by Jeff Wheeler
“You do not belong here,” Mrs. Pullman said in a choking voice. “You’ve never belonged here. And you’ll bring disgrace on this house. The master should never have brought you home. Were it not for Miss Felicianna, you’d be back in the Fells this very night.”
Cettie trembled inside as Mrs. Pullman’s thoughts and corroding will pummeled her mind. A sense of blackness and despair struck her forcibly, making her want to cower. But she resisted the urge. She clung to the belief that no one controlled her destiny but herself. Mrs. Pullman was like the villagers from the tale of the father and son and the mule. She was afflicted with the same self-doubt that she spewed on Cettie. It was Mrs. Pullman who secretly felt she did not belong, who tried to prove herself day and night by her tireless work. But no amount of work had erased her feelings of unworthiness. Cettie walled herself off from the poisonous thoughts. Even though her arm was throbbing, she tightened her little muscles, squeezed her hands into fists, and stared at Mrs. Pullman with determination.
The two locked wills.
“Go,” Mrs. Pullman whispered angrily.
Cettie walked away.
Later that night, after the lights of the manor had dimmed, Cettie and Anna huddled beneath the warm blankets in Anna’s room.
“I don’t see how your father can keep someone when she . . .” Cettie said with a throb of injustice, but her throat immediately seized up again. She frowned in frustration.
“Mrs. Pullman acts differently sometimes when he is away,” Anna said, snuggling closer. “She’s never been kind to me the way she is to Stephen and Phinia, but she’s getting worse. There’s something . . . wrong with her.”
I’m going to find a way to tell him, Cettie thought darkly. She was determined to endure her mistreatment no longer.
Anna swallowed and shivered. “We should tell Mother what she did tonight. She shouldn’t have done that.”
Cettie thought a moment. She could not talk about the ghosts, but she would say as much as she could. “No. Mrs. Pullman is stronger than her.” A horrible thought struck her. Mrs. Pullman didn’t like any stain of disgrace on the Fitzroy household . . . She certainly wouldn’t consider Lady Maren an appropriate wife for Fitzroy. Though everyone agreed that the lady’s health had been foundering for years, no one knew the precise cause. “Maybe . . . maybe she’s even the reason your mother is so sick. I don’t know. I don’t like the way she treats you, Anna, and she’s doing it because of me. She’s controlling everything in this house. She even . . . nngghh . . . I have to make it stop.” But first she would have to get through the night. They both would.
As was usually the case, Anna fell asleep first. Cettie was having difficulty relaxing; her mind was reliving the confrontation with Mrs. Pullman. Just touching that door had triggered an awakening inside her again. She was drained, but not as drained as the night of the ball. New vigor had been granted to her.
Later, much later, she experienced the strange prickle down her back. The room was dark. The manor was still.
Cold. A pit of cold filled Cettie’s stomach, and her teeth began to chatter. Anna groaned in her sleep, beginning to fidget. Fear twisted inside Cettie’s stomach. It was a familiar sensation, like a remembered stench, but she had not experienced it in a long time. It was the tall one. It was coming down the hall.
Sickening panic. It was coming. The ghost was coming. She felt it drift noiselessly down the hall. Anna let out a whimper, still asleep. Cettie tried to move, tried to get out of bed, but her muscles were locked, just as they had been at the grotto.
Cettie started to gasp for breath as her mind went black with sickness. It was coming. It was coming. And she couldn’t move.
She felt it enter the room, a clot of blackness in the shadows. Suddenly Cettie couldn’t breathe. It felt as if an icy hand had clutched her throat.
Hello, little one. Do you remember me still? Did you think I wouldn’t find you again?
And then Anna started to scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE
STORM
Anna couldn’t stop shrieking. Cettie tried to wrench free of the sheets, but she was frozen. The ghost was in there with them, and she had no idea how to banish it. She tried to will it away with her thoughts, pouring all her energy and will into it, but she didn’t know how to make it obey her as it had obeyed Fitzroy. There was knowledge he had that she lacked. Then Anna started to thrash and writhe in the covers, her screams piercing the air. Cettie watched in a helpless state as the ghost floated toward her friend.
