Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  ‘By challenging the spell’s defences,’ said Doctor Mithily, smoothly taking over the explanations again. ‘Any escapes or attempts to break the spell trigger certain … consequences. One such is you as you are now: the spell returned you here, to the scullery, so you can’t try to escape again. There are other consequences that will become clear to you. It was my proposition that we could exploit them … but I did not put my plan into action. The majority of us decided it was too cruel.’

  ‘That didn’t stop the minority,’ said Olive, with a sniff. ‘Cruelty comes easier to some, I suppose.’

  ‘Despair breeds cruelty,’ said the white-haired old lady who had not until now spoken. Madame Iris’s voice was soft but full of pain. ‘ … just as cruelty breeds despair.’

  Before Etta could decide who to yell at, a hammering came from the door behind her. Almanac was back.

  ‘Hold on,’ he shouted to her through the sturdy wood. ‘I’ll have the door prised open in a minute.’

  Etta opened her mouth to tell him why that would be impossible, but the words travelled no further than her thoughts.

  She tried again, to no avail. Her capacity to speak had suddenly dried up.

  The spell would not let her tell Almanac what he needed to know.

  Almanac took the crowbar Etta had left by the gate and wedged it into the gap between door and wall. It was odd she hadn’t replied to him, a fact that gave him momentary pause. Maybe she didn’t want to distract him. Maybe she didn’t believe he could do it. Maybe it didn’t matter and he should just get on with it in case she was hurt and needed his help.

  Leaning all his weight on the free end of the crowbar didn’t produce the wood-splitting effect he had hoped for. Shifting the business end down a foot, he tried again. Still no happy outcome.

  He stepped back to consider the door with new respect. He had heard of a particular kind of ‘ironwood’ timber and wondered if this was what he was up against. Not one to give up when a friend was in need, however, he made the attempt several more times before admitting to himself that getting the door open would be much harder than he had expected.

  ‘Okay, the crowbar didn’t work,’ he called to Etta. ‘I’ll try something else.’

  He had brought all the tools she had liberated from the garden shed. Picking up the screwdriver, he attacked the lock as she had the gate’s, with as little success.

  ‘Almanac?’ she said through the wooden barrier.

  ‘Etta? Don’t worry. I’ll think of a way to get you out.’ He sat back on his haunches with the useless screwdriver in one hand to consider if the file and hammer might succeed where the crowbar had failed.

  ‘I’m … You should … Will … ’

  He cocked his head. A line formed between his eyebrows. Etta never had trouble finding words. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I can’t … Listen … Stupid!’

  Another time he might have thought that she was calling him stupid, but the exasperation in her voice told him otherwise. Her frustration was directed at herself.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said to her again. ‘I think I saw an axe in Silas’s shed. I’ll just fetch it and give that a go.’

  ‘No … wait … stop, please!’

  But Almanac had already started running to the shed. He ran all the way there and back and had to catch his breath for a moment before hefting the axe at the obstacle standing stubbornly in his way. Etta was still talking to him, but he couldn’t make any sense of what she was saying.

  ‘Careful,’ he told her. ‘I’m coming through!’

  He swung. The blade of the axe left a deep furrow in the wood but didn’t split it. Another swing, and the axe head came right off the handle, ricocheting with enough force to put his own head at risk. Tying the axe back together with string as firmly as he could, Almanac made one more attempt. This time, the handle split messily in two, beyond all possibility of repair.

  ‘Almanac! Almanac, listen to me!’

  Etta’s words somehow penetrated his furious thoughts. ‘What?’

  ‘Just stop it!’

  ‘I can’t leave you in there. You’ll starve!’

  ‘I won’t. Trust me.’

  ‘You’ve got food in there?’ A wild possibility struck him. ‘Did you lock yourself in the scullery? Why would you do that?’

  ‘I … Almanac … Oh, I wish … ’

  ‘I wish you would just tell me what’s going on! I thought you’d left me … ’

  He turned and slumped against the door, too confused to think straight. Life was so much simpler when he only had one thing to concentrate on. Break down a door. Solve a puzzle. Start his new life. Nothing was easy now.

