“For their innocent sakes,” he said, and once more left the room to step out through the front door of the mansion. Here he paused to look out into the night, listening.
The bell of the clock in its Gothic cupola above the stables sounded, and he saw that its hands stood at a quarter to eleven. Yes, there was still time. All the same the feeling of being watched, as expressed by his wife a moment before, came to him now from out of the immense quiet, and he shivered. Then Mr Merewether, the practical man of architecture, dismissed the notion. It was nothing but a twinge of conscience; and conscience, he knew, had no place in what was to be done this night.
He turned to glare up at a lighted window in the upper storey of the mansion and shook his fist.
* * *
Mrs Merewether, the taper in one hand and an uncorked wine bottle in the other, entered the bedroom, all smiles and pleasantries to her white-haired father lying awake in his four-poster. He appeared nervous and anxious from the way he shifted about, his fingers drumming on the coverlet. A nurse was asleep in an armchair by the fireside. Mrs Merewether roused her, giving her the wine bottle. The nurse poured some of its contents into a silver saucepan, adding spices and sugar from casters on the table. While she set it on the fire to warm the old man in the bed beckoned feebly to his daughter.
“If the deal is not struck soon, Elizabeth, I fear I may not last the night,” he said in a thin, querulous voice.
She took his wrist, felt his pulse and bit her lip in consternation. Not because it was failing as he feared but because it was as strong as ever. He would last the night. He might last many nights.
“When I sign the pact,” her father continued, “the processes and the rituals will be enacted and felicitous results obtained before the morrow. We shall all benefit.” Her silence to this and the way she looked at him prompted him to add, “The children, yes. But you were aware of this all those years ago when you agreed.”
She turned away and said in a low voice something that might’ve been, “When you threatened.”
“Do not fret, daughter,” he said, oblivious to her suppressed ire. “They will not suffer. But needs must be done in this desperate hour of my life, and if you and your James are to maintain your fortune. He squandered his talents, such as they were, in the making of these mere models and . . . ” His lip lifted in a sneer, “dolls’ houses. Now he is beginning to create real houses and is gaining respect and recognition amongst his peers. If this is to continue . . . truly I am your hope for a better life, just as your children are my gateway to deliverance from death, and in turn yours. Remember that!”
Dropping once more into anxious tones, he asked her to go to the window and listen for approaching carriage wheels. She did so, opening the casement and, like her husband earlier, putting out her head, hand to ear. The night was as quiet as ever.
By this time the saucepan on the fire was steaming. The nurse poured it into a two-handled silver bowl and brought it to the bedside.
“No,” said the old man, pushing it away. But the women pressed it on him.
“For your health’s sake, sir,” said the nurse soothingly, and he took it in several grudging draughts.
* * *
Mr and Mrs Merewether were in the drawing room downstairs when the shrieking began. At once the state of high anxiety they’d been waiting in snapped like a thread, replaced by a coldness in the pit of the stomach and a singing in the heart.
Putting on expressions of alarm like Fifth of November masks, they hurried upstairs. By the time they reached the bedroom the old man was already a corpse, collapsing back under the nurse’s hands, foam at his lips, his features contorted with agony and rage—as if he had known the cause of his passing—now relaxing slowly into calm.
As servants crowded in with much bustle, the master and mistress of the house stepped back into the shadows lest they betray themselves with the sly smiles stealing slowly over their faces.
Outside in the carriage drive a coach with flambeaux drove up to the front door. A white-wigged gentleman dressed in black was swift to alight and swift up the front steps of Ilbridge House, though he smelt of slow time, of dust and rat-gnawed book bindings. Under one arm he carried a small leather case holding papers with curious clauses requiring a signature; also a small knife with a fine blade to aid in its signing. Nestling beside these items were two antique volumes, The Book of the Toad and Turba Philosophorum.
At the door he was met by Mr and Mrs Merewether with their sad faces on once more. Bringing him into the dining room, they explained how his haste had all been in vain.
After a thoughtful moment the gentleman in black said, “Yet there is the matter of our agreement.”
“The agreement died with my father,” said Elizabeth Merewether in a voice quiet yet forthright.
“Madam,” the visitor said patiently, “it is clear you do not appreciate that which has been set in train by your father. His mere death cannot—”
“Nevertheless,” James Merewether cut in firmly.
Seeing further argument was futile, their visitor bowed, picked up his small leather case containing knife, contract and tomes of necromancy, and returned to his carriage.
The clock in its Gothic cupola above the stables struck the hour.
* * *
Laughter rilled from the nursery upstairs, the sound of mother and father at play with their children. James Merewether, dressed in the black of mourning, was in animated and happy talk with his son Roger. Both were seated upon a truckle bed playing with a model of a frontier fort: a wall of miniature sharpened logs, ladders to lookout platforms where stood little figures of delicately fashioned wood in proper uniforms, shouldering musketry. Barracks, stables and an armoury completed the establishment. Two lines of toy soldiers stood at attention in the parade ground, flanked by their officers.
