Wild Fell

by Michael Rowe

  I hurried up the large stone steps to the shelter of the covered veranda and put my suitcases down. Feeling in my windbreaker pocket for the keys, I located the largest one by touch and fumbled for the lock on the massive oak door. I inserted the key and turned it. The door swung open inward, perhaps pushed harder by the wind. Then I stepped over the threshold and into the house.

  The blackness that swam toward me from the open door was huge and absolute. There was an immediate sense of vastness and space, a dimensional illusion created, no doubt, by the absolute lack of light coming from anywhere inside or outside of the house—except for the occasional flashes of lightning, which did nothing to illuminate the interior, even when they touched the panes of the high stained glass windows deeper inside. When I closed my eyes, there was no discernible change in the comparative depth of the dark. By instinct, I felt along the wall near the front door until I located the hard ridge of what could only be an antiquated light switch. It was stiff with age, but it yielded to pressure, and suddenly there was light.

  I stood in a hallway of dark panelled walnut or mahogany, and not for the first time did I wonder by what fluke or error I had been successful in purchasing something this ridiculously grand, even out here on an island in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Mrs. Fowler really had been insane and had sold me this house in error, leaving an extra zero, or a comma, off the purchase price.

  I walked slowly down the dim hallway, taking its measure, turning on light switches wherever I found them until the downstairs was reasonably illuminated—at least enough for me to inspect. Directly in front of me was another carved arch of the same rich dark wood as the panelled hallway walls. This one was blazoned with an exquisitely rendered coat of arms that I assumed belonged to the Blackmore family.

  To my left was a well-proportioned room, also panelled, that must have been a stately library in its day. The numerous shelves were mostly empty, but here and there were bunches of ancient books: first-edition nineteenth-century novels, I discovered.

  I took one of the books off the shelf, an octavo of Wordsworth’s poetry bound in burgundy calf. Opening it carefully, I saw that it bore a bookplate on the inside left cover. In an ornate design of intertwined roses were engraved the words Ex Libris Rosa Blackmore.

  On a long trestle table was arrayed a stack of magazines with names like Anglo-American, The Canadian Journal, The Literary Garland, and British Colonial mixed in with more easily recognizable antique copies of American periodicals like Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Punchinello. With the exception of the empty shelves, the library looked as though it had remained almost completely untouched during the entire duration of its vacancy. There was no sense of rot, decay, or any sort of degradation or neglect. Mrs. Fowler had said that the house didn’t age. At the time I had put it down to part of her theatrical sales pitch, but I could see now that she had a point: there was nothing here to suggest that the true owners of Wild Fell weren’t merely on holiday, or that a light turn of the house and some fresh flowers wouldn’t bring it immediately back to its genteel state of habitability.

  Against another wall, there was a fireplace with reading chairs grouped around it in an inviting way. Oddly, there was a mirror hanging over the fireplace, unusual for a library, I thought, which would normally have some sort of landscape or portrait.

  To the right of the hallway was the parlour. Unlike the library, this room had been painted in some light colour rather than panelled in wood, and it was completely furnished, though dustcovers had been carefully draped over every piece in the room. I tugged on one of the covers. It fell away, exposing a richly brocaded wingback chair. I pulled away another cover, then another. I marvelled at what was revealed. Not only were these superb examples of period furniture, but they were also in excellent condition, like everything else I had seen so far. Next to the fireplace stood an elaborate grandfather clock, its hands frozen at three o’clock.

  Here, also, was a mirror over the fireplace. The glass was the exception to the rule of agelessness. It was dark with years. Fine spiderweb cracks were visible in the glass around the gilding, and the surface was veined with brown and grey lines.

  Along the walls were lightened sections where paintings had once hung. The outlines were clearly visible. I counted four of them, large vertical rectangles that suggested portraits. I frowned, and glanced around the room to see if they had been lined up against the lower walls, but there was no sign of them anywhere. I considered that the family in England might have had them sent to them when they were preparing to sell the house, which I found a bit odd considering that so much other personal furniture had been left behind.

