Down a Dark Hall

by Lois Duncan

  “Get them,” she said quietly. “All of them. Sandy and Lynda and Ruth, the professor, your mother. I want everybody down here right now. I want to know exactly what has been happening here at Blackwood, the whole story!”

  “Now, Kit, look,” Jules said desperately. “You’re upset, and I don’t blame you. But this isn’t the time to talk about anything. It’s two o’clock in the morning. Everybody’s sound asleep. You don’t want to bring them all down here now.”

  Straightening on the bench, Kit glared at him as anger swept in to take the place of fear. “If you don’t get them, Jules, I will. I’ll start yelling and I’ll wake up the whole house. I want to know the answer to the mystery of Blackwood, and I don’t intend to wait until morning to get it.”

  “It is two o’clock in the morning, scarcely an hour to hold a conference.” Madame Duret’s voice was crisp and cold. “I must say, Jules, that you are not showing the best of judgment.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Jules said. “Kit woke up while she was at the piano. Of course she started asking questions.”

  “But to bring down everyone!” Madame was wearing a crimson dressing gown. Her long, black hair, loosed from its usual coil, hung down her back in a great cascade, and her face, void of makeup, had an almost skeletal look in the lamplight.

  “I made him,” Kit said. “Whatever it is that’s happening here involves all of us. I don’t care what time of night it is.”

  She spoke with a firmness that surprised her, and she could see a flicker of grudging respect in Madame’s eyes.

  “And you?” Madame’s gesture took in the other three girls, who, in robes and slippers, were now gathered in the parlor. Professor Farley, wearing an overcoat over his pajamas, was seated in an armchair by the window. “You wish this—this confrontation?”

  Ruth nodded quickly. Her face was flushed with excitement. Sandy hesitated, her eyes wide and frightened. Then she nodded also.

  Lynda glanced blankly at Ruth.

  “What is it she’s talking about?” she asked. “Why are we all down here?”

  Ruth turned back to Madame Duret. “Lynda has to hear it too. She may not understand, but you’ll have to tell her. It’s only right.”

  “Very well,” Madame said. “I had planned, of course, to disclose everything in good time, just as I did with the girls at my former schools. I had hoped it could wait a bit longer, however. We are still so close to the beginning. There is so much distance still to be covered before your relationships are secure.”

  “What relationships?” Kit asked.

  Madame did not answer immediately. Instead, she turned to gaze past them, out the window into the darkness that lay beyond the pane.

  When she did begin to speak at last, it was slowly, as though she were searching for the perfect words.

  “Most people in this world are like children. Their lives run on one level only, the physical level of the here and now. From day to day they go, seeing the material things that surround them, believing that there is nothing beyond that.

  “But they are not correct. There is a second level of reality, a spiritual level that is as real as the physical. It transcends the first level and exists beyond it. A few special people are blessed with an extraordinary sensitivity to that spirit world and can bridge with their minds the space between those two realities.” A note of pride crept into her voice. “I am one of those people.”

  Kit stared at her. “Do you mean to say that you’re a medium?”

  “I find that word offensive,” Madame said stiffly. “It carries with it a flavor of fakery and parlor tricks. I do not lend myself to such demonstrations. I believe my gift is too valuable to be abused in such ways. It must be used only for the good of humanity.”

  “Which is how?” Kit asked.

  Madame continued as though she had not heard the question.

  “Today the average lifetime is over seventy years, long enough for a great number of accomplishments. But this development has occurred within the present century. Before that, people tended to die much younger than they do today, and among those early deaths were those of many brilliant and talented people who had much to give the world. It is those people to whom I reach out. It is to them I offer the opportunity to return.”

  “To return!” It was Sandy who spoke now, her voice expressionless with shock. “But people can’t come back once they’re dead!”

  “Not in physical form,” Madame said. “But in spiritual form they can, if there is a place for them. By this, I mean that there must be a receiver, a young, clear mind, still uncluttered by worldly problems, impressionable and sensitively tuned. Such minds are unusual, but they do exist. They can be found.”

  “And you found them in us.” Ruth made the statement in a matter-of-fact manner. She did not look or sound surprised. “Through those entrance tests, you were able to tell.”

  Madame nodded. “My tests took years to develop, and they are dependable. Here at Blackwood, I was fortunate in finding a place of perfect atmosphere. There have been spirit occupants here before. Mr. Brewer was in his own way a medium of a sort. He was able to recall and surround himself with the spirits of his deceased family. Their vibrations remain here still, a part of the house. The trip to Blackwood from the plane beyond is a short one, made along a well-traveled path.”

  The parts of the puzzle were in place now, but Kit could not believe them.

  I’m going to be sick, she thought, right here on the parlor floor.

  But she wasn’t. Instead she simply sat there, staring at the tall, red-gowned woman in growing horror. Could they be true, the things that Madame was saying, could they possibly be true?

  “I told you,” Ruth said, “that you wouldn’t be able to accept it.”

  Kit turned to her in amazement. “You already knew?”

  “I guessed,” Ruth said. “Remember earlier, when we were walking by the pond and I told you I wanted to check something out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I did,” Ruth said. “Tonight after dinner I went into the library and looked up a few people. One of them was a woman named Emily Brontë, who wrote under the name of Ellis Bell.”

