by Sarah Bryant
About two hundred feet from the house, the ground leveled off, tapering toward a cobbled drive. The front door had a roofed carriage entrance. The elaborate entryway must have been beautiful in its day, but time and disuse had worn heavily on it. Curtains of ivy and Spanish moss hung over its open sides, swaying gently in the breeze. Narrow terraces ran the length of the house in both directions, but the railings had begun to crack and crumble in the ivy’s insidious grasp, and the cherubs at their stair ends were covered with fine brown moss and corrugated lichen. Stone urns, rattling with the desiccated skeletons of ferns and a few of the tougher, ranker indigenous weeds, sat on either side of the front door. One had cracked in half, and part of it lay shattered on the stairs.
If I had felt sadness or the hint of a buried secret in my grandmother’s house, it was nothing compared with the feeling of the house on the hill. I found myself wishing desperately that I could make it what it should have been. I wanted to throw open the windows and let the wind blow the cobwebs from its rooms. Its chimneys should spill smoke, its windows and doorways laughter. The sounds of children’s feet should resound on its floorboards. Instead it was trapped in a wail for its own barrenness, a vacancy far more pervasive than its unoccupied rooms.
Drawing a breath, I stepped over the broken urn, placed my hand on the doorknob, then stopped, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that someone was watching me. I stepped back and looked at the windows on either side of the entrance. I tried to tell myself that unease was making me see what wasn’t there, but at the same time, I was sure that the curtain covering the window to my right had twitched the moment I looked at it, as though it had been lifted and then dropped back into place. I shuddered, paused, and then, taking a deep breath, turned the doorknob.
Anticlimactically, the door opened easily onto an empty entrance hall. The far end of the cavernous room was nearly lost in shadow. The few remaining pieces of furniture were covered by white drop cloths and rested on a faded oriental rug. French doors lined the wall on either side of the front door, all but two covered by faded blue damask draperies. I pulled the cords on several of the curtains, and the room flooded with light.
The white walls and ceiling were decorated with elaborate plaster molding, its gold leaf mottled but still shining softly. On either side of the room were several closed doors, and at the far end three dusty French doors opened onto what appeared to be another terrace.
Dimly illuminated, dual staircases curved from the far end of the room up into the shadows. The stairs were covered with a thick film of dust, and I felt irreligious leaving footprints in it, as I had felt walking in new-fallen snow as a child. At the first landing the stairways converged into a balcony that looked down into the room below. On one wall of the landing was a half-shaded casement. I uncovered this, dispelling more of the gloom. The original abandon with which I had entered the house was dissipating rapidly, leaving in its place an apprehension that, however childish, I could not shake.
Another stairway ran up along the far wall. A wide corridor opened to the right of the landing, a smaller one to the left, and a set of closed doors stood opposite the top of the stairs, at the base of the next staircase. I chose the wide hallway. At its end, sunlight streamed blearily through a large window; more doors opened off either side of the corridor.
Fear clutched as I opened the first of these, but the room behind it was empty. After that, my timidity disappeared. There was nothing in any of the rooms but antique furniture, dust, and spiders. After looking into a few of them, I abandoned the hallway. I even debated leaving then, putting the place out of my mind altogether. However, the feeling that the house was hiding something was still strong enough to overcome any remaining unease. I studied the stairs and the small hallway. Remembering the tower on the left wing of the house, I decided to make this my destination.
Though dim and murky, the hallway was not long. The walls were painted deep red, and there were several small, arched, leaded-glass windows set in the left wall. Looking out, I saw that I was level with the tops of the three oaks. The lake seemed miles away, my house even farther. Quickly I looked away.
At the end of the passage was a heavy wooden door, which led to a surprisingly bright corridor. The left side was lined with windows, the right with closed doors. Sunlight lay in warped rectangles on the wooden floor. At the end of the corridor was an arched door, also closed. I had come to expect that all of the doors I found would open easily, but this one did not. I rattled the handle, to no effect. I could not fathom why an inner door would be locked when the front door was wide open to the world. One answer squeezed out of the back of my mind, but I wouldn’t entertain it: the mustiness and pristine layer of dust belied the possibility that anybody might be living in the house.
I knew that I was on the second floor; therefore there had to be a ground-floor entrance as well. I went back through the corridors and down the stairs to the entrance hall, which seemed brighter and smaller and far less formidable than it had. I opened the first door that led to the left out of the entrance hall, and came into a sitting room with a large stone fireplace. Two doors opened off the room, one on the back wall, the other straight ahead.
Opening the door in front of me, I found myself in another wide corridor, this one also lined with long windows on one side and more closed doors on the other. The door at the end of this corridor had to be the entrance to the tower. I tried it, and found it locked as tightly as the first. I raced up to the third floor, found a comparable entrance, and when it, too, was locked, I nearly cried in outrage.
I inspected the lock carefully. Its keyhole was large enough to see through, but it was dark on the other side—either that, or the hole was blocked. Clearly, the lock would not be difficult to pick if I could find the proper implement.
