The Vanishing

by Wendy Webb

  Amaris Sinclair exhaled and held my gaze. “Well,” she said finally. “This has certainly happened quite a bit more rapidly than I thought it would. It’s only your second day here.”

  My stomach tightened. Was she about to ask me to leave? “Have I done something wrong?”

  “Oh, my goodness, no.” She slipped the book into the pocket of her jogging suit and took my hands in hers. “On the contrary. This is why I’ve asked you here, my dear.”

  She looked deeply into my eyes—almost in a trance, as she had been the day before at lunch.

  “I don’t understand, Mrs. Sinclair.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but then seemed to think better of it. She shook her head and turned toward the elevator. “Come. Let us put Mr. Scrooge and Mr. Marley back into their place on the first editions shelf.”

  I was feeling a bit like a naughty schoolgirl, caught doing something she shouldn’t, so I did damage control as the elevator creaked its way down to the first floor. “If you’d rather I didn’t touch the books or take them from their shelves—”

  “Don’t be silly! Only the items under glass—the Gutenberg Bible, ancient scrolls, that type of thing—need to stay where they are. But the rest are here for your pleasure. And if I know anything about you, Julia, darling, you will be in this library more often than not.”

  As we exited the elevator, I looked around at the stacks, imagining what other wonders they contained. “I think you’re right,” I admitted with a sly smile.

  As Mrs. Sinclair was slipping the book back into its place on the shelf, Marion appeared in the doorway.

  “Sorry to disturb, ma’am,” she said, smoothing her apron.

  “Not at all, Marion. What is it?”

  “It’s Mr. Sinclair. He’s on the telephone.”

  That was quick, I thought. I moved to follow Marion out of the room, thinking he had returned my call. But Mrs. Sinclair spoke up, her face alight with twinkling eyes. “Ooh!” she cooed. “My boy!” She turned to me and said conspiratorially: “He’s been gone for only a day and already I miss him.”

  “It’s for Mrs. Sinclair?” I said, my words falling on top of one another with a thud. “I thought maybe…”

  But Marion’s face told me all I needed to know.

  “Excuse me while I take this,” Mrs. Sinclair said.

  “Of course,” I said, but she was already off with Marion, leaving me alone.

  After she had gone, I wasn’t sure if I should poke around the shelves anymore on my own or not. So I meandered through the library’s first floor, past shelf upon shelf, the tables, and a reading area that was clustered around a fireplace, until I found a set of double doors, much like the ones we went through to get to the west salon.

  “This must be the east salon,” I said to myself, remembering an architectural drawing of the house that I had spied my first day here. I wondered if this room was as warm and welcoming as its mirror image on the other side of the house where Mrs. Sinclair and I took our lunch these past two days.

  I stood at the doors for longer than I normally would have, that same feeling of dread circling around me. It was stronger here, almost emanating from the doors themselves.

  “Hallucinations,” I said aloud, remembering my unease at entering the library, which turned out to be full of wonderful surprises. Maybe this room would be the same. “It’s just an old house.”

  I pulled open the massive doors, which creaked with what seemed to be their anger at being disturbed. After the opulence in the library, I was unprepared for the sight that awaited me.

  Sheets were draped over the furniture. The windows were shuttered closed. A layer of dust blanketed the fireplace’s mantel. And the floors, which gleamed in other parts of the house, were dull and dark with age.

  One round table sat in the center of the room, its chairs haphazardly pushed back as though their occupants left in a hurry. Plates sat where diners had left them, remnants of their meals long since devoured by industrious mice. Silverware was strewn here and there, and delicate wineglasses—some broken, some still standing at attention beside their plates—completed the strange tableau.

