by JB Duvane
“Why haven’t you had this fixed? It seems very dangerous.”
Raymond just shrugged then pushed me up the stairs ahead of him. “It’ll hold.”
It spiraled upward toward an arched doorway, similar to the kind in my room with a distinct Islamic style. It was made of shiny white and black bricks. The colors were almost macabre, set against the red brick and gray mortar; a design that felt too exotic. People back then used uniform styles, architecture that had been passed down through the generations, but this house seemed to be all over the place.
“What kind of place do you imagine I live in?” He stopped and blocked the entryway to the next level.
“Something with a neo-modernistic design. It'd have to be perfectly sterile, right down to the microbial level, with metal beams and glass walls.”
“But that's so fake and arrogant.” He frowned. “There's nothing aesthetic about that at all. If there's one thing I know, it’s that you treasure beauty.”
He grabbed my hand, and a shock rolled through me. “I think you know a bit more about me than that.”
“Look,” he said as we entered a long hall. I felt a burst of air hit my cheek and watched the light crawl over the wooden floor of a long corridor, similar to the one we'd passed through, only it was lined with mahogany brocade wallpaper and golden crown molding.
He led me down the hall toward a large room where everything opened up. I couldn't see much at first, just a window—twice as tall as my dad’s trailer—that was overlooking the desert. Then as my eyes adjusted and I looked up, I noticed the edges of a domed ceiling with light shining down through a series of stained glass panels, reflecting a soft light off of a center table on which sat a marble bust of a woman with a round head and hair that was pulled up into a soft bun.
As I looked around I was uncertain if what I was seeing was real. It was a classical library with books from wall to ceiling, some of them ancient, older than the house. There was an actual ladder that had been placed on a track and could circle the room, and the ceiling—I could've cried it was so beautiful. A single rose was etched in stained glass, throwing pinks and greens about the classically furnished Edwardian library.
“This room is almost two hundred years old?”
“Yes.”
“But it all looks so clean and new.” The rugs looked like they'd just been spun, and the thick velvet curtains had none of the characteristic soot marks from the time. There was no mud, no dirt, not signs of wear, but the furnishings appeared authentic. I turned to a practically giddy Raymond.
“I had it all redone when I was younger. After my mother died.”
“And her?” I stepped closer to the bust. He was watching me closely with wide eyes, almost as if he were holding his breath.
“That’s my mother.”
“I see.” I didn't want to go over my Norman Bates theory again and sully something as sacred as his bond between him and his mother. Whether it was unhealthy or not, and I suspected it was, this was something that he was giving to me to make up for what he'd done.
He'd abducted me, and he couldn't take it back. It was hurting him, and as monstrous as what he'd done was, I was having a hard time seeing him that way anymore. His eyes … they were so sweet and sincere. There seemed to be so much going on inside his head. I wanted to know more about him. The little that he had told me so far just wasn’t enough. He really did seem like a good man, at least parts of him were, and this place … it was magnificent.
“This isn't all.” He rested his hand on my shoulder.
“No?”
“No.” He laughed. “You can have the entire western wing. Every part of it, consider it yours. It’s your place and I want you to feel welcome here. I want you to …” He sighed and the bright mood he'd conjured just a moment ago seemed to slip away.
“What?”
I moved closer to him and as I felt him near me I thought about what my life could be like here. The house was spectacular and Raymond was beyond intriguing. I wondered if it could work. If I could let myself be held by him for the rest of my life.
“I just hoped that if I could do more than just welcoming you into my home … if I could give you a place. It all seems so silly now.” He seemed so lost. His guilt was palpable. As I wrapped my arms around him I realized that I couldn't hold him close enough. But why? He had kidnapped me.
“But you know it's not enough, Raymond. It is beautiful, but—”
“It's all for you, Charlotte.” He pulled back, renewed and dignified, and I allowed him to take my hand while he led me through another corridor with an endless series of rooms. They could have easily been used as bedrooms, studios, or offices by ten or twenty people. I found it hard to believe he was the only one who lived here. I also found it very sad.
Is he here all alone in this enormous mansion every day? Does he ever talk to anyone? I wondered as I watched him move past the countless rooms.
Each of the rooms had its own unique eccentricities. And as opposed to the library, the rooms down this hall looked like they hadn’t been cleaned or touched in decades. In one there was an ancient sewing machine with a pedal, encrusted with dust and spider eggs. In another, there was a desk, made in the classical style, with an inkwell and a crumbling feather.
One had bedpans stacked to the ceiling, another an ancient bed that reminded me of something I'd seen in a hospital in an old World War II movie. Nothing new. They were all filled with ancient artifacts, entombed with the wistful memories that were locked deep within the walls.
This entire floor seemed to be charged with an electric energy, just like Raymond’s eyes. Everything felt raw and intense, like the panic that ensued during a medical emergency. Several rooms had concrete walls and ancient chains. In one room, I saw a tall, human-shaped structure and realized it was an iron maiden.
