by Adam McOmber
“Of course not,” she said.
He lowered his gaze to the doll, the effigy. “Give it to me. Maybe he’ll take it as payment.”
Drouet clutched the doll, then realized how silly she must look. If she was ever going to escape this city, escape her father, she had to let go of things. She had to act like a woman. Drouet extended the doll carefully toward the sleeping merchant, who was not, in fact, sleeping. He stared at her from beneath half-closed lids. The old man took the doll, touched its hair gently, then its mouth.
Drouet felt a chill.
The old merchant stood from his stool and swung open an iron gate to allow them passage. Drouet followed Bledic down a narrow hall painted with a mural showing high red cliffs. The two of them came to a landing where a wooden boat waited in a man-made stream.
“You see,” Bledic said. “It’s not a theater.”
“It’s a show, nonetheless,” Drouet said. Yet she felt a new hesitation when she saw the boat. She was no longer quite sure about Bledic either—the way he’d grown angry when he learned she lost the money. She didn’t like how he’d forced her to give away the doll. Yet his hands felt strong and good as he helped her into the boat. His touch still thrilled her. As they pushed away from the dock, she wondered what her father would say if he could see her. She smiled briefly at this, thinking how angry he would be.
The boat glided out into darkness, Bledic at the prow and Drouet in the stern. She thought she could hear the rushing sound of the sea in the distance and wondered how such an effect might be achieved. There were more murals that showed bleaker landscapes, populated by thin wraiths.
“Will you hold my hand?” Drouet asked, and Bledic obliged though he appeared far more interested in the darkness ahead. His palm was sticky with the remains of butcher’s blood. Still, Drouet clutched it thankfully.
The little river curved once and then again. She felt they were dropping deeper into the earth. The images on the walls grew stranger, sylphs and satyrs dancing. Symbols hovered in the air before the boat, ancient scripts. Finally the river opened onto a small lake. At the center of the lake was an island of trees—not real trees but painted props with stuffed black birds perched on the branches. “A stage,” Drouet whispered. “You see?”
“A forest,” Bledic replied excitedly, steering the boat toward the island.
Together they disembarked. Drouet felt her boots sink into the muddy quagmire at the island’s edge. “We should—” she began, wanting to tell him they should go back. But there was such a silencing about this place. The false trees made a kind of chapel. The stuffed black birds were a congregation, eyes of yellow glass.
“Walk a little more with me,” Bledic replied. He took Drouet’s hand and eased her forward. “Your mother—perhaps we’ll see her. Wouldn’t that be good?”
“My mother?” Drouet said, confused.
There was something different about Bledic in this darkness. His eyes shone. His lips curled. It was as if he belonged in this place, Drouet thought. Far more so than he belonged at the butcher’s stall.
“Bledic,” Drouet said, “how—how did you come to work for the butcher?”
He stared ahead, as if he could see something in the far distance.
“How did you take up your trade?” Drouet repeated.
“It was on a lonely road,” he replied, “running north from Rome. Cypress trees made deep shadows there. It was the kind of road that seemed to move toward ancient times. The butcher found me there. He lured me onto his cart.”
“Lured you?” Drouet said. A fearful thought occurred to her then. What if the butcher had trapped the boy, forced him to learn a trade? And what if Bledic wasn’t merely a boy? She’d sensed that all along somehow, hadn’t she? Bledic was something more. And now Drouet was foolishly setting him free.
As they walked, Drouet continued to glance back at the tiny rocking boat in the lake until she could no longer see it through the painted trees. The island was much larger than she’d first imagined. Bledic strode ahead now, hurrying toward something unseen. She remembered how he’d described the yearly fairs in the underworld—the talking golden heads and boxes of blood. Was Bledic’s body changing in the dark, Drouet wondered. Did the boy grow smaller and more hunched? Did his fingernails lengthen and did horns protrude? Or was all of this another trick of the shadows? Either way, Drouet knew she wouldn’t have his company for long. She wished she had her doll again. She wanted to use its face as a mirror. She wanted to know that everything was still in place. But what Drouet had given away was now gone for good. She looked up, hoping for at least the comfort of a painted ceiling, another mural, but instead she saw the dome of an actual sky, dark and vast, full of twinkling red stars.
