The Dark Closet (4 page)

From the rooms beneath could
be heard Crossett’s step on the old wooden floors, wincing at the burden of his weight. The eerie light streaming through the windows on either side of the front door glistened on the step molding that lined the ceiling of the great hallway. He had brought the crown molding from Wetherton House just before the family sold the land and house to what was now Applewood Horse Farm. How the family had survived to the 1950’s was a source of much speculation as it was well-known that the males of that family were given to gambling and drink and had thus spent centuries imbibing the family fortune. Nearly every piece of furniture, all antiques, had been sold over the years as well as bits and pieces of the 900-acre estate. Once there was nothing left in the house to sell, the Wetherton masters began selling off parcels of the property, at first the least desirable parts until they were exhausted with only the prime land left. With the prime land went the cash crop of tobacco and with the cash crop went Wetherton solvency. The last of the Wethertons sold what remained to Applewood Horse Farms and died a pauper, a derelict in the streets of Baltimore. The house itself remained unoccupied, slowly deteriorating in the peace and solitude of the two-acre, overgrown, brambled lawn.

Crossett
stood studying the shadowy molding as he struck a match to light his cigarette. It snapped and hissed in the cold as it ignited, illuminating Crossett’s white, cold breath. For the most part he had left the house of his ancestors alone, but here and there, overcome by temptation, he had imported from other great houses in the area architectural embellishments. The Wetherton molding was one such example. The mantel in the library was another. It had come from the home of Robert Wighte (or so Crossett liked to think) and dated to the 1790’s with its stepped and molded shelf, its fluted sides. It had been its simplicity that had allured Crossett when he first saw it at an estate sale last summer, that and the auctioneer’s claim that it had come from the Wighte home. Twynne—the resident local historian, a Ph.D. in American history, his private docent through the history of the region—grunted as he studied the mantel on Crossett’s behalf, then proclaimed that whether of not it came from the Wighte mansion it was authentically of the Federal period and held some value.

“
That’s about the only house around here we haven’t been in,” Twynne said  as he clapped Crossett on the back. It was true. Since their youth the two friends had investigated scores of abandoned old homes in the area and beyond. As boys they would go wherever they could walk, later wherever they could ride their bicycles along the winding, narrow country roads, dodging the sharecroppers on their tractors carrying piles of cut tobacco to barns spread out over the farms along the way, racing with the steamy August air for who would win the heat. It was always great sport to climb over the briars and underbrush that had grown up around most of these houses, find a broken window or a hapless, gaping door and go in. Sometimes broken pieces of furniture still lay around, bits and pieces of rubble on the floors. At other times the house was as empty as a tobacco barn after the hogsheads had gone to the warehouse. It was in just such barren houses to which all that was left to stir the imagination was the beauty of their architecture—their moldings and railings and mantels—that gave Crossett the idea of transplanting their parts, thus to salvage something of their glamorous youth faded now with time and overcast with the dusty gloom of misfortune.

Crossett knew where the Wighte house was,
so overgrown now since his boyhood days when a mosaic of it could be seen through the intertwining branches that veiled it from the road. His father used to point it out to him frequently along with many of the other old houses in the area, both inhabited and not.

Whatever its genealogy, the old mantel must have had a busy history, for he had gotten five layers of paint off it—Indian red, yellow, cream, steel
blue, and a most aggressive shade of green. Now it was rose to match the native molding of the room as well as the large, fringed Oriental rug whose now-muted reds blended.

The chair rail in the dining room was another imported ornamentation. It had witnessed many a sumptuous feast at Farrington Hall, home of the Hereford famil
y from 1733 to 1944 when, crippled by the great Depression and finally crushed by the demands of the second world war, the family fortune had been drained and the estate lost. His father had been alive then and Crossett had persuaded him to procure the chair railing, which he had promised he would install himself. His father did procure the railing but forbade Crossett to put it up because he said his dining room was dignified enough just the way it was. Crossett could still see the piles of folded laundry on the table of that room even as his father delivered this edict.

Upstairs it was the wallpaper in his bedroom that he had brought from another house, the Teilbiright mansion of Widow Grove. It depicted a garden scene of the 1700’s
with parasoled women in bonnets sitting on stone benches or standing beside statues of Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Alpheus and Arethusa, Apollo and Daphne. The paper ran the gamut of the room, all four walls. Edward Teilbright had brought it with him from France when he had left England in 1765 to pursue his own religion in the New World. He had also brought with him his vast wealth that enabled him to purchase 3,000 acres and build one of the largest houses in the area to that day. The estate was not always called Widow Grove; it was Edmund Teilbright’s widow who renamed it thus upon the death of her husband. He had been cleaning a gun in his drawing room when it backfired into his face, leaving him in agony for several weeks before he died, having never regained recognition of his wife. The wallpaper now in Crossett’s bedroom had been in that ill-fated drawing room of Edmund Teilbright.

