by Dean Koontz
“She can dress any way she likes. Why would I care?”
“But this is weird.”
“She’s always playing dress-up.”
“Not like this,” Harley insisted. “Mom’s dressing her, and it’s just weird.”
Before her marriage to Giles Gregorio, Clarette never had much time for her children. She says that she prefers to play with grown men. Children are her business, she explains, not a leisure-time activity. She sports or games, or cuddles, with them only on those rare occasions when vodka and more powerful substances put her in a foolish or sentimental mood.
Since the wedding, she has become even more remote from them. If anyone is raising Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell, it is the staff of Theron Hall.
“I heard Mom say, when they finish fitting Mirabell’s new dress, they’re going to give her a bath in warm milk and rinse her with aqua pura, whatever that is.”
From high on the ladder, Crispin at last looks down at his brother. “That is weird.”
“And there’s other weird stuff like the hat they’ve made for her. You’ve got to come see.”
The model of the mansion will be here for further exploration whenever Crispin wishes to return to it.
He climbs down to a safe height before unhooking the tether and then descending the final ten rungs.
As Crispin follows his brother into the third-floor hallway, Harley whispers, “They don’t know I saw. I think Pip’s new dress is for some surprise party or something, and probably we aren’t supposed to see it until then.”
Hurrying down the back stairs, Harley explains that he was on the prowl for the mysterious white cats, alert and stealthy, when he came across the scene with their mother, Mirabell, and a housemaid named Proserpina.
Among the many chambers on the second floor are a sewing room and a gift-wrapping room. They are side by side.
Harley quietly leads Crispin into the gift-wrapping room. The single curtained window provides little light.
An interior door connects this space with the place where Proserpina, not only a housemaid but also a seamstress, repairs and alters clothes for the family and staff. The door stands about three inches ajar.
Harley crouches low, and Crispin leans over him, so they can both spy upon the activities in the sewing room.
Mirabell stands on a yard-square platform about a foot high. Their mother kneels before her, fussing with the fancy collar of the girl’s white dress. Proserpina kneels behind Mirabell, pinning the waistline of the frock for some adjustment that she apparently will make.
This is no ordinary dress. The fabric is shiny but less clingy than silk, less stiff than satin, so soft-looking. It almost seems to glow a little, as though the dress produces its own light. The cuffs and collar are made of lace, more intricate than any Crispin has previously seen.
Mirabell wears white slippers with white bows. Attached to each bow is what appears to be a cluster of red berries.
“I feel very pretty,” Mirabell says.
“You are very pretty,” their mother replies.
“These are like ballerina slippers.”
“They are a little,” Clarette agrees.
“Will we dance tonight?”
“Some of us will dance,” Clarette says.
“I know how to pirouette.”
“Yes, I’ve seen you do it.”
“This dress will really swoosh when I pirouette.”
Mirabell’s blond hair, usually straight, is curly now. Her dress glows, and her hair glimmers.
Perched on her head is not a hat, which is what Harley called it, but instead a wreath. The wreath appears to have been woven of real leaves of some kind, and with white ribbon. There seem to be acorns attached to it, as well as clusters of bright red teardrop berries like those on her slippers, three fruits in each cluster.
“If I take a bath in milk, won’t I stink?” Mirabell asks.
“No, sweetie. There are rose petals and essence of roses in the milk. Anyway, we’ll rinse you afterward with nice warm water.”
“Aqua pura.”
“That’s right.”
“What’s aqua pura?”
“The cleanest water in the world.”
“Why don’t we rinse with it every day?”
“It’s only for special occasions.”
“Does it come in a bottle?”
“Sometimes. But we’ll pour it from silver bowls. Wait till you see them, they’re very pretty bowls.”
“Cool,” Mirabell says. “Mommy, on special occasions, do you rinse in aqua pura?”
For some reason, this question so amuses Proserpina that she can’t contain a little laugh.
Clarette says, “Aqua pura is only for little girls and boys.”
Except that she doesn’t have wings, Mirabell is so beautiful that she looks like an angel in her white dress, the wreath a kind of halo.
Eye to the gap between door and jamb, Crispin is surprised by how much his sister looks like an angel. He half expects her to float off the floor and glide around the room.
Their mother says, “All right, sweetie. Let’s get you out of this dress so Proserpina can make the final alterations.”
First, their mother removes Mirabell’s slippers, and then she and the seamstress strip the dress from the girl, who stands now in her undies.
Crispin is only nine, Mirabell six. He has never before been embarrassed to see his sister in her underclothes. Strangely, he is embarrassed now, but he can’t look away.
Clarette rises to her feet, lifts the wreath off her daughter’s head, and places it on a small table that is draped in a white cloth. She handles the wreath as if it is a thing of great value.
Now another housemaid, Arula, enters the sewing room. She looks like that actress, Jennifer Aniston, but younger.
“Come, Little Bell,” says Arula. “Time for your special bath.”
Mirabell steps off the yard-square platform. In her bare feet and underclothes, she follows Arula out of the room, into the hall.
Harley eases away from his brother and moves toward the door between the gift-wrapping room and the hallway.