“Go away, go away, go away,” Cettie pleaded through tears, wishing she could hug Anna. Wishing she could take all her friend’s fear on herself. The hysterics went on for what seemed like forever before Cettie saw the tall one reach its clawed hand through Anna’s chest. Anna, finally awakening, sat up and started sobbing. She breathed in choking gasps, looking frightened but unable to see the eyeless ghost poised over her. Cettie thought it was smiling.
Anna started making a choking sound, and Cettie, in pure desperation, flung aside the wraith’s power. She needed help right away for her friend, and, despite her earlier hesitation, Lady Maren was the only person she could think of to go to in the midst of the crisis. Rushing from the bed, she struck her shin against the footstool and fell in a heap from the pain. The pain helped her shift her focus away from the fear, and she managed to get up and limp to the door and hurry out the corridor. She felt the tall one coming after her. Although her shin throbbed, it was of no concern at all. At least she was leading the ghost away from Anna. At least her friend would be safe. She saw a light coming from down the hall. It was the same kind of swinging lantern that Mrs. Pullman carried.
And then the keeper rounded the corner, the light from the lantern in her bony hand making her face look frightening.
Stifling a scream of her own, Cettie raced in the other direction, determined to find Lady Maren. The corridor was lit by moonlight through the high windows. Cettie’s bare feet padded down the hall and then up some stone steps. The distance from the ghost allowed some of her wits to return. She hurried to the door to Lady Maren’s bedroom. She rapped on it quickly and hard, bouncing from one foot to another, covering her mouth and trembling uncontrollably. Summoning her strength of will, she gazed down the hall for any sign of movement in the shadows.
The door opened. It was Elizabeth, Lady Maren’s lady’s maid, looking confused. “Cettie? What are you doing here?”
“Anna!” Cettie said, not sure what to say.
Elizabeth rubbed sleep from her eyes. She turned, Cettie felt a slight pressure in her skull, and the light came on in the room.
“Did you send for Mrs. Pullman?” Elizabeth asked in concern.
Cettie slipped past her, earning a gasp of surprise, and hurried to Lady Maren’s bed. She was already awake and coming out of the sheets. Elizabeth grabbed a shawl for her lady and hastily put it around her shoulders. Lady Maren was disheveled and weak, but her eyes were full of concern.
“It’s Anna,” Cettie whimpered. “You must come.”
Lady Maren asked no questions. She put her arm around Cettie, and the three of them, Elizabeth included, rushed back to Anna’s room. When they arrived, the light was shining dimly, and Anna was asleep, being held and soothed by Mrs. Pullman. In the half-light of the room, Anna looked peaceful and tranquil. Mrs. Pullman stroked her hair. The hypocrisy of it made Cettie want to brutalize the older woman.
“What happened, Mrs. Pullman?” Lady Maren asked wearily.
“Just the night terrors,” Mrs. Pullman said. “Like she used to get. Something has brought them back on.”
“I thought she was sick,” Lady Maren said with relief.
“It wasn’t the night terrors,” Cettie said, staring hotly at Mrs. Pullman.
Mrs. Pullman’s eyebrow arched innocently.
Lady Maren turned to her. “She used to get them all the time, Cettie. She hasn’t had one since you started sleeping in her room. You’re just not used to them.”
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br /> Cettie grew more frustrated. “I’ve seen night terrors. I know what they are. This was different. It was a—” And then her throat blocked, and she found she could neither swallow nor speak.
“Was what?” Lady Maren asked in concern. She looked closely at Cettie, wanting to understand.
Cettie’s throat was constricted once again. It felt like she was choking. The fear she had felt earlier began to writhe to life again.
“I’ll get her some water,” Elizabeth said, hurrying from the room.
But no amount of water could loosen her words. She wanted to say the word “ghost,” and she simply couldn’t. Mrs. Pullman continued to stare at her with a knowing smile. The keeper had left the door unlocked, she realized, just so Cettie would realize how very helpless she was.