  A complicated pattern of cobwebs adorned the walls and upper corners of the room, the woven masterpieces of generations of spiders undisturbed by humans. A bird’s nest was perched on the great chandelier that hung from the ceiling, and the soft skittering of mice whispered along the parquet floorboards. A rug in the center of the room had been chewed and shredded—squirrels? raccoons?—and it appeared that something had built a nest in the long-cold fireplace. Dust floated in the air, and I heard the scratchy strains of music. A vision began to formulate to go with the tune: men in tuxedos, women in glittering gowns, laughter, celebration, dancing.

  It was such a stark contrast to the rest of the house that it caused me to take a quick breath in. Clearly, this room had been shut up and unused for years, and once that realization took hold, that same sense of dread began to wrap itself around me, with something added to it—guilt. Crushing guilt and sadness. I realized I did not want to know what had happened here that had caused people to leave in a hurry. I just wanted to follow them out.

  I started to back out of the room and pull the doors closed, when something caught my eye.

  An enormous painting hung above the fireplace mantel. In the gloom, I couldn’t get a good look at it, but I was drawn to it somehow.

  Forgetting my haste to leave, I crossed the room to the windows and pulled open the dusty shutters, and as I did so, a shock of sunlight illuminated the darkness. I pulled open another set of shutters and another until the room was well lit. Then I turned to the painting, and my knees nearly gave out because of what I saw.

  People in Victorian dress were seated at a round table—the very one in the center of the room before me. They were holding hands. Candles burned and a fire was lit in the fireplace.

  It might have simply been a depiction of an evening’s post-dinner entertainment, if not for the specters. Swirling around the people at the table were ghostly images: a woman whose mouth was open in a scream, three children dressed in white gowns with wicked looks on their faces, a dog with bared teeth and red eyes. An elderly couple hovered beside one of the men at the table, each with a hand on his shoulder. A man floated in the corner holding his own severed head.

  A woman stood in the midst of it all. She was wearing a long, light-colored dress with a high collar and a sash at the waist. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head in a loose bun. Her arms were raised, and she seemed to be commanding the scene.

  I was compelled to move closer and closer until the image seemed to engulf me, and then I saw what it was about the painting that mesmerized me so.

  The woman’s face. It looked exactly like mine.

  TEN

  I don’t know how long I stood there, openmouthed, staring at my own face in the painting. Any thoughts of quickly exiting what seemed to be a forbidden, if certainly unused, room vanished. All I could do was stand and stare at the image of this woman who seemed both familiar and strange. It was me, and yet decidedly not me.

  As I looked closer, the people in the painting seemed to stir. It was almost as if they began to breathe, slowly coming to life until they were no longer flat pictures on a canvas, but living beings around me. At the time, I was not sure if they entered my world, or if I was drawn into theirs, or if the whole thing was nothing more than my imagination. But whatever it was and however it happened, I found myself in the midst of the séance depicted in the painting—a place I had no wish to be.

  The specters swirled around me, their ghostly moans ringing in my ears. The three children moved closer, whispering to one another. The screaming woman turned and said: “Hear me.” The man’s severed head began to grin.

  For a moment I was frozen in terror, but then I found my feet. I backed out of the room, slamming the doors behind me in the hopes of containing whatever had been unleashed there.

  I pounded through the
library, out its double doors, and into the hallway, which was empty and dark. My footsteps echoed on the marble floor as I hurried along, desperate to find Mrs. Sinclair, Marion, or anyone. I had no idea where in this massive house she had taken the call from Adrian—her own private suite of rooms, for all I knew—and I became more and more frantic as I went from room to empty room.

  Finally I found her, in the study just off the kitchen. She was seated in an armchair near the fireplace, a pot of tea on the end table next to her.

  “Mrs. Sinclair! There you are!” I was breathing heavily from all my rushing.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, greeting me from behind her teacup. “I just finished talking with Adrian when Marion brought me some tea. Join me?”

  I slumped into the chair opposite hers and stared at the fire, which was dancing and darting and crackling merrily. The room was so warm and welcoming, such a contrast to where I had just been, that I leaned my head against the high back of the chair and exhaled.

