Amber House (8 page)

He went on in a scholarly vein, but not with me. I flipped past. After the preface came a poem, entitled “Otherwhen.” I wasn’t much for poetry, but I was curious. I read it:

So, what was that even supposed to mean? Did she actually,
literally
think time could be changed, or was I just missing the metaphor? “Otherwhen,” huh. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that the woman had spent some time in an asylum.

She’d laid out sort of a family tree — “Families of Amber House,” in which she listed all my ancestors who had actually owned the property, starting with the pair Richard had mentioned, Liam and Sorcha O’Malley. I found Deirdre Foster in the mid-seventeen hundreds, four generations later, and her husband, Captain Foster of the whale ivory and weapon obsessions, who had evidently been married to someone else before the unfortunate Deirdre. My eye ran past a roll call of solid American names: Tate and Webster, Gideon and Quincy, with a Maeve McCallister for some more Irish leavening. Maeve proved to be Fiona’s grandmother. The tree ended with Fiona’s daughter — my grandmother — Ida Warren. I guessed she was the last to be born before the book was published, and as Fiona’s only child, the one who had been destined to be the next owner of Amber House. My mother would be the last. I would never belong to that group.

My eyelids were sagging. It wasn’t even eight o’clock back home. I closed the book and leaned forward, intending to rest my head on my arm for just a minute.

And I dreamed.

The priest stood over Gramma’s grave, reminding us there was indeed “a time for everywhen under the sun.” Gramma stood beside him, watching me, a little smile on her face.

The black-coated women were gone, but other women were there, dressed strangely, standing before different headstones all over the graveyard. Each of them was watching me. Gramma said, “One day you’ll be here too.”

I tried to say, “Never,” but the word wouldn’t come from my mouth.

I seemed to hear an echo of voices, rising, “Sarah, Sarah —”

“Sarah.”

I jerked upright, the sound of many voices still in my ears. It took me a second to understand I was sitting in my gramma’s kitchen.

Jackson poked his head in the door. “Sorry.” He smiled. “Couldn’t stay awake? I thought you said it was only eight thirty your time.”

I cursed myself for being a lightweight. “Must have been all that exercise I got this afternoon, running through your tick-infested woods.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You’re sitting smack in the middle of the tick capital of the nation, if not the world.” He closed the door behind him. “The trick to avoiding them,” he said, flipping up the hood on the sweatshirt he was wearing to demonstrate, “is body armor.” He grinned, pushed the hood back down, and unzipped his jacket. “Where are we going to start?”

“Why don’t we go up the main stairs to the third floor? I haven’t been up there yet. Have you?”

“No. Let’s go.”

We crept quietly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. After we passed the second-floor landing, the staircase turned once and became instantly utilitarian. The narrow steps ended on the third floor in a short hall with three closed doors. I opened the first one on the right.

Light from a moon one-third full illumined the room, which held just four things: a small table, a chair before it, a standing
brass lamp, and a small glass-fronted bookcase filled with identical slim leather-bound volumes.
Something to come back to
, I thought.

The door to the left opened on an old and dusty scene of chaos: a broken easel knocked on its side, still clamping a torn canvas that was once a pretty landscape, and a case full of paint tubes spilled on the floor, their guts stomped out.

On the other side of the third door, our stabbing lights revealed a long, narrow garret room, with a slanted ceiling and a single window at the far end. Midway down the attic, an ancient lightbulb hung from a pipe, a string dangling below it. Jackson went over, tugged the string, and, miraculously, the bulb glowed. Its feeble light revealed a graveyard of forgotten objects shoved toward the shadows at the sides of the room, mostly filling the V at the base of the slanting ceiling.

I ran my fingers over the handle of a worn-out wicker baby carriage and thought of the infants who had ridden in it, all kin to me, all dead and buried. A headless dress dummy boasted the painfully carved waist of a corseted era. A bald china doll sat in a wooden high chair with a busted seat, her empty eyes staring out over the memory of a nursery.

I opened a trunk. The tulle veil of a yellowed wedding gown disintegrated into dust at my touch. Beneath it, the groom’s tuxedo lay above the frills of old-styled baby clothes, a child’s sailor suit, a layer of high-topped leather shoes. A silverfish slithered away from my searching hands.

“Yuck,” I commented involuntarily. I dropped the clothes back into place and returned them to darkness.

Jackson snorted. “I never thought of you as squeamish.”

Thought of me?
I shrugged and said, “Silverfish. Gross.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll give you that one. They
are
gross.” And he flashed me a big smile, wide and relaxed. He seemed —
happy
. I realized he always seemed a little tight to me, like he was under some kind of strain. But for once, he just seemed easy.
“It’s our warm, wet weather — we got a million bugs. Some you don’t see anywhere else: a beetle that only lives in the cliffs on the Chesapeake, and a spider that’s only been found along the banks of this river.”

