The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  Forty-One

  I walked forward as if in a trance, following the trail of hummingbirds lying still on the ground as if they had dropped dead while fleeing from something awful, their faded colors dulled by the darkness to smudges of black.

  The light shifted into greasy shades of yellow as I waded through the blackout, the glow of a candle appearing ahead of me as I came to the very last room, where the hummingbird cabinet was situated.

  The birds were strewn like a carpet there, as if thrown by a child having a fit.

  And standing by the cabinet, a candlestick at her feet, was Mary, her furs discarded in a pale heap behind her, like the hump of some unidentifiable creature. The sequins of her dress glimmered like sparks in the flickering light.

  “What are you doing?” I cried.

  She reached into the cabinet again—she had prized off the wooden board that had replaced the broken glass last year—and flung out another bird, its body so insubstantial that it did not make a sound when it fell onto the floor.

  “Stop!” I called, and she turned to face me. “Leave the hummingbirds alone.”

  “I was a child when he first had me, do you know that?” she said, her voice breaking with pain, the whites of her eyes glinting. “I got lost during a game of hide-and-seek and found him waiting for me in his office. I was just a little thing. Little bird, he called me all the times when we were together, little angel, little rabbit, little beast, little doll. He used to have me wear his wife’s furs with nothing underneath; he used to have me run away from him and then chase me down.”

  My knees shook, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

  Her face was a picture of agony, her gaze blank, as though she were looking back to some monstrous past.

  “My little rabbit, he called me, when he had me. Other times he called me a bird, or an angel, because of the whiteness of my hair and the dresses I used to wear”—her hand floated toward her head, as if her limb had been untethered—“and he said he’d buy me lace wings like an angel from a play. But even when we were together last year, it wasn’t the same. He fucked me but he didn’t love me.” Tears spilled from her wide eyes, gleaming gold in the light. “He didn’t—doesn’t—want me like he did back then; he doesn’t even speak of it, it’s as if that girl, that child, that little doll of his, was someone else, someone he doesn’t remember, but I remember. I remember. My little secret, he called me, but how many of those did he have?” She gave a sob, and seized another hummingbird.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said weakly, my eyes fixed on her as though she was something dear of mine that had been ignited into some terrible inferno.

  “You know who I’m talking about. The Major. Lord Lockwood. He doesn’t want you either, even with your pale hair. He wants Sylvia; he’s going to marry her instead of me.”

  “He hurt you, when you were a child?”

  “He loved me when I was a child.”

  I wanted to cry.

  “He liked to beat me too, said I was a naughty little savage, but I didn’t mind that; he would be so gentle afterward. It was a game.” She smiled. “He used to have me right under his wife’s nose, in a different room each time. He used to kiss me and love me while his wife ran around the house looking for him. Once, he had me hide in a wardrobe and when she came in the room asking who he had been talking to, he told her she was mad.”

  “Stop,” I said, raising my hands as if I could push the horrific images away. Mary’s story was terrible, but somehow I knew she was not lying. Pain like this could not be feigned.

  “Even when his wife was dead, he wouldn’t marry me. He promised me he’d buy me furs of my very own but he never did, I had to wear his wife’s, his mistresses’, his daughter’s.”

  She looked at the hummingbird she still held in her hands, then threw it, its body skidding into the wall.

  “Please stop!” I begged. “You’ll damage the birds.”

  “The birds . . .” she repeated, turning to face the cabinet, the dark shadows of the hummingbirds on the branches looking almost like one great winged creature crouching inside. “The birds, and the bear, and the rabbits, and the foxes,” she said, as if it were a line from a nursery song. “He thinks he can own everything. He thinks he can take us and discard us as he wishes. I wanted to make him pay. He will pay.”

  “You were the one who stole the birds, who skinned the bear,” I said, trying to follow her strange logic. “The porcelain doll, was that yours too?”