  The sound of faint movement came from the other side of the door. Perhaps Etta was leaning against it too, just inches away.

  ‘Cheese wigs,’ she said.

  He frowned, remembering the fake cusswords they had laughed about what felt like weeks ago. There was no reason for Etta to swear now. He hadn’t said anything stupid. ‘What?’

  ‘Cheese wigs,’ she repeated, with added emphasis.

  ‘Is that supposed to make sense?’

  ‘Cranberries.’

  ‘Are you playing a game on me?’

  ‘Cheese wigs.’

  ‘Because if you are, I’ll just leave you in there to rot.’

  ‘Cheese wigs! Cheese wigs!’

  Almanac frowned. Etta sounded annoyed, but not at him. She was trying to tell him something, but why wasn’t she just talking normally? Why was she using nonsense words that didn’t mean anything?

  Because she didn’t want someone to overhear.

  No, to understand. That had to be it. She couldn’t say what she wanted to say because someone … or something … was listening in.

  The spell.

  ‘You’re trying to tell me something, but you can’t.’

  ‘Cranberries.’

  ‘You’re not annoyed with me.’

  There was a slight pause, then she said, ‘Cheese wigs.’

  He could only assume that she meant yes and no.

  Almanac’s eyes widened.

  Two knocks for no, one for yes, Ugo had said. But this time, not knocks but words.

  Etta was using Olive’s code!

  He wanted to tell her that he understood, but if she was going to the trouble of talking in cypher, it wouldn’t be wise for him to just come out and reveal the fact. If he was foolish enough to do that, he presumed, the trick wouldn’t work anymore.

  He would just have to play along in order to learn why the spell now had her in its grip.

  ‘What you’re telling me,’ he said, rewinding the conversation in his mind now he understood what she was saying, ‘is that I should give up trying to open this door.’

  ‘Cranberries.’

  ‘But you’re okay, in there, for now?’

  A slight pause, and then, ‘Cranberries.’

  He sighed. ‘All right, but … that is, I don’t know what to do next. You see, I got to the end of the maze while you were gone but there was nothing there. No magic spell. Nothing written down, anyway, and that’s how magic works, isn’t it?’

  ‘Cranberries.’

  ‘Perhaps I should go back to the library and see if we missed something. Or maybe there are other clues somewhere else. I don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep looking.’

  ‘Cranberries.’

  ‘Would you feel bad if I made some toast? I’ve hardly eaten in the two days … I’ve been so worried, and … Oh, I wish you’d come out and bake us a cake. I’d promise not to eat more than half!’

  ‘Cheese wigs,’ she said, with the hint of a sad laugh.

  He sighed again and looked down at the cuffs of his pants. They were getting ragged. It was a minor detail that made him feel utterly wretched. Everything had gone wrong, and now Etta was locked behind a door that might as well be a yard thick, for all he could get through it. She was like the others now, trapped more by the spell than by ordinary wood …
r />   His unhappy reverie was interrupted by a sound he had never expected to hear.

  Knock-knock-knock.

  Someone was at the door.

  Hearing the winking-lion knocker hammering upstairs, Etta jumped to her feet. The ghosts too startled into motion, many of them disappearing deeper into the walls, some clutching at one another for support.

  ‘We should not be surprised,’ Doctor Mithily told them in peevish tones. ‘This is what always happens!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Etta, realising that a vengeful sorcerer would hardly bother to knock on the door. ‘Who is it? No one ever visits!’

  ‘Come, come!’ Ugo held out his hand and gestured for her to follow him, deeper into the apparently solid wall. ‘You will see.’

  ‘But—’ She hesitated, then looked down at herself, glowing and somehow insubstantial. Ghostly. And what could ghosts do if not walk through walls?

  Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and dived after him … but into the wall, not through it.

