It Will Just Be Us, page 25
The hallway to the north will lead me back to the front of the house, to the foyer and the main staircase; to the east lies the billiards room, and the dining room, and the kitchen; west, I will find the den, the parlor, the sitting room; and the hall that takes me south will lead me to the library, the basement, and the back of the house.
The only problem is that I cannot tell which way is which. My heart thudding in my throat, I convince myself it is only the dark that is confusing me—anyone would get lost at this intersection, even one who has lived here all her life, who has found her way in the dark countless times before through touch and memory and spatial intuition, perhaps by feeling the magnetic field of the earth, like a bird.
Wrapped up tight, Julian nevertheless manages to wriggle free his tiny arms as if to punctuate the cries that build from his throat. I try to shush him as I tuck his arms back in, but he cries anyway, to spite me. Then I wonder if I should leave his arms free, his fists flailing, and I realize how very little I am prepared to care for an infant, how little I know about this whole mystery of life. The weight of it is abrupt and appalling.
“Sam!” Donovan’s voice echoes down to me. “What are you doing? Where are you?”
Perhaps I ought to give him up to his father. I am not the child’s parent; Julian does not belong to me. And why not give him up to the future, at that? It isn’t my responsibility to stop the future in its tracks. I can give him up, yes—I can leave this place—I can let whatever happens to him happen.
But he is not yet the child who smashed the frogs and cut Constance Wakefield down. He is a small infant in my arms, fragile with precious life. There is a magic here beyond what I thought I knew, beyond my mother’s tarot cards, beyond even the house’s sad talent for recalling not life but merely echoes of it. I bounce him gently in my arms, which calms him some.
Down the hall I pass a ghastly vision—the hulking shadow of Donovan, brooding and pacing.
My heart is so far up my throat I think I may vomit, but when he turns my way to pace back in the other direction, his hate-filled eyes pass blankly over me and Julian, gazing past us, and I know this is the Donovan of several hours before, pacing as he wracks his brain wondering where we have gone, losing himself, yes, losing himself utterly in the house. I sidle past as he stalks farther down the hall.
I think I have gone east, to the billiards room, but I am wrong again; I’ve turned unwittingly north, to the foyer and the base of the main staircase and the front door. Above I hear Don moving toward the stairs, and I shush Julian, whose small mewling sounds may yet give us away as I crouch in the dark. Does he know we are down here?
He calls out, his voice ringing through the foyer. “Stop this, Sam. Give me my son!”
An instinctual drive to escape impels me to dash for the front door and yank it open toward cold freedom—only to be met, of course, with those mounds of snow closing us in, and the bitter darkness beyond. I cannot go out there.
Don’s footsteps pound down the staircase behind me, and I turn again to run blindly down another hall, east or west it hardly matters. My running has begun to jostle Julian enough that his wails echo behind me like a sonic trail, calling Donovan to us even as I run away.
I am in the parlor; I am in the drawing room; I am floating along the hidden staircases, believing myself to be ascending, but realizing instead that I am going down; I am stealing through the cobbled back corridor that serves no purpose but to provide a secret byway around the house; I am at the base of the rickety spiral staircase that leads up to the tower room at the top of the turret, where I once looked out as a girl, seeing all the way across the tops of the trees in the swamp for miles; I am turning, turning, and all the while Mad Catherine changes the house around me as I go, as the shadows reach out to snatch Julian from my arms.
Along the way, I pass more visions—there is August, cold and terrible, rearing up to beat Meriday. There is no time to dive around them, so I pass directly through, a strange chill dousing my bones, the sensation of passing through a memory that isn’t mine.
In the library, I slow, feeling momentarily safe amid the towering shelves of books, which I imagine will protect me like a magic shield. If I do not make a sound, if Julian remains quiet, Don will not think to look in here. The clouds must have parted, as a faint white glow comes in the window, moonlight bouncing off snow. It lends a silvery quality to the bookshelves. Somewhere in here is an armchair; I will find it, I will sit, and I will think of what to do.
I am creeping through the library delicately as I can, bouncing Julian in my arms to keep him calm, when drifting through the darkness comes a huffing sound, breathy laughter puffing through someone’s nose.
I am not alone.
The skin of my neck crawls with morbid recognition, but I resist, I resist, until I come around the side of a bookshelf and see the figure sitting in the corner of the room. It is her, the old woman, and she is laughing to herself, though she cannot open her mouth for her lips are glued shut, and she cannot open her eyes for her lids are glued shut, and over those lids someone has drawn in black marker the Xs that denote a cartoon’s death. She cannot see; she cannot talk. She can only sit in her wheelchair and laugh to herself, a horrible knowing laugh I recognize again, but I tell myself that recognition is only because I have seen this ghost before, I have seen her about the house ever since I was a child. She is just as real as Julian.
She cannot even push herself to a different spot in the room, for her fingers are broken, crooked and bent, just as I remember them. She is so familiar.
“Who are you?” I whisper, knowing she cannot answer and thinking, no, why did I ask that, I do not want to know.
The sight of her untethers my nerves, and I back away from her slowly as the clouds roll over the moon and cast her in shadow.
