Candle in the Attic Window

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “... gone and lost your mind. Turned 17 and it’s just gone.”

  I turned away from the chilled window, to free the golden velvet curtains from their loops. Wrangling their considerable weight across the windows helped close out the frigid night from Aunt’s house. Once done, I turned to look at my sister. Across the room and bundled before the crackling fire, Louisa clucked her tongue at me. Like an old woman might, though she was all of 15, black hair smoothed into a shining cap that my own hair could not manage. Louisa looked like a butterfly tangled in its own cocoon, with – With my sketchbook across her knees!

  “There was someone out there,” I murmured.

  “I meant this.” Louisa jabbed a finger into the sketch she had exposed.

  I lunged for the book, grasping it by the corner to pull it out of Louisa’s lap. She didn’t try to keep the book and I closed it against my chest, upset that the man outside had distracted me. No one was allowed to see these drawings. No one.

  “It looks like the cliff without the house,” Louisa said, turning the small tie that bound her hair. “Tangled thorn bushes, shadowed skeleton men caught inside ... Why do you draw such awful things?”

  Because I dream them, I would have said, if I wanted to gift Louisa with the truth. Being that I didn’t – for she would simply brush my answer to the side, again – I shrugged. Still, I couldn’t stop my heart from lurching into a frantic rhythm. A shadowed skeleton man, not in the black thornbushes of my mind, but on the snowy rocks, pressed beneath my palm for the merest of moments. I could feel all the ice that covered him melting in my palm, running down my lifeline, over the pad of flesh near my thumb, down into the shallow loveline where it would greedily overflow.

  The book made a gentle protest as I closed it, its binding groaning under the slight motion. It was an old book, a gift from Grandmother. She claimed it had been her own as a girl my age, though she had never used it. And now? Now, it was seeing use, with a fresh set of pencils from my mother, who came into the room just then, offering Louisa and me cider. Louisa took hers, but I was content to let mine sit, hugging my sketchbook against my chest, looking to those ugly velvet curtains.

  “Making lists, then?” our mother asked, and settled onto the couch, which Aunt had always claimed was host to the cream of the celebrity crop. Why any of them had ever come here was beyond me: this small town, with its ancient windmill, and roads in need of decent service. Perhaps people came here to escape the modern world, but – I laughed at that idea. No one came here to escape, but maybe to get lost.

  “Aunt kept a green-striped scarf, didn’t she?” I asked, before Louisa could reply to Mother’s question.

  Mother’s nose wrinkled, but soon enough, her frown turned to a laugh. “Why would you want that old thing?”

  I shrugged, for how could I explain that such an item would be perfect for the man upon the rocks? “Just a keepsake,” I said, and that was when Louisa launched into how strange I’d become since we had arrived. Aunt’s house was clearly haunted and the spirits were sinking down into my bones, taking me over, turning me into someone I was not. I said nothing, but slapped Louisa lightly on the head before I left the room, climbing the old staircase up and up and up to the small corner room that had always been mine.

  Aunt had never married, though she could tell you one tragic tale after another about the men she had loved. Oh, certainly, she wished to wed (a dozen times, if you believed her), but the men she loved always seemed to flee onward to something else, leaving her behind, a memory, a ghost, although she was a living girl – until two weeks ago.

  Without a family of her own, Aunt made us her family, treating Louisa and me as her own daughters, which, at first, made our mother prickle and scowl, for we were her daughters, not those of her sister. Aunt snapped during one argument they had – faces heated to scarlet as they screamed, making me and Louisa wonder, as we crouched under the kitchen table, if such a sound might indeed break the kitchen windows. When the glass did shatter, oh, the four of us simply gaped. We looked all afternoon for the stone that someone had surely hurled, but there was no stone, no brick, nothing physical that might have caused the pane to break. Only those terrible screams.