I retraced my steps, looking for any such tool. Eventually I arrived back in the sitting room next to the entrance hall. It was empty except for a deer’s head hanging over the fireplace on the left-hand wall, an equivocal look in its glass eyes. The deer resurrected the uncomfortable feeling that I was being observed, and I turned away, toward the door I had not yet tried.
The room it opened onto was long and high-ceilinged, running at least half the length of the house, where French doors let in floods of sunlight. The walls were white, or had been; now they were discolored with age. The floor was a checkerboard pattern of black and white marble, and a balcony ran around the length of the room, lined with doors that must have belonged to second-story rooms. A stairway curved up to meet the balcony, its steps made of the same marble as the floor.
The arched ceiling was pale blue, painted with mythological scenes spreading from a yellow sun in the centre. Goblins danced with fairies; gods with severe faces and long beards chased nymphs in chariots drawn by swallows; satyrs played their flutes on clouds where butterflies fluttered in rings of gold and red and blue; Pega sus carried a boy to a girl in a pearly turret. Myriad species of birds and insects, both real and imaginary, fluttered in and out of scenes too numerous and intricate to extract from the whole.
It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen. I could imagine it decades earlier, lit with candles or gas, the light glinting on ornate costumes as the crowd swung to a waltz or reel. Then I saw the piano, and the imaginary dancers vanished.
It had been pushed into the far right-hand corner of the room and covered with a white cloth. I peeled this away, revealing an old Steinway. The keys were in perfect condition. I touched several of them gingerly. Though it had slipped, as my own piano did all too quickly in the Louisiana climate, its tone had no trace of the tinny dissonance inherent to instruments that have been neglected for a number of years. I sat down on the leather-covered stool, settling my fingertips on the keys. I did not know whether I meant to play; before I could really think about it, I was not only playing but utterly absorbed.
The music that emerged was a Chopin ballade, the one Alexander had played that night at the symphony half a year before.
I had not played it in years—would have said, if I had been asked, that I had forgotten it. Nevertheless, the ballade poured forth, my fingers never hesitating. Only when the last notes had faded to an echo in the vast, empty room did my mind begin to work. I stared dumbly at my hands on the keys before me, as though one or the other would answer the questions that now churned in sickening circles, like the butterflies on the ceiling.
Outside, a cloud eclipsed the sun. Shadows crowded the room, pushing for space in the corners and the arched depths of the ceiling. With shaking hands I closed the piano and replaced the cloth.
My conviction that there was something wrong with the place was growing by the second. Yet I had come for a reason, and I told myself that it would be ridiculous to abandon it because of a piano that seemed to enable me to play a piece I believed I had forgotten.
Resisting the urge to look back, I walked up the stairs to the balcony and opened the first door I came to. Inside was a surprisingly well-furnished library. Books lined the walls from floor to ceiling, some of them very old. They were of all sorts, written predominantly in English and French, though there were several in other languages. A ladder led up to a small loft on one side of the library. The loft held two bookshelves, and the bookshelves held Bibles, prayer books, hymnals, and various other books of a Christian nature. I pulled one from a shelf. Its brittle pages were filled with calligraphy and illuminations, the words in Latin. I chose two more at random; they were equally old and precious.
I stared at the books in my hands, unable to believe or deny what they seemed to be. They must have been priceless, yet they were rotting in this fetid place, abandoned with the house. Again the fear was creeping, for had this all been mine, nothing less than fear for my life could have induced me to leave it.
The mummy’s-skin leather of the books’ bindings began to repel me; it crumbled under my touch, leaving a dry, rotten-smelling dust on my fingers. I replaced them in their cases and climbed back down the ladder. I was still no closer to the tower, and the day was wearing on.
In the right-hand corner of the room, under a window, was a writing desk. In the top drawer I found a pair of cracked reading glasses, three rusted pens, and a sheaf of heavy, yellowed paper, all of it blank. In the next drawer down was a ring of keys. I closed the drawer and ran back down the stairs into the ballroom, through the sitting room, and down the bright corridor to the locked door. The first three keys did not fit. The fourth one slid easily into the lock. Something clattered to the floor on the other side.
I pushed the door open. A narrow stone staircase wound up out of sight. The only light came from a slit of a window, high above on the curving wall of the stairwell. When I closed the door behind me, I noticed a key on the ground, identical to the one that had opened the door—my key must have pushed the other one out of the lock. I dropped the key from the floor into my pocket, slid the key ring in next to it, and began to climb.
Every few feet a narrow window was cut into the wall, but they shed little light. My legs began to ache from the slant of the tight spiral. As I climbed, I wondered again what I expected to find at the top. If there was something substantial, it would be likely to upset me, as Eve’s portrait had done. What would I do this time, so far from home? I wondered. Worse still, what if the place was inhabited by someone demented or violent? Stubbornly I pushed the thought aside and climbed on.
After a time, I reached a narrow landing. The stairway continued up beyond it, and to my right was a door that must have been the second-floor entrance to the tower stair. The window across from it threw a blade of light that glinted dully on the nails in its crossbeams, the faded brass doorknob, and the key in its lock. The trepidation I thought I had dispensed with rekindled at that; I climbed up to the final landing.
