Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling

by Michael Boccacino

  There were other tables from Everton in addition to the cook’s. Ellen and some of the other maids had a display of handmade dolls with simple button eyes but exquisitely detailed dresses. Mrs. Norman sat enclosed in a small tent, looking haughty and mysterious in a cloth turban that was woefully inaccurate if she intended to conjure the image of an Indian swami. Some of the villagers, Cornelia Reese in particular, seemed mortified by the idea of having a fortune-teller on the grounds of the church. They glared at Mrs. Norman as they passed by her booth, some of them more than once to make their opinions known, and all of them crossed themselves with exaggerated devotion. If Mrs. Norman noticed, she neglected to give them the benefit of a reaction, for hers was the busiest of all the tables, and by the end of the day no one had contributed more to the proliferation of St. Michael’s Church than the housekeeper from Everton.

  The bazaar was a boisterous affair, despite the occasional social posturing. Mr. Watersalt, the carpenter, had built a small puppet theater next to Ellen’s table and was demonstrating the usefulness of her handmade dolls with a bit of theatrical flair and a vast assortment of tiny, high-pitched dolls’ voices. Mildred Wallace, who was usually too concerned with the lives of others to enjoy her own, tried to show anyone who would listen the ornate clock her husband had constructed that, on the hour, displayed a whole array of carved, lifelike figures that very much resembled herself. Even Mr. Darrow seemed to forget his melancholy. He greeted everyone he passed with a dashing smile and carried James on his shoulders until the boy was persuaded to join a group of children in a complicated game of tag that mostly involved running in circles around the church and screaming as loudly as possible.

  “It occasionally astounds me that he can be so happy,” Mr. Darrow observed.

  “Children are more resilient than we are, but they do still need us to set an example,” I said, obliquely referencing Mr. Darrow’s unfulfilled promise to spend more time with his sons.

  “You are a wise woman, Mrs. Markham.”

  “You flatter me, Mr. Darrow.”

  “Perhaps I should do so more often.”

  We gazed at one another, lost in the moment until Constable Brickner cut between us. Mr. Darrow shook his hand with enthusiasm, much to the other man’s surprise, for he was immediately suspicious of such goodwill. Together they went to the Larken brothers’ table, which was copiously populated by both many kinds of ale and the majority of the men of the village. I asked after Susannah, since I hadn’t yet seen her at the bazaar, but Lionel had lost track of her the hour before last. Mr. Darrow found Fredricks, who was well ahead of everyone else in his enjoyment of the festivities. It was then that Mr. Darrow took his leave of us to purchase a pint for his old friend and confidant.

  That left Paul and me to wander the grounds of the church alone. We drifted away from the noise and the laughter and the scent of food, into the graveyard. The tombstone of Lily Darrow was unchanged from our last visit, and yet it meant so many other things than it had before. Paul touched the chiseled numbers that marked the date of her death.

  “It’s still here.”

  “What did you expect to find?”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe a crack running through it? Just something different.”

  We stood beside one another in silence. I didn’t know what to say. I placed my hand on his shoulder, and he continued.

  “I wanted to see her again so badly. I dreamt of her every night, and every morning I would wake up and remember that she was gone. It made me sad, but it was worth it just to pretend for a while that everything was all right. But somehow this is worse, because it’s real, and I still have to leave her. I can hug her, but she’s still dead and Father is alone. We can’t take her back with us, and everything is still broken.”

  “Would you rather that she never came back?”

  “No. I don’t know. I wish nothing ever had to change.”

  “That’s all life is. It must change, or else we never would.”

  Paul looked so sullen, his bright blue eyes dull with a sadness that resembled his father’s more and more every day. I ran my fingers through his soft black hair. “We don’t have to go back, you know, not if you don’t want to.”

  “Yes, we do. I’m not ready to say good-bye, and neither is she.” Paul stood from his mother’s grave and returned to the bazaar without any pretense of enjoyment. I followed behind him, until Roland caught my gaze with a friendly, nervous wave. He was dressed in his best Sunday clothes, and he had attempted to slick down his dark hair with copious amounts of pomade, but instead of refining his appearance the waxy substance sharpened the strands into asymmetrical spikes that lent him a feral, yet also innocent look.

  “Good bazaar, eh?”

  “I can see that you’ve dressed for the occasion.”

  “A fellow’s got to look nice once in a while, or he’s not much of a fellow at all. Is Mrs. Larken all right?”

  “I suppose so. I haven’t seen her in a day or two—” He ran past me, toward a disheveled young woman with wild red hair. He slid an arm beneath her and sat her on the ground. Her hands were bleeding.

  “Susannah?”

  “Charlotte!” She smiled at me with relief, and patted Roland’s arm. “I’ve so much to tell you!”

  “What on earth has happened to you?”

  “You’re going to think I’m insane.” She put her head in her hands, smearing blood onto her forehead. It was difficult to get the groundskeeper to leave her side, but eventually he relented and agreed to fetch Lionel, occasionally glancing back at us with a dark expression. I took Susannah into the church and sat her down in a pew before the altar.

  “I could never think you mad,” I told her.

