by Marc Secchia
“Sir?”
“Nothing, carry on.”
“Would Sir care for a drink? A light snack?”
Kevin sighed. “No, sir would not, thank you.”
Thankfully, the Library had more exits and nooks and crannies than could reasonably be guarded by the most zealous corps of servants. He resolved to employ such an exit, just as soon as he figured out how to gain access to the Blue Room undetected. The only Blue Room he knew of was an old study in the unused East Wing of the house, a study that belonged to Great-Grandmother and had been locked, well, forever. Father probably had the key. The second problem was that in order to reach the East Wing, he would have to pass through the main hallway or cross the courtyard–assuming he could make it that far without collapsing. Discovery was assured. But was there an alternative?
When he was younger, he had heard two servants passing in the corridor outside his room. His door had been left ajar, which was unusual. The hour was late, and they were returning from a night on the town.
“I’m tellin’ you, ‘e’s no good!” said the first.
“Wharr–seein’ th’ scullery-maid?” slurred the second.
“Nay, th’ how is th’ stranger thing!”
“Wharr? Wharr yer on about, yer ol’ lecher?”
“Blimey, that’s th’ last time you drinkin’ six pints! You can’t stan’ straight up. ‘Ere, ‘old me arm.” There was a crashing noise and some muffled swearing. “’Old me arm, ah say! Better. Ah’ll ‘ave yer know, sonny, ‘e’s usin’ th’ secret passage behind them rooms.”
“Gerroff, yer big buffoon!”
“Shh! You’ll wake th’ house.”
“Wharr, ‘e’s getting’ it an’ yer jealous?”
“Nay, but that’s how ‘e’s seein’ ‘er, I reckon, sneakin’ back there.”
Kevin gnawed at a fingernail. Just two old servants, stumbling back to their rooms, chuckling over another’s affair with one of the maids. But to his knowledge, the matter of the secret passageway had never come to light.
“Not impossible,” he sighed.
Several weeks had passed since he had requested a worktable in the Library. Professing an interest in architecture, Kevin began to cover the pitted work surface with various diagrams and books on the subject. He intended to examine Pitterdown Manor’s building plans, which had taken him almost two months to find, hidden in a mildewed box in the lowest level of the Library. Some of the pages fell apart at his touch. But Kevin liked to think he had the patience of a monk. Quietly and secretively, he pursued his detective work. He was so fearful of discovery, that he did not even record his observations on paper, but trusted all to his powers of recall and deduction. He hid the plans and drawings within books and read them on his favourite armchair, or stuffed them down his shirt and read them by moonlight in his bedroom with the door locked and bolted. Overnight, he began to dream plans and room dimensions, but the business of mentally comparing the different extensions and renovations that he had unearthed took weeks of intensive mental gymnastics.
“Thank heavens for a first-rate brain,” he told himself, rather immodestly.
Immersed in his studies late one afternoon, Kevin was aghast to hear a familiar tread in the downstairs hallway. No, it couldn’t be! His hands gathered and sorted through the papers in panicky haste. Dread speared into his bowels, causing his nerveless fingers to fumble and shake with maddening debility. The low voice, inquiring of the servants what had transpired in his absence … a demand for whiskey … Kevin’s paranoia escalated to mountainous proportions.
He swore weakly as he dropped a book on the floor. He scrabbled under the desk like a vagrant mining a trash-heap. All the tiny freedoms he had allowed himself, all the careful and secretive planning, all was lost in an instant.
Father had returned.
* * * *
He was in an indeterminable place. All around was a soft, milky illumination upon formless and perfectly uniform haze. There was neither sense of movement nor sense of time’s passage. Though his legs moved, they were so disconnected from his perception that they might have belonged to a different person, for there was no sensation of solid contact with the ground, just an ethereal drifting of the kind usually associated with summer’s slow clouds. All colour had been leached from the haze until it resembled ghoulish shrouds upon the sweep of an endless plain. He peered forward intently, trying to make out the outlines of … trees? Mountains?