  Farther along the hallway, on the same side as the parlour, was the dining room. Like the library, this room had been panelled, and there was a long dining room table with six chairs and a sideboard at the head of the table.

  Here, as well, like the two previous rooms, there was a mirror—a rectangular one hanging horizontally above the sideboard, framed in the same mahogany, decorated with gold maple leaves at each corner.

  A discreet swinging door at the far end of the room led to a large kitchen and pantry with a set of servants’ stairs leading to the upper regions of the house. I glanced up the stairs to the hallway above. Since it was dark and I could find no light switch anywhere nearby, I decided to leave it till the next day, and instead exited through the kitchen and back into the dining room, then out into the hallway.

  Between the dining room and the parlour was the staircase I had seen in the photographs Mrs. Fowler sent. It led to the four main bedrooms upstairs and the three servants’ bedrooms at the opposite end of the house.

  On the second floor, I explored each of the bedrooms. The master bedroom was of lordly proportions, obviously the bedroom of a husband and wife of wealth and position. Here, as in the parlour, there were superb pieces of mahogany furniture crafted in the Victorian style under the dust covers, which I removed. As was the custom, the room was decorated with an eye to the feminine tastes of the lady of the house. Although the bed and the adjacent chest of drawers were heavily proportioned, there was also an elegant vanity table at the opposite end of the room with a bevelled mirror and a brocade chair. At the other end of the room was a sort of dressing room off the attached bathroom. All the shuttered windows had heavy burgundy velvet curtains with gold-fringed tassel.

  There were two other furnished bedrooms, also large, but smaller than the master suite. One of them, obviously a young man’s room, was decorated in a bachelor style—bulky masculine furniture, a washstand, a commodious single bed and a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The walls were hung with small oil paintings of northern landscapes, maps, and military-themed prints. Here, as in the master bedroom, all the curtains were burgundy velvet.

  The third bedroom, much smaller than either of the other two, had clearly belonged to a young woman. This room had been painted yellow. Originally, it had likely been a sunny buttercup colour, but it had darkened over the years to deep saffron. The curtains here were deep green velvet and the furniture—the bed, a writing desk, a framed full-length mirror, and a vanity table—appeared to have been crafted from white ash, or fine light oak. Beneath the dustcovers, the bed was draped with a substantial quilt in patches of pale rose and violet. I touched the quilt: it was cold and stiff with age, but nonetheless soft and relatively clean. As with the other two bedrooms, there was a fireplace against the far wall.

  Over the fireplace was hung a framed collection of what at first I took to be butterflies, but on closer inspection appeared to be moths, all expertly mounted on board and beautifully preserved. There appeared to be more than two dozen, all of them dazzling samples of a variety of the insects, many of which I knew to be indigenous to Ontario, but also many that seemed far too large, colourful, or exotic to be local. Beneath each sample, in exquisite feminine penmanship, was the species name. The ink was too faded to be entirely clear in each case, but I was nevertheless abl
e to read some of the names: Luna, Polyphemous, Emperor’s Gum, Cabbage, Deathshead Hawk, Cecropia, Comet, Blotched Emerald.

  On the mantelpiece directly beneath the framed collection of pinned moths was a rectangular wooden box in a marquetry design of a moth in flight. I opened the box, releasing into the air a dusty, spicy floral scent like very old potpourri or flowers just before they turn after too long in a vase. There was some sort of inscription carved into the inner lid. In the dimness I strained to make out the three words carved there: Moths for Forgetfulness. Underneath the odd phrase were three letters, likely a monogram: RAB. I closed the box and replaced it on the mantelpiece.

  The overall impression given off by this room, unlike the others, was one of intimacy, even if not actually warmth. But from a purely practical standpoint, I decided to install myself there. Its relatively small size would mean I could maximize the heat from the fireplace. I was soaking wet from the rain and the house was cold. If the heat had been turned on, as I had been told it had, there was precious little evidence of it.