Lingering at the connecting door, Crispin alone hears the last exchange between his mother and Proserpina.
With evident amusement, the seamstress says, “If not aqua pura, what do you bathe in for special occasions?”
“Dragon piss,” says Clarette, and she shares a laugh with the other woman before leaving the sewing room.
Crispin has heard his mother use worse language than this. He is not shocked, merely confused. He can’t make sense of her comment or of anything he’s just witnessed.
When they are sure Arula, their mother, and their sister have gone to one bathroom or another, the brothers slip out of the gift-wrapping room, angle south across the hallway, and take refuge in Harley’s room, which is next door to Crispin’s.
Although they discuss the scene in the sewing room, they can’t reach any conclusions about what it means. Maybe Mirabell is going to a party this evening. But the brothers haven’t been told of it.
Harley thinks it’s unfair that their sister should be going to a party but not the two of them. “Unless maybe it’s a surprise party for us.”
“When has anyone ever given us a party?” Crispin asks.
“Never.”
“They’re not gonna start now.”
“Let’s just ask Mom what’s going on.”
“No,” Crispin says. “We shouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. We just shouldn’t, that’s all.”
“How else are we gonna find out?”
“We’ll wait and see.”
Harley pouted. “I don’t understand why we can’t ask.”
“For one thing, we were snooping.”
“We overheard, that’s all.”
“We were snooping, and you know it.”
“That doesn’t mean we’ll get in trouble.”
“We’ll
get in trouble, sure enough,” Crispin said. “What we’ve got to do is—we’ve got to wait and see.”
In Theron Hall, the main dining room, where the adults have dinner, is on the ground floor. They dine at eight o’clock.
The children are served in a smaller, second-floor dining room at six o’clock.
Clarette says that children eating with children, adults with adults, is a custom in that part of Europe from which the Gregorios hail.
This could be true. Crispin has known his mother to lie, but he doesn’t know enough about Europe to doubt her on this point.
Anyway, he’d rather eat with Harley and Mirabell than with his mother and stepfather. Here on the second floor, they can talk about anything they want over dinner. And they don’t have to choke down the fancy rich-people food that’s served downstairs, like poached salmon and snails and spinach soufflé. Here, they’re served the best stuff, kid food like cheeseburgers, mac and cheese, and tacos.
Their dining room is smaller than the one for the adults, but it’s no less formally furnished. The dark wood sideboards are heavily carved, and the carving has gilded highlights. The table stands on ball-and-claw feet, the chairs have high ornate backs, the cushions are upholstered in tapestries, and a crystal chandelier hangs over them.
Sometimes it seems as if no one in the Gregorio family was ever a child.
The servants who bring dinner also inform the boys that their sister will not be joining them this evening. They have heard that she is not feeling well.
Between the tortilla soup and the chicken nachos, Nanny Sayo stops by to report that Mirabell has what seems to be a migraine. Once the headache passes, the girl will eat in her room.
Clarette sometimes complains of migraines, squirrels herself away in a dark quiet room, and is unapproachable for the duration. This is the first time that her daughter has suffered such a thing.
“The condition can be inherited,” Nanny Sayo says. Before she leaves, she tousles Harley’s hair and kisses the top of Crispin’s head. “Don’t worry. Mirabell will be fine. But you must not bother her tonight.”
When the brothers are alone again, Harley says, “There’s a party, all right. This sucks.”
“There’s no party,” Crispin disagrees.
“If it’s not a party, then what is it?”
“We’ll just have to wait and see.”
For the next couple of hours, nothing unusual happens.
Being only seven years old and having spent hours stalking the farthest reaches of Theron Hall for the white cats that refused to materialize, Harley is ready for bed at eight o’clock. He says that he doesn’t care about any stupid old party, but he cares enough to want to pout in bed and retreat into sleep.
Crispin is not sleepy, but he puts on his pajamas and slips under the covers before nine o’clock.
He’s lying in deep shadows, the dimmer on his bedside lamp dialed down to the palest glow, when he hears the door open and someone approach his bed. The lightness of the visitor’s step and the swish of her skirt identify her as Nanny Sayo.
She stands there for long minutes while Crispin pretends to sleep. He has the crazy expectation that she will get into bed with him, but she does not.
After she leaves, he lies watching the digital clock blink away thirty minutes.
Some things we know that we shouldn’t do, some things we know that we must do, and sometimes the shouldn’t and the must are the same thing.
He gets out of bed and scopes the hallway, where the crystal fixtures in the ceiling cast light in soft prismatic patterns.
Crossing the threshold, he quietly closes the door behind him. He hurries north along the hallway, past the sewing room.
Mirabell’s bedroom is on the west side of the hall, adjacent to Clarette and Giles’s suite. Crispin listens at the door, but he hears nothing.
After a hesitation, he raps softly, waits, and raps again. When Mirabell does not reply, Crispin tries the door, finds it unlocked, and warily enters her room.
The bedside lamps burn at the lowest setting, but they are just bright enough for him to see that Mirabell is not here and that he is alone.