Without warning, the scene changed.
Damp-slick, gnarled trunks rose all around him, a circle of trees ancient beyond knowing, and from the prickling, cloying chill along his spine he knew himself to be in a special, powerful, place–yet all remained insubstantial, as though the merest breath might send these visions back to the mists. The irruption between reality and unreality confused him. He knew he was not a physical presence in the dreamscape–this was a delusion, a sliver of the subconscious magnified by his imagination–but he recognised a defiant counter-current that coolly insisted upon the vision’s reality, that he was being drawn by a force external to himself to an unknown destination. Subtly, the dream enticed him in. Apprehension grew in his breast.
Some distance apart from him, far enough that details were indistinct, was the figure of a ghostly little girl. She was barefoot, and garbed in an otherworldly dress of what appeared to be leaves or some unfamiliar textile, he could not tell which. She was crying.
She was the same every time. Never smiling nor merry, always fixing him with such beseeching glances from her soulful dark eyes that he squirmed and blushed in reaction. He was unable to speak to her, though he yearned to understand the cause of her tears. Kevin sensed she waited for him. Her arm lifted to beckon, to invite him to follow her, as with an impetuous step she turned to lead him on. But he was incapable–his feet were carved of stone. She looked back over her shoulder. Her despair only seemed to deepen when Kevin made a helpless gesture grounded in frustration and misery almost equal to hers.
There was a danger of losing himself here, he realised, an insinuating thread of fear that coiled silkily about his heart and ensnared him in weakness and self-loathing. Perhaps it had to do with the dreamscape. An inkling of mystical significance suggested itself to his senses, a thread too tiny and delicate to readily identify, but nevertheless he felt that there was woven into the dream’s fabric a magnitude of composition or importance that transcended ordinary physical substance–which gave his fears voice. They crowded in suddenly, like a flock of vultures descending to feast upon carrion, tearing into him with such visceral abhorrence that he staggered and nearly retched, even in his dream. They pushed him over the edge. The dream, never comfortable, had become a nightmare.
He took a backward step.
The little girl’s mouth flew open, a soundless, desperate cry. Perhaps the impact on him was the more acute because the cry was inaudible; his imagination supplied from her stricken expression what was lacking in sound. His retreat instantly transformed into statue-like immobility. They stared at each other across the intervening space, unable to break the terrible connection. Kevin’s heart skipped a beat, two, and then burst into a frenetic catch-up. What now? Had she captured him? Why was he unable to leave the dream? He could not even tear his eyes away from that tearful gaze, nor could he deny her hope–an unutterable expectation united him to her, a knowledge she possessed but was somehow unable to share, as if he held the key to her world and did not know it. He could not articulate what he meant to this strange girl, but her behaviour wordlessly screamed his significance.
Kevin had never considered his possible importance to another person. Everything Father and Brian had taught him, everything beaten and pounded into him over the years, pointed to the utter insignificance of the desires and opinions–indeed, the very existence–of one Kevin Albert Jenkins. He counted for nothing. Less than nothing, for his sickliness was a burden to his family and required the services of a small army of carers to ameliorate. To Father he was just a use
less mouth to feed.
And the target of his rage.
He ought to do something. The ‘ought’ snared and held him, for having never before been required to serve another in any capacity whatsoever, he now became paralysed with indecision. To be switched from weakness to a position of strength was more than disconcerting. It was chilling, unthinkable, anathema.
But his immobility gave the little girl heart. First her features began to relax, then her fists unclenched, then suddenly she tottered a dozen or so steps toward him before pulling up short. It was enough that Kevin’s eyes grew round in astonishment.
