“You mean there’s an exit,” I say, relieved that we won’t have to go back up through the tunnels.
“I thought you would have figured that out by now. Here—” he says, pointing up at a hole in the ceiling through which I can see a tiny chink of light, “this is the pipe we uncovered that day I met you in the garden. One of the giochi d’acqua.”
“So that means we’re right near—right below—the Pegasus fountain.”
“Exactly. This large pipe here must be right under its foot. It would have sent up a jet that reached twenty feet into the air.”
I look up, imagining the enormous marble statue directly above our heads, the winged horse’s heavy hoof stamping the ground, and feel suddenly dizzy. I can hear the rush of my own blood in my ears and then a voice.
“The ghostly spring still murmurs; water moves,” I hear, “with atom-knowledge old as heat and light.”
“It’s Zalman,” I whisper, feeling a little better when I identify the poet’s voice. “He must be working on a new sonnet.” David and I stand in silence listening to the poem. It feels as if we’re standing in church listening to a service.
“The ghostly spring still murmurs; water moves
with atom-knowledge old as heat and light
along the grotto’s ancient limestone grooves,
its soft caress of stone concealed from sight
but rapturous as any human love,
a soothing blood for ancient bones of Earth
that never ceases flowing. Listen, now:
a sudden bubbling whirl, as if the birth
of yet another passageway in stone,
quick-spins and spills directly overhead,
arousing dread as timbers whine and moan.
Yet somehow reassuring; time has wed
this water, rock, and dark moist soil of Earth
in silver-tumbling merge, ceaseless rebirth.”
Although the poem is lovely, the idea of an ancient spring eroding the rock above us is hardly reassuring. I shine the flashlight ahead, looking for a way out, but the beam hits a solid wall that curves into an apse. It looks exactly like the bulbous dead ends I remember from those diner place-mat mazes.
“I thought you said there was a way out down here.”
“There is—but first I want to show you something.” He climbs up on a narrow ledge that is carved into the wall and waves for me to join him. There’s a small window—way too small for us to get through—covered by a metal grate. David presses his eye to it and then moves so I can look. “It would be better if there were more light in there, but you can still make it out.”
I press my face up to the grate. At first I can’t see anything, but as my eyes adjust I can just make out a dark circular space beyond the grate illuminated by tiny spots of light. Then a breeze blows through the grotto and the lights waver and swell, sparkling on the enamel tiles that cover the walls and ceiling of the dome-shaped room. The light of a dozen candles are reflected in a pool of water.
“It’s the grotto,” David says. “Aurora had Lantini add this little window so she could see inside. Doesn’t it make you wonder what went on in there that she wanted to see so badly?”
I nod, speechless at the glowing spectacle. It’s like looking into one of those sugar Easter eggs (the kind my mother would never let me get because white sugar was “poison”). The more I stare, the brighter the scene grows, the lights dancing off the water and sending ripples onto the walls, so that the room seems to be moving, the enameled sea creatures and mermaids on the walls writhing as if alive, the whole room pulsing, keeping beat with the lapping of the water against the stone. It feels as if something is trapped inside, some creature trying to escape. I can hear it, something scraping at the stone just below the grate as if it is crawling up the wall, its fingers prying deep into the rock—
I pull away from the grate, stepping into air. David catches me before I can fall to the ground. “There’s something . . . someone in there,” I say. “I saw a hand . . .”
“Really? I don’t know how you can see anything in the dark. Let me see.”
He looks through the grate and then looks back at me. “I don’t see anything. It must have been a shadow.”
“No,” I say. “I saw it in the candlelight.”
“Candlelight?” David asks, his face blank. “What candles?” He looks through the grate and then pulls me toward it so I can look, too. I hold back, but he moves me as firmly and gently as if I were a tree he was replanting. When I look this time, all I see is a bare stone room, dim and dry and still.
