Authors: Miranda Beall
The dwindling light was already casting the long
shadows of bare, spindly trees like crooked black snakes over the white snow when Crossett turned off the ignition and he and Twynne sat silently before the great vacant front windows of Wightefield. They loomed like black portals to the underworld, yawning in the crystalline snow that had piled itself along their frames and at their bases. A light wind groaned softly about the eves, creaking the old gutters and gently tapping an outside door at the back of the house.
Like Aeneas, like Odysseus, it seemed to Crossett that
he had to traverse the Underworld to ask of the shade of one who had gone before the way home .
The two men sh
uffled through the thigh-high snow that lay undisturbed before the pillared porch of Wightefield. To the left a line of leafless, stringy weeping willows waved their drooping branches in greeting. Winded, Crossett and Twynne reached the porch at last and ascended the snowy steps to the front door for which Crossett produced the key Lamerie had given him. The immense silence of the great hall was softly broken by the rush of cold wind that ushered in the two men. The circular staircase wound before them to the second floor, powdered with lightly glistening snow that had sifted through the thinning roof and ceilings of the upper floor. The steps seemed covered with millions of shards of glittering glass. A huge wooden beam broken loose from the upper hallway ceiling had long ago crashed down where it lay midway to the bottom, having dented and splintered the oaken handrail in its descent. In the parlor to the right, broken sticks of furniture fragments glittered also with the snow blown through the broken window panes. A fine swath of a cold white cloth laid over the floor beneath, fanning out thinner and thinner until on the far side of the room lay only bare wood, whose finish had worn with the repeated rains and snows and the humid summers and dry autumns. A few brown leaves still lay huddled in the corners, rustled now and then by the breezes escaping from the cold outside into the relative shelter of the looming empty rooms.
Cro
ssett’s boots scuffed the naked floor boards as he made his way to the fireplace where the mantel had once been. It appeared in the waning light to be no more than a black husk of a hearth, a gaping opening in the wall, a dark black entrance to the Underworld.
“This is it,” he said turning to Twynne as he laid his hand upon the flat surface.”
Not much to see, but perhaps if we—“
Both men raised their heads at the same time.
“Did you hear that?” Crossett asked Twynne.
“Yes. It sounded like someone
calling.”
“Calling who?”
“I couldn’t make it out.”
“Maybe someone sees the car and is wondering
who’s in here. If it’s Jake, we want him to know we have Lamerie’s permission to be here.”
“I’l
l go look,” Twynne volunteered.
“Get the flashlight on your way back, will you?”
Crossett called after him.
He
turned his attention to the fireplace and began running his hand along the rough surface looking for the line of where the mantel was once lodged but feeling nothing extraordinary in the stone face. Gingerly, he ran his hand up into the fireplace and felt for the flue, which he eventually found and gave a wrench when it did not come easily. It opened with a puff of soot and snow that sent him coughing into the room. The sound echoed through the chambered house, ricocheting off old beams and plaster walls, calling to itself from the farthest rooms with a hollow, lingering moan. After waiting a few moments for the air to clear, he went back to the hearth to retrace the areas he had already examined. He even ran his hands through the sooty mess at the bottom of the fireplace, lifted the andirons with a grunt, probed with a shattered table leg along the bricked back of the fireplace, and finally flung the piece of wood in exasperation across the room where it rattled into a corner.
The light was fast fading, and
he realized Twynne had been gone now for some time. At the window he peered through one of the broken panes and called Twynne’s name softly. When he received no response, he strained to see in the gathering darkness, but there were so many skeletal winter trees he could not in the shifting gloom distinguish what he thought was the figure of a man. He called softly again. It could not be Twynne, he thought, because Twynne had worn no hat. The frozen figure was wearing what appeared to be a fez of some sort. He could see the trailing tassel in the moving air. Something long and thin rested by his side. Or was it a man, indeed, he asked himself as he squinted into the darkness. Perhaps it was just a slip of a naked tree to which the shadows lent the guise of a man. If so, a different angled view may tell the tale, and so he went to the front porch and sought the little tree from there. He could not find it. Camouflaged, he thought, by larger trees and the shadows they threw among themselves. An intermittent rustling sounded like no more than the light, icy winter breeze that moved the air.
“Twynne!” Onl
y the sighing wind moving over the slick surface of the snow answered him. “Come on, Twynne! Answer me!”
He
stood back a moment from the edge of the porch. It seemed unlikely that Twynne could not hear him. Why did he not answer then?
“
Twynne!”
A cold kno
t began to twist in Crossett’s stomach, an old familiar knot. The discomfort radiated out into his limbs before he succeeded in stifling it. It was the same feeling he always got when he realized Twynne and his brothers were nowhere in sight and that the next time he saw them they would be all over him, shoving him into—
He could n
ot think about it. Would Twynne try such an old trick here in the darkness of Wightefield? His stomach crept. For a wild moment of panic, he felt sure he would. It was a part of Twynne to prey on Crossett’s inner weaknesses and feel a sense of fulfillment from it. He had seen it countless times in Twynne’s dark eyes when he would explode from the confines of the suffocating closet to move freely once again into the greatness of the room beyond.
He backed through the doorway
into the darkened hall as he closed the front door. He was being foolish. Twynne had probably just gone around the back of the house to look and could not hear Crossett calling. Undoubtedly, he would be back soon. Perhaps he was already headed back to the front door.
Hi
s breath was coming more heavily in the woozy silence of the house as he turned to walk back into the parlor. He decided he would wait there where he could look out the windows and see the car and the expanse of the front lawn. Besides, it would be where Twynne would expect to find him, since it was where he had left him. The receding light made the shadows it cast on its retreat dance before the exposed fireplace, conjoining themselves in lethargy into the loose form of a woman turning from Crossett’s startled gaze to the outer rim of where the mantel once lodged. Her movements were frenetic as she sought to complete whatever desperate mission on which she found herself. And she turned once again to Crossett with recognition in her strangely shifting features.