  It was like stepping into a shadow, one with weight and texture that nonetheless allowed her to pass. Feeling a hand at her elbow, she allowed herself to be guided around tight corners and over doors, skirting the spaces between the walls – the rooms and halls, corridors and cupboards – as though they were uncrossable chasms. Opening her eyes, she found the experience nowhere near as strange as she had expected. In her childhood, she and her tenth sister Deb (Debacle) had pretended that the floor of their home was on fire, shimmying along skirting boards to get from one place to another; this was much like that, except she was within the manor’s walls, not clinging to them.

  With relief she found herself still at last, staring by ghostly means into the lobby, where Almanac had just arrived to greet whoever it was that had knocked. He straightened his clothes and body to try to look his tallest – an action that revealed his bravery, rather than making him seem pathetic, which made her heart ache a little – and opened the door.

  Two young children, each barely ten years old, stood on the verandah. A boy and a girl with very similar features, they were dressed in rags and painfully thin.

  ‘Beggar twins,’ said Olive, floating in the wall next to Etta.

  ‘It appears so,’ said Mr Packer.

  ‘So young,’ breathed Lady Simone.

  ‘Who are they?’ Etta asked.

  None of this conversation could be overheard by Almanac, who with only a faint stammer asked the strangers directly who they were.

  Shyly, and with awe in their eyes, they looked up at him.

  The girl opened her mouth and said, clearly but unintelligibly, ‘Hilyli sirry wi-iri hiri-ibity—’

  The boy nudged her and the girl’s mouth snapped shut. ‘Sorry, sir. She only speaks that way when she’s nervous. I’m Hackett, sir, and she’s Elsie. We’re here to work, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Elsie said in a normal voice. ‘Forgive me, sir. I forget myself sometimes.’

  ‘Work?’ asked Almanac, staring from one to the other.

  ‘I’m to be a shoe boy, sir,’ said Hackett, knocking his painfully narrow chest twice with one clenched fist.

  ‘And I’ve been offered the position of laundry maid, sir,’ said Elsie, producing a much-thumbed letter from within her pinafore.

  Almanac opened the piece of paper and glanced over it once, and then a second time. ‘Who is Master Owen?’

  Elsie and Hackett’s faces fell.

  ‘Don’t you know, sir?’ asked Hackett.

  ‘I’m afraid … that is, I imagine I ought to know,’ Almanac managed. ‘But please, do stop calling me “sir”. My name is Almanac. I’m only the apprentice second footman.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy without thinking.

  ‘Hackett!’ Elsie reproved her brother sharply. ‘Sorry … Almanac. Speaking right don’t come natural to us, you see. We’ve lived rough all our lives.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ Almanac said. ‘We’ll get you fed and cleaned up and then we’ll see about your jobs … ’

  ‘Who is Master Owen?’ asked Etta as Almanac waved the twins inside the manor.

  ‘I didn’t know he was still with us,’ said Doctor Mithily, as the pale shade of a man in a groom’s uniform wafted by them, with a sullen teenager in tow. ‘Nor Ian the stable boy. I thought they both had dissipated long ago.’

  Below them, Hackett stepped across the threshold, and with a sudden cry of ‘Ilysi!’ collapsed face-forward onto the ground.

  Elsie leapt to his aid, and with a squawk promptly fell on top of him.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Almanac, laying them both on their backs and patting their cheeks. ‘I forgot!’

  Etta had also forgotten the way magic had attacked her when she first entered the manor.

  ‘Is that when the spell strikes?’ she asked the others.

  ‘Yes,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘If you don’t enter the manor, I expect you could leave the grounds freely, but everyone enters. Everyone wants to.’

  ‘Because they’re invited!’ Etta said, understanding. ‘Because they don’t know it’s a trap. Oh, if only we could’ve warned them!’

  ‘We cannot,’ said Ugo. ‘No, we can only watch.’

  The tongue-tying effect of the spell caused new levels of frustration. Etta tried to call out to Almanac, but she could make no audible noise at all outside the scullery, not even the cussword code they had improvised earlier. The only people she could talk freely to now were the other ghostly inhabitants of the house, whispering within its ensorcelled structure.

  Almanac had roused the unconscious twins and was helping them to their feet.

