the way home .

  The two men shuffled through the thigh-high snow that lay undisturbed before the pillared porch of Wightefield. To the left a line of leafless, stringy weeping willows waved their drooping branches in greeting. Winded, Crossett and Twynne reached the porch at last and ascended the snowy steps to the front door for which Crossett produced the key Lamerie had given him. The immense silence of the great hall was softly broken by the rush of cold wind that ushered in the two men. The circular staircase wound before them to the second floor, powdered with lightly glistening snow that had sifted through the thinning roof and ceilings of the upper floor. The steps seemed covered with millions of shards of glittering glass. A huge wooden beam broken loose from the upper hallway ceiling had long ago crashed down where it lay midway to the bottom, having dented and splintered the oaken handrail in its descent. In the parlor to the right, broken sticks of furniture fragments glittered also with the snow blown through the broken window panes. A fine swath of a cold white cloth laid over the floor beneath, fanning out thinner and thinner until on the far side of the room lay only bare wood, whose finish had worn with the repeated rains and snows and the humid summers and dry autumns. A few brown leaves still lay huddled in the corners, rustled now and then by the breezes escaping from the cold outside into the relative shelter of the looming empty rooms.

  Crossett’s boots scuffed the naked floor boards as he made his way to the fireplace where the mantel had once been. It appeared in the waning light to be no more than a black husk of a hearth, a gaping opening in the wall, a dark black entrance to the Underworld.

  “This is it,” he said turning to Twynne as he laid his hand upon the flat surface.” Not much to see, but perhaps if we—“

  Both men raised their heads at the same time.

  “Did you hear that?” Crossett asked Twynne.

  “Yes. It sounded like someone calling.”

  “Calling who?”

  “I couldn’t make it out.”

  “Maybe someone sees the car and is wondering who’s in here. If it’s Jake, we want him to know we have Lamerie’s permission to be here.”

  “I’ll go look,” Twynne volunteered.

  “Get the flashlight on your way back, will you?” Crossett called after him.

  He turned his attention to the fireplace and began running his hand along the rough surface looking for the line of where the mantel was once lodged but feeling nothing extraordinary in the stone face. Gingerly, he ran his hand up into the fireplace and felt for the flue, which he eventually found and gave a wrench when it did not come easily. It opened with a puff of soot and snow that sent him coughing into the room. The sound echoed through the chambered house, ricocheting off old beams and plaster walls, calling to itself from the farthest rooms with a hollow, lingering moan. After waiting a few moments for the air to clear, he went back to the hearth to retrace the areas he had already examined. He even ran his hands through the sooty mess at the bottom of the fireplace, lifted the andirons with a grunt, probed with a shattered table leg along the bricked back of the fireplace, and finally flung the piece of wood in exasperation across the room where it rattled into a corner.

  The light was fast fading, and he realized Twynne had been gone now for some time. At the window he peered through one of the broken panes and called Twynne’s name softly. When he received no response, he strained to see in the gathering darkness, but there were so many skeletal winter trees he could not in the shifting gloom distinguish what he thought was the figure of a man. He called softly again. It could not be Twynne, he thought, because Twynne had worn no hat. The frozen figure was wearing what appeared to be a fez of some sort. He could see the trailing tassel in the moving air. Something long and thin rested by his side. Or was it a man, indeed, he asked himself as he squinted into the darkness. Perhaps it was just a slip of a naked tree to which the shadows lent the guise of a man. If so, a different angled view may tell the tale, and so he went to the front porch and sought the little tree from there. He could not find it. Camouflaged, he thought, by larger trees and the shadows they threw among themselves. An intermittent rustling sounded like no more than the light, icy winter breeze that moved the air.

  “Twynne!” Only the sighing wind moving over the slick surface of the snow answered him. “Come on, Twynne! Answer me!”

  He stood back a moment from the edge of the porch. It seemed unlikely that Twynne could not hear him. Why did he not answer then?

  “Twynne!”

  A cold knot began to twist in Crossett’s stomach, an old familiar knot. The discomfort radiated out into his limbs before he succeeded in stifling it. It was the same feeling he always got when he realized Twynne and his brothers were nowhere in sight and that the next time he saw them they would be all over him, shoving him into—

  He could not think about it. Would Twynne try such an old trick here in the darkness of Wightefield? His stomach crept. For a wild moment of panic, he felt sure he would. It was a part of Twynne to prey on Crossett’s inner weaknesses and feel a sense of fulfillment from it. He had seen it countless times in Twynne’s dark eyes when he would explode from the confines of the suffocating closet to move freely once again into the greatness of the room beyond.

  He backed through the doorway into the darkened hall as he closed the front door. He was being foolish. Twynne had probably just gone around the back of the house to look and could not hear Crossett calling. Undoubtedly, he would be back soon. Perhaps he was already headed back to the front door.

  His breath was coming more heavily in the woozy silence of the house as he turned to walk back into the parlor. He decided he would wait there where he could look out the windows and see the car and the expanse of the front lawn. Besides, it would be where Twynne would expect to find him, since it was where he had left him. The receding light made the shadows it cast on its retreat dance before the exposed fireplace, conjoining themselves
in lethargy into the loose form of a woman turning from Crossett’s startled gaze to the outer rim of where the mantel once lodged. Her movements were frenetic as she sought to complete whatever desperate mission on which she found herself. And she turned once again to Crossett with recognition in her strangely shifting features.

  His feet carried him closer to the apparition, which blurred and grew in the dimness until it was indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness. His hands sought the spot her own filmy appendages had struggled with until he felt a block of stone give way, push in, and then slide gently out. As the stone gave way with a grind he thought he heard another sound also, like the distant report of a rifle. His hands froze in their search for just a second as he strained his ears. Just the wind in a low hum, whistling now and then through the jagged edges of shattered window panes, was all he could hear. Sometimes thunder came with snow storms he remembered, and he returned to his work. Into the dark recesses of the stone pocket he plunged his hand feeling the cold metal and faceted stones within. In the last wisp of light in the parlor windows, he saw the green of the emeralds and the soft glow of the 24 karat gold settings of the fabulous and fabled Wighte necklace. Grasping it in his hand, he stashed it deep within his pants pocket and began to flee the room to the front door when he heard it—a low, droning thump whose familiarity strung his heart along a wire. He stopped breathing for a moment wondering if he would hear it again. It echoed lowly throughout he house, threatening to become a bang, seeming to vibrate without doing so, resonating in the hollowness of his chest. He knew that sound, had heard it night after night for weeks, had combed Winterhurst for its source, and finally tracked it to the hideous closet in Maude’s room, where he had stood unable to open the door and expose the perpetrator, so enormous was the dread in his heart.

  Would Twynne play such a trick in the darkness of Wightefield?

  He began up the old staircase, stepping over the fallen beam, following the increasing noise up to the rooms beyond. How long had he sought its source? It drew him like the bewildered insect to a flame, revealing nothing, promising everything. Maude’s small form with the apparition bent over her silky white neck flashed into his mind. The recesses of a closet he had not seen in 22 years yawned before his mind’s eye like Tartarus. Through the hollow hallway he went, into the far back bedroom until he faced a dark oak closet behind which the banging increased in frantic crescendo. Woodenly, he laid his hand upon the knob and turned it; the latch slipped down, and the door hingeless swung open. The deafening sound stopped immediately, and the house hung in the silence. Into the dark chasm of the closet, Crossett walked like a man entering his own tomb.