It Will Just Be Us, page 24
Frost clouds the window, out which I have looked periodically to watch the drifts of snow below, to look away from the room that makes me dizzy when I try to focus my eyes; the snow has mostly stopped falling by now, just light flurries whizzing to and fro, but too late, indeed, for us to dig our way out through the front door, free the car, and get to the hospital.
“Tell me about him,” she hisses, talking to distract herself.
I hesitate. Did she believe me about him after all? Has she believed me this whole time, only pretending not to—clinging to normalcy? “What do you want me to say?”
“Say anything,” she snaps, her voice a fury of clenched pain. “For god’s sake.”
I think. “He likes animals.”
Her fury turns into a sob. “This isn’t how I wanted it to be.”
“I know, honey,” says my mother, petting Elizabeth’s untamed hair away from her slick face. “But pretty soon you’ll get to hold your baby boy in your arms and none of this will matter.”
She glances up at me, and I know she is thinking what I am thinking: what we know about that baby boy and the child he will become. Perhaps it is the habit the room has of shifting minutely around us, but I feel nauseated of a sudden, and I want Elizabeth to clench her legs together and not let him out into the world at all.
Somewhere above us is the maddening creak of a heavy weight swinging on a rope.
I do not know how many hours it has been; the candles have melted almost all the way down to their bases, dripping wax into puddles and expelling thin smoke that obfuscates the room, which smells of burning, rancid sweat, dust, and the faint pervasive musk of the swamp, so strong you could just about taste its bitterness.
Elizabeth’s low, familiar birthing groan turns into a throaty wail, and my mother checks below the sheet she has thrown over my sister’s legs and looks at me. “It’s time.”
Elizabeth’s scream echoes around the room, and I imagine the waves of it ringing out into the swamp, filling the swamp with the terrible sound of her labor—but it isn’t the swamp we have to worry about hearing.
All this time I have imagined Don somewhere below, pacing from room to room in search of his wife, finding, perhaps, strange ghosts who are not there, and strange memories that are not his. But now heavy footsteps pound their way up the stairs and creak down our long narrow hallway; he has heard, and he has found us.
“Liz!” he shouts through the door, which rattles and shakes as he works the knob, but remains mercifully locked. I never thought I would be so relieved to be locked in this dark, festering place. “Open this door!”
My mother kneels on the floor at the end of the bed, instructing Elizabeth to breathe, propping her up with her knees bent. “Push,” she commands, her voice low and calm against the sounds of pounding as Donovan beats his fists to be let in.
Elizabeth makes a hideous sound through her clenched teeth, her face turning red, and then collapses on her elbows, panting. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You’re doing great, honey,” says my mother, and I do not know how she can sound so calm with Donovan beating his way in and Elizabeth screaming and the baby coming—it’s too much even for me as I crouch beside my sister, letting her hold my hand but unable to do much more than that, staring wide-eyed and frozen as the room seems to close in around us, then stretch as if into a yawning abyss. The air crackles with static. I want to scratch my skin off. I want to get out of here. Were I a spider, I imagine I might crawl up the walls on my eight spindly legs and spin myself a web to watch and wait. The room blurs at the edges, like its veneer is wearing thin.
In the recesses of the room, which seems larger than it did only moments ago, stands the cracked mirror. I try not to look at it, but I cannot help it; the surface is odd, reflecting nothing.
“Let me in!” Don shouts from the other side of the door, which bangs and rattles like a thing alive. “Let me in!”
Elizabeth gives another push, throws back her head, and screams—this time because she sees the man hanging from the ceiling.
“Don’t look up,” Agnes tells her softly. “Don’t look up.” She continues murmuring odd nonsense, telling us that the baby has started to crown. I remind Elizabeth to breathe, but I have to look away, feeling dizzy. I remind myself to breathe. I don’t look up at the dead man swinging from the rope. I don’t want to see my father hanging above us. It’s too horrible to contemplate.
Elizabeth’s cries mingle with the echo of Jonah’s and Meriday’s—cries to escape, to be let out, a rising crescendo of wails.
