The Dark Closet (7 page)

There was little text in the
article, but a huge picture of the Green mansion took up a third of the page. Crossett rubbed his eyes. He was finding out nothing about Winterhurst’s ghosts, if indeed any existed. This was interesting reading as far as the history of the region was concerned, he thought, something Twynne would undoubtedly like to see. It was apparent, however, that there was nothing to be gleaned here about any Mainwaring ghosts, nothing except an unpleasant memory or two about the shortcomings of a prominent family. Just a few skeletons from the closet, he thought with irony. Nothing more.

T
he light timbre of the music traveled up the icy stairs as if carried on the whispering lips of the softest of summer breezes. Indeed, it was so ethereal it seemed of the substance of dreams and was dismissed as such among those of the slumbering forms that happened to rouse long enough to catch its frail tenor through the haze of sleep. Even the somnolent ancestors lodged along the walls remained still within the confines of their golden frames, although two or three would find themselves tilted this way or that come morning, their view of the stairway distorted even from the nether world as if they wore the wrong eyeglass prescription. They would welcome with relief the nudge of the familiar hand that would set them aright, reinstate them in dignity in their respective places regardless of the imprisonment of their frames.

The music exhaled
itself softly on its sojourn to the second floor where it wrapped its subtle intonations around Crossett in its passage past him and into the rooms beyond. He had given little if any thought to it when he had arisen to use the lavatory. It had not registered with his numbed brain as he had staggered out of bed in the snowy light that illuminated the room when the clouds thinned enough in their own sojourn over Barrow. As he poured the rationed bucket of water down the commode to flush it, he still took no note of the tendrils of music. It was not until he stood addled by sleep in a quandary over how to wash his hands with a spigot that sputtered only air that he understood at all that the house was not silent. And at that point that was as far as his cognizance reached.

Then
in a groan he remembered that there was no water with which to wash his hands because there was no electricity with which to pump the water from the well. Only the empty dark metal bucket and the clear water in the commode told him he had somehow flushed the toilet in his sleep. Had he been awake he would have used only half the bucketful, leaving enough water for another flush and a wash. Now the question in his somnolent brain was whether to go down into the cellar to procure a jar of water with which to clean up or to let it go in the interests of interrupting his sleep as little as possible.

Crossett, however, was fastidious in his person, and
even the allure of the warmth of his three woolen blankets could not vie for supremacy over a presently compulsive desire for clean hands. So he shuffled in his sock feet and overcoat to the bathroom door to begin the journey to the cellar, two stories below him. Still overcome by a sleepiness he had woefully not experienced since the storm had knocked out the current, he did not even stop to think to retrieve from his bedroom the kerosene lamp.

And so he
stood now at the top of the winding staircase, thinking even less of the kerosene lamp as the soft wash of light bathed the hall below and transformed the darkness to dusk along the steps themselves. His paralyzed mind thought only that the current must be back on; he could not return to the events of just a few minutes earlier that had necessitated now his trip to the cellar for the water he could not get from the faucet of his bathroom. His overcoat hung shapelessly from his shoulders, some of the buttons having come undone in the abandon of his sleep and the coat itself rumpled and untidy. It was the discomfort of his cold hands that finally began to impinge on the staleness of his mind. They twitched compulsively as if their owner were trying to dislodge some insect there whose presence had become a source of annoyance. His socked feet glided over the polished wooden boards of the floor until they stopped at the edge of the top step, their insensate toes hanging over the tip but not grasping it. There he stood not fully cognizant of where he was in his own house or even that he was in a wakeful state.

To
him, it seemed a dream. The quality of the light below was too gentle a glow to be from the electric lamps that serviced the house. The music emanating from beneath was too soothing to have any substance in actuality, and the utter silence beyond that sound alone was too peaceful to be that which settled upon Winterhurst on any night. Thus, lulled into the belief that he was dreaming, he paid no attention to the status of his own feet and to whether they themselves were conscious enough to keep the rest of him upright.

The laughter from below that rose and
fell as gently as the music did not strike Crossett as odd. The tinkling of crystal glasses as they tapped one another did not spear his curiosity. The shadows that blackened the glow of light in the hall below did not prod him to speak. He only thought to himself that there was a party going on downstairs. It did not occur to him that he had not been invited anyone or that it was taking place in the wee hours of the morning or that it was impossible for anyone to get up into Winterhurst through the snow-drifted roads. All that leaked into his consciousness was that parties were often held at Winterhurst, that he followed himself the tradition set by Mainwarings long ago to open his home to other tobacco barons of the countryside, to let the liquors flow freely and the food abundantly. Such sounds as were drifting from the first floor tonight were not unfamiliar at Winterhurst. The spiraling nature of the music, however, as it encircled Crossett’s stationary form, the suggestion about it that it might have a substance of its own that exceeded its aural nature and the impression that it was guided by its own sense of purpose wafted through Crossett like a summer breeze but did not awaken his consciousness.

