by Marc Secchia
“Here, don’t do that!” cried a soft, concerned voice. A gentle hand that reminded him of his mother’s before she became ill, stopped him.
“What?” he croaked.
“Just lay you down, sonny,” continued the voice. “You’ve been burnt bad. There’s a bandage over your eyes, and you’re laid on your stomach so as not to aggravate your back.”
In a rush, Kevin remembered the letter, Father’s anger, the beating …
“Water,” he whispered.
The hand held his head. A glass pressed against his lips, allowing a wondrously cool sip of water to trickle down the back of his throat. Kevin coughed and cried out and collapsed against the pillow, sweating in a wave of nausea.
“Soft you, soft you!” said his nurse tenderly, wiping his cheeks with something cool and wet. “You’re not to move so, sonny. With such an accident, you’re lucky to be alive at all! Softly now.”
Kevin realised from the timbre of her voice that his nurse must be quite old. So they were calling it an accident, were they? There had been many ‘accidents’ over the years. Usually it was a whipping or a thick cane applied to his buttocks and legs, leaving welts and weals. He recalled a time when he was five, when Mother had tried to intervene, but after Father turned on her, she had never again tried to help him. He wondered how she had been able to shut her eyes and ears to what was going on. Mother was not a very strong person. During the early years, the little stories and lies had multiplied. ‘A cycling accident,’ she would lie, as his teacher nodded. That was before he became too ill to attend school. ‘Kevin’s such an active boy. He’s always getting himself into these little bumps and scrapes.’
One day blazed in his memory; the day his father’s business partner had cleaned up and disappeared, leaving him with a pile of debt and no business to run. He had woken up when Father arrived home, slamming the door. First there was shouting downstairs, then after a while, his father’s heavy tread on the stairs. Kevin knew the creak of the third-last step–it was to be avoided when he had gone without supper, and stolen down to the kitchen to see what food there was to be had. He trembled in his bed, hoping that the heavy footsteps would pass down to the end of the hall. He heard Father’s laboured breathing outside his door. For a long time, that was all. Then, the door handle creaked and turned, outlining Father’s burly frame against the hallway’s light. Kevin pretended to be asleep. But the inexorable fear had already clenched his bowels, and his bladder emptied itself despite his frenzied, silent battle to prevent it. Father stood still so long that Kevin secretly began to hope he was safe.
The big nose lifted and sniffed the air–once, and once again. “Wet our bed, have we?” he slurred loudly. “Nine years old, and a bed-wetter. How revolting–to think his mother whelped such a weakling. Nine, and still he wets his bed.” He stepped closer, raising his voice. “You know what happens to bed-wetters, don’t you, Kevin? You know? Speak, boy! If you have a tongue in your craven little head, speak!”
“S-Sir!” stammered Kevin.
“Don’t you hide from me, boy!” roared his father, undoing his belt clumsily. “You’ll get your punishment! Just like your mother, sucking up when you’ve done wrong! Well, I’ll teach you a lesson, boy. I’ll teach you good!”
At those times, Kevin’s mind watched his body from a distance; as the blows rained down, his mind was safe elsewhere. But he still felt every weal and every stripe. He felt it when the belt was exchanged for Father’s meaty fists, and even an interminable time later, when the big arms wrapped roughly around his shoulders and Father began to sob into the pillow–great, wrenching sobs of disgust and brokenness.
* * * *
“Another accident? You’re pathetic!”
Kevin stared blankly ahead, saying nothing. He lay on his stomach, head cocked to one side.
“You know, they had to replace that carpet in the Library,” his brother continued. His tone was a carbon copy of Father’s, as was his personality.
Kevin did not even flicker his eyelids in recognition.
“Father told me what happened,” Brian added. “It’s always snivelling little Kevin this and helpless little Kevin that. Oh, we just need to call the nurse because the weasel’s done it again. Well–I’ve had enough! You’re a disgrace to the family! A humiliation!”
He made no response.
