The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  I’ve got you, my father said, and I turned my face to hide in his chest as he shouted at my mother to get away from me.

  I wished then that he had married another woman; I wished I had a normal mother who did not see spirits, who was not mad.

  My father had the room bricked up, and my nightmares, which had begun after that other fated game of hide-and-seek during my birthday a year previously, worsened. I had to take spoonfuls of sedatives most evenings and would tearfully demand not only that two lamps be left burning in my bedroom but also that the curtains were open to let the moonlight in so I was never shut up in the dark again. My mother was sent away for a month and then returned looking pale and sad, telling me she was sorry she scared me, that she was only trying to keep me safe, but I never played a game with her again—no hide-and-seek, no blindman’s bluff, no chasing down the halls, no spinning on the spot until I turned dizzy, no games of pretending.

  I had forgotten that time, or thought it only a nightmare, a dream. As if my mind made its own brick wall and shut away my memories of it. I knew now why I was frightened of the dark, frightened of being trapped and smothered. Was this why I was dreaming of the hare too, was it the creatures scampering out from the tiles of that room, was I chasing a lost memory?

  If I opened the other locked rooms, the ones that had been shut up waiting to have the plaster of their walls fixed and their warped floorboards replaced, their furniture shrouded by dust sheets like mourners; if I turned the key in their locks, would other memories come spilling out?

  If a house could hide a missing room for more than a decade, a room from a nightmare, only one wall away from my rooms, what else could it hide? If I, who spent my evenings roaming the house in my mind, mapping all ninety-two rooms, had not known that there was a ninety-third, did I know anything at all?

  I was too frightened to close my eyes, fearing the press of the dark, fearing the things that might hide in the gloom—the brush of fur, the pinch of cold fingers, or something unknown, something worse . . .

  And when I did fall asleep, I would wake inside my dreams to find that I had never left that room after all, never grown up, never been rescued, that I was still there, locked away from the world and frozen still with terror.

  Twenty

  It looks like the red pandas are breathing, in their cabinet, I mean,” a voice said as I entered the library one day in early December.

  “Pardon?” I said, and turned to see one of the newer servants reapplying her red lipstick using the reflection of the glass of the cabinet as her mirror. Her shirt collar was tucked down at the back and her apron straps were twisted.

  “The condensation,” she said.

  I joined her in front of the glass. There was, as she said, a patch of condensation in front of the two little faces of the red pandas. I sighed, and my own breath created a cloud in front of me in the chilly air.

  “They’re not alive then?” she asked, eyes twinkling.

  “No,” I said, and tapped on the glass, “but something else is, something small and hungry, hiding inside from the cold.”

  “I don’t blame them, this house is freezing,” she said, rubbing her arms distractedly, her eyes flicking toward the door and—I surmised, after having walked past the lord of the manor flirting with her in the billiards room—the Major’s office.

  Had she come from there just now? Was that why her clothes were out of place, or did the lipstick mean that she was hoping to catch his eye? I could not think of the Major as anything other than brutish, could not imagine wanting his hands on me.

  Lockwood was losing a steady stream of servants, far too many to blame on the war effort alone, but far too many to blame solely on broken hearts and bruised pride either. Lucy had told me that newer staff sometimes struggled with the demands of such a grand house and left soon after being hired, but now things were exacerbated by the demands of the war, and the housekeeper was increasingly harried—such that I had started to physically hide from her if I heard her nearby, to close doors and hurry through to other rooms, because she always found some way of mentioning the work that was needed to keep the museum rooms clean, work that the museum paid for by way of government funds, although I never said that, not wishing to spark her to some new height of hatred.

  “I better get back to work,” the maid standing next to me said, and I heard her footsteps pause in the hallway for several long moments as I stared at the pandas with their pretty white faces and luxurious brush of red hair.

  When I removed the red pandas from their cabinet, I found the remnants of a shrew’s nest inside one of their torsos and set to work repairing both the animals and the hole in the cabinet where the shrews had squeezed their way through, thinking of how I would narrate this tale for Lucy if we were still meeting for tea like we used to, and thinking, too, of all the many other things I wanted to talk to her about.

  Since she had suffered her night terror, she had retreated to her tower room. She did not have any more dreams that woke the house, nor did I see the doctor come to visit her, but she was clearly still shaken or at the least ill at ease with company. She hardly ever came down for breakfast, and only occasionally joined us for dinner. She was quiet, she avoided eye contact, and ate very carefully, looking down at her plate as if she could find something there to ground herself.

  I felt for her dearly, and I tried to think of light and breezy things to mention when she did join us for dinner; like the day the cow from the farm got loose and trampled the new cabbage patch; or the afternoon a starling had got trapped in the long gallery and how I got into an argument with myself over whether the primal human fear of winged creatures close to one’s head was a call back to some giant avian of the past that hunted our ancestors—but then I had never had the gift for casual conversation and these topics were politely rebuffed by silences and short answers. I knew that I had to trust her to approach me when she was ready for company, and I tried my best to show that I would greatly welcome the return of our friendship. In the meantime, I was lonely and I missed her.