“What did you see?” David asks.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “It was just a trick of the light. I thought for a moment there were candles—” And water, and enamel sea creatures, and a hand grasping the stone ledge below the grate. “Can we get out of here now?” I feel, suddenly, as though if I don’t get into the air, I might start scratching at the stone walls.
“It’s a bit of a scramble. The tunnel is partly collapsed.”
“Another tunnel? Aren’t we already in a tunnel?” I try to keep my voice from shaking, but the word collapsed has completely unnerved me.
“I guess you can say it’s a tunnel within a tunnel. Someone went to a lot of trouble to conceal it; I wouldn’t have found it at all if I didn’t have Lantini’s plan.” David steps off the ledge and kneels on the stone floor, shining his flashlight along the bottom edge of the wall. When he rests the flashlight on the ledge and starts pulling out bricks, I kneel beside him and help pile the bricks to one side. If necessary, I will dig my way out of here.
“Did you put all these back after you went through before?” I ask when we’ve dislodged a few dozen bricks. The bottom ones, I notice, are damp.
“Uh, I haven’t exactly been through. I wanted to recheck Lantini’s plans first, and it’s quite clear that the underground passage was intended to reach the grotto.”
“Intended? But you said before that Lantini left a lot of the garden unfinished. What if he never completed the tunnel?”
“Don’t worry; I’ll go first,” David says. “If I get through, you’ll know it’s wide enough for you. You’re awfully slim for a tall girl.”
I can feel David’s eyes traveling along the length of my body as if his gaze were a warm current. The sensation is distracting enough that I fail to object fast enough to David’s plan to stop him. He’s down on the ground, wriggling through the narrow opening below the ledge before I can point out the flaw. What if he gets trapped in the tunnel? I’ll never find my way back to the house through the winding maze to get help. I’ll be alone underground . . . alone but for whatever thing was trying to scratch its way out of the grotto.
I take a deep breath, willing myself to forget that image. Like the candles, it was only a mirage, I tell myself. I pick up the flashlight and aim it under the ledge just in time to see the soles of David’s feet disappear into the black hole. “David?” I call. “Are you through?” When there’s no answer, I call again, my voice echoing shrilly in the tight space, the light from the flashlight trembling along the dirt walls like a firefly trapped in a jar. And then David’s face appears at the end of the passage, graven as stone in the flashlight’s beam.
“It’s a bit of a squeeze, but I’ll help you through,” he says. “Hand me the flashlight first.”
I do what he says and then, closing my eyes, flatten myself on the ground and crawl through the tunnel, willing myself not to think about the weight of stone and dirt above my head. The ground is damp and covered with some kind of slime. With my ear practically pressed to the ground I imagine I can hear beneath me the sound of running water. The ghost of the old spring Zalman wrote about in his poem whispering with its last breath in a voice so seductive that for a moment I pause to listen. But then I feel something crawling down the back of my neck and push forward as fast as I can, not waiting for David’s hands to pull me out or pausing when something sharp digs into my thigh.
“Okay, oka
y, easy now,” David says, half lifting me onto the stone bench. “You’re through.”
I know he means through the tunnel, but for a moment I understand him to mean, You’re finished, you’re done, and I realize that the panic I felt in the tunnel came less from the touch of the spider than from the sudden conviction that the hand scrabbling on the stone wall and the voice speaking to me from beneath the ground belonged to someone who’d been buried alive.
“You really are afraid of the dark,” David says. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought you down here.”
“No,” I say, “it’s okay. I wanted to see it.” I look around the grotto. It’s not really all that dark. A wedge of light comes in from a narrow opening to the right of the bench. I can see traces of enamel on the ceiling and patches of white that might be paint or salt deposits. The basin that once held water from the fountain is covered in soft green moss. “And I’m trying to get over being afraid of the dark.”
“Did something happen?” he asks.
“It’s because of the séance,” I tell him.
“Séance?”
“You see, my mother was—still is, I guess—a medium.”
“Really? You mean, like, for a living?”