Swaingrove
Atlanta, 1863
Here, in the green glass light of the parlor, Swaingrove cultivates its memories. The house recalls the history of its own silent rooms, how they began as ideals, as uncreated forms. Long before the architects raised their beams and trusses, Swaingrove existed as an invisible body. It stood in the tall grass beneath tattered clouds and willow trees. Its flesh was a dream of paneled walls and wax wood floors. At times, it seemed to passersby that some vast and unknowable intelligence must have descended from the higher realms to crouch there on the hill. Animals avoided the grassy slope. Birds found other skies.
“Most houses gather dust,” the aging Viscount d’Archambault told a handsome young soldier of the Confederacy, as the two of them sat together on the rose-colored divan in Swaingrove’s grand parlor. “My house, dear boy, gathers desires.”
The soldier, called Sam, had fine black hair, cropped short, a precaution against the recent infestation of lice in the barracks. His skin had the pale and sickly sheen of one who’d been too long in the winter regiments. He smelled of horse sweat and gunpowder. He kept his brass buttons polished. His leather boots, though worn, bore signs of good care. The viscount, a long-time friend of the regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Joseph, had made some pretense of cigars. He’d promised the boy a glass of strong brandy too if he came and sat for a time. But, in the end, there was neither cigar nor brandy. The house, in fact, seemed oddly bare.
The viscount reached out with his papery hand to touch the young soldier’s downy-bearded cheek. The caress seemed to express something more than mere admiration. And because of this, the boy drew back, though only slightly. He didn’t want to appear rude or foolish. He’d never been touched in such a manner before. There’d been no girls for him in the town he’d come from. No courting of any sort. He’d certainly not imagined a touch like that in the green light of Swaingrove’s parlor. The viscount—white-haired and wearing an overlarge suit—smiled kindly enough. The noble air of the old man’s French ancestry hung about him. He’d come to America some thirty years before. The gray waters of the Atlantic still colored his eyes. “They’re sending children to war these days, aren’t they?” the viscount said in a tone that might have well described his own shame at what the South had become. He allowed his fingers to trail down the breast of the young man’s uniform, enjoying the firmness of a youthful chest. “When I was your age—” he said.
The solider gently took hold of the old man’s wrist, attempting to stop the viscount’s curious stroking. “Sir,” the boy said. He had a faint accent. A pleasant hint of rural Georgia.
The viscount merely smiled again and removed his hand, as if the whole thing might have been some mistake. “When I was your age,” he said. “I would walk along the riverbank near my father’s house. The water there was clear, like the mirror atop my mother’s dresser. I could see myself reflected in that water. Just a boy, tripping along over rocks and stones.”
“I knew a river once—” the young soldier began. He intended to tell a story of his own, as the soldiers did around the campfire. They spoke mainly of girls they’d left in their hometowns, but sometimes there were other stories too, those of high adventure, set along back roads and other unknown places. T
hese were the landscapes that caused young men to feel the world had been made for them.
“Memories are like that, aren’t they?” the viscount said, interrupting the soldier before he could even begin. “They trip along. Like a reflection over water. Always threatening to disappear.” He slid his hand across the divan and let it rest in a place near the young man’s strong thigh.
At that moment, the house shuddered around them, creaking its beams and momentarily causing the window glass to tremble. It was as if, the soldier thought, the whole of the structure had contracted like a muscle, pulling inward upon itself. A flicker, too fast for the eye to see. The soldier looked toward the green chandelier that swung now on its silver chain, casting odd shadows.
“You’ll have to excuse Swaingrove,” the viscount said. “My house is surely haunted.”
