by Tyrer, D.
“But the noise?” I asked. “What if they hear us?” I meant, of course, the housekeeper and the caretaker.
“Don’t worry – they have never heard us play up here before.”
Well lit by a series of windows above head height, the gallery was perfect for a game of ball – rolled, bowled, thrown or bounced, it had distance and the potential to ricochet, making it great fun. I felt so carefree as we played, like I was a little girl, again. It was wonderful to be having fun with her, once again, without feeling mixed emotions.
I was never entirely certain what the rules of the game were and, eventually, Camilla declared herself the winner; I couldn’t be bothered to argue the point – mainly because I didn’t want to ruin things again, not when we had got them back right.
There were other oddities up there. There was a cupboard from which, when the door was shut, there emanated a sound of sobbing. We would wait outside to hear the sound, and then Camilla would pull the door open to reveal a silent and empty space. She admitted ignorance as to the cause and dared me to hide within it. I went inside the cupboard and, a little nervously, allowed her to shut me in, but heard and saw nothing but the silent darkness.
“That was a little disappointing,” I told her, “although, I guess, nothing is probably better than encountering some horrible ghost!”
She laughed and closed the door. The sobbing resumed. I wished I could understand it.
Another day, we explored the attic rooms. These were low ceilinged and often cramped. Although a few were stacked high with crates, cases and boxes, most were more or less empty, save for dust and cobwebs. Those that did have something in them often more than made up for those that were empty – although either sort could contain spiders that would scuttle across the floorboards when startled by our presence and which, inevitably, made me shriek when they startled me.
We opened an old traveling case, its black leather cracked and fragile, with the initials H.A.R. on it in gold – it had clearly lain there for many years. It was empty, save for an old and faded piece of paper, the words on which were almost illegible. I could discern the name Hali and a reference to tears, but, otherwise, the handful of visible words were unimportant conjunctions and the like.
“I wonder whose it is.”
“There are many cases here,” Camilla replied. “People come to visit. A few stay, others leave, but often they leave a little of themselves behind, a memento.”
We discovered another such memento in another attic room nearby, an old, discarded pasteboard facemask leaning against the corner of the room. It was quite crudely done, like the work of a child, yet sized to the head of an adult, although lacking in any sort of string or band to allow it to be worn. It was a very pale pinkish colour, like the pallid flesh of a corpse.
“How odd – why leave it lying around here?”
Camilla shrugged and took it from me, turning it over in her hands. “Probably from some masque held here years ago.”
“But, how could it have been worn?”
Camilla just shrugged again.
“And, why abandon it here?”
“Perhaps they came up here to make love and left it behind when they were fully sated?” she suggested with a wicked grin.
We never did reach any better conclusion than that about it and left it where we found it. Although crude and near-featureless, there was something about it that made me feel uneasy – perhaps it was the very featurelessness that disturbed me.
Another thing that disturbed me as we explored the attic was an empty room – not that far from the room that held the mask – with an old dried blood-splatter – blood had clearly splashed up the wall and pooled upon the floor long ago. It looked as if somebody must have been attacked there. Camilla either knew nothing of it or was refusing to be drawn on it. That room definitely frightened me and insinuated itself into my dreams so that, now, I dreamt of myself being stabbed to death in it, my blood splashing up the wall, my blood congealing in a pool beneath my body – and, Camilla standing over me, licking blood from her lips with a cruel expression that matched that worn by her angry twin when she attacked me.
It was near that room that we encountered the stranger and everything came to a head.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We had entered one of the empty attic rooms when the door opposite opened and a man stepped through it. We both screamed in surprise, thinking that it was Chambers. It wasn’t. Neither of us recognized him – he looked to be about fifty with a heavy beard and long, but receding, hair. He was dressed in a grey, pinstripe suit that seemed slightly tattered or moth-eaten. But, it was his eyes that drew the gaze – intense grey eyes that almost seemed to blaze with madness. He was terrifying to look at and we both recoiled from him in fright.
