by Michael Rowe
Whatever had happened at Wild Fell in the last twenty-four hours, my best friend was here and no problem was, or would ever be, a match for her ability to solve it and triumph. Everything would be all right. We would be on our way home to the city within the hour. I crossed the floor to the open doorway at the far end of the kitchen. Then, careful not to slip, I climbed down the stairs to the cellar where Hank was waiting.
As I descended the steps, I felt the cold drift of air I had noticed that morning. I became aware, too, of a weird flickering glow emanating from somewhere in the basement’s depths. The glow grew brighter as I descended farther into the subterranean part of Wild Fell, as did the chill and the aroma of dirt and wintry rot.
When I reached the foot of the stairs, I paused in the antechamber and tried to let my eyes grow accustomed to this deeper darkness, but also to locate the source of the weird flickering pinprick of light. Finally, I did. The doorway to the third room—the farthest room from the entrance to the cellar, the room that had been locked tight that afternoon, but from behind whose door I had heard things moving—stood open.
It was the latest in the series of doors that had been open tonight—the front door, the yellow bedroom, the servants’ door to the kitchen, the cellar door in the kitchen, now this one far beneath Wild Fell—none of them by me. In a voice just past louder than a whisper, I said, “Hank? Where are you? I can’t see anything down here.”
This time there was no reply. Then the cellar door to the kitchen slammed shut in the darkness above me, sealing me underground.
Because I was likely insane by that point, I believed entirely that it was still logical to conclude that Hank was in the third room in the basement, that Hank had lit the candles whose light I could now see, that Hank would be the one waiting for me as I made my way along the hallway, feeling my way along the rough stone walls of the cellar.
I passed the portraits I’d left stacked in front of the doorway to the second room. The portrait of the predatory Alexander Blackmore was where I’d left it: turned like an errant schoolboy forced to face the wall after misbehaving in class.
“You miserable cocksucker,” I said to the back of the portrait. “You fucking child molester. Yeah, you, you rapist piece of shit. I know what you did here. The whole town knows now, you prick. I hope you burn in hell.”
The light beckoned me, growing brighter and brighter with each step of my progress, until finally I stood in the open doorway of the third room. It was empty.
Hank was not there. Hank had never been there.
The walls were thick with dust, so thick in fact that the candlelight seemed to be absorbed by it. Yes, someone had indeed lit candles, two to be exact, each rising out of a floor-standing hammered-silver pillar candlestick.
In the centre of the room, flanked by the two candles, stood a large full-length mirror whose glass, latticed with webs of tiny cracks, looked almost dark blue in the candlelight.
My eyes were drawn to the mirror’s frame, the thick gold scrollwork, and the ornate design. When I stepped closer to better examine it, I saw that what I had initially taken to be flowers carved into the gold were in fact runic symbols, interspersed with tiny, exquisite renderings of carved moths. I realized then that I had seen this mirror before, if only the edge of it.
This was the mirror from the photograph I’d found in the library, the photograph of Rosa Blackmore posing in the glass more than a hundred years before.
I turned my back to the glass and said, “Amanda? Are you there?”
There was silence. And then that familiar voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Yet as I had when I was a child, I still felt my mouth form the words—her words.
Yes, Jamie. I’m here. Turn around.
“Amanda, why? Why have you done all of this? What could you possibly want from me?”
Jamie, look into the mirror.
I moaned and covered my face with my hands. “No, Amanda, I won’t look into the mirror. Go away. You’re not real. None of this is real.”
Jamie, look into the mirror. Look in the mirror and all of this will be finished.
“No. You’re still making me see things that aren’t real, that aren’t there, just like you did when I was nine. My name is Jameson Browning,” I began, reciting the basic facts of my life like a mantra to ward off evil spirits. “I am a middle-aged man with a father in an Alzheimer’s hospital. My father is a kind, loving man. And I am the owner of Wild Fell and Blackmore Island. I bought them from Mrs. Fowler with money from my accident. You’re not real.”