  “At least that makes one of us.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning. What happened to you?”

  She sat back in the pew and smoothed down her hair before taking a deep breath. She told me her story.

  “I’d brought along a special cask of ale for the reverend. Lionel forgets himself sometimes when he starts drinking with the boys, and I didn’t trust him to keep it set aside, so I hid it in the cellar of the church for safekeeping. But when I went down to retrieve it, the room had changed, Charlotte. There was a door where there had never been one before. For a moment I thought I had gotten turned around and discovered some new chamber beneath the parish, but no . . . it was the same old stone walls, and the cask of ale was on the table right where I had left it.

  “There was nothing special about the door aside from the fact that it hadn’t existed just a few hours before. It was made of cherrywood, with no special markings and a plain brass doorknob to match. I was about to leave, but then it opened inward by itself. I didn’t want to know what was inside, you must believe me. I tried to go back up the stairs, but there was a darkness on the other side of that door that spilled into the cellar. The entire room went black, and soon I couldn’t tell which way was up. I felt along the walls trying to find my way out, and then I saw a light.

  “I went toward it, desperate to get out of that accursed place, but was disappointed to find myself staring into a mirror. I spun around in an attempt to locate the source of the light, but the rest of the room was still awash in gloom. I pressed my forehead against the glass, starting to feel exasperated, when a pair of black hands slid around my throat. Gloved hands. His hands. I tried to scream, but he was already choking the life out of me. I tried to thrash against him, but I could find no one behind me, just the hands closing tighter around my throat, and yet, I wasn’t dying. In fact the light before my eyes multiplied, and I was surrounded by a half dozen similar mirrors. My reflection was different in each of them. In the closest one, I was drowning underwater. In the next, I was burning alive. There were scenes of me with my throat slit, being mauled by a wolf, shot in the head—every terrible way that I’ve ever been afraid to die, forced upon me. I felt
myself growing faint. The hands were tightening their grip around my throat, and the mirror images multiplied again.

  “I saw a vision of myself the same way I had seen Nanny Prum . . . coming apart from the inside. In that moment, even as I began to lose consciousness, I felt something rise up out of me, from some deep place I didn’t know I had. I stopped trying to pry the fingers from around my throat, and with all my might, I punched my fist through the looking glass.

  “Every mirror shattered at once. I grabbed ahold of a glass shard and cut at the hands still clutching my neck. They shuddered and fumbled against me, trying to regain their grip, but then stopped altogether. We were no longer alone in the darkness. There were other women with us, visions of myself flayed, burned, bleeding . . . all of them stepping through the broken glass to lunge at the man in black with a fury I could never have dreamt I was capable of. I turned away and ran into the gloom that surrounded us, until the world felt solid beneath my feet once more and I could feel the cool stone walls of the church cellar. I turned around to close the door, but in its place was nothing but a pile of soot and cinders.”

  She stared at me when she was done and waited for me to say something. I didn’t know what to believe until she unclenched her bloodied hands to reveal a small shard of mirror glass.

  “I didn’t dream it, Charlotte. It happened. What do I do?”

  My mouth tasted like ash. My mother, my father, Jonathan, Nanny Prum, and now Susannah . . . all of them set upon by a mysterious man in black.

  “Be careful. Be watchful.” Mrs. Norman’s warning became my own. “It’s time for you to find your husband and to tell him what’s happened.”

  A man waits for you. He watches you.

  But why? What did he want from me? The specter of Death had hung over my life since I was a girl, taking everyone I had ever loved. But then, with a wave of triumph, I remembered: Death is not an absolute. I knew someone who had fought against it and won, and I realized that with her help, I would be able to put an end to this horror once and for all.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Dangerous Game

  The next afternoon, I took the children back to the House of Darkling. A young man of sixteen or seventeen years was already waiting for our party on the other side of the swirling mist. He bowed before us in greeting, and I nearly introduced myself to him. But Paul touched my arm.

  “Is that Duncan?” he asked.

  I observed the young man’s face as he rose back to full height. There were certainly traces of the impish, mute little boy in the appearance of the stranger, as they both wore the same frozen, knowing smiles, but we had only been gone a matter of days and the pigmentation of this young man’s skin was more like that of a human, whereas Duncan had retained a distinctive shade of orange. I could not believe that the two were the same until the young man brought a finger to his lips.

  “Have we really been gone that long?” I said softly, my mind wandering to thoughts of Lily Darrow, alone in Darkling for what must have felt like years, though it was probable that the Whatleys kept her busy with Olivia’s education, and there was certainly enough mischief to keep her occupied were she not otherwise indisposed. I wondered how she passed the time, and then I remembered the room with the gauzy silk veils, and Mr. Samson strapped to the chair. I shivered against the coolness of the air and warmed myself by keeping pace with Duncan.

  “How do you know when we’re coming through?” I asked.

