My House Gathers Desires

by Adam McOmber

  His path was darker than her own. Eventually, it grew so narrow and leafy that Jane worried it wouldn’t take them anywhere at all. But the boy diverged from the path before the trees swallowed it entirely. Jane caught a glimpse of an opening in the earth. “Be careful,” the boy said. “It’s dark. And there are bats living in there.”

  “Bats?” Jane said.

  But there wasn’t time for questions. The boy moved quickly now.

  Together they passed out of the wooded light and into the cave, which was indeed so dark that Jane couldn’t see her own body. She had to trust that the boy would lead her in the right direction. “Stop here,” he said in the darkness. He let go of Jane’s hand. She felt the coldness of the cave touch every part of her. She wished she hadn’t worn her sundress.

  The cave brightened then, and the boy emerged from behind two rocks. He held an antique oil lantern with the wick trimmed low.

  “This lamp is like what the miners used,” he said. “Back when the mines were still working. I found it.”

  Jane looked up at the ceiling of the cave. The craggy surface appeared to be alive, undulating. The boy was right. There were bats.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Again, she allowed him to lead her. Eventually the cave widened into a kind of high dark chamber. In the shadows, she saw a small wooden shack, hastily constructed, nail heads pushing free. Two glassless windows bracketed a makeshift door that leaned against its frame.

  “If you look inside, you’ll see her bed,” the boy said.

  When he let go of her hand, Jane suddenly wondered why she’d allowed him to bring her down here. She was from the city. She was a professor’s daughter. A doctor’s wife. Things hadn’t been right in her life for some time. That much was true. But she could make them better. She and the boy should have remained together in the sunlight. She could have explained to him how to stay safe in the woods. “I don’t want to go any further,” she said. “We need to go back.”

  The boy’s face glowed white in the lamplight. His eyes looked nearly silver. “The miner’s wife liked the dark,” he said, “craved it. This was the only place for her.”

  “She should have seen—” Jane paused, thinking the word “doctor.” But she couldn’t speak it.

  “Just come see.” The boy ran ahead and was already pushing at the wooden door of the little house, using all his strength. He motioned for her to come, and Jane walked toward the dark doorway, almost as if she was in a dream. The light from the boy’s lantern allowed her to see a filthy blanket piled on a broken bedframe. The mattress beneath was torn and gnawed. She pictured the miner’s wife, wretched with sickness, moaning for water.

  “I’ve always been afraid to check and see if there’s anything under the blanket,” the boy said. “Can you look for me?”

  Jane didn’t want to look. Yet she knew she’d dream about this house. And it would be better to dream of an empty bed than one still full of a poor woman’s corpse. Jane went to what she thought might be the head of the broken bed, the part furthest from the door. Gingerly, she touched the blanket, reaching beneath it. She felt something furry and warm. Something that twitched. Then there was pain, bright searing pain in the meat of her hand, between her thumb and index finger. Jane jerked back and saw blood. She’d been bitten by something beneath the blanket. Something with terrible sharp teeth. She screamed. She couldn’t help herself. Then came the sound of leathery wings. Bats seemed to come from everywhere at once, flooding the little house, striking the walls. Jane flailed at the bats, knocking them from the air. The boy dropped the lantern. The house went dark.

  Jane awoke to find the boy curled next to her in the cave. The pain was no longer confined to her bleeding hand. It had spread up her arm, into her chest. She felt strange. It felt as if the bats had flown into her body and now clung to her insides, shuddering there. She gathered the boy. He was so small, so pale. Making her way out of the cave, she coughed at the dust caught in her throat and then spat. The boy stirred but didn’t wake.

  Night had fallen, and it was difficult to see in the dark. She could only make out the shapes of trees. The smell of the woods helped her navigate. She carried the boy back to the lake. The water at night was neither blue nor gray. It was somehow gold, a shifting royal color that moved in molten currents. Putting the boy down beside his easel rock, she went to the lake and rather than cupping her hand to lift the golden water to her mouth, Jane got on all fours and drank. She could still feel the bats crawling inside her, moving their stiff, clawed wings.

