Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  What do you want, Frances? What do you want from me?

  “Mrs. Manders?” the photographer asked.

  I stuttered an apology and handed the portrait back to him. “Can you show me how to use the camera?” I asked.

  He spent an hour teaching me how to set it up, how to load and unspool the film, how to take pictures and advance the film using the lever. He talked about light—I’d need a powerfully strong light to shoot anything indoors, unless I acquired a flash, and outdoor sunlight would work best, especially the less harsh hours of dawn and dusk. Thinking me a hobbyist, he even gave me tips on where to find the best vistas in the area. I tried to take it all in, and then I left, carrying the camera in its valise and my borrowed tripod, my mind spinning.

  At Wych Elm House, I had missed dinner. The sky was dark, the late-autumn wind chill now that the sun had gone.

  I pulled off my hat and gloves and stopped in the library first, looking for Dottie, the camera and tripod still in my hands. She had dismissed me for the day hours ago, but there were potential art buyers due to arrive tomorrow, and if she were still working I would offer to help. I found the library empty, Dottie’s desk tidy. The new typewriter sat on my little writing desk, hunched under its cover.

  A single letter in a sealed envelope lay in the middle of the desk. This was Dottie’s way of indicating that the letter was for me and had come in with her stack of correspondence. I knew immediately what it was. I received no mail except for the monthly updates from Mother’s hospital.

  The letters were always written by one of the senior nurses, though rarely the same nurse from month to month. Perhaps they rotated writing letters to keep their distance from the families; perhaps it was simply part of the shift rotation to write letters once per week from a list. I opened the envelope there in the empty library and read the letter.

  Mrs. Christopher has been quiet and very well behaved. There was an incident in which she became agitated and broke some breakfast dishes, but the doctors have adjusted her dosage and she has been quiet since. We have moved the patients’ outdoor time to the solar as the weather is chill and some days inclement, and she is much disappointed in this as she does like to sit outdoors. Her appetite is still thin, though the doctors do monitor her eating habits. She enjoys having her hair brushed of an evening, and when one of the nurses reads a novel to her, it seems to calm her, though she does not always comprehend the story.

  There have been several instances of night terrors, in which she complains upon waking of having been walking outside in the cold, but the doctors have made note of it and a sleeping powder will be administered if her rest is much disturbed. It pains me to say that she does not ask for her family, for her mind is in much of a fog; but I am certain that deep within her she carries her love and memory of you.

  So dutiful, so kind. It must be easy to write such things when it wasn’t your own mother sitting there, staring at you in puzzlement as if you were a stranger she has never seen. Such a simple thing to call her Mrs. Christopher, as if she’d ever had a husband.

  And not a word about the scratches on Mother’s neck.

  I pocketed the letter and carried the camera equipment through the quiet house to the kitchen, where I scavenged a bowl of soup. One of the maids, who was washing the dishes under the kitchen’s dim electric light, informed me that Mr. Forsyth was out, Mr. Martin was in his room, and Mrs. Forsyth had just retired early, claiming a headache. I wondered briefly if I should check on Dottie—when we’d traveled the Continent, her infrequent headaches had been my responsibility—but was assured by the maid that she’d already been given a pill and wanted only rest.

  I finished my soup and continued upstairs to my room, dragging my feet with exhaustion. Martin was still sick, and the house was too quiet. But I knew that I would not sleep.

  I stopped in my bedroom doorway.

  I noticed the bed first: The cover had been pulled all the way down and trailed from the end of the bed like a bridal veil. On the table next to the bed, the shade of the lamp had been removed, and placed next to the bald light—which had been switched on—was a figurine I recognized from one of the glass cabinets in the morning room, depicting Salome cradling the head of John the Baptist in her lap, looking rather sorrowful; I could not think where Dottie had acquired it or why she had thought it worth money. The figure now sat under the glaring light of the lamp, John the Baptist’s unseeing eyes staring upward.