If his sister endured her migraine in bed, the bed has since been made. The quilted spread is smooth, taut.
From under the door to her bathroom, a yellow light beckons like the light in dreams that promises some revelation a moment before the sleeper wakes in darkness.
No sounds come from within.
Crispin whispers his sister’s name, waits, whispers it somewhat louder, but receives no response.
Easing the bathroom door inward, he enters a wilderness of white candles in clear glass containers. They line the deep windowsill, are clustered here and there on the marble bathtub surround, stand on the floor in every corner in groups of three, and flicker on the sink and vanity counters, where opposing mirrors clone and reclone them into a receding forest of burning tapers.
The quivering flames, sensitive to the slightest movement of the air, produce faint, trembling shadows that wriggle up the walls like ghost lizards.
She must have been bathed here hours earlier. The tub is dry. The wet towels have been removed.
Stuck to the white bathtub, however, are six scarlet rose petals.
On the floor beside the tub gleam two silver bowls with beaded rims. He picks up one and sees words in a foreign language engraved all around the exterior.
In the bottom of the bowl shimmers no more than a tablespoon of clear liquid, which he supposes is aqua pura. He dips a finger, raises it to his lips, and licks away the single drop.
The liquid has no taste, although the instant that it wets his tongue, he hears his sister’s whispered yet urgent plea, “Crispin, help me!”
Startled, he lets the bowl slip from his fingers. He catches it before it can ring off the marble floor.
He turns, but Mirabell is neither in the bath nor in the room beyond. If she spoke the words, she did so at a distance, and he heard them not with his ears but with his heart.
After carefully setting the silver bowl on the floor, he returns to his sister’s bedroom, where for the first time he notices that her teddy bears and other plush toys are gone. Mirabell must have had two dozen of them on the bed, the armchair, and the window seat. Not one remains.
The shelves that once held her collection of picture books are empty.
On her nightstand, where her Mickey Mouse clock once glowed with green numbers, there is nothing to tell the time.
On a hunch, Crispin yanks open the door to her walk-in closet and switches on the light. Nothing hangs on the rods, and the shoe shelves do not contain a single pair.
7
Early December, three years and four months later …
Since the close call on the recent Halloween night, Crispin and faithful Harley have been less bold, traveling more by greenbelts, alleyways, and storm drains than by the main streets.
Entirely separate from the sewer system, the massive drains are not dangerous in dry weather. They are secret highways, shadowing the avenues and byways above them.
Occasionally he encounters a rat or a pack of them, but they always run from him. City employees can reliably be spotted far in advance because of their work lights, and can be avoided by taking a branch different from the pipe in which they’re doing maintenance.
Initially, the boy and his dog were limited to entering and exiting the storm-drain system by way of open culverts that sloped up from ditches and streambeds to join that subterranean network. Manholes and the perfectly vertical iron-rung ladders that serve them offer a great many more entrances and exits, including a number of discreet options in quiet alleyways and abandoned factory yards, but four-legged Harley can’t use them.
For the past year, however, having grown rapidly stronger in his exile, Crispin has been able to lower the fifty-pound dog through a manhole or carry him up a ladder with the help of a device that he has crafted.
First, there is a sling made of fabric
-backed vinyl, customized to the dog’s body, with holes for his four legs to be sure that his weight is evenly distributed and that undue pressure is not put on any of his internal organs. Crispin cut the vinyl and hand-sewed the sling himself. He is confident that neither will the seams split nor the snaps fail under stress.
When lowering the dog, he employs two lengths of a multistrand nylon rope favored by mountain climbers. He uses carabiners to attach the ropes to a pair of rings on the sling.
When climbing out of a drain, he wears a harness that he has also fashioned himself. With dog loaded, the sling attaches to the harness, and on his back Crispin carries his best friend up the ladder.
Before performing that feat, however, he ascends alone to open the manhole. From a city maintenance crew, he has stolen a tool with which he can hook and lift aside the big iron disk. From below, the reverse end of the tool allows him to tilt the cover up and, using leverage, swing it out of the way.
After poking his head out into the cold night to be sure there are no witnesses, he pushes his backpack through the opening before descending again to get in harness and carry the dog.
In such manner, they now emerge into a dead-end alley a block from Broderick’s, the largest and oldest department store in the city. Over the past year, they have taken shelter from time to time in Broderick’s, which is an especially welcoming place in winter.
This night, the moon is lost behind a lowering sky. The icy air cuts at him so that tears bleed from his eyes.
After freeing the dog, Crispin folds the harness and the sling. He stashes them in a compartment of his backpack, which is larger than the one he carried when he first fled Theron Hall to live wild in the city.
With the pack on his back, with the dog on a leash, he sets out for the wide service alley behind the department store.
His breath plumes from him as if he’s exhaling ghosts. Snow is predicted before morning.
On this first Saturday in December, an hour before closing time, no deliveries are being made to or from the shipping-and-receiving center that occupies the uppermost garage level beneath the huge building.
At the bottom of the two-lane ramp, the automatic bay door is down, and the man-size door beside it is latched. Latched but not deadbolted.