The House on Parchment Street

by Patricia A. Mckillip

“I don’t want to stay in bed for a whole week,” Bruce said. He sounded close to tears.

  Aunt Catherine said grimly, “You’re lucky you don’t have to stay in bed the rest of your life.” She felt his flushed face. “And I don’t want to see you downstairs until you can walk down on your own two feet.”

  “What did Mrs. Brewster say about the tunnel?”

  “She hasn’t, yet,” Uncle Harold said. Bruce glanced at him doubtfully. He looked at Carol, and she said, “We told him.”

  “Oh.” His breath gathered and loosed in a long, slow sigh. He went to the stairs and began his slow, halting progress up them. Uncle Harold went to his side.

  “Let me carry your crutch,” he said gently. “I don’t know where to touch you without hurting you, but perhaps if you lean on me it won’t be so difficult.”

  Bruce gave him the crutch. He put his arm around Uncle Harold’s shoulders. Aunt Catherine stood at the foot of the stairs and watched them until they disappeared around the bend in the stairs and Bruce’s door clicked open. Then she stirred herself. She looked at Carol.

  “He’ll be cross for the next few days. If he snarls at you, snarl back.”

  Carol smiled. The movement of her face felt strange, as though she had not smiled for a long time. Aunt Catherine’s arm dropped lightly across her shoulders.

  Carol said slowly, “Do you believe us? About the ghosts?”

  She was silent a moment, her brows tugging together. “Yes,” she said finally. “This house is very old, and I think that must be only one of the strange sad things that may have happened in it. I don’t know anything about ghosts, but I hope that somehow opening the tunnel will put the girl’s mind at rest, because three hundred years is too long a time to spend haunting a cellar. I wouldn’t want to do it.”

  “Bruce says ghosts might be only reflections of people living.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But I don’t think that’s what we saw yesterday. It was more than a reflection, and I think she knew we were there.” She shivered suddenly, and Aunt Catherine’s hold tightened.

  “I think she chose the right people to appear to. Under the circumstances, you behaved very sensibly, in your own fashion, and I hope Mrs. Brewster appreciates that.”

  “I suppose she’ll ask how we found it.”

  “I think she might enjoy having ghosts in her cellar. After all, she does like old things.”

  “I suspect she might draw the line at three-hundred-year-old people,” Uncle Harold said, coming back down the stairs. “Bruce is in bed. I think he’s feverish. They prescribed some medicine that will help him sleep.” He took a bottle out of his sweater pocket and gave it to her. “I’ll call Mrs. Brewster now.”

  He went to the kitchen. Aunt Catherine went upstairs with Bruce’s medicine. Carol sat down on the bottom step and watched the huge pendulum in the grandfather clock trace its silent path back and forth, back and forth. The closed door and the thick stones of the house muffled the drilling. The hall was cool and changeless. She wondered for a moment what the house had looked like out of the blue eyes of a young girl three centuries before, as she came down the stairs in her long dress with its lace collar. The stairs creaked behind her and she jumped. Aunt Catherine came down.

  “He’s asleep,” she said softly, as if the sound of her voice might wake him. The kitchen door opened, and they turned. Uncle Harold came out. His mouth was crooked; he ran his fingers through his hair and sighed.

  “Some people,” he said, “have no historical perspective.”

  “She didn’t like it,” Aunt Catherine said. He shook his head.

  “She wants it closed.”

  Carol stared at him. Her breath caught in a gasp. “She can’t—she can’t close it up—she can’t—not after all that work! It’s not right! We spent hours opening it, and my hands are all blistered, and it’s our tunnel, and if she closes it the girl will keep coming back for another three hundred years, and where else is she going to find people who won’t get hysterical and run like Susan did—” She began to sob helplessly. Uncle Harold drew her against him; she felt the soft wool of his sweater, smelling of pipe-smoke, against her face.

  “We won’t give up that easily,” he said soothingly.

  “Bruce—Bruce couldn’t take it being closed up—he couldn’t—He’d run away, or something.”

