Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  He rose from his seat and started slowly off through the trees. When we emerged, I looked at the house, standing tall and silent in the sunlight. There was something sullen about it, as if it kept its secrets on purpose, buried in the tangled brush that surrounded it. As the sunlight winked off the glass of one of the upper windows, I saw a figure looking out at us, but when I looked again, it was gone.

  A servant, I thought. One of the maids. That’s all. I forced myself not to hesitate at the front door, not to think of the bloody tracks I’d seen in my dream. I couldn’t start babbling about nightmares, mists, and leaves. Instead, I stared ahead as Martin led me to the staircase.

  Upstairs, Martin showed me Dottie’s picture gallery, a massive open space at the east end of the house in which she displayed her paintings. Two workmen were on ladders, rearranging works of art, moving the paintings already on the walls to make room for the new pieces Dottie had just bought. “This room is actually a ballroom,” Martin said, his hushed voice echoing from the walls. “But of course Mother doesn’t use it that way.”

  I nodded and followed him. As we crossed the room, I thought footsteps echoed behind us, but it must have been a trick of the acoustics, because when I glanced back, no one was there.

  On the same floor, at the other end of the house, were the rooms that included my bedroom. I was the only tenant in this part of the house, he explained, while himself, his parents, and the servants were upstairs. He paused on the stair landing, his hand on the rail, looking up. “Fran’s old room is up there,” he said, his voice quiet. “I suppose no one has emptied it out. I haven’t gone to look. I don’t think—Mother wouldn’t throw away her things.”

  I looked at the expression on his face and placed a hand on his wrist. “We don’t have to go up there,” I said softly.

  But his usual easygoing humor was draining out of him, leaving his gaze cold and bleak. “It’s a terrible thing to say,” he said, “but it was hard to love Fran. It was hard. You know?”

  “I know,” I said, the words pricking my skin like needles as I thought of Mother.

  “It was always something.” The words seemed to have come loose in him. “She’d have one of her spells, and the doctors would come. She’d break valuables, shout nonsense at the servants. And sometimes—the screaming.”

  I had come home one day, at fifteen, to find that Mother had pulled all of our belongings from the closets and cupboards and piled them in the middle of our tiny flat. She had convinced herself that our landlady watched us somehow, listened to all of our conversations through secret telephone wires she’d laced through the walls, and we needed to move. It had taken days for me to undo the damage and put everything away. I let Martin talk and said nothing.

  “She was desperate,” Martin said. “It was part of what made it so hard. Beneath it all, she wanted love so badly. Mother’s, of course, though Father was her favorite. He didn’t speak to her much—Father doesn’t like to deal with difficult things—but Fran would have shined his shoes if he’d let her. As for me, she would throw her arms around my neck, and all I’d be able to think about was that she hadn’t bathed since the last time the nurse had made her do it. Do you know, when I first heard she’d died while I was in the hospital, the second thing I thought was, Thank God it’s over.” He glanced at me. “Not very brotherly, is it?”

  I remembered the monument Dottie had bought for her daughter, expensive and overweening. “What was the first thing?” I asked. “The first thing you thought when you heard she was dead?”

  He swallowed. “Well, I was very ill, and it was a shock. I’m afraid I wept a little more than is considered manly. But the first thing I thought was, Fran wouldn’t do that. I wonder if someone did her in. I didn’t know the circumstances, you see. I thought maybe one of the village children—they hated her. But she died here, at home, so it wasn’t possible.” He shook his head. “Enough morbid talk. Let me continue the tour.” He moved ahead of me and began to climb the stairs.

  In the hall behind us, a door slammed.

  I was still at the foot of the stairs, Martin several steps up. I felt a chill—as if a hand had touched me—and I took a step back, my feet quiet on the carpet, and looked down the hall. There was no one in sight. A servant is about, I told myself, changing linens or cleaning . . .

  “Martin, did you hear that?” I asked softly.

  There was no sound from him. I stood frozen. The air grew thick, hard to breathe.

