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

by Douglas Clegg

  The inky darkness within his mind returned, and suddenly the keening wails of a baby burst all around him, echoing. The badsmell began - wafting toward him, as if by memory alone.

  Someone whispered, “Esteban, come to me, come within these walls.”

  A woman said, “You can’t take him from me,” and then began screaming, “Esteban! Esteban!”

  A man began shouting, “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! GET HIM OUT OF MY HOUSE! HE’S ONE OF THEM! HE’S ONE OF THEM!”

  And then, another voice came from the woman, a child’s voice, “Let me play now. I need to play. Give me my little playmate.”

  He felt a child’s hand slide across the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, which now trembled along with the rest of his body.

  “Come with me,” the little girl said, her only image, darkness.

  10

  The darkness took on a shape, and a texture - it was like a smooth alabaster surface, and its coldness became numbing. Then, he felt spots of heat pass along his neck and shoulders, and something brushed along his ankles. He was led down a winding staircase, which he took slowly and carefully, step by step.

  He went along in the dark, the hand of the child clutching his, drawing him forward.

  Someone said, “Let me taste him.”

  “No,” said the child, her fingers tightening around his. “He belongs to me.”

  She squeezed his fingers harder, and he tried to draw back from her grasp but could not. Then, a sudden flare of light came up. Ethan stood there, alone, clutching no one’s hand within his.

  He was in the turret room.

  Constable Pocket stood in front of him with a lamp held out. “I thought you might’ve come back up here.”

  As if expecting just such a jolt - for Ethan had been positive that he’d been going down a staircase with the little girl - Ethan nodded. “There are hundreds of manifestations in this house, Pocket.”

  “No,” the other man shook his head. “I think there may be just one. One disguised as many.”

  11

  Shaken but relieved and both trembling and laughing to himself, Ethan went with the Constable back down the stairs.

  “The house has Maggie. I saw her. I saw what it wanted me to see of her,” Ethan said.

  “Perhaps,” Pocket said. “Perhaps what you saw -“

  “I saw too much,” Ethan added. “I heard voices. I felt them. I saw things. I saw!”

  “There are illusions here,” Pocket said. “I knew it when she was a girl, Mr. Gravesend. Matilde could throw her voice. That was the beginning of it. And then, perhaps after her grandfather had brought her from the tomb, the voices had become more than voices. Perhaps she…” He paused as they reached the landing of the first floor. “Alf is no longer himself. He woke up. He just stared at me. Unblinking.”

  “Catatonic?” Ethan asked.

  “I don’t know. It began to make me feel uncomfortable, his staring. As if he could see through to my soul.” Pocket withdrew a beloved cigar, and thrust it, unlit, into his mouth. He spoke around it. “There’s nothing scarier than a child who looks through you. Tell me, sir. Have you ever done anything truly monstrous in your life?”

  Ethan didn’t respond right away. Then, he said, haltingly, “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Not the small monstrosities of ordinary life,” Pocket said. “But the grand ones. I did something monstrous once. I helped wall your aunt into the house. I helped your grandfather keep his secret. I knew about the others.”

  “Others?” Ethan asked. “The ones she murdered. The gathering that your grandfather had invited into the house. The psychics.”

  12

  “Murdered?”

  “Yes,” Pocket said.

  “What do you mean. What precisely do you mean?”

  “I didn’t witness it, of course. I don’t even know for sure. I just suspect. I suspect, and I..”

  “You’re sworn to uphold the law and you never investigated murders at –“

  “You don’t even know,” Pocket said, with such authority, that Ethan took a breath and stepped away from him. “Insanity, sir. Your family. Your aunt. She manifested things. She was not always herself. She was splintered in some way. Mentally. I suppose with what she’d gone through as a child, it might be expected. But it was not your grandfather’s fault if she killed, is it? He kept her safe here. He kept her safe. But the others. Those others. They came to take something from her. To get inside her. And they did. I suppose. They got inside her. And she,” he added, “got inside them.”

  13

  They went to check on Alf, who had fallen back to sleep, curled up in a ball like a kitten.

  Pocket began jabbering about knowing things, but not knowing them, feeling them, sensing them, of people who came and went in the house (“Famous people. People with names like Lizzie Borden and Aleister Crowley and other names, and the gossip in the village became unmanageable. Isis was famous, too. She was known around the world. Crowned heads and all that kind of thing. She could talk to the dead. She could predict the future. She was considered to be the whore of Babylon when she’d arrive in her fancy roadster…I finally had to say something to your grandfather. I finally had to mention the scandal he was bringing down upon us, but by then. By then…”)

  Pocket had just reached the study ahead of him, and, as if not having thought much about it, picked up the telephone and pressed it to his ear.

  “It’s dead. Of course,” Pocket said, setting down the telephone.

  The air seemed charged in some way that Ethan could not have described – and he felt that Pocket must sense it to. It was like a drop in barometric pressure in this room.

  The thought came to him: something is here. In here. With Alf.

  Pocket hesitated, as if he were about to say something of some gravity.