Jamie, you’re behaving like a child. Don’t you want to understand why you’re here?
I squeezed my eyes shut. “You are not real, Amanda. I reject your existence. You have never been real, and you have nothing to explain to me about why I’m here. I’m here because I bought this house. I own it. Wild Fell is mine.”
Oh is it? This time there was humour in the voice. How interesting. We’ll have a long, long time to discuss the proper ownership of Wild Fell. But in the meantime tell me—haven’t you ever wondered why you’ve always believed your father was perfect, Jamie? I always knew mine wasn’t. Do you really think that’s normal? Do you think that’s how normal boys, or men, think of their fathers? That they’re perfect?
“He is perfect.” Even to my own ears my voice had acquired a childish singsong na-na-na-na quality. “He was kind to me every day of his life. He was kind to everyone. Why are you talking about my father?”
Because I’m going to kill him tonight, Jamie, that’s why. I failed that night on the bridge when the policeman saved him. But there’s no one to protect him now. I will visit him again tonight while he sleeps. You have no idea of the dreams I send him, Jamie. Terrible, terrible dreams. I torture him with them. Tonight I will have his last breath.
“Why, Amanda? Why do you keep hurting people? Why do you keep hurting me?”
Touch the glass, Jamie.
And then because there was nothing left to do, no other way to make the voice stop, no way to bring an end to the terrible lies it whispered, I looked into Rosa Blackmore’s mirror and placed the tips of my fingers against the cold glass one last time.
This time there was no shock, no violence to my body. I felt nothing pass through me. For a nanosecond, I caught a glimpse of my own shape in the dark blue glass.
Then the surface of the mirror rippled and shimmered beneath my touch, reflecting not the underground room beneath Wild Fell but rather the night-contours of the bedroom in my old house, the house in which I had grown up, the bedroom in which I was nine.
The bedside lamp had been switched off, but I could make out the dark hulk of my father’s body looming over mine, my own body curled in on itself, hugging the pillow to my midsection. My back shook with the force of my sobbing. As I watched, my mirror-father traced his fingers along my spine, lingering at the place where my lower back met my waist. When he spoke, there was no love in this voice, no tenderness, only shame.
“Jamie, don’t cry,” my mirror-father said. “I’ll just stay here with you here for a little while. Until you fall asleep. What’s wrong? There’s nothing to be scared of. Are you upset about the bike? We’ll get it back. You shouldn’t have gone out of our neighbourhood, but what happened wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about?”
“No, Daddy, I’m not upset about the bike. Please daddy no . . . it hurts too much. No more. I’ll do anything you want. Please, daddy, I love you. I’ll be good. I won’t tell, I promise. But no more.”
“Hush, Jamie,” my father crooned. He began to rub my shoulders. “I’ll just stay for a little bit. Just until you fall asleep.” Then he lay down beside me on the bed and put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in close, spooning his body around mine, locking my nine-year old body to his in an implacable grip.
Beside my narrow bed, the wall mirror. Innocuous looking, perhaps, but not empty. It had never been
empty. It had always been a doorway, all through the lost years of my now-remembered childhood, a childhood in which every mirror in every room I had ever stepped had been a doorway.
“No!” I screamed. “That never happened! You made me see that. That’s not what happened! He never hurt me! You were the one who hurt me, Amanda . . . Rosa . . . whoever you are! You killed Manitou; you killed that little boy who stole my bike with your wasps, just like you killed your father, because he hurt you. My father would never hurt me! Never!”
We’ll kill him, Jamie. Amanda’s voice was implacable. He has always hurt us, and we have always killed him. When we sent the wasps that day when our father was out riding, our father died terribly. If we had succeeded that night on the bridge in the city, our father would have died quickly. In this life, he has sought to escape our vengeance through oblivion, through forgetfulness. But we found him, anyway. We will always kill him and he will always die, no matter how hard he tries to forget what he did to us.
“THERE IS NO WE! YOU ARE NOT ME! THAT IS YOUR STORY, NOT MINE! THAT HAPPENED TO YOU, NOT ME!”
