“Fiona, Fiona, thank God you’re all right! I heard the crash when I was down the road taking a little walk in the moonlight, and I came running back, and when you weren’t in the house, I thought you had gone down the bank to see the train and…Oh, Fiona—” and she was crying and hugging Fizz, and Fizz was crying and hugging her back. But why was she calling her Fiona? If I could just think for a minute, I knew that was important somehow.
“It was their train!” sobbed Fizz. “Oh, Betsy, you know it was their train. I saw Bubble waving at me through the window just before it crashed.”
“I know, I know,” replied Betsy.
“We called for help,” gasped Fizz. “Alice had to do it because I was shaking so much—”
“Alice?” said Betsy. “Who’s Alice?”
Fizz opened her eyes and glanced quickly over Betsy’s shoulder at me.
“Nobody, I was confused. I phoned. Help is coming. But Betsy, do you think they’re all right?”
“I don’t know. We can only pray that God spared them.”
As I stood there, watching them clinging to each other, I couldn’t get over how much Betsy reminded me of Mary. And then I remembered something Mary had said about her family cleaning houses around here for over a hundred years, and I wondered if she could possibly be Mary’s grandmother.
And then it came back to me. My first day here, Mom had said that Mrs. Bishop called her Betsy a couple of times. Why on earth—
My thoughts were interrupted by the loud sound of someone banging at the door at the back of the hall. Then it was wrenched open and a man called out, “Can you help? There are wounded people coming up from the crash. Can you help?”
Betsy and Fizz went to meet them.
“Bring them in the kitchen door, downstairs,” said Betsy. “It’s easier that way, without the stairs.”
The man turned back outside, and Fizz and Betsy disappeared into the dining room.
I was left alone in the hall. I could hear the far-off wail of sirens and a clamor of voices downstairs.
I couldn’t help. An invisible person does not make a good nurse. And I didn’t want to see any more. The images of people broken and dying and dead were seared into my memory already, frozen like flash photographs, illuminated by a cold white light.
I shivered, although the air was still so warm and muggy around me. I headed toward the stairs and began to climb. I wanted nothing but to get back into my bed and sleep, and wake up in my own world, with Mom and Dad fighting and maybe getting a divorce and maybe not getting one. I could go swimming with Lily, listen to Mary talking her head off, and laugh at crotchety old Mrs. Bishop bossing everyone around. All of that was familiar and safe, so much safer than the dollhouse world where Fizz’s whole family had been wiped out in a train crash.
Because all of them had died. I was sure of that. They were too near the front of the train when it hit the tree and flew up in the air. Bubble and Harriet and Bob. All gone. Winked away. Just like that.
Fizz knew it and so did I, the moment it happened.
* * *
—
I gave an involuntary sob and stopped, just at that turn of the stairs where it got so steep and scary. I was suddenly so tired that I didn’t think I could lift my foot to the next step. My head began to spin, and I sat down quickly near the wall side of the stairs, not wanting to lose my balance and fall. I closed my eyes for a moment and took some deep breaths.
This is the dollhouse, I told myself. This is a dream. It’s not real.
But the train crash hadn’t felt like a dream. Standing on the hill with Fizz when the lightning struck and watching the train cars heaving and toppling over, and the people screaming— that hadn’t felt like a dream. And waking up inside the train in the dark where Mom was crying as if her heart would break, and someone who looked just like me was lying still and covered in blood beside her— that hadn’t felt like a dream either. It was all too real— and strangely familiar. I’d experienced that train crash before, the night we came to Blackwood House.
As I sat on the stairs, transfixed by the possibility that I had been right all along and our train crash had been far worse than Mom had told me, the world split apart again.
Another bright burst of lightning accompanied by an almost instantaneous crash of thunder rent the air and the dark hall jumped into sharp relief— the thickly carpeted stairs, the polished banisters, the paintings, the chandelier— then it was all swallowed up in a deeper darkness.
The electricity must have gone off. I held my breath. Then, with a mighty swoosh, came another sound: the rhythmic, clattering noise of a torrential downpour.
The weather had finally broken and it was raining.
My first thought was how much more difficult the rain would make it for the crash victims and their rescuers. At least it wasn’t raining the other time. The time with Mom.
I couldn’t figure it out. I had such clear memories of being in a horrendous crash that first night and yet— and yet I also remembered waking up afterward with everything being okay. No one was hurt too badly, and the train wasn’t tipped over. Mom wasn’t crying, and the train started up soon after. How could I have both memories? Which one was true?
The pain in my head was grinding away. The bloody images from both train crashes were bouncing through my brain, till I couldn’t tell which was which. Poor Fizz. All her family— dead. Everyone I had met in the dollhouse— dead. All ghosts.
The rain was drumming on the ground and the windows and the roof, encasing the house in a torrent of falling water. Like Niagara Falls, I thought. Thunder rumbled in the distance, moving away.
I dropped my aching head into my hands and held it.
A thought stirred, deep in my cotton-batten brain, and it slowly rose to the surface.
Maybe they weren’t all ghosts. Fizz wasn’t killed in that crash. It happened in the 1920s. She would be an old lady by now if she was still alive.