  It was late by the time she arrived at the rental house. Scott’s car was parked in the drive. Jane made her way up the littered path, crunching debris beneath her tennis shoes. She wanted to crawl on her hands and knees. She wanted to be closer to the earth. Yet she compelled herself to walk. There were things to take care of here. Things she needed to do. She opened the mudroom door. Scott stank of tonics from his clinic. She could hear how he shifted his papers at the kitchen table.

  “Janey,” he called. “Is that you? You had me worried.”

  Jane stood in the shadow of the doorframe. She watched her husband and thought of the cave. She thought of its sorrow.

  Scott rose from the table. “Jane, what happened?”

  “I—” she said. But what she wanted to say was “we.” We have been in the dark. We have seen the other house—

  Jane felt the bats shift inside her. She was so full of their small wriggling forms.

  Scott took a step toward her. “Your face,” he said.

  Jane thought of the woman in the gaudy silk dress on the television, the one who handed out dolls to children. That woman didn’t understand demons. Jane crossed her arms over her chest. She shivered. We will speak to you from the water, she thought, and from the very depths of the earth. When we speak, you will listen. And you will come to care for us. We are that which is meant to be cared for.

  “Are you cold?” Scott said. “My God, Jane.”

  She hadn’t asked the boy if the miner and his wife had a son, but she knew now they did. They’d had a quiet son who painted pictures. She wondered what trials he’d been through after his mother and father were both taken from him. How long had he suffered alone? How long had he wandered?

  Jane understood she needed to prepare the house. For soon, the boy would wake. He’d walk up the weedy path from the lake. He wouldn’t hurry. Jane pictured him in his ragged clothes, eyes of forged silver. It was as if his eyes were mined from the earth itself. The boy wanted to feel safe. He wanted to come home.

  Scott was closer now. He looked confused, frightened.

  He couldn’t be here when the boy arrived. Jane understood that. She thought of the cave once more: the wife’s house, the mother’s house. Her jaw felt tight. Her teeth, too big.

  Scott reached for her.

  Jane opened her mouth.

  Petit Trianon

  “If only Eleanor and I had remained in Paris that day,” Anna Moberly writes in an unsent letter to her sister, dated October 3, 1901, “our lives would not have been altered. Not in such an unnatural way, at least. I would still be with my dear girl now, holding her as I once did.” The letter, along with two calfskin diaries filled with notes written in the finely looped cursive of a schoolteacher, was recently discovered in an archive of the St. Hugh’s School at Oxford. (Have the dead suddenly begun to dream? a page in one of the diaries asks. Or have they been dreaming all along? And is it possible to become ensnared in such a dream like a gull in a fisherman’s net?) Moberly, a venerable matron, acted as headmistress at the girls’ school for some eleven years. She was said, at times, to walk the marble halls with an appearance of such loneliness that even the sunniest of girls were made to feel melancholy. Her gaze was always searching, looking for something that did not appear to exist. And then one day, the headmistress found Eleanor Jardin, an elegant young woman from Somerset. How the two women met is a story lost to history. What is better known, of course, is that Jardin soo
n became Moberly’s assistant. The two began a secret affair in February of 1900, meeting once or twice a week in a small rented room near the school. It’s said they created a world together in that room, quietly serving tea and reading books of poetry. For a time, they lived as any husband and wife. Yet they were quiet about their actions, so as not to be too harshly judged.

  Their trip to Paris in late August of 1901 was meant to provide an extended romantic escape, a time for the two women to be more fully at ease. Moberly’s letter to her sister sheds new light, not on the affair itself, but on the now infamous incident—often dismissed as a folie à deux—experienced at the Palace of Versailles. It’s well known that both women provided an account of the events after their separation. But the newly discovered letter reveals details far more disconcerting than anything in the official reports.

  “Eleanor had taken up a recent interest in the history of the Revolution,” Moberly writes, “and despite the heat of late summer, my young friend persisted in her wish to visit the palace. She said she wanted to see how the king and queen had lived before their imprisonment and execution. The kind of life that Madame de la Tour du Pin had called a ‘laughing and dancing toward the precipice.’ And who was I to refuse my darling girl?

