“She is my cousin. But she lives with us, as good as a sister.” And Smoll lost his good posture again, thinking of Biss waving him off in the carriage that day, a little weeping to lose him; of Biss how she laughed too much sometimes and had to be sat and calmed; of Biss ill and subdued, lying abed (unimaginable!), and how he had not been there to help Ma care for her, or to share in the worrying.
“Ah, here is the business. ‘Your brother Dravitt has come into the good fortune of being apprenticed to Nape’s uncle George Paste down at Caunterbury, and he will be coming through London on the twenty-ninth of January—’ ” Cook read on, frowning, crouched over the letter. If he had not known her, by her expression right now he would have thought her a most bad-tempered person.
“Your porridge will get cold,” said Smoll. His own porridge was all spooned up and eaten, fast and nervously, he had been rendered so self-conscious by the letter, and by his home life being brought out around the breakfast table, here in his new life. It pained him, the thought of Ma relaying to the priest all she wanted Smoll to know, and the way the priest had corrected and embroidered her words with priest-language, putting himself and his education between Smoll and his Ma.
“She hopes Mr. Beecham will permit young Dravitt to stay here a night on his journey, is the sense of it, boiled down.”
They both looked to Mr. Pinkney, at the far end of the table with his tea and thin toast, his braces and his white, white shirtfront on which never a drop was spilt, never a crumb was deposited.
Pinkney tipped his head, sipped his tea. “I am sure Mr. Beecham will have no objection. Dravitt, is it? Should be no trouble to us, sharing your little eyrie for a night.” He took another sip and glanced along the table, a glint in his eye. “Unless he is of a much different make from yourself, Smoll. Is he a wild boy, your brother?”
“Oh no, sir. Drav would be timider than me, by far.”
“Oh, Smoll.” Cook laughed a little at Smoll’s earnestness, and gave his hand a brisk rub where it lay there on the table.
He barely noticed, he was so occupied with the warring emotions inside him. He felt a stab of missing Dravitt and all the littlies, and Biss and Ma, and the house, and all around it, the village he knew, so humdrum, every stone and weed of it, every codger and kid. This keen distress was cut through by the relief it would be to see Drav again and show his new life to him—yet it would be pain, too, for it would agitate Smoll’s homesickness, which until now had been thoroughly obscured by the novelty of his new duties and worries. And all these complexities were in turn flattened by the stark dread, the absolute impossibility of Drav’s visiting, the intractable necessity for Mr. Pinkney and Mr. Beecham to forbid it. Sharing your little eyrie for a night—that must not happen. Drav must never endure a night with Smoll in the attic room! Clearly Cook and Pinkney knew nothing of what happened up there, once the household slept. Smoll gathered up his posture again, lifted his chin, and the necklace of raw patches stretched and twinged.
“I will ask Mr. Beecham this morning,” said Pinkney, “but I dare say he will be entirely happy with the idea.”
It was near a fortnight before Dravitt was to come. Smoll proceeded towards the day mazed with terror. Dravitt must not see the dream-lady, he knew that much. He certainly must not be forced to take her beads. But even if Smoll took them himself, as usual, how could he save Drav from being terrified by the whole transaction, by the mere sight of the woman, by her voice—now foggy, now sharp and clear—by her urgent attentions?
In a bid to be moved from the attic room he revealed his wounds one morning to Cook. “Gracious!” she cried, “How long have you gone about like this? Look at the boy, Pinkney! What are these? Have you seen anything like them?” And they turned Smoll about and exclaimed some more, the pair of them.
But all they did was smother the lesions with a strong-smelling grease that Cook mixed up, that everyone remarked on and made faces at when Smoll was near—everyone but the dream-lady, who only went at him with her customary combination of impatience and flattery. It suits you, she said just the same, as the beads burned on Smoll’s slippery chest, and the attic room might have been suspended from a hot air balloon miles above the Beecham house, or might be a wind-whipped hut out on the Arctic ice, for all the help he could expect from beyond its walls.