On the other side of the nursery Mrs Merewether, likewise wearing the attire of mourning, was likewise showing little sign of it in her demeanour. With her daughter Bessie she was delightedly arranging the furniture, the fittings and inhabitants of a large dolls’ house in Strawberry Hill Gothic; a replica in fact of Ilbridge House itself with a chapel with its coloured windows at one side, stables at the other. The finger-small doll of a gentleman in blue satin sat in the dining room; a lady in brocade and a boy and a girl sat in the drawing room; a nurse, a footman and a cook were in the kitchen, while in the stables stood two postillions, two grooms and a coachman. In a four-poster in the bedroom little Bessie found a white-haired man in a long white nightshirt. She held the doll up to her mother.
“Grandpapa,” she said in that solemn way only a seven year old can.
Mrs Merewether regarded the doll a moment. Then, taking it gently from the child, she replaced it in the four-poster, sliding the bed curtains shut on their rods all round—and quickly pulled her fingers away as if something had just nipped her.
* * *
Out in the park of Ilbridge House, in the deep of the covering night, a lone figure stood watching the lighted windows and the gaiety within. In one hand covered in blood he held a freshly killed toad; in the other hand, clenched tight, were two rag dolls of a boy and a girl. His gaze moved to the coloured windows of the chapel, to the coffin draped with a black velvet pall lying upon a bier, candles in tall candlesticks flickering at each corner. He raised his hands with what they held as his gaze became a rigid stare and began muttering dire, dread words.
Now one tall candlestick lay toppled on the floor beside the crumpled heap of the pall, and the lid of the coffin was open.
Down the passage connecting the chapel to Ilbridge House a grey light not of lamp or of candle but pallid and ugly receded as something moved away.
* * *
In the nursery, while his son was absorbed in extracting cavalry from the stables of his little fort, Mr Merewether quietly left the room. In passing he took a white garment that hung on a peg by the door.
A minute passed and the door of the nursery opened
once more. A muffled head poked around it. A bent form of sinister shape, all in white, advanced on the children, their mouths agape, their eyes wide. It stopped, raised its arms and revealed itself—as their father, laughing. But young Roger was already under the blankets in a shrieking agony of terror, and little Bessie had flown wailing into her mother’s arms.
“James! Really!” his wife scolded him, but not without merriment, and swatted ineffectually at him with a pillowslip. Then, taking the children on their laps, mother and father patted and consoled them, showing their terror to be nothing but a white gown. Calmed at last, they were put to bed, their parents bidding them goodnight as they left.
They shut the door and stole quietly away.
For some moments all is dark in the nursery, and silent. But now around the door-case there dawns that pallid and ugly grey light that had earlier advanced along the chapel passage. It washes into the room as the door opens and the smell of nine days dead enters, and with it a figure, wrinkled and toad-like, with scant white hair about its head. It looms a deliberate moment above the truckle beds so that their occupants may see and cry out before cold and wrinkled hands reach down and work among the pillows.
The clock above the stables tolls one.
* * *
Ilbridge House stood in an almost knowing silence, broken only by the sound of weeping. For twelve nights running Elizabeth had retreated to her room alone. Though she never said as much outright, James knew she blamed him for what had happened. And now they wore their mourning raiment without pretence.
The daily tours of the estate farms James Merewether now carried out in a mechanical way, neither heeding his workers’ condolences nor his overseer’s reports. At night he lay awake listening to those intermittent stretches of quiet he hated which preceded the sobbing from his wife’s own room. It was the anticipation, the waiting that strung out his nerves the most. Not that he hadn’t done his own weeping. “We acted for the best,” he would whisper into the dark.
Not that it made any difference.
For on that twelfth night there came another sound to his ears, a softness as of naked feet moving stealthily down the passage outside his room, heard in the silences between the sobs. He realized he’d been hearing the soft noise of their approach for several minutes, but had been deigning its existence to himself. As he stared out into the darkness for a moment a darker shadow crept slowly past his open doorway. He sat up in his bed, heart racing, telling himself it was imagination, that it was a waking dream, that it was anything than what he knew it to be. The smell of death was in the night air.
Then from the next room he heard his wife say in a small, cracked voice, “James, he is here.”
As James scrambled in the dark for a candle and a tinderbox, managing only to knock them to the floor, he heard his wife continuing to speak—not now to him but to some other, and her voice came intermittent and in rising pitch: “ . . . not let you take . . . insidious design . . . flesh . . . life . . . monstrous . . . ”
Her words crescendoed into a long, loud shriek. James leapt from his bed, catching in the bed curtains, colliding with a cabinet, rushing headlong into something cold and wrinkled in his wife’s bedroom doorway. He recoiled an instant and dim candlelight came into view as something moved away into the dark.
The candle burning on her bedside table flickered ghastly shadows over her prone body dragged half out of bed. Her mouth gaped open in that last despairing cry now silent in her throat, and her eyes were wide with what they had seen.
As he bent to her, knowing in his heart that she was dead, he realized pale light now streamed from behind. He turned sharp about—to see the footman in his nightshirt standing in the doorway holding a candle in a china candlestick.
“What was it, sir?” he gasped.
