Ellis took a step closer to one of the longer walls, peering intently at the largest of the paintings there as she approached it.
She stopped.
It was a depiction of the Curtis lighthouse during a storm. The waves crashed against the island’s eastern rocks, rising up and seeming to engulf the structure. The lighthouse stood against the threatening darkness, its beam cast outward through the rain and over the sea. Two small figures could be seen silhouetted against the lamp: a woman and a small child both clinging to the railing and threatened by the storm.
Ellis shifted her gaze to another, smaller piece of art next to it. This depicted a nursery with a bassinet near a window but there was something wrong in the composition of the painting. The light coming through the glass illuminated an empty rocking chair in stark light while casting the more prominent cradle in shadow. Beyond the glass was a bright garden with a picket fence and a gate.
Ellis looked closer.
There, beyond the gate, was the shadowed figure of a man.
“Jenny!”
The name echoed, as though being summoned from a distance.
Above her, Alicia gasped.
It sounded as though it came from the direction where Ellis thought the stairs might be.
“Jenny!”
Ellis spun to her left. It was a deeper voice calling this time and closer from beyond the long wall on her left.
“Oh, Ellis,” Alicia said, her voice now tightened to a fearful squeak. “They’re getting closer!”
“Quiet!” Ellis called up in hushed tones. “Where’s Jonas?”
“I don’t know!” Alicia looked about her, her voice quivering. “He left … I don’t know where he went!”
“Jenny!”
“Jenny!”
“Jen-ny!”
Multiple voices this time. Ellis thought they were coming from the end of the room that would have been back toward the staircase.
The voices were getting closer.
“You’ve got to run!” Alicia whispered hoarsely from above.
“Why?” Ellis asked, her eyes fixed on the closed doors at the end of the hall directly beneath where Alicia stared down at her. “They’re looking for Jenny, not me. We’re all looking for Jenny!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Alicia called desperately back at her. “After what you did to Merrick’s play, running like that from the theater … if they catch you, there’s no telling what he’ll do to you!”
A sudden knocking shook the door behind Ellis.
She jumped at the sound, turning. She waited a moment but nothing happened. She took a step toward the door.
“Ellis!” Alicia whispered frantically from above. “Don’t open it!”
Ellis glanced up. “Maybe it’s Jonas.”
Silence filled the space for a moment. Ellis reached hesitantly for the stained brass doorknob.
“Run,” Alicia whimpered. “Oh, please, just run.”
A thunderous knocking shook the door in front of her so violently that she could see the upper corner separate from the frame.
Ellis jumped back, turned and ran.
She ran for the far end of the room, twisting the doorknob and throwing open the door. The hall she entered twisted mazelike deeper into the ruins. The doors to either side were open as she fled down the corridor, weak light streaming in from each one as she rushed past. There were voices coming from the rooms as well, echoing in the abandoned space. Sometimes muffled and sometimes entirely too clear.
“That is a completely inappropriate question for Sunday School, Sister Harkington! I shall speak to your mother about this immediately after…”
“From what lurid magazine did you copy this story, young lady? Ellis, do not deny it! You could not possibly have written anything this well on your own…”
“She’s a Harkington! No one who is anyone speaks to the Harkingtons. They’re such a disgrace…”
“Gee, Ellis, I’d really like to take you to the dance but there’s this other girl…”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see dark, shadowy figures standing in the rooms but she kept running. The memories each voice sparked were painful, vivid and, worst of all, entirely her own. Each incident rushed up into her mind with painful awareness. The Minister’s Wife, the Teacher, the Girls from her class, the Boy in the empty classroom; each memory with its disappointments, pain and shame rushed at her out of each open doorway like a terrible jack-in-the-box of the mind, springing hurtful memories at her from her childhood.
Ellis steeled herself against them, running faster down the twisting gauntlet of her childhood.
Other voices, too, were still heard behind her.
“Jenny!” they called like hounds at her heels. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
The hallway abruptly ended at a door. She pulled it open with vehemence, charging into the room beyond.
She nearly collided with the broken bed in the corner of the room. Rebecca, her childhood friend when Ellis was only eight years old, lay in it coughing weakly and covered in the measles. She reached out her blotched hand for Ellis, calling her name. Ellis swept quickly past the bed to the next door beyond, forcing it open with her shoulder.
She stumbled onto a landing at the top of a steep, spiraling set of stairs. Ellis went right instead, following the corner to a short hall on the left. She was running now as much from the memories as from the baying voices still calling for Jenny.
At least the calling voices seemed to be receding and she thought wildly for a moment that she might have a chance of losing them in the Ruins. Perhaps she could find a place to hide, catch her bearings and perhaps find her way back to Jonas and Alicia.
The hallway ended at another door. A ball that Ellis had lost when she was three lay in the corner. She willed herself to ignore it and pressed on through the doorway.
Ellis stopped abruptly on the other side.
Snow was gently falling beyond the tall windows on the far side of the room. The polished, sumptuous oak paneling was practically aglow from the warm light of the fire raging in the large, marble fireplace to one side. Opposite the fireplace and set in one corner of the room, an enormous evergreen tree stood decorated in bows, strings of popcorn and berries as well as paper ornaments and candles.