The soldier raised his unblemished brow at this. He was no child on his mother’s knee, to be sure, yet he’d heard tales from the other soldiers about this place. The old man thinks he can conjure hexes . . . there’s a painting in the hall . . . D’Archambault claims to have bought it off the back of a wagon driven by some wraith. And there’s worse things too. . . The young soldier hadn’t seen any paintings, and he didn’t believe spirits drove wagons around backcountry roads. He’d agreed to visit Swaingrove because the promised glass of brandy sounded restorative. And the viscount hadn’t seemed so terrible. He was a friend of the colonel, after all. What harm could such an old gentleman bring? “Haunted by whom, sir?” the soldier asked finally.
“Oh, ages of the dead, I suppose,” the viscount replied. “People too often make the mistake of believing revenants are local in time. But ghosts tend to stay on, son. I imagine my haunts go back long before I laid the foundation of Swaingrove. There’s probably more than a few red Indians crawling about. Right along with my house-girl who came to her end after falling down the stairs from the landing. And there’s the man called Jonny who put a shotgun to his head in the cellar. There was the little baby too. Terrible thing. Sent my wife into paroxysms of grief. Our poor little child all laid out in white coffin lace.” The viscount shook his head. “Now where were we?” he said.
“Colonel Joseph calls roll at nine o’clock, sir,” the soldier said. “I should be going.”
“Beauregard will understand,” the viscount replied. “He is a merciful man.”
But the young soldier persisted, standing from the divan and adjusting his uniform jacket. At this, some joint or brace deep inside the house began to squeal. It was an alarming sound, like a child in pain. And it seemed, for a moment, as if the whole house might suddenly collapse.
“Oh, you’ve done it now,” the viscount said. And he looked as if he found something amusing.
“Done what?” the soldier asked.
The viscount stood and moved toward the boy again.
The soldier retreated to the lamplit foyer, reaching for the brass handle of the door.
“You’ll find it locked, I’m afraid,” the viscount said.
The soldier tried the handle and, indeed, the door was locked. For a moment, it seemed not even to be a door at all, but instead some kind of dry flesh that wanted his touch. “The key?” he said.
“Dark and lovely,” the viscount replied, looking at the boy. “Dark and lovely.”
At this, the soldier heard something on the stairs: the sound of a man or woman descending. Step after slow and measured step. The noise faltered once or twice, as if the person who descended (if it was a person at all) was injured or had some kind of ailment. The soldier watched for a shadow to appear, that of a servant perhaps or the viscount’s wife. But when nothing came down from the rose-papered landing, he began to wonder if the stairs themselves might be making their own curious sounds. The footsteps were memories, old thoughts buried deep inside the wood.
The soldier paused then. For beyond the stairs, in the long dim foyer, there had appeared a large oil painting in a gilded frame. It was the sort of painting that might have been found in the halls of some grand museum, the likes of which the soldier knew he would never visit. He hadn’t noticed the painting before, but now it seemed to be the most important thing in the entire house, a sprawling work, vast and detailed. And it appeared (yes, the soldier was quite sure this was true) the painting appeared to radiate with some light, as if a gas lamp glowed behind its canvas.
The scene, depicted in careful brushstrokes, was a sylvan glen where a group of fair young men reclined. Their limbs were long and languid. Their torsos shone in the sunlight. The soldier thought it might be a scene from history or perhaps a depiction of a tale from the viscount’s home in France. A few of the young men in the painting wore scraps of peasant’s clothes. Others wore almost nothing. All of them had a certain stillness in their handsome faces (not like death, the soldier thought, but rather like a feeling of a great and final peace). These men had not been to war. They had never known the handle of the plow. Or if they had once known those things, they had certainly forgotten.
Then it seemed as if their painted eyes—blue and green and silent black—had turned to gaze upon the young soldier in his ragged gray uniform. They appeared to wonder why the soldier had not yet joined them there in the beautiful sun.
“The house once told me—” the viscount said.
The rest of his words were lost, for a great rumbling came from beneath the two men as they stood in the foyer. It sounded as if a large object rolled through the root cellar, back and forth, making an awful noise.
“What did you say?” the soldier called. He was frightened now. He spoke loudly enough to be heard over the din. “What did the house tell you?”