  Uncle Harold found a handkerchief in his pocket and gave it to her. “I hope not,” he said. She straightened, wiping her face, her breath catching in quick jerks. “Carol, when I called Mrs. Brewster, she was upset at something the boys had done to her garden, and that’s why—”

  “Bruce didn’t do it; neither did Alexander. He told me about it. Sandy squashed her flowers.”

  “I know, but Bruce has been in trouble with her before, and if he’s reformed, she hasn’t found out yet. She was in no mood to appreciate anything any of the boys had done. She was too upset with them to understand properly that she has the only priest tunnel in England. If she begins to understand that, she might change her mind.”

  “Perhaps if she sees it, she’ll change her mind,” Aunt Catherine said. Uncle Harold sighed.

  “The problem will be to get her down here. I think she expects me to wall it up personally. I can’t do that; it goes against all my principles.”

  “What are you going to do, then?” Carol said.

  “The only thing I can do. Procrastinate.”

  Carol went up to see Bruce in the afternoon. She opened his door quietly, peeked in, and found him awake, looking at her.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said. His brows were drawn in a dark line. He waved at the chair beside his bed. “Sit down. I’m sorry you had to do all the explaining.”

  “Alexander helped.” She moved a water glass and the medicine off the chair and sat down. Bruce picked at threads in his cover.

  “Did he believe you?”

  “He believed us. I’m not sure if he believed the ghosts.”

  “How can he believe us and not believe in them? He must think we’re either barmy or lying. Did he call Mrs. Brewster?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  She hesitated. He watched her, his eyes steady under his frown, and she said finally, “She’s not sure.”

  “Not sure? Is she coming to see it? She is, isn’t she?”

  She shook her head, her throat burning again. Bruce stared at her; he shifted impatiently, trying to sit up.

  “Carol, what did she say?”

  “She said—she—Bruce, why did you have to bother her so much! We did all that work for nothing, and all because you probably rode circles around her one day, and now you could draw the most beautiful picture in the world and she still wouldn’t like it because you did it—”

  Bruce dropped back on the pillows. “She wants it closed,” he said levelly. His eyes were black in his white face.

  “Yes, because Sandy ruined her flowers, and she thinks you and Alexander did it because you’re always doing things—”

  “I suppose you’ve never done anything wrong in your life—”

  “Of course I have! And I’m wishing now that I’d never done anything, ever, that hurt anybody, because it just ends in people being killed, or hurt inside so much that they don’t trust people, or they can’t think straight enough to even like priest tunnels that other people dig up for them.”

  Bruce sighed. He dropped a hand over his eyes. “Oh, well,” he said, and the weariness of his voice startled her.

  “Oh well what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I can’t think. My thoughts won’t lie still. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “There must be.”

  “It’s her cellar, her priest tunnel.”

  “We opened it. Bruce, that girl might have to haunt the cellar for another three hundred years if we close it now.”

  “She might just do it anyway.” He stirred restlessly. “I don’t want to think about it. Carol, go away, o
r stop lecturing me, or something. I can’t think now. I’ll think tomorrow.”

  She stood up. Then she looked down at him, seeing his heavy eyes and the taut pull of his mouth, and her clenched hands opened. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I forgot what it’s like to be sick. I’m not sick very often. The last time I had to stay in bed, it was because I fell off a skate-board into a brick geranium planter and broke my ankle. I hated it. It wasn’t funny.”

  “It sounds like something that could only happen to you. I’ll think of a way out. I promise. But everything happened so fast, it’s all jumbled in my head. And I didn’t even get the hedges cut. You’d think I could do something right for a change, now that I’d like to.”

  The door opened softly. Aunt Catherine came in. She went to Bruce and felt his forehead. “Are you hungry?”

  “No. I’m thirsty, though. Are there any lemons?”

  “I’ll get some. You try and sleep.”

  Carol followed her out. She paused at the foot of the stairs, thinking. “I think I used my last lemons in a pie. Would you go over and see if Emily has some to lend me?”

