Down a Dark Hall

by Lois Duncan

  The straight nose, the stubborn chin, the curve of the rounded cheek, all were there, but there was something more, something about the eyes. As Ruth had commented, they had a directness which was typical of Kit, but there was another quality too—a vulnerability, a touch of uncertainty. The eyes were those of a girl who was not as sure on the inside as she appeared outwardly to be.

  “Who am I?” the eyes asked. “What is my place in life? Am I pretty? Do people like me? Does Jules like me? In what direction am I going? Will I accomplish anything worthwhile in my lifetime? Will I be happy? Am I worth loving?”

  A multitude of questions glimmered behind the eyes, suggested by a few tiny lines and some subtle shading. It was the difference between the real Kit, the one known only to herself and possibly to Tracy, and the strong, self-confident Kathryn Gordy everyone else saw.

  How did she know? Kit asked herself wonderingly. How could Lynda Hannah see right through me so well? We’ve never even talked with each other except as part of a group.

  But the girl in the picture could not be denied.

  “Kit?” Sandy’s voice called to her from the stairs at the end of the hall. “Madame’s rung the bell for dinner. Come on or you’re going to be late.”

  “Coming,” Kit called back.

  Flicking off the light, she left the room, pulling the door closed behind her. She hesitated a second and then, turning back, she reentered the room and took the key off the bureau top, where it had lain ever since Madame had given it to her upon her arrival at Blackwood, and went out again into the hall.

  This time she thrust the key into the lock and turned it. She did not know exactly why, but for the first time since she had come here, she felt that her room held something of value.

  Dinner hour was one of the pleasantest times at Blackwood. All meals were served in the grandeur of the dining room, but only the evening meal was eaten by candlelight with a white cloth on the table and linen napkins and fine china. The dishes were pure white and thin to the touch, and each plate was bordered by a delicate line of gold.

  “They came with Blackwood,” Madame Duret explained when Kit asked about them. “The dishes and kitchenware, the furniture, the piano, the drapes and carpets, all of them have been here for years and years. The only things that were brought in from outside were the furnishings in my own apartment, which I had shipped over after I closed my school in England, and those in the reconverted carriage house, which was made into an apartment for Professor Farley. And, of course, the furnishings in the rooms occupied by you girls.”

  “It’s strange,” Kit commented, examining the china, “that something so lovely would just have been left here. You’d think the owners would have wanted it for themselves.”

  “It is strange,” Madame had agreed, “but then, people are peculiar sometimes, are they not? After Mr. Brewer died the new owners wanted nothing to do with Blackwood except to sell it. It is a shame, really, but very lucky for us.”

  The china set the mood of dinner. It was an elegant meal, served in several courses, and Madame Duret seemed at that time less a headmistress than a gracious hostess, entertaining her guests with interesting stories of her life abroad. Jules occasionally contributed to these, as did Professor Farley, who had taught at Madame’s school in England, though not at the one in France. Conversation flowed freely, with all of the girls joining in, and dinner generally ended with everyone in good spirits, ready to adjourn to the parlor or to go up to her room to study.

  This night, though, was different. The atmosphere in the dining room seemed charged with an extra quality, a kind of electricity. Conversation moved well, as always, but to Kit there seemed to be an artificiality about it, as though the speakers were playing their parts and did not really have their minds on the discussion. At one point she caught an exchange of glances between Madame and Professor Farley. As far as she could see, there had been nothing to trigger it, but when Madame Duret turned back again her eyes were shining with a kind of suppressed excitement. Or perhaps it was simply the flicker of the candles reflected in the black pupils.

  When dinner was over and Kit had started down the hall to the stairs, Sandy caught up with her and laid a hand on her arm.

  “Let’s go out for a little while,” she said softly.

  “Out? At night? Whatever for?” Kit asked her.

  “Just into the garden. I need to talk. Please?”

  “All right,” Kit said. “But we’d better sneak out through the kitchen. I’m sure Madame wouldn’t want us roaming around the grounds in the dark.”