  Then, “He still used the old kind. That’s so much like him. And yet, so modern of him, too. The most modern thing in his house is his telephone.”

  “The line would be dead, with this storm,” Ethan said, but felt as if he were just assuaging his own fears. Yet, despite the crashes of thunder outside and the hard rain that had battered at the windows as they’d descended staircase after staircase, this room was peculiarly silent.

  He wanted to say something about it, but thought better of it. Pocket must feel it, too. We’re just talking around what we’re feeling here.

  “Blasted storm.”

  “What time is it?” Ethan asked.

  “There’s a clock in the hall,” Pocket said.

  “I know. It stopped sometime earlier. I certainly haven’t been winding anything lately. I assumed Wentworth…”

  “She hasn’t kept up,” Pocket said, as if this were a given. “I suppose we can thank god she’s not here tonight.”

  “She never stays after dark.”

  “I can’t say as I blame her.”

  A brief silence ensued; then Ethan said, “Tell me about it. About this gathering.”

  “A salon,” Pocket said, nearly amused with the word. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not at all. Just exhausted.”

  “I could eat a whole sheep right now. A whole sheep spread with mint jelly. I’m that starved.”

  “All I can think of is Maggie. She’s here somewhere.”

  “Yes, I’m sure of that. There are other ways.”

  “Ways?”

  “Ingress and egress.”

  “Secret passages?”

  “Very much so,” Pocket said.

  Ethan arched an eyebrow, begging the question.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Pocket said. “I don’t know the ways through the inner part of this house. I just know there are ways.” Then, an afterthought: “Perhaps after the storm – at dawn— we can go get help. We’ll have a search party.”

  “A search party for a house?”

  Pocket shook his head. “You don’t even know.”

  Ethan felt as if he were being led into a game of Blind Ma
n’s Bluff. “Know what?”

  Pocket half-smiled, shaking his head, but amusement didn’t seem to be etched there. It was nearly a half-grimace. “Mr. Gravesend with his puzzles. It’s a looking-glass house.”

  “Looking glass?”

  “Mirrors. There are mirror rooms for every room in this house. He built it that way. For every bedroom, there is another crawlspace. For every library, there is a room of ancient tomes. For every staircase, there is a descent into the caves that open beneath this house. There are bedrooms that may not be the kind of bedroom with a comfortable bed. There is a foyer, I’m told, that is quite grand. And then, well, I’ve heard…” Pocket’s voice trailed off. His mood shifted, and suddenly he brightened. “Here’s the thing, sir. Here’s the thing.” Pocket began fumbling with words as some people fumble with their pockets looking for change – words like “spiritualists,” and “magicians” and “explorers” and “grave robbers” spilled out when his mouth had emptied.

  Ethan very much felt like having a good stiff drink, but still wasn’t sure if Pocket’s hypocrisy would allow him to openly have one. “Grave robbers?”

  “Body snatchers. All. He gathered people around him who had unusual occupations. He was fascinated with the afterlife. He was drawn to the rituals of death. He was said to have books stolen or bought dearly from great collections. Your grandfather. He was a remarkable man. He was a haunted man.”

  “Look,” Ethan said, “all I want is to find Maggie. It won’t wait til dawn. It won’t wait for a search party. If she’s in this house, this looking glass house, we will find her. You and I both. And I don’t want to find out an hour from now that you know something about this house and its passages and you haven’t told me.”

  Chapter Nine

  1

  But, in fact, nearly an hour had passed, and Ethan had learned very little from Pocket beyond words to the effect that his grandfather had a great deal of fear of what he called “restless spirits,” and of the condition that was affecting his daughter.

  They had decided to move Alf to a bed in the caretaker’s cottage (“Safer there, I’d think,” Ethan said, somewhat warily, wondering if the constable knew of any cases of hauntings at the smaller house); in the slashing rain, returning to Harrow, Ethan shivered as much from fear as from the cold. Pocket began shouting at him about how insane it was to even live in Harrow and why did he come. Ethan shouted back, equally ferociously, that none of that mattered now, all that mattered was finding Maggie and making sure she was unharmed.

  Somehow, as their shouts barely rose above the cracks of thunders and the steady hammering of rain, it was comforting to be free of the house for even a few minutes.

  2

  The shouting had turned to whispers and murmurs by the time they were inside again.

  Upon entering Harrow, Ethan, felt a weight pressed against him – as if the pressure of his mind were closing in around him.

  It was almost like the beginning of a deep but unwanted sleep – a feeling of being warmly drugged in some way.

  “Do you feel it?” Pocket nodded. “You feel something?”

  Ethan nodded, but the sensation intensified. “It’s like...like someone is wrapping me in blankets.”

  Pocket reached over and felt his forehead. “You’re running a fever.”

  “Am I? Am I?” Ethan asked, not sure if he could make sense. Sleep beckoned; that’s what it felt like. Sleep within him was drawing him down into some darkness. Then, he gasped, “It’s Harrow. It’s Harrow. I wasn’t sleepy five seconds ago. But now...”

