by Eve Silver
There were days that Gabriel thought he knew, that memories and images came to him and painted a terrible, terrifying picture. But he thrust those thoughts aside, refusing to believe.
In recent months, the cloud over the abbey had become heavier still, and Gabriel had felt himself a stranger in his home, an outcast in his family. He had slowly begun to lose interest in any of his normal pursuits, while his twin, Geoffrey, gained interest in those same things. Where it had always been Gabriel who was anxious to read, to learn, it was now Geoffrey who professed a love of books. And Geoffrey had begun a strange game, playing into their mother’s odd behavior, answering whenever their parents used Gabriel’s name.
At first, Gabriel had gone along, answering to Geoffrey’s name, believing—as his brother insisted—that it was best to humor their mother who was sad and confused. He likened it to the games they had played as children where they traded places and tricked anyone who was near. In truth, they were identical, able to fool anyone save each other.
Geoffrey laughed at that, and said, “Perhaps we can learn to trick even each other.”
Gabriel thought such a thing absurd. How could he be tricked to believe he was other than himself?
Soon the game had turned sour for him, and though he insisted he was Gabriel, not Geoffrey, he was not certain his parents believed him. Certainly his cousin Madeline seemed positive that he was Geoffrey and his brother was Gabriel.
The longer Geoffrey played his tricks, the more Gabriel’s sadness and weariness grew, until he was loath to roll from his bed each morning. He stopped answering to any name at all, because no one believed he was who he said he was.
His parents had taken to closeting themselves away, taking first Madeline then Geoffrey into the room for hours at a time. But not Gabriel. Never Gabriel. Not until that day last week when three men in black suits had come to Cairncroft. They had sat with him in the sun-drenched parlor, the windows at their backs, making it hard for him to read their faces. They had asked him all manner of odd questions, one of them making detailed notes in a black, leather-bound book as Gabriel made his replies.
At first, he answered readily. But soon, a cold dread had come upon him, though he could not name a reason for it, and his answers had become terse, his voice betraying his anxiety.
But today things had dawned brighter. Mother had invited him to ride with her in the carriage. Only him. Not Geoffrey. Not Father or Madeline. Only him. She had exchanged a long look with Father and then called Gabriel by his own name, not Geoffrey’s.
He knew then that he had done something right, though he had not managed anything right since that horrible day in the woods. The day he had almost died.
The carriage turned now, and stopped. Massive iron gates blocked their path. On either side, extending as far as the eye could see, was a high brick wall. This must be a fine estate indeed to warrant such protection. The gates swung open, and Gabriel could hear a clunking sound from within the small lodge adjacent to the gate.
“Do you suppose there is a mechanism there for opening the gates, Mother? Could we stop? I should like to see it.”
But she did not answer. She only stared out the window, her skin stretched taut and thin across the bones of her face. They went slowly up a long drive with vast squares of open lawn on either side. They were close to the village of Hanham, his mother had told him earlier when he asked.
Eager now, he scooted forward on the seat.
“What place is this?”
His mother continued to stare out the window and still did not look at him. “Hanham House,” she replied, her voice thick.
He knew that sound, the sound of choked tears, but he knew better than to ask why she was sad. He had stopped asking that question months past. She never answered, only looked at him with eyes that did not see what was before her, but rather something far, far away.
He wished he could change the past. He wished he had never followed Geoffrey into the woods that day, never seen him twist the neck of that baby bird, never run through the woods with his brother pounding at his heels. Never been stabbed with the sharp end of that stick. There were even days that he wished he had never recovered. They had thought he would not. He vaguely remembered endless pain, and the heat of his fever, and doctors coming and going. His mother’s sobs. His father kneeling by his bed.
Oft times, he thought they had mourned his passing, and were somehow distressed that he had lived instead.
He wished, too, that they had never found the dead girl in her shallow, leaf-strewn grave. Better if she had been left to rest there quietly. Things had only gone from bad to worse, then.
Once, Madeline had even asked him why he had killed her. Stunned, he had at first made no reply. Then he found his voice and practically snarled at her an order to never say such a thing again. She had run to his father and said he had threatened her, and his father had only looked at him with eyes narrowed and cold. Madeline made certain to leave any room he entered, after that. She was never alone with him again, a situation he had not found overly disappointing.
He had disliked his cousin before. He despised her now.
The carriage rocked to a halt again, and he looked out at a massive house, nearly as large as Cairncroft Abbey. Then he saw it was not one house, but several, built close together.
On the seat across, his mother began to fidget. She played with her collar, her pearls, her hat. She did not meet his gaze, and he felt suddenly afraid. His mother never fidgeted.
The door opened and three men stood all in a row, their faces somber, their hands clasped behind their backs as they stared at him with eyes dark and beady. They were the same men who had come to Cairncroft and asked all those odd, unsettling questions.
“Does your head ache at times? Does your brain feel overheated? Do you suffer seizures or sweats in the night?”
He had only stared at them, befuddled.
“What is your name?”
“Gabriel.”
They had looked one at the other with raised brows. “What is your name?” they had asked again.
“Gabriel St. Aubyn.”
“Gabriel? Not Geoffrey?”
