Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  Maggie dropped her rag in the tub. She reared back on her haunches, and then stood, almost reaching his chest. She pointed a finger at the top button of his shirt. He could almost see steam come from her nose and ears. “Sticky with keys. Ha! She’s the one who can’t seem to keep keys off her fingers. She has all of ‘em. She’s supposed to turn them over to you. Why, that lyin’ old…old…”

  Then, she fell silent. Shaking her head, she let out another laugh. “I can’t say’s I blame her. She thinks she owns the place after the way he treated her.”

  “I wondered why she seems so…annoyed with me all the time.” Maggie nodded, putting her hands on her hips. “She was called his Little Wife, you know. People called Wentworth his Little Wife and she’d blush when they did. It wasn’t because of anything he did. It was Wentworth. She stole money sometimes from him, and she always had the keys to things. She acted like he was going to get down on his knees and propose to her any minute. He didn’t trust her much, but he let the little thievings go on. I’m not sure why. When I was new here, I told him I saw her taking some money from his dresser, and he told me that that was fine. I never took a thing from the dear old man, but Wentworth had sticky fingers for everything.” Then,

  Maggie took a long hard look at him, one eye squinting as if she wanted to get into his brain. “What key is it you’re precisely after?”

  “The room in the West Wing,” Ethan said. “The tower. There’s a window there. There used to be a window there,” he corrected himself.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well.”

  Then, Maggie Barrow smiled, and he almost saw something like a devilish twinkle in her eyes.

  9

  “Come on,” she said to him.

  Ethan followed her, feeling far too much like a sheepdog tracking a much-smarter lamb. Passing through one of the secondary routes to the West Wing (through the empty ghost-towns of the servants quarters, which were vast, as Justin Gravesend no doubt planned on having ten or so servants live and work at Harrow), they ended up at the arched door that led to the turret.

  “Ever been up there?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m not the curious type.” Maggie reached into a pocket of her apron and withdrew a long hat pin. “My Uncle Francis was a good man for the most part, but he tended to lose his key when coming home late at night. He taught me a little trick he had, and being the obedient niece I was, I’ve never forgotten it. Where he got a lady’s hat pin every night, I couldn’t say.” She twisted the pin slightly, and thrust it into the keyhole.

  Ethan began asking her some irrelevant question just to fill the silence. She shushed him and bent down to press her ear against the keyhole.

  Then, that wicked grin returning to her face, she straightened up. “Eureka,” she said, and opened the door to the narrow staircase going up.

  10

  The steps were wooden, and creaked each time Ethan set foot on the one above it. Maggie had procured a small lamp. She walked ahead of him, taking the stairs nearly two at a time.

  “I can’t believe I’ve never gotten in here before. Wentworth has always kept me in the East Wing or downstairs,” she said, her eagerness spilling over in her voice. “I love little mysteries.”

  In the light of the lamp she carried, Maggie looked like a glowing faerie, her red hair nearly ablaze with the light, and he was reminded of his first impression of her: The Lady of Shallots, the Faerie Queen of Harrow. When she reached the top step, she gave a little shriek of delight. “You should see it, good lord!”

  Running up the steps behind her, he glanced over her shoulder and felt a certain familiarity with the room.

  It was mostly dark, but the lamplight glanced off the rows of candlesticks, and two low tables, upon which a large painting was propped. The picture was of some a saint.

  As Maggie went around the spider webbed room (pressing the strands of webs away from her face) she lit the candles. The light came up in the room slowly, and for a moment, it seemed that the candlelight would flicker down to nothing.

  Ethan whispered, “He blocked it.”

  Then, the flames along the candles burned brighter, turning the small antechamber into a flickering dawn.

  “What’s that smell?” Maggie asked, wrinkling her face.

  “Some kind of sulfur?” he guessed aloud.

  He went to examine the painting of the saint: it was like none of the other icons that his grandfather had owned. She was definitely holy, with her halo and her prayerful and somewhat mournful look. She had long golden braids, and her aspect was one of a beautiful peasant girl of centuries past. Joan of Arc as the Maid of Orleans? But the face was the same as the woman in the St. Joan portrait in the hallway, and it was nearly like the woman in the painting at the top of the stairs in the front hall of the house.

  “It smells like dead rats,” Maggie said. “Those cats had better not have some sneaky way of getting up here and leaving all their victims.”

  Ethan drew the painting down, and set it against the wall. The door behind where the painting had rested was made of thick wood, and studded with nails and spikes.

  “See? He blocked it. The door to the room,” Ethan said. “Here, help me with this.”

  11

  The door on the other side of the painting was also locked, and no amount of playing with the keyhole would open it.

  “They’ve put glue in this, or clay, something to gummy it up,” Maggie said, withdrawing a now nearly-uselessly bent pin. The door’s hinges were fastened with epoxy, and were also unmanageable. Large nails and been driven into the door, and bent rods - like brackets - had been stapled from the frame to the door itself.

  “Someone genuinely did not want us to get in,” Maggie said. “Do you think it’s Wentworth hiding stolen goods?”