  Natalie was putting away the silver when they entered. She glanced up sharply.

  “Where do you girls think you’re going?”

  “Out,” Kit told her. “For air.” Natalie’s crispness had never bothered Kit, for she knew that the girl liked her and that this was simply her manner.

  “I don’t blame you,” Natalie said now. “It’s stuffy in this place. The rest of the staff is quitting.”

  “You’re kidding!” Kit exclaimed. “Why?”

  “They just don’t like it, especially the upstairs part. They say it spooks ’em, cleaning in that hall. One girl says she gets headaches.”

  “Are you quitting?” Kit asked.

  “Not me. I need the job. I got myself and a sick dad to support. Besides, I don’t go along with all that superstition stuff. Whatever happened was so long ago, you can’t blame it on that.”

  “What do you mean?” Kit’s curiosity was piqued. “What happened here?”

  “Oh, well, Mr. Brewer was sort of odd.” Natalie gave a shrug. “People blow things out of proportion. Will you be warm enough outside? My coat and sweater are in the broom closet if you want to wear them.”

  “Thanks,” Kit said gratefully. “We won’t be outside long.”

  Giving the coat to Sandy, she herself pulled on the worn blue sweater that hung on a nail on the inside of the closet door, and the two girls let themselves out into the night.

  The path from the kitchen door led around the corner of the house and into the garden. There was a three-quarter moon hanging high over the trees, sending long bands of silver out across the lawn. The garden path was aglow with moonlight, and a faint, sweet smell rose from the bushes, as though in remembrance of recent summer flowers. Below the lawn the pond lay black and still with the moonlight making a silver path across its surface. The night air was cold and pure, tinged with the scent of trees. The woods rose in a dark frame around the silver garden and shining pond.

  “It’s so nice out,” Kit said softly. “I’m glad you wanted to come outside. It’s even more beautiful at night than it is in the daytime.”

  “I had to come,” Sandy said. “If I’d stayed cooped up inside those walls any longer I think I would have suffocated. Kit, am I crazy? What is happening to me?”

  “You mean, your dream?” Kit tried to sound reassuring. “I talked with Jules about that, and what he said made a lot of sense. You’re away from home for the first time, adjusting to new things—”

  “That’s not it,” Sandy interrupted. “It really isn’t, I’m sure of it. It’s this place—Blackwood itself. There’s something creepy about Blackwood. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it too. I know you have.”

  “Well, yes,” Kit found her thoughts swept back to that first day as she and her mother and Dan saw the mansion standing before them, huge and imposing with the late afternoon sunlight glancing off the windows to make the whole place seem aflame from within.

  “Can’t you feel it?” she had cried to her mother. “There’s something about the place—”

  “Yes,” she said to Sandy now, shivering a little despite the wool sweater. “I did say that, and I do know what you mean. But how can it be the place itself? A place doesn’t have a personality.”

  “What was the first word that came to your mind when you saw it?”

  “I—I don’t remember,” Kit stammered.

  “You do. You just don’t want to rem
ember. There was a particular word, and it jumped right into your mind. It was ‘evil.’ ”

  “You’re right.” Kit turned to her incredulously. “How could you know that? I never told you. I never told anybody.”

  “I know it because the word was there. I felt it too. It was as much a part of the first view of this place as the peaked roof. Professor Farley picked me up at the bus stop in the village, and we drove up here through the beautiful morning with the sunlight streaming down through the trees and the sky so blue and clear. We came through the gate and started up the driveway, and it was as though a black shadow fell in front of us. An invisible force. The closer we got to the house, the darker it got—the kind of darkness you can feel and not see—and when I got out of the car and walked through that front door, I almost turned and ran back out again.”

