Wild Fell (28 page)

At the edge of the hallway I looked down over the banister and shouted, “Hank! Where are you? It’s so dark—shout so I can follow your voice!”

Hank yelled something encouraging in reply as I continued to descend the staircase, feeling my way in the feeble light from the moon behind the stained glass windows, but Hank’s voice was fainter now, as though she had moved deeper in the house. I heard a door slam—
the kitchen door?
—and I staggered down the hallway toward the sound. There were brief bursts of moonlight through the windows as I passed the empty library and the parlour.

“Hank!” I shrieked. “Where the fuck are you? I can’t find you!”

I heard another crash, this one coming from the dining room.

Oh Jesus, finally,
I thought as I ran down the hallway. Then a dreadful thought followed that one
. What if she’s hurt? Maybe she hurt herself coming here to save me, and now she can’t call out anymore. Oh please, God, let her be all right. Let us both be all right, and let us both get away from this place tonight.

Hank was not in the dining room, either, but I saw the door of the servants’ entrance slowly swinging back and forth. The sound I had heard must have been Hank crashing into it on her way to . . . the kitchen? I ran through the doorway into the kitchen.

It was empty. But at its far end, the doorway to the cellar stood ajar. No, not ajar. It was wide open.

In a voice not much louder than a whisper, I called out, “Hank? Are you there? Where are you? Answer me,” I pleaded. “Please, Hank.”

And then from the cellar, I heard Hank’s voice. It was clear and wonderfully calm and strong—the most calming voice I knew.

“Jamie, I’m here. I’m downstairs. Come on down.”

“Hank, can you come up?”

“Jamie, come on,” came the mocking-but-still-loving-bro voice in the cellar. “Don’t be such a goddamn
girl!
You’ve got to check this out! Then we’ll go. I’ve got a boat on the beach. I’ll take you back to the city. We’ll drive all night and make it a road trip. I’m going to need a Timmy’s double-double before we hit the highway. Come on, hurry up!” It was Hank’s warm, joyful laugh—the essence of all things Hank—which finally made my decision for me.

Whatever had happened at Wild Fell in the last twenty-four hours, my best friend was here and no problem was, or would ever be, a match for her ability to solve it and triumph. Everything would be all right. We would be on our way home to the city within the hour. I crossed the floor to the open doorway at the far end of the kitchen. Then, careful not to slip, I climbed down the stairs to the cellar where Hank was waiting.

As I descended the steps, I felt the cold drift of air I had noticed that morning. I became aware, too, of a weird flickering glow emanating from somewhere in the basement’s depths. The glow grew brighter as I descended farther into the subterranean part of Wild Fell, as did the chill and the aroma of dirt and wintry rot.

When I reached the foot of the stairs, I paused in the antechamber and tried to let my eyes grow accustomed to this deeper darkness, but also to locate the source of the weird flickering pinprick of light. Finally, I did. The doorway to the third room—the farthest room from the entrance to the cellar, the room that had been locked tight that afternoon, but from behind whose door I had heard things moving—stood open.

It was the latest in the series of doors that had been open tonight—the front door, the yellow bedroom, the servants’ door to the kitchen, the cellar door in the kitchen, now this one far beneath Wild Fell—none of them by me. In a voice just past louder than a whisper, I said, “Hank? Where are you? I can’t see anything down here.”

This time there was no reply. Then the cellar door to the kitchen slammed shut in the darkness above me, sealing me underground.

Because I was likely insane by that point, I believed entirely that it was still logical to conclude that Hank was in the third room in the basement, that Hank had lit the candles whose light I could now see, that Hank would be the one waiting for me as I made my way along the hallway, feeling my way along the rough stone walls of the cellar.

I passed the portraits I’d left stacked in front of the doorway to the second room. The portrait of the predatory Alexander Blackmore was where I’d left it: turned like an errant schoolboy forced to face the wall after misbehaving in class.

“You miserable cocksucker,” I said to the back of the portrait. “You fucking child molester. Yeah,
you
, you rapist piece of shit. I know what you did here. The whole town knows now, you prick. I hope you burn in hell.”