The night before Dravitt was due, Cook made Smoll bathe, his own small personal bath so that he would not infect anyone with his disease, if infectious he was. He sank back disconsolate in the stinging, soothing water, behind the screen in the kitchen. Don’t rub at them; just soak, Cook had said, and so he soaked, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Cook come and go, and others who must be explained to, about Smoll and his condition, and his coming brother. We will bandage you up, the night he’s here, Cook had said, and put clean sheets on your bed, so’s he doesn’t catch it. We don’t want to send him down Caunterbury covered in bibulous plague, do we? Won’t impress his new master.
Soggy-warm from bathing and freshly anointed with the foul salve, Smoll tottered upward through the cold house, carrying his candle and the wrapped hot-brick for his bed. He would meet Dravitt at the coach tomorrow afternoon; Drav would be looking out for him, excited, perhaps a little frightened that Smoll would not be there; when he saw Smoll he would beam, all relief and pleasure at having a companion in his adventure. He would be looking to Smoll for advice, for explanation. He knew nothing of the world, Dravitt, and he was very small (though he would have grown some since Smoll last saw him in the summer); he was easily cowed.
Smoll stood on the steep wooden steps, halfway through the floor into his room, clutching his brick and candle there on the threshold of his exile. The very air felt different here; the top half of him was tainted with its solitude and horror, while his legs stood in a freer, kindlier atmosphere below. He summoned his energies and stepped up wholly into the attic, and went to the bed and put down the candle and tucked the hot-brick under the blankets. Then he came back and closed the door in the floor, shutting himself in, untethering himself from the safety of Beecham’s household. He climbed into bed, the bed that Dravitt would be sharing tomorrow. He blew out the candle with a frosty breath and hugged the hot-brick to his stomach, and he wept a little for Dravitt, for Dravitt’s innocence (which once he himself had shared), and for the distance he was from home and Biss and Ma, and for his own want of courage.
He was dozing when the attic announced the dream-lady’s imminence, its cold air curdling, hostile, its space become a little theatre where only unpleasant things might play out. Then she rustled at him out of the darkness, the hourglass waist of her, the cocked featureless head. She thrust at him her handfuls of gleam: Take it. Smoll flattened to the wall as always, without deciding to; the fear never lessened, however well he knew her, however often she uttered the same words. There was something distressing, indeed, in their repetition, in the mechanical nature of her performance, the fact that she could be neither paused nor halted.
The necklace shone in the darkness. What would I do with it, for heaven’s sake? hissed the rustling lady, and Smoll’s flesh crept from her touch, and his salved wounds winced and pained. His hands unstuck themselves from the wall as they always did, because he was obedient, and because she would go away if he obeyed, and the most important thing in the world was that she go away.
He had thought he had no room, when the woman was there, for considering or scheming, for outwitting her. She took him over, he had thought, and his whole being underwent her visitation, was ground through it like meat through Cook’s great dark mincing machine down in the kitchen.
But tonight he found that he did have an extra thought spare, a small pocket in his mind where ruled, unafraid because unaware, his younger brother—not Dravitt as he would be now, skinny and bright-faced and ready to start his new life apprenticing, but Dravitt when he was small and round and red-curled, a plaything for Smollett and his sisters; the sleep-sodden Dravitt whom Smollett had carried home after the mids
ummer bonfire; the Dravitt who had run stout and screaming with laughter, Biss and Clara pursuing him, towards Smollett, whose one hand was tip-fingered on the oak that was Home for this game, whose other reached out to Drav, so that he might reach safety sooner.
The beads began to rattle, from the lady’s hands to Smoll’s, and to weigh on his palms, fall over his fingers. In the cold light of the winter moon pouring through the attic window each bead was vaguely its own color, the ghostly ivory, the implacable jet, the flecked transparent warmth-that-was-not-warm of the amber. They piled and slid on Smoll’s palms; the woman’s white hands were emptying; her breath from the other time blew warm, sour and intent on his forehead. He had only these few moments while she poured, while she reached through from her time to his; once the last bead left her grasp, he would be helpless against her returning tomorrow, and including his brother in her terrors.
“No.” Smoll’s voice was small, ineffectual. No matter. The voice it was uttered in did not matter.