Her voice was the tauntingly cruel voice of a sadistic child impersonating a vastly patient adult woman, an adult woman with all the time in the world for torture.
Are you sure it never happened, Jamie? Don’t be stupid—I just showed you what your father did to you. How do you know it didn’t happen? Haven’t you always wondered why your mother really left him, Jamie? Do you not wonder if, perhaps, your mother was jealous of the attention your father was paying you?
I turned my back on the mirror. “You’re making me see things that aren’t real, Amanda. It’s your trick. You’re not real. None of this is real. None of this happened. You’re a liar—you always were. You’re a sick, evil liar.”
How do you know they aren’t real, Jamie? How do you know he didn’t hurt you and you didn’t just forget about it when you smashed your bedroom mirror, like you forgot about everything else? You forgot about me, didn’t you? What else have you forgotten?
“Shut up, Amanda! Shut up!”
Who did you really buy Wild Fell from, Jamie? Mrs. Fowler? How could you have? She’s dead. You saw her grave. Everyone you’ve spoken to swears this house is a ruin. But you see furniture and paintings and rugs and silver. You see walls and doors and windows. Are they real?
“They’re real, Amanda. I’m standing here in the basement of Wild Fell. The floor is real. The walls are real. The house is real. I’ve touched it. I slept in your bed. The only thing not real here is you.”
Then why are you talking to me, Jamie, if I’m not real?
“Shut up! Shut up! Get out of my head!”
She was pitiless, relentless. And if they are not real, what else is not real? Are you real, Jamie? Do you exist? How do you know you’re not just a character in a ghost story I wrote one evening to amuse myself?
“SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”
No one believes in Wild Fell, Jamie. No one believes in you. Where do you think you really are? Who do you think you really are?
I looked wildly around the room to find something that I might use to smash the glass into a million pieces—to stop the lying voice I now knew had never been the voice of a little girl, but had always been Rosa Blackmore’s voice, across time and through the doorways of any number of dimensions in between. She said she would always find me. She’d had it carved onto her own gravestone.
I reached for one of the silver candlesticks to swing at the glass, to shatter it and banish this creature forever by destroying her main portal into the world of the living.
But as I picked up the candlestick, the walls of the room trembled and shivered and I realized that I had been wrong about something else, as well—the walls were not coated with thick dust.
What I had at first taken for dust were thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny white moths. They clung to the wall, they clung to each other, three, six, nine layers deep. And now, disturbed by the movement and the sound of my voice, they began to stir.
Jamie, look into the mirror again, just one more time. Tell me whose reflection you see there. Look into the glass, Jamie. It will show you the shape of your true soul. And it will show you what else you’ve forgotten about who you are.
And I looked. God help me, I looked.
My face and body in the mirror had become the face and body of a woman of forty-five, a woman with a high, intelligent brow and eyes of the purest grey-green, the eyes of the portrait in the cellar. My long hair, chestnut brown now, was gathered in a loose knot behind my head, tendrils from which cascaded down the back of my neck. When I moved my hand across the glass, my hand moved there, too, with fingers that were long and white and slender.
“This is not real,” I cried, my voice now a high, light musical contralto. I pointed my finger at the woman in the mirror. She pointed back with a slender index finger. My voice, her voice—Rosa Blackmore’s voice—formed my words in the glass. “This is not my reflection. My name is Jameson Browning. I am a man, not a woman. You’re still lying, Amanda. You’re still hurting me.”
Her mouth—my mouth—formed a perfect oval of horror and agony as she—I—screamed and screamed. I tore at my—her—face with those lovely white hands with their fine sharp nails until the blood began to flow; the reflection in the mirror was that of a keening, raving madwoman staring into her mirror, watching her own sanity flow away like water while she wept and gibbered and bled.
My mother, Catherine Blackmore, always said you could tell a lady by her hands. On those hot days of my girlhood summers here on the island that bore our name, Mother said it while forcing my own hands into white lace gloves to ward off the sun as I played. Malcolm had never been forced to wear gloves.