  On the covered porch behind the kitchen, the promised cord of wood was stacked carefully beside the door, with a smaller pile of kindling next to it. If the fireplaces worked—I prayed they would—then I would be able to heat some of the rooms in the house before I froze.

  It was already past eight o’clock. The long drive, the concerns about my father, and the strange altercations with Mrs. Fowler leading up to my arrival had begun to take their toll. My eyelids felt heavy and my vision was beginning to blur. I needed to sleep, but before I could, I had to make myself warm and dry. I realized I should probably be hungry, but I wasn’t. There were some protein bars in my suitcases, which would tide me over in case I needed them. If I didn’t need them, they’d make a passable breakfast tomorrow and I’d take the boat back across Devil’s Lake and drive to Alvina to pick up some provisions.

  I lit two fires, one in the parlour and one in the yellow bedroom upstairs.

  The parlour fireplace was massive and the fire I’d built was substantial. To my delight I found that the heat it generated quickly spread through the room and even out into the hallway. This cheered me up immensely and I briefly considered sleeping in a chair in front of it, covered with a blanket from one of the rooms upstairs. I decided against that, reasoning that the room’s size would mean it wouldn’t hold the heat over the long term, while the smaller room upstairs would likely hold it all night long. I stripped off my wet clothes and laid them on a chair in front of the fireplace, then dressed in dry jeans, a t-shirt, and a flannel shirt over that. When I was sufficiently warm, I left the fire to die down in the parlour and stepped into the hallway and climbed the stairs to the yellow bedroom.

  By now the room was warm and inviting, both in terms of the temperature and the ambience. The ruddiness of the fire’s glow warmed the yellow walls and the dark green velvet curtains and, for the first time since arriving in Alvina, I had the sense of being in my own time and place. The room was beautiful, and even if it didn’t have the twenty-first-century conveniences to which I was accustomed, tonight it didn’t matter.

  At that moment there was no thought that I was sleeping in a dead woman’s bed, in a dead woman’s sheets—only that I was the first guest in my own guest house. My eyelids fluttered. I yawned, pulled back the quilt, and climbed into bed without even undressing. The last thing I saw before the whole day faded into nothingness was the sight of my own reflection in the full-length mirror at the foot of the lovely white ash bed. I have no recollection of falling asleep, so complete was my exhaustion.

  There was someone in my bed with me, someone erotically skilled and deeply desirable, someone with hands that deftly unbuttoned my flannel shirt and caressed the skin of my chest, pinching my nipples until they stood up like points. I heard someone call my name as though from a great distance, but the room was dark and anything was possible and I didn’t want her—for it must have been a woman? Ame, perhaps?—to stop, not ever. I felt fingers unbuttoning the fly of my jeans, pulling them down and taking out my penis, which felt enormous, rampant and hard, and squeezing it, teasing the tip till the place where the fingers met the tip of my cock had become the centre of my entire world.

  The air around me was awash in some floral scent—roses, perhaps, or violets, and I knew without knowing that it was coming off the smooth, cool skin of the woman who was even now taking my cock in her mouth and tonguing it with long, languorous strokes inside her mouth.

  I groaned and thrust upwards, gently, so as not to bruise her throat or her lovely mouth, or do anything that might bring this moment to anything but the perfect climax I knew we both wanted. When she drew her mouth away from my cock, licking the shaft, I cried out in protest. I felt lips against my ear, tasting the inside of it with her tongue.

  But when my invisible lover spoke, the voice was not Ame’s voice, or indeed any other woman’s voice. It was a man’s voice, deep and rough with lechery and it carried the weight of a dreadful, lascivious urgency.

  Show me your cunt, daughter.

  I opened my eyes to my naked father on top of me, straddling my thighs, grinding his buttocks into my midsection. I felt the sharp skeleton pressure of his bare knees digging into my sides. His face was slack with his disease, but his eyes were alive with malignant focus and foul pleasure; his smile was wolfish and hungry and he leaned down and kissed me with lips like raw liver, reeking of sour bourbon. I felt his cold tongue exploring the inside of my mouth.

