by Marvin Kaye
The boy left the room by the far door, forcing himself not to run. A stair led upwards to the second floor. He climbed.
The window at the far end of the upper hallway was small and round, silvery with twilight. It seemed a great distance away, and yet Morthill was not large. After all, it only had two central corridors, one on each floor, with rooms opening off to either side. It should be easy to find his cousin’s bedroom. Women liked to keep their secrets hidden close. He hesitated a moment, uncertain, and then turned to the first door on the left, which stood half open.
His boots crunched on broken glass as he stepped inside. The door closed behind him. He edged forward in utter darkness, his feet now rustling as if through fallen leaves. He ran into something, hard. A table edge. More glass fell and broke. Now he could see the vague outline of a window. Advancing on it, he pulled down the black velvet which muffled its long, narrow frame.
Twilight glimmered into the ruins of Dr. Vernet’s laboratory. Here was the squat hulk of an alchemist’s athenor; there, rows of shattered retorts like jagged, crystal teeth; everywhere, the pages of books ripped out and strewn in drifts about the floor. Chemical formulae, astrological symbols, and Celtic runes tangled in black charcoal across the white-washed walls.
Bon sang ne peut mentir, read one notation. Le sang c’est la vie, proclaimed another—and a third, simpler and more raggedly written: Sangsue. Leech. Bloodsucker.
Scrawled over it all, in letters almost too large to read, was a single, repeated word: NON, NON, NON . . .
There were secrets here, but they belonged to the doctor, not the daughter. He must look elsewhere.
The boy dragged the door open again, grating over shards of glass. Beyond, however, lay not the hall but another, smaller room. He must have lost his bearings in the dark, he thought. Thin light showed him two iron cots, bolted together side by side. One was draped with leather straps. The floor beneath it was dark, and greasy, and there was a smell.
The boy paused, thinking that he heard the distant voices of children, singing. Alice and Alyse must have come upstairs before him. This was a cold, lonely place. He would find his little cousins and ask for their help.
But each door only led to another room, never to the hall.
As night fell, the boy wandered on, deeper and deeper into the house. How cold it was and how silent, except for a chill winter’s rain stealthily tapping on the windows. Where were his cousins? Where was he? Maybe he was no longer even in the same house which he had entered—oh, such a long time ago, it seemed. What if tonight all the Morthill manors down through the ages had come back, stone, and oak, and human bone?
(“Do you know what happens to children in this house?”)
What if, even now, black-robed monks were walling the little novices up alive? In the dark, gagged and bound, they beat their heads against the newly set stones: Ta-thump, ta-thump . . . and from within the mound came the slow, heavy answer: THUMP.THUMP.THUMP.
What if, even now, Roman soldiers were bending the limbs of a child to fit into an oak-lined cavity under the floor? “The earth is still hungry,” the centurion in charge would say—in Latin, of course—and they would come tramping through the house, looking for another child to bury alive . . .
Then, to the boy’s relief, he heard the singing again, closer now, almost clear enough to understand the words. They were playing hide-and-seek with him. He hurried on through door after door, room after room, following the thread of song, until at last he entered a chamber which reeked of roses.
At the foot of an unmade bed was an oblong chest, the size of a child’s coffin. Was this what his little cousins had wanted him to find? He listened for them, but only heard the rain, tapping on the window panes. The box was oak, black with age, bound with iron. He traced the crude carving on its lid—a spray of mistletoe, split by a finger-wide crack. Then, gingerly, he opened it.
Within lay a welter of Blanche’s under-garments.
At first the boy thought that the bosom of the negligee uppermost was soaked with blood, but then he saw that the red was the backing of a lace paper valentine, ripped down the middle. He had found Blanche’s broken heart, whose other half his father had burned almost but not quite to ashes.
The boy looked on, detached, as his hands shredded the paper. (“What are emotions to the superior mind?”) Crimson fragments fell into the chest like a sprinkling of blood.
