Mrs. God (11 page)

A space opened up before him, and he moved more confidently toward the hovering plane of the wall. After a single step he tripped over some low piece of furniture, screamed, and fell. The glass flew out of his hand and shattered far off to his left. He landed on his left arm, still clutching Isobel's papers. Sharp, definite pain shot from his elbow to his shoulder, then settled into a constant throb. Standish began to push himself along the floor like a grub. He realized that he was very drunk.

From somewhere above him, he heard a woman laugh.

His entire body grew cold, and his testicles shrank back up into his body. He tried to speak but his throat would not work. The laughter expired in a short happy sigh. The severed tendons of Standish's throat reattached themselves. “Where are you?” he whispered.

Silence.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

He heard a soft flurry of movement behind him, then thought he heard rapid footsteps moving down the staircase.

Standish groped his way across the room until his outstretched fingers found a wooden door.

He came out into the blaze of light that was the Inner Gallery, rubbing his eyes with his left hand. Reality wavered around him, golden plates and golden forks and a deserted mansion and severed heads and a woman who vanished into laughter and a baby not his baby in a past that—

The Birth of the Past.

He shook his head. He needed sleep. Cool drafts moved around Standish's ankles. He looked through the dark windows and saw the windows of the Seneschals' suite shining back at him.

While he watched, a small dark shadow scuttled across the shade of the window on the left, and the lights went off as abruptly as the slamming of a door. It had not seemed the shadow of an ordinary human being. All the contradictory feelings within Standish melted into a single act of acceptance: he was in the Land, and he would follow where he was led.

Standish let himself into the Fountain Rooms, moved unseeing through the living room, and threw himself onto the bed.

nine

…
B
orn in Huckstall, the fleeing blue-eyed boy it was?

Standish's bed stood beside the long pond in cool moonlight, and a disembodied voice had just spoken lines about Huckstall and a blue-eyed boy which, though nonsense, had caused a turmoil in his breast. The dark pond stretched out before him. He held a sleeping baby in his arms, and the baby slept so rosily because it had just nursed at his breasts, which were womanly, large and smooth-skinned, with prominent brown nipples. A drop of sweet milk hung from his left nipple, and with his free hand Standish brushed it away. The peace of holding the baby in the bed beneath the moon was a kind of ecstasy. Then he remembered the speaking voice and the creature in the window, and looked down the side of the pond to the group of leaning trees. Their twisting branches concealed a being, male or female, who wished to remain hidden. Standish felt a simple profound apprehension that this being wanted to harm his baby. It—he or she—would kill him too, but the threat to himself was a weightless scrap, a nothing against his determination to protect his baby. As if in response to the threat, his breasts tingled and ached and began to express tear-shaped drops of white milk that leaked, rhythmically as drips from a faucet, from his nipples.

From somewhere either in the depths of the silvery trees or beyond them a woman began to laugh—

—and in the darkness of the Fountain Rooms, without breasts or baby, Standish flew into sudden wakefulness. His heart banged, and his body felt as if it had been torn from an embrace. Someone else was in the room: the dream-danger had been supplanted by this real danger. Whoever was in the room had just ceased to move, and now stood frozen in the darkness, looking down at him.

The publican of The Duelists had told the truth and Robert Wall had lied: an American had been lured here and lulled to sleep with rich food and strong wine, and the murderer had crept into his room and killed him.

Standish felt with a horrible certainty that the murdered American had been decapitated.

He tried to see into the darkness. His baby had been taken from him, and a being who meant him nothing but ill stood wrapped in darkness ten feet away.

“I know you're there,” Standish said, and instantly knew she was not.

There were no giggles now. Standish lifted his head, and nothing else in the room moved. He was now as alone as when he followed the woman's laughter down the kitchen stairs. Yet it seemed to him a second later that someone
had
been in the room with him, someone who circled all about him, someone who was a part of Esswood, Miss Seneschal or his beloved (it occurred to Standish that his beloved might actually
be
Miss Seneschal), someone who needed only the right time to appear before him. She could not show herself to him now, for he did not know enough now.

She would show herself when he had earned the right to see her.