He grasped a bead and sprang with it up from his bed. He pushed his arms through from his time into hers, forced his head into the cold syrup of the past. “No,” he said to the woman’s clear, bright-eyed face, to her alarm, to the smell of the past, of an old, gone meal, part of it burnt. Against the force of her will and her magic, with all his small strength he pushed the loop of beads back through the thick air, and over her head.
He forced it down around her neck. Her face, aghast, almost touched his. “Mistress!” cried Smoll into the syrup, dropping to the bed again, dragging on the necklace, all but swinging from it. “Come quickly! She has your necklace, your lock—”
Her hand stopped his cry. It was not a soft lady’s hand; it was worked to leather, cold and strong and real, and smelled of laundry soap. She took him by the mouth and by his nightshirted ribs, and hissing she began to push him out of her time, her eyes wild, her eyes afraid as he had never seen them. He saw the enormity of what he was doing, the disgrace and punishment it would entail for her, not a ghost-woman or a dream-woman at all but an ordinary servant like himself, whose good name in her household was the only wealth that she had in the world. Still he fought to stay, to make his voice heard in the house of her time, to make as much noise there as he could, whether words or no. He yammered behind her hand; he threw himself about to loosen her grip on his mouth, and let out more noise.
Slowly her strength succeeded against his—but he had not meant to conquer, only to delay her, only to keep her fighting and in possession of the necklace until the other person, the maker of the dream-footfalls, reached the top of the stairs and entered. He listened for the mistress through the strain and pain and noise of the struggle. His ears were right at the border between the two times now, and all sounds were warped there, the dream-lady’s grunts compressed into quacks, her panting concertina’d to weirdly musical whistles. The knocking on the attic door he heard as thunder; the mistress’s voice was a god’s calling across a breadth of sky.
And then as the doorknob rumbled in its turning, the servant-woman pushed Smoll wholly through the divide, the magicked aperture between the times, back into his rightful night. As she and her era fell away, as she shrank, she tore the necklace off and flung it after him. Soundlessly it splashed against the intervening time as against a window between herself and Smoll. She watched in dismay as it fell, and the door opened behind her no bigger than a playing card now, and the dark opening swallowed up woman and beads and attic and all.
The two times snapped apart to their proper distances; Smoll felt the event of that, in his ears and in the punching of air into his throat and lungs. Somewhere between sprawled and sitting, he stared from his rumpled bed, out into a darkness utterly free of reverberations. No dread sang there, and no historical glee resounded. No weight sat bead-by-bead around his neck or ached against his breastbone. There was only Smoll in his eyrie, the odor of Cook’s salve, warm from his exertions, clouding up from the neck of his nightshirt, the light of the moon pouring down on him from the window.
Visiting them, there had been times she’d been sure she could feel . . . she didn’t know what. A something there in the house with them . . .
The Third Always Beside You
John Langan
That there had been another woman in their parents’ marriage was an inference that for Weber and Gertrude Schenker had taken on all the trappings of fact. During the most recent of the late-night conversations that had become a Christmas-Eve tradition for them, Weber had christened the existence of this figure “The Keystone,” for her and her intersection with their mother and father’s marriage were what supported the shape into which that union had bent itself.
Over large-bowled glasses of white wine at the kitchen table, his back against the corner where the two window seats converged, Web met his eleven-months-younger sister’s contention that, after all this time, the evidence in favor of her remained largely circumstantial by shaking his head vigorously and employing the image of the stone carved to brace an arch. Flailing his hands with the vigor of a conductor urging his orchestra to reach higher, which sent his wine climbing the sides of its glass, Web called to his aid a movie’s worth of scenes that had led to their decision—during another Christmas Eve confab a decade earlier—that only the presence of another woman explained the prolonged silences that descended on the household without warning, the iciness that infused their mother’s comments about their father’s travels, the half-apologetic, half-resentful air that clung to their father after his trips like a faint, unpleasant smell. The other woman—her, the name custom had bestowed—was the stone that placed a quarryful of cryptic comments and half-sentences into recognizable arrangement.