Then he knelt to burrow beneath the shattered “heart,” through layers of not-very-clean linen. The smell made his head swim. Breathing through his mouth, he clambered inside the chest so as to be done searching as quickly as possible. Camisoles, chemises, drawers, petticoats, no, no, no . . . yes! Here was a legal document: his father’s promissory note, tucked into the bodice of a peignoir.
Then the chest’s heavy lid crashed down on his head.
Darkness. Pain. Confusion. Fear.
The reek of sweat and perfume clotted his lungs. He . . . couldn’t. . . breathe. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, tightening as he struggled . . .
Don’t struggle. Listen. The children are singing:
“The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old oak wall,
The baron’s retainers were blithe and gay,
Keeping the Christmas holiday . . .”
Mistletoe. He was inside the mistletoe chest, tangled up in his cousin’s clothing. There was a crack in the chest’s lid. He was not going to suffocate.
Be calm, he told himself, still more than half dazed. Breathe deeply. Never mind the woman smell. Mycroft says women will kill you if you are weak . . . if you feel . . .
Then, when his heart finally stopped hammering and he caught his breath, he tried to lift the lid. At first it resisted and he thought (. . . be calm . . .) that someone was sitting on it, but it was only stuck. At last he was out of the chest, of the room, down the stair, into the hall . . .
Blanche sat on the dining room hearth, beneath her portrait. Father bent over her. She had looped her long, pale hair around his neck and he was staring down at her like a rabbit at a snake. The boy’s eyes were dazzled—by the firelight, he groggily supposed—but it seemed to him that a darkness loomed over them both, as if the house itself stood there, watching, waiting. Then Blanche drew his father down. They kissed. And the darkness smiled with Irisa’s thin, cruel lips.
The boy heard a strange sound, then realized that he himself had made it.
Father broke away from Blanche, as glad of the interruption as of a rescue. He fussed over his son, brushing fragments of red paper out of the boy’s hair, staring when his fingers came away stained with blood. The chest lid had struck hard. The boy looked blankly down at his own hand, at the stiff legal paper which he still clutched.
He heard singing. No, he was singing:
“The baron beheld with a father’s pride,
His beautiful child, young Lovell’s bride,
While she, with her bright eyes, seemed to be
The star of that goodly company,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!”
Blanche stood rigid, glaring like a Gorgon at father and son. “Siger, why did you bring this brat? Was it to remind me how false you are, what other bed you have shared?”
Darkness moved. For a moment, the boy stared directly into Irisa’s black eyes, inches from his own, and then she retreated, taking the promissory note with her.
“Go,” Irisa murmured to Blanche in her heavily accented English. “Take this. Lure him to your narrow bed. The song guides you.”
Blanche looked blankly at the paper which her aunt had thrust into her hands. Her full lips framed the song’s next line. Then she caught her breath in a gasp of laughter and began raggedly to sing:
“I’m weary of dancing now, she cried:
Here tarry a moment, I’ll hide, I’ll hide,
And Lovell, be sure thou’rt the first to trace
The clue to my secret lurking place.”
“T
he clue, ‘Lovell,’ the clue!” Blanche cried, waving the note in Father’s face as he stood as if turned to stone. “Find me and—perhaps, perhaps—you may keep it!” Then she thrust the paper into her bosom and ran from the room, her aunt following like her a shadow. And again the boy sang, as if possessed:
“Away she ran and her friends began
Each tower to search and each nook to scan,
And young Lovell cried, oh where dost thou hide?
I’m lonesome without thee, my own dear bride,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!”
But the boy was singing to himself. Siger Holmes had left the room. Trailing after him, Sherlock found his father standing irresolute at the foot of the stair, listening to the voices above—the aunt’s low and intense, her niece’s shrill with rising anger.
“Leave me alone!” Blanche suddenly cried out loud. “Why do you prattle of the dead? The dead are nothing! Only life matters. I am alive, and I will live, do you hear? Arrêtez! N’y touchez pas . . . !”
A hollow thud cut off her words.