One of the rooms, the one with the hospital bed, had the unmistakable stench of death. It was ancient but pungent. I didn't know how I knew it. Probably some unspoken instinct telling me to stay away. That room sat on the right side near the end of the hall and had a thick metal door and whitewashed walls. And there was a hook screwed into the ceiling in the center of the room.
“If you want to use any of these rooms they can be cleaned,” Raymond said, his eyes watching mine as I examined the dark and dusty room. “This next room is why I brought you down here. This room is for you, Charlotte.”
We approached a room that had obviously been fixed up very recently. The hardwood floor shined from the reflected light that came in through a wall of windows. I walked into the center of the room and spun around with my hands clenched to my chest.
One entire wall was covered in a floor to ceiling mirror with a barre running along the entire length and in each corner stood a coat rack with hooks that held countless tutus and feather and jewel-encrusted costumes. This room had been made for a ballerina.
“Raymond …”
“Do you like it? I had planned on showing it to you much later, maybe after you became comfortable here. But …”
“It’s perfect! ” I walked up to one of the racks of costumes and picked up a black feather boa, then slipped it around my neck.
“It suits you.”
“How did you know, Raymond?”
“I didn’t. Not when this room was built. This used to be my mother’s studio. Before I was born. I only saw her dance once or twice when I was very young.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She would never talk about it. It’s yours now, Charlotte. I want you to be happy here. I want you to have everything you could ever dream of. Whatever you ask for it will be yours.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say that you’ll stay. At least for a little while. So that we can get to know each other better. You’ll see. I’m not such a bad guy.”
“I don’t think you’re a bad guy, Raymond. I just … I do want to know more about you. You do seem to know a lot about me. The room and my clothes
—how do you know so much?”
“Some of it really is a feeling, Charlotte. I can’t explain it. There’s something about you that feels so familiar to me.”
I knew exactly what he meant somehow. Even though I didn’t understand him I feel like I knew him. I didn’t have any other explanation as to why I felt so comfortable with someone who was holding me captive.
“Plus one of my men was in military intelligence.”
“Oh.” So I had been under surveillance longer than I realized. “Tell me about your family. I'm willing to bet that this is the only nineteenth-century mountain estate in eastern Arizona.”
“I wouldn't doubt it, but there were mountain settlers, and some of them were rich.” He took my arm as we left the room and walked back down the corridor toward the library.
He stood in the center of the room, pointing at a painting of an elderly woman with a fop of gray hair and a black, brocade dress staring down at them. “Her name was Angeline Beauchamp. She was originally a French socialite who relocated to Louisiana. She was well known and feared at the time for having amassed a large knowledge of the occult.”
“Voodoo.”
“Yes. You’ve heard of her?”
“I’ve read her name somewhere. I did a lot of research when I was creating one of my characters, one of the ones I used at Red’s—“
“Marie Laveau.”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“You were wearing that costume that night … in the private room.”
“Oh yeah, I was.”
“She’s a lot like you. I think Marie Laveau is a big part of your personality.” My scalp tingled as Raymond pushed his hand through my hair. “Only with this gorgeous hair.”
I stepped away from him and his hand fell down to his side. “Why don’t we go back to your family,” I said with a slight shake in my voice. I wasn’t ready for him to get that close to me again. Not yet.
We sat down in armchairs across from one another, the window in between us.
“Can you imagine a world where alcohol took the place of water, nobody lived past fifty, and ninety percent of infants died? They were all out of their minds and they needed hope, so they used magic. That woman was considered by some to be an accomplished sorceress. But ...”
“What?”
“From what the old books in this library say, she used the servants to conduct grotesque experiments. One she called The Beast was given the head of a lion that she had sewn on. Another was said to have had his arms and legs cut off so he could walk on fours with animal legs.
“The servants gathered together one night with a Mambo, a voodoo priestess, to hold a ritual. Possessed by Marinette, the spirit of scorned slaves and the tortured, the priestess took a torch and burned the house down. They said she danced and shrieked the whole time, and that the slaves danced with her.
“Angeline survived, but the servants had control of their master. They wanted to go west to build a home, but she told them that she would have men hunt them down and kill them unless she was allowed to come with them.”
“They let her come?”
“They stripped her of her clothes and gave her nothing but a thin white shift, then they made her walk barefoot. She survived, barely, but her feet were cut up from walking barefoot and her knees were giving out. She had to be carried on horseback a good portion of the trip, and it's believed that they inflicted pain on her, branded her, and tore out her hair. I don't know how she lived, but I suspect the accounts in the library were exaggerations.
“The journals say that when they got there she looked like a corpse. She was sunburnt and dehydrated and her skin was the consistency of leather. They said that the servants were so happy that she'd been maimed that they named this house the Beauchamp estate, even though the Valices who served the Beauchamps were the ones who took possession of it.”