He had pressed his lips tight and refused to reply. They had looked to each other and stroked their chins and nodded and muttered about complete delusion and appropriate care.
The sight of them now, standing all in a row like three black crows, frightened him. Their posture reminded him of his father’s that morning, but the look they leveled upon him did not. He thought now that his father had looked at him with pity, but these men seemed to look through him. Beside them was a stocky woman in a black dress, her hair scraped back from her face, her expression austere.
“Step down,” his mother whispered as he turned his face toward her. She looked as though she might swoon, her eyes rolling back, her lips and cheeks bloodless, her face chalk white in the shadows of the carriage.
He did not want to step down. He was terribly afraid.
But he was a good son, and he did as he was bidden, stepping out of the dim, hot carriage into the bright sun- light. The breeze caught his hair and ruffled it.
One of the men moved forward and closed his hand around Gabriel’s arm, the grip tight. Restraining.
“Mother!” Gabriel cried, his voice rising now, his certainty clear. There was something wrong.
She leaned forward, but did not leave the carriage. Her face was streaked with tears, and her hands clawed so her nails dug into her own forearms through the cloth of her dress.
“Goodbye,” she whispered. “Geoffrey”—her voice broke on the name—“be a good little man. Goodbye.”
Another man stepped forward and slammed the carriage door as Gabriel stood, stunned and uncomprehending. Only as the carriage rolled away did he come to himself and scream, “Gabriel. I am Gabriel. Not Geoffrey. I am Gabriel.”
None of the three men touched him now. Only the nurse swooped forward like a hawk and grabbed hold of both his arms and he
ld him fast as he tried to run. Then she dragged him, kicking and screaming, up the front stairs and through the front door where another woman came and together they wrestled him, one on each side, up a staircase to a long bright hallway, the sun pouring through rows of windows. Finally, they reached a small bedroom and they pushed him inside and slammed the door. He heard the click of the lock and the thud of their footsteps and he was alone with only his terror and his thoughts.
In the weeks that followed, he tried everything to make them listen. He was rational and calm, explaining again and again that he was Gabriel. Not Geoffrey. But they would not listen. So he screamed his name at them each time they called him Geoffrey.
At first, they did nothing other than try to correct him, and the three dark-garbed men came and poked him and prodded him and asked him questions. They asked him to say his name. To write it. To spell it aloud. He found it ridiculous, and in the end lost his patience and told them so.
They did not like that.
That day, the nurses came again and dragged him to a massive, dim room with icy floors and no windows. There, they restrained him in a long, narrow box, with walls like a cage, made of thick bars. His screams for release grew hoarse. In the end he was silent.
Still, he would not answer to his brother’s name. Again the three doctors came and asked him all manner of ridiculous questions. Then they took him to a different room and stoked the fire and applied hot irons to his feet to raise blisters. They said that would draw the overabundance of blood from his overheated brain.
“So young to be here,” one doctor, newly arrived at Hanham House, observed some months later. “And such complete delusion.”
“Please,” Gabriel begged, thinking the observation indicated sympathy. “There has been a mistake. I am Gabriel. Gabriel. Not Geoffrey. I have done nothing wrong. I swear it. I swear it.”
The doctor only shook his head and put him in a device that whirled him round and round until he was dizzy and sick, until dry heaves racked his body because there was nothing left in his belly.
Weeks—or was it months?—passed. A letter came for him from his cousin Sebastian. He leaped upon it like a drowning man on a floating board. Then he saw his brother’s name, Geoffrey St. Aubyn, and he understood that even Sebastian was in their thrall.
“Whose thrall?” the doctor asked. “Tell me.”
“My brother. Maybe my mother. My father. My cousin. I do not know,” Gabriel babbled. “I do not know. I only know they have done this to me and I should not be here. I should not be here.”
“Cold water baths,” the doctor said after he had summoned the nurse once more, and Gabriel was taken to a different room and forced into a different type of box, no wider or longer than a coffin, but with holes in the top and sides.
“Please,” he cried. But no one heard. No one listened.
The box was dropped in a vat of icy water again and again. He knew how to swim. There was a lake at Cairncroft Abbey. After the first plunge, the shock and terror of it, he knew better what to expect, and he held his breath as he felt the box drop with him in it. But sometimes, he could hold his breath no longer and the water poured into his nose and mouth and throat, choking him, drowning him.
By the end of it, he wished he could just die. Just close his eyes and never open them again.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he whispered when it was done and they let him out, barely able to speak, barely able to stand.
“To remedy the disruption of your blood circulation. To improve the circulation to your brain,” the doctor said, his tone reasonable and calm. “To cure you.”
“Cure me of what?” Gabriel cried, but no one heard him, or if they did, they never answered.
If he struggled too strenuously, they forced opium upon him, or camphor mixed with vinegar.
Weeks bled into months, and months into years.
His one link to the world, to his sanity, were the letters from his cousin Sebastian, written as he traveled the world with his guardian.
Gabriel never looked at the name on the direction; it would only make him angry and bitter to see that proof that even Sebastian believed him to be someone other than he was. But he waited for those letters, only hungering for a taste of the world beyond the walls of Hanham House. And he read them over and over, long past the point that he had memorized every word.
