“All the locals remembered was that the family was killed in a train crash. When I came back, people around here thought I was an eccentric old lady from England who had bought the house. And that was fine with me. I didn’t want it all brought up again and talked about. I didn’t want anyone to know who I really was.”
“But why did you come back?” I asked. “If you hated it so much? Why didn’t you just stay in England?”
She looked at me directly then, and again I felt the power of those intense green eyes.
“As the years went by, that dark little corner of my mind where I had locked everything up began to take up more space. Memories of my life before the train crash began to surface at the oddest times— things I’d done with Bubble, conversations with my father, arguments with my mother. I tried to shut them down and close them away again, but they kept coming back. Then when I was about seventy-eight, I had some health problems, and I could see my own death coming closer and closer, and the darkness began to take over. It grew bigger and bigger until it was all I could do to focus on anything else.
“I thought I was going mad. I could see my family when I closed my eyes at night before I went to sleep. I could hear their voices in my sleep. And then I started to have a recurring dream that I was young again, lying in my bed with the green curtains, sleeping while the world turned without me.
“For the first time since I left this house when I was twelve, I wanted to come back. I needed to come back. I needed to come back to this house to die where my parents and my sister had died. The house was calling me back. Death was calling me back.”
The candle flame flickered in a sudden draft from the window. I shivered. I could almost hear the house calling to her, whispering like the wind outside in the trees, sending its ghostly message across the miles and miles of land and ocean to where she lived in England.
“I ran away from it all my life,” said Mrs. Bishop quietly. “And finally there was nowhere to run but back. But a very strange thing happened, Alice. As I felt Death pulling me back here, there was something else. A tiny spark of hope. Because I knew everything was still here— the house, the furniture, the books. And the dollhouse. And the dolls. Even though they were wrapped in a death shroud for all that time, they were here. I started to believe, against all reason, that they were waiting for me to come back and wake them up. That I might be able to get back through the dollhouse and be with them again, the way it was before the crash.”
Her voice trembled a little, and if possible, her eyes grew even more intense, boring into mine.
“I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in God. But I believed that somehow if I came back here, I could taste it again. Taste my childhood. Through the dollhouse.
“I knew it was a mad idea. All my life in England was built on being an objective journalist. I had no room in my life for wild flights of the imagination.
“But as I drew closer to my death, I began to see the world differently. I had nothing to lose anymore. So I came home. Hoping beyond hope to somehow find my family again.”
Her wild green eyes were fastened on mine, her face flushed.
She looked like a madwoman.
And I was trapped with her in this place, somewhere in between the dollhouse and the real house, and I didn’t know how to get out.
Chapter Forty-Eight
BROKEN GLASS
She must have seen something of what I was feeling in the expression on my face because she gave a witch-like little cackle of laughter and began to mock me, just the way Fizz would have done.
“You’re scared of me now, aren’t you, Alice? You think I’m insane. But it’s not me you should be afraid of. It’s this house. It’s what’s in this house, all around us.”
I shivered again as she said that and glanced back over my shoulder. I could almost hear the darkness whispering to me. I was aware of the open door behind me leading into the hall and the cavern of the stairs curving down into the deep darkness of the rest of the house.
“What happened?” I asked. My mouth was so dry that I could barely give voice to the words. I swallowed. “When you came back? What happened?”
She laughed again, but this time there was a bitterness in her laughter that I had never seen in Fizz.
“Nothing happened. As soon as I walked in the door, I knew I’d made a mistake. The house was filled with shadows but no ghosts. Everything was sad here. Sadder than sad. I had the house and furniture restored to what it had been, except the kitchen— I had a new kitchen put in, with doors to the terrace. But everything else was the same as when I was a child.
“But the house was empty. There was nothing for me here. I would climb the stairs to the attic every day and play with the dollhouse, all by myself, when Mary was gone. I’d move the dolls around. I’d dress them in the clothes that were identical to the clothes we wore. I’d sit there for hours.
“But nothing came alive. The only thing that came back was the pain. It grew until it was as sharp inside me as it was the day that train crashed. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to walk. It hurt every minute of every day. And finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and—”
She broke off. The words had been pouring out of her and she seemed out of breath. She took a moment to calm herself down, and then began to speak again, so softly that I had to lean in closer to be able to hear her.
“I stood at the top of the stairs. Those stairs have always been treacherous. I felt like I was living inside a bag of broken glass, and every time I moved, shards of glass would pierce my skin. And I stood there, looking down the stairs and then I let everything go and I fell.
“I thought it would hurt for just a few more moments, till I reached the bottom of the stairs, and then it would stop.”
I felt that feeling of suspension again as she spoke, like the world was holding its breath.
“I fell slowly at first, but then I bounced off the wall where the stairs turn, and I picked up speed. My leg twisted under me and then I was at the bottom, lying there looking up at the chandelier. Still alive. Still in agony. Only now it was my head and my leg that were hurting as much as my spirit had been hurting before.