“Don’t look.”
But it’s not my mother’s voice this time—it is Jonah in chains, on the floor a few feet from the bed, his pupils blown wide as black holes. “Don’t look at it. It’s where she came through. You look, and you’ll see. You don’t want to see.” He is wasted, his clothes worn to rags. He has been here a long time. “That’s where death is. The death of time. Ain’t no time in here.”
He’s told Meriday not to look, but I am not Meriday. I look behind him, into the depths of the room, at the mirror. And I know, with dreadful certainty, that this is where he does not want me to look.
But the more I look, the stranger the mirror appears. I try to focus my eyes on it, and it blurs and gapes open like a wound.
The crack has split and widened. It is a darker shadow than the dark. It is like charcoal, like a hole burned into the molecules of the air, like a long black slit slowly dilating, opening up. A primal, empty, sucking dark.
“What is that?” I murmur, but no one else is paying attention—Elizabeth pushes and my mother nods and offers small inane encouragements, both of them trying to ignore the bang of the door as Donovan pounds at it—and I look back again, unable to draw myself from it. Darkness there, unlike any darkness I have ever seen, or perhaps like a darkness I saw, once, long ago.
As the darkness opens up, deep inside I can almost make out two small pinpricks of light, a reflection of our candles, and the darkness gives birth to itself, and its edges peel like a flame burning a hole through a piece of paper as it spreads beyond the mirror’s frame.
I ought to smash it before it spreads any further, but I cannot move. Elizabeth is clutching my hand too tightly.
“Push!”
Elizabeth’s face is red, her muscles taut. She strains her whole body to get him out.
“Open this door, dammit!” Don shouts, rattling the doorknob.
I want to get out of here.
If I wander to the far reaches of the room, I think I may not find my way back. I think I could just keep going and going eternally into that everlasting dark, finding myself in an increasingly strange and unfamiliar world, a place that is somehow both contained within the house and also much larger, much vaster, and much older than the house. And whichever new direction I turned in, I would see floating before me, mysterious as death, that gently smoldering hole. All around, the room is like outer space, with our candles like stars shining in the distance I left behind. And somewhere, here, in the dark, live primordial entities from before the birth of the universe, and far-future enigmas I could never hope to understand. I go around and around, and the geometry makes no sense—I may wander here for weeks. The darkness inhabits the mind, and time becomes illusion. But always, always, that black hole following me, as if it exists in all places at once, even though that cannot be.
But so it is, and as I look around, the light begins to bend strangely, the way the distant light of stars and galaxies bends around objects with high gravitational fields, light bending around a black hole and in doing so revealing its shape but also unnaturally curving the galaxies that lie behind it, warping them into twisted shapes so that the way they look is nothing like the way they are. I see the light bending in the room around that singularity of the endless hole—and everything, everything is bending outward from this central point, this moment that has fractured the world and sent its ripples outward like a stone dropping into a pond, distending the room and all that lies beyond it, the edge of the earth, the curve of a pregnant belly.
Oh, I have gone mad, haven’t I?
When the room snaps back and I wake up from my weeks-long reverie, Elizabeth is saying that something is wrong, while Agnes reassures her and tells her to keep pushing. Liz says she can’t, she can’t, and the door rattles madly on its hinges with sharp, deafening bangs like some great beast beating its fists.
Liz pulls my hand closer to her. “No, no, something is wrong,” she pants, her eyes beseeching me to go check, to make sure our mother is not lying to us. I nod, gently pull my hand free, and go to the end of the bed to peer beneath the white sheet.
The child’s bloody head has emerged, but I see a soft wormlike cord wrapped around its neck twice, like a noose—I gasp involuntarily, and Liz begs me to tell her what is wrong.
For a moment, I consider not saying a word. It would be fitting, perhaps, for the child to strangle itself upon exiting the womb, in which case the future the house showed me could not come to pass. Then I start to say, “The umbilical cord—”
My mother hisses at me as she reaches to gently slide the cord up over the infant’s head. “See? No big deal,” she says. “Happens all the time.”
