Arcane II

by Nathan Shumate (Editor)

  I could hear his music last night, floating low and liquid up the stairs like lamp oil. Of course it was beautiful; my husband has a genius. But it was hardly soothing. Perhaps he poured his own insomnia into the notes and they, in turn, have infected my ears and driven the sleep from me?

  Either way, we were quite the owl-eyed pair at breakfast this morning. I have not slept properly for these last four nights. For my husband, it has been much, much longer. I discovered this unfortunate affliction of his on our wedding night. Which, I am given to understand, was rather unorthodox.

  Do not from that statement take me for some blushing schoolgirl. I am every day of twenty-eight and I have lived in the world. But my new husband is my first husband, and I was surprised when he did not touch me. We laid like children with out faces pressed close together until, eventually, I fell asleep. I gather he did not. When I woke in the lost and early hours of the morning, I found him sitting motionless on the edge of the bed we share but so rarely inhabit together. “Darling?” I said, and reached out my hand to touch his arm. He jerked away from me as if I had fired a shot.

  “I’ve had a breakthrough,” he said, and turned his shivery, pale smile on me. He left me then, bewildered in the dark. He has spent the days since then holed up in the conservatory, where he keeps his piano. His composition is starting to sound very accomplished, but my ears are hardly what one might call refined. My mother attempted to have me instructed in the piano several times when I was younger. She herself was a rank amateur, having never had the opportunity for that sort of education in her own youth. But she was obsessed in a small way with the idea that a lady must play something, piano being the favorite, violin sufficing if necessary. I had neither the fingers nor the patience for the task and frequently shirked my lessons. Thus, my nuptial match pleased her in a number of ways.

  We ate fruit at the breakfast table, picking at it like birds while the sunlight bathed us in an eye-searing white. There seems to be no filter between heaven and earth here in the desolate countryside. It has a way of making one feel rather skinless. I do not inquire about his composition, he does not ask me about my tours around the house. Our breakfast passes in a bright silence but I am not disturbed by this. Neither of us are particularly loquacious. I think that is something my husband values in me: a man of his age does not want a wife consumed with constant prattle.

  I spend my days here doing what my mother trained me for and what she herself would be delighted to do: homemaking. I walk from room to room, along hallways and down stairs with a little notepad in my hands, performing a kind of inventory. My husband has lived here alone for a very long time and he has not taken much care with the house, outside of his library. He has a staff, of course, though a small one to be sure. Everything here is well maintained and scrupulously clean, but it is clear that no one has given any thought to aesthetics in a very long time. What decoration there is must have been imposed by his mother, a woman I have only seen in pictures. Which, if my general impression of her taste is correct, is probably all for the best. Mothers-in-law are necessary for young wives, to mold and guide them. A mature woman and a mother-in-law attempting to share the governance of a home and a man can only come grief.

  She apparently had a strange love of the tastelessly macabre (one of the many affectations of the previous decades that I do not miss at all). The house is thick with hair wreathes, twined with musty ribbons with pictures of the dead propped up inside. After finding them in room after room, I began to wonder if it was even possible for one individual to have this many departed relatives. An unfortunate individual, to be sure.

  One room, another parlor I presume (I had never before been in a house that required more than one parlor), was all done in silken black wall papering with a gloomy purple sofa, and on the table there was a handful of dead flowers in a bone-white vase. Why my husband would preserve such things is beyond me. Is this to be a home or a mausoleum?

  But that room is puzzling for more than one reason. There is a clear discoloration on one of the walls, to which I have devoted considerable study. One square area is much darker than the wall surrounding it; presumably something hung there once, perhaps a cabinet or a small painting? It seems strange to me that a decoration should have been removed when everything else appears so untouched. Perhaps it was a relative who fell out of favor? Or a decoration so profoundly dreadful that even my oblivious husband stirred himself to get rid of it?

  I do not bother my husband with these idle thoughts in which he could not possibly have any interest. Besides, the process of creating a home is, at least in part, meant to delineate the spheres of male and female. To mark out some small things that are just mine. The picture room is my own little mystery.

  I have spent my last two days searching for the lost cabinet or picture, but, despite her fascination with the dreadful and the departed, my late mother-in-law was scrupulously organized. Not a single gaudy bauble nor grim accoutrement out of place. I have become certain that it has something to do with the keyless room.

  On the third day of our marriage, my dear husband gave me a heavy ring of keys, one for nearly every door in the house. Some were huge skeleton keys for the outbuildings and storage sheds on the grounds, others were as small and delicate as a child’s breath (these, I found out, belonged to the red music box in what had been my mother-in-law’s room). I spent several pleasurable days working out the function of each of these keys and exploring the rooms that they opened to me.

  But there was one door, an unassuming door on the second floor made of ordinary wood and an ordinary brass knob. It looked just like its fellows on either side of the hall (those doors took long, narrow keys with fleurs de lis on the end). But there was not a single key on my ring that would fit into the lock.