Walking through shadows
and phantasms cast by the luminance of the snow, he headed for the library, his favorite room, the brightest in the house with its five floor-to-ceiling windows, where often he read on drowsy summer afternoons, with the snap and buzz of locusts through the open windows, or before the open fireplace on long, still, cold winter nights. He stood in the doorway, listening to the rural quiet of the room, the soundlessness that brought to the ear the creak of every settling beam, rafter, and strut in the 200-year-old house.

It was some time before the movement on the floor near
his feet came to his attention, although he realized later it had been swirling gently there from the moment he had entered. He had thought at first it must be smoke filtering in from some hidden smoldering incendiary, and he remembered how, years ago when he was just eleven years old, his father had thrown open the heavy front door to let in the bitter wind as they all sat huddled around the library fire to keep warm in the snow storm. His mother had walked hypnotically out of the room, following the wash of cold air that slid along the floor and chilled his ankles. He had been aggravated. The current had been off for days, and there was little difference in the temperature inside as out. What little warmth the fire had thrown against the cold plaster walls had just been marshaled from the room by the insidious winter air. Mittens on and coat pulled and buttoned at the neck, he had followed his mother to stand before the open door and watch the puffs of smoke choke the pristine, snowy sky until it was black. Ridell’s house had gone up in flames that day, a gigantic fireplace, not unlike those in the basements of great houses where the kitchen was located, huffing its black bellows into the white sky, melting twelve inches of snow for three hundred feet around the house, or what was eventually left of it. The wood stove in the kitchen had, despite the iron pan beneath it and despite its warmth and friendliness in so cold a winter storm, cast sparks onto the wooden floor. The only thing that had died in the fire that day had been Ridell’s heritage.

As he looked down
at his feet, the idea of Winterhurst’s falling prey to such a fate wafted from his mind as gracefully as the smoky mist swirling about his feet. Now he watched with little comprehension as the filmy, pearly strand inched its way across the darkened Oriental rug, thinning itself on its journey until it stretched thread-like from his feet to the fireplace. Entranced, he watched it snake along the vertical ridges of the mantel, filling first one, then another until it reached the mantel shelf where it entwined the gilded bases of the matching candelabras, winding around their lutzes like wisps of smoke, swirling about the Dresden china and lusterware tea cups, dipping tenuously down the vertical ridges of the other side. As the undulating alabaster thread hung from the shelf, he heard one of the tea cups rattle gently in its saucer as the filament unwound itself from its embrace. The strand lifted itself into the air glowing with the luminescence of the snow outside, climbing to the ceiling as it stretched itself in length, dipping down to twist and loop itself into the outline of a woman raising to Crossett her adumbrated arms.

Chapter
2

“Then Anne came in with a light and there was nothing there.”

Crossett was slouched down in one of the two hunter
green corduroy Queen Anne wing chairs in Twynne’s library where a crackling fire periodically spit sparks at the metal scrolled screen tucked inside the highly-polished S-shaped brass fender. Twynne insisted on spending his currentless days up here in the library with a fire, even though the fifteen-foot ceiling was the only warm part of the room. Crossett himself never kept enough firewood on hand for such a luxury as a fire every day; he was too lazy. There was not enough to keep the basement with its low ceilings warm and still bask in the glow of a fire in any of the upstairs rooms—including the three of the five bedrooms that had fireplaces.

“Why were you walking around in the dark?” his friend asked with incredulity in his voice.

“Because I enjoy it. I do it all the time.”

Twynne bellowed with laughter until
he had to set the two highballs on a Sheraton drum table whose finish glistened in the yellow light of the fire.

“You hate it. You always did!” he man
aged to choke out between his fits of laughter.

Crossett propped his fiv
e-o’clock shadowed chin on his darkly forested hand.

“Where are the children?” he asked with little
interest,  trying to change the subject.

“Oh, downstairs with Maragret. They’re
not allowed in here when I have company. They should be seen but not heard, don’t you think?”

Crossett decided not to touch that one; he was
not sure whether he agreed or disagreed. He raised his eyes as Twynne picked up the two frosty drinks and headed toward him, the smell of bourbon preceding his arrival. The cocktail hour came a little earlier on these dreary, snowy days.

“Thank you,”
he muttered as Twynne returned with a crystal coaster with a star design. Gingerly, Crossett placed his glass into it as he fiddled distractedly with the small paper napkin that had accompanied it.

