by Lois Duncan
“It was an original,” Professor Farley said. “It was the work of Vermeer, no matter whose hand it was that held the brush.”
“But couldn’t experts tell the age of the painting?” Ruth asked in bewilderment. “The paint would be different and so would the canvas.”
“You are forgetting,” Professor Farley said, “that Madame is herself an expert on art. She supplied her students with used canvases of the proper vintage, scraped down to the original gesso. She was also able to supply paints made from lapis lazuli and cochineal. The final look of aging is not difficult to achieve. We baked the paintings in a hundred-degree oven for two hours and then rolled them to bring up the craquelure. No one can tell the painting is anything but authentic.”
They had thought of everything.
I won’t go to sleep, Kit told herself. I may sit here all night, but I will not close my eyes. It was a futile vow, and she knew it. Sleep waited behind her door like an all-encompassing fog. The moment she stepped into her room a heavy drowsiness would fall upon her, almost as though she had been administered a sleep-inducing drug, and her eyes would be falling closed before she reached the bed.
Tonight she fought it by crossing to the window. Pressing her forehead against the cold glass, she stared out into the night. At first she could see nothing but darkness.
Then, as her eyes became adjusted, she saw the black shapes of the trees begin to emerge against the sky and realized that somewhere, too high to be seen from the house, the moon must be hanging bright in the sky. This is the wing, she thought, where the Brewers slept. Perhaps the Brewer babies were born here. This is where they had their nursery and where the parents had their big master bedroom.
Suddenly, there sprang into her mind a vivid picture of a woman, perhaps a little younger than her own mother, standing at this window just as Kit herself was doing now.
The woman was plump and dreamy-eyed, and she loved her home; she loved to stand here and gaze out at the summer garden and the stretch of smooth, green lawn leading to the sparkling pond.
The world seemed to shift, the night lifted from Kit’s eyes, and she could see before her the same scene that the woman saw: a lush garden abloom with flowers and a sunlit lawn on which three little boys were playing. A baby carriage was parked in the shade of an oak tree, and a uniformed nurse wearing a sun hat was leaning over it to speak to the tiny occupant.
How lovely, Mrs. Brewer thought. How happy I am! What a beautiful, beautiful life this is! Kit felt the glow of the woman’s happiness sweep through her as though it were her own. Then, as quickly as it had come, the vision was gone. She was herself again, Kit Gordy, and it was November, and outside the night lay thick across the brown lawn.
Turning away, Kit went over and sat on the edge of the bed. Madame’s words came back to her: Their vibrations remain here still, a part of the house. Somehow, in his desperate grief over the loss of his family, Mr. Brewer had managed to call them back to him, the gentle, sweet-faced wife, the romping children. He had closed his doors to the outside world and continued to live with his spirit family just as he would have if they had been with him in body.
It was too much to contemplate.
Sleep was pressing upon her now. Kit could feel the weight of it upon her eyelids. I won’t give in, she told herself vehemently. I won’t!
Softly, at the edge of her mind, she heard the music, faint and far away, but ready to move closer, to close in upon her and take her over if her consciousness faded even slightly.
Go away, Kit cried silently, whoever you are—go away! You’ve had your time on earth! This is my time! Mine!
The bed was soft, tempting, drawing her backward. Her head touched the pillow and sank helplessly into its feathery depths. Above her the wine-colored canopy seemed to sway, dizzily, hypnotically, and in her ears the music grew louder. It was not just the sound of a piano this time, but strings, the high, sweet voices of violins, the richness of violas, the melodious ripples of a harp. And then there came a flute, shrill and true as the song of a bird.
“No,” she wailed. “No!”
But her resistance was gone, and it had closed upon her, and she was a part of it, being carried along on the sweeping tide of sound.
“You must write it down,” the dream man told her. How easily he came to her now, as though he belonged there, at home within the confines of her mind. “You must put this on paper. It is too great to lose.”
