Avenged

by Lynn Carthage

  The air felt museumlike. Cold. I tried to imagine the hall filled with life, lots of people in high ruffled collars smiling and laughing, and the sound of carriages rolling up to the entry outside, but all I could think was that all of them were long dead, and their dresses and breeches had rotted into sticky threads.

  “Hello!” shouted Steven to the ceiling. It echoed back at him seconds later.

  I wished he hadn’t done that. It seemed—I don’t know—just wrong somehow. He started toward the stairs, and when he was halfway there, I ran to catch up with him. The run was long enough that I was out of breath when I got there—and I’m the girl who can hold her breath. My lungs are hard as canteens from all my years of swimming.

  I practically needed my passport to cross that room. The leaded glass windows, at varying levels in the walls, let in a filtered sunlight that made the place more disturbing. Gigantic cobwebs, or maybe they were spiderwebs, hung everywhere, stretched between light sconces like an ethereal tapestry.

  The stairs were steep but seemed to draw me upward. Come in, come in.

  I remembered my initial aversion to entering the manor . . . and now I was climbing up into its timeworn center. Some sort of invitation was being issued to me. Something lonely was made glad by our visit.

  Steven climbed ahead of me; I kept some distance between us in case he started to fall. I didn’t want to be a pair of dominoes with him.

  Halfway up, I turned and looked down. Vertigo overcame me as I wavered there on the steps. For a second I was so sure I was going to fall that I clutched for the banister, furred with grime. After I steadied myself, I rubbed my hands on my jeans.

  At the top of the stairs, I took a good look at the stained glass window that presided over the landing. Etched at the bottom was xxx, which made me snort because the image depicted was hardly X-rated. It showed two medieval knights. One was thrusting a spear into the other, who was rearing up with his sword. It looked like the one being impaled was going to seriously damage the other one when the sword came down.

  Steven turned left, where he opened another set of double doors. We entered what had once been a ballroom. The curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows hung in shreds, their fibers simply too old to keep their shape against the sun’s endless onslaught. The floor was a black-and-white marble parquet.

  A trickle of sweat rolled from my temple. I felt like we were trespassing and were about to get caught at any minute. I wished Steven would walk a little more softly, but his heavy oxford shoes created their own small echo.

  At the other end of the long room was an organ, large as a church’s. It dominated the space, looking like a miniature factory with all its pipes and bellows.

  Steven took off his sweatshirt and used it to sweep dust off the organ bench. A cloud enveloped him and he began sneezing. “This better be worth it,” he said. “I actually really like this shirt.” His voice sounded brittle in the huge space.

  He sat down and began pushing his feet alternately on two large, slanted wooden panels on the floor. I could hear a sort of wheeze or breath deep within the organ as it came to life. He pressed down one of the keys. Nothing happened, but as he continued to work the pedals, he pressed again and a slender noise came. As he pumped life into the mechanism, music emerged, his fingers moving swiftly over the keys, jumping from octave to octave. He performed something I recognized from the classical music station he always played in the car.

  He pulled a round lever that said vox HUMANA and the sound instantly changed, became eerily like monks singing in the distance, their voices drifting up from the monastery walls.

  “I didn’t know you could play,” I said. He was a master, and I’d never seen him so much as look at a piano before, other than Tabby’s four-key toy in the shape of a blue hippopotamus.

  “God, it’s been a long time,” he said. He pressed another pedal and the sound became louder.

  “You’ll wake the dead,” I said. I leaned over his right shoulder and tried to play my own chord. To his credit, he didn’t try to rearrange my fingers like my old piano teacher used to. But he had already stopped working the pedals, so I didn’t get to hear how monstrous and discordant my guess was.

  The profound silence of the vast house settled around us. I had the strange feeling that the house or maybe the organ had not appreciated his sudden, forceful playing. . . as if he hadn’t been respectful.

  Please, get real, I told myself. The house isn’t angry at us.

  Steven stood up and the organ bench gave a stilted screech at the redistribution of weight. He tied his filthy sweatshirt around his waist and led me through an arched wooden door set in the side wall.

  This next room was probably as big as the ballroom, but divided into three levels of bookshelves, ascending all the way up to the ceiling. The number of books was overpowering, and so was their odor. They were moldering, page by page, moisture making its way from the prefaces all the way through to the epilogues. Railings fenced in the three levels, making them resemble Spanish balconies. Narrow, rickety staircases—almost more like ladders—led up to each floor.

  I climbed one of the staircases to see what kind of books rich people read in the 1700s. At the top level, I looked down at Steven, noticing the bald spot that his height normally hid, at least from me. He was reading the titles on one of the shelves, so I did the same, turning randomly to stare at the spines. Surprise: they were in French. But as I walked carefully across the balcony I saw some English titles, too, like The Governance of Servants and Quelling Insubordination.