  “Who?” Sandy asked.

  “Emily Brontë . . . she wrote Wuthering Heights. She lived in England during the nineteenth century. It was a time when woman writers weren’t taken seriously, so she and her two sisters decided to write under male pen names.”

  “Ellis, my Ellis, is Emily Brontë?!” Sandy shook her head. “That’s impossible. Emily Brontë has been dead for years.”

  “She died in 1848,” Ruth said. “Of tuberculosis.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Sandy’s voice rose hysterically. “Ellis is just as alive as I am. She writes poetry—”

  “She dictates poetry,” Ruth corrected, “and you write it down for her. You’ve admitted yourself that those poems don’t come out of your own head. She’s using you, Sandy, to get onto paper the words she didn’t have time to write while she was alive.” She turned to Madame. “Isn’t that right?”

  Madame nodded. “Control yourself, Sandra. There is nothing to become so upset about.”

  “Nothing to become upset about!” Sandy cried. “With dead people walking through my mind!”

  “You haven’t been hurt, my child.” From his chair in the corner, Professor Farley spoke for the first time. “You have simply been part of a unique experiment. You should feel privileged, not exploited.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to Kit,” Jules said.

  “Privileged!” Kit exploded. “By having my mind used as a receiving unit?” She turned accusingly to Professor Farley. “And you—you’re in on this too?”

  “Of course,” the professor said. His kindly old face held no trace of guilt. “I became acquainted with Madame Duret in London while doing research for a paper on psychic phenomena. When I learned about her school in Paris, I was fascinated. I encouraged her to open another, similar institu
tion in England, and later I accompanied her to America to assist with the establishment of Blackwood.”

  “I think,” Kit said, “that it’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “What’s so terrible about it?” Jules asked her. “You ought to be proud.”

  “Proud of what? That I’m being used, like a tool of some kind?” Kit exclaimed incredulously. The voices from the dream came back to her, and she shuddered uncontrollably.

  “ ‘She must play for me!’ ‘I want her tonight!’ ‘I haven’t used her yet!’ It’s the way you talk about an object, not a person!”

  Lynda was looking dazedly from one speaker to another.

  “What is all this?” she asked in bewilderment. “Who’s an object?”

  “You are!” Kit cried. “We all are! Don’t you understand at all, Lynda? It’s not you who is creating those beautiful pictures we’re so impressed by! It’s a famous landscape painter who died over a century ago. No wonder they’re so good!”

  “That’s not true,” Lynda said. “I painted all day today. Look—I can prove it.” She held out a slim, delicate hand smudged with green paint. “That’s from doing the grass. There’s a lot of grass in my new picture.”

  “And who wants it there, that grass? Who planned the picture? Who guides the brush?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That night in your room,” Kit said in exasperation, “when I brought up your tray, you said, ‘There is so much to be done. He wants so much.’ Who were you talking about, Lynda? Who is this ‘he’?”

  “I never said anything like that,” Lynda said with a catch in her voice. “I think you are all mean. First Ruth says I’m tracing, and now you say that somebody else is doing the work for me. You’re jealous! Here’s the first thing I’ve ever really been good at in my whole life, and you can’t bear to see me get the credit for it.”

  “Let her be, Kit,” Ruth said. “She can’t take it in. Can you blame her? It’s an incredible concept. It will take some getting used to for all of us.”

  “Well, you can get used to it if you want to. Personally, I don’t intend to!” Kit turned to Madame Duret. “I’m going home!”

  “You cannot do that. Your parents are away.”

  “I’ll stay with friends! I’ll call Tracy tonight. Her parents will be here by morning.”

  “And they can drop me at the bus stop in the village.” Sandy moved to stand beside Kit. “I’m not going to stay in this place a minute longer than I have to. And you’d just better wait until my grandpa hears about this. He’ll blow a fuse!”

  “Girls, you are being ridiculous.” There was a cold edge to Madame’s voice. “You cannot back out at this point. The connections are still in the process of being stabilized.”

  “That’s great,” Kit said. “I’ll break them off before they do become stabilized. I’m getting out of here while my brain is still my own. If you think I’m going to sit here and let some wandering spirits take possession of it, you’re out of your mind!”

  “That is sufficient, Kathryn,” Madame said icily. “I ask you to remember, please, that you are a young lady, and you will mind your manners accordingly. I do not enjoy listening to yelling, particularly in the middle of the night. It is you who demanded this explanation, and you have now had it, and as far as I am concerned, the discussion is over. You will all please return to your beds. You need your rest in order to be alert for your morning classes.”

  “I’m not going to be here for classes,” Kit told her angrily. “By tomorrow I’ll be with the Rosenblums on the way back to the city!”

  And then she stopped as the realization came to her that she was without her cell phone and there was only one telephone at Blackwood. It was located in Madame Duret’s private office.

  The next few days moved past in a blur. Nightmare days was the way Kit thought of them. The last of October became the beginning of November, and the final leaves drifted from the branches of the trees around the pond, leaving them stark and bare against the heavy gray of the overcast sky.