A new doctor arrived, Dr. Bradley, who based his treatments on the methods of an American physician, Dr. Rush. Icy baths were replaced by the relaxation chair, which offered restraint at both ankles and wrists, and a wooden box that fitted over the patient’s head like a shroud.
Gabriel’s head.
The first time he was forced onto that chair, he thought he would go well and truly mad.
Dr. Bradley saw Gabriel as a wonderful challenge, and he paid special attention to him. And Dr. Bradley had a fondness for that chair. Gabriel quickly learned that crying and begging and pleading only made it much worse.
Though he could not move, could not see, could not scratch the terrible itch at the tip of his nose, he forced himself to keep silent when they stretched the leather tight across his wrists and fastened the buckles. To bite hard on his tongue when Dr. Bradley took the knife and slit open his vein. To make not a sound as his blood dripped into the bowl.
“Madness,” Dr. Bradley expounded to anyone who would listen, “is caused by morbid qualities in the blood.” And so he bled Gabriel until he fainted, strapped in the chair, unable to move, his world narrowed to only what his mind could conjure.
“Purgatives,” Dr. Bradley pontificated, “are a depleting remedy for the overwhelming state of madness.” He would force the patient’s mouth open—Gabriel’s mouth—and if he refused to swallow of his own volition, the doctor used a funnel attached to a long tube to administer his treatments.
Too, Dr. Bradley was a proponent of solitude as punishment. When Gabriel refused to answer to his brother’s name, he was locked away in the darkness and the quiet. Too quiet. He hated it there, believed himself truly mad when the only company he had were his memories. Of Cairncroft. Of his childhood, stolen from him now. Of his brother.
Memories of the dead girl, with her chest slit open and parts gone, and her blood staining the ground in a dark, glistening pool. Only, he had not been the one to find her, so how did he know what the others had seen? Was it their description that he conjured? Was it only a horror from his imagination? He had no way to know.
He began to believe he was Geoffrey and not Gabriel, that he had gone into the woods after Sebastian that day and found the dead girl.
Other days, he knew he was Gabriel. Knew that his brother had become him, though he knew not how. Or why. Those questions gnawed at him like a thousand hungry ants, nipping and biting and squirming beneath his skin.
“How are you today, Gabriel?” Dr. Bradley asked as he strode along the narrow aisle between the tables where the inmates of the house were eating their supper.
“Fine, thank you, Dr. Bradley,” Gabriel replied, knowing as soon as the words left his lips that he had erred. He must never answer to his own name. He must answer only to his brother’s. Too late.
“To the solitude room,” Dr. Bradley said over his shoulder to the nurse. “To ponder his behavior.”
By now, Gabriel knew better than to resist. He glanced at the supper he had not yet touched, and knew he would not have any food to eat for some time. Inmates of the solitude room did not warrant dinner.
Hours later, in the damp, frigid darkness, Gabriel curled into a ball, and for the first time since he had arrived at Hanham House, his desperation and fear faded. Suddenly everything became clear.
Nothing mattered.
The questions he had asked so many times needed no answers, because the answers would lead him nowhere. He must look forward, only forward. He must let go of his burning need to understand why, and instead think only of how he might escape.
No . . . not just escape. That would only be another sort
of hell. He must not just escape. He must regain all he had lost.
To do that, he must become the monster they had judged him to be. In the solitude of his cell, he murdered the boy he had been as surely as if he had plunged a dagger in his breast. And from the rotting corpse of that boy rose a new creature, wily and sly, and coldly focused on revenge.
* * *
“Who are you?” Dr. Bradley asked, his fingers steepled before his face, his brows lowered in contemplation.
“Geoffrey St. Aubyn,” Gabriel replied, letting no emotion color his lie. To say his true name aloud would only earn him the doctor’s well-intentioned treatments, and he had had enough of those to last him a lifetime.
He had become so adept at lies that he rarely gained any notice at all anymore. All of which made him wary of the reason for this summons by Dr. Bradley, who meted out his attentions only to those patients he deemed in need of reward or punishment. Gut instinct had Gabriel sincerely doubting he was here for reward.
“Did you enjoy your visit with your family, Geoffrey?”
“Very much, thank you.” The words tasted like dust on his tongue. The only thing he enjoyed about their visits was the packet of books they invariably brought. He lived for Sebastian’s letters, and for those books, devoured them, soaking up knowledge. But the visit itself was always a torment, their faces a reminder of all that had been stolen from him.
Earlier today, they had sat there in a small, windowless room—his mother, his father, his treacherous brother, his cousin Madeline—and stared at him across a bare wooden table. They had done this to him, confined him to this place, to hell on earth. They came now, once every few weeks to visit, and always they brought him a plate of raspberry tarts.
“Your mother was saddened that, yet again, you declined to taste the tarts she brought,” Dr. Bradley said, his tone chiding. “Did you mean to cause her distress?”
Yes. I meant to make her tear her hair and beat her breast and truly see what she has done to me. Why, Mother? Why did you leave me in this place, with these people? What wrong did I do to make you hate me so?