“Did your father know about the gloom?”
“Before coming to High Place, you mean? No. He married my mother, and she brought him here, but she obviously didn’t mention it. He didn’t know for a while. By the time he learned the whole truth it was too late, and he eventually agreed to stay.”
“The same setup that they are offering me, I suppose,” Noemí said. “A chance to be a part of the family. Not that he had much of a choice.”
“He loved her, I guess. He loved me. I don’t know.”
Noemí handed him back the locket, and he tucked it into his pocket. “Will there truly be a wedding ceremony? A bridal dress?” she asked.
She recalled the rows of pictures in the hallways, fixing each generation in time. And the bridal portraits in Howard’s room. If they could, they would have painted Catalina’s portrait in the same style. They would have painted Noemí’s portrait too. Both paintings would have hung side by side atop a mantelpiece. There would also have been a photo of the newlyweds, decked in their fine silks and velvet.
The mirror offered her a vague impression of what such a wedding picture might have looked like, for it captured both Noemí and Francis, their faces solemn.
“It’s tradition. In the old days there would have been a great feast, and every person attending would have given you a gift of silver. Mining has always been our trade, and it all began with silver.”
“In England?”
“Yes.”
“And you came chasing more silver here.”
“It had run out, over there. Silver, tin, and our luck. And the people back in England, they suspected us of odd doings. Howard thought they’d ask fewer questions here, that he’d be able to do as he wished. He wasn’t wrong.”
“How many workers died?”
“It’s impossible to know.”
“Have you wondered about it?”
“Yes,” he whispered, his voice thick with shame.
This house had been built atop bones. And no one had noticed such an atrocity, rows and rows of people streaming into the house, into the mine, and never leaving. Never to be mourned, never to be found. The serpent does not devour its tail, it devours everything around it, voracious, its appetite never quenched.
She gazed at the wide-open fangs of the snake surrounding the mirror, and she turned her face and rested her chin on his shoulder. And like that they sat for a long time, she dark and he pale, making an odd contrast amidst all the snowy-white sheets, and around them, like a vignette, the darkness of the house blurring the borders.
23
Now that there was no need for pretense, they let her talk to Catalina without the watchful maid to spy on them. Francis was her companion instead. She supposed they saw them as a unit. Two symbiotic organisms, tethered together. Or else, jailer and prisoner. Whatever their reasoning, she appreciated the chance to speak to her cousin and pulled her chair closer to the bed where Catalina was resting. Francis stood on the other side of the room, glancing out the window and tacitly offering them privacy as they spoke in whispers.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you when I read the letter,” Noemí said. “I should have known.”
“You couldn’t know,” Catalina said.
“Still, if I’d simply fetched you, despite their protestations, we wouldn’t be here.”
“They wouldn’t have let you. Noemí, it’s enough that you came. Your presence makes me better. It’s like in those stories I used to read: it’s as if you’ve broken a spell.”
More likely it was the tincture Francis was administering, but Noemí nodded and grasped her cousin’s hands. How she wished that it were true, though! The fairy tales Catalina had shared with her always had good endings. The wicked were punished, order was restored. A prince climbed a tower and fetched down the princess. Even the dark details, such as the cutting of the wicked stepsisters’ heels, faded into oblivion once Catalina declared that everyone lived happily ever after.
Catalina could not recite those magical words—happily ever after—and Noemí had to hope the escape they had formulated was not a tall tale. Hope was all they had.
“He knows something is wrong,” Catalina said suddenly, blinking slowly.
The words unsettled Noemí. “Who?”
Catalina pressed her lips shut. This had happened before too, that she suddenly, dramatically grew quiet or seemed to lose her train of thought. As much as Catalina might want to say that she was getting better, she was not herself yet. Noemí brushed a strand of hair behind Catalina’s ear.
“Catalina? What’s wrong?”
Catalina shook her head and then lay back on the bed, turning her back toward Noemí. Noemí touched her cousin’s shoulder, but Catalina shoved her hand away. Francis walked over toward the bed.
“I think she’s tired,” he said. “We should walk back to your room. My mother said she wanted you to try that dress on.”
She had not really pictured the dress. It had been the furthest thing from her mind. Having no preconceptions, anything should have sufficed. Yet she was still surprised when she saw it laid out on her bed, and she regarded it with worry. She did not wish to touch it.
The dress was silky chiffon and satin, the high neck adorned with a collar of Guipure lace, and a long line of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons running down the back. It had rested in a large, dusty box for years and years, and one might have expected moths to have feasted on this creation, but although the fabric had yellowed a little, it was intact.
It wasn’t ugly. That wasn’t what repulsed her. But it seemed to her it represented the youthful fancies of another girl, of a dead girl. Perhaps two girls. Had Virgil’s first wife worn this too?
It reminded her of an abandoned snake’s skin. Howard would slough off his own skin, would sink into a new body, like a blade entering warm flesh. Ouroboros.
“You must try it on so the alterations can be made,” Florence said.