  “Husband,” I said, as he pushed his mango (imported, of course—my mother would be in fits if she could see the contents of our breakfast table) about his plate with a pale, passionless expression, “there is a key missing from my ring.”

  “Mhm?” he said, for my husband’s mind is often elsewhere. This is the way of men and especially of brilliant men.

  “On the second floor, the fourth door on the right, I cannot open it.”

  My husband did not look at me. He had arranged the slices of his strawberries on his plate in dense red spirals. “It must have been lost. Probably years ago. I doubt there’s much of interest in there.” I nodded and I sipped my black coffee.

  Part Two: Summer

  I have never been, you must understand, a patient person. My mother used to despair of me ever finding a husband, for I could not sit still long enough to learn French or water coloring, or even to get properly fitted for a dress. And my husband’s home, while large and elegant and filled with a good deal of interesting things, did have a certain lack of stimuli, after the initial survey was complete. My mother had been thrilled upon first encountering the large ballroom in the east wing of the house. She had excitedly imagined the parties and balls I might host to learn the names of my neighbors and their general dispositions. But there were no other homes, no neighbors, for miles and miles. Just dark forest and the braying of my husband’s disused hunting dogs. And, of course, my husband still declined to engage me in the normal occupations of the newly wed. And so what was there left for a wife, save some minor mischief?

  I often paced a streak in the hallway before the keyless room. I stared through the eye of keyhole, but could see nothing but darkness. I attempted to jimmy the lock with a hairpin, but I had no luck. I thought of simply bashing the door in and saying it had been an accident. But I could not conceive of what sort of accident would result in my smashing through an otherwise strong and serviceable door.

  “Darling?” I said, on one of the rare nights when my husband shared my bed. Still, he did not touch me and kept at least two inches of sterile space between us at all times.

  “Yes?” he said, for he does not sleep and only stares at the ceiling.

  “D
o you think perhaps we should get a new lock for the room on the third floor?” I did not need to clarify which room I meant, as he knew perfectly well.

  My husband, who had never before denied me a thing I desired, said only: “No.”

  I left the matter there, in the dark and the silence.

  Since that night, I have tried to put the keyless room out of my mind. I have catalogued my husband’s treasures, I have ordered new wall hangings and new furnishings, picked out paint schemes and mosaic tiles. I have eaten sumptuous meals and read all the fashionable novels that I never had time for before. I have listened to my husband’s strange, floating music in the darkness. And I have not slept one night in the last week.

  My mother has written three letters in the time I have been here and I have yet to respond to a single one. I feel a certain filial shame at this, but, in truth, the things that occupy my thoughts are of such surpassing strangeness that I could never share them with my mother, lest she think me gone entirely mad. Two nights ago, there was something outside my window.

  I could hear it, as I lay awake. It was very faint at first, the lightest of tappings, like a child’s softened fingernails. But it grew more insistent until it drew me from the reverie that, these days, passes for rest. Someone, I am certain of it, was pounding on my window’s pane. I could see the glass shudder and bow underneath the abuse.

  I laid very still on my bed, frozen with indecision. My husband was down in the library, too far to hear me should I call out. I knew there must be servants in the house, but I had never seen any of them, save for the dour butler and the expressionless cook and I had no idea where I might find any of them at this hour. I looked about the room for anything that might be made into a serviceable weapon. There was not even so much as a fireplace poker. All this time, the pounding at the window was growing more vicious and more violent, I felt certain that whoever was on the other side would soon break through the glass.

  I stood up silently and grabbed the cold lamp that rested on the beside table. It was not ideal, of course, but it had a heavy iron base and that would have to do. But as soon as I stood, the pounding, the tapping, all of it ceased. I waited a few moments and heard nothing but my own breath. I moved over towards the window, thinking perhaps that the fiend had seen me rise and was lying in wait. Outside, there was nothing but that darkness of the uninhabited country, the sort that lies so heavily upon one’s eyes. There was, however, a handprint on the window, outlined in the white mist made by a body’s heat. The print was tall and slender, not much bigger than my own hand.

  I stood before the window for a very long time, until the moist heat of the handprint had faded and the place where it had been was indistinguishable from the rest of window pane. When I returned to my bed, I heaped blanket after blanket upon myself and still I was cold.

  Part Three: Fall

  My mother came on Saturday and we took tea on the white veranda. I stared out at the green hills that rolled ceaselessly into one another until they crashed up against the horizon. This place had seemed so open the first time I stepped on to the grounds. A silly thing; all the sillier for thinking herself wise.

  “You look wretched, darling,” my mother said, pressing a lemon slice down again and again into her cup.

  “I am sleeping poorly,” I told her. And it was so. The dark hollows underneath my eyes, the tremor in my hands, even the shocking, ghostly whiteness of my skin; all of it could be cured, I felt sure, if I could only close my eyes and rest. But always there was that knocking, that terrible rapping. Worse, somehow, was when it would cease for a few moments and then the tapping would begin, soft, insistent. Like fingernails. It had not let up, not one night since that first night.