  “Is something wrong, Julia?” Mrs. Sinclair leaned toward me and extended her hand. “You seem rather disturbed.”

  How was I to begin? I wanted to ask her about the painting of the woman who looked exactly like me, but I wasn’t sure I was even supposed to have been in that shuttered-up room. I wanted to tell her what I had seen—but then I remembered the side effect of stopping my medication. Was it all just a hallucination?

  I took a deep breath before speaking, giving myself time to gather my thoughts.

  “I’m fine,” I finally said, and sighed, deciding to keep whatever had happened in that room to myself, at least for now. It might well have been a hallucination, for all I knew. And as for the painting, I must’ve been imagining the resemblance. She was just a woman with similar coloring and a similarly shaped face to mine; that was all. It was just a coincidence. What other explanation could there be?

  Mrs. Sinclair smiled an indulgent smile. “I know, dear. I know. In this old house, it can seem like ghosts are around every corner when one is alone.”

  “Is Havenwood haunted, Mrs. Sinclair?”

  She leaned forward in her chair and raised her eyebrows. “It’s positively chock-full of spirits, Julia,” she said with a slight smile.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Are you serious? Because it seems like you’re teasing me.”

  A more solemn expression replaced her grin and she looked into my eyes. “Do you believe in the spirit world, my dear?”

  I turned my gaze to the fire for a moment before responding. “I’m not sure.”

  “Have you had any strange experiences since arriving here at Havenwood?”

  “What sort of strange experiences?” The words caught in my throat.

  “Anything that might be construed as seeing something that’s not entirely… alive.” Her eyes were filled with concern and seemed expectant, somehow.

  I didn’t answer her. How could I? I wasn’t about to admit that I had seen a painting gurgle to life, or heard a child singing, when I knew full well they were probably hallucinations brought on by abruptly stopping my medication. I didn’t want her thinking I was crazy. So I just sat there, not knowing quite what to say next.

  Fortunately, she spoke, breaking the silence between us. “Let me tell you a little story,” she began, lifting her teacup to her lips, but then stopped before sipping. “Shall I call Marion? Would you like some tea?”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  “Well, then,” she said, clearing her throat and staring into the fire. “This is a story about the time in my life when I was a young novelist. Before Adrian was born, so that gives you an idea about how long ago this was.”

  She took a sip of her tea and I settled back into my chair, calmed by the sound of her voice and the thought that I was going to hear another of Amaris Sinclair’s stories.

  “I had just published my first novel.”

  “The Haunting of Hattie Doyle?”

  “That’s the one, my dear. As you know, it’s the story of a woman who moves with her family into a haunted house, but nobody can see or hear the ghosts except her…”

  “And then the ghosts turn their attentions to her husband.” I finished her thought. “Are you going to tell me it was real?”

  “Just the opposite.” She smiled. “When I wrote that story, darling, I was a young woman with very little life experience. I conjured it up in my own head, without any sort of facts or reality entering into it. I knew nothing about ghosts, just that they made for good storytelling.”

  I nodded. “They did make for good storytelling. That book reached the bestseller list.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “It made me an overnight sensation. The story I want to tell you happened on the book tour for that novel. My publisher sent me nationwide.”

  I smiled, imagining the young Mrs. Sinclair meeting and greeting her readers. “It must have been thrilling.”

  “Oh, it was,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “All of my dreams came true. But something unexpected happened as well.”

  I looked at her. “What was it?”

  “Every time I did a reading or a signing, people would tell me about their experiences with ghosts,” she said. “That was what the discussion turned into. Not just once, not just twice, but every time, at every bookstore or library I visited. People would share these experiences with me. One woman told me how her dead mother’s perfume would waft through the air on special family occasions. Another told me how, when she was unpacking boxes in her new house, her children saw a photo of her grandfather who had died several years before they were born and whose photo they had never seen. ‘Oh, that’s Grandpa,’ one of them said. ‘He comes to play with us in our room. Will he come to the new house, too?’ I’ve heard thousands of stories like this, Julia.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

  “The point is, I started writing ghost novels before I believed. Now I do.”