Boys don’t have to, Mother said. They’re boys.
Even before my father’s vile, beastly depredations—depredations for which he paid with his life, at my hands and the hands of . . . certain friends of mine—the world had seemed woefully unfair to me. I hated the gloves and refused to wear them after I turned thirteen.
By that time, my mother was dead, and my father didn’t care if my hands were white, only that they were soft. But my hands are white and lovely, and they are soft.
In time, Jameson’s friend, the girl, Hank, will come to Blackmore Island. Her hands are not white, nor lovely, nor soft. Her hands are hard and rough, the hands of a man. She is possessed of a man’s soul. I can smell it on her. She will come to find him, of that I have no doubt. I will ensure it. I will visit her tonight in her dreams and I will give her such a taste of his death that she will make haste to reach Blackmore Island even before the sun rises, in fear of his life. She won’t find him, of course. No one will. But I will be waiting for her, here in my house.
When I find her, I will flay her alive and peel that male soul of hers like a grape.
And if I find that her soul is sheltering and disguising my brother Malcolm, I will discover it and I will make him suffer for having tried to escape me through death.
I heard the sound of Jameson Browning’s harsh crying on the other side of the mirror—a clumsy, indelicate masculine braying that hurt my ears to listen. I put my hands to the side of my head to block out the sound. Men forget how to cry for the most part, don’t they? And when they do cry, the sound is hoarse and crude, undignified and difficult to listen to. Jameson may have had a woman’s voice when he wept, but I heard his own voice.
Still, I did feel a kind of pity for the body that was making the sound as it remembered and acknowledged whose soul it harboured, whose soul occupied it (whatever vanity it may have concocted about its own identity), and most of all, whose soul would now reclaim and recycle that body’s life-force, devour it, in fact, for regenerative sustenance.
My sustenance, to be exact. I seeded his body with my soul while he slumbered in his mother’s womb; now was the harvesting time. In truth, I had and always would find my own soul’s cor
poreal host wherever she—or he—had been reborn.
Jamie, I said, gazing at his rent face on the other side of the mirror, it’s not my ghost story. It’s our ghost story. We are the ghost.
From this side of the glass, I opened my arms to him. From his side of the glass, the storm of moths surged off the walls, a dry white squall of wings and dust, erasing what was left of Jameson Browning’s light, carrying off all traces of him as he pitched forward into the mirror.
I said I wanted to tell you a ghost story. I said it wasn’t to be a ghost story like any ghost story you’d ever heard. I’d said it was my ghost story and that it was true.
Like any ghost story, it involved the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather what, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead. As I said earlier, time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything but linear. Certainly it has never been linear to me, not in life, certainly not in death, nor any of the time afterward.
Which brings us back to ghosts. One ghost in particular: me.
As you may have surmised, I do not acknowledge time. I do not abide temporal borders. Life or death is all the same to me. I walk those bridges with ease now, and their guardians call me by my Christian name.
I will bring pain to anyone who trespasses here on my island and I will make the trespassers see and feel terrible things before they die. I am the queen of wasps and moths. I am the enslaver of lesser spirits. I am the authoress of agonies barely yet conceived.
I am Rosa Blackmore. I am eternal.
I live in your mirror. And I will always find you.
Wild Fell House
Blackmore Island
29th April, 1890
Author’s Note
Although Wild Fell and Blackmore Island are fictional locales, as is the town of Alvina, it was inspired in part by The Corran, the nineteenth-century estate of Alexander MacNeil of Wiarton, Ontario, which lies in ruins in a forest on the outskirts of that town, on a cliff above Colpoys Bay. I visited the ruins in January of 2012 with a friend in order to get a sense of the locale, and how it might possibly play into the novel I was writing. I was able to take two or three quick pictures of the ruins before my camera shut down completely and I lost the use of my cellular phone. While I do not ascribe any supernatural influence to either of those two things, I was relieved that both the camera and the phone promptly resumed their proper functions when we left the site of the ruins and returned to town.