From there Adeline pulled herself as quickly as she was able back up the stairs, carrying the Doctor’s bag with her. In narrating the evening’s events to Rebecca and John later, she tried, she did try, to explain what happened in the Doctor’s room over the course of the unending hour before the Hirschfelders arrived at home, but was largely unable. Her English seemed to fail her. No one who lived nearby had noticed the lights blazing from the house or heard the boy’s screams, or if they had, they hadn’t made it their business to come. She said merely, “After some time, the little boy, he stop crying downstairs. But I could not leave him alone, your father, in his Leiden.”
The Doctor had only just finally died when Rebecca saw him, and the blood on his bedclothes was still bright and fresh.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bridget manages, somehow, to scramble partway up from the floor, with Julie half in her arms and half in Mark’s. Crabbing backward, away from the ghost in the door, Bridget whangs her head, for the second time in seconds, on the stair banister post. Tears start in her eyes, and she realizes that in falling she has also bitten the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood—it feels like there’s actually a little loose flap of skin in there, and the pain is both needle sharp and throbbing. There is no air in the house, no air in the universe, and her lungs are white pain. Standing, running, getting away, is impossible. Her arms are shaking so hard she can hardly keep herself propped up.
The ghost has turned effortfully in the doorway and is staring down at them with hunger in its eyes. Inside the shape-shifting openmouthed whiteness Bridget can still just see the blackened figure of a woman, melting and struggling. And now it moves, taking a shuffle step that throws it off-balance, and it brushes against the doorframe with a revolting thud like a hand flapping against the inside lid of a coffin.
Mark, of course, cannot hear it. He has struggled along on the ground with Bridget, keeping low to prevent Julie from falling out of their arms, and with a grunt he lands on his ass on the polished wooden floorboards. He pulls Julie away from Bridget to his own chest, smooching and rocking the girl and looking at Bridget with betrayed astonishment in his eyes.
“What the hell, Bridget?” he demands. “Are you drunk? How much did you drink?”
As Bridget watches in nauseated terror, the ghost reaches out its flickering, grotesque arm and closes the front door to the house behind it. Now we are all here. Now you are mine.
“We have to move. We have to get Julie away from here,” Bridget whispers.
“I’m getting her into bed,” Mark snaps, exasperated, and rises to his feet with the sobbing little girl in his arms. Like it’s nothing. He steps over Bridget at the foot of the stairs and ascends quickly, making funny nom-nom-nom noises into the crook of Julie’s neck that cause her to insert one giggle, exactly one giggle, into the line of sobs she is producing. Bridget hears the upstairs bathroom door close, hears Mark’s comforting voice talking to their girl, hears the bathtub faucet come alive with a hiss that runs through the walls.
Meanwhile neither she nor the ghost has moved.
“What do you want?” Bridget manages through numb lips.
Around its blackened center the ghost actually enlarges—spreads itself wide like a hellish preying bird. The world grows momentarily dark and bone-chillingly cold. I want it all. Everything you love is mine.
“Please don’t,” Bridget begs. “Please, please just leave them alone. Take me, take just me.”
The ghost’s head dips low, as if bending to a trough. Then its jaw lowers like a mantis, and its black and earth-stinking mouth opens wide enough that Bridget can see directly into the chasm. There the dark-eyed woman inside is trapped and reaching. Join her, then. Go on. Climb inside. You knew all along you were going to be swallowed alive.
There’s a happy squeal and a splash upstairs.
Bridget’s mind stutters to Julie. I would do anything for you, but I can’t go in there. Forgive me.
“I have something for you,” Bridget extemporizes. “I have something you want. I promise.” It’s slow it’s slow it’s slow, I can lure it away from them, I can lure it into the dark, and then I can escape and get us all out of here.
It flickers and then preens again, growing and stretching, a mindless wall of cold and anger that dissolves all the air around it into nothingness. Everything you love is mine. You know yourself that you already gave it all away.
“Follow me. Follow me. I’ll show you,” Bridget pants.
Keeping her eyes on the ghost, her breath a thin and painful whistling in her throat, Bridget gropes behind her for balance and begins slowly to pull herself up. The airless world spins, and for a heart-stopping second she’s sure she’s going to black out. The ghost tilts its maw toward her, as if to scoop her in, and Bridget almost loses her determination not to scream. She scrambles backward into the dark, moving faster now.
She is halfway into the darkened living room before the ghost makes its move, throwing its weight forward to drape halfway over the banister post, flopping horribly, half impaling itself. Then it swings its weight forward and begins its struggle after Bridget.
She needs to outflank it again. She tries to think how she can trap the ghost somehow, corner it and then get away with her family. But whether because of her terror or because of her struggle to breathe, her mind can’t focus. She staggers, lurching from one support to the next, gripping the arm of a chair and then reaching for the corner of the low bookshelf by the entrance to the dining room, pulling herself to the entryway and holding herself up by clinging to the wall. The smell and the airless void of the grave pursue her. This can’t be happening. This dead thing can’t be chasing me through my own house.
