The reek of sweat and perfume clotted his lungs. He . . . couldn't . . . breathe. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, tightening as he struggled . . .
Don't struggle. Listen. The children are singing:
The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old oak wall,
The baron's retainers were blithe and gay,
Keeping the Christmas holiday . . .
Mistletoe. He was inside the mistletoe chest, tangled up in his cousin's clothing. There was a crack in the chest's lid. He was not going to suffocate.
Be calm, he told himself, still more than half dazed. Breathe deeply. Never mind the woman smell. My croft says women will kill you if you are weak . . . if you feel . . .
Then, when his heart finally stopped hammering and he had caught his breathe, he tried to lift the lid. At first it resisted and he thought ( . . . be calm . . . ) that someone was sitting on it, but it was only stuck. At last he was out of the chest, of the room, down the stair, into the hall . . .
Blanche sat on the dining room hearth, beneath her portrait. Father bent over her. She had looped her long, pale hair around his neck and he was staring down at her like a rabbit at a snake. The boy's eyes were dazzled—by the firelight, he groggily supposed—but it seemed to him that a darkness loomed over them both, as if the house itself stood there, watching, waiting. Then Blanche drew his father down. They kissed. And the darkness smiled with Irisa's thin, cruel lips.
The boy heard a strange sound, then realized that he himself had made it.
Father broke away from Blanche, as glad of the interruption as of a rescue. He fussed over his son, brushing fragments of red paper out of the boy's hair, staring when his fingers came away stained with blood. The chest lid had struck hard. The boy looked blankly down at his own hand, at the stiff legal paper which he still clutched.
He heard singing. No, he was singing:
The baron beheld with a father's pride,
His beautiful child, young Lovell's bride,
While she, with her bright eyes, seemed to be
The star of that goodly company,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!
Blanche stood rigid, glaring like a Gorgon at father and son. "Siger, why did you bring this brat? Was it to remind me how false you are, what other bed you have shared?"
Darkness moved. For a moment, the boy stared directly into Irisa's black eyes, inches from his own, and then she had retreated, taking the promissory note with her.
"Go," she murmured in Blanche's ear in her heavily accented English. "Take this. Lure him to your narrow bed. The song guides you."
Blanche looked blankly at the paper which her aunt had thrust into her hands. Her full lips framed the song's next line. Then she caught her breath in a gasp of laughter and began raggedly to sing:
I'm weary of dancing now, she cried:
Here tarry a moment, I'll hide, I'll hide,
And Lovell, be sure thou'rt the first to trace
The clue to my secret lurking place.
"The clue, 'Lovell,' the clue!" she cried, waving the note in Father's face as he stood as if turned to stone. "Find me and—perhaps, perhaps—you may keep it!" Then she thrust the paper into her bosom and ran from the room, her aunt following like her shadow. And again the boy sang, as if possessed:
Away she ran and her friends began
Each tower to search and each nook to scan,
And young Lovell cried, oh where dost thou hide?
I'm lonesome without thee, my own dear bride,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!
But the boy was singing to himself. Siger Holmes had left the room. Trailing after him, Sherlock found his father standing irresolute at the foot of the stair, listening to the voices above—the aunt's low and intense, her niece's shrill with rising anger.
"Leave me alone!" Blanche suddenly cried out-loud. "Why do you prattle of the dead? The dead are nothing! Only life matters. I am alive, and I will live, do you hear? Arrêtez N'y touchez pas . . . "
A hollow thud cut off her words.
Father ran up the stairs. The boy stumbled after him. Irisa stood in the upper hall before the closed bedroom door, stern as Fate, implacable as Nemesis.
"Leave," she said. "She is my business now and none of yours, nor should she ever have been. Leave, and the debt which you owe this house is buried forever."
"What have you done with her?"
"Can you not guess? Sing, boy!"
And the boy sang:
They sought her that night, they sought her next day,
They sought her in vain when a week passed away,
In the highest, the lowest, the loneliest spot
Young Lovell sought wildly, but found her not . . .
"Stop!" cried Father. "I cannot . . . I will not understand! Why are you doing this?"
"In my homeland, we know how to deal with such heartless stregoica as she, who must feed their lust at whatever cost to others, who prey upon those whom they should first protect."
"You think her a vampyre, like Polidori's Lord Ruthven or Prest's Varney?" Father tried to laugh. The boy could see that he thought her mad, and that she frightened him. "Come, the pallor of her cheek and the blood upon her lips are the curses of her illness, nothing more. You are an educated woman. Surely you cannot believe such wild tales!"
She smiled, and her smile was a terrible thing.
"I believe in evil. I believe that no place on earth is immune, including your oh-so-civilized England. Do you think that only nosferatu prey upon the innocent? Shall I tell you why this woman still lives while her little sisters lie side by side in the grave? Because that hero of science, their father, stole the blood from his infant children's veins to transfuse into hers. There."