“You must flee!” he cried in a voice that managed to simultaneously be both hoarse and shrill. “This house is an accursed place!”
“What do you mean?” I managed to stutter.
“This house is a terrible place! The tears of Hali cannot cleanse the taint! This house is the house of death!”
His words were essentially meaningless, the almost generic ramblings of a madman – only that one brought me up short as I turned to flee. It was plausible that he, too, had found and read the letter, but it seemed to be just a little too specific. Then, he cried: “I name you, Sylvia! And, I name you, Camilla!”
“How do you know me?” I demanded, terrified.
But, he didn’t have the chance to answer, nor to ramble any further, as the door behind us burst open with a crash and we all three jumped at the sound.
It was Chambers. We didn’t even need to turn to see it was him as he rushed past us, enraged, right at the stranger.
“Silence!” he cried and leapt at him. They both fell to the floor, Chambers astride the stranger, and struggled for a moment before Chambers got a grip on him and began slamming his head against the bare floorboards until he stopped twitching and a smear of blood darkened the wood.
Camilla and I stood transfixed by the violence, but, now, we turned and fled. However, we had only passed through a couple of the attic rooms when he caught up to us, grabbing us by the hair, which he yanked, causing us to tumble backwards.
“You little bitches!” he snarled, spittle flying. “You were warned! You were warned! I oughta kill you...”
But, he didn’t immediately follow up on his threat; instead, he dragged us both along by our hair – forcing us to crawl or slither along as he wished in order to curtail the pain – to a cupboard, into which he shoved us both, slamming the door shut and somehow locking it so that we were trapped. Unable to open the door or move, we clung together in the darkness and sobbed. I didn’t grasp the significance of that until it was too late...
CHAPTER NINE
It was impossible to be sure how long we were trapped in there. It may have been mere minutes; it felt like hours. Of course, I now know that time is essentially meaningless. Regardless of how long it was, the cupboard door did, eventually, swing open and, although we both cowered and tried to press deeper into that confined space, it was not Chambers who opened it.
“I heard you crying,” Cassilda said as she helped us out of it. “Chambers is in a rage.”
We heard a door slamming shut somewhere below us and the sound of heavy footfalls growing closer.
“This way!” Camilla took Cassilda’s hand and mine and pulled us back in the direction from which Chambers had dragged us.
Never before had the empty attic rooms seemed so desolate – but, emptiness was surely preferable to seeing the corpse of the stranger laying in the room where Chambers had killed him, unseeing eyes staring upwards and his face a lifeless, pallid mask.
We ran past the body and could hear Chambers somewhere behind us – it could only be seconds before he found that we had escaped our imprisonment. The next room was empty, but the one after that held a lone rocking chair that was still tottering, as if someone had just risen from it; that might hav
e been of note had we had the leisure of properly digesting that fact. But, as it was, we just kept running through rooms piled with stacks of manuscripts that scattered as we ran past or containing manikins that seemed to grab at us, snagging our dresses, holding us back.
In panic, we ran almost blindly through empty rooms and others that might have had content, only we lacked the opportunity to take it in. All we wanted was to escape from Chambers and the man’s fiery rage – only, I have absolutely no idea what we thought would have happened had we succeeded in getting back downstairs; after all, merely having left the scene of the crime did nothing to resolve the fact that Chambers knew what we had done and what we had seen. Perhaps there was something in our unspoken assumption that was true, perhaps not; in the end, it didn’t matter either way.
Chambers caught us up in a room that was plastered – walls, floors, ceilings and doors – with newspaper cuttings. I felt his hand snatch at my shoulder and I stumbled and fell, a newspaper headline declaring the fall of Paris rushing upwards to fill my vision. Clearly, he had not anticipated my fall at that moment, for Chambers tripped over me and went sprawling, too. Camilla and Cassilda reached back for me; dragged me to my knees, then my feet. We kept on running.
Not far behind us, Chambers had stood again, too.