  Finally, Ethan said, half-joking, “What we need is a pickaxe.”

  “You really do want to get in that room, don’t you?” Maggie asked, her hands on her hips as if she were about to launch into a speech about how crazy he was. But she looked at him with something that might’ve been admiration.

  Ethan nodded. “As badly as my grandfather apparently wanted to keep me out.”

  “Well,” Maggie said, setting her lamp down on a table. “I just happen to know where Mr. Gravesend always kept his pickaxes.”

  12

  It was seven at night, and they emerged from the flickering room to a house that was half-dark.

  As they went together down the corridor of the West Wing, Maggie made him promise not to be mad.

  “Mad?” Ethan asked, and then grew suspicious. “What would I have to be angry about?”

  She cocked her head to the side, and looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re a most unusual man, Mr. Gravesend.” She turned about and continued down the steps to the next landing.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I suppose.”

  He had to move fast to keep up with her as she practically bounded down the stairs to the foyer in a decidedly unladylike fashion, and when he caught up with her, she began to look rather grave.

  “All right, sir,” she said. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “You’re a ghost, too,” he laughed.

  “No,” she said, so seriously that he felt as if his heart were going to stop. “But here’s the truth of things: I am not a married woman.”

  “Oh.”

  “There is no Mr. Barrow,” she added. “You’re a widow.”

  “Well,” she began. “In some ways, I suppose I am.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Sir, be patient with me,” she said, but he had to be patient all the way to the caretaker’s cottage, where, she told him, there were axes of all kinds as well as hammers and saws and everything that could bring a door down.

  Waiting there at the doorway to the room in the cottage that was filled with the hardware, Ethan saw the little boy again. The one who had just the day before worn a paper hat and had run through the mud t
o escape him. The child wore a pair of brown trousers cut all wrong for his height and weight, and an oversized white shirt with blotches of what was either tomato juice or blood. Ethan assumed the former. He stared wide-eyed at Ethan. Ethan had the peculiar sense that the boy felt he was in some kind of terrible trouble.

  “Mr. Gravesend,” Maggie said. “Meet Alfred. My son.”

  13

  “I believe Alf and I have already met,” Ethan said, offering his hand to the boy.

  “He’s an Alfred,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, Mrs. Barrow,” Ethan agreed, adding the emphasis to the Mrs.

  “Good to meet you, sir,” Alf said, stepping forward like a puppy who had been caught piddling on the carpet.

  “Alfred,” Maggie said, shooting a glance between her son and

  Ethan. “You weren’t playing ghost yesterday were you?”

  “No,” Alf said. “I was just playing in the woods. I didn’t think…”

  “I used to play in those woods when I was your age,” Ethan said, smiling. He took the boy’s hand and shook it gently. “You got your hat back?”

  Alf nodded, his eyes never leaving Ethan. “Thank you. Sir. Very much.”

  “He’s shy,” Ethan glanced at Maggie.

  “My Alfred? Hardly,” Maggie said.

  “Alf, would you like to come help us break down a door?” Ethan clapped his hands together as if it was the most interesting scheme in the world.

  14

  It all was done with few words between them - what needed to be said was in the air, and in a gentle telepathy that Ethan now felt. Some barrier had been broken between them.. Ethan understood it in a glance, and he saw it in the little boy, too.

  Maggie had been abandoned by someone, had raised her son on her own, and Justin Gravesend had, in most respects, taken care of her for the past year. She and her son had occupied the upstairs rooms at the empty caretaker’s house; Wentworth had been ignorant of this because she had never bothered to go to the cottage, and Maggie had never volunteered it for fear of Wentworth’s moralizing.

  “She thinks you’re a witch. Did you know that?” he asked, trudging the last steps with the heavy axe; Alf ran up ahead and proclaimed the room full of candles as the most mysterious and wondrous place he had ever seen.

  “She thinks I’m the apocalypse,” Maggie said.

  Alf cried out that it smelled like an outhouse, only he used a less savory term, and his mother promptly raised a great hue and cry.

  Ethan went in and swung the pickaxe at the door.

  15

  An hour later, the door was a brittle pile of splintered wood, and Alf began laughing. “You look funny!” he said, pointing at Ethan, his face thick with sweat.

  Ethan set the pickaxe down, shaking his head.

  Maggie put her hand lightly on his shoulder. “Now, why would your grandfather do that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Behind the door: another wall of stone and brick.

  16

  “It’s like he was locking something in there,” Ethan said, and then wished he hadn’t even thought it.

  The smell was stronger here, with the door smashed away.

  The badsmell was in his nostrils.

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think of the little girl on the stairs, or the way something got beneath your skin and felt you - felt your pulse and your blood and your heart.

  It was imaginary.

  There’s nothing bad behind the wall, he thought. You’re not alone. Others are here with you. It will be some foolish thing. Some room that Justin wanted to preserve. Nothing more.

  He hefted the pickaxe up again, and motioned for Maggie and Alf to move away from him.