  Outside the air was damp and chill with the promise of winter, and within the walls of Blackwood a different sort of chill prevailed. Even in the daytime, the house seemed filled with shadows, and in the evenings the girls gathered in the parlor to share the bright reality of the glowing TV screen, with a sense of relief at finding the banal programs still the same.

  “It’s as though this is the real world,” Sandy said thinly, gesturing toward the screen on which a rubber-faced comedian, tossing her hair flamboyantly, was imitating a famous pop star, “and we are the make-believe. Sometimes I wonder if I’m real at all.”

  “You’re real, all right,” Kit told her. “We all are. But for how long? We’ve got to get out of this place as soon as possible.”

  “How?” Sandy asked hopelessly. “We can’t get to the phone. Madame keeps the office locked at all times. The gate at the end of the drive is padlocked, and there’s no way of getting over the fence. I know because I went down to check. Those spikes on top aren’t decorations. They’re for real.”

  “I think you’re making too much of this,” Ruth interjected. She reached over to turn down the volume of the TV so they could talk more easily. “We’ll be going home at Christmastime. That’s not very far off. In the meantime, how many people our age ever get to be intricate parts of such an original experiment?”

  “Honestly, Ruth,” Sandy said in amazement, “I actually think you’re enjoying this. You don’t seem to be upset by it at all.”

  “I was in the beginning,” Ruth said, “before I understood what was happening, but now . . . well, I guess I’m more excited than anything. Imagine having an opportunity to be in on something so significant! It’s a breakthrough in science. And the insight it’s giving me is incredible. I have a grasp of mathematical concepts that I never would have believed were possible before.”

  “But it’s not you who’s grasping them,” Kit objected. “It’s somebody else, working through your mind!”

  “Not entirely,” Ruth said. “That’s the difference between our situations. You feel that you’re being used as a vehicle. You don’t have any understanding of the music that’s coming through you. You simply let it flow through you, mechanically, the way Sandy does her poetry. But in my case, I am able, just barely, to begin to get the meaning of the knowledge that’s coming through me. Math and science are my thing, they always have been. I feel now as though I’ve been sitting all my life inside a box, and suddenly someone is lifting the lid and I can look up and see the stars.”

  “Then there’s no actual personality coming into your consciousness?” Kit asked her. “Not the way there is with Sandy and me?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Ruth told her. “I think perhaps what I’m receiving is a pool of knowledge from a lot of different minds. There may be a hundred different mathematicians and scientists pouring all of their accumulated thoughts and theories into my head, and if I can receive and handle all that and eventually grow to understand it, there will come a time when it’ll be my knowledge too.”

  “The way Lynda’s painting is hers?” Sandy asked bitterly. “She’s living in a world that doesn’t even touch ours anymore.”

  “Well, Lynda’s different,” Ruth admitted. “She’s kind of gone nuts.”

  “She’s possessed,” Sandy said.

  “We have to escape.” Kit made her voice firm. “There has to be a way—”

  She broke off the sentence at the sound of voices in the hall. Professor Farley appeared in the doorway. His crinkled old face was as friendly as ever, and his white hair and little pointed beard gave him the look of an underweight Santa.

  “Nine thirty,” he said pleasantly. “It’s time for you young ladies to be climbing the stairs to get your beauty sleep.”

  Glaring at him, Kit got to her feet.

  “I don’t need beauty sleep. All I need is to get out of here and go home. My stepfather is an attor
ney, did you know that? You just wait until he finds out I’ve been held here against my will. He’ll put you in jail.”

  “Now, Kit,” the professor said, “we don’t need that kind of talk. Your parents have placed you in our charge for the semester, and it would be very lax of us indeed if we let you go charging off in all directions. You are our responsibility, both legally and morally.”

  “Morally?” Kit growled. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. What about all the letters we’ve written to our friends and families, the ones we’ve laid out on the hall table for you to mail for us in the village? You stole them! Do you call that ‘moral’? It’s not only wrong, it’s illegal.”

  “Nobody has stolen anything,” Professor Farley told her calmly. “Your letters are in a neat pile in Madame’s office, and you may have them back anytime you so desire. And some of them did go out—the early ones in which there were no disturbing references to ‘strange dreams’ and ‘odd things happening.’ I’m sure your parents were delighted to receive them.”

  “One thing I’ve been wondering,” Ruth said. “What happened to the other schools, the ones in Europe? Madame had two of them there. Why did they close down?”

  “For various reasons,” the professor told her, “none of which have anything to do with Blackwood.”

  “What about the girls in those schools?” Sandy asked. “What kinds of talents did they have? Did they compose music and write poetry?”

  “Indeed, they did,” Professor Farley said. “Many beautiful contributions to the culture of the world came forth from Madame Duret’s previous students. I think I may go so far as to say that some of their creations were masterpieces.”

  “Then where are they?” Kit asked him. “What was done with them? Why haven’t we ever heard about them?” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “The Vermeer—the one Madame said she discovered at an auction! She didn’t buy that painting at all! It was painted by a student at one of her other schools! Madame got a fortune for it! She sold it as an original!”