“I have nice dresses. My purple taffeta—”
Florence stood very straight, her chin slightly raised, her hands clasped beneath her bosom. “The lace at the collar, you see it? That was taken from an older dress, incorporated in the final design. And the buttons, they came from another dress too. Your children will reuse this dress. It is the way things are done.”
Leaning down carefully, Noemí noticed there was a tear on the waist and a couple of small holes on the bodice. The dress’s perfection was deceiving.
She grabbed the dress and ventured into the bathroom, changing there, and when she emerged Florence regarded her with a critical eye. Measurements were taken, alterations indicated with the required pins; tuck this, tuck that. Florence muttered a few words to Mary, and the maid opened another dusty box, producing a pair of shoes and a veil. The veil was in a much sorrier state than the dress. It had aged to a creamy ivory color, and the lovely flower-and-scroll design running near the edges had been marred by ugly mildew stains. The shoes were also hopeless, and besides, they were a size too big.
“It will do,” Florence said. “As shall you,” she added derisively.
“If you find me displeasing, maybe you could kindly ask your uncle to stop this wedding.”
“You silly creature. You think he’d desist? His appetite has been whetted,” she said, touching a lock of Noemí’s hair.
Virgil had touched her hair too, but the gesture had had a different meaning. Florence was inspecting her. “Fitness, he says. Germ plasm and the quality of the bloodstream.” She let go of Noemí’s hair and gave her a hard look. “It’s the common lust of all men. He simply wants to have you, like a little butterfly in his collection. One more pretty girl.”
Mary was quietly putting aside the veil, folding it as though it were a precious treasure and not a stained, wrecked bit of clothing.
“God knows what degenerative strain runs through your
body. An outsider, a member of a disharmonic race,” Florence said, flinging the soiled shoes on the bed. “But we must accept it. He has spoken.”
“Et Verbum caro factum est,” Noemí said automatically, remembering the phrase. He was lord and priest and father, and they were all his children and acolytes, blindly obeying him.
“Well. At least you’re learning,” Florence replied, a slight smile on her face.
Noemí did not reply, instead locking herself in the bathroom again and peeling off the dress. She changed back into her clothes and was glad when the women laid the dress back in its box and silently departed.
She put on the heavy sweater Francis had gifted her and reached into a pocket, clutching the lighter and the crumpled pack of cigarettes she’d taken to hiding there. Touching these objects made her feel more secure; they reminded her of home. With the mist outside obscuring the view, trapped between the walls of High Place, it seemed very easy to forget that she’d come from a different city and that she would ever see it again.
Francis came by a little while later. He brought with him a tray with her dinner and his razor wrapped in a handkerchief. Noemí joked that it was a terrible wedding present, and he chuckled. They sat side by side on the floor as she ate, the tray on her lap, and he managed a few more quips, and she smiled.
A distant, unpleasant groan dried up their mirth. The noise seemed to send a shiver down the house. It was followed by more groans, then silence. Noemí had heard such moaning before, but it seemed especially acute tonight.
“The transmigration must take place soon,” Francis said, as if reading the question in her eyes. “His body is falling apart. It never healed right since that day when Ruth shot him; the damage was too awful.”
“Why did he never transmigrate before? When he was shot, then?” she asked.
“He couldn’t. There was no new body he could inhabit. He needs an adult body. The brain must grow up to a certain point. Twenty-four, twenty-five, that’s the point at which the transmigration may take place. Virgil was a baby. Florence was still a girl, and even if she’d been older, he would never transmigrate into a woman’s body. So he held on, and his body stitched itself back together into a semblance of health.”
“But he could have transmigrated as soon as Virgil turned twenty-four or twenty-five instead of staying an old man.”
“It’s all connected. The house, the fungus running through it, the people. You hurt the family, you hurt the fungus. Ruth damaged the whole fabric of our existence. Howard wasn’t healing alone, everything was healing. But now he’s strong enough and he will die, his body will fruit, and he’ll begin a new cycle.”
She thought of the house growing scar tissue, breathing slowly, blood flowing between the floorboards. It reminded her of one of her dreams, in which the walls palpitated.
“And that’s why I won’t go with you,” Francis continued, fiddling with the cutlery, spinning a fork between his fingers and setting it down, ready to grab the tray and depart. “We’re all interconnected, and if I fled, they’d know, maybe even follow us and find us with ease.”
“But you can’t stay here. What will they do to you?”
“Probably nothing. If they do, it won’t be your problem anymore.” He clutched the tray. “Let me take that and I’ll—”
“You can’t be serious,” she said, snatching the tray away and laying it on the floor, shoving it aside.
He shrugged. “I’ve been gathering supplies for you. Catalina tried to run away, but she was ill prepared. Two oil lamps, a compass, a map, perhaps a pair of warm coats so that you can walk to town without freezing. You have to think about yourself and your cousin. Not about me. I don’t really count. The fact of the matter is this is all the world I’ve ever known.”
“Wood and glass and a roof do not constitute a world,” she countered. “You’re not an orchid growing in a hothouse. I’m not letting you stay. Pack your prints or your favorite book or whatever you wish, you are coming with us.”
“You don’t belong here, Noemí. But I do. What would I do outside?” he asked.
“Anything you want.”