“And you're a Valice?”
“Yes.”
“Are you part black?”
“My family is originally from the south. The white men, I swear to you, slept with everything from sheep to goats back then. We're all part black. But no, the servants were white.”
“Are the Beauchamps still here?”
“Yes. They became the new servants and have been kept on over the centuries. Angeline's family was allowed to live so long as they served the household.”
“So … your family … they are the descendants of the servants who are now the owners of the estate?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. That’s quite a twist. Well,” I said as I looked around. “Where are the servants?”
“They have their own secret hallways and passageways and rooms. I rarely see them unless I need something. When I was a child, I never saw them once. Not until I was presented to the head of household when my mother become bedridden.” I could see a sadness come over his face at the mention of his mother.
He stood up and ushered me down an arched corridor with windows lining the wall.
“The story of the background of this house is very interesting, but I’m afraid that’s all it is. A bunch of tall tales and myths.”
“It’s fascinating, though.” As I looked out onto the desert I imagined that we were in a giant snow globe that was just about to be shaken. The window was so close to the edge of the cliff that I felt like one wrong step and I'd fly down, straight through the thin layer of dust onto a rocky surface where my whole body would instantly vaporize into a pile of sand and blow away.
“You don't like heights?” he asked.
“I've just never seen any place built quite like this.”
“There's a lot to it.”
“Is there?”
“Layer upon layer. See that ceiling there?” He pointed up. “It's a bridge one floor up. It leads from one set of rooms to a catwalk which you'll see when we pass into the study here.”
The study was another library with a more somber tone. There were ancient desks with green gas lights attached to them and were surrounded by shelves of books. I wandered over to the shelves, which were smaller than the ones in the library and started going over the names.
“Gray's Anatomy: A Study of Microbial Infections, Epidemiology...” I said aloud as I scanned the shelves. “These are all medical textbooks.” I looked to Raymond, who was sitting at one of the desks. “Did a doctor live here?”
He didn't answer. “My great-grandfather, Lawrence, used them to try to recreate some of the old woman's experiments.”
“So some of these rooms ...”
“Were used to house the people he experimented on.”
“And my room.”
“For study after operation.”
I leaned against the shelf to steady myself. It shouldn't surprise me that something this mystical and strange would be in Raymond’s blood.
“The servants had him murdered after his first year of experimentation, but the damage he did was left here.”
“What damage?”
“The smell obviously. It’s in some of the rooms in this wing, ones that I haven’t shown you and that will remind locked. There are cells in the attic and in the cellar. And the spirits.”
“Spirits.”
“Memories. Whatever you want to call them. You live here long enough and you'll feel it.”
“The suffering and the pain and heartache they went through? You think it's all part of the house now?”
“I know it is. I hate it. I'd have the place burnt down if it weren't for the fact that it's my home … and my mother’s …”
“Is your great-grandfather the only killer in the family?”
He shook his head. “Abortions, a child locked in the attic for having a birth defect, surgeries, and experiments not unlike the ones performed by Angeline back in the day. There are countless examples of abuse and bloodshed here by other members of my family. And at night, when you walk around, you can feel them. I think that's why my mother never let me leave my own small wing of the house.”
“What was she like?”
He paused for a long moment as if he were choosing his words carefully. “She was kind but firm. And she was a strong woman who would fight if she needed to.” When he spoke he looked intently into my eyes.
“I remind you of her.”
“In a way.”
“Is that what you want? Someone to take the place of your mother?” I had to ask. The question had been on my mind for days.
“No. I … there was a time when I couldn’t even imagine anyone taking her place in this house. But now,” Raymond took a step closer to me. “I want you, Charlotte.”
I didn’t have any way of knowing if he was telling me the truth, but I felt like he was. I wanted more than anything to believe him.
“But there’s something more to this, I can feel it. The way you look at me. The way you fucked me. There’s more to you than a man who saw a girl he wanted.”
“I didn’t think I could have you.”
“Are you joking? Look at you! You’re gorgeous! I’m nothing compared to you. I’m not anywhere near your league. You are different, I’ll give you that. But you can’t expect me to believe any sob story about not thinking you were good enough.”
“No, I can’t.” He sighed deeply and looked down at the floor. “You don’t know me, Charlotte. There is more, and most of it I don’t understand. I don’t know why I’ve done some of the things I’ve done. But some recent events have caused me to see that I’ve been …”
“What?”
“That I’ve hurt you, and that’s the last thing I wanted to do.”
It’s possible that maybe a man like him, who grew up in a place like this, might go to the ends he went to get a woman. But why me? It didn’t really make sense, but it was starting to make more and more the longer I was with him, and the more I felt this mysterious connection we seemed to have.
“What would happen if I tried to escape right now? What if I got down the mountain?”
“I'd bring you back up.”
“And if you couldn't and I got out onto the highway? What if you couldn't find me? What lengths would you go to bring me back here?”