The ghost returned the next night, and the night after that. Mrs. Pullman had started locking the door each night to prevent Cettie from waking Lady Maren. But that was another subject that Cettie was forbidden to speak up about. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t use words that would have explained the situation. And Anna couldn’t explain what was happening either. To her, it seemed a dark, horrid dream, and she grew to fear the night. To fear Cettie’s company.
Finally, after several days of Anna’s fear steadily escalating, Mrs. Pullman persuaded Lady Maren that things might improve if Cettie were no longer sharing the room. Lady Maren was dubious of the claim and said she would try it out for one night.
And, of course, that night Anna slept peacefully. The weather took a sudden turn for the worse, which Cettie feared would delay the return of Fitzroy, who would surely set everything to rights. Cettie sat by the windows, watching the droplets of water chase each other down the glass as a storm battered Fog Willows. She felt impotent against Mrs. Pullman’s machinations. Anna had become extremely withdrawn around everyone, including Cettie. The two had been very close before Stephen and Phinia had left for school, but a shroud now seemed to hang over everything. Cettie took the change badly and feared that a fissure was splitting them apart.
Despite the situation, Cettie refused to abandon hope. Mrs. Pullman hadn’t expelled her yet. Something was holding the old woman back from that final act of domination. Fitzroy would return and put things right; she had to believe that. She wanted to be useful to him, so she made sure to go to his study every day and update the log she was keeping on the level of the quicksilver. After updating the information, she added a little square and drew the rain in. She wondered how long ago it was that it had last rained, so she went back through her previous entries and saw the little mark she had made on that day. Something struck her instantly.
It was the same number of tick marks she had just written down.
Cettie frowned and began chewing on the end of the pencil. She compared the two entries again. Something snicked inside her mind. Maybe it was because of the rain lashing the windows outside. Maybe it was because she knew Fitzroy was prevented from returning to the manor because of the storm. Maybe it was some intuition deep inside her that had always known and was just now revealing itself.
She flipped between the pages, watching the numbers change. Some days they changed dramatically. Most days they stayed the same as the day before. But there were subtle, regular shifts. Sometimes the quicksilver went down. Other times it went up. She and Fitzroy had pored over the instrument for months, trying to make sense of it. But Cettie had an impression, a guess, that the quicksilver was reacting to something they couldn’t see.
It was like opening a window and letting in sunshine. Cettie dropped the pencil and went back and studied her markings again. She had been tracking them for months, almost since she had first come to the Fitzroy manor. The changes all happened within a few ticks of each other.
What if, somehow, the quicksilver was responding to changes in the weather?
A pulse of pure giddiness washed through her. She picked up her pencil again, going back to each entry that shared a similar number. The excitement of the idea thrilled her. Staring out the window, it felt as if the sky were cheering her on instead of threatening her. The rain continued to dribble down.
With the pencil, she wrote a little note for herself next to the boxes indicating rain. When the silver falls, a storm will come.
She stared at the glass and the shiny liquid within it. Then she closed her notebook and determined to test her theory.
The opportunity came almost immediately. After three days of perpetual rain, during which the level had stayed the same, the amount of quicksilver in the glass tube changed again. It changed dramatically between morning and night. Cettie made an observation during dinner that she thought Fitzroy would come back in time for dinner the next night.
“It has to stop raining first, Cettie,” Lady Maren said, looking more weary than usual. “He won’t pilot a tempest in a storm unless it’s an emergency. It’s too dangerous.”
“I think the storm will end tonight,” Cettie said innocently, sipping broth from the spoon.
“I hope it does,” Lady Maren said.
The evening went on in its somber manner, as it had for days now. Even though the attacks had ended once Cettie had gone back to the garret, Anna grew anxious each time the sunlight began to fail. Mrs. Pullman had become very solicitous to the girl, and crooned to her each night as she tucked her into bed, no doubt attempting to win over her affections and her loyalty. Cettie clenched her fists, wishing she were older and more capable. Wishing she knew how to best the older woman.