  ‘You’ll be okay,’ he said, little knowing how wrong he was, Etta thought, clenching her fists in anger. They were trapped now, just like him! But at least they still had their bodies and could walk about in the house …

  ‘Come with me,’ Almanac was saying. ‘I’ll make you something to eat.’

  ‘Yes, please!’ they said simultaneously.

  ‘Don’t get too excited, kids – it’ll only be toast,’ Etta sniffed, although she acknowledged that it was undoubtedly better than what the young beggars were used to.

  ‘And then there were three,’ said Doctor Mithily reflectively, with sadness in her voice.

  ‘Why are they here?’ Etta asked.

  ‘I told you before that there would be consequences. You see them now.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What does me getting over that gate have to do with these two?’

  ‘Everything. Bad enough, you might think, that your body is lost now, taken by the spell. Bad enough that you are trapped in your own corner of the house – my attic, your scullery, Ugo’s chimneys – and in the walls beyond that small prison. Bad enough that you cannot tell anyone outside what awaits them here. But there is worse. Far worse. You see, every successful escape triggers the spell’s most cruel reprisal: the issuing of another invitation.’

  Etta stared from Doctor Mithily to the twins. A hard lump was moving from her stomach into her throat. ‘You mean … it’s my fault that they’re here?’

  ‘It is the spell’s fault,’ Ugo corrected her firmly.

  ‘But still, if I hadn’t escaped, they wouldn’t have been invited … Wait. I only escaped once, but there’s two of them. Two invitations.’

  ‘Escape is one of two triggers we have identified,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘The other is an earnest attempt to locate and break the spell. Finding the clues is not sufficient. Using them, and getting too close, is.’

  ‘Like Almanac did.’ She closed her eyes, unsure whether to feel shame or horror or anger or all three. Hackett and Elsie were innocent of any wrongdoing, but now they were victims of the spell because she and Almanac had broken its rules.

  That was awful. It was also an unbelievably vicious way of punishing captives of the spell who didn’t behave – especially when there was no way existing captives could tell new arrivals how to behave!

  ‘We have to rescue them,�
� she said with firm resolve. ‘We must break the spell now, before they become ghosts too – and so no one else is ever invited here!’

  ‘You understand our dilemma,’ whispered Madame Iris. ‘If we stay, we fade uselessly to nothing. If we try to break the spell, others are trapped with us. Our only hope is to seek help from outside. There must be a sorcerer powerful enough to end this torment.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Olive. ‘But the gate’s always locked, and no one can see what’s happening in here. You know that. The spell forbids any sight or sound of us from leaving the grounds.’

  ‘Of course, but if we can leave the grounds ourselves—’

  ‘You have seen what happens if we try your way, Madame Iris,’ said Ugo. ‘People die. People like me. We must find a way to beat this spell without endangering anyone else. We have to!’

  ‘All our best efforts have failed,’ the shadowy old woman told Etta, her eyes large and full of grief. ‘They do not believe me. That is why I ignored them and tried to escape without Ugo’s help. Not for myself … for everyone who might yet fall victim of this trap.’

  ‘She wouldn’t listen!’ exclaimed Olive. ‘And look what happened!’

  ‘You’re not making sense,’ said Etta, almost out of patience with their endless bickering, ‘any of you!’

  ‘It was just Madame Iris and I,’ Ugo explained. ‘I was new, while she had been here for years. She had had so much time to work out the rules, and should have known better. But no. Instead, she put all her efforts into finding a way to cross the wall. On the night she made her attempt, I tried to stop her … but instead I became tangled in her rope. When the counterweight pulled her over the wall, I went with her … and then it was too late. The spell struck. We became as you see us today.’

  Etta stared from him to Madame Iris and back again.

  ‘That’s why we were invited here, Almanac and me – because you broke the rules?’

  ‘It is true, child,’ said Madame Iris in grieving tones, but with a hint of defiance. ‘I did what I thought was right.’

  ‘Would that I had stopped you in time,’ said Ugo. ‘Instead, I only made matters worse.’

  Madame Iris reached out a hand as though to cup Etta’s cheek.