The Dark Closet (12 page)

The two men let go of
one another in embarrassment as Christopher John gently swayed back and forth along the wall with a soft brushing sound. Crossett carefully straightened the picture so that he stood eye to eye with his ancestor whose usual expression of mild disgust he now found particularly aggravating.

“
I guess you see the problem now with the stairs,” he said gruffly to Jake. “A little first hand experience helps in pinpointing a problem.” It was an experience he would not care to repeat, Jake thought to himself as he reluctantly followed Crossett to the bottom of the steps.

“
You be careful next time. There won’t be anyone there to catch you,” Crossett said as he turned to Jake in the hall. It was a fact of which he felt Jake should be made verbally aware.

“Come along,” Crosset
t said softly as he turned to go into the library. “I want this mantel off.”

The experience on the stairs
had chastened Crossett. He stopped his bellowing behavior—at least for a time.

The events of the
last several days, especially the telephone call that morning from the
Baltimore Herald
, had prompted Crossett to take this measure regarding the mantel. It was the last thing he could think of. Once inside the library, Crossett began carefully removing the Dresden tea cups, candelabras, and luster ware from the mantel shelf, placing them gingerly on a Chippendale pedestal table nearby as Jake stepped closer to examine the mantel itself. Somewhere in a more recessed part of the house, a brass handle hit the wooden floor with a dent as the tongs rolled from the brass jamb hook next to a fireplace. Its reverberating sound echoed with fearful familiarity as Crossett raised his head from his work. How many times had he heard that? He could hear it again in the depths of his mind as the dull thud of the tongs faded away.

T
he night before he had been asleep for what must have been a very short while when he felt himself dragged up from the depths of slumber as if a dark hand were squeezing the muscle of his heart. It pounded in bewilderment at the restriction and he suddenly awoke with a gasping breath. The banging filled the room, sourceless, echoing through the chamber with a ferocity only the slips of time could conjure. Yet when he raised his head from the pillow, the room was as empty as an unattended church pew. He glanced over at Anne, who slept peacefully and deeply, undisturbed by whatever ethereal noises Winterhurst bred for Crossett to hear. Slipping quietly from bed, he began the familiar journey though the house in search of the banging’s source. Unafraid of the stairs even after his recent experience on them, he trudged to the lower level of Winterhurst, disregarding the hazy light cast by the reflecting moon on the snow, whose precarious luminescence peered through the long, rectangular windows and examined with elongated shadows the many objects before it. Two strips of whiteness lay like runners on either side of the hall, cast by the narrow windows on either side of the front door. Quietly, he padded toward the library, with watery eyes and little sense of direction as he pursued his habitual round in search of Winterhurst’s nocturnal sounds. There in the paneled doorway he stopped, stunned that on this night there should be something there to see.

She stood
in wait before the mantel until their eyes met; then she turned her back to him, her luminescent skirts leaving a shadow of their  trail through the air, devoid of a noise of any kind. Her cloudy, wispy hands struggled to grasp the mantel shelf, passing through it time and time again as the tea cups and lutz bowls and candelabra lutzes all did a trembling, tinkering dance on the cream-enameled shelf. The sonorous banging began again with a clap like thunder that involuntarily turned Crossett’s  head toward the upper story. When he looked back into the library fireplace, he saw nothing.

Skipping steps
in his bound toward the bedrooms above he ran lithely up the staircase. Down the hallway he went, glancing into rooms as he followed the sound as it grew and grew reaching its crescendo at the very back bedroom where Maude slept. His breath gasped as he strove to keep up with the racing of his heart when he stopped like a statue at the door of Maude’s room. The unearthly banging filled the room from ceiling to baseboard, vibrating nothing, leaving Maude undisturbed, her little face slack in the immersion of sleep, utterly vulnerable to slumber’s distortion of time and space.