Candles her papa had lit for her.
Ellis drew in a shuddering breath.
There he sat, her father in his favorite wingback chair.
He was too plump and his cheeks were, perhaps, a little too rosy. He was still wearing his tuxedo slacks but he had draped his coat over the back of the couch that sat opposite him and had opened the front of his vest. The tie was nowhere to be seen. He had even somehow managed to be rid of his polished shoes, favoring instead his tattered and far more comfortable slippers. He sat with his legs outstretched, crossed at the feet, and peered at a book he held in his hands.
He looked up and saw her.
He smiled.
He closed the book and held his arms out wide to her just as he had when she was fifteen years old. Her mother was still out at the Cabots’ party trying to get the support of Elise Cabot for Mother’s latest social project. Papa had managed to slip away early and take refuge in the parlor. Ellis had heard him and come down from her room, far too excited on Christmas Eve to sleep.
“You’re still up, my girl?” His voice was warm and welcoming, as familiar to her as anything could be. The joy in its memory wounded her heart with longing. “Come on, my girl! Give me my present early! A little hug for your old father, eh? How about a story?”
How could she have forgotten this night? She had carried it with her down through the years, a precious moment of her own never to share, never to lose. The silent snow falling outside and only the crackle of the fire to disturb them. He had lit all the candles on the tree for them—just for them alone—and then they had settled into that great chair together, her in her father’s lap with his left arm cradling her and his right hand steadying the bo
ok. It was Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and, with her mother away for the evening, her father did not skip over the ghostly parts but performed them with relish for his appreciative audience of one. Curled up on his lap, it was the safest she had ever felt or would ever feel. It was the memory she recalled when nothing else could bring her peace.
Ellis stepped across the room, tears welling up in her eyes. She fell to her knees next to him, throwing her arms around her papa’s waist and resting her head against his chest just as she had those many years ago.
“Oh, Papa,” she sobbed. “I’ve missed you so!”
“There, there, my dear girl,” her father said. His hand began to stroke her hair. “It’s Christmas! Everything is just fine. Your mother will be at the Cabots’ a while longer. Let’s have some time of our own.”
“The Cabots’?” Ellis chuckled through her tears. “And this is good old Boston…”
Her papa grinned down at her. He had been at the dinner in 1910 and heard the toast himself. That he had taught it to their daughter was a source of never-ending grief for her mother. He dutifully delivered the next line. “The home of the bean and the cod. Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots…”
They finished the toast together.
“And the Cabots talk only to God.”
They laughed heartily together, then, overcome, Ellis once again buried her face against her father’s open vest, breathing in the smell of his clothes and his pipe tobacco.
She took no notice of the voices approaching beyond the walls.
Ellis closed her eyes. “Please read to me, Papa.”
“Of course, my girl!”
“And do all the voices,” she said.
“I always do all the voices,” came the deeper, darker-sounding voice of her father behind her.
She opened her eyes wide.
The floorboards in the room were rotting through in places. The oak paneling was warped and cracking from neglect. The tree was entirely gone but the old wingback chair remained, its fabric torn and stuffing exploding outward from the holes.
Her father was gone.
She leaped upward, trying to run, but a strong hand gripped her wrist and spun her around. She tried to strike the face that was suddenly before her with her free hand but he managed to grip that, too, pulling both her hands back behind her as he held her close.
“You left my party too soon,” Merrick said, staring down at her with his pain-filled eyes. “You owe me a dance, Ellis. You most definitely owe me a dance.”
12
THE WALTZ
Merrick dragged her away from the rotting wing-back chair, pushing through a door beyond the bookcase. Ellis glimpsed the books as she passed, each with a faded spine and no title. She wondered if they, too, were fake or whether they were filled with words entombed between their covers, never to be read—never to live.
“So you want the past?” Merrick sneered as he pulled her into the hallway. “Nostalgia, is it? A longing for those memories of the good old days? How fortunate to be so selective, so discerning about our own past that we can pick and choose that which justifies who we have become.”
The hall ended in an enormous foyer with curved staircases rising on either side to a landing above. The ceiling frescoes were largely fallen to plaster rubble on the ground, though here and there the original square pattern could be seen still intact. The stair treads looked as precarious as the floor she had fallen through earlier but there was light coming from beyond the landing.
Merrick began pulling her up the left-hand stairs. The treads and stringers swayed under their weight.
“Let go of me!” Ellis yelled, her struggles powerless against his iron grip.
“After all I’ve done for you.” Merrick’s voice shook as though he were about to sob. “After all I’ve built to protect you. Why can’t you just let it all go as we have? Why do you insist on this futile pursuit of an answer that you really do not wish to know?”
“Is that why you hid Jenny from me?” Ellis demanded. “Because she’s known the truth all along?”
“Here you are looking for all the answers in your cousin Jenny,” Merrick laughed. They were at the top of the stairs where a set of doors shone with light through the dust coating the panes. “That would be funny indeed if it were not so sad.”