A very old lady.
Suddenly the house seemed very quiet. I couldn’t hear any voices from outside or from the basement. No sirens.
I stood up. It was very dark. I gripped the banister and climbed the last few steps to the hall.
I groped my way into Mom’s room and fumbled on her bedside table until my hands closed on a candlestick. I’d seen it there the morning after I slept in her bed. It was the old-fashioned kind with a dish and holder underneath, like the one Wee Willie Winkie carried in my old nursery rhyme book.
I felt around in the drawer and came up with some matches and lit the candle. It illuminated Mom’s room— the neatly made bed, the dresser, the bookshelf by the window. The bathroom doors were both open, and as I stood up and held the candle a little higher, I could just make out the motionless figure lying in Mrs. Bishop’s bed.
The old lady was still sleeping peacefully, just as she had been when I had come down from the attic into the empty house. I must be back in the real house. Weird. The worlds had switched again, somehow, while I was sitting on the stairs after the crash. Except— if this was the real house, where was Mom?
I took a step toward Mrs. Bishop. I could see her white hair gleaming against her pillow in the candlelight. I stood there for a moment, just staring at her. I felt like the whole house was holding its breath with me.
I let my breath out. The hand holding the candle was shaking. I couldn’t go any closer to her.
I wanted this to be over. I was so tired. I just wanted to go back to sleep. Why shouldn’t I? When I woke up, it would be morning, and Mom would be there, and maybe Dad and Mary and Lily, and everything would be back to normal.
I turned away from the old woman sleeping in the bed, back into Mom’s room, and then walked slowly across the hall, holding the candle up high to guide my way. I walked carefully into my room, the candlelight flickering over the rich carpet and the silky green bed curtai
ns. They were closed.
I stopped. I knew I had left them open.
I took another step. The rain pelting down incessantly outside made me feel like I was inside a drum. The window was wide open, and I could smell that sweet, fresh smell of rain in summer. The bed curtains stirred. From the wind? It had to be the wind that was making them billow and shift.
I took another step. My heart was thudding in my chest. I reached out a hand and slowly pulled the curtain back, feeling the fine silk of the real bed curtains, not the coarser silk of the dollhouse bed curtains.
There was somebody in my bed. I could just see the huddled shape under the blankets.
I swear my heart stopped at that moment. I know my breath did.
A girl in a pretty white nightgown was sleeping in my bed, her red hair fanned out against the pillow.
Fizz.
Fizz, in my bed, in a deep sleep. In the real house, not the dollhouse. And Mrs. Bishop across the hall, asleep in her bed, also in the real house.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. Was this the real house? Or was this somewhere else entirely, that was neither dollhouse nor real house? Some kind of…in-between place? Where Fizz and Mrs. Bishop could both be asleep and dreaming?
And then my dream flashed back to me again. In the dream, it was me, not Fizz, who was sleeping in the bed. It was me. Sleeping for years and years while the world went on around me. All alone in my little green world, waiting to wake up. Lonely. With a train whistle in the distance, getting closer.
Was it really me who had been sleeping for all that time in my dream? Or was it Fizz?
Part Five
THE DREAMER
Chapter Forty-Six
THE WITCH
I stood, candle in hand, staring down at the sleeping Fizz. Whose dream was it? Mine or hers?
A loud, screeching buzzer shattered the silence, echoing through the empty house.
Mrs. Bishop’s bell.
I jumped and let out a shriek. I just managed not to drop the candle. My scream seemed to blend in with the echoes of the bell, and the sound died away like a train whistle charging into the distance.
I steadied myself by grabbing the post of the bed, waiting for the adrenaline rush to pass.
Fizz hadn’t stirred.
Hmmm. I reached out my hand to her white arm and gave it a quick pinch.
“Fizz! Wake up!”
She still didn’t move. Her breath came evenly, her chest rising and falling peacefully.
I pinched again, harder. “Fizz!”
She didn’t react.
In sleep her expression was soft, with a little smile at the corner of her lips. Whatever she was dreaming about, it wasn’t the train crash.
Mrs. Bishop’s bell cut through the house again, high-pitched, insistent.
I turned away from sleeping Fizz and made my way reluctantly out of the room and back across the hall, gripping the candlestick tight. Each step was an effort.
The light from my candle preceded me into her room. My hand was shaking again now, and the light skittered and danced over the thick blue carpet and the rich velvet bed curtains. And then I turned and saw her.
She lay propped up among the pillows, watching me. Something green flickered on her hand.
The emerald ring— which I had last seen twinkling on Harriet’s hand at the party when she took the champagne glass from her husband.
I stepped forward and held the candle closer to Mrs. Bishop’s face so I could see her more clearly.
Tonight she really did look like a mean old witch, with her long nose, her sharp chin and her jutting eyebrows. I’d never noticed what color her eyes were before, but now I could see a flash of green in the flickering light from the candle.
I knew those eyes.
I tried to speak, but my voice was no more than a croak. I swallowed and tried again.
“Fizz?” I whispered.