  The wardrobe door stood partly open, and one of my cardigans had been pulled from it, half in and half out. The waist of the cardigan rested inside, and the neck and arms were drawn out the wardrobe door and onto the floor, the sleeves raised pitifully and eerily lifelike, as if someone inside the wardrobe drew the cardigan in against its will. The room’s only chair had been placed next to the wardrobe, and a pair of my shoes was set beneath it. A set of my stockings dangled empty from the seat to the shoes, one of my skirts lay on the seat, and one of my blouses hung unbuttoned from the chair’s back, the sleeves folded decorously on the lap of the skirt. The entire display, looking oddly like a woman sitting in a chair, was topped with the shade from my bedside lamp, balancing like a misshapen head.

  My numb fingers dropped the camera case and the tripod to the floor. There was no thought in my mind that someone in the house had done this—not one of the family or one of the maids. I listened to my breath rasp loud in the still air and stared again at the wardrobe, the pitiful cardigan, its deliberate message, its unmistakable display.

  Frances saw a door, David Wilde had said. The things she saw coming through that imaginary door were dead. She was showing me. She wanted me to see.

  “Frances,” I whispered.

  I looked again at the figure in the chair. It looked withered and dead, inhuman, the head misshapen and eyeless, and yet it was a woman. Posed in a chair with her hands in her lap. Was she standing sentry over the awful doorway? Or mimicking the pose in the portrait I’d just seen? You’ve seen me, the hideous figure seemed to say. I see you. We see each other.

  I made a strangled sound. I should run. I should pack my bags, call for the motorcar, and leave this house, never to come back. Find some other way to make a living. I should not stay here, sleep in this bedroom, anymore.

  And yet despite its monstrousness, the figure in the chair was pitiful. There was something about the lifeless way the empty sleeves were folded, the weakly dangling stockings. I had taken a step forward again, my hand out to knock the lampshade off the chair, when I remembered the camera.

  This was what I had wanted—to be able to take pictures so someone outside my fevered mind could see. I crouched and fumbled with the latches of the camera case, and I had removed the camera before I remembered Mr. Crablow’s lecture about light. I’d need powerful artificial light to shoot indoors, he’d said. I did not have a flash.

  Still, I raised the camera, balanced it on my crouched knees—I did not bother with the tripod—and snapped a picture of the chair. I rotated the film, then snapped another. I rotated the film again, angled the camera toward the wardrobe, and snapped a third.

  “I see you,” I said aloud.

  It was the best I could do. I could not look at the eerie chair anymore. I put the camera down and stood. I found myself staring at the lampshade as if it were a set of features looking back at me. I quickly turned and left the room, closing the door behind me.

  In the corridor, I paused. I looked down at my hands, which were trembling but not shaking. My throat was tight, but I could still breathe. She wanted something—from me. She wanted it so desperately she was willing to come back, to come through the door she had feared in life, to beg it of me. That what I had just seen was a violation of every rational belief, I knew very well. But I also knew an act of desperation when I saw one. I knew what it was to want something that badly. To feel that deeply.

  I would not run screaming. Frances had come to
me; so I would go to her. I would go to her own places, her private places, as she had been to mine. I would start with the place where she died.

  I turned toward the stairs and headed for the roof.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  To get to the roof, I had to climb to the attic floor, where the main stairwell ended, then cross to the other end, where a small door led to a service staircase winding upward. I didn’t know my way, but it wasn’t difficult, since the attic floor contained only a single long, musty corridor, with failing light coming through its windows, and the dark, closed door to Frances’s room. I followed the corridor, which was empty and silent, until I found the service door, which was unlocked. Then I climbed the smaller, dusty set of stairs.

  At the top was a second door, wooden, held shut by a latch. I could hear the low howl of wind from the other side, as if someone were moaning pitifully. I lifted the latch, the damp wood chill against my palm, and pressed the door open.