“I call it Swaingrove for love, you know,” the viscount replied, as if that was an answer to the soldier’s question. “It didn’t have a name before I gave it one.”
The soldier felt as though he was about to have a nervous attack. The sharp report of rifle fire on the battlefield and the black thunder of mortar were nothing compared to Swaingrove. The house now shifted subtly and changed around him. The boy braced himself against the wall. He slid slowly down to the polished floor. The viscount knelt beside him, telling him it would be all right. “Things are different here at Swaingrove,” the old man said. “But you mustn’t worry, boy. And you mustn’t leave me here all alone.”
“I mustn’t?” the soldier asked. It was hard to breathe. Difficult to even hold a thought.
“No,” the viscount said. “You mustn’t.” He put his hand on the young man’s forehead, as if checking for a fever. Then slowly he ran his fingers through the boy’s short hair. “Every leave-taking is a kind of death. Don’t you know that?”
The soldier didn’t know if he should agree.
He closed his eyes. He imagined the bright grove in its gilded frame. He might rest there, he thought, away from the viscount, away from the house. Sunlight would fall between leafy branches. He’d lie among the figures, the elegant and peaceful men (nothing like corpses). And they would whisper their secrets to him.
The soldier felt the viscount unfastening the brass buttons of his gray uniform jacket. Swaingrove continued to shift around them. It certainly was a restless house. Perhaps it remembered how it had once crouched upon the hill, long before the viscount had come with his architects, long before the so-called ghosts had arisen. The house had been a deathless thing, a power to be reckoned with. And now? Well, now its uses were all too apparent.
“I was never your age, was I?” the viscount mused as he removed the soldier’s shirt. He kissed the young man on his bearded cheek, then on his neck. “No, I was never your age at all.”
Versailles, 1623
From the Private Reckonings of the King: On the morning of the hunt, the light was so thin my men carried torches. There, beyond the stables, I was granted a vision. The sky above Saint-Germain-en-Laye opened to me, and a marble hall appeared. A thousand candles burned among the clouds. And there was music too—the sort my father once bid his court musicians to
play. I heard the sound of a harpsichord. A dreaming melody. I thought of my wife, still in our bed. During the night, she’d complained of spirits on the stairs. They woke her, she said, moving stealthily on bandaged feet. They were children, teeth bare and gleaming. They wore garlands of the sepulture. Their once bright lips and eyes were black and crusted with the brine of decay.
I did my best to soothe my wife. “There are no such children,” I said.
“How do you know, my lord?” she asked.
“Because I am the king,” I replied. “And I would not allow such a thing.”
But on the morning of the hunt, I learned that I did not control the world. For I watched the sky reach down for me. A giant’s finger pressed against a blue membrane. Something wanted to break through. A thing that lived there in the sky. My men had already released the hounds. The hawk made circles above. We were at the edge of the Woods of Marley. Shadows fell from the turning blades of a windmill on the hill. Sheets of silence moved. It was as if day and night were one.
I did not pursue the stag that morning. Nor did I use my longbow. Instead, the creature emerged from the woods of its own accord, its great rack of antlers the color of ivory. The stag knelt delicately before me. I used my sword to pierce its muscular throat. My blade sliced through its flesh. The color of the animal’s pelt was the color of the palace I would build one day on that very spot: a pure and regal cream. And the blood of the stag was marble blue. When its throat was finally open, I saw a hall of mirrors shining there amongst the creature’s precious bones. I remembered my father once saying, “Take heart—for I have conquered the world.” I let him hold me then in his arms, and I wept at such a thought. I wondered if I too would one day be so strong.
“I will build a new palace,” I told my wife when I returned from the Woods of Marley that day. “A glorious thing.” My wife did not immediately respond. Perhaps she was still thinking of her dream, the children on the stair. “The gods,” I said, “they’ve always hunted. But none, I think, has ever hunted as well as me.” I was still covered in the stag’s glorious blood. Covered in gold and mirrors. I didn’t tell my wife about the sky. Or how it had reached for me. I didn’t dare.