Because the haze rendered all colours a uniform grey, he could not have told if her eyes were blue or brown, or discern if the trees were green or puce, for that matter. But he could distinguish patterning, and his initial impression was that she was intricately tattooed on her hands and forearms, feet and calves, similarly to Celtic or Gaelic designs and motifs that he had encountered during his extensive researches in the Library. Or henna hand-painting! He had seen a picture of that once, but these were different, more organic–leafy. That was the right word. Leafy. Either the toil of an artistic genius had been worked upon her flesh, or the patterns were natural. They were boldest on the extremities of her limbs and faded toward her torso.
She essayed now a welcoming smile, albeit a weak one, and made an encouraging gesture with her tiny hand. She was afraid! This startling new insight flashed into Kevin’s mind, instantly dismissed as laughable. Why, she was but a slip of a creature, just a girl, but even so a thousand times more able than he. What reason could she have to fear him?
Movement in the mists caught Kevin’s attention. Seeing the direction of his gaze, the little girl turned, too. At once her hands flew to her mouth. This must be some happy surprise, for she eagerly waved several times and jumped up and down, before turning to him with a ‘now-you’ll-see’ gesture.
Kevin did, and for a timeless age nearly forgot to breathe.
A unicorn! Ridiculous.
Now he knew he was dreaming. Momentarily, he had feared his dream had been subverted by an unknown force. What had appeared from the haze beyond the little girl was unmistakeably a Unicorn. The creature was as white as freshly starched sheets, with a long mane and gentle dark eyes. Though it dwarfed the little girl, and its double-spiralled horn must make a wicked weapon indeed, the Unicorn approached her with the fluttering steps of a ballet dancer and paused to nuzzle her arm briefly. She trembled.
Kevin had never seen a creature nobler or more splendid, nor could he find words adequate to describe how sculpted was its musculature, or how effortlessly it filled the space between the twisted old trees with light and beauty. If all the goodness and rightness in the world were to be reduced to living flesh, then the Unicorn would be the embodiment of these.
He felt compelled to speak, to respond. But he remained helpless.
The Unicorn tossed its silken mane and pranced toward him. But it, too, was unable to approach Kevin, and he could see the puzzlement in its mien as it mapped out the boundaries of the invisible space between them. There was no explanation. The separation was physical and apparently inviolable. At length, the Unicorn turned to the little girl as if to say, ‘What do you think, then?’ She stomped her little foot in a fit of pique.
This too was astonishing, for her reaction was completely at odds with the subdued and imploring behaviour he had come to expect–it jolted him from his previous indecision into a state approaching real alarm. From costly experience it stood to reason that if he had caused someone to be angry with him, then he should expect further violence, and now indeed, as if to complete this unhappy train of thought, the Unicorn turned purposefully toward him and lowered its horn to point its needle-like tip directly at his heart. Kevin curled within himself, victim of a thousand ill-conceived fears, which were never far removed from the surface of his consciousness.
He wanted to run. He wanted to scream. But he was trapped as surely as had he been tied to one of those ancient trunks, and even as the jewelled horn began to glow with an otherworldly incandescence he knew that he was incapable of acting to save himself–this was the true and pitiful measure of his worth–for something unspeakable was about to happen and he should hide, pull the blankets over his head, or better still, his legs should give full measure to the shrieking in his mind and he should run, run, run!
* * * *
Kevin awoke feeling frayed at the edges and travel-weary. He wanted to vomit. The thick, putrid sweat of his nightmares had congealed on his brow and dampened his sheets. Disgusting. Frigging unicorns, what a childish thing to dream about! His eyes jumped between the sun-edged drapes and the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar, as if half expecting a legion of demons to be leering over his expected demise–but this was not so.
“A dream,” he reassured himself. “It’s only a dream, old sport! Don’t be more wretched than your weakness already demands.”
