Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  Finally, he had enough hot water for a bath, and he scrubbed himself twice, with soap each time, to restore his skin to its rightful colour. Then he washed his uniform in the murky bathwater. Down the drain went the stains and the smell, and with them some of his blue funk.

  Etta would be safe, he told himself. She was smart and stubborn and didn’t need him to look after her. He should be worrying about himself, and fixing something resembling dinner. Toast, rock-hard eggs and burned bacon weren’t going to keep him going for very long, not if he hoped to tackle the cellar again in the morning. At that moment, he was far from sure what he was going to do …

  In the end, he just had toast with an extra helping of butter to fill his belly. Hopefully there would be a new loaf in the pantry the next morning, for he had eaten all that was left, right down to the crusts. Sipping on a mug of chocolate by the fire, he soon found himself nodding off, but there was something so mournful and lonely about going upstairs to his tiny room that he decided to spend a second night in the kitchen, where the sound of shifting logs in the fireplace would at least give him the illusion of company.

  Tomorrow, perhaps, he would work out what came next …

  His sleep was restless, and in the middle of the night, he sat bolt upright, the echo of a plaintive cry in his ears.

  It had been Etta’s voice again, he was sure of it!

  He sat as still as a post, hardly daring even to breathe, waiting for the cry to recur.

  It didn’t, and as time passed he became increasingly certain that he had only been dreaming.

  No wonder, he supposed. He felt guilty for reasons he couldn’t easily define. Perhaps he should have been more open-minded. Or perhaps he simply should have argued less. If she had been there, he would have asked her and happily accepted what she told him. A sharp set down was always followed by peace and goodwill, with her – and even if it was different this time, he would take that over the emptiness of the manor.

  It was amazing, he thought, how lonely he felt without her.

  He got up to stoke the fire and then lay back down again, not really believing that he would fall asleep a second time. Every muscle ached. He couldn’t get comfortable, no matter which way he tried to settle.

  Sleep did come, however, and with it some true rest, so when he woke in the morning he actually felt a degree or two less hopeless. Etta was out in the world somewhere. Not here in the house crying out in the night. And he knew that she wouldn’t abandon him. Any moment now, she could come running back into the manor, accompanied by her mother, some constables, even a sorcerer or two to break the spell.

  He got up, dressed, and went to wait by the gate. There he felt hope rather than the despair of tackling a cellar that had already defeated him once.

  By midday, he could resist the growling of his stomach no longer. He found a fresh loaf of bread in the pantry, as hoped for, and made a rough sandwich from cheese and butter, then went to resume his pacing.

  There he stayed, all afternoon, but still no Etta.

  At sunset, he returned to the manor with hopes decidedly diminished. If she was going to come back, she would have done so by now, surely. The nearest village, Lower Rudmere, was less than three hours’ walk, and she had been gone for almost a full day. Either she wasn’t coming back, or she had never made it there in the first place.

  He should have listened to her, worked with her, followed her. He prowled the house, not eating, not listening to anyone who tried to talk to him from the chimneys, from the pipes, or from wherever they were hiding.

  Long after the sun had set, he was passing the servants’ stairs when he heard Etta cry out a third time. Tempted to ignore it as a product of his feverish imagination, he might have kept walking, had not it come again, a fourth time. It was definitely Etta – and it sounded like it was coming from the kitchen!

  With a hesitant step, he descended the stairs. Ugo and Olive were silent, as though they were listening too. The whole house seemed to be hanging on, breathlessly waiting.

  The cry came again, and again, and he followed it to its source.

  The scullery door was shut, locked with a key he had never known existed. He rattled the handle, but it was defiantly unyielding. Pounding on the door, he called Etta’s name.

  ‘Etta, Etta, are you in there?’

  The reply came instantly.

  ‘Almanac! Oh, Almanac, is that really you? You have to get me out of here!’