  A gust of wind blew in at me, touching my hair. Outside, all was dark; twilight had given in to full night. The air was cold, stinging, trailing its fingers under the neck of my dress before I’d even left the stairwell, but I felt braced by it after the stifling corridor and the dusty stairs, and I lifted my face.

  I stepped out onto the roof. Immediately the wind gusted in my hair again, slapping my skirt against my legs, chilling the fabric of my clothing even as it touched my skin. I was on a landing atop Wych Elm House’s highest gable, a space about four feet square enclosed by a black wrought-iron railing at waist height. To my right and left, the roof of Wych Elm House fell away, as if I were the mermaid on the prow of a ship, sailing into the woods. Before me spread the tops of the trees, the closest ones visibly rippling and shimmering in the wind, the farther ones mere ribbons of black and pewter and dusky silver, blending into a mass that spread for miles.

  I stepped to the railing and put my hands on it; it was icy, and even under my touch it barely warmed. My eyes watering in the sting of the wind, I gazed out at the view, vast and beautiful and terrifying, as if I were a queen alone in a tower. A handful of lights twinkled far off to the right, all I could see of the town of Anningley. Through the roaring of the wind in my ears, I imagined I could hear the sea. It was cold and beautiful up here, powerful, hypnotic.

  And then I looked down.

  The drop was sheer, the precipice of the house falling away from the tips of my toes, past the attic room, the window of my own bedroom, and straight to the cobbled circular driveway below, looking from this height like a child’s drawing. I felt my hands clench the iron railing, the edges digging into the flesh of my palms, my wrists and forearms aching as my grip wrenched tighter. I blinked the water out of my eyes, unable to look away. This was where it had happened. Frances had stood here, placed her feet here, possibly placed her hands where mine were right now. And then she had bent forward, her weight taking her over the edge of the railing, her grip loosening, letting go as she fell down and down and down . . .

  Forget.

  So simple. Lean out, lean over, let gravity take you. Let go.

  Forget.

  The wind howled in my ears. Alex gone, no child to love me, my mother mad. What did it matter? I could simply feel the cold wind in my lungs and the rush of air as I closed my eyes.

  In the woods, deep beneath the canopy of the trees, a dog barked. Not a happy bark or an alarmed one, but a low, snarling snap, booming in a deep bass. It sounded once, and then again, closer.

  The door behind me swung shut.

  Cold shot down my spine, and I pushed away from the railing, shoving myself off with my slick palms. I whirled, but there was no one on the landing with me—just the dark and the scream of the wind. I stepped to the stairwell door and wrenched it, expecting to feel the knob slick in my hand, unyielding, the door latched shut. But it turned, and I swung the door open, the latch on the inside swinging limply as the door hit the wall. I quickly moved onto the stairs, turning briefly to fasten the latch again.

  What were you thinking? I berated myself as I descended through the gloom. What is the matter with you? To stand there like that and contemplate such things . . .

  I dashed the water from my eyes with the heels of my hands as I came through the service door. My hair was tangled, my skin cold. I stepped into the corridor.

  Frances’s door was ajar. From behind it, I heard a faint creak.

  I put my hand to the striped wallpaper, steadying myself. I could see a faint strip of light between the edge of the door and the doorframe. It hadn’t been there before; the door had been closed and locked, silent. The creak came again.

  I stepped softly on the flowered carpet, holding my breath, as the sound came again, furtive. With a chilled hand, I pushed open the door.

  It was a girl’s room. A pretty wooden dresser, painted white, against one wall; a matching wardrobe; a bed covered in linens the soft green of new leaves, a canopy above it; a window seat furnished with pillows, much like the window seat in my own room. The curtains on the window were drawn back, tied neatly, showing the blank black square of night outside. A bookshelf, crowded and scuffed, adorned the far wall. A single lamp, barely throwing light past its own circle, was turned on, casting a glow beneath its china shade. In the middle of the room stood a wooden rocking chair, the source of the creaking noise. In the rocking chair sat Dottie.