It emanated f
rom the closet. He was sure. And he was petrified. He had not been fully inside that closet since the last time his brothers and Twynne had thrust him into it in the last gasp of their era of practical jokes. His reluctant feet slid along the polished boards around the perimeter of the rug until they stopped before the door itself. His hand tentatively fingered the brass knob as it shook and joggled beneath his tenuous hold. The fear in his heart governed his trembling hand as he fought with the tendons of his own fingers to close on the jittering and rattling knob, open the door, and expose the perpetrator of the hideous banging that had robbed him of the peace of sleep for weeks. But then he heard a noise behind him, and when he looked, he saw the apparition that had three times tenanted his library leaning over the slumbering form of Maude. Her ghostly hands encircled the child’s frail neck and moved their pale fingers now over her cheeks rendered colorless by the depth of repose.

Crossett bounded in a leap toward Maude’s bed. A parental
protectiveness that flooded him on the level of instinct engined his assault. He swept at the pale apparition as it dissolved in his hands, and he fell on the still form of his daughter. Together they slid with the bedclothes and landed with a thud on the floor, taking with them a Queen Anne table with its priceless contents rolling dizzily over the rug and onto the wooden floor, meeting the baseboard with a crash.

Maude’s screams brought Anne to the
child’s door. She flipped the switch to see Crossett huddling the screaming child in his arms, holding her far too tightly, batting at the air with a free hand.

“Stop!” she screamed herself,
attempting to wrestle the child from him. “Let go, Crossett! Let go!”

He woke as from a dream, unable to
get his immediate bearings, fuzzy, befuddled.

“Good God
, Crossett, are you walking in your sleep now?” she demanded, cradling the weeping child. “Get hold of yourself! You’ve scared Maude to death! What on earth were you doing?”

“I saw  her in here,” he babbled, “leaning over Maude! She was trying to
strangle her, I tell you! Strangle her!” He looked  around in confusion. “How did she get up here?”

“Who
m are you talking about Crossett? You’re dreaming! I’ve told you that before! For God’s sake Crossett tell Dr. Frolich about it will you? You’re becoming a danger to us all!”

Crossett sat in a lump
on the floor for some time listening to Maude’s whimper and Anne’s light soprano as she went through her entire repertoire of lullabies, until his own nerves were soothed.”

Tomorrow,” he said in a wh
isper, “we move Maude to the guest room.”

The hectic morning saw Maude moved lock, stock
, and barrel to the guest room. Her room was then officially declared the new guest room, its radiators turned off, and door closed in honor of its transformed status. Maude’s old room with its numinous closet stood silent, cold, and sarcophagal.

And that was
the way he wanted it, Crossett mused while Jake examined the mantel. He glanced at the tea table from Maude’s room, brought it to the library laden with fragments and slivers of Chinese Export broken the night before and which he had laid out earlier like an archeologist’s array of site findings. Later in the day he planned to begin the daunting task of gluing them together. Crossett was from a long line of gluers. His great aunt had been most practiced at the art, and from her he had learned this meticulous craft of patience. Her handiwork, which still adorned many a shelf and table at Winterhurst, had survived some of Barrow’s closest scrutiny. She had not believed in discarding such hapless victims of chance. She repaired them and then displayed them either in less prominent locations or on shelves far above eye level. For those heirlooms, all of whose shattered pieces she could not retrieve, she merely turned the fragmented sides to the wall and tested securely in Barrow’s unwritten law that no one dare touch any item in an estate home. Only she had known the extent to which Winterhurst’s china collection had been damaged. Speculating on the entirety of pieces perched on Winterhurst’s highest shelves was one of Crossett’s more peculiar pastimes.

He turned from the array of broken pieces as
Jake stood back from the mantel.

“I’ll
do the best I can,” Jake said woodenly, still edgy from his near-fall down the stairs and feeling, as usual, vaguely aggravated by Crossett’s aristocratic air. The splintering wrench of the wood being parted from the frame sent chills down Crossett’s spine as he moved toward Jake to signal him to stop. From one of the oldest homes of one of the most respected families in Barrow history, the mantel was one of Crossett’s prized pieces. He considered it something of a coup to have gotten it away from Wightefield. He had his social charm to thank for that, he had often thought. As he stepped up to Jake’s elbow, the mantel came off with one last squealing wrench.