  Aunt snapped, yes. Said, of course she knew we were not her daughters, but where was the harm in giving us a place of our own, a place to run to should we need, a place to dream? And when she cried, tears running down her hot cheeks, our own mother also snapped, gathering her older sister close to hug, and rock, and wipe her cheeks clean. So, this house and its countless rooms were dear to us. Though even Aunt had fled, going to that great unknown, I still felt her here. Felt her in every shadow as a warm hand, guiding me along.

  My room was cold, however, the very windows beginning to ice up in the corners. I shivered and bent to the vent in the floor, finding it tightly shut. The little lever did not move until I cursed at it. Even then it moved with a squeal, as though I’d stuck a knife into a living creature. It even seemed to wriggle under my fingers. I pulled my hand back quickly, wiping my fingers on my jeans. Disgusting.

  I straightened and set my sketchbook upon the desk that ran under the windows, windows which looked out onto the lake. The storm was deepening now, the moisture in the air and that in the lake combining to throw snow every whichway. At the dark flicker at the edge of the window, I leaned forward, pressing a hand against the chilled pane. The shadow skimmed the lakeshore, seeming like a bird in flight, but there were no wings ... only arms wrapped in a dark great coat. The tails snapped in the rising wind. It was him – out on the lake!

  The window creaked beneath my hand, so loudly that I looked down. My hand had made a foggy impression upon the glass and condensation ran downward, warm enough to melt the hint of ice that had begun in the corners. But there was a strange shadow pressed against my hand, only the creaking glass between. I stared at it for the longest time, trying to fathom what it was, and then I realized, it was another hand.

  Another hand, and it had no warmth, for where my hand left an imprint of fog, this hand left a deeper imprint of ice and snow. My head came up sharply, so sharply that it hit the edge of the lamp on the desk. But the light was unlit and, through the window, I saw him, the man at the lakeshore, the man upon the rocks. The man crouched upon the roof just outside my window – how many times I snuck out via that little ledge, I could not tell you, but in the summer, there were sweet vines to help me find my way safely down – and pressed his shadowed hand to the glass. He had no eyes – nor even a face, I suppose – for with the swirling snow, he seemed only the impression of a man.

  “Mädchen.”

  He only whispered my name, but it came clear to me, through the very window. His breath, if it were his breath and not simply a random puff from the storm, swirled against the window and reached me, smelling of wintergreen oil. Sharp and strong and dark, like the planks of the old windmill.

  “Come to me.”

  I screamed and jerked my hand back from the glass. In that moment, he dissolved, like a snowflake upon a tongue. There and then gone. I was left to wonder if he had been there at all, or if perhaps Aunt’s house was laughing at me, turning shadows into whatever it would.

  “What on earth is wrong with you?”

  Louisa’s voice came from the doorway and I turned to look at her with eyes that must have been wide, because she came forward with a look of concern. She even reached for me, taking up my hands. Her mouth fell open in a soft O.

  “You’re like ice! Did you check your vent?” She squeezed my hands and crossed the room to check it. “Mine keeps closing on its own – something to tell the handyman about, I’d guess ... yeah, yours is open and there is warm air. Mädchen –”

  I shoved my hands into my pockets, forcing a smile for my sister. “Just a long day and I – I miss Aunt, don’t you? This place is different without her. She’s here and yet, she’s not.” It was a good cover – because it was entirely true. My strange behaviour could easily be blamed on missing our a
unt, and Louisa – trusting, sweet Louisa – nodded.

  “I do feel her here, but she’s still gone. I think they call that a paradox?” She shrugged and then reverted to her 15-year-old self. “Dunno – I’m not thinking about words until I’m back in school. Storm’s getting worse; Internet is down. I may not survive the night!” With that, she stomped out of my room and toward her own, as though she hadn’t just shown me concern a moment before.

  I closed the door behind her and looked to the window, thinking to see nothing, but there on the other side of the glass was the clear outline of a hand in ice.