Brian’s voice dripped with malicious glee. “Playing the silent game, are we, Kevin?” Deliberately, he leaned over the bed and pulled down the sheets, exposing a burnt and bandaged back. He slapped the bandages, drawing from Kevin a high-pitched squeal of agony. “Poor ailing Kevin. Found our voice now? I’m speaking to you, moron!”
A tear squeezed down Kevin’s cheek.
Brian, who was five years older and a law student since his failure at business–another aspect in which he took after Father–brought his hand down to Kevin’s side, the side that had been kicked. Almost gently, he trapped Kevin’s wrist in his thick fingers and said, “I suggest that you start talking, or I’ll make you wish you were never born. You probably wish it anyway, but I can make your wishes come true.”
When there was still no response from the inert figure, Brian tapped him on the ribs exactly where Father had kicked him. “Does this hurt?” he inquired solicitously, to Kevin’s answering moan of pain. He would have covered his ribs, but that was why Brian held his wrist–subtlety was not one of Brian’s strong points. “How many broken ribs was it? Now, why don’t we consider this a lesson that you will not forget? When I say ‘speak’, you speak. When I want you to listen, you listen.” He punctuated this statement with another hard tap. “When Father asks you to behave, you behave!” Another sharp tap, another strangled moan. “You’re responsible for Father’s drinking, you know–it’s because of worrying about your miserable existence that he drinks! Don’t you ever give me the silent treatment again!”
This time he used his full strength to punch Kevin in the ribs. There was a dull crack, a stabbing pain, and a deluge of darkness.
* * * *
Recovery took months. The burns described a long stripe from the region of his left kidney to his right shoulder blade. There were further burns on and behind his right ear. Brian had broken two more of his ribs, which was the more painful injury. Luckily he had been yanked away from the fire quickly, so the burns were not life-threatening. But the scars remained. He needed plastic surgery for his ear.
Already introspective and lonely by nature, Kevin withdrew even further into himself, spending the days in bed and asking the servants to fetch him books from the Library. Father disappeared on an extended business trip to the Continent and Brian was back at his studies.
But he was troubled in spirit.
A futile rage would grow in his breast after Father’s attacks, symbolised by the humiliating inability to control his bladder. In a miserable caricature of a man, this continued lack of self-control was his greatest shame. He despised himself. He heaped up castigation in an inner voice more scathing and more hurtful than any Father or Brian had ever used.
To survive the abuse, he had learned to withdraw deep within, a tortoise into its shell, to lose his identity in the world of imagination. He learned to curl up and endure. He took refuge in that endless realm–which was why the Library was his solace. It was why he hid there. To him books were portals to inviolable places and a means of forgetting, at least for a time, who and what he was. A life lived vicariously was better than anything real. Denied what he assumed were the ordinary pleasures of travel, attending university, or whatever else people his age did, he had only the Library. To tell the truth, he had no idea what others did. His only friends over the years had been doctors and nurses, come to assess his condition or administer his many medications.
Pills, pills, and more pills. There was a multi-coloured handful to take every morning, and more at lunch and teatime–fifty-seven varieties in all. He knew how each tasted. He wondered that he did not rattle descending stairs. Every morning, after a breakfast of oat porr
idge and a slice of brown toast, washed down with a cup of Earl Grey tea, he would line up the pills on his tray and ritually down them one by one. Kevin had once tried eschewing this daily regimen–and nearly died from an asthma attack two days later. Never again.
He had the misfortune to be born into a dysfunctional family. Kevin’s upper lip curled in aristocratic disdain. Father, who despite the inheritance money, was unable to make any success of his business ventures, who after his first debacle had taken to the bottle with a vengeance, turning himself over the years into a drunkard and an abuser. With the inheritance, which was far more substantial than Father had ever dreamed, he could have retired to a kingly living. But instead he was unable to let go, unable to accept failure. He became a tyrant, violent and depressed. At times, Kevin felt he would rather have been born a Dickensian orphan than a Jenkins.
He watched the fields grow lush and the days balmy with summer, and ached for freedom from his life sentence.