“You should
have been more careful,” Crossett said gruffly as he examined the fluted surface of the mantel. Then he turned to study the darkened, unpainted frame from top to bottom. Finally, he ran his hand over the entire area.

“
Don’t understand,” he muttered. “She was trying to get it off. I know she was.”

“
What?”

“O
h, nothing,” Crossett replied distractedly as he ran his fingers again over the rugged black surface. He did not know just what he had expected to find, but it was not this—it was not
nothing
. He got down on one knee.

“We’ll leave it off for a while.
Just prop it up over there and be careful with it.” His voice was dictatorial, and he knew it. That would aggravate Jake, and he knew that, too. “It’s valuable.” Then he added, because he did not feel moved to resist temptation, “It came from Wightefield.”

“
Wightefield?” Jake took the bait.

“Yes,” Crossett answered shortl
y, feeling better now that he knew someone else was going to feel at least nearly as frustrated as he did.

“How did you come
by it?”

“Through Lamerie Wighte,
of course.”

“Lamerie?”

“Yes, Lamerie. Your wife, Lamerie,” Crossett said indiscreetly. “We’ve known each other for a long time. I used to go with her to Wightefield now and again,” he continued as he crossed to his desk where he pulled out a cigarette. “We used to go all through the house. Fine house, you know.”

“Yes, I know,”
Jake said brusquely, baring his hostility. “It’s mine now.”

“You mean,
it’s not in Lamerie’s name anymore?” Crossett asked just mildly enough to keep Jake’s interest.

“That’s something
that’ll change very soon,” Jake replied confidently. “Then, Mr. Mainwaring, if you see anything you like in it,” he continued softly, “you’ll have to speak to me about it—that is, if you get in there. As my property there won’t be any trespassers.”

“You have problems with
trespassers at Wightefield, Jake?” Crossett asked unruffled, lighting his cigarette.

“Speculators of silver and preci
ous stones, you might say.”

“Sounds lik
e a sunken treasure ship,” Crossett said disinterestedly.

“
According to the stories in last week’s paper, you know quite a bit about Wightefield and what’s up there.”

Jake
did not like Crossett’s name being connected with Wightefield, especially when the article mentioned only Lamerie and not himself.

A look of disgust reconfigured Crossett’s
face. “Local propaganda,” he said shortly, propelling himself slightly away from the desk against which he had been leaning. He felt a sudden urgency of his own frustration at the mention of The Rambler’s latest article. “You said it  yourself—stories.”

“Been
up there lately?”

“Certainly not. That would be trespassing.”

“So it would.”

“Are you suggesting that I make
a practice of going uninvited to Wightefield?” Crossett asked with a jerk of impatience and as well of anger.

“Sounds like
you and Lamerie were pretty good friends.”

“That was a
long time ago.”

Then
the eyes of the two men met, and they came to understand one another.

“So you were great friends when you were young,” Jake rasped.

“That’s not at all what I said. I said we k
new each other—we were friendly,” Lamerie said.

“Friendl
y enough to take trips to Wightefield together?”

“We went to Wightefield a few times, yes.
Crossett Mainwaring is very knowledgeable about old houses. I needed help in trying to decide what to do with Wightefield.”

“It w
asn’t even yours then!”

“But it was
going to be and I knew all the problems my father had had!” She was beginning to raise her voice, she knew it, but she could not help herself. He never ultimately listened unless she raised her voice, and then it always backfired; the pattern was always the same. As usual he would have a concealed weapon, something hurtful, something to foster regret, something he had been saving, some mechanism by which to strip her naked and make her stand before him. What kind of a person did not merit even simple human decency? There was no nobility left in her that he had not already peeled like layers of skin to leave her exposed and raw and shivering with every breath of air that moved about her.