“I used every swear word I had ever heard. I even made up some. All I had done was make everything worse. I was lying in helpless pain on the floor, and Mary wouldn’t be in until nine the next morning. Not only was I not dead, but now I wouldn’t even be able to climb the stairs to the attic and look at the dollhouse.
“And then I started to laugh.” She grinned, and for just a moment, she was Fizz again. “It was just so funny! I had made a complete mess of it. But laughing made my head hurt, so I stopped.
“I suppose I was unconscious for a while. I had that dream again. I dreamed I was Fizz, sleeping in my bed with the green curtains in the summer heat. Sleeping for days and weeks and months and years. Dimly aware of sounds outside and life going on, but still asleep. Delicious, deep, wonderful sleep.”
She smiled. “The best of sleeps. A happy sleep, knowing that when I woke up everything was going to be fun. A summer holiday sleep. And as I lay there in that beautiful dream, I heard the far-off sound of a train whistle. And then I knew that someone was going to come soon and wake me up and pull me into the daytime world.”
She stopped talking. She looked sleepy now, as if talking about that wonderful sleep was putting her back there.
I reached out and gave her arm a little shake.
“Then what happened?” I said.
Her eyes snapped out of their sleepiness and she frowned.
“What do you think happened?” she said crossly. “I woke up in the hospital with a concussion and a broken leg.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
THE CONNECTION
The wind stirred the curtains and that fresh after-the-rain smell wafted in again. The house was so quiet. I imagin
ed Mrs. Bishop lying twisted at the bottom of the stairs, all alone, with this dense darkness all around her, knowing that it would be hours before anyone came to help her. In and out of consciousness— dreaming.
“That dream you had,” I said slowly. “That was my dream too. The same dream.”
“It’s Fizz’s dream,” said Mrs. Bishop. “Not yours, not mine. That was what she was dreaming all those years while she lay locked away in the dollhouse.”
“Like Sleeping Beauty,” I said. “Sleeping for a hundred years.”
“Sixty-eight years,” corrected Mrs. Bishop. “But yes, like Sleeping Beauty. And like Sleeping Beauty, she needed someone to wake her up. Not me. Somebody else.”
There was a brief silence.
“Me. You mean me, don’t you?” I said. “I was the one to wake her up.”
Mrs. Bishop nodded.
“That night you came here, that was the sixty-eighth anniversary of the train crash that killed my family. I was lying in bed trying not to think about it, but I couldn’t help myself. Every year on June 21 it’s the same— I try not to remember, but it all comes back to me anyway. And then the train came, and then the sound of a crash, and for a moment I was right back there on the hillside watching the train cars fly up into the air. I could smell the smoke; I could hear the people screaming, just as if it had happened all over again.
“But I saw it too! That first night, I mean. When I woke up after the accident, I remembered a much worse accident than what really happened. I saw all that.”
“You saw it because Fizz saw it. Because I…saw it. Somehow we were connected in that moment and we’ve been connected ever since.”
I thought about this for a moment. It seemed bizarre.
Mrs. Bishop went on. “I know the minute we became connected. Right at that moment, reliving the crash, I saw something new, something I’d never seen in all the times I’ve been haunted by those awful memories. A young girl with blood running down her face. You.”
“Me?” I squeaked.
“Well, I didn’t know it was you, not until I saw you the next morning. Then I recognized you at once. But by then I knew you were the one to wake Fizz up.”
“How…how did you know?”
“Because when you went to sleep that night and dreamed you saw Fizz sleeping beside you, I saw her too. I was dreaming what you were dreaming. And it’s been like that ever since. Every time you have the dream about going into the dollhouse, I’m with you. I’ve seen them all. Bubble, Mother, Father, Sailor—” She broke off, smiling. “Good old Sailor.”
“But how—” I began. “How did you get inside my dreams? That’s what I don’t understand. And I wasn’t the first person to wake Fizz up. Lily woke her up before I even got here.”
“She did?”
Finally, something Mrs. Bishop didn’t know about.
“Yes, the night Lily slept in that bed, after you got back from the hospital. Fizz woke up and called her Bubble. She said it wasn’t time yet.”
Mrs. Bishop frowned. “Hmmm. I guess Lily wasn’t the right person.” Then her face cleared. “That must be because I had no connection with Lily. After the train crash, you and I were connected, and we had the same dreams. It wouldn’t work with Lily because she wasn’t in the train crash. You were.”
She spoke as if it all made perfect sense. But it was still impossible, all of it.
Except that it had happened.
“Oh, and I heard the two of you sneaking up the stairs to play with the dollhouse,” she said. “Not much happens in this house that I don’t know about. I hear every little squeak of the stairs or the floorboards. Nothing wrong with my hearing.” She laughed. It was Fizz’s laugh, loud and infectious.
Except I didn’t feel like laughing.
“And, of course, I arranged for you to find the keys in my dressing table that day,” she went on. “I wanted you to go up there, Alice, I wanted you to pull out all the dolls and play with them and wake everything up. Then you’d be all the more likely to dream of them at night. And you thought you were being so careful, you and Lily, hiding around the house.” She laughed again.