  Pocket reached over and put his arm across Ethan’s shoulders. “She was like that. Here, let me help you sit down.”

  “She?”

  “That woman.”

  “Matilde?”

  “No. The other one. The one he loved. The Lady of Shalott, he called her.”

  The words seemed to echo his own voice, for Ethan felt he heard himself say, “The lady of shallots,” and remembered seeing Maggie the first night in the garden, digging up her vegetables from the Holy Land, and calling her that, as a lark, the lady of shallots. Words from the poem by Tennyson went through his mind: Four grey walls, and four grey towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott.

  “Her name was Isis. She was quite beautiful. She was in love with your grandfather. There was no mistaking. I suppose he loved her, too,” Pocket said. “I suppose one would have to love a woman to do what he did to her.”

  “She felt...things?”

  “Well, she would. She was a medium. A spiritualist, she called herself, but truth was, she had come into his life to destroy him. To draw him back to something that he should have well left. And she felt it here, too. She said it was a special place. She said she had traveled around the world, but had never felt it like she did here. I can’t say too much of her. I can’t say much. She was who she was. And Harrow destroyed her. It destroyed her. But enough of that. Do you believe in the spirit world, sir?”

  Feeling a bit stronger, Ethan coughed and said, “Ever since I was a boy. Returning here has only reconfirmed that. How can I help but believe?” Then, he felt cooler. It was gone. It had passed over. Whatever had caressed him in the foyer, had vanished. It was as if a chilly draft had entered the house.

  He held his hand out, half expecting to feel a form in the air.

  Instead, his fingers began tingling with something that at first seemed like iciness, but as he kept his hand steady, he realized that he could create a shape in the air around the feeling of electricity. A cold electricity.

  “Here,” he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard. “Pocket. Put your hand here. Like this.”

  Pocket thrust has hand in the air as if he were saluting some foreign dignitary. He gasped, withdrawing his hand.

  Then, Ethan nodded to him. “Do it again. Feel it. It’s amazing.”

  Pocket pressed both his hands in a cup formation, and held them against the spot near Ethan’s own hand.

  “It’s as if there’s a window –“ Pocket began.

  “No, not a draft. I thought that at first. It’s like an electrical current. It curves, see? It runs vertically, and it curves. It has a form. It’s here, wait.”

  “Enough, sir. Enough,” Pocket said, shivering slightly.

  “I wonder...” Ethan said, and then thrust his fingers into the cold spot.

  The tingling went through his fingers and seemed to travel along his palms, to his wrists, and it moved like fluid, and his hand began twitching.

  It began flowing along his forearms, and something told him not to let it go to his heart, that there was something about it, something within the energy he had tapped into that was not going to let him live; that wanted him dead.

  The feeling sped through him, and he quickly pulled his hand back from the spot.

  Panic melted. He was fine. It had not gotten to him. The fear had seized him, but he had not let it get into him. His hand felt numb for several seconds. “How do we get to these hidden areas?”

  “Perhaps,” Pocket began. And then, the telephone rang.

  3

  Ethan glanced at the constable, who would not look him in the eye. “It was dead.”

  “Yes, sir. It was.”

  “Now, it’s ringing.” Ethan grabbed the candlestick telephone, lifting the earpiece up, and holding the speaker in front of his lips. “Gravesend,” he said.

  The sound of whistling wind on the line, and then somewhere, a woman began shrieking, but it was so distant as to be barely audible.

  Then, it grew louder, “Ethan! Help me! For the love of god, help me, help me, thousands are here, they want to, they have me in here, they want to bury me with them, oh god, help me –“

  And then, the wind came up on the line again, and he was sure he heard the sound of a gentle laughter. The phone went silent.

  Ethan clicked it on and off again, but the line didn’t come back up. He set the phone down. “Maggie. I know i
t was her.”

  He felt his blood go cold, and he turned to face Pocket. He felt a change within himself. It was not the feeling he’d always had of innocence and world weariness and sadness mixed with a general happiness despite circumstances – in other words, it was not the feeling he had of who Ethan was, of what Ethan had become.

  He felt as if he had been turned in that moment into an entirely different man. “The devil is in this house,” he said, smashing the phone down to the floor. “Whether it is my grandfather or my aunt or this Lady of Shallot, I intend to find its source and destroy it.”

  And he felt as if he had risen above something that had never grown up within himself. He felt as if he had been baptized with fire, and would not ever be the same man again.

  4

  “She said they’re going to bury her with them,” Ethan said. “We’ve wasted time. We have to find her now. Now – while she still has a chance.”

  Pocket nodded. “Then, that’s where we start looking.”

  “Where?”

  “The crypt. Where people are buried,” Pocket said.

  Chapter Ten

  1

  Pocket donned his great black cape for the journey up to Bald Hill, where the graveyard spread, muddy and gray in the storm, which had only begun to let up a bit.

  Ethan managed to grab an umbrella that barely protected him from the downpour as they walked in silence to the mausoleum of the Gravesend’s.