  Emily Raison opened her front door even before Carol opened the gate. Her face was wrinkled with anxiety. “Oh, my dear, is he all right? Does Catherine need something? Come in a moment and sit down; you’ve been running. What is it, then?”

  Carol stepped into her neat parlor. She sank into a fat chair, catching her breath. “Aunt Catherine wants to know if she can borrow some lemons, because Bruce wants some lemonade. He’s all right. He’s sick, but he’ll live.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad. You sit there, and I’ll find some. I’ll be back directly.” She disappeared into her kitchen. Carol rose, prowling restlessly around the room, picking up china what-nots and putting them down again. Geraldine the cat lifted her head from the depths of a chair and yawned. The room was silent, full of old things without a speck of dust on them, each with its own particular spot. There were doilies on the armchairs and glass flowers and candlesticks on a tiny table and dark, framed photographs on the walls and on the mantel. She looked at the stern faces, wondering if they had ever smiled. She turned, and something above the piano caught her eye. She went toward it, not breathing, and knelt on the piano bench, staring at it where it hung in its own place on the wall.

  “There,” Emily Raison said. “I didn’t use them after all. Here you are, my dear. Tell your aunt—”

  “Who did that?”

  “What?” She looked at the wall. “Oh, the needlework? Mrs. Brewster did that when she was a little girl. She copied it from the painting in the study.”

  “I know, but why did she—” She stopped abruptly, shaking her head. The girl looked down at her, blurred a little by uneven stitching, and behind her was not a dark arch but a smooth wall of unbroken grey stone. Carol felt something in her throat too wide to swallow. “I wonder…” she whispered. “I wonder…”

  “Yes, it is nice, isn’t it? She gave it to me as a memento when I left service. She was very good with a needle when she was small. Here are the lemons.”

  Carol took them. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Emily Raison.”

  IX

  Bruce was asleep when she got back. He slept fitfully through the night. She woke once at his sudden shout and struggled out of bed to stand blinking in the hall light until Aunt Catherine came out of his bedroom.

  “He said he was dreaming about the hedges,” she said, puzzled. Carol yawned.

  “He didn’t get them cut.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Aunt Catherine said. She shook her head and went back to bed. He did not wake again until lunchtime, and then they heard his voice, faint down the stairs, demanding food.

  Carol took him a tray. He maneuvered carefully to a sitting position, and she put it on his knees. He looked down at it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Poached egg on toast.”

  “I’m supposed to eat it?”

  “No. You can throw it out the window if you want.”

  He poked at it doubtfully with his fork. Carol drew the curtains and sat down on the window-seat. The light splashed across the bed; his face was pale in it, but the shadows beneath his eyes were gone.

  “I’m glad you weren’t hurt,” he said. “You could have been hurt so easily, if you had been close behind me.”

  “I might have gotten killed,” she said thoughtfully. “Then I could have haunted the cellar, too.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Well, I didn’t, so there’s no use thinking about it, is there?”

  He was silent a moment, looking at the egg. “I suppose not. But it frightened me. Perhaps I should start thinking before I do things, instead of jumping into them, like I jumped into the blackberry bushes. But then, that was probably the most stupid thing I’ll ever do.”

  He took a bite of egg. Carol leaned back against the windowsill. She smelled sun-warmed grass on the warm air. The drilling had stopped for the weekend; the afternoon was soundless. “I wonder where the tunnel ends. I wonder if there still is an ending to it, a place where you can come out.”

  “Maybe Dad can talk to Mrs. Brewster so we can find out. He’s good at talking to people.”

  “He doesn’t want it closed. He said he was going to procrastinate.”

  Bruce stirred restlessly. “I can’t understand why she’s not even curious. She likes old things. She loves this old house, and all the antiques in it. Why doesn’t she want a three-hundred-year-old tunnel in her cellar? That’s an antique.”

  “She’s angry.”