The light beckoned me, growing brighter and brighter with each step of my progress, until finally I stood in the open doorway of the third room. It was empty.

Hank was not there. Hank had never been there.

The walls were thick with dust, so thick in fact that the candlelight seemed to be absorbed by it. Yes, someone had indeed lit candles, two to be exact, each rising out of a floor-standing hammered-silver pillar candlestick.

In the centre of the room, flanked by the two candles, stood a large full-length mirror whose glass, latticed with webs of tiny cracks, looked almost dark blue in the candlelight.

My eyes were drawn to the mirror’s frame, the thick gold scrollwork, and the ornate design. When I stepped closer to better examine it, I saw that what I had initially taken to be flowers carved into the gold were in fact runic symbols, interspersed with tiny, exquisite renderings of carved moths. I realized then that I
had
seen this mirror before, if only the edge of it.

This was the mirror from the photograph I’d found in the library, the photograph of Rosa Blackmore posing in the glass more than a hundred years before.

I turned my back to the glass and said, “Amanda? Are you there?”

There was silence. And then that familiar voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Yet as I had when I was a child, I still felt my mouth form the words—her words.

Yes, Jamie. I’m here. Turn around.

“Amanda, why? Why have you done all of this? What could you possibly want from me?”

Jamie, look into the mirror.

I moaned and covered my face with my hands. “No, Amanda, I won’t look into the mirror. Go away. You’re not real. None of this is real.”

Jamie, look into the mirror. Look in the mirror and all of this will be finished.

“No. You’re still making me see things that aren’t real, that aren’t there, just like you did when I was nine. My name is Jameson Browning,” I began, reciting the basic facts of my life like a mantra to ward off evil spirits. “I am a middle-aged man with a father in an Alzheimer’s hospital. My father is a kind, loving man. And I am the owner of Wild Fell and Blackmore Island. I bought them from Mrs. Fowler with money from my accident. You’re not real.”

Jamie, you’re behaving like a child. Don’t you want to understand why you’re here?

I squeezed my eyes shut. “You are not real, Amanda. I reject your existence. You have never been real, and you have nothing to explain to me about why I’m here. I’m here because I bought this house. I own it. Wild Fell is mine.”

Oh is it?
This time there was humour in the voice.
How interesting. We’ll have a long, long time to discuss the proper ownership of Wild Fell. But in the meantime tell me—haven’t you ever wondered why you’ve always believed your father was perfect, Jamie? I always knew mine wasn’t. Do you really think that’s normal? Do you think that’s how normal boys, or men, think of their fathers? That they’re perfect?

“He
is
perfect.” Even to my own ears my voice had acquired a childish singsong
na-na-na-na
quality. “He was kind to me every day of his life. He was kind to everyone. Why are you talking about my father?”

Because I’m going to kill him tonight, Jamie, that’s why. I failed that night on the bridge when the policeman saved him. But there’s no one to protect him now. I will visit him again tonight while he sleeps. You have no idea of the dreams I send him, Jamie. Terrible, terrible dreams. I torture him with them. Tonight I will have his last breath.

“Why, Amanda? Why do you keep hurting people? Why do you keep hurting
me
?”

Touch the glass, Jamie.

And then because there was nothing left to do, no other way to make the voice stop, no way to bring an end to the terrible lies it whispered, I looked into Rosa Blackmore’s mirror and placed the tips of my fingers against the cold glass one last time.

This time there was no shock, no violence to my body. I felt nothing pass through me. For a nanosecond, I caught a glimpse of my own shape in the dark blue glass.

Then the surface of the mirror rippled and shimmered beneath my touch, reflecting not the underground room beneath Wild Fell but rather the night-contours of the bedroom in my old house, the house in which I had grown up, the bedroom in which I was nine.

The bedside lamp had been switched off, but I could make out the dark hulk of my father’s body looming over mine, my own body curled in on itself, hugging the pillow to my midsection. My back shook with the force of my sobbing. As I watched, my mirror-father traced his fingers along my spine, lingering at the place where my lower back met my waist. When he spoke, there was no love in this voice, no tenderness, only shame.