I shivered. “I hate spiders. I have this theory that they all come from some alien thing that fell to Earth on a meteor a billion years ago.”

He chuckled. “A little bit arachnophobic?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m just scared of spiders.”

He started to explain to me the meaning of “arachnophobia,” but then realized I was making a little joke. “Ah. Humor,” he said, smiling. “Difficult concept.”

He kept up the small talk as we worked, cracking jokes, peppering me with questions: “What’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?” Me, the northern lights; him, a hurricane coming in across the Chesapeake. “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?” Me, Paris; him, New York — “That’s where my parents met.” “Which are better, cats or dogs?” Both of us — “Dogs.” I didn’t mention that cats reminded me too much of my mother. I found myself telling him about Jecie, and the time she’d led a cow up an exterior staircase at our school, and how they’d had to get a crane to lift the cow back to the ground because cows couldn’t walk down stairs. He put his head back and laughed at that one. “Jecie’s pretty cool,” he said, like he knew her from that one story. We talked for the better part of an hour as we pulled one box after another into the light of the single bulb to poke through their contents.

I could tell fairly quickly that it wasn’t likely that anything up there was going to get us closer to the Captain’s fabled diamonds. Most of it was interesting to me — like that little box at the bottom of one of your mother’s drawers that contains three baby teeth and a curl of soft fine hair — comforting, connected, and kind of disgusting all at the same time. The boxes held
documents, old clothes, broken treasures, once-loved toys — things not even the inhabitants of Amber House had deemed worth saving from the slow moldering of time. Each box wheezed out a gasp of dust and decay that settled on my skin and wafted into my lungs. After a while, it began to get to me. It seemed proof, silent and inescapable, that all the pieces of my life would one day come to this — this soft, sad, gray disintegration.

“I can’t take much more of this,” I said, struggling with the sense of suffocation. “Is there a lot left?”

Just like that, the easy-going companionability I’d been feeling from Jackson disappeared. The relaxed lines in his face retreated behind that smooth, bland look he wore so often. “Nope,” he answered. “I looked over everything from here to the window. Old china and linens and papers and junk.”

“I want to get out of here, then. I just have a couple more boxes. I wish we’d brought some tape.” I pointed to a small collection of cartons I’d set to one side. “I’d like to seal these back up, keep the mice and moths out of them.”

“I could run down and get a roll from the kitchen drawer,” he said.

And leave me up here alone?
I thought unhappily. But I said, “Yeah, that would be great. Thanks.”

“No problem.” He left through the open door.

I pulled the last couple boxes into the light. Twice, as I worked, I craned my head around and looked over my shoulder, some part of me compelled to check the room behind me. I wondered what was taking Jackson so long to return. Even if he took the stairs slowly, he should have been back.

When I finished the final box, I didn’t want to wait anymore. I’d come back and tape everything up another time.

I spotted Jackson’s sweatshirt slung over the back of a broken chair and tucked it under my arm to free up my hands for a box
of photos I wanted to take with me. I realized, belatedly, that I would have to turn the overhead light out before I left. It made me feel a little sick — the thought of being swallowed by the attic’s shadows. With one last glance around to reassure myself, I switched my flashlight on and tugged the light’s string to shut it off.

Wedging the flashlight under my elbow with the sweatshirt, I bent to pick up the box. As I stood back up, fully burdened, the flashlight slipped loose, deflected off my leg on the way down, and thunked to the floor. I froze there in disbelief, helpless, with my hands full, and watched it roll away from me as if in slow motion. It came to a stop deep under the slanted roof, its glow trapped by the dusty mounds to either side of it.

With the darkness crowding me, I set the box down and bent low, then got on my hands and knees. Wishing fervently that Jackson had not gone, feeling keenly the place between my shoulders, naked and exposed, I reached in and under the angled ceiling. My fingers brushed a pile of something cold and metallic that made me flinch away.

And the light snuffed out.

Blackness wrapped around me like floodwaters. I felt like I was drowning, like the air had departed with the light. I backed up and stood, seeking blindly for the hanging bulb’s string, my arms up, my hands searching. I kicked something, staggered, paused.

Silence rang in my ears, almost a buzz, a hum, a sigh. A rapid pulse of air. Which resolved into panting.

Huh-eh-huh-eh-huh-eh-huh-eh-huh-eh-huh-eh-huh.

The sound came from in front of me, from the farthest corner of the attic.

My blood all turned to water that rained down inside me, freezing cold. I was pinned on the sound of that breath, immobilized. All of my senses riveted.