  “I know, but…She’s not thinking logically. I wish she would. I was tempted, before you came up, to try to sneak downstairs and go through the tunnel, but it takes me five minutes even to sit up…Have you gone through?” he asked a little wistfully, and she shook her head.

  “I won’t go without you. Anyway, I’m not going now—not so soon after you got hurt. It scared me, too.”

  “I dreamed about it falling last night…The hedge was growing in it, and it pushed at the top of the tunnel, and knocked the stones loose.” He finished half a glass of lemonade, then asked, “Where was Alexander? Why wasn’t he there when we went through?”

  She told him. He was silent when she finished, tracing a delicate design on his napkin with the point of his knife. He put it down finally and shifted the tray off his knees to the bed. “I suppose it’s no use telling her we were tearing open her cellar wall when someone ran over her flowers. It doesn’t matter really. It may as well have been me. I would have, I think, except that I like flowers. But I’ve done other things…But it still doesn’t seem right that we’ve done all that work for nothing. There must be something we can do.” He was silent again, looking at her as she sat on the window-seat. He said suddenly, “Turn your head a little, away from the light. Can I draw it?”

  “What for?”

  “Because there are some lines in it that make me want to draw it. I don’t have anything else to do. Do you mind sitting still?”

  She shook her head. “Nobody ever drew me before. Can I talk? What lines do you want to draw? I don’t have wrinkles, do I?”

  He smiled. “No. Would you get my things out of the window-seat? The tablet and the pencil-case…Thanks. Put your hair back and look at the light-shade. No. Look at the dresser top. Don’t smile.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “All right. Smile.”

  The door squeaked open half an hour later, and Alexander stuck his head into the room. “Hello,” he said gently. “I came to visit the sick. I brought you a flower, and I thought I would read you some soothing poetry.” He put a purple thistle in Bruce’s water glass and looked at the drawing. “I say, who’s that beautiful girl?”

  Bruce smiled down at it contentedly. “It’s in the bone structure. You miss it when she’s got her hair all over her face.”

  Carol’s feet hit the floor with a thump. “Let me see.”

  “I’m not finished�
��”

  “I’m getting a crick in my neck.” She leaned across the bed to look at it. Bruce glanced up at her sudden silence.

  “Don’t you like it? I’m not quite finished.”

  She stared down at the still face, fine-boned and delicately shaded, oddly unfamiliar. “That’s not me.”

  “I tried to make it like you. Sit down again; I’m still shading. You’re not used to seeing your face on flat paper.”

  “I think it is like you,” Alexander said.

  “But where’s the rest of my hair?”

  “Tied back.”

  She sat down slowly. Alexander sat down on the chair. “I never called you a matchstick. I have a great respect for bones, living and dead. Speaking of dead bones, I don’t think it’s fair that you had all that adventure without me. I worked just as hard to open the tunnel.”

  Bruce’s pencil checked. “I know. We waited as long as we could for you.” He paused briefly. “There’s a problem.”

  “Another one? Bring on your problem. After telling your dad we’ve been seeing ghosts, we can tackle anything. What is it?”

  “Mrs. Brewster. She wants the tunnel closed.”

  Alexander’s mouth moved in a silent whistle. It settled into a thin line. He bent down to pick up the water glass and sat a moment looking at the thistle. “I can guess,” he said softly. “She was that angry when she talked to me. But I never thought her reason was impaired. Doesn’t she like ghosts?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Carol looked away from the dresser. “Bruce—”

  “I don’t know what to do.” He leaned back, tired, his hands still.

  “She’ll like it when she sees it,” Alexander said. “Perhaps we should kidnap her and leave her in the middle of it. Perhaps you should do something nice to her, and she’ll have to come and thank you. Be charming.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Bruce,” Carol said again. “Miss Emily has something on her wall—” There were footsteps outside of Bruce’s door, and she stopped. Uncle Harold opened the door. Father Malory followed him in.

  “Hello,” Father Malory said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything, but I wanted to hear about the ghosts. Do you mind telling me?”