  After I came down, we walked room to room in silence, as if a deaf-mute real estate agent led us. The glut of rooms was dizzying: some chambers elevated by a few steps, others sunken. The house was a beehive with these dark interlocking cells. I imagined a gigantic queen bee, mistress of the hive, loping ahead of us, dragging her useless wings, to not be seen.

  Once, after consulting his map, Steven knelt at a paneled wall and exposed what looked to be a cupboard but was actually the beginning of a passageway. After staring into its black depths for a moment, he closed it and said, “No, thanks.” I laughed in agreement. Too claustrophobic.

  At times, he jogged forward; at times, I had to stop and wait for him. I kept imagining hearing the swish of those giant bee wings, or maybe more like the sound of skirts, the way a small train would drag along the floor.

  Somehow we emerged back in the great hall. It took me a second to recognize it from the different perspective.

  “And that was just one wing of the house,” said Steven. “Holy Christ.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Steven didn’t usually swear in front of me. “You want to do the rest?” I asked. “I’m not tired.”

  He matter-of-factly folded his floor plans up and tucked them under his arm. “We’ll save the rest for a rainy day,” he said.

  * * *

  We went back to the apartment, where Mom and Tabby were playing with spoons on the living room floor. They hadn’t been able to bring many of her toys, so apparently the flatware drawer was the new Babies R Us.

  Now that I knew some of what lay beyond the zany brightness of these 1970s walls, I found it wasn’t as easy to relax as before. Decay breathed behind the macramé. That’s pretty good, I thought. “Decay breathed behind the macramé.” I could use that in a story.

  “What’s it like?” asked Mom. Steven sat down on the floor next to her while I crashed on the sofa. For Tabby’s amusement, he began drawing lines in the shag’s pile with a soup spoon.

  “Huge. Beautiful in a really decrepit way.”

  “So it won’t be easy to make a showplace out of it.”

  He snorted. “It would be the project of the century.”

  “Sounds like just what we need,” she said.

  He snorted again.

  “No, honestly,” she said. “I need something to focus on. Anything we could sell to fund a renovation?”

  “There’s quite the library,” said Steven. “I should g
et a rare books expert in here to inventory it.”

  “How come your mom didn’t?” she asked.

  “A commonsense thing like that would never have occurred to her. And she was never here long enough to put something like that into action.” I saw the muscle at his jaw clench, just for a second.

  He didn’t like to talk about his mom. I had never met her.

  “How long did she live here?” I asked.

  “She and my father lived here less than a year, I think. She got pregnant with me, and he was abusive, so she fled back to the States to protect both of us.”

  My jaw dropped. I had never heard this. And from the look on Mom’s face, neither had she. Steven was secretive about his family.

  “He died soon afterward, so he was a nonevent as far as I’m concerned,” Steven added.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said lamely. I didn’t know what else to say. I was lucky that although my parents had separated, it wasn’t until I was ten. And pretty much immediately Steven was on the scene, so I never went dadless.

  “For anyone who would lift a hand to a child,” said Steven, “death is a good answer.”

  “You mean . . . he hit her when she was pregnant?” Mom asked.

  “That’s what she told me.”

  That was a weird way to answer, especially with the tone of voice he used. He stared down at the runes his spoon had made. “Well, anyway, ancient history. It makes me think about the life I might’ve had if he was a different person. That nursery was meant for me, you know; I would have been raised as an Arnaud heir on the palatial grounds of his forebears.”

  “Would you have wanted to?” she asked dubiously.

  “Well, things were much more in order back then,” he said. “The estate has been neglected for as long as I’ve been alive.”

  Personally, I didn’t think the manor’s crumbling was just from the last half century . . . things had been declining here for way longer than that.

  “It’s sad not to know your father,” said Steven. “And that’s the last I’m going to say on that.”

  Mom nodded wistfully, glancing over at me on the sofa. This was as much info on his family as we’d ever gotten. Mom had once warned me not to ask. It didn’t make sense to press for more. He’d talk when he wanted to.

  * * *

  That night, I went to my lime-colored room. On a whim, I opened the dresser drawers to see neatly folded piles of my clothing. I hadn’t had time to unpack, but Mom, God bless her, had done it for me. She must’ve filled the drawers while Steven and I were exploring the house. A little unnerved, I searched for my diary until I found it, still safely locked with the key in the toe of my candy-cane Christmas socks.

  I sat down on my bed and let my mind drift back into a memory: Richard Spees stopping by our table in the cafeteria.

  He’s a senior and hot beyond belief. He stands right beside me, and I’m immediately thinking, No way! He’s standing by me? Uma freezes, her french fry, coated with ketchup, halfway to her mouth. I straighten my posture and tuck my hair behind my ears.

  “Hey, Phoebe, you looked good yesterday,” he says.

  “You were there?”

  “I was.”