  Then he swung the axe hard into the wall. Once. Twice. He kept swinging, determined to open the room that his grandfather had not wanted him to find.

  Or perhaps, the thought snaked through his brain, this was the very room he meant for you to discover.

  17

  When it was over, Ethan sat down in the rubble.

  He felt waves of nausea as dust and that awful smell overcame him.

  Maggie brought her lamp forward, and said, “What could possibly be in here that smells like that?” She began coughing.

  “It’s a dead cat,” Alf volunteered. “I’m sure of it. I smelled one in the field once. It was awful.”

  Ethan reached into his breast pocket and brought out a handkerchief, which he passed to Maggie. She covered her mouth with it. She took a step forward into the room. Ethan was about to tell her not to go any further. He was sure it was not going to be good. He was sure there would be something there, in that dark room.

  Some secret thing.

  Meant only for you.

  A gift from grandpa.

  “It might be bats,” Alf whispered. “They live in places like this, I think.”

  Ethan didn’t want to say it aloud, but it was obvious to him. From the look on Maggie’s face, it must have been obvious to her, as well. Someone had died in this room.

  Someone had walled the room shut.

  Someone had nailed the door shut against the wall.

  Someone had locked the entrance to the room, and then…

  Maggie whispered “What’s that? On the wall?” She stepped into the room, around the rubble, holding the lamp up, its flame casting a kaleidoscope of whites and blues along the stones.

  Ethan arose, dusting himself off, and grabbed a candle. He motioned for Alf to remain behind.

  Ethan stepped into the room with Maggie.

  In the light, they could make out the scratch marks along the walls, as if a wild animal had been trapped inside.

  A human handprint, burned into the brick.

  Chapter Four

  1

  After a few moments of staring and waiting within the room, Maggie said, “It’s gone.”

  Ethan felt distracted by a sense of something completely benign in the room. He heard Maggie’s voice as if from a great distance, beneath water. It was as if he were swimming beneath the calm surface of a lake, and somewhere above, Maggie was looking down at him and saying something to him.

  “What about you?” Maggie asked her son.

  “Nothing,” Alf said. “The stink’s gone out.”

  Ethan felt the distance of some watery expanse. For just a second, he closed his eyes. The sense that came up to him, not like a dream at all but like the pinprick of reality, was that he knew that he would be standing here, like this. Before. Years ago. Somehow he had known it, once upon a time, when he had been a little boy in the statue garden, looking up at his grandfather standing at the window that was no more.

  2

  He could recapture that moment: he was eight, he realized, and the world seemed fuzzy, as if he’d eaten something too sweet, or had too much tea. His stomach felt funny. He almost felt as if he would fall down.

  The angel in the garden was with him. Her skin was so white it was like bone. He knew someone was at the window of the tower room. The scent of lilac and honeysuckle was in the air, and the yellowjackets of summer swarmed somewhere nearby, their buzzing growing ever louder, and she said (who was she? The angel?), They live down below, and they come up now, they come up to find you, but do not be afraid.

  He glanced up to see his grandfather, not waving, but shouting and raising his fist—his grandfather was angry at him, but he didn’t know why—and the fuzzy feeling kept swirling around him, and he heard her say (was it his mother? The angel?) Esteban, she whispered, they’ve come to get your sweetness. All your sweetness, all the honey within you, all that you possess, they’ve come for it.

  You must never let them in, but they will try and get a taste if they can.

  His grandfather left the window. Now, it was just stained glass, in the shape of a flower. Ethan felt he could smell the flower in the glass, and that he could almost reach it, all the way from below in the garden. Moments later the old man was bounding out the doors by the conservator
y.

  Ethan heard the humming grow louder along his body. He felt an energy in the sticky heat. He felt something along his neck and arms and circling his ankles.

  The thought came to him: some engine powers the universe, and I am at the heart of it, right now. I am where the engine of the universe hums.

  His grandfather shouted to him, waving his arms, but Ethan just stood there, and – remembering himself as a little boy standing in the ivy, looking down at his bare feet and seeing the yellowjackets moving like brilliant fireflies around his legs, swarming across his throat, and then a darkness came, too, as they covered his face and eyes…

  3

  Ethan, in Harrow, 29 years old, opened his eyes a moment later.

  Disorientation took the form of seeing a beautiful woman with red hair scolding a little boy with a shaggy mane, and then the words on the wall, flickering in the candlelight.

  Help, was all it said. Other words – whole sentences were written in white chalk around the room.

  Ethan thought: I am here. I am not there. Not a little boy. That is the past. Somewhere in the past. Gone.

  “Are you all there?” Maggie asked, too sympathetically.

  “Do I look awful?” Ethan asked.

  “Like you swallowed a dead rat,” Alf chimed in, proud of himself.

  4

  Alf was probably the least daunted by the Secret Chamber, which is what he’d dubbed it once they’d brought more candles and lamps in the place.

  He scrambled about the rubble, holding a drippy candle in front of the bricks, and would pronounce, “There’s some more words here, look,” and then curse as if he had been raised in a brothel.