  I tried to scream but he’d sealed my mouth with his own. I struggled under his weight, trying to free myself from his implacable grip on my wrists.

  I shoved hard, as hard as I could, and then—

  —the impact of falling to the hard floor woke me, still thrashing, still trying to throw off my nude father. I blinked, gasping for air, unable to breathe.

  All around me was pitch darkness and, for a moment, it was unclear to me where I’d landed. I was pinned to the floor and thrashed about on the hard wood trying to free myself from the tangle of sheets that had restrained my arms and legs. Then I remembered that I was in the yellow bedroom at Wild Fell. I was on Blackmore Island, in Alvina, and I’d just had the worst nightmare of my life. But if I’d just had a nightmare, then it seemed to have followed me out, because I’d gone blind. Then I realized why. The fire in the grate had gone out, and the room was full of thick black smoke from the fireplace. Choking, eyes watering, I struggled to disentangle myself from the sheets and quilt. I stumbled over to the window and opened it wide, leaning out over the sill and taking in great heaving breaths of air.

  My eyes streamed with tears from the smoke. When I found I could open them again, when I was able to focus, I saw that the storm had stopped and an enormous moon had risen above Devil’s Lake, and that the water beyond the overgrown lawn was smooth as glass.

  Just beyond the lawn, closer to the stairs leading down to the water, the figure of the woman I thought I had seen earlier that day stood motionless, as though watching. When I rubbed my stinging eyes again with the back of my hand, she had gone.

  I turned back to the bed and shrieked aloud at the sight of the naked man with the lunatic’s rolling eyes standing in the yellow moonlight beside my bed.

  But only when he also screamed did I realize that the terrified man was me, and that I was looking at my own reflection in the full-length mirror at the foot of the bed.

  Chapter Five

  MEETING THE FAMILY

  I gathered up my clothes where I found them bunched up at the foot of the bed, tangled up under the sheets and the quilt. I dressed quickly and hurried out of the room. The nightmare of my father straddling me had been too horrible and vivid for me to even consider returning to the bed in the yellow room that night, let alone fall asleep there. Remembering the chill of the lower part of the house, I stepped back into the moonlit room and retrieved the quilt from the floor. I took care to close the door behind me, though G
od only knew who, or what, I thought I was locking in that room. I left the window open so that the rest of the smoke could escape and give the room a good airing at the same time.

  The upstairs corridor of Wild Fell was unearthly quiet, but I found the staircase and made my way carefully downstairs. The Oriental runner on the stairs under my bare feet was soft and worn, but cold like the rest of the house.

  The fire I’d left burning in the parlour fireplace had died down to embers, but with very little effort I was able to coax it back to life. I threw on more logs and settled into a chair to think. My throat was still raw from the smoke, but I had no intention of leaving this room until the sun came up, not even the short distance to the kitchen for a glass of water. Instead, I sat and watched the flames and tried to deconstruct what had occurred in the yellow bedroom.

  First point: I fell asleep fully dressed, but I had woken nude. The explanation for that was simple enough: I had undressed in my sleep. The room had grown too hot, and I had been uncomfortable. Then, the smoke had woken me, and all of it was mixed up in those images of unspeakable, unnatural foulness.

  Second point: The erotic dream had obviously been a dream of Ame. While I hadn’t thought of her consciously for a very long time, perhaps I had been suppressing feelings of loss—the loss of our marriage, the loss of those months I’d spent in the hospital recovering from the car crash that took away part of my memory; the loss of my father’s memories to Alzheimer’s; and mostly, my loss of him to the disease, and my abandonment of him to come here to Wild Fell, to chase some entirely ludicrous fantasy of opening a summerhouse in the middle of Georgian Bay. The dream was a synthesis of those various intertwined lusts and guilts. Likewise, the figure I thought I’d seen outside the window.

  As for the scents, which were as clear to me in the dream as the voice and the outrageous presence of my father in that perverted context—the violets, the liquor, the warm flesh—these could only have been preambles to my brain identifying the smell of smoke.