  “Hello?” I called.

  Near the end of the hall, my bedroom door swung open in a silent motion. I did not hear the click of the latch. The door hung open like a gaping mouth, dark and somehow obscene, for a long moment before another door in the corridor swung open in exactly the same manner. And another, on the other side of the hall.

  A bead of cold sweat ran down between my shoulder blades. I opened my mouth, wanting to call for Martin—for anyone—but I could not make a sound. I forced my feet backward and nearly stumbled onto the staircase, turning and looking up.

  Martin had sunk down onto a step, his body sagging. His hands gripped his knees and his head hung down, as if its weight were too much to carry. He was breathing heavily. With the lowered angle of his head, I could not see his face.

  I climbed the steps and approached him. “Martin?” I whispered.

  He raised his face to me. It was ghastly in the dim light of the stairwell, his eyes sunken, his cheekbones stark. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and his temples. His jaw sagged.

  “I’m afraid I cannot show you any more of the house,” he said to me in a voice that was nothing but a low rasp. “I don’t feel quite capable.” Behind me, I heard soft footsteps, and one of the doors in the hallway snicked closed.

  Martin blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I reached out and grasped his arm. It was thin as a matchstick inside his sleeve. “Martin,” I said.

  But he was already gone, his eyes rolling back in his head, his body falling gracefully on the jagged steps.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Wych Elm House fell silent after Martin’s collapse. Dottie called it an attack of nerves, as if her son were merely anxious instead of wasting away to nothing, incapable of taking a walk around the house and back. Doctors came and went for a few days, and then Dottie declared that what Martin needed was rest and absolute quiet. Her rule was law, so everyone, servants and family alike, took to tiptoeing silently around the house, speaking only in whispers and low tones.

  Robert quickly finagled a steady stream of invitations that took him out of the house in his motorcar, as he had no patience for Dottie’s rules. That left Dottie and me alone. I ran her errands, wrote out her correspondence, and made her telephone calls—she had a distaste for the instrument and had me use it in her stead. After a small meal at my desk or a tray in my room, I would continue work in the afternoons until she dismissed me.

  There was plenty to do. We sent out a volume of correspondence that rivaled Casparov’s, handling the business of the house, inviting potential buyers to view and purchase her art, and receiving replies. Dottie also took delivery of the art itself, dealing with deliverymen and the display of the works in the upstairs gallery, as well as overseeing the servants and the daily people she used to supplement them, including a woman to help with laundry twice per week and a single hapless gardener she hired to tackle the overgrown grounds.

  Despite the nunnery-like rigidity of our routine, Dottie was tense and irritable, impossible to please. As she had throughout our trip home from the Continent, she nitpicked me endlessly, from my messy curls to the dull shine on my new shoes. She acquired a typewriter for me to use for her letters, then stood by like a harpy as I used it, searching for errors and complaining about the noise it made. She had spent much time at Martin’s bedside, and the sour disposition that resulted made me wonder if he’d told her about my marriage situation. Perhaps
she was hoping I would quit. Or perhaps she was simply miserable, and it had nothing to do with me at all.

  I was miserable myself. I was suffering from incurable insomnia, my nights plagued with sleeplessness and my few bouts of slumber weighted with dreams that were complicated and vivid, filled with images like I’d seen on that first night, real and somehow horrible. I sometimes woke weeping, or laughing, or trying not to scream. Twice I woke to find my hair and nightgown soaked with chill water and a sickly sweet smell in my nose as I clutched my sheets in panic. I would spend the rest of the night awake, until it was finally time to rise and dress and sit at my typewriter, gritty-eyed and dull. I found no more leaves in my room. If I had deluded myself into seeing them the first time, I had done it convincingly.

  I barely recognized myself. I had never been like this, prone to hallucinations and dreams, even in the awful days after Alex died. My mind kept circling back to the footsteps I’d heard and the doors I’d watched swinging open—including the door of my own bedroom—as I’d stood transfixed in the hallway. No one had witnessed that but me, not even poor Martin. Either I was going mad or something uncanny was happening.