  My mother chuckled to herself, “well, you are just lately wed, it is to be expected.”

  “My husband does not touch me,” I spit, with a violence that surprised me. My mother was taken aback as well, and she set her tea down with a clatter, splashing some of the hot liquid on to her fingers. We both jumped up and reached for the little tea towels. We dabbed at her injured hand and the stained white of the table cloth and took the excuse not to say anything to one another.

  When we sat back down, my mother smiled tightly and regaled me with tales of the elegant dinners she had recently attended. My new surname had afforded her the status she had hungered for when I was a child and she delighted in it now.

  She exclaimed over the leaves on the trees, the riotous colors of them. “My,” she said, “isn’t this beautiful country?”

  “They’re dying,” I said. Could that be my own voice, so toneless and dour? “Their color comes from the process of decay.”

  When I was a girl and even when I wasn’t, even just a few years ago, my mother would have chided me. My mother would have told me what is demanded of a lady and it would not include morbidity nor rudeness. It was yet another education from her, her silence in that moment. I had succeeded in the task she had set out before me; she need no longer correct me, she need no longer mother me. Her task was complete.

  As her carriage rolled through the tall front gate, I waved goodbye and for a moment, I had the strongest urge to run the thing down, to climb inside and never come back.

  But that was a little girl’s impulse. And she was just an old woman who loved fine things and rich friends. She had no power to save me now.

  Part Four: Winter

  I think someone is watching me.

  Oh, but I have not slept and such a thing does play with one’s mind. I have a terrible headache at all hours of the day now. I lie in my bed and do not sleep, I can stomach no food. My husband, I do not see. He has been working on the same piece of music for days, for more weeks than I can recall. I hear it at all hours. I have bribed the cook and she says he does not leave his conservatory at all now and asks that trays of food be left outside the door.

  I have abandoned my attempts at decoration. Except for my own bedroom, which I have had fitted with heavy window draperies in dark navy blue. At night I stick bits of cotton deep into my ears; I sleep with pillows over my face, and still I hear it as though it were next to my skin. Every night I think that surely the glass will crack this time. Sometimes, I think that I want it to crack, I want all the unknown to rush in and join the world that is seeable and touchable and knowable.

  You will think me foolish... I have tried sleeping in nearly every room in this manor. But the knocker follows me. Even down in the servant’s quarters, even at the very top of the house, three floors off the ground. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I were to go over to the window, throw back my dark curtains, undo the latch and spread the panes of the window wide. Would the night and everything inside of it rush in?

  But really, if I am to be perfectly truthful, I think it does not matter whether the window is opened or closed, because the thing that is out there is in here as well. I think I hear it moving, walking from room to room ahead of me. Its footsteps are very light, they sound like cloth softly skimming rough wood.

  ***

  Some weeks ago, when I could still close my eyes in the night and did not flinch away from whispers and footsteps, I went to see my husband.

  The city where I lived before sometimes seems unreal now, like something I heard of once in a story and never really existed at all. But I remember the parties, I remember the heavy, wet feeling of silk sitting on my thighs and I remember retreating to the dark corners and dead-end hallways where faceless men whispered in my ears. And I remembered how to put on my make-up, ghosting powder along my cheeks until they shone pale in the gloom and painting my lips a cheerful crimson. I even did my hair up with heavy irons that I heated myself in the bedroom’s fireplace. I wore only my white nightdress. It was my mother, after all, who cared for fine things.

  I lingered outside of the closed library door and I heard him murmuring to himself. I couldn’t make out any words, just the mutter of his voice and the low plunking of piano keys. I knocked on the door and I could hear eve
rything inside his room go still and silent. “Husband?” I called, and I made my voice so soft and so velvet. My mother was waiting for something very precise in a husband for me and that is why she demanded I stay unmarried for so long, but there were men before and I have learned some of their ways.

  He came to the door with his hollow, black eyes. I think my husband must have been handsome once. Now, he looked at me like a man drunk, or else drugged. I opened my mouth but found myself incapable of speech. He took the long skirt of my nightdress in his hands, twisted it all around his fists until I was pulled inexorably towards him. He looked at the white fabric like he had never seen such a thing before, as though I didn’t wear the exact garment or a copy of it every night in our arid bed.

  My husband lifted my long white skirt, bundled it up into my unresisting hands. My skin, my exposed legs and my pale stomach, were cold. But they had been cold before. This place, this place. It vanished even the memory of warmth.

  My husband knelt down before me like a supplicant knight and rested his head in the flat cradle of my hips, directly above the rise of my sex. It should have been embarrassing, and for a moment it was and I could not think what to do with my arms, save hold them stiffly out from me. But then it was as if some strange fairy magic had descended upon the two of us. I was transfixed, shot through and stuck fast to the floor. The world narrowed to the shivering of my husband’s sweat-slicked hair moving gently, like wind, like breath, against the skin of my abdomen. I rested my hands atop his head, he drew his own arms up to encircle my waist. Gooseflesh erupted on my legs.