  “Versailles itself, we soon discovered, was in a state of dreadful disrepair—looking more like a poorly painted stage set than a monument of historical significance. We walked together through the Halls of Venus and of Mars, the Blue Dining Room where the court had once taken dinner, and the narrow apartments belonging to the servants. As evening came on, I said we shouldn’t tarry. We should make our way into the garden. Perhaps there we’d find a more picturesque setting. Eleanor and I went arm in arm through the great doors of the Mirror Gallery, like two girls from a novel.”

  Moberly writes that young Eleanor looked lovely in the dying light, auburn hair pulled into a loose bun and her gray dress so fresh and soft. As the two of them progressed, Eleanor perched a pair of spectacles on the bridge of her nose and read aloud from The Baedecker Guidebook: “‘On your left,’ she said, ‘are the remains of the King’s Labyrinth, populated by bronzed statues and hidden fountains. And just ahead is Marie Antoinette’s famed refuge, Petit Trianon—a structure, designed initially for Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, which Antoinette quickly made her own. The young queen constructed marvelous follies in the Trianon Gardens: a rustic farm village with actors playing the roles of peasants, a false mountain where goats could graze, and a carousel of porcelain farm animals. It is said that, when she was imprisoned, the queen often wept when she thought of Trianon. The whole of it, she said, was such a foolish dream.’

  Moberly continues, “Both Eleanor and I paused there on the stony path, for though we saw the remnants of the King’s Labyrinth, we did not see any sign of Petit Trianon or its itinerant follies. Eleanor said we must have simply missed the ‘little palace,’ though I could not imagine how. I was aware that Petit Trianon, despite its name, was an imposing structure—a grand neoclassical temple, complete with Corinthian columns and intricate rococo moldings. The guidebook was most certainly mistaken in regards to the whereabouts of the building. But because I knew a search would please my Eleanor, I said we should retrace our steps and look for the little palace. ‘Circle ’round,’ were the exact words I used. I’ve wondered since if that phrase might have acted as an incantation, causing the natural order of things to shift. For isn’t it true that mages often draw circles in the sand to complete some spell? And don’t witches too arrange themselves in circles on their Sabbat?

  “Not some twenty paces after we’d made our circle, a lone female figure emerged from the tall hedges of the King’s Labyrinth. At first, I believed she was another tourist. Though thinking back on the encounter now, I find it difficult to say why I assumed such a thing. The woman walked with a certain stiffness in her gait. She was dressed in a pale and outdated garment. The crinoline of her gown had yellowed with age. Her white-blond hair was bound in a loose braid. And she had a somber air about her. I did not see her face at first. Or if I did, I don’t recall.

  “I remember thinking I should say something to the woman. Perhaps make an apology, as Eleanor and I had been laughing a bit too loudly only a moment before. But I didn’t have time to speak, as my dearest Eleanor was then pulling at me. She sensed something was amiss before I did. Maybe it was her study of the Revolution that gave her a clue. Or maybe it was simply because Eleanor so often understood things better than I. She knew, for instance, that our little apartment at Oxford would never last. Such dreams, she told me, they can’t go on. One must always awaken. ‘Come, Anna,’ she said in the garden. ‘Walk faster.’ But the heels of my boots made it difficult to walk quickly on the gravel path, and I wondered, at any rate, why we needed to hurry in the terrible heat of late August.

  “That’s when the trees before us began to change. I do not rightly know how to describe what occurred. I can only say the transformation didn’t happen all at once, but by degrees, until eventually the trees appeared as if they had no thickness. They were flat, like images painted on a tapestry. Fruit hanging from the branches (oranges, I believe) looked not like spheres, but like dabs of color on an aging canvas. I thought I was having an attack in the heat. I gripped Eleanor’s arm. ‘Just come on, Anna,’ she whispered. ‘Please. We mustn’t let that woman catch up.’