A black-gloved finger stabbed like a lance at the laboratory's closed door across the hall.
"He took and took and so did she until there was nothing left to give. Too late did I understand those devils' marks scrawled across the wall, those iron beds of pain. Too late, his remorse, too late. Oh, my dear little nieces, my sweet Alice and Alyse . . ."
For a moment, grief cracked the dark mask of her face and something darker still glared through, beyond reason, beyond mercy. Then by ruthless will alone she pulled herself back together.
"Leave," she said again to Father, with such awful, cold scorn. "You weak, foolish man. Once you willingly embraced her corruption and now she has breathed death into your mouth. I know. I saw. Leave. Soon enough, you will join her in the grave's narrow bed. Listen: already she calls to you."
And they heard. Inside the bedroom. Muffled. Raging. Thuds. Long, scraping sounds. Fists beating again the coffin lid. Nails scratching . . . Father made a choking sound. Then he snatched up his son and fled. Behind them, Irisa laughed and laughed. No one ever saw Blanche again.
* * *
And years flew by, and their grief at last
Was told as a sorrowful tale long past,
And when Lovell appeared the children cried,
See the old man weep for his fairy bride,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!
The echo of Holmes's voice died in the room, swallowed by its dank decay. The storm was muttering off into the distance, leaving the melancholy drip of water outside the manor and in.
"Curiously enough," he said, with a shaky return to his normal, dry manner, "that ballad is based upon a tragedy which befell a family in Rutland named Noel. We cannot seem to escape it or the Christmas theme—or can we? Gone she was, but my father did not weep. He died within four months, coughing blood. I nearly followed him. As I lay ill, I overheard that Irisa was also dead, of self-inflicted starvation. A refusal to consume, if you will. Nonetheless, some curses are . . . very persistent. Even now, in my dreams, I hear it: fists beating against the coffin lid, nails clawing . . . "
I stared at him, speechless, then blurted out the first question that came into my mind. "B-but what about the two little girls?"
This was too much for me. "And they, I suppose, are the 'ghost or two' which you promised me before we entered this foul place, not to mention a Wallachian madwoman, an evil scientist, and a vampire in the linen chest. Oh, well done, Holmes. Bravo! And you call me romantic!"
His attention sharpened and he threw up a hand for silence. I, well trained, instantly obeyed.
We listened. Water dripped, the wind soughed, the old house creaked . . . and then it came again, from above us somewhere on the second floor: a faint rasp, a muffled thump.
"Oh, really!" I exclaimed.
Snatching the candle from his hand, I limped hastily down the hall to the far door. There was the stair, with water cascading down the steps. The decayed remains of a carpet made them as slippery as moss in a riverbed as I climbed, clinging to the banister.
I did not want to believe my friend's story. It frightened me the way he had groped after details, not as if making them up but as if drawing their memory out of a half-forgotten childhood nightmare like splinters from a long neglected wound. And such details! Was I really to believe that . . . no, I would not.
But I had to be sure.
Here was the upper hall as Holmes had described it, eerily long, lined with doors. I hesitated on the upper landing, suddenly unsure. After all, here I was, with a guttering candle, in the upper storey of an abandoned house miles from anywhere, on a dark and stormy night, hunting ghosts. For all I knew, we might instead be sharing Morthill with an escaped ax-murderer—which, at that moment, I would almost have preferred.
The first door to the left stood half open. From the darkness within came a furtive rustle, as if of shifting paper.
A hand closed like a vise on my arm. "Don't go in there," snapped Holmes.
I was startled, so quickly and quietly had he come up the stair on my heels, and I was annoyed to find myself whispering. "Why not?"
"Because the way in may not be the way out. And besides," he added, somewhat lamely, "the floor may be unsound."
"A fine time to think of that. Very well, then; if not this door, which?"
He would not answer me, but his eyes betrayed him, sliding involuntarily to the first door on the right. When he made no move to open it, I pushed past him and gripped the knob. It came off in my hand.
I glanced back at Holmes, suddenly as reluctant as he. Candlelight flickered across his face, shadows pooling in the hollows beneath cheekbones and eyes. He stood as if rooted before the door from which his father had fled.
There was no way forward but one.
I set my shoulder to the warped panels and pushed. The lock broke in a shower of rust and the door squealed open on clutching hinges. Mindful of the house's tricks, I reached blindly inside, fished out a high-backed chair, and wedged the door open with it. Holmes stared into the darkness, then entered, as if drawn. I followed.
Candle light flickered on moldering clutter: a disordered bed whose canopy long since had fallen down across its foot, rags of once-elegant clothing strewn about the floor, a pair of long, dingy gloves draped like flayed skin over the back of a chair. More confusion littered the dressing table—age-dull bottles, lotions, notions, and trinkets tumbled together.