  She was angled away from me, so I could see only the neat twist of her hair on the back of her head, the line of her neck and shoulders, and a glimpse of her ear and jaw, the same way I’d seen the ghost of her dead daughter. She wore the same dress she’d worn all day, of soft, expensive wool, its color drained to gray in the weak light. She did not turn to look at me. As I watched, the image of Frances overlapped with the image of her, her feet in their practical oxfords pressed to the floor, and the chair rocked slowly, back and forward again.

  “You have never been in this room, have you?” she said.

  I swallowed. “No.”

  “Do you see any chains?”

  I blinked, recalled the rumors in town about how mad Frances Forsyth had been kept under lock and key. “No,” I said again.

  Dottie nodded. “I couldn’t bear to get rid of her things,” she said. “Pack them up as if she’d never been. I left the house instead. I haven’t been in this room since she died.”

  I stepped farther inside, circling Dottie until I could see her face. It was half in shadow, her expression subdued, though her lips formed a tight line. Her hands curled over the arms of the rocking chair. She was looking straight ahead, into her own thoughts, and not at me.

  “It’s a pretty room,” I offered.

  Dottie was silent for a long moment. Her gaze traveled to the bed, with its untouched cover. “Frances was a difficult girl from the day she was born,” she said. “Even as a baby, she fought me. The nannies I hired quit—they said she was unmanageable. I ended up caring for her myself.”

  I held my breath, listening.

  “She had imaginary playmates,” Dottie said. “All children do. I’d overhear her, alone in this room, talking quietly. I’d think she was talking to her dolls, but she never was. She never played with her dolls at all. I’d always find her sitting on her bed or in the middle of the floor, alone.” Dottie paused for a moment. “When she was six, she began to speak of—things she was seeing. Faces. Voices she heard in her mind. She complained of a face that would appear at that very window, over there.” She pointed briefly to the window with its furnished window seat.

  “A face?” I asked.

  “A man,” Dottie said. “With a white face and black, deep-set eyes. He’d appear at night, begging her to let him in. There is no way anyone could stand at that window—it’s three stories from the ground—but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t sleep. And one night we heard a crash and a scream. I found Frances crouched by the wall, just there, her hands cut and runni
ng with blood. She’d tried to smash the window, telling the man to go away.”

  I stood silently, picturing it.

  “It got worse,” Dottie continued. “I had doctors come, but they were fools. They told me she’d be better off in a hospital, just because she saw faces and heard voices. A hospital!” For the first time, Dottie looked at me, and her eyes were like small, hot coals. “Do you have any idea what can happen to a little girl in a place like that?”

  A chill went down my spine as I thought of the hospitals I’d toured while looking for somewhere to put Mother. I could guess very well.

  “Robert wanted her to go to boarding school,” Dottie said. “I fought it, but he said I was being overprotective. Frances wasn’t stupid, and given the opportunity, she could learn as well as any other child. And finally I gave in.” She took a breath, and I realized she was quietly furious. “It didn’t stop the visions—her letters told me there were ghosts. A girl at her bedside, a dead girl in the pond. She didn’t fit in, of course—she had no hope to. The other girls showed her no mercy. They smelled blood, as girls will. They teased her, played tricks on her, put terrible things in her bed. I wanted to remove her, but Robert said no. He said she had to wait it out, that the girls would eventually leave her alone.”

  I walked to the bookshelves and glanced over them, unable to observe Dottie’s pain anymore. I saw books of nursery rhymes, fairy tales—the books any girl would own. I ran my fingers gently over the spines. This room looked so much like a normal girl’s room, like a living girl’s room. I’d never had a room like this one, and if someone had given it to me, I would have thought I was in a dream. “What happened?” I asked.

  Dottie’s voice was brisk, hard. “They chose a cold night and locked her alone in the school’s bell tower. But first they took away all of her clothes.”

  I exhaled a shocked breath. What that must have done to Frances—already isolated, terrified, and alone. How it must have broken her.