In the convoluted layers of his mind
lay the weapon he had been holding back, and it had a name. Shadrack Hawkins. Ever since she had heard the name from his lips, she had coveted her own prior ignorance. Shadrack Hawkins was the hinge upon which they all turned and moved—Crossett, Jake, and herself. Somehow her association with both men seemed interminable, carved from an ancient stone by a timeless hand. Deep in the bowels of her being, she feared she had walked a thousand lives by their sides in different permutations of the same equation, seeking the answer to that equation beneath every rock of existence, every stone of mortality. And in between the lives? In between their souls met in another plane of the same continuum to skirt and prowl about one another in search of a familiar scent distinguishable only to whatever ethereal senses a soul possesses. As she faced Jake now, she knew in that next hiatus they would have to answer to one another for what would happen here next.

Jake
stepped menacingly forward.

“Do you think you’
re going to give Wightefield to Crossett Mainwaring?”

She was
shocked. No matter what her relationship with Crossett, she had never considered such a thing, and his suggestion of it showed how little he understood her determination to keep the estate house and most especially from Jake himself. She had been discussing with Crossett for some time her alternatives in keeping Wightefield in her own name and protecting it from any claim Jake may lay to it. A surge of anger roiled up from the depths of her stomach. Jake’s incredible arrogance was every match for the bluest blood of Barrow, some of which was beginning to run hotly through Lamerie’s veins.

“I haven’t the slightest
idea what you’re talking about,” she answered coldly, raising her head as she did so. “It was years ago. We all grew up together, more or less. Crossett was by no means the center of my attention. We all knew each other, where we lived, and each other’s parents. We went to school together, all of us—Twynne Forster and Benjamin Teilbright and John Beale and—“

“All
men!” he erupted.

“—Sara Forster,
Abigail Winston—“

“Has he bee
n here?”

“What?
”

“Has he been here?” he yelled.

“Has who been here?”

“Crosse
tt Mainwaring!” He took another step closer to Lamerie.

Her
mouth opened slightly but she could not make any sound come out. Her face lost its expression, as if a pale swath of fog had suddenly enveloped it and left it vacuous in its wake. It leeched the blue from her eyes, leaving them a flannel gray, her dark eyebrows standing out from the white of her face like two curves from a raven-tipped paintbrush.

“No,” she finally whispered.

“You’re a bastard daughter,” he hissed, taking several more steps closer until he stood not a foot from her, the warmth of his breath like a hot wind on the cold, clammy skin of her face. When the blow came, she barely felt it, only found herself face down on the unforgiving wood of the floor, gasping a little from the quickness of it, winded from the surprise. She did not turn her face up to watch the hideous contortions of his face as he spoke, to bare to him the massive welt that already stood raised on her cheek.

“
Shadrack Hawkins—you remember that name, don’t you? Stayed on after the war looking for the necklace and silver of Wightefield your great-grandmother Lamerie hid from the Union soldiers? Killed your great-grandmother, raped your grandmother, just a child of twelve? Yes, you see I know the horrible family secret, the unmentionable Wighte humiliation. Well, she had a son. My grandfather. Yes, Lamerie, we have the same great-grandfather.” There was a pause. “That makes us cousins, doesn’t it?”

He
moved closer.

“Some people call that incest. But not me.
I need you for Wightefield. No one has figured it all out yet—the genteel Mainwarings—“ he spit the words out. “Another blemish! Christopher Mainwaring—in love with every slave that crossed his threshold. Why shouldn’t there be incest, too, among such respectable and respected families?” Suddenly, he laughed.

“Respectable! Hardly
that
!”

From the corner of her
eye, she could see the steel-tipped toe of his work boots, close to her face. The palms of her hands lay flat against the cold grain of the wood.

How much hate can
one soul carry from life to life, she thought. How many other spirits can it garner to itself in an effort to quell its own pain? She put her arm up before her face as he leaned down toward her, the yellow of his teeth glinting in the electric light, the crevices of his face throwing shadows among themselves. His grip lifted her to her feet and ushered her into the bedroom.

Now there
would be four souls to hover and circle one another in the misty sphere of the next plane.