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

by Douglas Clegg

  Maggie would scold him, but she, too, would let out with some brief blasphemy when she saw the fragments of words along the wall. She laughed at once. “It’s a joke, this part, see?” and she’d drag Ethan over and hold her lamp up, shining its blue light along the stones.

  “When the seventh seal is broken,” she began, and then tried to find where the sentence continued.

  “It’s not a joke,” Ethan said. “It’s Biblical. Seven angels, seven seals.”

  “Seals?” Alf asked, turning about for a second. “Like in the circus?”

  “Seals like sealing wax,” his mother said. “The kind you got into last summer and got all sticky with Wentworth’s keys.”

  She’s sticky with keys, Ethan remembered Wentworth’s words.

  Then, a page from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came to him, The Walrus and the Carpenter: ships and sails and sealing wax and cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, or whether pigs have wings.

  “What’s this?” Alf asked, and then read aloud, as best he could, “’Four grey walls, and four grey towers overlook a space of flowers’. It’s a rhyme.”

  “That’s a poem,” Ethan said. “Part of a poem,

  anyway.” Then he began reciting what he remembered of it. “’Four grey walls, and four grey towers, overlook a space of flowers, and the silent isle imbowers the Lady of Shalott’. It was my grandfather’s favorite poem. Tennyson,” he added, noticing the blank stare that Maggie offered.

  In the lamplight, despite the strangeness of the find and the day spent hacking at brick and mortar, he had the sudden urge to lean over and kiss her. It was the oddest revelation, and it seemed both terribly out of place and very appropriate. Maggie Barrow was completely kissable, and it made him feel like a schoolboy with a crush.

  And then, something in the flickering candlelight transformed her face in shadow into Madeleine’s, and he felt somewhat reproached by the thought of his ex-wife.

  “What’s the matter?” Maggie asked.

  “Nothing,” Ethan said.

  “You looked at me queerly enough,” she muttered.

  “Did I?” he said, as if he could not think up anything better.

  “Look!” Alf cried out, his voice echoing in the chamber, while he stumbled into a dark corner of the turret room. “Over here, I found something! Something big!”

  And that’s when they found the remains of a human body in a recessed corner of the room.

  5

  Finding a body came with its own set of problems—particularly a corpse that had been rotting for several years by the look of it (so saith Maggie, not showing on her face half the horror that Ethan felt must have been on his).

  Maggie pulled Alf back, completely against his will, practically lifting him by the elbows.

  Ethan convinced Maggie — who then went to look at the corpse with better lamplight—that they should all just go downstairs and telephone for the police like sane people. Alf proclaimed his hunger halfway down the banister to the first floor; Maggie made some grumblings about a woman’s work never being done; Ethan volunteered to make sandwiches; but Maggie pushed him away, told him to “make your blasted call to the coppers,” and so, another remarkable evening in Harrow began.

  Ethan rang up the local constable, the man named Pocket; Maggie went to put some soup on the stove (“And clean up a terrible mess in the kitchen of teapots that had their own tempests,” which she blamed entirely on Wentworth), while Ethan went to wait for the officer of the law.

  The weather had, as Ethan had come to expect in his brief time at Harrow, turned sour. Rain clouds seemed to have blackened out what there was of moon and stars. But still, the sky at nightfall had a glow to it, as if the threat of rain were its own kind of flickering candlelight.

  A chilly wind whistled down the valley, stirring up leaves that magically seemed to turn from gold to brown by the time they hit the driveway of Harrow.

  6

  Ethan sat down on the front steps and had a smoke, fretting more than slightly over the discovery of the body in the upstairs room; and yet, something within him felt free, as well. It was as if he had discovered something that he knew would be there all along. Perhaps not a body, but a secret.

  Something that had its own reflection in his childhood. Something that had not been right, that he had sensed from the moment he set foot in Harrow.

  It’s what I imagined with that ghost of the little girl. She wanted me to find the room, to find the body. My mind made her up because somehow I knew things were not as they should be. That was what that had been—a premonition.