Ellis could hear the first strains of music coming from beyond the doors, the sounds of an orchestra tuning up.
“So you want to know your past?” Merrick asked. His bright eyes seemed to burn as he looked down at her, standing far too close for her comfort. “Then, by all means let me grant your wish.”
He reached over to the stained bronze handle of the door, pushing her through before him as he swung it open. A gentle rhythmic plucking of a string was soon joined by a long, soft chorus of violins.
There was nothing but the music beyond the doorway, a waltz she recognized as written by Camille Saint-Saëns.
It was the Danse Macabre.
Her body began to disintegrate as she spun into the nothingness. The drab, green skirt, the jacket, blouse, hat, shoes, stockings—everything dissolved and whirled away from her as she rotated in a void. She desperately tried to reclaim it, to gather it back in, but the skin of her arms fled from her, too. She tried to scream but her throat and larynx were already gone. They drifted into dust as she revolved to the three-count music of the waltz, their particles followed by her muscles and sinews, tendons, bowels and entrails. Her lungs drifted as dry flecks outward between her ribs and then her bones exploded into the growing mist that surrounded her.
She was thought. She was intelligence. She was entity. All that and nothing more.
The music pressed on about her, spinning her without direction until the mists coalesced about her. Now the spinning of the dance was gathering elements of herself together, but she was not alone, for in the surrounding mists there were others who were gathering as well, taking form out of thought into being. Soon they began to take on shapes she could recognize. Alicia Van der Meer, Ely Rossini, Silenus Tune … each of them also spinning to the music near her. As the music continued on, Ellis’s apprehension grew at the number of figures forming in the enormous ballroom, each spinning to the music.
She realized with a shock that she was dancing with Merrick.
It was as though she were seeing him for the first time. His features were perfection, as though he were the model for Olympian heroes appearing in its perfect form. He was a bright, shining star smiling down on her.
Through the spinning ghostly spirits that crowded around them, Ellis was astonished that Jonas was spinning toward them. Merrick reached out his hand. In a moment, the three of them were joined in a ring, dancing to the waltz in a circle of chain steps, swinging their arms together in the joy of their common movement and the jubilation at having form and substance. Jonas was now different than he first appeared to Ellis. There was no great paisley discoloration marring his face. He was handsome and his eyes shone as he looked at her.
Together, they moved down the hall. Ellis sensed they were progressing toward the far end but she could not yet see it over the heads of the souls whirling about her.
Then the music changed. It became discordant and mellow. A violin struck down on the strings with discord and the music took a darker and more combative turn. The spinning dancers began to separate to the left and the right of the hall. Jonas, Merrick and Ellis spun faster and faster to the music, being pulled one way or the other.
Merrick and Jonas argued with each other though Ellis could not hear their words over the music filling the ballroom.
Jonas angrily let go of Merrick’s hand. The circle of the three friends was suddenly unbalanced and they stumbled in the dance. Jonas clung to Ellis’s hand but something inside of her feared that the dance would end.
Ellis knew that this had all happened before.
Ellis let go of Jonas’s hand.
The young man spun off to the side, his face contorted in pain and disappoi
ntment as Merrick quickly closed the waltz frame with Ellis and they spun together down the center of the hall. Alicia, Silenus, Ely and all the members of the Nightbirds Society were dancing about them, spinning down the ballroom. By then, all the people of Gamin had joined them. Other voices from the sides of the room called to them, beckoning them to follow them into the salons on either side of the dance floor, but the music played on and still Merrick and Ellis continued their mad dance down the interminable ballroom.
The room itself began to change and Ellis changed with it. Merrick held her in a firm waltz pose as they spun to the sound of the orchestra still filling the room but now he was dressed in a Greek chiton off one shoulder with a laurel wreath encircling his head. Ellis realized with a shock that she wore a Doric chiton, her hair in a complex style reminiscent of those she had once seen on Grecian urns. The ballroom had suddenly evolved into Doric columns. Around them, the rest of the citizens she recognized as coming from Gamin were spinning about them in more common costumes. Ellis and Merrick were the rulers of this domain, the center of the dance about which everyone else orbited.
In an instant it all shifted again. Merrick was in a regal coat with a ruff at his neck, his hair suddenly a powdered wig. Ellis realized that she was now in a long ball gown. Her hair was piled high upon her head, held in place by a gaudy tiara. The hall, too, had changed, its architecture now more Baroque and gilded. Still, Alicia, Silenus, Ely and the others from the town continued to whirl about her.
Ellis searched desperately beyond the faces of the dancers spinning about her. Everyone familiar to her had departed the dance floor except for Jonas. He moved at the very edge of the hall, his eyes on Ellis, as though waiting for something.
Merrick spun her suddenly beneath his arm, then took her again firmly in his hold.
“I made you a queen here,” Merrick whispered in her ear over the driving rhythm of the music. “Anything you wished became the heart of our Game. Anyone who offended you was punished. Anyone who pleased you was rewarded. It was me that you followed. I was the only choice you made…”
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