The next day, Cettie awoke in the garret and waited for Mrs. Pullman to let her come down. The rain had stopped beating on the shingles during the night, and the air smelled clean and fresh through the upper window of the garret. But no bell rang inviting her down. All was silent below.
The daylight increased and still no Mrs. Pullman. Cettie paced restlessly in the garret. She’d never been locked in for the morning. When the morning passed and there was still no sign of relief, Cettie’s mood turned desperate.
It was late in the afternoon when she finally heard Mrs. Pullman’s footsteps down below. The bell rang.
Cettie scrambled down the ladder, her stomach sick with worry and hunger.
Mrs. Pullman seemed worried. “The master has returned,” she said, looking hard at Cettie.
Cettie felt a thrill of comfort. “I’ll tell him what you did,” she said, clenching her fists.
“Just as you told Lady Maren about the ghost?” Mrs. Pullman asked, her wrinkles dancing across her face. “You think you can best me, you ungrateful little guttersnipe?” Mrs. Pullman taunted. She towered over Cettie, looking down at her with proud disdain. “You think about this, young lady. If I can rob you of being able to speak, do you not think I could also take away your hearing? Your eyesight? Hmmm?” She gave Cettie a hateful look. “You imagine what that would be like, child. A deaf-mute. I’d put you back into the Fells like that. Consider what that would feel like. How helpless you would be. How long do you think you’d last, child? I’m warning you. Now, the master wants to see you. He’s heard you’ve not been feeling well today. You’ll let him know that you’re feeling much better now, won’t you? That I’ve been caring for you myself in my own rooms. Do we understand each other?”
Cettie faced her, feeling a mixture of dread and rage. “I hear you,” she answered softly, not trusting herself to say more.
“I’m glad you hear me, child,” Mrs. Pullman said. “My voice may well be the last sound you ever hear. You remember that. Now go downstairs. Say nothing about what we’ve talked about. I will know if you do. These walls have ears, child. I think you know that by now. There is nowhere you can escape me in Fog Willows. I’ll know if you try to betray me again.”
“Yes, Mrs. Pullman,” Cettie said, squelching the fire inside her.
“You be back on the stairs after the lights go dim. Don’t make me find you.”
“I won’t, Mrs. Pullman.”
“Good.” She gestured with her head. “On your
way now.”
Cettie went down the inner well of the tower, seething all the way. Before going to see Fitzroy, she went to the study and looked at the glass vial. The level of quicksilver was at exactly the same level as it had been the day before. She marked it in the log and wrote another note.
The storm passed.
Then she tried to write the word ghost on the page. But her wrist seized up, her fingers locked, and she couldn’t use her arm. Closing her eyes, she began to clear her mind, to breathe in and out slowly, as Raj Sarin had taught her. After a few moments, she felt her arm muscles loosen. She tried to write the word again.
Again, her fingers seized up with paralysis.
Cettie stared hungrily at the page, wanting to give Fitzroy a clue. She tried to write it is back.
But she could not manage even that.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE MYSTERIES OF WIND
Fitzroy was in the sitting room when Cettie arrived. Music wafted in from behind the wooden panels, and the servants looked brighter than they had in recent days. For a moment, Cettie stood just outside the doorway, watching the family tableau before her. Anna clung to her father’s arm, sharing a chair with him. She had shadowy smudges beneath her eyes and a sickly air. Lady Maren sat on her couch, a blanket on her lap, and husband and wife were talking together with animated expressions.
Cettie wanted to know what they were saying. She felt awkward intruding, but she, too, was relieved to see Fitzroy. His presence brought a calming feeling, and, besides, it would curb Mrs. Pullman’s worse behavior. She was anxious to tell him the news of her insight, but that could wait. Clearly he was talking about something of importance. She wished she could hear what he was saying.
With her thought, she felt a throb of power, and suddenly their voices reached her ears as if she were actually standing amongst them.