It doesn’t want my baby’s story. It doesn’t want my deepest grief. It doesn’t want my house, or my marriage, or my daughter.
I already gave it all of those things. I already dissolved myself into the white.
It’s just ready to finish the job.
And then something like a cloud descends over her eyes, over her mouth, like the view from an airplane window when the craft is overtaken by a cloud. But this cloud isn’t water vapor suspended in air. This cloud is made of knives.
It has me it has me—
The pain is excruciating. Bridget’s mouth opens in a shriek, and now it’s in her mouth, the whiteness seeking a way down her throat, seeking a way into her heart, a way to gut her from within.
She falls to her knees, out of the white—she can no longer stand, but also it feels as if some force has come from behind her and given her a push. It was her. The woman—the one struggling in blackness inside of that hateful cloud.
Bridget gasps for air and begins to crawl again, digging her fingernails into the dining room rug to pull herself along. She makes her way to the corner of the kitchen entryway and pulls herself to her feet, looking back into the darkness behind her for the ghost.
What is silhouetted against the faint light coming from the entryway brings tears of horror and pity to her eyes.
She is tall, the dead woman, but painfully thin. She is more solid than Bridget has ever seen her because with one arm she is trying to pull herself out of the white. The other arm looks broken, somehow useless, bent at a wrenching angle. But she is trying to pull the white off, pull it up and over her head like a dress (or like a nightgown) that was found, too late, to be made of something dangerous, something that would eat her alive. (I know that feeling, I know it. I’ve been the ghost in my house, that whiteness is mine, too—or—or I made it—dear God, I made it, I chose it.) As Bridget watches, the woman’s thin frame doubles over and shudders. She pushes up from her knees and forces herself to stand. Her hands clutch at the edges of something around her that Bridget cannot see—she is nothing but a shade, with the entry light behind her as she struggles for her freedom in the darkened doorway. It is clear that the woman is in terrible pain, that sh
e is fighting for her life with what might be the last, the utmost that she has.
Bridget can no more watch a person struggle through that kind of pain than she can let someone hurt her baby girl. Before she knows herself what she is doing, she is moving back toward it. Back toward the shape-shifting, the flesh-dissolving, the hungry and hateful it, because the she (she could be me, she could be me—I am what you are) cannot hold out much longer. She’s across the room, but Bridget feels as if she reaches her merely by summoning the will to move, as if she has folded the space in the room like the corner of a tablecloth and erased the few feet between them.
“I can reach—let me help—” She puts her arms out to the woman, into the space where she seems to be, although even as she approaches she’s not sure what her hands will encounter there, what her arms might enclose. She lunges in, reaches through, and for a half moment she thinks their fingers touch, and it’s not painful, it’s not like the press of hot knives through her skin—but it is cold, and wet, and hard where this woman is, and she has become that place, and it’s a place she does not want to be.
In the dark, her eyes change. In the dark, in the second before Bridget realizes neither of them is strong enough, not yet. They haven’t beaten it, not yet.
It slips over the woman’s face like a caul and changes her into a horror. The eyes suddenly black and bottomless and huge, the mouth like a grave tipping her in (YOU’RE MINE, TOO, MINE MINE MINE). Bridget screams and yanks herself backward, but her hand (it’s got my hand, dear God, I can’t take it) is agonizingly held in its clutch.
“MARK!” She screams his name. But what could he do, even if he were here? This is the ghost that she chose. She’s the only one who can see it or fight it or free herself from it. There is pain here, unimaginable, but it’s pain she made, inherited, stepped into, was born into. It’s almost familiar. It’s almost like birth.
Let me go, please—I’m sorry, I can’t get through, I’m not strong enough—
She’s no longer sure which thoughts are her own and which are the thoughts of the woman—or the raw, frequency-annihilating broadcasts of the staticky, flickering white ghost. She’s connected to both; she’s inside of them as surely as they are inside of her. She’s not sure who lets go of whom, who was pulling or clasping, but somehow she’s released. For now. But the ghost is still a hungry mouth, it still wants her—and as she falls backward, it lunges again.
Bridget lands on her back and rolls. There is a thud behind her—something hitting the floor. She staggers to her feet and runs into the darkened kitchen, where for a moment, in a panic of fresh pain and bewildered instinct, she thinks the impossible (I could just leave, I could just run out the door into the night, a madwoman, get into the car and leave this horror show) and then she stops. She forces herself to think.
Mark might be safe, it’s true—he might not even be living in the same layer of reality that admits such things as the ghost, or the woman inside it. He might not even have heard her screams; the struggle of the last few moments simply took place in a house he doesn’t inhabit.
But there is another person in the house who can see the ghost. Who could always see it, who would go on seeing it, even if Bridget somehow found it in herself to leave her behind. There’s another person here that the ghost might accept, a compromise, if its first choice became unavailable. A girl, clever and special, worth everything.
It won’t stop. It can’t.
What does it want? Everything, everything. And it knows just where to find it.