  He understood about premonitions and instincts. He had them sometimes, but not often. But that’s what the hallucination of the ghost had been. He was sure now.

  Maggie called out from the kitchen that it was a mess but that she’d have some good soup for dinner; Alf came running out to the front steps to entertain him with some riddle or joke.

  “And so,” Alf concluded his third funny story that Ethan couldn’t quite grasp. “That’s when the horse turned to the ape and shouted, ‘I’m a horse, you dog, not a giraffe!’” and then Alf held his stomach while he brayed his laughter. Ethan grinned politely, and tried to laugh along. Every time he looked at Alf, with his mussed hair and face that was both like his mother’s and not like her face at all, he thought of the body in the room. His mind kept returning to seeing it there. As if this person had just fallen asleep and had not ever awakened again.

  Badsmell.

  He tried not to think of what it had looked like. Or how long that body must have remained in the room. Or the scratches on the walls that the body had made when it was not just a body, but a living, breathing human being.

  Or the Badsmell.

  He watched Alf’s antics in some kind of wonder: the boy could discover a corpse, and within the hour, told jokes involving talking animals. “What’s the name of your wife?” Alf asked, finally.

  “My wife? Who said I was married?”

  “You know who,” Alf whispered, winking.

  “Oh, her,” Ethan winked. “Well, I’m not married anymore. But her name is Madeleine.”

  “I bet she was mad,” Alf said. “Mad as in Madeleine.”

  “Alf as in Alfred,” Ethan responded.

  “Eeth as in Ethan.” Alf was not one to give up the chance at the last word. “Eeth and teeth go together. Nothing goes with Alf. I’ve tried it.”

  “That’s because everything that’s spelled like Alf is said a different way. Like half and calf.”

  “Is that true?” Alf asked.

  “Every word of it. From half to calf,” Ethan said.

  “It’s not fair, is it?” Alf said, as if this were perfectly logical. “Now, you.”

  “Me, what?”

  Alf crossed his arms over his chest. “You need to tell me a joke.”

  “All right. Here’s one.” Ethan held up his left hand, wiggling his pinky. “Do you know why polite people never ever use this finger when they pick up a cup of tea?”

  “No,” Alf said, scratching his head in confusion. “Why?”

  “Because,” Ethan said, pausing dramatically and wiggling his pinky faster. “It’s mine.”

  For some reason, Alf thought this was the funniest joke he had ever heard, and after he laughed as if being tickled to death, he raced inside to tell his mother the funniest story ever told about the human pinky. Then, he raced back outside to tell yet another joke.

  Then, he asked, “When you die, do you stay in your body?”

  “I guess you go to heaven,” Ethan said.

  “Even if someone locked you in a room so your ghost can’t get out?” Alf asked, and then looked a little sad. “Like you know who.”

  “Well,” Ethan said. “I think locked doors can’t keep you from going to heaven if that’s where you’re meant to go.”

  7

  Alf had grown tired of the jokes, and was hungrier than ever; he went back inside to bother his mother som
e more before dinnertime. Ethan went and stood in the drive, watching the early darkness for what seemed like hours (although, in fact, only thirty minutes had passed since he’d called the constable) until the squeak of a bicycle could be heard.

  Remind me never to find a corpse again, he thought. The police will take forever to show up.

  Emerging from the shadows along the drive, Pocket cut a fairly merry figure on an ill-fitting bicycle that had seen better days. Pocket was a small man of large proportion. Ethan guessed that he was in his fifties, but was not sure which side of fifty he was on—for there was something nearly decrepit about the constable, and at the same time, he had a curious energy.

  Pocket wore an enormous coat that seemed to be more of a cape. It flapped in the sweeping wind, and his hat was not the flat-style hat of an officer of the law, but more in line with a homburg of recent vintage, scrunched down over his head.

  He looked, in many ways, like a villain himself, right out of pulp novels, for there was something too melodramatic in the way he outfitted himself.