  Lucy was of a similar age to me but she had spent nearly all of her life here. I could not imagine staying with my parents, even if they had wanted me, but then again what did I have to show for my adult life, having flown the nest? No home, no family or children, only my work. I had mounted a few animals for the museum and repaired others, classified specimens and cataloged acquisitions, written notes and organized storage, helped researchers and compiled papers of my own, studied bones and flesh and fur, and written mountains of correspondence. The bulk of the museum was there when I arrived and would still be there when I left. The only mark I would leave on the world would be some lines of ink soon discarded when they faded or when better theories of natural history were proposed, anonymous stitches concealed by fur, and perhaps a fingerprint or two pressed into a molded skeleton underneath the skin of a long-dead animal.

  I wished that I had someone to talk to about my own silly fears, about how I held my breath each time I opened the locks of the museum rooms in the morning, waiting to see what animals seemed out of place. Just this morning I had found the juvenile giant otter shrew, a tawny animal about a foot long, not in the morning room where I had believed its home to be, but in the music room instead, placidly waiting for me on a bookcase.

  I could draw separate diagrams for each room, of course, to check which specimens were definitely out of place, but what would be the point when there were other people who worked in these rooms and at least four other sets of keys besides mine—with one belonging to the housekeeper, another to the Major, a spare for the other servants, and another shared between the night guards. Instead, all I could do was to remind the keyholders, and the servants who passed through the rooms, that the specimens were not to be disturbed or touched, while cursing Lockwood itself as the museum’s chosen location for evacuation. At least in London, people understood that things should stay where they were, that everything had its proper place.

&nb
sp; The servants had definitely cooled in any warmth toward me and started neglecting the cleaning of the museum’s rooms, which certainly did not help matters, and it was maddening being seen as some kind of tyrant, yet all the while wondering who it was who was playing with me in this way—for by this stage, I had convinced myself that this was hardly simple carelessness and must surely be a trick aimed at me personally, a joke at my expense, and nothing to do with the museum at all.

  Could it be someone from outside the house, I thought wildly as I tried to sleep one night, having noticed the spotted cuscus in the billiards room that afternoon and not the summer room where it should have been. Was it the housekeeper, who I still suspected was behind the abduction of the hummingbirds; or Dorothy, with her enjoyment of tales of ghosts and horrors? Or someone else, whose motivations I could not fathom?

  * * *

  “Miss Cartwright,” Joyce said to me early the next morning as she caught me frozen in my bedroom doorway.

  I had attempted to leave for breakfast as usual, after a night of horrible dreams of giant hands plucking animals from shelves, of the animals coming back to life and sauntering off where they wished as I scrambled feebly after them, but had been stopped short by the sight before me.

  The squirrel monkey was there in the corridor, barely six feet away, in front of the open door to the purple bedroom, its tail posed in the air and dark eyes glinting, its head tilted inquiringly to the side, its cap of dark hair and face of pale flesh making it look unnervingly human.

  Joyce stopped next to the monkey and leaned the heavy vacuum cleaner against the wall. “It makes my job that much harder if you’re bringing the animals up here to the corridor, I have to clean around them,” she said wearily.

  “I didn’t bring it up here,” I said, feeling the smarting of tears in my eyes now that the shock had passed. “I swear it.”

  She did not look convinced.

  * * *

  Late that night, at half past two, I was unable to sleep after a day of feeling hurt and ashamed, embarrassed by what others might be thinking and saying, so I decided to head down to the museum rooms to see if I could find any traces of the person who might be playing these tricks. What was I hoping to find, I thought, cross with myself as I pulled a jumper over my head—Dorothy sitting in a chair waiting for me like some grand villain?

  As I locked the door to my bedroom, torch in my pocket, I heard a noise, only just audible, but a noise all the same—like a piece of paper being drawn out of an envelope, or a hand brushing against a thick fur coat—and I turned around to look down the long corridor toward the west wing.

  There was something there, someone in the dark.

  I felt a quiver in my legs, and my breath caught as I clutched my keys tightly in my hands.

  The figure walked closer, solidified out of the darkness, as the hairs on my arms stood up.

  They were dressed in white and moving calmly and evenly. As they came closer still, I could see that they were wearing a nightgown and dressing gown a little like mine, the sweep of it creating a soft dragging sound on the carpet as they moved.

  It was Lucy.

  I took in a breath to call to her, but then let it out again. Something was not right. As she drew nearer, her face was oddly blank; her eyes were not peering into the darkness like mine, but wide open instead.

  She was sleepwalking. And now I could see that clutched in her hands, camouflaged by the pale fabric of her dressing gown, was one of my animals, the pygmy anteater, about a foot and a half in length, with its thick white fur and long silken tail that disguised it from predators as a hanging silk cotton seed pod.

  I moved toward her, catching the clinking sound of something heavy in her dressing gown pocket; keys?

  “You’re sleepwalking, Lucy,” I whispered, hovering by her elbow. She was warm and smelled like lavender and I felt my fear wash away.

  She did not reply and continued staring ahead. I stopped her tentatively with a hand on her shoulder.

  “What are you doing with this, you silly thing?” I said, touching the animal in her arms.