A shuffling sound has arrived at the kitchen doorway. Something hisses like static in her ear, the piercing sound of an empty frequency. The air thins out; the smell of damp earth and wet mud overtakes her.
Bridget is shaking. Her legs won’t move. She feels literally rooted in fear. She tries to force herself to put one foot in front of the other. She cannot do it.
But it’s slow, it’s slow, I can get there before it—
A thud. A dead step. Then a draft of air wafting over her shoulder, like a dreadful mockery of a summer breeze, cold like the grave and moving the loose hairs that have escaped her braid. Like a breath on her neck.
You’re all mine now.
Her paralysis shatters, and she is running for the stairs.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the weeks that turned into months after Dr. Mueller’s funeral, Rebecca, numbed as she was by the sadness and the lonely hideousness of the end of her father’s life, found herself wrapped up tight in an isolation from which she could not see an easy way to extricate herself. For her, of course, it was not an unfamiliar sensation.
For the Doctor had left his house to her—to his beloved daughter, “Rebecca Mueller.” And John, insulted but not wanting to reveal it, had seemed to align immediately with the notion that his mourning wife should remain in her childhood house in town, along with Frau and Matthew.
John went back out to the farm without them, coming into town for weekend visits, as if the family had decided to prolong their terrible holiday visit long, long past the date of its exhausted and joyless expiry. At first the separation seemed temporary, or at any rate they all assumed it to be so. But it was not long before an air of fatigued permanence and failure attached itself to the split household.
To Rebecca it seemed as if she had put on seven-league boots and stepped not forward but backward in time, to the days when she was a young and indolent beauty, except the small man in whose thrall she was held was not the Doctor but her little boy, for whose sake this arrangement purportedly made the most sense: He must be with her, after all, and she, oh, she must not be asked for anything, not now. And it was true that she was tired all the time, terribly tired.
Sometimes she stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up, just being quiet. Sometimes she found herself standing there without remembering when she’d moved into that spot, or why, and she’d think, Oh, what was it, what was I doing here? Thinking she should make some excuse to go up the stairs and look for something—just to see. Just to see if it might happen again: if she might suddenly drop into another house, onto another stair. At these moments she sometimes found herself thinking, Who is waiting in that place for me? What was I trying to get to, up there? And then the questions themselves would seem as unlikely as her own behavior, and she would force herself to move away and try to find something useful to do.
Perplexing as it was, Rebecca sensed that her father’s house was a box she herself had stepped into, closing the lid over her own head. The listlessness of the place crept into her bones. She was as unaccustomed to inactivity now as she had been unprepared for the endless work that had awaited her when she’d moved out to the farmhouse after her marriage, and to her amazement she found herself as exhausted by drifting around her father’s house as she’d been last year working through her first winter on the farm. Now, here, without the purpose that the farm gave her or the heightened awareness that she and John produced in each other’s company, everything she thought she was simply dissolved. All the self-doubt and the loneliness and the self-loathing she’d come to associate with her own many mistakes—everything she’d done wrong in her marriage, on the farm, even as a mother to Matthew—became a shroud in which she felt herself being embalmed, day by endless day. She lacked the power to fight her way out. It was a frightening sensation, this helplessness, and yet she supposed it ought to have felt familiar, perhaps even welcome: Wasn’t this how the fortunate among women lived, or dreamed of living? Comfortably in place, tending their dear babies and their dear homes and their dearly beloveds? Shouldn’t she feel more real and not less? But something was missing, something she wanted badly, and without it she felt she might become so insubstantial as to fly apart into pieces.
As the winter ended and the spring reared up, John was at the house in town less and less.
Frau was not herself, either. The Doctor’s death and the way she’d lost him—t
he long night that had rendered her as helpless as a girl in a dark, pitching boat leaving her homeland, never to return—stayed with her. She let the few remaining servants do whatever they would, whenever they would do it, while she sank into her chair by the kitchen window for long hours. She even allowed her garden to go to weeds.
“My father’s will was out of date,” Rebecca suggested out loud one afternoon, sitting with Frau in the kitchen. They avoided the parlor when they could help it. Her father’s chair and pipe stand still stood there.
“Ja, no doubt it was,” Frau replied, without conviction.
“Perhaps he meant us to keep this house as a Sunday house.” In the old times in their town, as in other hill-country towns where Germans had settled, farm families had kept little dwellings that were known as Sunday houses, two-room cottages with sleeping lofts for the children. Entire families would trundle into town on the farm-to-market road on Friday evening with wagonloads destined for the Saturday market, crowding into their Sunday houses and remaining until after church and Sunday dinner, then towing themselves back out to the farms for the week’s work. The houses themselves were half squalid and half charming, as was the custom itself, which had been mostly abandoned, although some of the little houses remained. Rebecca knew even as she made the suggestion that the notion of her father’s roomy, well-built house as a Sunday house, even for a successful farmer, was a preposterous one. But she couldn’t quite believe it of her father, that he had meant to maroon her here like Rapunzel or brick her up like the tell-tale heart.
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