  As soon as he was off the bicycle, he let the vehicle fall to the ground as if he didn’t care about it; and he did not take his hat off until Maggie suggested he do so in the dining room “to set a good example for my son.” Pocket’s cheeks were bright red, and his manner both brusque and nearly suspicious — for having brought him out on such an errand, at the dinner hour, for possibly nothing. “Things have been imagined here in the past,” he said, somewhat cryptically.

  Ethan watched the constable’s eyes for any trace of irony.

  What he saw instead was nervousness in the form of a tic in the man’s left eye, and a bit of a stammer when he mentioned the corpse.

  The first thing that Ethan thought was that the local constable was slightly horrified that he might have to investigate a murder.

  8

  “You believe this person was murdered,” Pocket said, his fingers thrumming the night stick he held in his right hand as if the stick helped him think better. Then, Pocket launched into his understanding of what was upstairs. Next, he began asking question after question of Ethan, but refused to go up and look at the body.

  “It’s a girl,” Alf volunteered.

  “Alfred, don’t interrupt. And it was a woman,” Maggie corrected, bringing around a tureen of thick chicken and vegetable soup to the dining room table where the two men and the boy sat. The tea was nearly drunk, and Alf told her that he didn’t want any more milk “because I’m not a baby.”

  Once the soup bowls were filled, Maggie took a seat beside Ethan, touching the edge of his elbow beneath the table, giving it a slight squeeze. “She’s a woman of about twenty-eight. I would guess.”

  Ethan glanced at her in slight amazement. “How could you tell?”

  Pocket watched them both intensely, but said very little.

  “Her shoes. Her dress. No one older than twenty-eight would’ve worn it,” Maggie said, as if this were the most obvious fact in the world. “You two gentlemen are telling me you don’t notice these things? Now, she might’ve been older if she were a madwoman. But that’s an enormous ‘if’. She died in winter, as well. And she didn’t expect to be in that room, waiting to die. I can tell you that. She wasn’t dressed for it.” She then went on to discuss the styles of women over thirty versus those under, and why the woman had not yet removed her shoes before she died.

  “All right, why?” Ethan asked, fascinated.

  “She didn’t think that she would really die. She thought that someone was going to rescue her. She wanted to be ready.”

  “The lady might’ve been poisoned,” Alf said, and then immediately looked back down at his soup bowl.

  “Well,” Pocket finally said, his white, furry caterpillar eyebrows flexing a bit. “If she were murdered, she would not have had time to take off her shoes.”

  Ethan slammed his fist against the table, nearly upsetting the soup. “Of course,” he glanced at Maggie. “She wasn’t murdered like that.”

  “For the love of –“ Maggie said. “You men. It’s staring you in the face, but you can’t see it. She wrote on the walls.”

  “She had time,” Ethan said. “She had time. She died in there. She must’ve had a source of light—otherwise, how could she write on the walls?”

  “Walled in,” Maggie said. “By someone she trusted.”

  “By who?” Pocket asked wearily. “And when? From what you’ve told me, she died years ago.”

  He’s treating this as if it were a parlor game, Ethan thought. He doesn’t really want to believe there’s a dead woman’s body upstairs in that room. He doesn’t want to have to begin this—whatever procedure he’ll need to begin, whatever headaches the discovery of that body will bring with it. He doesn’t want this to be happening.

  Pocket, Ethan guessed, had probably never had to deal with a murder in his village.

  “The West Wing has always been cut off,” Maggie said.

  “Ever since I’ve been here. Wentworth once told me she couldn’t remember a time when it was open.”

  “Constable,” Alf piped up, stirring his soup lazily. “When someone gets walled in to a room like that, wouldn’t people hear them scream?”

  “Alfred!” his mother snapped, and the boy immediately looked down at his soup bowl.

  “It was my grandfather,” Ethan said, knowing that this was what no one was willing to say. “He murdered this woman. My grandfather murdered a woman in this house by walling her in. Alive.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Maggie said. “I don’t believe it. I knew him too well.”