And then the rest of the baby slides out, crying as he waves his tiny fists, and my mother wraps him in a towel and hands him to an exhausted, delirious Elizabeth. Agnes bends down to kiss her daughter on her sweat-slicked forehead and murmurs, “You did it.”
For a moment, Don’s banging and yelling fades into the distance as we all look at what Elizabeth has birthed into the world.
Elizabeth gives something like a cross between a laugh and a sob as she brings the baby’s face up to hers, gazing upon it with wonder.
“Hello, Julian,” she whispers, staring at him as if she cannot believe he is real, and in this moment, something in my own heart breaks.
How can this small helpless child become a monster? It is unthinkable. This tiny creature does not know evil—knows only love and comfort and perhaps that terrifying moment when he was expelled from the womb. But how could he ever be what the house has told me he must be? How could I ever think to harm him—my nephew, only minutes old, not having yet opened his eyes to the world?
My mother discreetly cuts and ties the traitorous umbilical cord that tried to strangle him, and for a moment, in the faint glow of the candles imparting their soft warmth to the chill, dark room, its ghosts having vanished for the moment, it seems to me that everything will be all right, that there is nothing to worry about after all.
Then, its lock giving way under repeated assault, the door finally bangs open and swings away from Donovan Hill, who steps into the room and says, “Give me my son.”
19
“I’ve been looking all over this damned place for you,” says Donovan, his eyes locked on Elizabeth still clutching the small bundle to herself, a bundle that has started to cry, shrieking into the void.
The stitched-up wound on Don’s forehead looks crusty and black, stark against the pallor of his haggard face. His eyes dart from me to my mother to Elizabeth, haunted eyes.
“She doesn’t want you here,” says my mother. “Please leave.”
He takes a step toward her, staring her down with disgust. “Not without my son.”
“I don’t think Julian is safe with you,” Elizabeth admits, holding the child close. He is beginning to quiet down, calming in his mother’s arms. “We can talk about this later, but for now, please—”
“Not safe with me?” Donovan laughs cruelly. “You hit me over the head with a wine bottle and tied me to a fucking chair!”
Elizabeth looks as if she wants to respond, but instead she frowns and reaches down between her legs. Blood has begun to soak through the sheet over her lap, and when my mother gently lifts it up, we see a larger spreading stain on the bed.
“It’s okay,” says Agnes. “We just need to stop the bleeding.”
“Give him to me.” Don reaches for the baby, but Elizabeth yanks the bundle away from his grasping arms, telling him no. He manages to get his hands on the towel and tries to wrest the child from her, and they struggle momentarily for possession of Julian; Don bumps into the table near the bed, overturning several candles, which sputter and roll and eventually come to rest on the floor, where they burn out.
My mother hurries up behind Don and tries to pull him off of Elizabeth, but he slaps her away like a fly; she goes sprawling on the floor with a hand on her shocked face. I slide over to her on my knees to help her up, but I realize, too late, that opting to help my mother regain her feet means I have given Donovan time to pry the baby from Elizabeth’s fingers while she yells at him to give Julian back, not to touch him.
“Stop, stop it!” Agnes shouts at them both as she wads up a spare towel to staunch the flow of blood, looking worried. Though Elizabeth is heated and still shouting at Don, I can feel in my bones that she is bleeding too much; her skin is pale, hollow, and I can feel too her energy waning, the way, I suspect, my mother can feel the energy of a place. Perhaps I have inherited her peculiar sensitivity, passed down the line of Wakefields living in such an acutely sensitive place.
Don steps away from them both, leaving Elizabeth sobbing quietly as she falls back onto her limp pillow, utterly spent. He backs away from the bed and his bleeding wife, and when he turns around, he sees what I have seen, what Jonah told me not to look at.
“What is that?” he murmurs.
I look, and I see what he sees: the back of his head in the mirror, as if it’s forgotten how to reflect properly. But no—it isn’t the back of Don’s head. It is my father, standing in front of the mirror.