  “Oh, he liked to give me dolls. I wasn’t old enough to be given my own furs, but he could give me dolls. My mother was very impressed with them,” she said, smoothing her hair back from her face with an open palm. “She thought he might sponsor a place for me at some nice school, that he might help me get work when I was older. But he got bored of me.”

  The night’s rich banquet curdled in my gut and I wanted to vomit. I had known that the Major was cruel, but I did not know that he was a monster too. Had he hurt other girls, other children?

  “The rabbit, was that you too, and the thief, the woman in white haunting the house?” I found myself asking, as I stared at a woman so raw it hurt to look at her.

  She laughed. “The rabbit was my brother’s idea; he poaches them from the Major’s woods. I was hoping to make you leave so that I could come back—because it was your arrival that caused the Major to throw me out in the first place,” she said.

  I remembered seeing her the very first time I arrived at the manor; her tearstained face and the look of loathing she gave me as I entered and she left. “But how did you get inside?”

  She laughed again and the sound made me flinch. “Oh, there’s so much happening here, so much you don’t know. You’re as blind as his poor wife. It was the housekeeper who let me in.”

  “Why?” I asked, my voice thin.

  “Because I know all about her, and she’s worried I’ll tell someone, she’s worried about someone finding out,” Mary said, leaning forward with a mad conspiratorial glint in her eyes, even though her teeth were chattering. “She’s greedy, she is, don’t look at her plain dresses and think otherwise, she has an Aladdin’s cave in her rooms. She does very well for herself, doesn’t she, doing Lord Lockwood’s bidding. The pretty ones, he wants, the young ones just out of school. And it’s her job to hire them, to be so strict with them they wouldn’t dare tell anyone about him slipping into their rooms in the dark, and it’s her job too to drop them back with their families afterward and tell them their daughters are flighty and foolish and liars.”

  “The maids, he preys on them?” I thought of the steady stream of fresh-faced girls during my time at Lockwood and I wanted to wail; the ones who left so quickly, the ones whose work ethic the housekeeper complained about. “Then he’s the ghost,” I said, with horrifying certainty, thinking of the rumors of strange cries in the night, of figures gliding behind you in the dark and reaching out to touch you. I thought of how many young women, how many girls, had passed through this house as servants and guests and friends of his daughter. I thought of all those rooms, all those opportunities to corner someone, alone. I had been entrusted with the task of keeping my animals safe but what about them, the girls, who was in charge of their safety? Who would watch them and tend to them and keep guard at their door?

  “There’s no room he doesn’t have the key for, no door he can’t open,” Mary was saying, “nothing he wants that he doesn’t get.” She sounded almost triumphant but her chin was trembling, she was swaying on her feet. “He said I might be his mistress, but he wouldn’t marry me because I wasn’t rich enough, that the house needed funds or else it would crumble. I married my first wife for love and look how that turned out, he said.” Her face crumpled. “I put the rabbit there during the children’s visit so that they would be scared away and never return. I tried,” she said. She plucked another hummingbird from the cabinet and held it in cupped palms as I watched, mesmerized and horrified. “His wife was
mad, everyone knew that,” she said, and then she crushed the bird in her fist and we both cried out. “She thought I was haunting her, don’t you see? And when he told me to step in front of her car dressed all in white like a bride, to get rid of her so that we could be together forever, she looked like she’d seen a ghost.” A keen escaped her mouth, her teeth clattered, and her whole body shook. “But even when she was gone, he wouldn’t marry me,” she sobbed.

  “Mary—” I said, holding out my hands as if I sought to tame her.

  “He’s going to pay,” she said again, voice harder, and then, squaring her thin shoulders, she marched past me, into the corridor, her dress like a thousand tiny eyes glinting. As the door slammed behind her, the candle was extinguished. I cried out at the shock, at the horror of everything she had said.

