by V. J. Banis
She must try to enlist Mr. Kelsey’s help. Surely someone among all the people in this house must regret what was being done to her. They couldn’t all be monsters who could enjoy watching her starve to death, or go mad, without lifting a hand to help her.
She left her room and made her way quickly down the stairs to the main hall, and the entrance. The sun was warm and soothing when she came out, the air mellow. It was a lovely autumn day. It was certainly not the sort of day that one ought to be trapped in a house that defied comprehension, desperately alone.
He was still there on the lawn, exactly where she had seen him from her window. He stood motionless and stared across the lawn in the direction of the woods beyond. She thought he looked at them with longing, and the possibility that he too might want to leave seemed even stronger. He gave no indication that he heard her approach until she stood almost beside him.
“Good morning,” she greeted him, sounding as cheerful as she could manage. She did not want to offend him or turn him away from her. But she could not quite keep the note of desperation from creeping into her voice.
He turned, his eyes meeting hers, and for an instant all hope died in her breast. She had an urge to run, to leave him at once. What was it, that look that he gave her? Hatred? Violence, surely—no, nothing as active as that. A coldness, a terrible, lifeless emptiness that sent an involuntary shudder through her.
He turned away from her again almost at once, looking back toward the woods. It was as though he had dismissed her.
She would not be put off so easily, however. She summoned her courage again and said, “It certainly is a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
He made no answer, nor did he even acknowledge her comment but only continued to stare into the distance. Courtesy, Jennifer thought was not encouraged here at Kelsey.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find my car,” she continued, determined to make the effort to enlist his aid. “I wonder if you could tell me how to find that road again, the road that the stream crosses.”
Still he ignored her.
“I do think you could at least answer me,” she snapped angrily.
Still he did not reply. Without even looking again in her direction, he turned and started back toward the front porch of the house. She watched as he climbed the steps and passed through the door.
“Well, that beats everything,” she declared aloud, staring after him.
“He can’t talk, you know.”
The voice came from behind her. Jennifer whirled about, startled. It was disconcerting, to say the least, the way these people crept up on you without any warning.
“He can’t talk,” Marcella repeated, smiling at her.
“That’s no excuse,” Jennifer said, too angry and frustrated to feel sympathetic or charitable. “He could have at least made some sign to me that he heard me. Or can’t he hear either?”
“Oh, his hearing is fine. But he’s never forgiven Aunt Christine for what she did, and it’s made him rather distant, I think.”
Yes, Aunt Christine had said something similar herself—“Wilfred has never forgiven me....”
“What did Aunt Christine do?” she asked.
“She had his tongue pulled out,” Marcella informed her cheerfully. “That’s why he can’t talk. I’m afraid it was too much for his heart. He....”
“Marcellal!” Jennifer stared at her in horror. Was this only another example of the girl’s vivid imagination, or was she telling the truth? Surely Aunt Christine could not really have done such a thing. “You can’t mean what you’re saying.”
“Oh yes,” Marcella said, looking taken aback that her statement had been questioned. “I watched.”
“But that...that’s terrible.”
“Yes, it was. Quite terrible.”
Jennifer stared open-mouthed. Her mind was reeling from the shock of what she had just been told. What kind of monsters were these people, these relatives she had once been so eager to meet? What form of madness could devise so dreadful a deed?
But it went beyond that. Until now, she had clung to the hope, however faint, that there was some awful mistake going on. She had not fully believed that these people could truly mean to let her starve; she had been sure within herself that no one could be that cruel. Now she saw that it was madness to cling to that hope. If Aunt Christine could have her own husband’s tongue taken out she would certainly not hesitate to let a niece die of starvation.
“Marcella,” she said, her voice hoarse and strained, “Marcella we must leave here. You must go with me, and help me find my car, and we will go away from this terrible place, just the two of us.”
“Oh, I can’t leave here,” Marcella replied. “It isn’t allowed.”
“But you can, and you must,” Jennifer insisted. “It’s not safe here, can’t you understand that. All we have to do is find my car. You must know your way through the woods. I’ll go up now and get my purse, the car keys are in it, and we can leave at once.”
“Aunt Christine would never allow me to leave,” Marcella said, seeming quite unalarmed at the prospect of danger.
“But we won’t tell her,” Jennifer said. “It will be our secret, and by the time they discover that we’ve gone, we can be miles from here. All we need to do is find my car, and it will be all right.”
“But it is all right,” Marcella said. “There’s no need for us to leave.”
“But....”
“Good morning.”
Jennifer turned to find Aunt Christine standing nearby, only a few feet away. How long, she wondered fearfully, had the woman been standing there? How much of the conversation had she heard?