  “But we don’t feel it now,” Kit said. “Not all the time. At night along the hall we do, with it all so black, and in our dreams, but there are lots of times when we laugh and study and go to class and it’s all so nice and normal—”

  “Because we’re part of it now,” Sandy said. “Don’t you see, Kit? We’re part of the shadow. We’ve been living in it for weeks and we’re adjusting to it. That’s why I wanted to come outside tonight, to stand back from Blackwood and be able to look at it and feel the difference.”

  “It does feel different from out here,” Kit admitted. Standing there in the moonlight, she could look at Blackwood, at the great building with the pointed roof, towering against the paler darkness of the sky, as though it were a picture in a child’s storybook. Lynda’s second-floor room was dark. A light shone in Ruth’s; evidently she had already begun her evening studying. Sandy’s corner room was on the far side of the hall, facing off the other side of the house. And her own—

  “There’s a light on,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A light in my room. There—that window there—that is my room, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” Sandy said. “Perhaps you left it on when you came down to dinner.”

  “I didn’t,” Kit said. “I remember turning the light off. Then I locked the door.” She stiffened, her eyes glued to the shining window, as a dark form moved across it.

  “Somebody’s there!” she exclaimed. “Somebody’s in my room!”

  “That’s impossible if you locked your door.” Sandy too was staring at the window. “Maybe it’s the curtain blowing.”

  “It’s not! It’s a person!” Kit whirled and started up the path at a run. “Come on, we’ll catch him! There’s no place he can go except back along the hall. If we get to the stairs in time we can cut him off!”

  But the stairs were empty, and so was the long, black hallway. The door was still locked. When she turned the key and opened it, Kit found the room dark. She turned on the light, and before she looked, she knew what she would find. The pencil portrait was no longer on her desk. It was gone.

  Her dream that night was different. It was a strange dream, and oddly lovely. In it she was in the music room, sitting at the piano, and her fingers were at home on the keys. There was no sheet music in front of her, but she was playing in a way that she never had played before. It was a beautiful melody, as cool and haunting as the moonlight in the garden, as smooth as the path of silver across the pond.

  It is so beautiful, she told herself in the dream, that I must try to remember it so that I can play it again. But the music had no name, and she knew that she had never heard it before.

  When she woke in the morning she felt as exhausted as though she had never slept at all, and her fingers ached.

  The incoming mail was on a table in the entrance hall, and Kit, coming back from a class with Professor Farley, picked up the items addressed to her and carried them up to her room to read.

  There were two postcards from her mother, one from Cherbourg and one from Paris, both sent by airmail but with a week between mailing dates.

  “. . .  so exciting,” the first one said, “. . . marvelous trip over . . . so many interesting people on board . . . we caught up on our sleep and lay out on deck chairs.” The second was filled with references to the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre and the Folies Bergere.

  “Where are your letters, honey?” said a hurried postscript. “We got your note in Cherbourg but haven’t had a word since. You have our itinerary. Write care of American Express, but allow enough time.”

  Besides the postcards, there was a letter from Tracy. The neat, round handwriting, almost as familiar as Tracy herself, gave Kit a momentary pang of homesickness.

  “That must be some great place,” the letter ran, “if you can’t even get around to writing. What’s with that promise you made to keep me up to date on everything? Things here are as usual. I got Mrs. Logan for English—hooray!—and Mr. Garfield for Latin—boo! Advanced art is awesome, we can do whatever we want. There’s a cute guy in my geometry class named Kevin Webster. How are you dealing up at Blackwood without a single guy under the age of eighty?”

  There’s Jules, Kit thought. I wrote her about Jules in my very first letter. Did it get lost in the mail? But I’ve written a couple of times since and mentioned him both times.

  She flipped over the page and was skimming the next few paragraphs when there was a light rap at the door. “Come on in,” Kit called, assuming it was Sandy. To her surprise her visitor turned out to be Ruth Crowder.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” The dark-haired girl stood hesitantly in the doorway. “If you’re in the middle of studying—”

  “I’m not,” Kit said. “I’m only reading some letters.”

  “Then I want to show you something.” Ruth stepped inside and closed the door carefully behind her. “It’s this.”

