Haunted

by Lynn Carthage

  “You don’t know me,” I said. “But I’m trying to tell the truth. Whatever I understand of it.”

  Miles held my gaze with an earnestness that made my breath hitch into another cadence. “I believe you,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tragedy struck yesterday at the Arnaud property with the

  delivery of a thousand-pipe organ. Harkwirth & Sons Ltd. of

  London hired local labor to move the three-ton monstrosity

  into the newly completed east wing and up the stairs.

  Grenshire citizen Martin Ellis, 51, collapsed when a bend in the

  stairs brought too much weight to bear upon his person. Under

  Madame Arnaud’s direction, the remaining nine men continued

  to battle up the stairs lest the organ slip further. After installing

  the piece, the men returned to assist Ellis, who suffered internal

  injuries and spent a painful several hours on the staircase

  spitting blood into a chamber pot secured by a servant of the

  household, until he succumbed. The incident highlighted

  strained relations between the French family, still building their

  manor, and long-term residents. An inquest into Ellis’s death

  will be conducted.

  —Grenshire Argus, July 11, 1722

  Inside the library, Miles walked straight to a large book lying open on a marble podium in the center of the room. I hadn’t noticed it the two times I’d been in the library before.

  “It’s the bragging post,” he said. “I’ll wager you this is the family history.”

  I came to join him. I saw by the header that the title was La Famille Arnaud et Leurs Ancêtres. He murmured the translation, “The Arnaud family and their ancestors.”

  We studied the page the book was opened to, an engraving of aristocrats in their ceremonial dress, starched ruffs holding up proud heads and rings adorning slender, tapered fingers. The text, all in French, was elaborately tiny and the font too delicate to read.

  I reached out and turned the page for him. Dense text. I turned again, and yet again.

  “Wait,” I said. I turned back to the previous page, a full-color plate. My vision started to waver and fracture… no, goddammit! I wasn’t going to faint now!

  “That’s her?” he asked. He bent to read the inscription beneath the portrait, halfway blocking my vision. “It is,” he confirmed, turning to look at me.

  I mastered my breath, breathing shallowly. There was absolutely no surprise as I looked into the sinister eyes of the woman dressed in court finery, with profuse silk folds encasing her body, and her hair in an intricate chignon. Her mouth was closed in a gentle smile, but between her lips I could see the glint of her teeth. They were sharp and white, the color of bone. Her eyes appeared clear like a mountain lake fed by alpine runoff, but behind them was pure malevolence. It was the Madame Arnaud I already knew.

  “Phoebe, she looks just like you,” said Miles. He was still looking at me, his face appalled.

  “She doesn’t!” I said.

  “She looks like you with dark hair in ten years, dressed like a … what do you call these people?”

  “Oh my God, Miles, stop it! Please don’t say that.”

  “It’s not completely absurd,” he said. “She’s your ancestor.”

  “No,” I corrected. “My stepdad’s ancestor.”

  He nodded and looked again at the image. “All right,” he said softly.

  Together we stumbled through translating the minuscule text on the page but there was little about her other than the fact that she’d left her important standing at the court of Versailles to come to England in the early 1700s. The book made mention of the fact that she’d escaped with her family seventy years before Madame Guillotine wielded her terrible influence. The following pages showed later relatives, including siblings and the nephew born to her brother, and his resulting lineage. Madame Arnaud had had no children of her own.

  We reached the end of the book. “Can you show me the hidden room?” Miles asked.

  I looked over my shoulder, up at the second story of the library where I’d spent so much time terrorized. But it felt so different today: perhaps because Miles was with me, dispelling the sense of my own vulnerability.

  As if he could read my mind, he said, “It’s creepy, but I don’t get any feeling of her being here watching us.”

  “I know,” I said. “But let’s go fast.”

  I led him upstairs and manipulated the shelf until we entered the cramped chamber where a maid had been housed. “Look at this,” I said, pointing out the etched window.