His feet carried h
im closer to the apparition, which blurred and grew in the dimness until it was indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness. His hands sought the spot her own filmy appendages had struggled with until he felt a block of stone give way, push in, and then slide gently out. As the stone gave way with a grind he thought he heard another sound also, like the distant report of a rifle. His hands froze in their search for just a second as he strained his ears. Just the wind in a low hum, whistling now and then through the jagged edges of shattered window panes, was all he could hear. Sometimes thunder came with snow storms he remembered, and he returned to his work. Into the dark recesses of the stone pocket he plunged his hand feeling the cold metal and faceted stones within. In the last wisp of light in the parlor windows, he saw the green of the emeralds and the soft glow of the 24 karat gold settings of the fabulous and fabled Wighte necklace. Grasping it in his hand, he stashed it deep within his pants pocket and began to flee the room to the front door when he heard it—a low, droning thump whose familiarity strung his heart along a wire. He stopped breathing for a moment wondering if he would hear it again. It echoed lowly throughout he house, threatening to become a bang, seeming to vibrate without doing so, resonating in the hollowness of his chest. He knew that sound, had heard it night after night for weeks, had combed Winterhurst for its source, and finally tracked it to the hideous closet in Maude’s room, where he had stood unable to open the door and expose the perpetrator, so enormous was the dread in his heart.
Would Twy
nne play such a trick in the darkness of Wightefield?
He beg
an up the old staircase, stepping over the fallen beam, following the increasing noise up to the rooms beyond. How long had he sought its source? It drew him like the bewildered insect to a flame, revealing nothing, promising everything. Maude’s small form with the apparition bent over her silky white neck flashed into his mind. The recesses of a closet he had not seen in 22 years yawned before his mind’s eye like Tartarus. Through the hollow hallway he went, into the far back bedroom until he faced a dark oak closet behind which the banging increased in frantic crescendo. Woodenly, he laid his hand upon the knob and turned it; the latch slipped down, and the door hingeless swung open. The deafening sound stopped immediately, and the house hung in the silence. Into the dark chasm of the closet, Crossett walked like a man entering his own tomb.
Then he heard s
omething in the room behind him, a kind of sliding noise that was growing louder as if something were being dragged along the filth and dirt of the floor boards. He turned around, but just as he reached for the closet door, it slammed shut, and a shuffling ensued beyond it, ending in a thud. He reached for the knob to discover that there was none on the inside.
He reacted so
immediately he did not himself realize how close to the surface were all his fears. They exploded from his chest, a whiteness passed before his eyes even in the pitch blackness of the closet, and his mind lost its grasp on the reasonable procession of thought. His fists came down on the heavy wood with a furious pound as a growl escaped his clenched teeth and reverberated within the small confines of the closet. Again and again he thundered on the closet door, the perspiration dripping down his temples and beading within his clenched fists, covering his shirt beneath his coat with large ovals of darkened spots. The quickness of his breath could not keep up with the throbbing of his heart tightening within his chest in its vain attempt to support so monstrous a fear and so great a rage. Human speech was blurred in the feral noises that moved in Crossett’s throat and sputtered spittle on the immovable oaken door. He began to kick the paneled wood, rattling within its frame and refusing to give way. His hands flew to his head which he pressed mercilessly as if to squeeze the panic from his own brain, and he thrashed in the small enclosure of the closet until he had all but exhausted himself.
“Who is
there?” he finally yelled. Something slid along the outside of the door, rattling the knob and whispering.
“I hear you! Twynne,
you bastard! You’ve proven your point! Now let me out!”
Bu
t only a soft, unintelligible whisper answered him. Crossett’s face contorted and tears involuntarily streamed down his face.
“You think this is f
unny, you son of a bitch? You always enjoyed it, didn’t you, when you locked me in that closet at Winterhurst? Great sport, wasn’t it? Open this door!” he shrieked, pounding it now again, the sound resonating through the house, echoing into the parlors below for only the stained and spotted walls to hear, for only the broken panes to shiver a little from.
He pounded for some time,
still hearing the shifting going on outside the door, hearing the knob move a little now and then. Then he slumped into a corner, listening to the low shuffling and whisperings outside the door that responded to no pleas or calls or threats, and he wondered if it was possible to die of fear alone.
He would never be sure of the sounds and sights he
next witnessed. The pitch blackness was like that behind one’s eyes from which very slowly shapes and colors emerge from the periphery of closed vision. They swirl into the oblivion of the darkness as others grow from specks along the rim and blossom into a kaleidoscope of neon color. Some had faces. Some had features. Others had only limbs, perhaps this one but not that. They danced before him in the stillness like captivated children pleased by their own creations. Some came very close, others kept their distance, still others hovered within the recesses to watch alone at what seemed so great a distance Crossett began to wonder at the relation of space and time, how so small a closet could be now so immense that it held the eternity into which we are all finally consigned. The little closet grew and expanded its indeterminable borders. It housed with him a nether world so expansive it defied any concept of boundary, and he began to feel as though he were floating on an earthless plane whose dimensions the fleshy mind could not conceive. Their souls passed through his, and a long acquaintance grew at last into a deeper knowledge as impressions even from infancy and long before coalesced before him into featured embodiments that shifted and metamorphosed from one image to another. They were all familiar—from dreams, from shapes caught in the corner of his eye, from phantoms spun by the darkness before a child’s eyes, from catches in the belly presaging things to come.