He remembered dreaming of having large breasts so engorged with milk they leaked, and absently rubbed his hands over his actual chest, slightly flabby and covered with a crust of coarse black hair. Something about Huckstall pushed at his consciousness urgently enough to make him sit up in bed—he felt pricked by a pin. But what could Huckstall have to do with his work, which of course was the meaning of the baby in his dream?

Standish got out of bed to pee. A haze of light touched the bedroom window, and he turned just in time to look through the slats of the shutter and see the Seneschals' light snap off again.

ten

A
n impossible thing happened the next morning. On the way to the dining room by way of “his” staircase and corridor, Standish lost his way inside Esswood and found himself wandering around strange corners, down unfamiliar steps, past locked and unlocked doors.

Standish had suffered very few hangovers, but each of them had made him unreasonably hungry—he wanted only to get downstairs and devour whatever was on the table, even if it had a funny name and looked like earwax. He almost ran down the stairs. His head pounded, and his eyes were oddly blurry—no more alcohol, not ever, he promised himself. He passed through the remnant of the huge spiderweb and pawed at it in revulsion. After a time, it seemed to him that he had circled around and around so many times that he must have gone past the first floor. He slowed down. The walls of the staircase were of whitewashed stone that was cold to the touch. When had the walls changed to stone? He looked over his shoulder. The curve of the wall, the iron sconce, even the dim gray light seemed strange.

Soon he reached the bottom of the staircase. The corridor seemed both like and unlike the one he knew. Just ahead was a tall door and a dim hallway. Everything seemed a little darker and dirtier than he remembered. He could not be certain that he was in a new part of the house until he had hurried down to the end of the corridor and found a blank wall where a statue of a boy should have been. He turned the corner and saw another, smaller flight of steps leading down to a concrete floor.

He stopped moving. Now it seemed to him that he had turned both right and left, blindly, several times without paying attention—his stomach had led him. He had a vague impression, like an image from a dream, of corridors branching off in an endless series of stone floors and dingy concrete walls. He felt a flutter of nausea. He turned around. A dark hallway extended past thick wooden doors and ended at a T juncture. He groaned. For a moment the sense of being lost overwhelmed his hunger. He backtracked down the hallway and tried the nearest door. It was locked.

The next door opened into a room filled with irregular thin white things, bits of kindling. Dusty frames containing dead moths and butterflies hung on the wall. High in the opposite wall was a little window like a window in a prison cell. The air smelled dead. Standish peered into the room and recognized that the objects piled on the floor were bones. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of skeletons had been dismembered here. He suddenly remembered the story of Bluebeard's wife, and the ache in his head instantly became a red-hot wire of pain. Standish looked up and down the corridor and took a step into the awful room.

Skulls with long antlers lay in a corner. Standish walked nearer to the piles of bones. Many of them looked like the bones of animals. The faded colors of butterflies in a frame caught his eye, and he noticed a handwritten label taped beneath the glass. Nile Expedition, 1886. He began breathing again. Some cracked old Seneschal who fancied himself a naturalist had brought back these bones and butterflies from Africa in a crate.

He left the roomful of bones and hovered in the corridor. He could not retrace his steps through the series of rights and lefts he had unthinkingly taken. Opposite the bone room were two more doors, and Standish stepped up to one of them and opened it.

Things he could not see moved out of sight—he had an impression of fat little bodies diving behind the stacks of newspapers and magazines that filled the room. He imagined that malevolent eyes peeked at him, and thought he could smell fear and hatred. His eye snagged on the headline of a
Yorkshire Post
that lay on the floor, as if one of the little creatures had dropped it.
PREGNANT WIFE, LOVER TORTURED THEN BEHEADED
.
Grisly Discovery on Huckstall Slag Heap
. From somewhere quite near came a sly, breathless
tick tick tick
of sound that might have been laughter.

Standish stepped back. The entire room seemed poised to strike at him. He backed across the threshold and slammed the door. Standish felt light-headed, scared, unexpectedly brave—his discovery of this part of Esswood could not be accidental. He had been intended to find his way here. There were no accidents, no coincidences. He was
supposed
to be here. He had been
chosen
.