“You saw it?”
“I saw . . . something,” said the man, his face bloodless and white.
“Fool!” said James Merewether in a sudden spasm of passion and, snatching the candlestick from his hand, pushed the man aside to race out into the passage, shielding the flame with his hand as he ran. And as he ran he was dimly aware of running down the wake of some disagreeable odour which grew stronger with every flying step he took. He was not surprised to find the trail leading to the nursery.
Its door was firmly shut, as it had been firmly shut since that day twelve nights ago. Yet the odour of death led here; there was no mistake. Stepping forward, he threw the door open, then for some moments stood looking narrowly into the interior, holding the candle in one hand, the candlestick upraised and ready in the other. He did not know—or did not want to know—what he expected to confront in there, though he was conscious of surprise at the nursery not smelling as of a charnel house in summer. There was only the mustiness that any room closed off for a prolonged period might produce. But for all that it was midnight, all was not entirely dark within.
The children’s toys, lying between the truckle beds, and all of them works of love by their father, were illuminated in a dirt, grey glow. It seemed to seep from Rodger’s frontier fort, its officers and soldiers standing ready, its sentries still at their posts, looking for the return of their young master. It clung like a visible miasma to Bessie’s dolls’ house, all Gothic arches and turrets and windows, with its population poised within.
The soldiers in the fort turned stiffly like awakening puppets to face James Merewether, and the people in the dolls’ house filed out its front door and regarded him steadfastly. They raised their tiny arms and pointed their tiny fingers at him: the officers and soldiers, the gentleman in blue satin, the lady in brocade, the little boy and the little girl, the nurse, the stable staff, the old man in his white nightshirt who alone of the dolls was laughing silently.
“No!” said James Merewether, staring. “No!”
The dolls’ house was not now a four roomed model with a movable front, but a living image of Ilbridge House, to one side its stables with turret clock, to the other its chapel of coloured glass windows. Here the gentleman and the lady talked earnestly in the dining room, though not a word could be heard; now the gentleman stood on the front doorstep, shaking his fist at a lighted upper window; now the lady entered that upstairs bedroom to smile and give poison to the old man anxious in his four-poster.
A moment of darkness intervened, then the house lit into new activity with the old man starting up in his bed, hands clutching at his heart, uttering a cry unheard. Now the servants rushed in, and with them the gentleman and the lady who then backed into the shadows to hide their expressions of quiet glee.
Once more darkness fell on the scene and once more the house relit itself.
James gave a gasp of bitter sweet surprise at the sight of his children in happy play with Elizabeth and himself on that fateful night now reliving itself before him. Then with a groan of some unnameable emotion he saw into the chapel and to what was now happening there.
With one last look at the nursery within the dolls’ house, where a dirty grey light now dawned around the door-case, James Merewether raced from the room, fearful of meeting what he had glimpsed entering it as he ran through that self same door.
Somewhere behind him a clock bell tolled one.
* * *
Elizabeth’s funeral, much to her husband’s surprise and dismay, was attended by the white-wigged gentleman in black, arriving in his coach, its flambeaux burning against the night. Still carrying his small leather case he stood in the dark at a respectful distance from those gathered about the torch-lit gravesite, a smile lurking at his mouth.
* * *
Days afterwards James Merewether returned to the nursery—then returned again and again to watch in perverse fascination the re-enactment of his sins, those of his wife, and their awful consequences.
“We acted for the best,” he once beseeched the dolls’ house with hot tears rolling down his face as it relentlessly replayed the plotting, the poisoning, the joyful play, the vile retribution. At another time he stood
over it with an axe, but could not bring himself to destroy it. What if its destruction should be replicated in reality? Or if in some occult manner the blow kill himself? Was it not his own handiwork, physically and spiritually? No, he could not do it, though he often felt now that his life was not worth living. The punishment enacted on his wife and children had been lenient compared to his own.
Trusting no servant to help him, he carried the dolls’ house alone and with much difficulty to the lumber room immediately below the roof, placing it in a far corner, covering it with a sheet. He then locked the door and threw away the key, leaving the dolls’ house to tell its tale to the dark and to the dust of the years. But wherever he was throughout those years he could always feel it repeating the deeds done, the crimes committed—a conscience of painted wood and coloured glass and moving shadows best kept hidden.
* * *
James Merewether soon afterwards retired to the seclusion of Ilbridge House, a failed and broken man, having never accomplished any real recognition in architecture. Growing pandemoniously fearful of the creeping dirty-grey light of winter sunrises, and firmly convinced all windows were watching, in his later years he became known in Coxham parish as Old Mad Merewether.
* * *
John Merewether, heir to the estate on his uncle’s decease, could scarce credit the shameful family secret played out by the dolls’ house discovered in its place of concealment on the demolition of Ilbridge House. He eventually secreted it away in the lumber room of his own residence where it remained until sold many years later and thankfully by his descendants to a travelling buyer of antiques.
Who, after watching the hideous pantomime one, two, and three nights running, sold it for a quick ten pounds to an antiques dealer named Mr Chittenden.
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5) Page 45