  The last thing Etta remembered was running hard across the open grass with the manor and its gates receding into the distance behind her. She had no light to guide her way and the moon was new, so the darkness grew tight around her like a cloak until she could hardly see her feet pounding beneath her, but she only started to worry when the stars began to go out … and then the darkness was in her mind … and with a scream as soft as a bee’s sigh she fell … fell … fell …

  When she woke, she was in a room so tiny she could barely outstretch her arms. There was enough light to see by, but only barely, issuing through faded white paint covering a cobwebby window. There was a stone basin for doing dishes, and a set of rudimentary shelves holding a variety of cleaning supplies.

  She knew this room. It was the poky manor scullery.

  But how had she come to be here? She had no recollection of turning around and going back inside the gates, and would never have willingly done so, not after all the effort it had taken her to get out.

  Had Silas summoned Lord Nigel to open the gate and retrieve her?

  Alarm and anger filled her. Leaping to her feet, she tried the door and found it securely locked. It opened inwards, so she took the handle in both hands and pulled with all her weight, but it didn’t budge a hair. Looking around for anything she could use to pry it open – oh, if only she had the crowbar now! – she found nothing that didn’t break or bend the moment she tried to force it into the crack between door and jamb.

  Exasperated, she resisted the urge to shout. If she was now a literal prisoner, she didn’t want her captors knowing she was awake. Given enough time, she could surely find a way out.

  ‘Conserve your energy,’ said a voice she had come to know well. ‘That is my advice.’

  ‘Ugo?’ At first, she thought he was on the other side of the door, but it sounded as though he was speaking from behind her, even though she was certain the scullery didn’t have a chimney.

  Turning around, she came face to face with a small boy dressed in worn but colourful garb, with brown hair hanging long down his back. It was hard to tell what colour or age he was. He had a smudged face and eyes that were much older than his years, but that was not the oddest thing about him.

  He glowed like a will-o’-the-wisp, and what was more, was standing inside the wall, as though the brick and plaster had turned to glass and revealed another chamber beyond, one as narrow and cramped as the wall itself.

  Etta screamed and backed away until her shoulders thudded against the door.

  ‘Do not be frightened of me, Etta,’ Ugo said, raising his blackened hands in entreaty. ‘I cannot hurt you.’

  ‘Who … what are you?’

  A taller girl stepped out of the darkness in the corner to stand next to the shadowy figure within the wall. She glowed too.

  ‘You’ve never heard me speak,’ the girl said, ‘but I’m Olive. Pleased to meet you.’

  Etta felt faint. Was this some awful waking dream? Had she been knocked on the head harder than she’d realised? If she closed her eyes and held her breath long enough, would these phantoms leave her?

  All around her, pallidly phosphorescent people were appearing in the brick and mortar: a middle-aged man with a long nose and high forehead dressed in style; a bookish, black woman wearing a stained, white smock; a corpulent man occupying a formal suit and respectful expression; a bearded man who looked strong despite age and a stooped right shoulder; a white-haired old lady with entreaty in her eyes …

  She knew them. She knew them all.

&nbs
p; ‘No, keep away! Keep away!’

  ‘Don’t be afraid!’

  ‘We won’t hurt you! We couldn’t if we wanted to, even now. The worst has already been done to you!’

  They tried to talk to her, but Etta was deaf to every word. All she could do was press herself against the door and scream.

  Her panicky cries were cut short when the door behind her rattled.

  ‘Etta, Etta, are you in there?’

  Relief flooded her.

  ‘Almanac! Oh, Almanac, is that really you? You have to get me out of here!’

  ‘I will. Hang on!’

  ‘No, don’t leave me!’

  But she could hear his footsteps receding across the kitchen floor and up the servants’ stairs. He was already gone.

  Clenching her fists, she turned to face the phantoms again. They stood in a ring around her, no closer than the walls, which they couldn’t seem to leave, but that was quite near enough. There were more of them now, some so faint she didn’t notice them unless they moved.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked in a hushed voice.