He tried the other door on that side of the corridor, and found it locked. Standish moved to the end of the corridor and went slowly down the steps.

A lower, narrower hallway led to an open door to a tiny cement room in which a greasy armchair two feet high sat beneath a hanging light bulb. On the far side of the chair was another door. Standish stepped inside. To one of the cell's concrete walls had been taped a reproduction of a painting in the Fountain Rooms—a small dog scampered before a carriage drawing up to Esswood. Standish crossed the room and opened the other door. Beyond it was a dark chamber that contained a huge squat body with a Shiva-like forest of arms that snaked to every part of the low ceiling. Gauges and dials decorated the furnace, and beyond it other machines leaned against the far wall: penny-farthing bicycles, a row of axes in descending sizes like a hanged family, a sewing machine with a treadle, a vacuum cleaner with a long limp neck and a distended bladder.

This was the library's rhyme, Standish saw. Up there, subtle spiritual things breathed and slept in file boxes; here, dirty things pumped out heat.

He went deeper into the basement. Standish peered into rooms filled with dolls and broken toys, with five cribs and five baby beds and five black perambulators as high off the ground as a princess's carriage, with musty folded sheets and blankets, with faded children's books, wooden blocks, and stuffed animals. He came to an ascending staircase and looked back to see the flaring nostril of a rocking horse through an open door. He had found “Rebuke's”
rooms of broken babies and their toys
.

The unfamiliar stairs took him up past row after row of wine bottles in tall cases like bookshelves, then transformed themselves into a wide handsome set of stairs with an onyx balustrade that led him into the splendor of the East Hall.

Breakfast had been laid on a fresh white tablecloth. Standish sat down and lifted the golden cover. The smoked corpse of a fish regarded him with dead eyes. Standish slid onto his fork a pasty mess that looked as hairy as a caterpillar. He put the paste in his mouth and bit down on a pincushion. Small sharp bones stung every square millimeter of his palate. Other slender bones slid between his teeth. He spat onto the golden plate.

eleven

S
oon after, under the eyes of the great-great-great-great-grandfather and the pointing god, he nudged the bones lodged between his teeth with his tongue and made notes to himself on a legal pad.
If truly no accident or coincidence in universe, then narrative is superseded for everything is simultaneous. To be here is to be within Isobel's poetry, literally and metaphorically, for world without coincidence is world which is all metaphor. It is childhood once again. Key to the nonsense poems. Syntax the only source of meaning
.

Question: toys dolls beds, etc. seen by Isobel, as in “Rebuke.” What happened to the children that used them? Why “broken”? How many children did Edith Seneschal have?

Must ask Seneschals about siblings
.

Could the secret be some horrible family disease?

Standish thought a moment, then wrote another line.

Research in churchyard?

He looked down at the pad for a moment, then ripped off the sheet and wrote a few words on the next. This too he tore off, and took it outside the library door and laid it on the carpet. When he returned to the desk he looked at his guardian spirits and decided that he had spent enough time on the poems for the morning.
B.P
. was what he wanted to read.

With a happy sigh he pushed the poems aside and pulled the bulkier prose manuscript toward him. He began reading on page 26, where he had broken off the previous night. For some twenty minutes Isobel's handwriting squirmed before him on the page. Then time ceased to be a linear sequence of events, and Standish entered the Land with Isobel.

The young woman from Massachusetts found herself growing fonder of the house each day. A happy accident had led to her meeting her hostess, E., the well-known patroness of the arts, in Boston; and when E. had asked to see the young woman's work—and been impressed by what she described as its “bravery”—she had invited her new friend to join her at her estate. So the young woman felt an initial gratitude to E., but the speed with which she worked, once introduced to the Land, warmed this emotion to love. She found herself writing both prose and poetry more easily than ever before in her life, coming into her own voice a little more surely every day. And after readings in the West Gallery during the evenings, she was praised and applauded by writers whom she had earlier known only as revered names. Encouraged, she began to jettison from her work nearly everything that made it resemble the poetry of her own time.