  “Thanks,” I say, wishing I could come up with something cooler. Yesterday had been the swim meet against Oakland High. I’d torched them in the 100-meter freestyle, touching the wall what seemed like hours before anyone else. I think about how I must have looked from his eyes as I launched myself out of the pool in my school-colors-red-and-gold Speedo (last year, a few of us had petitioned for sexier, yet still aerodynamic, suits) and took all the high fives and wet hugs from my teammates. Finding out he had been looking at me when I didn’t even know it makes me feel self-conscious.

  “You looked good,” he repeats, and suddenly I see it as a compliment to my body, rather than a sports-based comment on my performance.

  I’m not going to say I completely take it in stride, because that doesn’t happen. My cheeks burn with a really big blush, but I do manage to give a huge and hopefully sassy grin. Luckily, Bethany rescues me.

  “Do you usually go to the swim meets?” she asks.

  I throw her a grateful look, but before he can answer, she adds, “Or was there someone there you wanted to see?” I try to kick her under the table but get only her chair leg. She jolts backward a half inch in her plastic seat and laughs.

  As I wait mortified for his response, it happens.

  Stars swim up from behind my eyes, lazy and spectacular, taking the place of Bethany’s gleeful face. The stars convey lightning bolts, too, and I’m dazzled and trying not to get hit. It’s a slow lightning storm across the landscape of my vision, and as air creeps into my lungs, I submit.

  Bethany tells me later that Richard said meaningfully, “There was someone I wanted to see,” but all hell broke loose and people were yelling.

  I wake up a few minutes after I passed out, Bethany says. Dozens of people cluster around me, and I’m lying facedown on the table. Ketchup from Uma’s fries coats my hair. I raise my head, and the cafeteria aide helps me walk to the nurse’s office.

  I had fainted. Pretty dramatically.

  It didn’t cost me Richard Spees, even though I’d drooled while I was unconscious. “It didn’t look great,” admitted Bethany when I’d pressed her. Plus, there had been that ketchup masquerading as hair gel. Yet Richard had risen above all his gentlemanly disgust and somehow considered me attractive, even while lifting me from the table like a beached jellyfish and slapping me.

  We dated for three excruciating months. He turned out to be a darb (dramatically asinine random boy) who prattled on and on until I had to admit my two-year-old sister was a more insightful conversationalist. But I was glad I dated him; I learned some skills I could put to better use with some other guy down the road. The kind of skills you have to write in code in your diary in case your mom reads it.

  The memory was over.

  I brushed my teeth in the bathroom (my own! Score one for England!) by the light of the 1970s big-eyed owl night-light. The wallpaper was gold foil depicting wheat stalks: so retro.

  I pulled back the jade-colored bedspread and got in bed. I missed my quilt from home, a red and white thing my grandma made from a pattern in a book of Amish quilts.

  I lay there looking at the ceiling, the kind of plaster that shows semicircular sweeps from some kind of tool. Like little white rainbows. I counted them. Wasn’t sure if I should count the half sweeps over by the walls.

  Come on, you must be tired, go ahead and sleep, I coached myself.

  I was drifting restlessly when I heard the organ. It was playing low and quiet, a plodding, rhythmic bit of music, so subtle I thought for a while it was just noise in my head.

  When I realized what I was hearing, I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding. The music seemed to disappear the more I concentrated on listening, like trying to figure out what a newscaster is saying on TV a room away.

  I wandered out to the living room, where Steven was reading. The room was dark and he sat in the light cast by the gigantic hanging orb. Mom must have already gone to bed.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked him.

  His gaze didn’t waver from the page. He was like that; he’d get caught up in whatever he was reading

  “I thought I heard that organ playing, Steven,” I said louder. “Do you think there’s someone else in the house?”

  He closed the book, letting it lie in his lap, and rubbed his face with both hands. Exhausted. Maybe sad. “Just forget about it,” he said. “Let it go.”

  “Seriously? But if there’s someone in the house . . .”

  He sighed. He knew how to make gestures like that speak volumes. That sigh said, You’re a hysterical teenager, chill out.

  Insulted, I almost said something pissy, but I stopped myself. We had moved to England because of me. I had done something so very, very awful that we had to leave the country. If he didn’t think the organ was anything to worry about, it
wasn’t anything to worry about.

  “Okay,” I said with a little smile. “They’ll come for you first.”

  He grimaced.

  I had imagined the organ because I was jet-lagged and out of sorts. Freaked out about living in a different house, a different continent. I went back down the hallway, opening the door to my own personal scarab-green room.

  I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t relax enough.

  Photo by Belle Photography

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LYNN CARTHAGE is the pseudonym of an acclaimed fiction writer who has been a Yaddo fellow and a Bram Stoker Award finalist. She lives in California and teaches novel writing. Her website is www.lynncarthage.com.