We ran onwards. More piled paper, this time falling in clumps, stuck together by damp and mould. More empty rooms. The room with the mask – although I was certain we were nowhere near it. More empty rooms. The room with the bloodstains.
I moaned as we entered that room: it had dominated my dreams and filled them with such terror that, now, it terrified me as I saw it. Suddenly, it seemed a premonition, not just a dream. Surely, Chambers had killed someone here, just as he had killed the stranger who had spoken to us. Camilla had known – that was why they had warned me about Chambers; the twins had known that he had killed before when someone had entered the attic. It was a horrible sensation to realize that I might be the next to die.
“Sylvia, run!” Camilla tugged on my arm, but it was too late – Chambers had found us.
“Bitch!” he spat, eyes full of hatred. I hadn’t noticed before, but he held a knife. It glinted dully in the light of a single wan light bulb. He stepped towards me.
“No! Please no!” Camilla cried, but it was useless – there could be no mercy.
The knife plunged and withdrew and, then, slashed. It was done in a moment. I collapsed to the floor like a marionette that had had its strings cut, Chambers standing over me, bloody knife in hand, laughing like the madman he was.
I saw, with a certain detached fascination, that there was a pattern of fresh blood where before there had been dry. Camilla dropped to her knees beside me and cradled my head on her lap. Behind her, I could see Cassilda standing, hands pressed to her mouth in shock, all hatred gone.
“Ca-Camilla,” I gasped, coughing, blood dribbling down my chin.
“Sylvia,” she sobbed and hugged me close. “Don’t leave me – I love you...”
I tried to reply, but my mouth was filling with blood and all I could do was gurgle.
“I love you...” she repeated and leant to kiss me on the lips. As she raised her head, I saw blood on her lips and running down onto her chin, just as her tears ran down her cheeks.
Everything was growing dark. Blackness engulfed me and, a moment later, her sobs ceased. There was nothing any more.
CHAPTER TEN
A sudden jolt wrenched me awake. I looked around confused. I could see no sign of Camilla, Cassilda or Chambers. I recalled him standing over me, bloody knife in hand, laughing. I could recall the tender touch of Camilla as she held me and the press of her lips on mine. But, where I had felt hard floorboards beneath me, damp with my blood, I now felt the relative softness of leather seats.
I was slumped on a wide, red-leather seat in a carriage that was pitching across an uneven road surface. Already, my dream was fading, leaving me with just the image of a shadowy figure looming over me with a bloody knife in hand.
I shook my head and attempted to collect my thoughts. I felt disorientated by my sudden awakening and could neither quite recall where I was nor where I was going. Pulling myself upright, a flash of yellow in the field we were passing awakened memories: the war; Camilla and Cassilda – cousins I had not, to my memory, met; separation and sadness – and, yet, a certain sense of familiarity.
Feeling curious, I leant my head and shoulders out of the carriage window. It was marvelous to feel the breeze on my face and whipping back my hair. We were passing a bright-yellow field of rape that looked amazing in the golden sunlight. The rape was the same colour as the dress I had on, my best, the one Father had given me for my birthday, and of the bow in my hair. It was also the colour of the house that came into view a moment later as it crested a hill. The Yellow House. I didn’t particularly like the look of the building, although I couldn’t really say why. I wished I could pinpoint what it was about it. There was a meaning, a familiarity – an odd sense of destiny...
Fin
About the Author
DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been a major contributor to The Yellow Site, collating forbidden lore concerning the various permutations of the Yellow or Carcosa Mythos. His Mythos-related credits include editing a 2007 King In Yellow anthology and the Yellow Leaves and Xothic Sathlattae series of poetic broadsides, contributing to The Phantom of Truth chapbook with Glynn Owen Barrass, and a short story in the recent Cthulhu Haiku & Other Mythos Madness; he also has a story in the forthcoming Steampunk Cthulhu anthology from Chaosium.
Atlantean Publishing http://atlanteanpublishing.wikia.com/wiki/
The Yellow Site
http://kinginyellow.wikia.com/wiki/