  He whistled lowly, shaking his head.

  “And here’s all her stuff,” I said, picking up the apron I’d dropped on the floor when I was here before, and going over to the trunk. He joined me.

  “My great-grandmother’s trunk had a secret drawer on the back,” he said. He tried to pull the trunk away from the wall and gave me a wry smile. “Not strong enough.”

  But I was easily able to move it forward, and sure enough, lodged in the pattern of the leather, barely visible, was a small drawer.

  Inside: a diary.

  “You read it,” he said. We both sat on the floor, he with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out. I sat cross-legged facing him.

  With trembling hands, I opened the humble paper-bound volume and looked at the lovely, careful handwriting in ink. I read the first page aloud to him. “ ‘This being the book of Eleanor Darrow, servant in the House of Arnaud, and containing her apprehensions about the Mistress and the goings-on that trouble the estate. I set pen to paper on this fourth day of May in the year 1854 …’ ”

  I looked up at Miles. His unsettling eyes were fastened on my face. “Go on,” he said.

  “ ‘… because it falls to me to chronicle the wickedness that pervades every evil stone of this manse. Helplessly, we servants watch as events so sorrowful and despicable take place, so strained we are to the point of wanting to release ourselves of the mortal coil.’ ”

  I began reading silently, scanning. I summarized for Miles. “She writes that Madame Arnaud would drive her carriage through the village, looking carefully out her window. She’d pick a child, and ask the mother to send him or her up to the manor to be her special companion. She’d smile and tell the mother she’d teach her child to play the organ. After the first couple of times she had pulled the trick, no mother believed her. But nonetheless they had to hand that child over, to save the rest of their family. They believed that if they didn’t do what she asked, she’d have them killed. So mothers gave up their children, giving a long, lingering kiss, making the sign of the cross with the tears she’d spilled on its forehead, and saying good-bye.”

  “Damn,” breathed Miles.

  “The child would go to live with Madame Arnaud,” I continued. I skipped an entire page that was illegible from the long-ago spilled tears that made gray rivulets of the ink.

  “At first it was wonderful. The child would be fed all kinds of sweets never tasted before, and would be allowed to play the organ. Then Madame Arnaud would hold the child on her lap while she embroidered, and somehow or other, as if accidentally, the needle would slip and puncture the child. Madame Arnaud would gently lift the child’s arm, or whatever limb had been cut, to her lips and suck away the blood. Just for a few seconds, that first time. In the beginning, Madame Arnaud was secretive, but as time went on she became very brazen. She would openly suck the child’s blood in front of me—I mean, in front of Eleanor.”

  I looked up. Miles was pale.

  I read the next lines, feeling the beginning threads of dizziness unraveling in my mind. “And not just for a few seconds, once the child got used to it. No, she’d take a full suckle like a baby at its mother’s breast. She drank her fill.”

  A page was torn out here. I ran my fingers down the jagged edge of remaining paper. What had this servant torn out? Simply another p
age that could not be read for the tear-smeared ink?

  “Go!” Miles said urgently.

  “Let’s see …” I focused on the next entry, skimming. “Madame Arnaud wanted to live forever, and she believed that drinking blood would prolong her life. She thought especially that baby’s blood would do the trick. If she drank the blood of a baby, she got to drink its future, all the decades it was expected to live. She drank the potential of that blood, a life just begun, all the things that child could grow up and do.”

  I read ahead a few lines and looked over at the window across the room. “Eleanor writes that she’d sit at her window, tormented by not being able to help a child. She’d beg the moon to intervene, the stars to cease their cold shine.”

  “So she’s the one who scratched the words in the window,” Miles said.

  I nodded. “She must be. And it gets worse,” I added, returning to the book. “After the child became accustomed to Madame Arnaud sucking at its cuts, she started using a tool. She had a sort of a straw, made of silver. One of the silversmiths in town made it for her. He had to. He knew the stories about workmen who refused her requests dying in strange accidents, falling down half-built staircases, crushed under ill-supported masonry.”