  ‘To explain,’ said the woman in the white smock, undoubtedly Doctor Mithily.

  ‘Save your breath,’ Etta said. ‘I just want to get out of here.’

  ‘I’m afraid the boy can’t help you,’ said the long-nosed man, Lord Nigel.

  ‘Look down, lass,’ said Silas, not unkindly.

  She did as instructed, and promptly screamed again.

  From her hands and arms issued a pale light. The rest of her also glowed, from the ends of her pigtails to the tips of her work shoes. She still had the injuries she’d sustained while climbing the wall or gate, but they no longer bled or even hurt. That was small comfort.

  ‘Dear poppet,’ said Lady Simone, ‘you’re one of us. That’s why you can see us. We’re all in the same sailboat.’

  It was too much to take in at once. Etta’s head spun, and for an instant she feared she might swoon, which she had never done before and hoped not to do now, even if she had somehow been turned into a … into a … a ghost?

  The possibility that she might have been killed was too great for her mind to encompass.

  And yet, try as she might, she could hear no pulse throbbing in her ears, and when she held her breath, she found she felt no need to breathe again.

  She was a ghost.

  ‘Who did this to me?’ she asked, fighting the urge to cry. She had no memory of any sorcerer coming and killing her. But she wanted to know who to blame.

  ‘The spell did this,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘It did this to all of us when we escaped.’

  ‘Then it brought me back here? It made me … like you?’

  ‘A ghost, yes,’ said Ugo. ‘Now, at last, we can reveal everything.’

  ‘Everything we know about the magic, anyway,’ corrected Doctor Mithily.

  Etta stared at them in shock. The ghosts had never been able to talk about the spell before. This was too great an opportunity to pass up … if she could only put aside the matter of how she had come to possess it.

  ‘All … all right,’ she said, fighting the sense that the walls were closing tightly around her in an unwanted embrace. Maybe there was hope yet, that thinking she had become a ghost was just her being dramatic, like her ma always said she was.

  ‘Go on. And don’t leave anything out.’

  ‘The spell was cast long ago,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘I have been here thirty years and am far from the oldest. That honour belonged to Tabitha, who lived in the manor almost beyond her memory, but is with us no longer. There are many here now who weren’t here then, and vice versa. Tabitha knew some of the first who were trapped. They told her they came to the house over eighty years ago. They rented the house, or worked for the people who rented the house … It is frustratingly unclear. We can’t ask them because they have faded into nothing, but I believe we can take Tabitha at her word.’

  ‘Who cast the spell?’ Etta asked. ‘And what do you mean, “faded”?’

  ‘That is what happens to everyone here, eventually.’ Doctor Mithily wiped her palms on her white smock, as though erasing the evidence of a chemical mistake. ‘We are ghosts, but not completely dead. Over time, we grow faint and … disappear. Why? That I have been unable to determine. And who does this to us? A powerful sorcerer, no doubt, but they left no signature, no trace apart from the spell itself. The matter of why it was cast also eludes me, as do the means by which it sustains itself. All active spells need … fuel, for want of a better word … and my experiments on the house’s magical aether, testing for such a fuel source, have been inconclusive. It seems to be all around us … But I am not by training a supernatural scientist. What I have deduced is that the spell is confined to the house and grounds, and that it obeys certain rules that we have learned by trial and error. You broke one of them. That is why you are here now.’

  ‘By attempting to escape?’

  ‘No,’ said Olive. ‘By succeeding. Trying isn’t sufficient. You have to actually get outside the grounds.’

  ‘Almanac broke the rules, too,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘But he stayed inside the walls of the grounds, so for him the consequences are different.’

  ‘I wanted to warn you both,’ said Ugo, ‘but I could not.’

  ‘That is another of the rules,’ Doctor Mithily said. ‘But you figured that one out already. The spell will stop us telling anyone the truth beyond these walls, but apart from that it pays no attention to what we say.’