  •

  Aunt’s house was something of a legend in the city. It was not uncommon for tourists to drive past, snapping photographs, or to even stop and take more detailed shots. Aunt had once found a man prostrate in her vegetable garden (on top of her very kale, she would tell you!), for that, he claimed, gave him the best angle on capturing the uppermost tower room of the build. “The build.” Oh, those words were poison to Aunt. It was not a mere structure; it was her home, she informed people, and quite often called the local police to come retrieve those who took to poking around.

  It was not only that it was a spectacular build, mind you; it was that the house had established a history all its own. People claimed it was haunted (We had counted no ghosts) and that chains could be heard all hours of the night (Not one clink), and that sometimes, if you were very still, it would snow in the middle of the living room (That only happened once; I believe I was nine). Candlecliff was well-known for miles and miles; some famous photographer had even won an award for a photograph of the house, a photograph at which I now stared, for Aunt had received the first print.

  The photograph hung in the uppermost hallway, which the photographer had taken as an insult, believing Aunt wanted to hide the image away. But no, Aunt had assured the woman, it wasn’t to hide it, but to allow the photograph to receive the best light it could. The lower floors were too dark, but upstairs, in this hall, there was a clever little window of leaded glass, which allowed just enough light in to illuminate the photograph as though it were in a gallery. Still, the photographer’s mood could not be assuaged and she had never spoken to Aunt again or come to her house. (So she claimed, for seven years later, I would have sworn that very photographer was crouched in the cornfield next door, camera in hand.)

  This photograph was much like my own drawings, I came to realize as I looked at it the morning following the strange incident with the hand upon the window. Candlecliff had been captured in black-and-white, the house standing in stark contrast to the pale sky. Brambles and bushes tangled around the house, looking rather bonelike in certain instances. Though I was certain it was my imagination, I would have sworn there was a skeletal man amid them, holding a hand up as if to ward off the camera’s magic.

  It made sense to me, then, I decided as I walked back to my bedroom. I had seen the photograph too many times to count and those images had imprinted themselves on my young mind. I had simply sketched the photograph, hadn’t I, pulling these strange images from it, rather than my own mind? It was comforting to believe that, if only for a little while. When I reached my room, I found the green-striped scarf resting on the foot of my bed. Louisa’s footsteps thundered down the wood stairs.

  “Left that hideous thing for you!” she called.

  Her voice and Mother’s floated upward as they worked on sorting other things. Aunt had many things – much of which would likely be sold at the estate sale – but we wanted a complete inventory before we jumped into that phase. I didn’t want to have the sale at all. I wished this house might stay forever ours, for what would we do without a place to dream?

  I closed the door behind me and curled into bed, with the scarf held against me. Just a little nap, I told myself, and then I could join Mother and Louisa and pick through the remains of Aunt’s life. I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to.

  Her scarf smelled like spearmint and tansy, and I thought of the small sachets she liked to make, to keep the moths away from all her most precious things. None of us knew where this scarf had come from, for she always seemed to have it. Not even Mother could place it. “But then, your father is that way, too, isn’t he? Just always been there ....” She would say it with a soft laugh, but you could tell she was partly serious. Her life before him had been a thing entirely different and now, she could not fathom him gone, so he had simply always been there.

  The dream was different this time.

  The windmill stood as it always had, a deep shadow beneath a moon that looked about to burst and send milky light everywhere. But this night, there was a soft wind which turned the sails; they creaked much like the glass beneath my hand had. If you listened long enough, it sounded like a low moan. This agony carried across the fields and seemed to saturate everything. Even the trees seemed to bend their bare branches low under this unhappy sound.

  I waited for one sail to pass before I could step into the slight doorway and press against the door. But the door did not give and the next sail was rapidly approaching – surely, the sails did not reach to the ground, I told myself, but I could feel the wind that pushed it and so, too, the wind that the sail itself made as it hastened toward me. I gripped the doorknob, shaking it and crying out to be let in (for it never occurs to the sleeper to simply step backward and out of harm’s way, does it?), but still, the door did not open.