  I knew that you were not supposed to wake sleepwalkers, and if I did wake her and she found herself in the dark corridor clutching a dead creature it would surely only upset her greatly.

  “Up to bed with you,” I said, and took her by the arm, gently guiding her in the other direction, unnerved at the way she easily followed my lead as if she had no mind of her own.

  I walked us slowly along the hall and even slower up the stairs to her floor. Her bedroom door was wide open, the inside brightly lit. Carefully, I tugged the anteater out of Lucy’s arms and set it down on the pink pouffe at the bottom of her bed.

  I decided to help her out of her dressing gown, fearing that it would tangle about her legs and startle her into waking. It was made of a pale pink silk that slipped easily from her shoulders, aided by the weight in her pocket. I draped it over the back of a chair and helped Lucy into her plush bed, relieved that she seemed amenable, because I would not have been able to lift her up that high. I pulled the covers up to her chin and stepped back.

  “Good night,” she whispered suddenly, her eyes still open and staring. But it was reflexive, she was not yet awake.

  “Good night,” I said, feeling an urge to kiss her on her forehead, but patting the bedding over her shoulder instead.

  I picked up her dressing gown, felt around for its pocket, and brought out a large, heavy ring of keys.

  This was how she opened the locked doors and wandered through the museum rooms then, her sleeping mind coaxing her to pick up specimens and set them down somewhere new. I opened a drawer of her chest, careful not to do it so sharply it would make a noise, and stuffed the keys inside a pile of unidentified silks, the fabric startlingly soft on my fingers. I would tell her where I put her keys tomorrow, but I did not want her going off on another expedition with them tonight. I slipped out of the door and closed it quietly behind me, making my way down through the house in order to return the anteater to its rightful place.

  Was Lucy, then, Lockwood’s sole mischief-maker; was she gliding down the stairs every night to move the exhibits with sleeping hands and unseeing eyes? How did her mind know to keep her body safe; what if she missed a step on the stairs or lost her way and walked through a window? And how could we—she or I or both of us together—stop her nocturnal expeditions? Even if she—or I—were to hide her keys from now on, what would happen to her sleepwalking after that; where would she go with no doors open to her?

  As I passed the night guard, who woke up with a startled snort—I had been working late on fixing a loose seam, I told him, when he saw the anteater in my arms, and he nodded slowly as if he did not know enough about taxidermy to know whether to believe me—I wondered if it was possible for Lucy to be responsible for every animal moved, but never once be spotted by the guards. They could not sleep all the time, surely? She was certainly not strong enough to ferry the jaguar upstairs, I thought, stopping to stare at the dark patch of the room where the beast had stood for only a day before disappearing, as the glint of a dozen pairs of glass eyes stared at me from the gloom.

  * * *

  I woke up early the next morning and knocked on Lucy’s door, announcing myself before she even answered because I did not want the embarrassment of being mistaken for a maid, of my coming into her room while she was expecting someone else.

  She was surprised to see me, propping herself up on her elbows, hair tangled and face creased by her pillow. That she looked beautiful even at this hour was surely unfair.

  “Hullo,” she said, wiping sleep away from her eyes with her fingertips. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, closing her door softly behind me. “It’s only—” I paused, unsure what to say. “Lucy, have you ever sleepwalked?”

  “I know that I used to as a child,” she said, responding to my question without looking at me as if I was silly to ask it. “My nurses were always finding me
in the oddest spots of the house, carrying on with things like I was awake, taking books down from the shelves of the library or drawing in the dark, getting dressed, you know. It used to frighten them something rotten, but I never remembered anything about it. Why?”

  “Well, you see, I found you sleepwalking last night in the corridor near my room, carrying the pygmy anteater in your arms and with a ring of keys in your pocket,” I said in one breath.

  She inhaled sharply. “Goodness, that must have been quite a sight. Oh, Hetty, I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “Is he all right, the anteater?”

  “Oh, he’s fine, none the worse for wear for his nighttime excursion.”

  “What the hell was I doing with it? I can’t imagine what was going through my head.”

  I moved closer to the bed, leaned against its post. “The thing is, is that this has been happening for a while now. Specimens being moved from room to room, animals picked up and put down, with none of us the wiser as to who might be doing it.”

  “Oh, Hetty, no,” she said, aghast. “Oh god. I’ve been so busy with my own troubles, shutting myself away up here, I had no idea. What you must think of me, barging into your rooms at night? I’m so sorry.” She bit her lip, her eyes were filling with tears.

  “Please don’t be sorry,” I said, coming to stand by her side as she reached out to take my hand. “You didn’t know, you were sleepwalking. If I had told you earlier, it might have twigged for you and this would have all been sorted out.”

  She squeezed my hand. The bright morning light that sneaked through the seam between her blackout curtains and the window had revealed the little lines by her mouth, the creases at the corner of her eyes.

  “I understand if you feel you have to move the museum elsewhere,” she said evenly.

  I shook my head quickly. “Don’t be silly; it was nothing, I was making a mountain out of a molehill, every specimen is quite all right. We’re quite safe here.”