Father ran up the stairs. The boy stumbled after him. Irisa stood in the upper hall before the closed bedroom door, stern as Fate, implacable as Nemesis.
“Leave,” she said. “She is my business now and none of yours, nor should she ever have been. Leave, and the debt which you owe this house is buried forever.”
“What have you done with her?”
“Can you not guess? Sing, boy!”
And the boy sang:
“They sought her that night, they sought her next day,
They sought her in vain when a week passed away,
In the highest, the lowest, the loneliest spot
Young Lovell sought wildly, but found her not . . .”
“Stop!” cried Father. “I can not . . . I will not understand! Why are you doing this?”
“In my homeland, we know how to deal with such heartless stregoica as she, who must feed their lust at whatever cost to others, who prey upon those whom they should first protect.”
“You think her a vampyre, like Polidori’s Lord Ruthven or Prest’s Varney?” Father tried to laugh. The boy could see that he thought her mad, and that she frightened him. “Come, the pallor of her cheek and the blood upon her lips are the curses of her illness, nothing more. You are an educated woman. Surely you can not believe such wild tales!”
Irisa smiled, and her smile was a terrible thing.
“I believe in evil. I believe that no place on earth is immune, including your oh-so-civilized England. Do you think that only nosferatu prey upon the innocent? Shall I tell you why this woman still lives while her little sisters lie side by side in the grave? Because that hero of science, their father, stole the blood from his infant children’s veins to transfuse into hers. There.”
A black-gloved finger stabbed like a lance towards the laboratory’s closed door across the hall.
“He took and took and so did she until there was nothing left to give. Too late did I understand those devils’ marks scrawled across the wall, those iron beds of pain! Too late, his remorse, too late. Oh, my dear little nieces, my sweet Alice and Alyse . . .”
For a moment, grief cracked the dark mask of her face and something darker still glared through, beyond reason, beyond mercy. Then by ruthless will alone she pulled herself back together.
“Leave,” she said again to Father, with such awful, cold scorn. “You weak, foolish man. Once you willingly embraced her corruption and now she has breathed death into your mouth. I know. I saw. Leave. Soon enough, you will join her in the grave’s narrow bed. Listen: already she calls to you.”
And they heard. Inside the bedroom. Muffled. Raging. Thuds. Long, scraping sounds. Fists beating against the coffin lid. Nails scratching . . .
Father made a choking sound. Then he snatched up his son and fled. Behind them, Irisa laughed and laughed.
No one ever saw Blanche again.
“And years flew by, and their grief at last
Was told as a sorrowful tale long past,
And when Lovell appeared the children cried,
See the old man weep for his fairy bride,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!”
The echo of Holmes’s voice died in the room, swallowed by its dank decay. The storm was muttering off into the distance, leaving the melancholy drip of water outside the manor and in.
“Curiously enough,” Holmes said, with a shaky return to his normal, dry manner, “that ballad is based upon a tragedy which befell a family in Rutland named Noel. We cannot seem to escape it or the Christmas theme—or can we? Gone she was, but my father did not weep. He died within four months, coughing blood. I nearly followed him. As I lay ill, I overheard that Irisa was also dead, of self-inflicted starvation. A refusal to consume, if you will. Nonetheless, some curses are . . . very persistent. Even now, in my dreams, I hear it: fists beating against the coffin lid, nails clawing . . .”
I stared at him, speechless, then blurted out the first question that came into my mind. “B-but what about the two little girls?”
Holmes drew a thin hand over his face. “How can I have forgotten? Of course, they were already dead. I saw their gravestones among the trees as we drove away.”
This was too much for me. “And they, I suppose, are the ‘ghost or two’ which you promised me before we entered this foul place, not to mention a Wallachian madwoman, an evil scientist, and a vampire in the linen chest. Oh, well done, Holmes. Bravo! And you call me romantic!”
His attention sharpened and he threw up a hand for silence. I, well trained, instantly obeyed.