I could see a little now — the charcoal piles of relics in the shadows, a slanting column of thin moonlight coming through the room’s only window. I squinted to penetrate the darkness beyond it. Maybe I saw a pale shape. Maybe it was crouching there, just beyond the reach of the light. Maybe it was looking at me.

The panting stopped. The silence rose, agonizing. I strained to listen; I strained to see. I waited for the sound of movement from the attic’s end.

And heard steps behind me, on the stairs.

Jackson.

Wild with relief, I turned. But could see, could sense, that the attic door was closed.
Jackson left it open; I know Jackson left it open.
I could sense, could feel, that whoever had climbed the stairs was now standing just beyond that closed door. Standing; not moving; not speaking. Not helping.

Behind me, the sound of chain sliding over wood.

I felt so cold, so squeezed, I could hardly draw in breath. A tear oozed like blood from the corner of my eye.

I made myself turn. I made myself look.

A woman stood in the shaft of moonlight. She was all darkness to me, backlit by the window. I could see thick curls of black hair, the curves of muscled arms, a shapeless drape of translucent gown. All motionless. She might have been carved of stone. A spider ran down a lock of her hair, and air escaped me in the smallest gasp. I wanted to shove my fist in my mouth to stop the scream rising in my throat.

She spoke. The voice was rough, ragged, hissing, soft.

“Are you listening? Can you hear me?”

Yes
, I thought.
Yes, yes, yes, I can hear you. Yes.

“You know I cannot be trapped here. You know I can leave this place any time I wish. You know you cannot stop me.”

Richard said the house was haunted. Richard said they kept Deirdre locked away. Dead, demented Deirdre. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

Her head tilted sideways. The voice rose almost to a scream. “You think you are safe? You think I can’t hurt you? I can. I can get you. I can find you in your dreams.”

I heard, behind the echo of that scream, a small one-note moan coming from my throat.

“Do not sleep,” she crooned as if to a baby. “No, no. Do not ever sleep. Because I live there now.”

And then she started to move, started to come for me. A rush of chains, a flutter of cloth. And the shriek I had kept locked in, behind my teeth, finally escaped.

“Sarah?” Jackson yelled from the stairs. “Sarah? What is it? What happened?”

I whirled and ran for the door. Saw Jackson’s flashlight reach up from below. Saw too late that the door was not closed — was still open. I smacked into its edge. Flashes of color starred my vision. I sagged.

Jackson caught me. He sank down to the floor, letting me lean against him, curled into his arm, resting against his chest. I felt a massive ache in my forehead. I ran a shaking hand over it. A huge bump was already forming.

“She was right behind me,” I whispered.

“There’s nobody here, Sarah.”

“Turn on the light.
Turn on the light!
” I was screeching, and I didn’t want to be, but I couldn’t help it.

He stood, found the string. The light returned. I tried to stand, but collapsed, white spots blotting my vision. Jackson caught me again.

“Rest a minute,” he said. “Tell me what you saw.”

I looked around to make sure that she was gone. “You’ll think I’m crazy,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“It was a ghost,” I said into my lap.

“No …” He struggled with his words. “It wasn’t … You didn’t see … a ghost,” he said.

“You don’t know. I saw her. I saw her!” My voice was getting loud again.

“Shh,” he said, trying to calm me. “It wasn’t a ghost. It’s …” He was shaking his head, almost as if he didn’t want to say the words that were coming from his mouth. “It’s … the house. It’s Amber House.”

I stared at him, the pain in my head suddenly unbearable. “What are you talking about? There was a woman. I saw her. She tried to hurt me.”

“No,” he said. “No. Ida saw things too. She called them echoes. When she touched certain things, little bits of the past came to life for her. She said they were the house’s memory.”

“Echoes? The house’s memory?”
What? Besides
— “Why didn’t you tell me? If you knew about it? Why didn’t you warn me?”

He looked down, shrugging slightly. “I wasn’t sure you’d see them. Didn’t know for sure that they were real, ’cause Ida was a little —”

Crazy?
I silently finished for him as he went on.

“And then you said Nanga wanted to talk to you. And I thought” — he made another little shrugging motion — “it was between you and Nanga.” He paused. “Ida said they can’t hurt you. It’s just the past. Like little windows on the past. And you can see into them. It’s a special gift that only some of the women in your family have.”

The crazy ones
, I thought. I wiped my face with my hand. I realized I was rocking slightly, like I sometimes do when I’m upset. I made myself stop. “They can’t hurt me?”

“No. That’s what Ida said.”

“And Nanga knows something about this?”

“If anyone does, she does.”

“Who is Nanga?”

“She’s … a relative of mine. I think she could help. Ida always said that Nanga wants to help, that she has some kind of plan.”