CHAPTER TWELVE
It did not seem as if Aunt Christine had overheard Jennifer’s grim conversation with Marcella. The older woman’s smile was as cheerful and whimsical as ever. Jennifer met her eyes, and found herself trying to envision that horrible scene that Marcella had mentioned. Could this smiling old woman who looked so frail and harmless actually have had her husband’s tongue pulled out? No, it seemed impossible that Aunt Christine could do anything so terrible, mad though she might be.
And yet, Jennifer reminded herself, here I am, starving to death; and for all I know, my tongue may be next to go. She can’t like some of the things I’ve been saying.
Aloud, she said, “Excuse me.”
Aunt Christine made no attempt to stop or delay her, and when she had started toward the house, she heard her Aunt and Marcella begin to talk in voices too low for her to hear what was being said.
She supposed Aunt Christine must have heard some of their conversation, and was now badgering the child for more details. Jennifer half expected to be attacked before she reached the house. But nothing happened. She reached the safety of the porch, and entered the house, walking without pause up the wide stairway. Not until she had reached the relative safety of her own room with the door locked after her did she stop.
She sank wearily down upon the bed. “I must remain calm,” she told herself, but in truth she felt anything but calm. She knew she must try again to leave Kelsey House.
“But to begin with, I must find some food,” she said. It would be impossible for her to do much of anything unless she found some food, and found it soon. And even if she did not leave, she might need some strength. She might have to defend herself.
There had to be a logical way of looking at all that had happened. “Everything,” her mother had been fond of saying, “makes sense, in its own way. Sometimes you have to discover what sort of sense it makes.” So far, things at Kelsey did not seem to make sense. But that was because she had not yet discovered what sort of sense they did make.
To begin with, they had to eat and keep themselves alive. They all looked healthy enough, that was for sure. So, that meant they must be eating when she was not with them. They had plenty of opportunities. Perhaps she could catch them at it.
That idea, though, seemed less appealing the more she thought of it. There wer
e too many of them, and she had no reason to suppose they ate together. She could not follow them all around all day long.
Perhaps she could pick a likely spot and just wait until she found someone there eating. If she hid herself in the dining room, for instance....
Upon reflection, the dining room seemed unlikely. There had been no evidence, on her trips there, to suggest that anyone had eaten anything there in years—no spilled crumbs, no food stains.
She went back to the idea of following people—of following one person. Perhaps if she followed Aunt Christine, for instance.
She gave her head a shake. No, she couldn’t follow her everywhere. Suppose Aunt Christine ate in the privacy of her room. Suppose the food arrived some secret way, by dumbwaiter or through another corridor. This house might well have that sort of convenience.
She abandoned the idea of finding them eating. She would have to work on finding food. There certainly was an indisputable fact; they had to have food. There had to be food in the house somewhere.
The answer came to her in a flash. The kitchen, of course. There would certainly be food in the kitchen. More than likely, this was where they ate too. Old houses like this often had huge kitchens, with tables set up there. She could almost envision the kitchen, warm and cheery, filled with the smells of bread baking and something spicy simmering atop the stove. There would be a big old table, round, and made of oak, or perhaps maple. From time to time during the day, perhaps even now, at this moment, various members of the family gathered over coffee and hot plates of steaming food. While they ate they talked, perhaps they laughed at the plight of their house guest, and planned how they would behave toward her at evening, when they pantomimed dinner in the dining room.
Her vision was so real that she nearly smelled the food and heard their voices. Her mouth actually began to water.
“I must find the kitchen,” she told herself. There was the obvious solution.
But at once her spirits sank again. How was she to find it? At the very least, that meant another trip through the house, and probably getting lost again. How on earth did people find their ways about in unfamiliar places? Men had explored the globe—the continents, and the ocean floors, even the jungles. They had gone through space and back. And she couldn’t find her way through a crumbling old house. Surely if she thought calmly and clearly, some means would occur to her. Not a map, no. Nor a compass.
“A string,” she said aloud, her face brightening. Yes, that was it of course, they carried a string with them and left a trail for themselves to follow. She remembered a story in which children had left a trail of breadcrumbs. In that, though, the crumbs had been eaten by birds, so that their trail had vanished. Well, she was not going to leave crumbs, and anyway, there were no birds inside the house, not of the feathered variety anyway.
She frowned again. Where was she to find a string long enough to leave a trail for herself to follow? Without much hope of finding anything, she opened a drawer of the dresser. It was empty, as was the second one that she opened. But she did find something in the third—not a string, but a spool of white thread. A spool of thread would do as well, perhaps even better.
She went out into the hall, taking the thread with her. There was no one in sight, not in the upstairs hall, nor in the downstairs hall. She thought as she descended the stairs that she should have looked from her window to see if there was anyone on the lawn. Aunt Christine had been there a short time before, and Marcella. But she saw no one in the house. In fact, now that she thought of it, it was difficult to imagine where all of these people spent their time; she so seldom saw any of them. Surely they did not just spend their entire days in their rooms.
Kelsey was a large house, however, and it was obvious that the part of it she saw was not where the family spent their time. There must be another section of the house in which they lived; rooms, perhaps, in which they played bridge or cribbage, or read.