“I still don’t understand,” I said. “I still don’t understand how you and I can be dreaming the same thing. About the dollhouse. About Fizz. Why are we so connected?”
“You know, I’ve been thinking about that too, Alice. I didn’t figure it out until tonight, when we dreamed about the train crash and what happened on that awful night.”
A picture of the upturned train cars, the smoke and Fizz struggling to break free of the conductor flashed into my head.
“What about it?” I asked, my voice shaking just a bit.
“You had another dream tonight, didn’t you?”
And there it was.
The image I had been trying to push away ever since I saw it. The image of the motionless girl with the blood in her hair on the train with my mother crying beside her.
Chapter Fifty
DEATH
I couldn’t say it.
“You mean— you mean—” My voice came out as half croak, half whisper.
Mrs. Bishop looked at me calmly.
“You know what I mean. Fizz kept telling you. The train crash. Your train crash.” She spoke slowly, each word hammering against my skull. “Your train crashed sixty-eight years to the day of the crash that killed my family. On a night near the summer solstice when the moon was full and a tree fell across the train tracks, just like what happened in the crash in 1929, which was also on a night near the summer solstice when the moon was full. When your train crashed, you must have been hurt more badly than anyone realized. That’s why you’ve been able to go into the dollhouse world. And that’s why you were the one who could wake Fizz up and help her.”
“No,” I whispered feebly.
“Fizz has been trying to tell you all along, but you wouldn’t believe her,” said Mrs. Bishop, her green eyes gleaming.
I shook my head.
“I don’t know why you’re still fighting this, Alice,” said Mrs. Bishop in a very reasonable, patient voice. “It’s all around us. Can’t you feel it?”
Panic took over. “What?” I yelled, jumping to my feet. “Feel what? Tell me! Stop playing with me like you’re a cat and I’m a mouse. You’re so much like Fizz it makes me sick! You’re mean and cruel and—” I floundered. “And nasty!”
She laughed, and her laugh was pure Fizz. “You’re so funny, Alice. She’s told you again and again. You’re in my dollhouse because you’re dead. Or as good as.”
The word seemed to echo in the silence of the house, and the fear that had been simmering ever since I came to Blackwood House boiled over and swooshed through me like the scalding steam from a kettle. I couldn’t breathe or move. A darkness began to close around Mrs. Bishop and me.
But it wasn’t an empty darkness. There was a presence here, filling the house, filling the sky, filling the world. A massive presence that was slowly wrapping itself around us, pulling us into its dark heart.
It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t kind. It was bigger than cruel or kind. Nothing could stop it.
I realized this wasn’t the first time I had felt it. Every time I came back from the dollhouse world, that darkness was there. And in the sudden, profound silence after the train crash, as I lay on the ground breathing in the metallic smell of the train with the grass tickling my nose, I felt that huge, relentless presence enfolding all the people who were dying. Taking them away.
And now I felt it here. Spreading up the curving staircase. Creeping along the thick carpets. Sidling around the corners into this room with Mrs. Bishop and me.
“No,” I whispered. “No.” I took a deep, shuddering breath.
Mrs. Bishop was watching me closely with an air of grim satisfaction.
“No!” I said more loudly. I grabbed her hand a
nd turned it over, feeling for her pulse the way my mother had taught me. The thump, thump, thump of her blood beat a steady rhythm through my fingers.
She let me do it, watching me with that annoying, superior half-smile I found so infuriating in Fizz.
“You’re not dead!” I said, letting go of her wrist and holding my own for a moment. A reassuring thump, thump, thump vibrated through my fingers. “And neither am I. And neither is Fizz.”
“Very good,” she said, with patient condescension, as if she was a teacher encouraging a hopeless student. “You’re right. We’re not completely dead. Not yet. But Death is here. It’s all around us. It’s waiting. You feel it just as I do.”
I shivered as she said that and I knew it was true. I glanced quickly over my shoulder.
Darkness. Darkness was all around us. Only the flickering flame of the candle seemed to hold it at bay.
I kept finding it hard to breathe. Like whatever was there in the house with us was stealing my breath. Snatching it away.
“It’s no use fighting it,” said Mrs. Bishop, watching me struggling with my breath. Her green eyes glowed in the candlelight like two bright, hard emeralds.
I focused on drawing each breath more deeply into my lungs. I didn’t know if it was the fear or that thing all around us that was making it so hard for me to breathe, but I wasn’t going to stop breathing. Not yet.
Mrs. Bishop spoke up again. Her voice was soft, insistent, almost kind.
“It’s better to face it, Alice. You can’t run forever. I learned that. I locked it up in this house years ago and I’ve been running from it ever since. But it’s no good. It brought me back here and now it’s going to take me. And you. And Fizz.”
Chapter Fifty-One
CANDLES
I closed my eyes. I felt like I couldn’t move. Fear engulfed me. I was going to die.
And in that moment, beyond hope, I heard my granny’s voice whispering to me.
The Dollhouse Page 20