He turns, looks back at the room, a terrible knowing in his eyes. He shakes his head. I want to reach out for him, but I know if I did my hand would pass through empty air.
“Who the hell are you?” says Don, though the bravado has gone from his voice; he doesn’t seem to know what to make of this man, and I suspect he has begun to realize that the people he may see in this house are not always there. He hesitates where he stands. The baby complains in his arms, calling out, perhaps, to its mother with those high-pitched pitiful shrieks, but he ignores it.
Behind me, my mother is distracted by cleaning Elizabeth, and I think she must not see her husband here. I almost tell her to look. But then my father rears back his fist and punches the mirror, the cracks erupting from the impact. He pulls his knuckles away, bloody.
“Hey,” Don snaps. “I said who the hell are you?”
Distantly, I hear my mother murmur, “This isn’t right,” followed by quiet reassurances, as if to make up for her small slip—but it isn’t right, none of this is right, and I don’t think there is anything I can do to make it right.
Don steps toward the man before him.
“He can’t hear you.”
He hesitates, turns to me. “What?”
“He’s deaf.”
My father steps away from the mirror and nods, as if he’s done it, as if he has fixed everything.
But he hasn’t. He’s only opened it up.
The cracked mirror melts into that dark hole again, reaching out into this world.
“The Zero,” I murmur, recalling my father’s name for it.
He reopened it, just like Mad Catherine’s workers, who maybe weren’t even the first ones to open it back then.
Don doesn’t seem to understand what he is seeing. Holding Julian in one arm, he reaches out his free hand toward the surface of the mirror, the Zero, as if to test it with his fingers, and the closer he gets the more he becomes distorted from my perspective, moving slowly, liquidly, his very skin warbling, Julian’s cries taking on an eerie note like sound warped by the Doppler effect, and I wonder, if they do step through, where will they come out on the other side? Donovan is so enraptured that he is paying no attention to the child in his arms.
In one quick movement, I snatch the baby from him and run.
* * *
This house is a labyrinth.
On the third floor, after I turn the corner of the crooked hallway, I duck briefly into the room that was once my hiding place—the room used for storage, filled with unmatched furniture and strange old things like dressmaker dummies, a full-length mirror (broken now), an antique wardrobe, sofas and chairs covered with dusty white sheets, and the out-of-tune piano. I look around frantically for a place to hide—inside the wardrobe? No, the door is rusted shut. Beneath one of the sheets? No, I could not stand there, still, indefinitely, hoping not to be found. After a moment, when I hear his voice call out from down the hallway, knowing he is in pursuit, I decide to leave this forgotten place and flee down the stairs instead, to the second level, which is where I lose my bearings.
The twists and turns I think will take me to the east side of the mansion instead curve back in on themselves and deposit me in a place that does not look familiar at all. One moment I am in the reading room, where a ghost of my young mother is holding a séance, surrounded by cold candles that do not flicker; and I am in the Rose Room, where a shape lies beneath a white shroud on the bed, a shape I can only hope will not rise up and prove itself to be something more than the long-forgotten form of Frances Wakefield; and then, inexplicably, as I back away into the hall, I find myself on the first level of the house.
Perhaps I am wrong, I think as I hurry down the hallway, clutching a softly cooing Julian to my breast the way I imagine a mother might clutch her child, but the farther I go, the more sure I am that this is one of the hallways on the main level—and, indeed, when I come to the four-way intersection of identical halls, I know this to be true. Yet I did not descend any stairs; or did I, automatically, the way one sometimes forgets the act of brushing one’s teeth, even though one tastes the echo of mint and knows it has been done?
Each way down the four-way cross, the dark halls shoot off into an abyss. The old wood of the floor creaks and groans where I step, and the dark-paneled walls, briefly dotted with dormant cobwebbed sconces, I see more with my memory’s eye than with my actual eyes, for the dark here is near absolute without windows to guide me, without electricity lighting the sconces. Which way shall I turn? I hear Donovan’s footsteps on the ceiling above as he rummages through the second floor looking for me. I must act before he comes down—but suddenly I am paralyzed with choice.