  Frances.

  In the haze of my exhaustion, her face was clear in my mind. I could see her that day in the small parlor. I could see her gray dress and the string of pearls around her neck, the clasp where it sat at the back of her collar. I could tell myself that I doubted her identity, that I was not sure, but pure exhaustion lowers your ability to lie to yourself, and I knew deep down that I’d seen Dottie’s lost daughter. I felt at times as if I could turn a corner or look in a mirror and I’d see her again, glimpse her image in the shadows of the huge, silent house. I thought I heard her footsteps in the corridor, ahead of me or behind me, or saw her hand on the curtain at the window from the corner of my eye. The things she saw coming through that imaginary door were dead, David Wilde had told me. She lived at home in privacy, plagued by her waking dreams.

  As I watched the days grow colder and shorter through the windows, that was beginning to sound familiar.

  You are acquainted with madness, are you not?

  Frances terrified me—but she drew me, too. Just like Mother did. Whatever was happening, Frances was the key. Dottie couldn’t help me, and Robert was gone. As day after day dragged on, I realized that if I wanted to understand Frances, I needed Martin.

  Two weeks after Martin’s collapse, I left my room one evening and stepped onto the landing, ready to ascend to the upper floor. I had just screwed up my courage to broach my cousin in his bedroom when I realized I was not alone on the stairs.

  On the landing below me stood a man I had never seen before—short, middle-aged, his graying hair combed back neatly from his forehead and temples. He was carrying a case, and he had paused in his descent, looking up at me. I froze in surprise, and for a moment I wondered if he would disappear, as Frances had. Then he moved, and I realized that he held in his hand a doctor’s case.

  “Good evening,” he said to me.

  I nodded. He gave me a polite smile, a little apologetic. Then he turned and descended the stairs below me, unaccompanied, as if he had free run of the house. I stared after him, bemused.

  “Curious?”

  I turned. Martin stood on the landing above me, looking down. In the dim light of the stairwell, his face was smudged and soft. He was slowly rolling one shirtsleeve back down the length of his arm. I realized I was standing nearly where he’d fainted that day after we’d walked in the woods, the last time I’d seen him.

  “Martin,” I said.

  “Hello, Cousin Jo.”

  His voice was harder than it had been before, some of the kindness in it vanished. “Who was that?” I asked him.

  He shrugged, the motion tight and uneasy. “My doctor.” He dropped his gaze to the sleeve he was unrolling.

  “I thought the doctors had already come,” I said.

  “Those were Mother’s doctors,” Martin replied. “Dr. Weller is mine.”

  I felt my jaw drop open. “Dottie doesn’t know,” I said. “She doesn’t know you’re seeing him, that he was here.”

  Martin raised his gaze to me. “You can tell her, if you like.”

  I thought it over. I would get in trouble if she found out I knew and didn’t tell her, but I realized I didn’t care. “Is it helping you?” I asked. “Whatever he does?”

  That made Martin smile. The lines on his face were deeper than they’d been two weeks ago, the shadows darkening the sockets of his eyes and the brackets around his mouth. “Would you like to see something?” he said in reply. “Follow me.”

  I ascended the steps, my hand on the rail. He watched me come toward him, and some indescribable emotion crossed his eyes, fear and pain and a queer sort of excitement. The charming young man who had led me on a tour was not in evidence tonight. When I reached the top of the stairs, he grasped my wrist—his hand was icy and strangely soft, as if made of wax—and led me down the corridor to a room with its door ajar, light spilling from within. His bedroom.

  It was messy, the night table and the desk covered in books and papers, empty dishes, empty cups, pens and bottles and jars. He had just blown out a candle, and the tang of smoke was in the air, scenting the room with that curious edge of fire that candles leave. I saw the thin line of smoke on the table next to the bed, twisting toward the ceiling, and wondered why he’d needed a candle when Wych Elm House was fitted with the latest electric light. I was still looking at it when I heard the door click shut behind him.