  The room was black, its features invisible although my eyes invented shadowy forms and shapes in the darkness. Not wanting to crush the thick carpet of birds beneath my feet before I could find the light switch, I kneeled on hands and knees, brushing away the stray bodies with gentle sweeps of my hands as I made my way to the furthest room and its lamp. I was weeping.

  My little beast, my little bird, my little dove.

  Heloise and her fears about what might occur behind locked doors; Lucy and her nightmares about something stalking through the house, about searching for a wounded leveret; Mary, and the maids, and the Major’s beastly collection of animals and girls—

  There was shouting as I came into the corridor, brushing my clothes free of dust, my face of tears.

  Mary was face to face with him, screaming accusations at him—the things he’d done to her; to others—while a group of servants whispered by the door that led to the opposite row of rooms. The other guests had already left—for cigars and coffee in the billiards room, if I remembered the plan for the evening correctly—but Lucy was standing by the table still, frozen as she watched her father grapple with Mary, who seemed to be trying to claw his eyes out. I stepped forward just as Mary spat at him and then broke free of his grasp, one hand flying out in a slap.

  Lucy grabbed my arm. “Come outside,” she said, pulling me with her.

  We stumbled past the animals—who seemed to be crowding closer to the grisly scene—Lucy squeezing between the table and the beasts, her fur stole dragging an array of things from the table that fell, clattering, onto the floor, while I maneuvered myself past the paintings on the wall, bruising my shoulder against their frames. And then we broke into a run, shoes skidding and sliding, and Lucy flung the garden door open with a crash, startling the guards waiting there.

  I turned back to look down the long corridor and saw a flicker of light, as if the pale polar bear were somehow haloed for a moment, and then I followed Lucy outside.

  “Everything all right?” one of the guards called.

  “Just coming out for some air,” Lucy replied as we moved further into the dark, past the overgrown knot garden and along the banks of dead roses.

  We stopped, panting, by a copse of trees, our breath clouding in the frigid air.

  “You’re cold,” she said, and draped her fur stole around us, but when I flinched at the once-familiar sensation of fur against my skin, she dropped it and replaced it with her arms around my neck.

  I hid my face in her shoulder, breathing in the comforting smell of her perfume, my body shaking.

  “Did you hear what she said, what Mary said?” I asked. Mary had not yet confessed to her part in Heloise’s death before we left the long gallery, but what she had shared would be horrifying enough to any daughter.

  “I did,” Lucy said, and dug her hands into my shoulders.

  “I found her in one of the rooms off the corridor, tearing the hummingbirds out of their cabinet, flinging them on the floor. The things she was saying—”

  “I think they’re true,” Lucy said in a small voice.

  We held each other as the cold of the night pressed in and a breeze whistled through the bare branches of the trees, rustling the last remaining leaves, making the bushes surrounding us shuffle in the gloom. There was a waning gibbous moon that cast shadows in the garden, and touched our skin with its silver.

  “I should never have said those things to you. I was cruel, forgive me,” I begged tearfully.

  “Only if you forgive me for calling you mad,” she said.

  “I was mad, this house has turned me mad.”

  She stepped back and held my face in her hands. “No, you’re not mad.”

  “Neither are you,” I said. “It’s Lockwood, it’s your mother, your father—”

  She shook her head.

  “Come with me,” I pleaded, kissing her cheek. “The mammals are going to be moved somewhere else; it’s too dangerous here.” Although I now knew who the culprit was, it was still not safe for any creature here, living or dead—even if the latter at least could not be hurt by the Major and his monstrous desires. “Come with me, we can live together, be together.”

  She closed her eyes, the soft skin between her eyebrows creasing into a frown, and then she kissed me feverishly as if she could meld the both of us together, and I could taste her tears, the sweetness of her mouth, her sour breath.

  “I love you; come with me,” I said, needing to hear her say the word, to hear her say yes.

  But it was another voice that rang out, coming from the direction of the house.

  “Fire!” someone screamed. “There’s a fire!”