  He gestured to the trees with long, spindle-like fingers, and as he did, the branches twitched and swayed. The hanging pieces of fruit turned to face us, drawn to Duncan’s presence. He escorted us the rest of the way out of the orchard and into the house, leading us past a room filled with the softest, most beautiful music I had ever heard, though there were no obvious musical instruments visible in the space. We found another room whose windows looked out onto a sunlit mountaintop that was, as far as I could tell, nowhere near Mr. Whatley’s estate. Another room was shaped like the inside of a gazebo and made entirely of glass, and as we passed through it, I was certain that I could see the town of Blackfield in its reflection. I had no time to dwell on this, for Duncan guided us briskly through the house, the slow, languid pacing of his youth replaced by the urgent certainty of adulthood.

  We found Lily and Olivia in a small parlor, both of them seated before easels with panes of painted glass identical to the ones in Mr. Whatley’s collection. Lily was helping the girl mix a particular shade of green for a rolling hillside when we entered, and as she saw us, she dropped her palette in a splatter of paint. She could say nothing for a moment as she extricated herself from behind her canvas, kneeling down to hug both of the children with an audible sigh of relief. When she rose she greeted me with a polite peck on the cheek.

  “You’ve returned,” she said, slowly recovering from her daze.

  “Of course, Mother. We missed you!” James buried his head in her skirts.

  She smiled weakly and stroked his cheek before turning to her pupil. “Olivia, will you excuse me for a moment? There’s something I want to show the children.”

  The girl nodded with her typical cool indifference, too involved in the creation of her landscape, which seemed to move even as she refined the details.

  Lily led us from the parlor, across a drawbridge set between two cascading, lavender-scented waterfalls, through a room where it was snowing and I had to pull the boys apart as they pelted one another with balls of ice, and finally into an empty banquet hall that could have been lifted from some medieval castle, the ceiling supported by roughly hewn wood beams, and the walls made of crumbling, porous stone. There was a door at one end, a ghastly thing forged from black wrought iron that snaked around the frame like ivy, with a silver knocker set in the center.

  Lily stood before it. “Now, tell me what you see.”

  “It’s a door,” said James.

  “Yes, but what kind of door?”

  “A heavy one, made from oak,” answered Paul. “With metal rivets set in the wood.” His little brother shot him a look unique to siblings, a combination of disbelief and pity that he could possibly be related to someone so dim.

  “That’s not it at all. What about the gargoyles?” James pointed to the top of the door, where I could see nothing but black metal loops like vines.

  Lily stepped between them. “The door is different for everyone. To some it might show the thing you need most, to others, a version of your life that you did not live. Some say it can even tell the future. Shall we find out what it has in store for us?” I was about to object, for there are some things that children are not prepared to know, but she had already opened the door. There was darkness on the other side of the threshold, and it descended upon the stone hall to surround us in a singular void. I could still make out the Darrows as a dozen points of light circled around them, taking the shapes of framed paintings.

  The first depicted Lily in a sickbed at Everton, one hand to her forehead, the satin sheets rumpled and positioned like something out of a romanticist’s studio as a doctor took her pulse. Suddenly the picture came to life, startling the four of us as the doctor’s voice echoed through the abyss, hollow and distant.

  “Madam, I do believe you shall recover!”

  The scene ended, and the trio proceeded to the next moving frame, where it was Christmastime at Everton. The house was decorated with an attention to detail that I could never hope to match. Lily sat by the fireplace observing her family. An older version of Paul carried a little boy in his arms, and the woman who might have been his wife held a little girl by the hand as they helped the children choose their toys from the magnificent Christmas tree. A teenage James was on the other side of the room, trapping a giggling young woman beneath the mistletoe and kissing her scandalously on the cheek. Mr. Darrow joined his wife by the fire and took her hand in his. I blushed. These were private moments, and yet they would never, c
ould never happen.

  My discomfort was readily visible and threatened to change into something else altogether. I could not put into words the anger I felt in that moment. I had been betrayed. The children were supposed to say good-bye to their mother. That was what I had brought them for, but instead Lily allowed them to wallow in their loss, to obsess over the things that could never be, the lives that could not be lived. And yet, was I so very different? Did I not dream of Jonathan or my mother or father every night? My anger shifted to myself. There was a danger in what we were doing.

  I backed away from them and sought my way out of the room. There was another point of light in the distance, and I moved toward it, hoping for some sort of exit, but unfortunately it was another of the floating frames. Then I realized that was wrong. I could see myself in its surface, fractured a million different ways. These were not paintings; they were mirrors, and a piece of this one was missing. Even in the splintered looking glass I could see the look of understanding as it crossed my face, curdling into revulsion, and then anger.

  I remembered the blood on Susannah’s hands, and the sound of Nanny Prum’s scream as it cut through the night all those weeks ago. But most of all I remembered the man in black; the phantom from my youth who had followed me into adulthood, striking down everyone I had ever loved.

  A man waits for you. He watches you.

  Were the specters from my past and present one and the same? How had a relic from the House of Darkling found its way into the basement of St. Michael’s Church, and why had it been used against Susannah?

  I willed myself out of the darkness, groping about for solid walls until I felt the edges of the door and slid back into the empty stone room. Duncan was waiting with a small piece of parchment that declared Mr. Whatley’s desire to speak to me in private.