“That’s
a double, but I don’t think you need it. You’re already confused enough.
Enjoy it
?” and he resumed his paroxysms of laughter. Crossett leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees. His cigarette on the other drum table of the pair sent up a white strip of smoke that at its extremity curled and undulated frantically as if there alone a great wind blew. Twynne finally took the pipe out of his mouth after struggling to keep it lodged there as he laughed. Crossett heard it tap the bubbled brown glass of another ashtray. Twynne was attired in his smoking jacket, as was his custom when he was at home, even though Crossett knew full well it was not warm enough today despite the frantic fire in the hearth. It was all part of the image of himself Twynne was always busy carving, even when he was alone and there was no one present to appreciate his workmanship. Crossett accepted this eccentricity in his friend in as much as Twynne accepted Crossett’s brooding moody side. They had both always been like that, even when they were children and a little more so when they were at Williams and so more so with each passing year. As for Twynne, his graying hair, abundant enough with his gray mustache and the ever-present pipe, gave him the air of distinction he sought for appearance’s sake. His enveloping knowledge of the area served to distinguish him socially.

Crossett passed his hand over his head, a characteristic
gesture. He had lost most of his hair before he was thirty but what was left had not yet turned gray, although it was overdue, an enviable family trait genetics had rendered void as few Mainwaring men escaped baldness. Just another of nature’s little jokes, Crossett often thought.

“Come now, Crossett,” Twynne continued, taking a swallow of
his drink. “Why were you walking around in the dark?”

Why
indeed? He wondered to himself.

“I walk around in the dark all the time.”

“I can’t imagine that. You were always scared to death of the dark!”

Crossett took a swallow
of bourbon and water and settled back again into the chair. It was true. He had always been scared of the dark, and his brothers and Twynne knew it well. They played on it, tortured him with it. Yes, indeed, as he had told Anne, they used to wander around in the dark all the time in that house after his parents had gone to bed. And it was always for the same reason, as far as Crossett was concerned: It was always a dare. Crossett twisted in his seat with the discomfort of it before resuming his thoughts. He was never scared in any other house, just his own. He and Twynne used to wander around in the house where they now sat as frequently as in his own father’s house, and it was always an adventure. But not at Winterhurst.

There never was
such a house that made as many nighttime noises as Winterhurst. His father used to say it was the house settling, an unconvincing explanation for the little boy who dwelt in the room all the way at the end of the house, the last bedroom entered via a sharp, blind turn from the bedroom before and graced with its own narrow twisted stairway—the back stairway that led to the kitchen, as well as an equally arthritic stairway in his closet, leading up to the attic. Because the doors to both stairways had no key in their locks and none could be located even among the lockless keys of his father’s general key collection (all keys to phantom doors at Winterhurst), he was without relief from the imagined terrors that lay beyond those doors, lurked on the steps, hovered about the door jambs, hopefully not disembodied enough to slither beneath the six-panel colonial doors and exhale themselves into his room. It was like that just at Winterhurst. So many blind turns and fathomless corners too dark to be penetrated by the human eye, whose phantom occupants could rematerialized instantly once the beam of a flashlight had been turned way. One was never safe. There were no rules. The only nighttime noise at Winterhurst Crossett welcomed was the sound of bats moving behind the shutters of his windows. He could hear them wriggling through the painted wooden slats and jockeying for position along the frame of the house. He could hear their webby wings flap as they took flight, hear the little thud as they returned, grabbing the slats with little black, pointed nails. All night long they would move and coo, and it was their comings and goings that often lulled Crossett to sleep amid the unseen specters that  haunted Winterhurst by night, creaking the wooden steps with their footfalls, the hinges of doors with their entrance and exit. But the bats behind the shutters were sounds of the living. Even to this day Crossett had neglected to have their population at Winterhurst thinned, although they left their dirt all over the brick walk along the back of the house. The rest of it fell into oblivion in the huge boxwood growing on three sides of the house. Anne complained loudly, but Crossett could not forget his father’s periodic exterminations of the bats that left him temporarily without comfort on long summer nights. Eventually, the bats returned, however, as they do to any roost.

“Admit it, Crossett,” his frien
d prodded.

And
who would not have been scared? He thought defensively. His stomach fell with the memory of it, his hands felt clammy, the alcohol became suddenly nauseating. Who would not have been? To be shut in a dark closet in a dark house with a chair wedged under the door knob on the other side, the sounds of human voices and laughter growing fainter as they went further and further from the room at the back, the room at the back with the large, walk-in closet (a misnomer coined by his father: One could stand in there against the huge, tunnel-like shelves and at the very foot of the stairs, but one could not walk in), the gnarled stairway leading darkly up, the black hole of a closet. And they would leave him in there for at least an hour and laugh all the while they secured the door and all the while they released it. Pale and wan, Crossett would fall from its black interior, still dizzy with the experience of it, unable to verbalize just what the terrifying hour had been like or what visions he had suffered. Just the thought of it brought a wave of claustrophobia over him as he unwillingly envisioned the utter ebony of the closet interior, the thousand spectral possibilities as he stood in his unprotected humanness inside a murky world of sightless spirits.