When I try to go up the hidden staircase from the library, I find myself somehow emerging back onto the main level of the house, in a room that looks unfamiliar to me. Can it be there are rooms in this house that I do not know, that I have never set foot in? When I exit the room, I leave behind me a man drowning in a bucket of white paint, struggling against the invisible force holding him down, paint splashing out onto the floor around him.
In the parlor, I finally have to stop, sinking to the floor with a stitch in my side and trying to calm an increasingly agitated Julian. The window reveals again the faint glimmering of starlight; at last the snow has stopped, and the clouds have shuffled off. Across from me, glinting dully in the moonglow, stands a broken mirror with jagged shards still clinging to the frame, reflecting bits and pieces of us. I pry free a dagger of glass, jostling Julian enough to elicit a complaint, just as the approaching footsteps slow and stop at the parlor’s entrance.
Crouching low to the floor, I swing upward as Donovan comes through the doorway, but he easily sidesteps the blow as if he knew exactly what I was going to do. The glass slices impotently through the air, its edges biting into my palm.
“What are you trying to do, Sam?” Donovan asks.
“Stay back,” I tell him, holding up the shard in one hand while holding Julian precariously to my chest with the other, casting about for an escape route. Isn’t there a small trapdoor somewhere in here that should take me into the hidden hallway and back out to the drawing room? But I search the walls, finding nothing.
“You’re out of your damned mind. Now give me my son.”
I back away from him, cornered; then, knocking aside the tall mirror so that it falls with a crash, momentarily separating us, I find the opening there, a low dark doorway, and I duck inside.
I feel my way through the blind dark and stumble instead into the dining room, which is not where I thought I would be, which has never held an entrance into the hidden hallway, and I am so shocked and lost that my eyes prickle with tears.
Then Donovan is there, grabbing me from behind, his hands yanking roughly at my clothes, twisting me around to face him—and as I do, I slice the air with the shard. This time it slashes his face, and he spins around, catching himself, while I gape, frozen. The arm holding Julian is growing tired as he seems to get heavier and heavier, and I have to drop the shard in order to hold him with both arms. A searing, bloody line marks my palm.
Donovan straightens and snarls at me, blood on his teeth. The glass sliced through his nose and lips, and his forehead wound has split open again and weeps down his face.
“You going to finish the job this time?” he asks, spitting blood on the floor. “Didn’t manage to take me down last time, so you’re trying again? You fucking women. You think everything belongs to you.”
I back away from him. “Don, stop. You’re out of control.”
“I am the only one here in control!” he bursts out.
“What if I told you that you’re going to turn your son into a killer?” At this, Don freezes, frowning at me. Julian mewls against my neck, his breath warm. “The way you’re behaving—the anger, the violence. Don’t you think it will rub off on him?”
Dark bruises have begun to bloom across Don’s glowering face, as if the shadows are reaching out to claim him. “Bullshit,” he says, his voice pitched low. He kicks the shard of glass, which shrieks across the floor away from us. Then he pulls from the waistband of his pants the crowbar. Seeing the surprise in my eyes, he says, “I thought I’d hang on to this.” Turning it over, feeling it in his hand, he gives me a leisurely, knowing grin. “It’s what you used to break the mirrors, isn’t it? To try to frame me?”
“Don’t you care what happens to Julian?” I ask, desperate to make him see reason, my eyes never leaving the crowbar in his hand.
“That’s all I care about,” he says. “So much that I am going to take my son now, and I am going to get him out of this place and away from you lunatics.”
He is wrong, I am convinced. What could possibly turn this innocent child into a killer but the violent man standing before me, willing to beat up his wife just to get at his heir? It has to be him. It isn’t just that Wakefields are cursed by evil. It can’t be. Yes, at this point there is no doubt in my mind that the only way to save Julian is to keep him from his father.
When he tries to take Julian from me, I kick his knee, and he grunts, grabbing me by the hair as he catches his balance. In doing so, he yanks my head down painfully and wrenches my neck to the side. Only barely do I manage to hold on to Julian, to twist out of Don’s way, to dash out of the room, where I find myself at the doorway to the basement.
I hear him behind me, so I descend the creaking staircase. Entering the basement is like wading into an icy lake, wherein the farther down I go, the heavier the shadows and the more frigid the air, until I imagine that if I were able to see at all past the blanket of night over my eyes, I might see my breath in a white cloud.
Down here, enveloped in the dark, we are safe. We must be safe.
Feeling my way to the far wall, I crouch down on the floor and bend over Julian, wanting to speak soft, gentle words to comfort him but at the same time keeping as quiet as I can. He makes small noises as I rock him, and I wrap the towel more tightly around his prone form. I tell myself again that we are safe here. There is a painful crick in my neck, like the ache that sits on your shoulders from whiplash—the feeling I had when I was fifteen, driving on my permit, and someone rear-ended me, knocking my car into the one in front. After that my neck complained for a week, haunted by phantom pain.
Balancing Julian on my knees, I try to rub out the pinch in my neck, but it’s no good—and what’s more, I can feel a presence standing at the top of the staircase now, a shadow passing through the blind dark. The stairs creak with careful, heavy footfalls.