  ‘You are a smart young girl,’ said Mr Packer, his voice precisely as resonant as a butler’s ought to be. ‘My hopes were initially pinned on Almanac, but you kept up with him at every turn. Together, you might have delivered the salvation we longed for—’

  ‘Now, now,’ interrupted Lady Simone, ‘she was not to know.’

  ‘Indeed, how could she?’ asked Lord Nigel. ‘We have been held off at every pass by forces far beyond our measure.’

  ‘Aye, and our own disagreements have done naught to help,’ said Silas.

  ‘We know who to blame for that,’ said Olive sourly.

  ‘Slow down,’ said Etta, holding up her hands.

  ‘We apologise,’ said Ugo with a solemnity in excess of his years. ‘I understand. There is so much you want to know.’

  ‘There is little else I can tell you with any degree of certainty,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘The spell contains us, but it also sustains us, as you noticed when you arrived. Food appears as needed, for those who still require it. The water is always fresh. The spell maintains the house, too, which is why it looks so pristine despite its age. But naught can evade time’s toll, not even a ghost, it seems, for nothing remains of those who came before us. They have faded away, as I said, and become completely dead. Perhaps the sorcerer was one of them – caught in a trap of their own making – for we have never seen hide nor hair of them. Unless … No, the clues you followed were laid down by brave souls who came before us, not by the mastermind of our fate. But the spell cannot destroy these clues any more than it can destroy a bannister or bathtub. That is why they are hidden – behind a panel, such as the library, or under vast quantities of rubbish. You are not the first to attempt to follow them. All before you have failed – because, it is my strong belief, they tried alone.’

  ‘Poppycock,’ said Lady Simone with none of the swooning frailty she displayed in the Yellow Room. ‘This fancy...your folly...will lead only to the entrapment of more innocents. I have never condoned it!’

  ‘Yet Etta and Almanac went further than any of us,’ said Lord Nigel in a mournful voice. ‘I allowed my hopes to fly for a moment.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘It did seem at first that providence had brought them here to release us.’

  ‘Providence?’ Etta looked from one ghostly form to another, not remotely understanding what they were talking about now. ‘We were invited here. We got letters from Lady Simone and Mr Packer—’

  ‘That was the spell, my dear,’ said
Mr Packer. ‘Impersonating us.’

  ‘It selects its, ah, victims from the world at large,’ Doctor Mithily said, ‘always people in need, and always people without magical ability – to protect itself from attack, I believe. It draws them in with the promise of better prospects than they currently enjoy, like an animal trap lures its prey under a basket that doesn’t fall until the snack has been taken. Here, the basket is the grounds and the snack is the house. I was offered a laboratory with unlimited time to study—’

  ‘I, an office in which I could work without interruption,’ said Lord Nigel.

  ‘And me, I wouldn’t have to be married off to that rotten tyrant,’ said Olive. ‘We all got exactly what we wanted, if you squint hard enough, but at the same time it’s all a lie … a horrible lie … ’

  ‘If only you and Almanac had not argued,’ mourned Lord Nigel. ‘But for that, we might be free at this very moment!’

  All of them started talking at once, so none of them could be understood.

  Etta turned her back on them. She refused to show this rabble of ghosts just how confused and upset she was. She had come to the manor hoping to prove her true self – clever and strong, not at all surplus to anyone’s needs – and now she was trapped, possibly forever, with no hope of escape. And mostly dead to boot. It wasn’t her fault that no one had told her that she was supposed to save everyone!

  Now she could only hope that Almanac, alone, could pull off the miracle that had eluded the likes of Doctor Mithily for thirty years … for his sake, even if it was too late for her.

  ‘Stop it!’ she yelled, coming around to face the noisy rabble. ‘You can’t blame me for arguing with Almanac when that’s all you seem to do!’

  ‘That is fair,’ said Lady Simone. ‘I apologise, dear, but you have no idea the trials we have endured. It is true that none of us chose you, but we did cause you to be here—’