* * * *
Key words and phrases from Great-Grandmother’s letter had leapt off the page and were now recalled with inexplicable clarity, as though the act of reading had somehow transcribed them simultaneously upon the tablet of his memory. Usually when Kevin read a book, he remembered more about how it felt than the particular words or plot elements. He read for unadulterated escape, the more unlike reality the better, similar to a philosopher who sallies forth against concept, ideology, meaning, and knowledge, yet remains safely within the confines of his ivory tower, having essayed no real risk. But the letter had shaken him. The sheer tenacity of those phrases in his memory terrified him. No doses of Freud, Tolstoy, Dickens, or Narnia, no weighty treatise on the Aztecs nor a compendium of Greek mythology, nor any lengthy grappling with Darwin’s Origin of the Species, could distract him for more than ten minutes at a time from the contents of that letter. Even now, as he gave up on Caesar’s Gallic Wars with a sigh of extreme irritation, he could not forget it.
Kevin rubbed his dark-circled eyes and yawned widely. “A pox on the filthy pirate,” he muttered softly, referring to Father’s act of destruction.
He was going crazy.
That pernicious epistle! What could it possibly mean; the incredible assertion that he had ‘inherited the Gift’? What ruddy gift? He had to be the least gifted person on Earth! He had no gifts, and received none at Christmas either. Father had long since banned the practice of religious festivals at Pitterdown Manor. The last gift he remembered receiving was a green hardback journal from his mother, containing his grandfather’s memoirs. Father had confiscated it after a shouting match with Mother that ended with his fist smashing her nose.
Put that mystery to one side, and there was this talk of ‘other worlds’ and the ‘spirit of a person’. Kevin believed that there was something more than merely physical that separated human from animal, if one were prepared to substitute consciousness for quasi-religious talk about spirits. But other worlds–that was a nonsense for writers of fantastic tales and nursery stories, and he was surprised and aggrieved that Great-Grandmother, whom he had always regarded as a paragon of old-fashioned British common sense, should spout such drivel in the course of an otherwise serious and important letter.
“Hogwash,” he grumbled, growing agitated. “Fiddlesticks! Codswallop and dollops of horse manure!” His lungs creaked and wheezed. He took a puff of his pump and leaned back upon his pillow, trying as always to defeat his throat’s closing.
Ah, and the nub of it–that he was the keeper of some ancient tradition passed down the family line, from generation to generation, only to be dropped by … “Good old Kevin.” He sighed. “Pathetic little weasel. Trust him to make a dog’s breakfast of it.”
But what was this tradition? The wording implied some special meaning to which he was not party, the knowledge of which Father had apparently denied him all these years. He had no doubt Father knew its exact meaning. The vein on his forehead only swelled and pulsed like that–Kevin’s palms grew sweaty and his bowels clenched–when Father was in a blind fury, in contrast to his routine fits of anger or petulance where he was wont to shout and swear at the servants but no worse. That kick into the fireplace–clearly, broaching the subject would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. Yet how could he not wonder?
How could Great-Grandmother reach him as it were from beyond the grave? A cold shiver played down Kevin’s spine. He touched his ruined ear. How could he become keeper of a tradition about which he knew not the first thing? Whom worse could she have chosen? The least capable person imaginable? A person of courage–a hero, not some asthmatic pipsqueak–was called for to stand up to Father, to take that decisive step. He hardly dared acknowledge it. The letter had spoken of the Blue Room. Something hidden beneath the mantelpiece. Proof positive. Proof that might burden him with the necessity of being ‘called to serve’.
“Oh, God!” he cried, throwing himself toward the bathroom.
He only just reached it in time.
* * * *
“The joys of the porcelain throne,” Kevin lamented, a little later, holding his feverish head in both hands. Lunch had been wholly expurgated. “At least it happened in private this time. Repulsive. Why me?”