However, instead of ringing for his breakfast tray, which he always did upon first waking, he drew the covers aside and swung his feet down to feel for his slippers. These were positioned meticulously alongside the bed every night after brushing his teeth and before switching off the main light. For some reason this morning, his feet tingled with a mild form of pins-and-needles, and so he examined them carefully lest there be some recurrence of the problem with his circulation. All the doctors’ warnings had been noted. ‘You have poor circulation, Mr Jenkins, and a weak heart. Taken together, these may lead to some unfortunate consequences. You must be vigilant.’ But no, there was nothing amiss save a pink blush one ordinarily associated with an overly hot bath, and so he consigned his feet to the slippers’ lambskin comfort and padded over to the window. It was only when he reached the bay window and tugged aside the drapes that he realised how easily he had crossed the distance.
Balmy sunlight splashed virtually unnoticed against the back of his head as he stared back at his bed. It was fifteen or so steps away. In his customary frailty, it normally took him almost a minute to cross the floor and rest weakly against the window ledge, gathering his strength for the simple task of opening the heavy drapes. “Not today,” he muttered darkly. “Oh, rather too easy.” Quite deliberately, he gave his arm a prolonged pinch.
It hurt.
It hurt like the blazes, because he was used to numb nerve-endings from all the medication and had therefore given himself a very firm pinch.
“By golly gosh!” he whispered, a phrase he had picked up from a book. A brief fumbling at the catch had the window open and he sucked in a great breath. “Fine morning, old sprout. Fine and fresh.”
The way he was feeling, he reflected with a thrill, he should be skipping about like a frisky lamb down there on the lawn–and that was not all. The asthmatic tightness in his chest that usually accompanied such a breath was strangely, wonderfully absent. He tried again, just to be sure. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Wonderful, clean country air flooded into the very roots of his lungs, with nary a rattle nor a wheeze. Elation! Goodness, what was this? An intoxicating bubbling of oxygen through his veins? There must be a catch, an imminent collapse, a just recompense for this shocking feeling of health. Kevin turned the unfamiliar word over in his mind. Years of infirmity had long since served to shrivel any such hope. Too many prognoses, too much medicine had rattled down his throat. No, doom had long since been carved on his gravestone by the insuperable march of bad genes–betrayed at every turn by his body, there could be no hope.
“What are you doing?”
The harsh question slashed across Kevin’s thoughts, making him cringe against the box seat under the window.
“Out of bed, old carrot-top?” No voice could possibly contain as much sarcasm as his brother’s. “Careful by that window. Father would be beside himself should anything befall you, brother dearest.”
Kevin winced at the bad pun. “What do you want, Brian?”
“Now, is that any way to greet your dear br
other?” Sinking onto the box seat, the younger brother faced the older across the room. As the question was clearly rhetorical and Kevin was wise enough not to reply, not even so much as to grumble under his breath, Brian continued, “I was just coming to see you. One of the layabout servants thought he heard you cry out, so I reminded myself of my care and duty towards my only brother, and hastened here.”
“How very kind of you.”
Brian stared at Kevin, but there was no answering scorn in the low tones. To that end he had supplied many lessons in brutality and submission in years past. “I had not expected to find you out of bed.”
“I was just opening the curtains.”
“I thought you usually had the servants do that? Just like they change your nappies.”
Kevin flushed at this untruth, but made no reply. That would just encourage Brian.
“I have come to inform you, brother,” Brian added, “that I shall be undertaking an extended trip–as part of my degree course. You shall not see me for some time. I shall miss your company, naturally, as much as I should miss a suppurating pustule on a whore’s backside. But the great wide world is calling.”
“Where are you going?”
“Ah–New York.” He caught himself after the stumble and added, “Now, Father has made all arrangements for your care while I am away. He too has a business trip planned. We trust that you can entertain yourself in our absence?”
“Indeed.”
“I wish you’d speak up, you little weasel!”
“I said, ‘Indeed’.”
Brian’s expression suggested the study of a particularly loathsome species of fungus; Kevin dropped his gaze at once, hoping his brother would not notice that anything was different. He held his breath.
“Father and I depart on the three o’clock train,” Brian announced at last.
Kevin secretly wished it were a permanent departure, and that Father and Brian might by some stroke of luck leap hand in hand beneath the train, but said carefully, “I wish you both good trips.”