There was a key on the wrong side of the third lock, too, but it barely registered, because what I saw in front of me was more unnerving still. The door to the room at the top of the tower was ajar, revealing a sitting room from an earlier era, neatly kept, without so much as a speck of dust anywhere. The room was round, with one large French door that opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. There was a sofa covered with cream brocade, and an old-fashioned mahogany desk. A matching wardrobe rested against the wall opposite the sofa. A trunk of the same wood was pushed against the wall on the side of the door, on the other side of which was a small table with an ornate old mirror over it, bisected almost symmetrically by a horizontal crack.
Opening the wardrobe, I found two pieces of antique women’s clothing, not unlike those Mary and I had found in the attic. Both were dresses: one fluttery and white, the other of red silk shot through with gold. I looked at each dress carefully but did not touch them. I knew well enough where I had seen them before, and something in me balked at the idea of their immediate tangibility.
I shut the wardrobe and moved to the balcony door. It was unlocked. From the balcony, it seemed as though I could see forever. Eden’s house was almost hidden by the trees, its driveway snaking through them toward the main road like a lifeline. Eventually the main road connected with the village of Eden: a huddled cluster of dollhouses in the pristine expanse of jungle and swamp. To the north, a dingy smudge on the horizon marked Baton Rouge.
I could no longer ignore the angle of the sun. Alexander and Tasha would have arrived long ago, and I would be missed soon, if I wasn’t already. I closed the glass door behind me. Perhaps the discovery of the room ought to have enticed even greater curiosity, but it had the opposite effect. For the moment the house had released its hold on me, and I grasped the chance to escape.
Before I left, I meant to replace the key I had taken from the ground-floor entrance to the stair. I refused to believe that the room could be inhabited any more than the rest of the house was, yet I was still superstitious enough to want to leave everything as it had been. I fished around in my pocket for the key but could not find it.
In an instant, mild annoyance solidified into horror. I stood benumbed, listening with every nerve in my body, because I had just heard what I could not have heard—and then I heard it again, too clearly to be denied. A faint strain of piano music twisted up from somewhere below. It was a Chopin ballade. It was the Chopin ballade I had played not an hour before.
The blood pounded in my ears. Don’t panic, don’t panic, I kept repeating to myself. I emptied my mind, thinking of nothing but those words, repeating them over and over until they had no meaning anymore save to block other thoughts. If I allowed myself to consider what was happening, I knew that fear would paralyze me.
I let myself out of the tower room, fighting hysteria all the while, and raced down the stairs. There seemed to be so many more now than there had been before, the stairway so much more confined. My heart beat in my throat as the minnows in the lake’s shallows would beat against my toes when I stepped into their school. I reached for the doorknob, and panic turned to terror. The door was locked.
I was beyond wondering how this was possible. I tore the keys from my pocket, and was shuffling through them, trying to remember which one fitted the door, when I heard footsteps, still far away but moving in my direction. I turned from the door in front of me to the stairway, unable to decide which was the better choice. Then some still-rational part of my mind told me what I must have known all along: whoever used the tower room must have some other way of entering and exiting the stairwell. There was no other way that it could have been locked from the inside.
And so I saw what I might never otherwise have seen. In the shadow of the staircase, to its right, was a small door. It led to a narrow compartment with two more doors. One led downward into darkness. The other could only lead outside, but it, too, was locked. I remembered the keys then, opened my hand, and looked down: I had clutched them so hard that beads of blood sprang up on my palm and fingers.
My hands shook so much that I could hardly place the key in the lock. I tried every one, and none of them fit. The footsteps were closer now, and unmistakable. In one
last, desperate effort, I threw all of my weight against the door. It sprang open, disgorging me into bright sunlight and a wave of sodden heat. Wrenching the keys free, I slammed the door shut, then ran to the shelter of the woods, where I slumped down against a tree, blinded by the brightness and sobbing for breath.
SEVEN
WHEN I had collected myself again, I found an overgrown drive and followed it down the hill. Eventually it connected with Eden’s own drive, and I was home in an hour.
I sat in the dim cool of the kitchen, trying to make sense of what I had seen and heard. It seemed unlikely that the house’s tenant was a wanderer. She—I had decided the resident must be female, judging from the contents of the bedroom—could be deranged, but she could not be poor or uncultured. At any rate, she could not always have been: her playing was too accomplished for that.
Of course, the most obvious answer was that I had discovered the whereabouts of my mother’s missing twin. Yet if Eve was alive and in Eden, I didn’t see how she could have escaped everyone’s notice for so long. More than that, if she had hidden from me all these months, it made no sense that she would then bid for my attention, particularly in so mawkish a manner.
The key ring from the library was still in my pocket. I pulled it out and lay it on the table in front of me. The keys were old and rusty, each more or less like the other, except for a small one which looked more like the key to a chest or cupboard than to a door. Something about this last key struck an ominous chord in me, though I was quite certain that I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Like everything else about the house on the hill, it made no sense.
The fear I thought I had left behind began to return. I knew that I had to confide in someone before it took hold. It was past four, and the Trevozhovs were to have arrived by two. The house was clearly deserted, and I was about to go look in the cottage when I found Mary’s note on the piano’s music stand.