  “Because of what people had told you about their experiences?”

  She shook her head. “Not just that. I had one of my own.”

  My eyes widened. “What happened?”

  “It was on that first book tour,” she said, settling back into her chair and gazing into the fire. “I was under contract to finish my second book, but I had delayed working on it because I was so busy doing readings at bookstores and libraries and enjoying every minute of it. Remember, this was my first time on the road as a novelist, and meeting people other than my family who had read and loved my work was intoxicating and even addicting. It was as though I wanted to squeeze every ounce of joy out of that first tour before I turned my focus to my next book, and that meant the next book was going to be late to my publisher. It had me a little worried, frankly, thinking I should buckle down and get to work already.”

  She took a sip of tea before continuing. “At one particular reading, I told the audience of my predicament,” she said. “Later, when I was signing books for all the people who had come to hear me speak, a woman of about my age approached me. She looked strangely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. She said to me: ‘Don’t worry about focusing on this book tour instead of writing your next book. It’s the right thing to do. Your next book will take care of itself. Enjoy every moment of your first book tour that you can. Later, you’ll be glad you did.’ And then she just stood there, smiling at me.” Mrs. Sinclair’s face lit up as she said this. “She didn’t have a book for me to sign. She just left, but not before she turned around and said: ‘We’re all so proud of you.’ ”

  “Who was it?” I asked her.

  “My grandmother.”

  I squinted at her. “I thought you said she was about your age.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “The woman in the bookstore was about my age. But it was my grandmother, I’m sure of it. Months later, I was looking through some old family photos with my mother, and we came upon one of her. She had died before I was born.”


  “And you’re sure you weren’t mistaken?”

  “She lived, died, and is buried in the very town where I did that reading,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “I didn’t know that before I met her.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Whoa.”

  “Whoa, indeed. My point is, Julia, there is more to this world than meets the eye. That story isn’t any different from any of the others that I’ve heard from readers for forty-odd years. This is what happens to people. These are people’s ghost stories. It’s a universal experience. And that means spirits are among us.”

  “Even here at Havenwood?”

  “Especially at Havenwood, darling,” she said, rising from her chair and opening her arms wide. “How many years of history have happened within these walls? Births, deaths, betrayals, scandals, marriages, love, hate, even the odd murder or two. Don’t be surprised to encounter the odd spirit wafting down the hallways here, Julia. Be surprised when you don’t. That means something a bit more sinister is at work.”

  My stomach cramped. “Sinister?”

  She extended a hand to me, which I took, and she pulled me out of my chair.

  “That’s enough talk of dark things for one day,” she said. “I promised to introduce you to the horses. It’s time to bundle up, Julia, dear!”

  I didn’t know quite what to make of this woman, who at once could talk of ghosts roaming the halls of Havenwood and allude to something more dangerous than that, and in the next moment become as giddy as a schoolgirl at the idea of seeing her horses.

  As I looked into her dancing green eyes, bright with anticipation of the afternoon to come, I could see the face of Mrs. Sinclair as a much younger woman, the lines around her eyes gone, the droop of her jowls lifted, her skin glowing. And then it faded, the wrinkles returning, the sallowness of her skin taking hold once again.

  I stood there squeezing her hands, looking into her now-aged face, and I smiled. This strange and even eccentric lady was beginning to get under my skin. I wanted answers, not just about the horrific fire and Adrian’s involvement in it, but about what it meant for me, here, now, at Havenwood. I wanted to know what sorts of specters lurked in these hallways, and why Mrs. Sinclair kept alluding to something darker. I wanted to get another look at that painting—did the woman really resemble me, or was I imagining things in the heat of a terrifying moment? Most of all, I wanted to know what I had really gotten myself into by coming to this house in the first place.