In her mind, she saw rooms with open fireplaces and walls of books, and on a tray would be a decanter of sherry and several dainty little glasses. There would be a rustling as the pages were turned in books, and perhaps the clink of glasses, and a crackling from the fire, and from time to time the clicking of knitting needles. Oh, if only they would invite her in there. How happy she would be with such a simple homely scene.
She came to the downstairs hall and walked instinctively to the front. There she paused outside the first door. This was the room in which she had waited for Aunt Christine, and from which she had started before. She had found nothing that way, not even evidence that anyone else used that part of the house. Perhaps it would be better if she started on the other side of the hall. After all, somewhere in this monstrous house there had to be those rooms they used for their living quarters. If they were not on one side of the hall, then they must be on the other.
She opened the door directly across the hall and peered in, half expecting to see the whole family sitting there, the pack of them, waiting for her to find them, waiting to laugh.
The room was another sitting room, similar to several she had seen already, and it was empty, so far as people went. There was plenty of furniture, and it wore the same coating of filth she had seen elsewhere.
She stepped inside, allowing the door to swing shut behind her. Then, very carefully, she tied one end of her white thread to the knob, tying several knots so that it could not accidentally come loose. This time she would take no chances.
Satisfied that her thread was secure, she started out from the room she was in, holding the spool in her hand and trailing the string behind her.
The rooms she saw were not much different from the ones she had seen the time before. When had that been? A day ago? A week ago? She really had no idea; time did not seem to flow in its natural course here. Nothing here seemed to flow in its natural course.
And all these rooms, so much alike, serving no particular purpose. Whoever had designed the house originally (Aunt Christine had told her: Robert Kelsey, wasn’t it) had been interested first and foremost in size, judging from all appearances. A lot of rooms had been the first requirement and no one seemed to have cared whether the rooms were of any use.
She passed through room after room, always choosing, if there were a choice, the exit that seemed to offer the straightest path.
“This time,” she told herself firmly, “I am not going to travel in a circle.” She was sure of this, and it followed that even if she found nothing, she was certain to reach the end of the house eventually, even if it took her all day.
And that, she realized, was another oddity. In the other part of the house, the part she had explored previously, she had apparently followed the outside walls of the house; most of the rooms had had windows, so far as she remembered. The rooms she was in now were, without exception, windowless. Either her trail was taking her directly through the house without approaching the extremities, which was entirely possible, or one side of the house had been built without windows; quite possible in this strange house.
The result of this oddity was that despite the bright sunlight outside, the rooms were dark as night. Without thinking she had taken to turning on the lights as she entered each room, leaving them on behind her. It was, she thought, like traveling through a nether world of night and darkness; indeed, the very shadows around her seemed alive, hovering about her, watching and listening. She shivered at the thought and tried to laugh at herself, but the laugh was unconvincing.
“You’re really going crazy,” she said, speaking instinctively in a whisper.
It was difficult to keep track of time here, and so she did not know just how long she had been walking. Nor did she know when or how the thread had broken. No doubt she had caught it carelessly on one of the doors as she passed through. But broken it was, the end of it trailing behind her. For a moment panic nearly overcame her again.
“Now wait,” she cautioned herself, fighting down the sense of helplessness that threatened to engulf her. “I have be
en unwinding this the whole time. If that’s all the tail there is hanging from the spool, it must have just broken. If it had broken very far back, I would be dragging yards and yards of it after me, instead of just a few inches here.”
She remained outwardly calm. She backtracked, reentering the room she had just left, watching the floor for the telltale thread. But there was no thread here. Across the room were two doors, almost side by side. Try though she might, she could not remember which one she had come through.
Heart in throat, she approached them and opened the first one, peering beyond. There was no thread there either. Closing that one, she opened the other. Still no thread. She closed that door also, before she thought of the lights.
She had turned on the lights on her way through the house, and that should have left another trail for her to follow; but both of the rooms she had just looked into were lighted.
She thought of Hansel and Gretel, and their trail of crumbs that the birds had eaten. Well, certainly no bird had come along to eat her thread.
But it had certainly vanished.
“This is ridiculous,” she said aloud, the sound of her own voice startling her. “There were no lights on when I came through. And anyway, I could not have come this far since the thread broke.”
Unless, she thought, and this thought she did not voice aloud, unless someone had turned on the lights, had removed the thread, someone following her from room to room, watching her, as the shadows in the corner were watching her....
She shuddered violently. On an impulse she returned to the room where she had discovered that the thread was broken. There was only one other door in this room. Perhaps as before she would find that she had made her way back to the main hall.
The door was locked, however. It was the first one she had found that was locked, and that alone was enough to make her suspicious, but that was not all. At almost the same moment that she tried the knob, she heard a sound from the other side, a sound that might have been a smothered cough.