  She held out a sheet of paper. At a glance Kit could see that it was a crude sketch of a face, a wavering, childish drawing of the type that one might expect to see in a display of elementary school art.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Did it come in the mail? Your little brother or sister—”

  “No,” Ruth said. “It’s a portrait of me. Lynda did it. It’s the picture she drew for that parlor game she was talking about.”

  “Lynda drew that?” Kit exclaimed, reaching for the paper and laying it flat on the bed in front of her. Ruth came over to stand beside her and together they studied the drawing. A round, unformed face. A triangle nose. A mouth that resembled a Halloween pumpkin. A mop of black hair.

  “She got the hair right,” Ruth said. “It’s black. Frankly, I don’t see any other resemblance. I know I’m no beauty queen, but even I have two eyes that look in the same direction. And she forgot to put on the ears.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kit said. “We know that Lynda can draw. That portrait she did of me was awesome.”

  “It was a freak occurrence,” Ruth said flatly. “Lynda can’t draw, Lynda doesn’t have any talent in anything. She’s pretty and sweet, but the day they distributed brains, Lynda was out to lunch.”

  Somehow, from Ruth, the statement did not sound brutal, simply factual.

  “Sit down,” Kit said slowly. “I think you and I need to talk.”

  Ruth nodded. She seated herself on the edge of the bed. In her lap, her square, strong hands gripped each other tightly.

  “Something’s going on here,” she said in a low voice. “I know it, but I don’t know what it is. Do you feel it too?”

  “Yes,” Kit said, “and so does Sandy.”

  “Lynda doesn’t. Lynda doesn’t notice things. She’s like a little kid in so many ways.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me about her,” Kit said. “And about yourself. The two of you seem to be good friends, but you’re so different. There’s nothing wrong with your I.Q.”

  “It’s a hundred and fifty,” Ruth said with pride. “I was ahead of myself from the beginning. I skipped two grades in elementary school, and by the time I reached middle school I was already so far ahead on my own that the things in the textb
ooks were boring to me. And the kids didn’t like me. Who wants a fat little nine-year-old in a class of twelve-year-olds?

  “My parents are both PhDs. They think education is very important, so they decided to send me to a special, ungraded school in Los Angeles. That’s where I first met Lynda.”

  “What was she doing there,” Kit asked, “if the school was for brilliant students?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly. At least, that’s what I discovered after I got there. It was just ‘elite.’ I don’t know if you realize it or not, but Lynda’s mother is Margaret Storm.”

  “Margaret Storm, the actress?” Kit said in surprise. “I’ve seen her on the classic movie channels.”

  “She was pretty popular in her day,” Ruth said. “Of course, a glamorous actress doesn’t stay on top forever. Lynda says she’s still making movies, but the parts aren’t that good anymore, and she met some Italian actor in one of them and there was some sort of scandal—well, anyway, she’s living in Italy now. That’s why Lynda was away at school. She was really lost there. She’d try and try, but she just couldn’t keep up academically. And I couldn’t keep up socially. We sort of found each other, and after that it wasn’t so bad for either of us.”

  “Why did you come to Blackwood?” Kit asked her.

  “That was my parents’ doing. They didn’t think the school in L.A. was challenging enough, and they were right. When they read the brochure about Blackwood and saw the part about the private instruction, the way each student moves along at her own level, they got pretty excited. We talked about it during spring break, and Mom wrote to Madame Duret and arranged for me to take the entrance tests, and then Lynda heard about it and persuaded her mother to let her take them too. She didn’t want to be left behind.”

  “And she got in?” Kit said. “That’s surprising, isn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Ruth said. “I thought maybe they’d mixed up the scores. But Lynda likes it here. Everybody’s nice to her. And now suddenly she thinks she’s an artist, and she’s thrilled about that. Madame Duret has given her an easel and oil paints and canvases. You should see Lynda’s room! It looks like a professional studio.”