It was a bitter question he was much in the habit of asking. Kevin looked up, studying his face in the dark mirror opposite. The leaded glass made his skin look healthy, but it exaggerated the bags under his eyes into a racoon-like mask. Just reflected in the mirror for a moment he thought he saw–his head jerked around–no, it was nothing. “You belong in an asylum,” he told the face in the mirror, “if you’re going to start seeing things now. Hearing odd noises in the night, jumping at the slightest sound–you are turning into a complete crackpot, my dear fellow. Why, you are even thinking …”
Did he dare?
Instead, he recalled a curious dream he had dreamed the previous night. He had woken to hear the grandfather clock on the landing striking eleven dolorous notes, with such a gripping sense of portent and urgency that he feared his heart would burst right out of his chest. At first, he thought there must have been some noise to rouse him, but long minutes of trembling, listening and staring across the bedroom at the unmoving drapes convinced him that nothing was amiss. Just a silly start, he decided at length, and plumped up his hypo-allergenic pillow preparatory to settling down again. Sometimes the medications gave him insomnia. But his head had no sooner touched the pillow than his eyelids flickered open, and he remembered the dream.
He was in an indeterminable place. All around him was soft, milky illumination upon a formless and perfectly uniform haze. There was neither sense of movement nor sense of time’s passage. Some distance apart from him, far enough that details were indefinite, but near enough to fuel the conclusions that he had since drawn, was the figure of a ghostly little girl. She was barefoot, somewhat plump, and garbed in an otherworldly dress of what appeared to be leaves or some unfamiliar textile, he could not tell which. She was crying.
No more did he remember, yet he found himself moved with unaccustomed emotion. Pitying another’s plight was foreign to Kevin’s experience, a notion for which he had neither explanation nor solution–yet he found himself reaching out to her, as if he were somehow responsible for her distress. Impossible, he knew, but the feeling lingered. Most of his dreams were about Father and Brian–he wrestled them out of his mind with an effort, and concentrated instead on the little girl. He sensed an inchoate urgency accompanied the dream, but why? Who was she? He did not generally read about girls, and had only once to his recollection met a girl his own age. This girl was different.
It was … disturbing.
Kevin felt as if he were a leaf fallen into a fast-running stream, snatched away by events, helplessly carried by the current until he should be washed up on some bank or caught in an eddy. All the carefully constructed edifices of his sheltered existence were collapsing around him like so much damp origami. Nothing was certain any more. Even sleep, that final surcease from his
daily misery, was being disturbed with flashes of dreams that he could barely recall in the morning–save for this dream of the little girl, and even there he was powerless.
Wretched letter! He wanted to deny the relentless march of facts. He was the addressee. It was found in a forgotten corner, tucked into an obscure book. The chance of anyone finding the letter by accident was so fantastically small … but he refused the alternative, that Great-Grandmother must somehow have foreknown that he would be its discoverer, twenty years later. And something within those fragile pages had triggered the most violent reaction he had ever seen in Father. Kevin shambled out of the bathroom and cast himself like a limp dishrag upon the bed. He fumbled for his pills. No, there were no simple conclusions to be drawn.
There was, he surmised, but one way forward through the morass. He breathed in and out harshly, stilling the asthma by sheer willpower–but he lacked the same willpower to conquer his panic.
He had to check the mantelpiece in the Blue Room.
Chapter 2: The Blue Room
He could afford no assumptions, so Kevin set about his scheme with the enthusiasm of a budding Sherlock Holmes. A certain slyness was integral to Father’s character, and he suspected that the servants had been instructed not to let him wander around unsupervised. Thus, taking advantage of the fact that Pitterdown Manor was a virtual maze, having been added to, remodelled and gutted in part numerous times over the years to satisfy the vicissitudes of its various owners, Kevin attempted on successive mornings four different routes to the Library and was each time met by an unwelcome escort. The servants took the opportunity to inquire solicitously about his wellbeing and needs, where before they had let him be. To cap it all, they began to invent little tasks that should be done in the Library, such as dusting and tidying, where before they had never bothered.
“A tad obvious,” he muttered behind the back of a particularly industrious book-sorter, that fourth afternoon when his suspicions had solidified into fact.