Why was Maude in that room,
anyway? He wondered, taking a huge gulp of his drink. Twynne took the glass from him to refill it. Why had he put Maude back there? Why would he put any child back there after what he had gone through? And was she going through what he used to? Would she tell him if she were? He doubted it. He had not in general made himself emotionally accessible to his children. No, Maude should be in the guest room and, the guest room should be at the end of the house. It only made sense. Guests would have to fend for themselves.

The cold glass returned to Crossett’s hand.

“I’ll tell you why,” Twynne said gently. “You’re still trying to prove to yourself you’re not scared in that house.”

That was true. He was not
, however, going to admit it, confess it, here and now or ever.

“It’s my
property,” he said softly with dignity, opening wide his big, brown, liquid eyes,” and I take the option of inspecting it.”

“In the
dark?”

“Most
especially in the dark.”

“You’re taking this too seriously, Crosse
tt,” Twynne laughed. “I was only joking—” a familiar response from Twynne that harked back to their boyhood days and excursions into the dark. “Besides,” he continued, you don’t think you have the corner on ghosts, do you? Why, I have one right here myself.”

“Oh, stop it, Twynne.”

“No, seriously. It’s true. My great-great-great grandfather still walks up and down the stairs—“

“Oh, please, Twynne!”

“It’s absolutely true! He was murdered by his slaves as he came running downstairs to get his gun. Family legend has it that he’s still trying to get to that gun.”

“
Shut up, Twynne.”

“It’s the truth,
Crossett—I just never told you because I knew how squeamish you were at home, but you never seemed to mind skulking around in the dark here. And I’ll bet this is the first authentic ghost you’ve had at Winterhurst. All the rest were in your mind. Look, I can prove it to you,” he said as he pulled a book off one of the painted library shelves.

“
Sharing County Ancestors
? Are you sure this is a reliable source?”

“There’s a lot of factual material
in there, even if May Wetherton dressed it up a little here and there. After all, she was trying to fill the family coffers once again with a best-seller.”

“A genealogy? A
best-seller?”

“Well,
you know what they say about May. So she wasn’t so bright. But the book’s not bad—written on the premise that we’re all related to each other one way or another—and she dug up all kinds of things. Look right here.” He brought the open volume to Crossett to read.

“ ‘Jeremiah Forster was slain by a coterie of his
own slaves’,” Crossett mumbled,” ‘as he ran through the house in search of a weapon of defense’—Twynne, it doesn’t say down the stairs.”

“Keep reading.”

“ ‘After an upstairs search yielded no weapon, he started down the staircase where he was met by another band of angry slaves who promptly knifed him with his own kitchen utensil.’“ Crossett’s finger moved on the page as he continued to read out loud to himself. “ ‘A cruel and indifferent master, Jeremiah lived only long enough to reap the fruits of the seeds he had sown.’ Very poetic,” he finished with sarcasm.

“But true.
Nor is it the only story of its kind in the region.” The pipe rang once again on the glass ash tray. Twynne pulled out a leather pouch and began to fill the bowl.

“That’s a god-awful smell
, Twynne,” Crossett said grumpily.

“Much truer to the tobacco leaf than the processed rol
l you prefer to smoke.”

“
Perhaps, but not as enshrined in tradition,” Crossett launched forth. “The first cigarette appeared in 1570 in Holland in the form of rolled plaited palm leaves. However truer your pipe may be, it didn’t appear until 1585 when the Europeans saw the Virginia Indians using clay pipes. And in 1610 Constantinople found the custom so odious that city officials marched through the streets a Turk with a pipe lodged firmly in his nose.”

“Well, that’s
a new tidbit. Where did you pick that up?”

“If this were 1634 in Russia,
Twynne, your nose would be severed from your body for lighting that pipe,” he continued, ignoring Twynne’s question.

“And in
1724 Pope Benedict lifted Pope Innocent XII’s ban of excommunication on pipe smoking,” Twynne proudly retorted.

“Inside
a church, Twynne, because he did it himself throughout the service.”

Twynne grunted. It was an old argument. The
wooden match flared brightly above the polished bowl, hissing and spitting in its phoenix-like burst.

“Besides,” continued Crossett,
as if the topics had any relation at all, “I don’t believe Jeremiah Forster is still skulking around your front stairs.”