“But that is a deceiving idea. You are right to think that I was grown like an orchid. Carefully manufactured, carefully reared. I am, yes, like an orchid. Accustomed to a certain climate, a certain amount of light and heat. I’ve been fashioned for a single end. A fish can’t breathe out of water. I belong with the family.”
“You’re not an orchid or a fish.”
“My father tried to escape, and you see how he fared,” he countered. “My mother and Virgil, they came back.”
He laughed without joy, and she could very well believe he would stay behind, a cephalophore martyr of cold marble who’d let the dust accumulate on his shoulders, who’d allow the house to gently, slowly devour him.
“You’ll come with me.”
“But—”
“But nothing! Don’t you want to leave this place?” she insisted.
His shoulders were hunched, and he looked as if he would bolt out the door any second, but then he took a shaky breath.
“For God’s sake, you can’t be that blind?” he replied, his voice low and harrowed. “I want to follow you, wherever you may go. To the damn Antarctic, even if I’d freeze my toes off, who cares? But the tincture can sever your link between you and the house, not mine. I’ve lived too long with it. Ruth tried to find a way around it, tried to kill Howard to escape. That didn’t work. And my father’s gambit didn’t work either. There’s no solution.”
What he said made a terrible amount of sense. Yet she stubbornly refused to concede. Was everyone in this house a moth caught in a killing jar and then pinned against a board?
“Listen,” she said. “Follow me. I’ll be your pied piper.”
“Those who follow the pied piper don’t meet a good end.”
“I forget which fairy tale it is,” Noemí said angrily. “But follow me all the same.”
“Noemí—”
She raised a hand and touched his face, her fingers gliding along his jaw.
He looked at her, mutely, his lips moving though he uttered no words, gathering his courage. He reached out for her, pulling her closer to him in a gentle motion. His hand trailed down her back, palm pressed flat, and she rested her cheek against his chest.
The house was quiet, a quiet that she disliked, for it seemed to her all the boards that normally creaked and groaned had stopped creaking, the clocks on the walls did not tick, and even the rain against the window panes was shushed. It was as if an animal waited to pounce on them.
“They’re listening, aren’t they?” she whispered. They couldn’t understand them since they were speaking in Spanish. Yet it still disturbed her.
“Yes,” he said.
He was scared too, she could tell. In the silence his heart beat loud against her ear. At length she lifted her head and looked at him, and he pressed his index finger to his lips, rising and stepping back from her. And she wondered if in addition to being able to listen, the house might not have eyes too.
The gloom, shivering and waiting, like a spider’s web, and them sitting on a silvery bit of silk. The lightest movement would reveal their presence and the spider would pounce on them. Such a dreadful thought, and yet she considered the possibility of entering that cold, foreign space willingly, which she’d never done before.
It terrified her.
But Ruth existed in the gloom, after all, and she wanted to speak to her again. She wasn’t sure how to accomplish that. After Francis left, Noemí lay in bed with her hands at her side, listening to her own breathing, and tried to visualize the young woman’s face as it looked in her portrait.
Eventually she dreamed. They were in the cemetery, she and Ruth, walking among the tombstones. The mist was thick around them, and Ruth carried a lantern, which glowed a sick
ly yellow. They paused before the entrance to the mausoleum, and Ruth raised the lantern, and they both raised their heads to look at the statue of Agnes. The lantern could not provide sufficient illumination, and the statue remained half in shadow.
“This is our mother,” Ruth said. “She sleeps.”
Not your mother, Noemí thought, for Agnes had died young, as had her child.
“Our father is a monster who comes at night, creeping around this house. You can hear his footsteps outside the door,” Ruth said, and she raised the lantern higher, the light shifting the pattern of lights and shadow, obscuring the statue’s hands, her body, but revealing the face. Unseeing eyes and the lips pressed tightly together.
“Your father can’t hurt you anymore,” Noemí said. Because at least there was that mercy, she supposed. Ghosts cannot be tortured.
But the girl grimaced. “He can always hurt us. He never stops hurting us. He will never stop.”
Ruth turned her lantern toward Noemí, making her squint and hold a hand up to shield her eyes. “Never, ever, never. I’ve seen you. I think I know you.”
The conversation was fragmented, yet it remained more coherent than any other exchange Noemí had conducted with the girl before. In fact, it was the first time she had the impression she was speaking to an actual person rather than the faint carbon copy of one. But that’s what she was, wasn’t she? A faded carbon copy, the original manuscript long destroyed. One could not blame Ruth if she didn’t make much sense, if she muttered and lowered the lantern and raised it again repeatedly like a wind-up doll.
“Yes, you’ve seen me around the house,” Noemí said, stilling Ruth with a gentle touch on the arm. “I need to ask you a question, and I hope you’ll have an answer. How strong is the bond between the house and your family? Could a Doyle leave and never come back?” she asked, because she kept thinking about what Francis had told her.
Ruth tilted her head and looked at Noemí. “Father is powerful. He knew something was wrong, sent Mother to stop me…and the others, the others too. I tried to keep my mind clear. I wrote my plan down, concentrated on my words.”
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