If I stay here, quiet, I don’t think he will find me.
But Julian has other designs.
His soft cries louden into unhappy wails, and now there is no pretending we aren’t down here. I try to shush him, but his cries echo around the basement, and Donovan’s footsteps come faster now, pounding through the dark.
“Where are you?” he calls out.
Still crouching, I sidle along the edge of the wall, feeling the fine, tingling tendrils of spider webs on the back of my neck, trying to visualize where I am. I reach up above me, feeling along the wall until I find a shelf. There are no candles on it, my mother having taken them all to her reading room, and now the locked room, of course, not that a candle would do me any good without a match, but—there!—my hand falls on the familiar shape of a flashlight, which rolls away at my touch, clattering to the concrete floor somewhere to my left.
“I know you’re down here.” Donovan’s voice comes hauntingly through the dark. “I can hear you.”
And I can hear him, moving around, his arms likely outstretched, knocking into shelving and crates, his hands fumbling around for me, following in the direction of Julian’s cries.
I cannot feel around for the flashlight while holding the child, so, bundling the towel carefully under his head, I lay him on the floor, which seems to calm him some; his cries become soft coos, quieting in the dark, and I mentally thank him for making it harder for Donovan to find us.
Now I crawl across the floor, seeking the light, and for long, terrible minutes it seems a fruitless endeavor. I am lost, abandoned. Yet as soon as I find it and the flashlight is in my hand, and I rise to my feet, grateful to be off the cold floor that still reeks faintly of water rot, two realizations come to me at once.
The first is that, with Julian now quieted, I no longer know where he is. I turn around in the dark, lose my bearings.
The second is that if I switch on this flashlight, Donovan will see exactly where I am.
For a moment I stand, paralyzed by indecision, the flashlight clutched to my chest the way I was holding Julian tightly to me only moments ago.
“This is ridiculous, Sam,” Donovan’s voice hisses through the dark. His footsteps move slowly around the other side of the room and then stop. A crash of forgotten objects spilling to the floor makes me flinch, the sound of metal against the old shelving unit there, and I imagine him swinging the crowbar blindly. When next his footfalls come to me, they are crunching over the glass of broken lightbulbs or shattered china.
Don gives an aggravated growl, a throat-tearing sound of frustration. “Don’t make me do this, Sam.”
“Is that what you said to Liz before you hit her?” I cannot help but verbalize, and I can almost feel him turning toward the sound of my voice, ready to pound across the basement and strike, and I think that now, if ever, is my chance; I switch on the flashlight and quickly scan the room, finding his form coming toward me, and I shine the light directly into his face. He stops, lifts his hand to shield his eyes, and turns away, disoriented, giving me enough time to find Julian, pick him up, and look toward my only escape.
The staircase back up to the sanctuary of the house is across the room. I would have to get around Donovan to go that way.
But there are other doorways here.
I choose one.
20
The tunnels beneath Wakefield Manor, I have heard, were once used by escaped slaves. Among the sorts of restitution the family sought to offer the world in the wake of Mad Catherine’s brutal conviction, they turned to their own spiritual atonement. It became clear that the townsfolk would remain unforgiving, and perhaps this is why they turned their backs on the law and on social propriety by delivering slaves to freedom. As you have discovered, of course, their story is much less interesting than the story of those who may have once traversed these very tunnels before they became flooded and impassable. This land does not welcome underground structures. One may as well dig anthills at the beach during low tide.
I have always believed the tunnels to be, if not merely dangerous, then utterly caved in or flooded through. In all my years of living here, I have never set foot down one of them; they are the only place in all the house, or under it rather, where I have not dared to tread, and they have held less fascination for me than the locked room, for there is nothing fascinating so much as dreadful about an uncharted, collapsing catacomb wending through the earth. I’ve no idea where they go, how far they extend, where they come out—or if they do come out at all.
The earthen floor is wet and sludgy, shocking my feet with bitter cold, and I cannot tell, by the wild searching eye of my flashlight, how these rocky walls have held up for so long against the erosion of the ages and the deluges of the swamp. The way is narrow, closing in around me like the throat of a great beast.
Behind me, I hear the splashing footfalls of Donovan’s pursuit, following the flailing white beam of my light. The farther we retreat from the basement, the colder it becomes and the more I begin to feel trapped—the more I begin to worry at where this tunnel is leading me, drawing me down its terrible length.
As I race through the dark, the air around me seems to vibrate with voices, the whispering voices of whoever once passed through here. We should turn back, a voice in some distant accent whispers, very close to my ear. I shake my head as if to frighten off a fly buzzing too near me. We have to trust, comes another whisper, amid the torrent of unintelligible ones. This is followed by humming. Did they make it? I wonder. Or did they die down here?
Now spindly roots hang down from the low ceiling, brushing me as I skirt past them, and now the icy water at my feet has risen above my ankles, slowing my pace but also slowing Donovan somewhere down the tunnel behind me. I am lithe, quick-footed; I am a panther bounding for freedom; I could have rolled out of the way and run off into the night if only my mugger hadn’t been holding a gun to my head; I bring my knees high, my feet darting in and out of the water like leaping fish.