  I inhaled sharply at what Eleanor next related, her ink growing darker as if she had pressed down her writing implement in agony. “Later, she used it on his own baby. He designed the straw that killed his own child.”

  “You can stop,” said Miles. “It’s enough.”

  I stopped telling him what I read, but I sat quietly and continued. I couldn’t have stopped to save my life. Eleanor Darrow wanted me to know. And I would listen.

  One end of the straw was sharp like a scalpel, Eleanor wrote, and Madame Arnaud would pick a large vein in the child’s arm and drink from it. That was when you’d start to notice it in the infant’s face: very drawn and white. The baby would stop dancing around the huge manor and become listless. Madame Arnaud was drinking all of its energy. Eventually the child would take to bed, lost in a huge four-poster, propped up on pillows, and Madame Arnaud would sit on the edge of the bed and drink and drink and drink, her lips pursed around that silver straw. Her eyes would be bright and sparkling, while the child’s eyes started to fade. She’d drink everything that child had. Everything.

  Eleanor had underlined that last word three times. She left the rest of the page blank as if she couldn’t bear to sully it with more of her wretched accounting.

  On the next page she continued, with an altered handwriting. Perhaps she had had to pause. I wouldn’t let myself consider what tasks she might have been called to do in that interval, what child she might have set kind eyes on … and yet not helped.

  Madame Arnaud would send word to the family that some accident had happened, Eleanor continued. That the infant had fallen down the grand staircase, or been trampled by a horse. After a while she didn’t bother to lie very well. Ten children in a row were said to have been bitten by a rat. Madame Arnaud knew no one believed her, and she didn’t care.

  “How much more is there?” asked Miles tensely.

  I ignored him. If he didn’t want to wait, he didn’t have to. I belonged to Eleanor Darrow and the spell cast by her haunting words of several centuries ago.

  I read on, flipping faster. The last page she had written on—although there were many more blank ones remaining—contained her terrified musings on how old Madame Arnaud was.

  “She is alive long past the time any woman should have died, yet she never looks a day older,” wrote Eleanor. “The older servants tell me their parents served her, and even a generation hence. The blood is preserving her. Her monstrous design has worked.”

  The diary ended. But I didn’t look up, didn’t signal to Miles that I’d stopped reading. I needed the time to mull over what I’d read. So Madame Arnaud wasn’t a ghost. She was still alive, with her skin peeling like lichen off a stone. So how had the automatic writing worked? Had she actually sat next to me writing those pages?

  “She’s real,” I said. I had seen her twice but until I read these servant’s words, I hadn’t believed it. This woman had charged others to bring children to her—and she drank their blood. Drank it until they died. She had murdered children and now she wanted Tabby.

  “We have to show this to your parents,” said Miles.

  “Along with the automatic writing pages,” I said. “They’ll have to believe me now.”

  He stood up, appearing huge in Eleanor’s tiny quarters. Somehow I was reluctant to get up. I sat fingering the battered diary cover.

  “What if they don’t, though?” I asked.

  “One way to find out, isn’t there?” he asked. He held out a hand and pulled me up. As soon as I was standing, he let go.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s happening again. The car—”

  It seemed I hadn’t even blinked my eyes, no chance for the scene presented in front of me to change, but suddenly I was in a car with Miles. I felt no bodily change, but somehow my limbs had rearranged themselves into sitting, and here I was with the landscape whizzing past. The upholstery was warm against my back, and the light through the windshield was too bright for my eyes.

  I made a strangled sound, but he didn’t react.

  “Miles? Where are we?” I whipped my head around, panicking.

  We were driving a thin road with the hedge built up as a tunnel around us. Miles was on my right, strong, tanned fingers clutching the steering wheel.

  In profile, he looked tense, his jaw set like he was grinding his teeth.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What the hell happened?” I tried to catch my breath. Why was he so calm?