  “You knew him barely,” Ethan said.

  “There was a woman went missing from the village in 1915,” Pocket said without emotion. He reached up to his face, and pressed his fingers against his nose, sniffing, as if he’d recently washed them and wanted to smell the traces of soap. “Her name was Rory Scopes.”

  “Do you think it’s her?”

  “I knew your grandfather for many years, Mr. Gravesend. I can tell you one thing for certain. He was not a man to senselessly kill a woman in his own home. And then leave her there.” Pocket made a slight sound of annoyance. “We won’t know much of anything until we examine the body.”

  “If we knew when the room was walled up,” Maggie began.

  “I knew,” Pocket said, as if this were common knowledge. “I asked him about it, when I saw him putting the bricks in the window ledge. It was in 1919, or 1920. He didn’t like the view. That’s what he said. Then. He said he didn’t like the view. The window broke, he said. And he didn’t like the view. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you, Mr. Gravesend. Justin was a true eccentric. I respected him a great deal, despite all the stories. All the rubbish piled on by a village of small minds. God love them, but they’re a small-minded lot. He didn’t murder anyone. I’m nearly convinced of that from just knowing him.”

  “You have other officers,” Ethan said. “On the way?”

  “From Parham, yes, there will be an investigation,” Pocket said, wearily. “But I wanted to make sure that this is a murder. That there is a body. That there is, as it were, something to investigate. And what I now discover,” he added, and then paused. “What I now discover is that there is a body, it is indeed a murder, of some type, and now we must see if this is the missing Miss Scopes. Or someone else entirely. Now, could you, sir, lead me upstairs to where the body rests? That is, if you’re finished with your soup?”

  Chapter Five

  1

  Pocket slowly took the stairs to the first landing, leaving Ethan, already halfway up the staircase above him, glancing down from the railing.

  “The body’s been there some time I imagine,” Pocket said. “She doesn’t need me running up to her, having heart failure.”

  “Of course,” Ethan said, wishing he had more cigarettes to smoke. He’d left them downstairs at the table.

  “It’s very dark in the room,” he said, apropos of nothing.

  “Yes, yes
, I’m certain of that,” Pocket said, grunting as he began the next set of stairs. “Justin certainly enjoys his little maze.”

  “Constable?”

  “This house. His maze. He told me once that the way a maze worked is it got your mind turning inward. He wanted the house to be a maze. And it certainly feels like one. I’ve gotten lost here more than once at one of his masques.” Pocket may have been in good enough shape to bicycle through the village, but he apparently had not climbed a stair in twenty years. It was as if he were climbing the Matterhorn.

  “Masques?” Ethan asked.

  “Parties. Entertainments. He always had gatherings during certain times of the year.”

  “I never imagined him as a party-giver,” Ethan said, trudging up the final set of steps to the long corridor between the East and West Wings.

  “Smoke, Mr. Gravesend?” Pocket offered a cigar when they reached the landing at the bottom of the stairs that rose up to the West Wing tower. Pocket seemed completely uninterested in exploring the tower.

  Instead, he went to one of the benches that lined the corridor, and set himself down. “It’s an excellent vintage. The tobacco is from the Vuelta Abajo district on the island of Cuba. I’ve never gone far afield from Watch Point, but that is one place I would dearly love to visit some day. The cigar is a special thing, sir. A special thing. The tobacco leaf must be cured just so, and these cigars…a friend who traveled to exotic climes used to send them to me each year at Christmas. These cigars, sir. Why, notice the wrapping – the leaf is pure maduro. It gives it that mahogany color. And sweet, sir. So very sweet.”

  “I think,” Ethan said. “I think we should perhaps be going up.”

  “What’s a smoke going to hurt? A fine cigar. Two men who have some serious business ahead of them, sir? Perhaps a smoke and a little conversation.” Pocket said this with a grave air, and held out one of the cigars for Ethan. “There are a few finer points of the past you may need to know.”