  Forty-Two

  We had been too wrapped up with each other to notice that the light in the sky had changed, that a warm glow bled from the long gallery of Lockwood, brightest in the cracks around the boarded-up windows halfway down the wing, near where the table was. The table with my animals arranged around it.

  The museum’s mammal collection, the crates, and boxes, and cabinets, and jars—

  Oh god.

  “The stirrup pump!” I called, racing toward the door of the gallery wing, where the night guards and servants huddled.

  “Where is my father?” Lucy shouted, sprinting after me. As we reached the building, Mary came running out, a hot rush of air behind her like a sweltering summer’s day. We could see the fire now through the open door—the table and the animals around it both ablaze, flames licking toward the ceiling and walls, but it was still manageable, I thought, not yet out of control. We could save almost all of the other animals, I was sure of it.

  “My father?” Lucy asked, grabbing Mary, whose hair was hanging loose from its pins, her face flushed and smudged with soot.

  “He went back inside,” she panted, her expression wild. “He’s trapped by the fire—”

  Lucy pushed past her and entered the long gallery.

  “The stirrup pump!” I called again, my hand on the doorframe, torn: wanting to follow Lucy, not wanting her to put herself in danger, but also knowing I needed to save the museum. I saw two temporary servants, women from the village, carrying the pump toward us across the dark grass. “Shovels and sand and water,” I ordered, looking around wildly. “Quick!” I told the guards.

  “It’s no use,” the guard nearest to me said. “The fire’s too large already.”

  “We have to try,” I said, following the women with the pump into the corridor, eyes fixed to the silhouette of Lucy ahead of me.

  The flames were climbing up the walls on both sides of the table, filling the entire width of the long gallery, and the air was hot and sharp in my throat as I tried to see whether they had reached the rooms at either side—the ones with boarded-up windows. The windows I’d had boarded up. Oh god, if my actions had made the fire worse, if they turned the whole wing into a furnace, oh god—

  “We need more water, more buckets!” I called, and one of the women ran back to fetch some.

  Lucy was right at the edge of the flames, arm held across her face against the heat, screaming, “Papa, Papa!” I crouched to the right of her, pumping the water that was being aimed toward the base of the blaze by the other ser
vant, trying not to notice how all three of us were having to inch backward as the fire strengthened and pushed out toward us. The water was gone in moments, useless.

  My eyes were stinging; my skin felt flayed. “Lucy!” I tugged her back as something in the inferno exploded. My animals, all that work; we were about to lose it all.

  “We need to leave,” the villager holding the hose said, her eyes wild with fear. “The whole place is going to go up.”

  The fire was traveling toward us like a predator who knew its prey was already weakened. It was feeding itself with the teak of the walls and all the wood of the crates and boxes in the rooms to either side, gorging on each hummingbird body left like kindling on the floor; it was growing taller, louder, hotter. The long gallery was crackling and groaning and roaring. The museum was on fire.

  The animals were burning in their cases, boiling behind shattering glass, their feathers and fur igniting like candles, their newspaper bodies sparking into flame, clay mounts melting, eyes rolling onto the floor and turning back to stare at their own destruction.

  The ceiling shrieked loudly and a large beam fell a few feet away, shaking the ground, sending up sparks that burned our skin. Lucy turned and broke into a sudden run. “He might have made it through to the house, I’m going to check his office!” she shouted.

  “Back!” the woman was saying, pulling me, and I picked up the stirrup pump and fled outside with her.

  “Is that everyone?” the guard called when we rushed through the door. “Lord Lockwood?”

  “We couldn’t see him. Is the fire brigade here yet?” I asked, but before he could answer me I was racing across the grass toward the back door of the main house, passing two more people with buckets.

  Maybe if we cut off the fire before it spread to the main house? We could still save some of the collections then.

  “Dorothy!” I called, barreling into her in the entrance hall, steadying myself with my hands on her shoulders. “The fire brigade?”