As for why, ten years on, the two of them were no closer to learning her real name, much less any additional details concerning her appearance or the history of her involvement with their father, when you thought about it, that wasn’t so surprising. While both their parents had insisted that there was nothing their children could not tell them, a declaration borne out over thirty-one and thirty years’ discussion of topics including Web’s fear that his college girlfriend was pregnant (which, as it turned out, she wasn’t) and Gert’s first inkling that she might be gay (which, as it turned out, she was), neither their mother nor their father had asked the same openness of their children. Just the opposite: their parents scrupulously refrained from discussing anything of significance to their interior lives. Met with a direct question, their father became vague, evasive, from which Web and Gert had arrived at their secret nickname for him, the Prince, as in, the Prince of Evasion. Their mother’s response to the same question was simple blankness, from which her nickname, the Wall, as in, the Wall of Silence. With the Prince and the Wall for parents, was it any wonder the two of them knew as little as they did?
Web built his case deliberately, forcefully—not for the first time, Gert thought that he would have made a better attorney than documentary filmmaker. (They could have gone into practice together: Schenker and Schenker, Siblings In Law.) Or perhaps it was that he was right, from the necessity of the other woman’s existence to their parents’ closed-mouthedness. Yet if the other woman was the Keystone, her presence raised at least as many questions as it answered, chief among them, why were their mother and father still together? A majority of their parents’ friends—hell, of their parents’ siblings—were on their second, third, and in one case, fourth marriages. If their mother and father were concerned about standing out in the crowd, their continued union brought them more sustained attention than a divorce, however rancorous, could have. Both their parents were traversed by deep veins of self-righteousness that lent some weight to the idea of them remaining married to prove a point—especially to that assortment of siblings moving into the next of their serial monogamies. However, each parent’s self-righteousness was alloyed by another tendency—self-consciousness in their mother’s case, inconstancy in their father’s—that, upon reflection, rendered it insufficient as
an explanation. Indeed, it seemed far more likely that their mother’s almost pathological concern for how she was perceived, combined with their father’s proven inability to follow through on most of his grandiloquent pledges, had congealed into a torpor that caught them fast as flies in amber.
It was a sobering and even depressing note on which to conclude their annual conversation, but the clock’s hands were nearing three a.m., the second bottle of wine was empty, and while there was no compulsion for them to rise with the crack of dawn to inspect Santa’s bounty, neither of them judged it fair to leave their significant others alone with their parents for very long. They rinsed out their glasses and the emptied bottles, dried the glasses and returned them to the cupboard, left the bottles upended in the dishrack, and, before switching off the lights, went through their old ritual of checking all the locks on the downstairs windows and doors. Something of a joke between them when their family first had moved from Westchester to Ellenville, the process had assumed increased seriousness with an increase of home invasions over the last several years. When they were done, Web turned to Gert and, his face a mask of terror, repeated the line that concluded the process, cadged from some horror movie of his youth: “But what if they’re already inside?” Gert, who had yet to arrive at a satisfactory response, this year chose, “Well, I guess it’s too late, then.”
The fatality of her answer appeared to please Web; he bent to kiss her cheek, then wound his way across the darkened living room to the hallway at whose end lay the guest room for which he and Sharon had opted—the location, Gert had reflected, the farthest possible distance from their parents’ room but still in the house. This had left her and Dana the upstairs room, her old one, separated from her mother and father’s bedroom by the upstairs bathroom. Gert could not decide whether Web’s choice owed itself to a desire to maintain the maximum remove from their parents for his new wife and himself, or was due to an urge to force the closest proximity between her and Dana and her parents, who, seven years after Gert’s coming out, and three years since she’d moved in with Dana, were still not as reconciled to their daughter’s sexuality as they claimed to be. Of course, Web being Web, both explanations might have been true. Since some time in his mid-to-late teens, the closeness with which he had showered their mother and father, the hugs and kisses, had been replaced with an almost compulsive need for distance—if either parent drew too near for too long, tried to prolong an embrace, he practically vibrated with tension. At the same time, he had inherited their parents’ self-righteousness, and given an opportunity to confront them with what he viewed as their shortcomings, was only too happy to do so. If Gert was uncomfortable, it wasn’t in the plastic pleasantness that her mother and father put on whenever she and Dana visited, to which she’d more or less resigned herself as the lesser of many evils—it was in being fixed to the point of the spear with which Web wanted to jab their parents.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 15