  The road widened as we approached a bridge. I peered over—below was a shallow river. I could see rocks on the bottom glinting with an ochre pretense at gold.

  “It rises in spring,” commented Miles tightly. “Even overflows sometimes.”

  Oh my God, I was hallucinating again. I was like those people Bethany and I had written our schizophrenia report on. My eyes filled with tears, and I tried to keep that from him. Although … was he even there?

  On the other side of the bridge, I saw a field of wildflowers, but Miles turned left, toward the woods instead. The flowers lured me with their brilliant scarlets and golden hues. Sirens wafting fragrance to me.

  “Go back!” I said. “Those were so pretty.”

  “No thanks.”

  I almost insisted, but I was like a leaf being carried by that low river, twirling and snagging on rocks, then freeing myself and floating farther.

  He drove until it fell dark. We didn’t talk. We kept circling around and driving over the bridge. Now and then, he glanced over at me, but it didn’t seem like he wanted to talk. He turned on the radio and I relaxed into his music, closing my eyes.

  Eventually I remembered.

  I had to get back to the manor to help protect Tabby. I had to show Mom and Steven the automatic writing pages.

  “Miles?” I said. “We need to go back.” He turned to look at me, his mouth opening to reply, and then—

  Then instantly I was there, crouched at Tabby’s crib, gripping the bars like I was a prisoner. He was gone.

  Unreal.

  What was happening to me? How could I be in her room when a second ago I was with Miles? I whimpered, watching my sister sleep, innocent and harmless as a baby mouse still blind from birthing. I wasn’t in control anymore. My body operated according to someone else’s dictates. I was a rat carried from cage to maze by the scientist.

  That was a dream, I told myself. Miles and the car were a dream. I’ve been here the whole time.

  So … had we really been in the library looking at the portrait in the book? And reading Eleanor Darrow’s diary?

  Of course. That had to be real. I couldn’t imagine to that degree of specificity. That part had happened, the library and Eleanor’s slow, written recitation of terrible details. The fact
that Madame Arnaud was alive.

  I frantically began to assemble explanations.

  I must’ve fallen asleep in the car, and Miles drove me back to the manor. But what about when I’d spaced out while Madame Arnaud was sitting there writing pages next to me, taunting me?

  I’d give anything to be in control again. It wasn’t fair.

  I let go of Tabby’s crib bars and took a seat on the nearby armchair.

  Eleanor had said evil was in the very stones of the manor. I pictured the workmen who quarried and stacked those stones returning home after the day’s labor. Heavy perspiration turned their shirts a darker color. They must have kissed their wives with delicate embraces so as not to get them sweaty, washed up at a tin bucket and changed their clothes so they could tickle their children and talk about the day. They tipped back a pint of ale, hardly aware that they were building the cage for a monster.

  Those men had no idea that when Madame Arnaud unpacked all the trunks of finery from France and began her new empire, she would turn her eye to the sprites of the family, the little elves that made their parents laugh. She’d scoop up the ones who crawled upon the floor before they could toddle to standing and point at things: the cat, the candle, the fireplace, the woman in the mirror with blood staining her teeth.

  As soon as it was morning and I heard Steven’s shower running, I let out a sob. I could relax my vigilance. Tabby had made it through the night just fine. It was time to go gather up the automatic writing pages from the office where Miles and I had left them and show them to Mom.

  I padded down the hallway with its runner of gold shag, and made my way to the den. I entered and instantly saw that the half-moon of pages was missing. No sign of it, and Steven’s printer tray and pencil cup looked untouched.

  I stood like a statue. I had known all along they would be gone. Madame Arnaud was alive. She didn’t need my body to write. She’d written those pages while I daydreamed, and after I’d read them, she’d scooped them up and taken them away. She knew I would use them to convince Mom and Steven to leave Grenshire, taking Tabby with us.

  But for some reason she wanted me to read them. She wanted to communicate with me.