  The sail caught my left shoulder, knocking into me hard enough to set me off balance. My other shoulder slammed into the door, just as it came open, and icy hands gathered me up before I might fall. My name was a whisper on his mouth then, dark and somehow full of secrets, as he bore me deeper into the windmill and the sails outside continued their anguished dance.

  Over and over, he whispered my name, but did not draw me upward to the top room as he usually did. He pressed me back into one of the work tables, iced fingers sliding against my throat, where they started to melt. I could feel the trails of water running down into my blouse.

  “This is the thing you must do,” he said.

  His voice was its own agony, rising and falling with the sound of the sails. His face was clear before my own – I could have touched his cheek, but my fingers curled into the old table beneath me.

  “Tell me what – what must –”

  But before I could finish and before he could tell me, the windmill broke apart. The hideous sound shattered around us, as the sails broke free from the old mill and took the upper deck with them. Centuries of dust and wood and memories fell down upon us. The moonlight showed us how the sails toppled into the old fields, running, running, until at last, they gave a final breath, and fell still, shattering amid the corn.

  “Come to me,” he said and I woke up, tangled in the green-striped scarf.

  I flailed in an attempt to free myself, for it seemed a snake, a tentacle, something cold and slimy, meant to hold me down. I flung the fabric onto the floor and stared at it, slowly coming to believe otherwise. It was just a stupid piece of fabric. Nothing more.

  If this house was our place to dream, I thought that I only need go home. Perhaps I had conjured him to life, from the photograph or the sketches, or some combination thereof. Driven mad by my sister’s need for social media, even in the midst of a winter storm, I sought the opposite refuge, that of imagination.

  But when I saw the footprint, I reconsidered. The footprint gleamed in the low afternoon light, just inside my door. As if someone had been walking in snow and paused here, long enough to leave a wet impression. Was the snowman melting?

  •

  According to the police reports – and sadly, there had been such a thing, because the neighbours didn’t know who else to call – Aunt was found just outside the door to the windmill. She was in her nightclothes and barefoot, her hair unbound, as though she had just come from bed. Being a woman of some seventy years, no one had been too surprised by her death, but its means remained a mystery. Had she simply wandered outside, fallen, and perishe
d there in the night? The medical examiner thought that the most likely scenario and Mother seemed to accept it well enough – for it was easiest. Asking more questions was tricky.

  Why had Aunt been wearing such a smile? Did the dead smile? Why had Aunt been carrying a spring of rosemary? (It had been broken from the large rosemary bush she kept in her kitchen, dirt scattered around the pot as though she had been in a hurry.) The old do curious things, so I was told, time and again. Who could truly understand the mind? I wanted to, but how did one understand a mind that had already moved on?

  If there were clues in the house, I could not see them. Everything looked ordinary. The kitchen felt as though Aunt had stepped out, but would be right back; even the teakettle that Mother had heated left me thinking it had actually been my aunt, for there sat her favourite cup with the white violets on it. Her room was still scented with the fragrance of her powder and there, by the bed, sat her slippers. Slippers she had not put on the night she had wandered outside to her death.

  “Curious old lady,” I whispered, as I turned circles in her room, looking for something, for anything.

  When I noticed the thin line that ran up the far wall, I stopped spinning. The wallpaper was slightly curled up, yellow on its underside. The paper crackled when I touched it and I thought it was unlike Aunt to leave something so worn. She was proud of her house, though she wanted the public to stay away; she made certain it was well-kept in all ways. Yet, here was an oddity.

  I ran my fingers along the paper, beneath it, where the glue had turned hard and had, in some places, flaked off entirely. There was still a little scattering of glue bits on the floor there, which I was prodding with my shoe when a hidden latch disengaged and the wall swung outward.