“Jamie, don’t cry,” my mirror-father said. “I’ll just stay here with you here for a little while. Until you fall asleep. What’s wrong? There’s nothing to be scared of. Are you upset about the bike? We’ll get it back. You shouldn’t have gone out of our neighbourhood, but what happened wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about?”

“No, Daddy, I’m not upset about the bike. Please daddy no . . . it hurts too much. No more. I’ll do anything you want. Please, daddy, I love you. I’ll be good. I won’t tell, I promise. But no more.”

“Hush, Jamie,” my father crooned. He began to rub my shoulders. “I’ll just stay for a little bit. Just until you fall asleep.” Then he lay down beside me on the bed and put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in close, spooning his body around mine, locking my nine-year old body to his in an implacable grip.

Beside my narrow bed, the wall mirror. Innocuous looking, perhaps, but not empty. It had never been empty. It had always been a doorway, all through the lost years of my now-remembered childhood, a childhood in which every mirror in every room I had ever stepped had been a doorway.

“No!” I screamed. “That never happened! You made me see that. That’s
not
what happened! He
never
hurt me! You were the one who hurt me, Amanda . . . Rosa . . . whoever you are! You killed Manitou; you killed that little boy who stole my bike with your wasps, just like
you
killed
your
father, because
he
hurt
you
. My father would never hurt me! Never!”

We’ll kill him, Jamie.
Amanda’s voice was implacable.
He has always hurt us, and we have always killed him. When we sent the wasps that day when our father was out riding, our father died terribly. If we had succeeded that night on the bridge in the city, our father would have died quickly. In this life, he has sought to escape our vengeance through oblivion, through forgetfulness. But we found him, anyway. We will always kill him and he will always die, no matter how hard he tries to forget what he did to us.

“THERE IS NO
WE!
YOU ARE NOT ME! THAT IS
YOUR
STORY, NOT MINE! THAT HAPPENED TO
YOU
, NOT ME!”

Her voice was the tauntingly cruel voice of a sadistic child impersonating a vastly patient adult woman, an adult woman with all the time in the world for torture.

Are you
sure
it never happened, Jamie? Don’t be stupid—I just showed you what your father did to you. How do you know it didn’t happen? Haven’t you always wondered why your mother
really
left him, Jamie? Do you not wonder if, perhaps, your mother was jealous of the attention your father was paying
you
?

I turned my back on the mirror. “You’re making me see things that aren’t real, Amanda. It’s your trick. You’re not real. None of this is real. None of this happened. You’re a liar—you always were. You’re a sick, evil liar.”

How do you
know
they aren’t real, Jamie? How do you know he didn’t hurt you and you didn’t just forget about it when you smashed your bedroom mirror, like you forgot about everything else? You forgot about
me
, didn’t you? What else have you forgotten?

“Shut up, Amanda! Shut up!”

Who did you
really
buy Wild Fell from, Jamie? Mrs. Fowler? How could you have? She’s dead. You saw her grave. Everyone you’ve spoken to swears this house is a ruin. But you see furniture and paintings and rugs and silver. You see walls and doors and windows. Are they real?

“They’re real, Amanda. I’m standing here in the basement of Wild Fell. The floor is real. The walls are real. The house is real. I’ve touched it. I slept in your bed. The only thing not real here is you.”

Then why are you talking to me, Jamie, if I’m not real?

“Shut up! Shut up! Get out of my head!”

She was pitiless, relentless.
And if they are
not
real, what else is not real? Are
you
real, Jamie? Do you exist? How do you know you’re not just a character in a ghost story I wrote one evening to amuse myself?

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”

No one believes in Wild Fell, Jamie. No one believes in
you.
Where do you think you really are?
Who
do you think you really are?

I looked wildly around the room to find something that I might use to smash the glass into a million pieces—to stop the lying voice I now knew had never been the voice of a little girl, but had always been Rosa Blackmore’s voice, across time and through the doorways of any number of dimensions in between. She said she would always find me. She’d had it carved onto her own gravestone.