  I turned to him. I was not afraid, even though we were now alone in his bedroom; I’d never felt any prurient interest from him. He leaned his back against the door, and without waiting for any further cue from me, he gripped his shirt just below the breastbone and yanked it upward. The shirt disengaged from the waist of his trousers, and I was suddenly exposed to an expanse of Martin Forsyth’s stomach, white and intimate, displayed before me.

  “My God,” I said softly.

  Across his abdomen was a jagged line, pinkish and healed. It rode upward, knotting the skin before tapering off in a jaunty curve that looked like the blade of a scimitar or half of a wicked smile. The wound had not healed cleanly or kindly; the puckers of skin that marked its length stood stark and angry against the smooth flesh below his rib cage, which I noticed was curved inward in pitiful thinness.

  “Shrapnel,” he said. “Infected before the medics could get to me. After three surgeries, the doctors claim they got it all out, but I’ve never believed them.”

  He dropped the shirt, and I raised my gaze to his face. He was watching me avidly, as if looking for something in my reaction. I lowered myself into the hard wooden chair by the desk. “This is why you spent three years in hospital,” I said.

  “Four,” he corrected me. “I acquired this lovely wound in 1917. The first two years were for the surgeries. The next two were to cure me of the morphine habit I’d so conveniently acquired in the meantime.”

  “Morphine,” I said, thinking of the doctor I’d just seen. “Does your mother know?”

  “Of course.” He began to tuck his shirt back into his trousers. “She paid the hospital bills.”

  “And your father?” I asked.

  “You could say Father knows,” Martin replied. “Though he doesn’t quite believe it. ‘Use your backbone, son,’ is his advice. ‘It’s just a little pain.’”

  “That’s why you fainted,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s me who’s sorry, for frightening you,” he replied. “The fact is, I’m usually in pain. Eating pains me. Exertion pains me. Sometimes even sleeping pains me. Mother’s doctors are useless, so I had to find my own. She has tried to help, but you know—just once I’d like to have a doctor who doesn’t report to my mother.”

  “And morphine?” I asked. “Is that why you send for him? To supply you?”

>   Martin leaned his head back against the door, his gaze rising to the ceiling for a long moment before lowering back to me. “I have not had morphine in nearly six weeks,” he said slowly, as if the words fought him. “Forty-one days, if you wish to be exact. This is the third time I’ve purged myself of it in two years. Needless to say, the other two tries were failures.”

  I put my hand to my mouth. I could not imagine it.

  “Do you want to know something?” Martin said. “Dr. Weller doesn’t even help, not all that much. He gives me vitamin shots—he claims a stronger constitution will help me kick the addiction—and a mild analgesic. But other than that, he listens to me. He sits in silence, in that chair just there, as I go on and on with the candle lit. It’s so strangely cathartic.” He raised his gaze to the ceiling again. “Perhaps talking helps me forget that I would gladly strangle him if he had a few drops of morphine in his doctor’s bag.”

  “What do you talk about?” I asked softly.

  “The war,” Martin replied. “My parents. My childhood. My condition, and how ashamed I am. Franny jumping off that goddamned roof.” He winced, whether in pain physical or mental, and I stepped forward, took his arm, and pulled him gently toward the bed.

  “You should sit,” I said.

  “Thank you. Awfully sorry about the language.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve heard it before.” I helped him sit against the pillows, swinging his legs up onto the mattress, then took a seat in the wooden chair.

  “So you see,” Martin said as he eased back in the bed, “how horrified Mother would be if she knew I was telling the family secrets to a doctor. It’s why I haven’t told her.”

  I took his hint. “I won’t tell.” I remembered why I had come to visit him, the information I needed. It seemed harsh to question a man so sick, but he was relaxed now, and I could tell he did not wish me to leave. We may as well talk, I thought.

  “There are a lot of rumors,” I said, “about the family’s secrets. In town.”