“Well, she claims not to charge for ‘spiritual services,’ but ‘contributions are always welcome’ and she lets it be understood that the spirits are always more willing in an atmosphere of open-mindedness and generosity. She also makes some money selling herbal salves and lotions and honey from the bees she keeps.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” I ask, allowing myself to look as miserable as I feel. I’ve always dreaded this moment with any new friend, but especially with men. I remember that when I told Richard Scully what my mother did, he was fascinated at first. Good material, he called it. But after my story won the contest and the agent asked me to write a novel about a medium, he said that I was in danger of losing control of my objectivity. People will think you believe in all that crap. I decided after that not to tell anyone about Mira’s “profession” or the peculiar way I grew up. Today, it seems, I’ve gone far underground to avoid admitting to this particular man why I dread the dark and yet it hasn’t been far enough. When he doesn’t answer, I take a deep breath and, staring up at the rounded dome ceiling, tell him the story.
“You see, I grew up in a town where everyone’s a spiritualist of some sort. It’s called Lily Dale, and my family has lived there for over a hundred years, although by ‘family’ you have to understand I mean the matriarchy. Somehow, men never seem to linger long with the Brooks women; I never knew my father or my grandfather or any of my uncles, and my mother and my grandmother acted as if conception were a matter of mixing the right herbs and roots in their Crock-Pots, which, for all I know, is how I was conceived—in a witch’s cauldron from eye of newt and a shot of wheatgrass juice. Anyway, when I was twelve, my mother said I could start attending the ‘spirit circles’ to see if I had ‘the gift,’ as they call it. I only made it through one . . . apparently I fainted. For months after that I wouldn’t sleep in the dark or stay alone in the house, which, in a town like Lily Dale, was considered eccentric behavior.”
“Do you remember why you fainted?”
I take another deep breath, wishing there were more air in the grotto. Is this what Richard Scully meant by “mining my deepest pain”? What I had wanted to ask him was, how would I know if I dug too far? Even miners took canaries with them to test the viability of the air down in the deepest shafts. I look at David and wonder if he would be able to categorize what I saw at that séance the way he’d named the ghost orchid in the maze.
“No,” I say, deciding not to confide everything all at once, because there is no reassuring Latin term for the thing I saw at my mother’s spirit circle, no scientific explanation, either, for the voices I hear or the hand I saw from behind the grate. “I couldn’t remember anything. My mother wanted to put me into a ‘spirit trance’ so I could recover what happened, but I’ve never let her.”
“I don’t blame you. It’s bad enough that she let you attend that séance in the first place. No offense to your mother, but it seems irresponsible.” He slips his arm around my shoulder and, after a moment’s hesitation, I lean into him, feeling how solid he is, how . . . of this world. Not a very good canary, really, because he’d be breathing long after I succumbed to poisonous vapors, but he’d be good at pulling a girl out of a collapsing mine. I like how his fingernails are rimmed with soil and how he smells, faintly, of shaving lotion, a clean, citrusy smell with none of the cloying sweetness that I still smell when I think of that séance.
“No offense taken; I agree entirely. I couldn’t wait to get out of Lily Dale. I would never raise a child there.”
“So you don’t believe in any of that stuff?”
I turn to answer and realize how close his face is to mine, his dark unshaven cheek just inches away. I can feel my heart pounding, a sound like beating wings, like something caged trying to get out. David’s arm tightens around my shoulders and as he pulls me toward him over the rough stone bench I feel something sharp pierce my thigh and I cry out.
“What?” he asks, pulling away, the moment broken.
I reach down and pull something out of the cloth of my jeans. Turning it over in my hand, I see that it’s a broken piece of blue-and-white china, the edges of its pattern blurred, as if the china pattern had faded with time.
“It must have gotten caught in my jeans at breakfast,” I say, “from when Nat’s cup broke.”
At the mention of Nat’s name David stiffens and stands up. “I guess we should get going,” he says. “I don’t want to keep you from your writing.”