“I can’t,” Kit replied. “I don’t know how to write music.”
“I will tell you. Get up from the bed. Here, take my hand, let me lead you over to the desk. Pick up a pencil.”
“I don’t have any music paper. You should know that.”
“You do. See!”
And she did. It was there, a music notebook with the staffs outlined in pale blue, awaiting her use. Someone had brought it and placed it in her room while she was down in the parlor. Madame? Jules? The same person who had come into her locked room on another occasion to remove Lynda’s first portrait? Once the question would have seemed important, but now it did not matter.
One or another of them, it was all the same.
“I don’t want to,” Kit said. “I don’t want to write down anything. You can’t force me to do something that I don’t want to do.”
But even as she spoke, her hand was reaching for the pencil. Her fingers closed around it and she lifted it and drew the paper toward her.
“Kit!” Through the pounding of the music there broke a familiar voice, calling her name.
“What? Who?” With a decisive wrench, Kit tore through the barrier between the two worlds.
It was Sandy who was standing in the doorway. She was dressed in pajamas, her hair was mussed from the pillow, and her freckles stood out in startling relief against her white skin.
“It’s so cold in here,” Sandy said, wrapping her arms around herself. “Is your window open? How can you sit there like that when it’s like the inside of an ice—”
She did not finish her sentence. The pencil in Kit’s hand flew from her grasp and broke with a loud snap in midair. As though fired from a gun, the pointed end shot straight across the room. Sandy screamed and threw her hands up to cover her face.
In horror, Kit watched the stream of blood burst forth from her friend’s forearm.
“Sandy!” she cried. “You’re hurt!”
Slowly, the red-haired girl lowered her hands and stood, gazing in bewilderment at the thin shaft of wood protruding from her arm. Dazedly, she reached over with her other hand and drew it out.
“Here, sit down.” Kit hurried over to her and, with an arm around her waist, drew her over to the desk chair. “I’ll get a washcloth. We’ve got to stop that bleeding.”
She went quickly into the bathroom and grabbed the cloth from the edge of the sink and ran cold water over it. Then she wrung it out and carried it back to the bedroom.
“Press this over the spot. No, I will, wait, I can use both hands.”
Sandy stared at her in disbelief. “Why did you do it?”
“Me? You think I did this?” Kit exclaimed, holding the cloth tightly against the injury.
“Well, didn’t you? Somebody broke that pencil and threw it at me. If you didn’t, who did? There’s nobody else—” Her voice broke and understanding came into her eyes. “I’m sorry, Kit. Of course, you didn’t. He was here, wasn’t he? The one with the music?”
“Yes,” Kit said. Her hand was shaking as she pressed it upon the washcloth. She felt sick.
“Why?” Sandy whispered. “What does he have against me?”
“It wasn’t you,” Kit said. “It would have been the same with anybody who had come in just then, who had broken his control. He had me, Sandy. I was going to write down his music for him. When you called out my name your voice came through to me, and I got away.”
“Who was it?” Sandy spoke with a choking sob in her voice. “Schubert?”
“I don’t think so. It’s been a long
time since it was Schubert. That is, if I can judge by the music. In the beginning it was lovely, but now it’s different, wilder, more discordant. It doesn’t feel like Schubert.”
“It’s the same with me,” Sandy said. “That’s why I came here tonight. I had to tell you. Ellis is gone.”
“Gone?” Kit felt a sudden surge of hope. “You’re free?”
“No. Oh, no. It’s just that Ellis has been replaced. This new one—I don’t see him, like I did with Ellis, but he’s there. I feel him come into my mind, and it’s like smoke, thick and gray and dirty.”
“Did he tell you who he was?”
“He doesn’t tell me anything. He doesn’t talk to me, he talks through me. He speaks some foreign language. I can’t understand him.”