One of Carle Vernet's lithographs hung on the nearby wall, depicting an extravagantly dressed eighteenth-century belle seated at her dressing table, admiring herself in its large mirror.
"The picture is called Vanity," said Holmes, behind me, "not that Blanche probably understood why. She had a certain imitative cleverness—like a monkey—but no real imagination."
I looked again, and recoiled. The mirror's rounded shape was that of a naked skull, the twin images of the woman's head and her reflection its hollow eyes, the cosmetic bottles her teeth bared in a cryptic smile. This print, not the Mona Lisa, was the original of Blanche's portrait in the hall below.
"Sangsue" her dying father had scrawled in horror over his meticulous notations. Bloodsucker. Non, non, non . . .
A long, scraping sound made me start. It came from the window. Outside, the fingers of a dead oak again drew restlessly across the glass and tapped against the pane.
I turned to Holmes in triumph, just as he threw back the collapsed canopy. At the foot of the bed was a chest, no bigger than a child's coffin. A crude spray of mistletoe was carved into the age-blackened oak of its lid. At its farther end, caught in the crack, were several long strands of pale hair.
Holmes hesitated a moment. Then he gripped the lid and, with a sudden effort, attempted to lift it. It rose a quarter inch and stopped with a jar that dislodged his fingers. Belatedly, he looked at the key, still turned in the lock. For a long moment we stood there, he staring at the key, I at him. It had grown very quiet outside. Inside, all I heard was the distant, forlorn drip of water. Then Holmes sighed.
"No ghosts need apply," he murmured, turned, and walked past me out of the room.
I suppose I stood with my mouth open a good ten seconds, and then I swallowed. There was the chest; there, the key. Stealthy moonlight pooled about it on the floor, and a breath of air sighed through the broken window. The strands of pale hair stirred . . .
I ran down the treacherous stair after my friend, in danger of adding one more ghost to the house by slipping.
Below, the dining hall had filled with shifting moonlight and shadow. I paused in the hall doorway, searching the walls not for the painted smile of a "da Vinci" or an icon's baleful glare, but for those two white blurs in the corner, forever side by side. They were not there. Something outside the window caught my attention. There they stood, white frocks glimmering among the moon-silvered birch, watching, waiting . . . for what, or whom? Their pale, unblinking eyes gazed upward, as though toward the window of a second story bedroom.
Cold water dripped on my head. I started and looked up. Above me hung the mistletoe, that filthy parasite, each bare twig glistening with a drop of condensation like so many sparkling poison berries.
When I looked out the window again, and cursed my gullibility. Not children but two small, white gravestones leaned toward each other in the family plot, almost touching.
We reached Bagshot in time to catch the last train. Holmes slept all the way to London.
* * *
We have never spoken of that evening again.
Was the whole adventure a practical joke—Holmes's attempt to cure me by surfeit of my foolish romanticism? I want to think so, but I cannot shrug off the story. It haunts me. In my dreams, I wander through endless, dusty rooms, sometimes hearing distant song, sometimes distant laughter. Last night, all too close, there was a muffled voice crying and the sound of nails breaking against wood as hard as iron . . .
Let me out, let me out, let me out . . .
Thus, I have felt compelled on this Christmas Eve to make what sense I can of that strange night four months ago. Perhaps I have read more into my friend's words and especially into his silences than he ever intended. Perhaps he is waiting for me to publish this fantastic tale to have the last laugh. Perhaps, in the beginning, that was his only goal.
I believe, however, that he found himself telling a deeper story than he intended, digging up the buried horror that poisoned his sleep. What he cannot endure is the inexplicable, the irrational. Mere ghosts will never bother him, for he does not believe in them. For him, the mystery is solved. That is enough.
In that, he is more the detective than I have proved the storyteller. Before that sullen, silent chest, my courage faltered, and the story's end remains untold.
[1902]
ADDENDUM
Storytellers die, but do stories ever really end? If you are reading this, then I too am dead, and the guardianship of these hitherto unpublished accounts passes to you.
Whatever my other failings, I have found myself too much both the storyteller and the detective to destroy evidence. At
the bottom of this old, tin dispatch-box is the last stanza of "The Mistletoe Bough," wrapped around a key—two keys, as it were, to a single mystery. The dispatch-box itself sits upon a oblong chest made of age-blackened oak, bound with iron, with a crude mistletoe carved into its cracked lid. Without telling Holmes, I had carters convey it unopened from Morthill Manor to the vaults of Cox and Company Bank.
Here, then, are the ballad and the key; there is the chest. As my dear, late friend once said of another case, "It can't hurt now." We all sleep as quietly as our several lives allow beyond, at least, any earthly harm. Do what you will.
At length an oak chest that had long laid hid
Was found in the castle, they raised the lid
When a skeleton form lay moldering there
Blood and Ivory-A Tapestry Page 20