  “It was then that the landscape—the flat trees bearing painted fruit—began to fold. I perceived what appeared to be a crease forming in the middle distance—a dark line drawing inward among the flattened trees. Eleanor and I were moving toward that crease at such a pace, I thought we’d soon be swallowed by it, just as the trees were being swallowed. What lay beyond the fold, I could not imagine.

  “Despite Eleanor’s pleadings for me not to do so, I looked back. I wanted to know if the woman from the hedge—the white interloper in the ruined gown—still followed us. I hoped she’d given up her pursuit. Certainly, I didn’t want to be forced any closer to the odd black fold that had appeared in the landscape ahead.

  “And it was then, when I looked back, that I saw the figure’s face for the first time. Perhaps Eleanor had seen it earlier. That’s why she’d told me to come away. For the face was no proper face at all. Instead, the woman’s flesh had a fold in it, like the landscape, a kind of crease running down the center. The figure in the yellowed dress had no eyes. No mouth. Her features were all lost. And still she came for us. Slowly. Deliberately.

  “I would learn later that the palace and its gardens were built upon what had once been swampland. Louis XIII had drained the swamp. The ground at Versailles was sacred to him. And I believe now it was the ancient swampland—the environment that preceded Versailles—that began to seep out of the fold that had formed in the middle-distance. A greenish-black substance, a primordial liquid, appeared to leak, inklike, into the sky and then onto the grounds themselves. Staining all of it. Changing the very nature of things. My own skirts were weighed down by dampness. ‘What on earth is this?’ I asked Eleanor. ‘Some kind of storm?’

  “In response, she would only say: ‘We’ve made a mistake, Anna. I don’t know how—’

  “In later research—trying to make sense of the events of the day—I would learn that, when the executioner cut off the head of Marie Antoinette at the guillotine in the Place de Grève, peasants rushed forward to dip slips of paper into her blood. They wanted the gore as a keepsake. And in this mad jostling, the wooden trough that contained the queen’s head was overturned, spilling a quantity of Antoinette’s vital fluids into the dirt, creating what was described by one onlooker as a ‘terrible dark swamp made of our queen’s very essence.’”

  Here the handwriting of Moberly’s letter becomes increasingly erratic, nearly illegible, before the narrative ends abruptly.

  “Sister, my dear,” Moberly writes, “it was there in the swamp that we finally discovered the palace we’d been searching for—the queen’s Petit Trianon. And I realized
, in horror, that the little palace was not lost to history. All of it had come alive again, and it was impossibly transformed. I could see the peasant village Marie Antoinette had built for herself, now a desperate medieval shantytown replete with dark figures that shifted, humped and strange, through the crooked streets. And there too was the carousel of farm animals hitched to a wheel. They were not made of porcelain as the guidebook suggested. Instead, the animals were all terribly alive. Bones protruded at sharp angles from their flesh, and the beasts called out in pain as they struggled beneath their heavy yokes. On the horizon, a black mountain rose—the queen’s mountain—an awful broken shape against the stained gray sky. And then finally, we saw Petit Trianon itself. But this was not the peaceful retreat I’d imagined—no, this was a black and swollen temple with tall reddish windows and terrible figures that moved within—aristocrats in high pale wigs and gilded gowns. These men and women had been tortured, eyes extracted from faces, blood clotting in the powder that lay upon their skin. One man carried his head like a lantern. A woman held a handful of her own broken teeth.

  “When we came into view of Petit Trianon, the revenant that pursued us, the walking horror in white, began to call out in a voice unlike any I’d ever heard—a high and unintelligible wail. The grotesqueries in the black palace gathered at the windows to gaze at her. The dead queen behind us—for that is what I believe she was, Marie Antoinette herself, living in the gardens of her own deceased imagination—raised her arms. Her flesh was the color of stone, a petrification of life. She called to her court. She screamed for them.

  “It was only a few steps more before I stumbled, falling into a damp low place in the earth. I thought for certain I was finished. The queen’s court would pour from Petit Trianon. They would fall upon me. When Eleanor turned to help, I told her she must go. She must hurry on. Make her way out of this infernal place. She did as I asked, blind with fear, and the dead queen followed, pallid arms outstretched.