“We should have guessed it,” Kit said. “That there would be others. Ruth told us it was that way with her right from the beginning, with a whole host of people pouring their thoughts into her. I felt it, too, the night I woke up in the music room. It wasn’t just one voice then but a lot of them, all bidding for me as though I were some sort of community possession.”
“But why? I mean, why now, when at the start it was just one?”
“Maybe the road’s wide open now, and they can all get through.”
“Then we can expect it to get worse? More and more of them, crowding into our minds, shoving our own thoughts out, until there’s nothing of ourselves left?”
Sandy was crying now, soft, hopeless crying which had nothing to do with her injured arm. Kit lifted the cloth. The blood was stilled. Raising her head, she met the misery in her friend’s face with that on her own.
“We’ve got to fight it,” she said. “We can’t give up. We can’t let them take us over.”
“But how can we help it? They’re stronger than we are, especially when there are so many of them. They don’t have to stop to sleep the way we do, they can keep at us constantly.”
“Then we’ll have to get out. We’ll plan an escape. After all, there are four of us. That’s four against four, if you count Lucretia, who’s so devoted to Madame she’ll do anything for her. It’s even sides.”
“You’re counting Lynda as one of us. What good will she be? And Ruth—she’s more on their side than ours. She likes what’s happening.” Sandy shook her head. “You’re dreaming, Kit. There’s no way. We’ll never break out of here. Our only hope is Christmas. If we hold out till then, we’ll go home for vacation. Our families expect us. There’s no way Madame can hold us here over the holidays.”
“That’s true,” Kit said. “And Madame knows it, and that’s what scares me worst of all. Because it doesn’t seem to bother her. How can she accept the fact that we’ll leave here and tell the people who love us and never come back again?”
The answer lay there between them in the stillness of the room, too horrifying to acknowledge.
“Don’t say it,” Sandy said, but Kit spoke the words anyway.
“By Christmas,” she said softly, “it won’t matter any longer. We won’t have to be at Blackwood for them to get through to us. They’re digging in deeper every day. By Christmas, they’ll be part of us, the spirit people. They’ll have such control that no matter where we go, no matter what we do for the rest of our lives, we’ll belong to them.”
Dear Tracy,
It’s strange to be writing a letter which I know will never reach you, and even writing it by hand because setting words directly on paper somehow makes me feel closer to you than using a computer. Having you to talk to is what is keeping me sane. The days go by. I don’t even bother to keep track of them anymore; they’re all the same. We don’t have classes now—those stopped soon after that night when I woke up in the music room and forced Madame to tell us the truth about Blackwood. After that, school became impossible.
How could we keep going to classes, studying and doing regular everyday lessons, knowing that it was just a cover-up for something else? How could we sit at a desk and listen to Madame or Professor Farley lecturing about history and literature and languages, as though they were regular teachers, when we know now what they really are?
And Jules! How could I possibly sit at that piano and play rinky-dink beginners’ pieces for Jules, who has heard me playing music that no one has ever heard before, my fingers moving in patterns that some musical genius has arranged for me? Out of everything, what I find hardest to accept is Jules, the fact that he is part of this. Imagine him sitting there in the music room, night after night, making recordings, while I sat on the piano bench in some kind of stupor, being ruled by a ghost! And I thought he liked me. I really did, Tracy . . . the way he looked at me, and the tone of his voice, and there was something in his eyes that night when I saw the figure in the mirror and started to scream. He came running up the stairs ahead of the others, and he put his arms around me and held me, and he cared. I could have sworn it. How stupid I was to think that, when all I am to him is part of a weird and awful experiment.
Now that the classes are gone, so too is the pretending. Madame Duret and Professor Farley and Jules don’t sit with us in the dining room anymore. We eat alone—Sandy and Ruth and I—when we eat at all. Most of the time we’re not hungry, and when we are it’s easier to go out to the kitchen and make a sandwich than to try to choke down the meals that Lucretia prepares. We spend as much time as we can outside, in the garden and by the pond, but the weather is so bad that the wind and chill soon drive us in again.