“No,” I say, getting up, not sure if I’m sorry that the kiss was interrupted. Although I am drawn to David, the last thing I need is to get involved with someone here. “I guess I should get back, but thank you for showing me this . . . It’s . . .” I turn around in a circle, looking for a word to describe the grotto. My gaze falls on a chink in the stone above the bench. “Is that the grate?” I ask. “You really can’t see it from this side.”
“I guess that was the point,” David says, already heading out the side passage. Instead of following him, I step up onto the bench and run my hands along the stone wall until I’ve found the opening in the rock. I press my face up against it, but the tunnel on the other side is too dark to see anything. As I move away I notice something embedded in the stone, a chip of paint or fragment of shell. I lift it up and see that it’s neither of those things: it’s the thin white crescent of a fingernail.
Chapter Eight
“As you can see, the nursery is rather lonely for poor Alice. She does little but draw all day long.”
The girl is seated on a wide window seat beneath the steeply sloping attic roof, her drawing pad balanced on her knees. She doesn’t bother to raise her head when her mother and her guest (the woman whose long dark hair and slanted eyes remind her of the captive Indian maidens in her own pictures) come into the room.
The room, though low-ceilinged, is huge, stretching almost the length and breadth of the house; only a small portion of the west side has been sectioned off into a separate room. Along the north wall four narrow beds are lined up like cots in a dormitory. Corinth shivers, remembering the year she spent working in the glove factory in Gloversville, sharing an unheated attic dormitory with a dozen other factory girls. She walks to the south-facing windows to warm herself in the sun and catches a glimpse of Frank Campbell, standing with his easel set up on the far edge of the terrace, talking to Mrs. Ramsdale. The novelist’s mauve peau de soie dress soaks up the early morning light like a deep, unlit pool—an image of stagnant water that rises in Corinth’s mind and threatens to seep over the sunlit garden.
Turning from the window, she sees that Aurora has also been observing the two figures on the terrace.
“Here are all the children’s toys,” she says, indicating the shelves below
the windows. “As you can see, there’s plenty to choose from, although much of their playthings are sadly worn. Heaven knows, I tried my best to impress upon them the importance of taking care of their possessions, but they were always leaving their things scattered abroad willy-nilly.”
Corinth looks down at the now neatly arrayed shelves and sees that indeed many of the book spines are tattered and broken and the dress-up clothes folded in their baskets are stained and frayed. One basket is full of broken toys, a tin gun missing its trigger, a hatchet without a handle, and an adult-sized bow with a quiverful of featherless arrows. It’s not the hard use that seems sad to Corinth, though, it’s the present neatness, the way the well-used toys have been so lifelessly corralled onto their shelves and into baskets. Even the rocking horse—so often ridden that its brown fur is worn down to its wooden frame—looks like an old dray horse waiting to be taken away and made into glue. Corinth touches the horse’s head, which is festooned with feathers and pink ribbons, just to set it into motion.
“That’s Belle,” Alice says, looking up from her drawing pad at the sound of the horse’s runners creaking on the wide-planked floors. “She was Cynthia’s favorite.”
Corinth crouches down so that she’s at eye level with the horse. She can see herself in its glass eye. “Are these Cynthia’s ribbons on her bridle?” Corinth asks.
“Well, they certainly didn’t belong to James or Tam,” Alice says.
“Don’t be rude, Alice,” Aurora says. “Answer Miss Blackwell’s questions civilly.”
“Yes, Miss Blackwell,” Alice recites in a singsong rhythm, “the ribbons belonged to my sister Cynthia. Pink was her favorite color. She was buried with a pink ribbon in her hair, but I imagine that ribbon isn’t such a pretty color now.”
“That’s enough, Alice. If you’re going to speak like that, I’ll send you to the storage room.” She points toward the door at the west end of the attic.
Corinth sees the girl’s look of defiance instantly melt into fear.
The Ghost Orchid Page 9