We listened. Water dripped, the wind soughed, the old house creaked . . . and then it came again, from above us somewhere on the second floor: a faint rasp, a muffled thump.
“Oh, really!” I exclaimed.
Snatching the candle from his hand, I limped hastily down the hall to the far door. There was the stair, with water cascading down the steps. The decayed remains of a carpet made them as slippery as moss in a river-bed as I climbed, clinging to the bannister.
I did not want to believe my friend’s story. It frightened me the way he had groped after details, not as if making them up but as if drawing their memory out of a half-forgotten childhood nightmare like splinters from a long neglected wound. And such details! Was I really to believe that . . . ? No, I would not.
But I had to be sure.
Here was the upper hall as Holmes had described it, eerily long, lined with doors. I hesitated on the upper landing, suddenly unsure. After all, here I was, with a guttering candle, in the upper storey of an abandoned house miles from anywhere, on a dark and stormy night, hunting ghosts. For all I knew, we might instead be sharing Morthill with an escaped axe-murderer—which, at that moment, I would almost have preferred.
The first door to the left stood half open. From the darkness within came a furtive rustle, as if of shifting paper.
A hand closed like a vise on my arm. “Don’t go in there,” snapped Holmes.
I was startled, so quickly and quietly had he come up the stair on my heels, and I was annoyed to find myself whispering. “Why not?”
“Because the way in may not be the way out. And besides,” he added, somewhat lamely, “the floor may be unsound.”
“A fine time to think of that. Very well, then; if not this door, which?”
He would not answer me, but his eyes betrayed him, sliding involuntarily to the first door on the right. When he made no move to open it, I pushed past him and gripped the knob. It came off in my hand.
I glanced back at Holmes, suddenly as reluctant as he. Candlelight flickered across his face, shadows pooling in the hollows beneath cheekbones and eyes. He stood as if rooted before the door from which his father had fled.
There was no way forward but one.
I set my shoulder to the warped panels and pushed. The lock broke in a shower of rust and the door squealed open on clutching hinges. Mindful of the house’s tricks, I reached blindly inside
, fished out a high-backed chair, and wedged the door open with it. Holmes stared into the darkness, then entered as if drawn. I followed.
Candlelight flickered on mouldering clutter: a disordered bed whose canopy long since had fallen down across its foot, rags of once elegant clothing strewn about the floor, a pair of long, dingy gloves draped like flayed skin over the back of a chair. More confusion littered the dressing table—age-dull bottles, lotions, notions and trinkets tumbled together.
One of Carle Vernet’s lithographs hung on the nearby wall, depicting an extravagantly dressed eighteenth-century belle seated at her dressing table, admiring herself in its large mirror.
“The picture is called Vanity,” said Holmes, behind me, “not that Blanche probably understood why. She had a certain imitative cleverness—like a monkey—but no real imagination.”
I looked again, and recoiled. The mirror’s rounded shape was that of a naked skull, the twin images of the woman’s head and her reflection its hollow eyes, the cosmetic bottles her teeth bared in a cryptic smile. This print, not the Mona Lisa, was the original of Blanche’s portrait in the hall below.
“Sangsue,” her dying father had scrawled in horror over his meticulous notations. Bloodsucker. Non, non, non . . .
I turned to Holmes in triumph, just as he threw back the collapsed canopy. At the foot of the bed was a chest, no bigger than a child’s coffin. A crude spray of mistletoe was carved into the age-blackened oak of its lid. At its farther end, caught in the crack, were several long strands of pale hair.
Holmes hesitated a moment. Then he gripped the lid and, with a sudden effort, attempted to lift it. It rose a quarter inch and stopped with a jar that dislodged his fingers. Belatedly, he looked at the key, still turned in the lock. For a long moment we stood there, he staring at the key, I at him. It had grown very quiet outside. Inside, all I heard was the distant, forlorn drip of water. A long, scraping sound made me start. It came from the window. Outside, the fingers of a dead oak again drew restlessly across the glass and tapped against the pane. Then Holmes sighed.