Lynda is lost to us completely. We never see her at all. I know she’s painting, because once in a while Professor Farley goes into her room and brings out the canvases and carries them down to Madame’s office. What they do with them after that, I don’t know. I wonder if they’ll sell them like they sold the Vermeer? Is that how Madame managed to finance the purchase of Blackwood? With a brand-new manuscript by Hemingway, a poem by Kipling, some music that only Chopin could have composed? Is she even now trying to market the newly discovered pieces by Schubert that Jules has on his tapes?
If only I could get into that office to the phone. I have punched in your number so many times in my imagination that it’s almost a part of me. I write it with my finger in the dust on the dresser top and I see that I’ve scribbled it several times in the margin of this letter. I could call you in my sleep, I think, if I could reach the land line. But the office door is kept locked.
And Lynda’s door too. They keep that locked so that we can’t go in and “distract” her. Madame has the key, and she gives it to Lucretia to use when she brings up the trays. Sandy and I stand outside the room sometimes and try to talk to her, but Lynda doesn’t answer. I feel like she might speak to Ruth. If anyone could get through to her, Ruth could—they have been friends for years—but Ruth won’t call in to her. She says that the work Lynda is producing is too important to be slowed down by silly conversations.
Sandy and I stay away from Ruth as much as possible. Being with Ruth is almost as bad as being in the room with Madame Duret herself. Ruth isn’t one of us anymore. She has accepted this thing, and she is riding with it like someone on top of a wave. Her eyes are shining with excitement, and she carries a notebook with her at all times so that she can write down the things that “come” to her. I looked into the notebook once, and it is like a strange code with numbers and signs and odd diagrams. But I won’t accept it! Not as long as I’m alive, I won’t! I will fight it all the way! I am going to get out of here, Tracy, somehow, some way, I will get out of here!
—Kit
Kit folded the letter, placed it in the pocket of her jeans, and left the room. She did not bother to lock her door, knowing now how senseless the formality was. She did not look in the mirror at the end of the hall. She didn’t want to know whom she might see there.
Descending the stairs, she went softly down the hall to Madame’s office and tried the knob. It would not turn. One time, she thought, it will. She cannot keep it locked always. There will come a day when she forgets, and when she does, I will be in
there so quickly that no one can stop me. It’s just a matter of waiting and watching and trying.
Beyond the office the door to the parlor stood open and there was a fire burning in the grate. Lucretia was in the room, dusting. Kit paused, but she did not enter. There was no use trying to talk with Lucretia. She didn’t know how much Lucretia understood of the situation at Blackwood, but it didn’t matter, since she would listen to no one but Madame Duret.
Kit continued down the hall until she reached the music room. From behind the closed door, she could hear the sound of the piano. She listened a moment and then, without knocking, opened the door. Jules was seated on the piano bench, his back toward her, playing softly to himself. He stopped when the door opened and turned to see who had entered. This time he did not seem irritated by the intrusion.
He said, “Hi.”
“Hi.” Kit stood staring at him, wondering how she could ever have found him attractive. He looked like his mother, and she hated them both.
“What are you playing?” she asked him bitterly. “Something from Schubert?”
“Kit, please.” He made a helpless gesture. “I don’t want us to be enemies. I like you a lot. I have right from the beginning. I wish you’d try to understand my position.”
“What, exactly, is your position?” Kit asked coldly.
“Well, it’s not that of an accomplice in a crime. You’re trying to make me feel guilty, and that’s not fair. My mother has a gift, a marvelous one. She’s given you a chance to help enrich the world. Why do you find that so upsetting?”
“Why do I find it upsetting?!” Kit regarded him incredulously. “How would you feel if it were you, being used as a kind of vehicle for dead people? And since the subject’s come up, why is it that you’re not taking an active part in this experience? Isn’t your mind ‘young and clear and uncluttered’ enough for your mother to want to use it?”