Her eyes gleamed.
“Took you long enough,” she said. “You’re not actually a very intelligent child, are you?”
I swallowed again.
“How— how—?” I seemed to have lost the ability to form words.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, stop gaping. You look like a fish,” she snapped, and then a smile twitched across her mouth. She threw back her head and laughed.
It all came together. Fizz. Fiona. Fiona Bishop. Mrs. Bishop.
This old lady with her white hair and sharp features looked nothing like the Fizz who was sleeping in my bed with her red hair and smooth skin. Only the eyes were similar, but when she laughed, it was like the two people merged and I could see that she really was Fizz— or some version of Fizz.
“I— I don’t understand,” I said feebly.
“No, that’s obvious,” said Mrs. Bishop. “You take a very long time to catch on to things, don’t you?”
That was pure Fizz. Acting superior because she knew something I didn’t.
I stared at Mrs. Bishop for a moment, trying to see how she and Fizz could possibly be the same person. Fizz did have a sharpish nose and a sharpish chin, but her face was so young and full that they didn’t stand out the way they did on Mrs. Bishop. And the lines and wrinkles on Mrs. Bishop’s face seemed to emphasize her features, while Fizz’s face was unlined and clear of all the wear and tear the years had put on Mrs. Bishop.
Her hands were an old woman’s hands, stiff with arthritis—
“The ring,” I said slowly. “Harriet’s ring.”
She glanced at it. “So you did notice something,” she said. “She left it behind in her jewelry box when they went to the city. I put it on that awful night, and I’ve been wearing it ever since.” She raised her hand and turned the ring slowly so the candlelight glinted in the dark-green shadows within.
“So it’s all true,” I said finally, pulling my eyes away from the hypnotic radiance of the emerald and looking at her face again. “Everything that happened? Everything I saw?”
She looked up at me. The smirk was gone now and she just looked sad.
“Yes,” she said. “It all happened. Long ago.”
“The train crash?” I whispered, remembering the train cars flying into the air and Fizz sobbing in Betsy’s arms.
She nodded. “They all died,” she said. “Bubble. My mother. My father. Fizz.”
“Fizz?” I asked. “But Fizz didn’t die in the crash. You’re Fizz.”
“No,” she said softly. “I used to be, but I’m not anymore. I’m Fiona. Everything that was Fizz was destroyed that night. She’s been dead for sixty-eight years.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
LOCKED AWAY
I tried to make sense of what she was saying. Everything I thought I knew was flying around like a bunch of juggler’s balls about to cut loose and tumble into the audience. I tried to grab at something.
“She’s not dead,” I said stupidly. “She’s sleeping in my bed.”
“She might as well be dead,” said Mrs. Bishop slowly, as if each word hurt her to say. “That girl, the girl that was me, died out there on that hillside when the train crashed. I was only Fiona after that, and that was the end of Fizz. I shut her away in the dollhouse. Then I closed up this house and the horrors of that awful night and left it all behind.”
She fell silent. I thought of this house locked up all that time, the curtains shut tight against the light, the lovely furniture draped in sheets. And the dollhouse in the attic, identical curtains pulled across the windows, little sheets over the little chairs and sofas and beds.
And Fizz, sleeping in the dollhouse bed, all that time, dreaming as the world turned and time passed without her.
Mrs. Bishop seemed to have forgotten me. Her eyes looked far beyond what I could see. I felt like she and I were marooned in a small island of candlelight while the darkness lapped around us lik
e waves against the shore.
“How long?” I asked finally. “How long was it all closed away?”
She gave a big sigh. “Sixty-seven years. I went away to boarding school in September 1929, after the train crash, and I didn’t come back until last year. Sixty-seven years. It was closed up all that time. Mr. Brock— Fred— my father’s lawyer and best friend, looked after it at first, along with Betsy, our housekeeper.”
Her eyes were sad, and it seemed that she was dialing back the years in her mind. “I wanted to get rid of the house. Just sell it. But because of the way my grandfather’s will was written, I couldn’t. He tied everything up in a special trust, and then my father tied up the dollhouse with it in his will. My grandfather wanted the house to stay in the family. But there was no family. Only me.”
Her voice faded in and out, as if she was talking to herself, not to me. I had to strain to hear her.
“I tried to forget about it. I did my best. I had my life in England. But the whole time there was a darkness niggling away at me, deep inside. I always knew that Blackwood House was here, all locked up, with everything inside just the way it had been left. Not just the furniture. Not just the dollhouse. My parents. My sister. My childhood self. All here, as if they were frozen in time on that terrible night. No. I could bury it, but I could never completely forget it.”
She looked over at me then, as if she had just remembered I was there.
“I had to keep it. The only way I could get rid of it was to die and leave it to somebody else in my will. The house was well cared for over the years. When Fred Brock retired, his son took over the law firm, and when Betsy got too old to come in and clean, her daughter took her place. And a long time after that, it fell to Fred’s grandson and Mary, Betsy’s granddaughter. Three generations. They, all of them, kept my trust all those years and didn’t speak of it to anyone.
The Dollhouse Page 19