He
teetered a little on the top step as he considered abandoning his quest for water and returning to bed. He even turned slightly to do so, but it was when he saw that the light was bright enough, however dimmed it was by the time it reached the upstairs landing, to lead him back to bed with no trouble that he began to think again. Something in the presence of it jogged the sleepy inertia of his brain to wonder why it was not dark, to wonder where the characteristic pitch blackness of a Winterhurst night was. Even if there were current, his stifled mind told him, lights would not be on at this hour.

As he pulled back
his lifted foot—the one that was heading toward the bedroom—the other remaining on the step suddenly found itself sole supporter of all its owner’s weight, which was tilted just enough off center to threaten its stability.

He felt
himself leaning back over the staircase enough off balance to keep going.

The banister was
not within his reach from the awkward backward slant in which he found himself. There was not time to both call for help and determine a plan for succor. In the confusion of the decision that followed, he could do no more than flail his arms in the air, thus facilitating his complete loss of balance. Even as he lay for a split second prostrate in the air, he knew he was helpless to catch himself, and the only intelligence in his brain was the wild thought that someone else would have to do it for him.

It was Christopher
John Mainwaring IV who caught his descendant’s uncontrolled left arm as it waved in the air like a flag. The heavy gilding of the frame to which both time and Crossett had not been kind sported several naked plaster spikes where the gilding had chipped. It was one of these that caught the cuff button of Crossett’s left sleeve, literally hanging him up in his fall like a coat on a hook. A great noise ensued just beforehand as Crossett’s socked feet slipped along the polished wood of the top step and his five-foot eleven-inch frame spread its appendages in all directions, hitting several steps on the way down his lower extremities carried by the momentum of the fall so much so it took them a few seconds before they realized the rest of Crossett was no longer following. Christopher John did not as a matter of course ever look pleased, nor did he now from the thread of the picture by which he clung to the wall while trying to support Crossett’s 190-pound frame.

Crossett’s slipper socks made
it difficult for him to regain his footing, but he finally laid one foot so firmly upon a step that the other was encouraged to follow, and he managed to sit even with his arm still snagged on the portrait. The adrenaline from his racing heart was serving as a stimulant to finally fully awaken him. Shaking from the realization of how close a call he had had, he reached up to remove his coat button from the portrait when the jagged piece that had saved him snapped off, leaving a very visible area of rough white plaster. Crossett groaned. He hated to have to get things repaired. The plaster spike popped right into his lap as if demanding congratulations on a job well done.

Ho
lding his head in his hands, Crossett tried to steady his pounding heart throbbing in his brain. He realized how close he had come to a very bad fall and felt terrorized that his forty-four years of sure-footedness at Winterhurst could be so easily abandoned in just one breath. How many times had he walked through Winterhurst in the dark and laid his feet exactly where he should? How many times had he wandered to the lavatory in the middle of the night and found his way sagely back to bed? How had he on a whim at awakening in the night gone down the winding stairs to examine the rooms below? He lifted his head slightly. Yes, how many times had he done just that—gone down to examine the rooms below. And why? He strained to remember. A desire it was, a simple desire to look into the rooms below, into the library and living room and dining room and kitchen, as if he expected to find something there, as if there was something that must be seen, was waiting to be seen. He flicked the broken piece of plaster from his lap and listened as it popped down the steps—tap, tap, tap, tap, tap—then rolled on its corrugated surface for a short distance beyond the bottom step. Why had he gotten up those nights? Something had awakened him, something that was
finished
by the time he had gotten up, something that left no more trace of itself than the feeling that it had come to pass and then spent itself.

Crossett’s eyes met the wash of light from the library door as he watched the trail of the plaster chunk. At long last he saw it.
It startled him so he straightened enough to tip Christopher John’s heavy frame just enough to send it with a bang to the step on which he sat. The movement of Crossett’s shoulder against the frame was all that was necessary to break the fraying piece of picture wire by which it hung cockeyed on the wall. Crossett managed to grab the huge portrait before it went tumbling down the stairs end over gilded end. The two of them, Crossett and Christopher John, descendant and ancestor, sat on the steps for a few moments frozen with disbelief—each that they were witnessing anything so vivid in a house that seemed to specialize only in suggestion and intuition.

Propping Christopher John against the
wall on the upstairs landing, Crossett turned to go downstairs. The light had not faded in the vestibule below and now he could distinctly hear the rise and fall of violins. Creeping down the stairs holding his  breath, he was amazed it had not yet stopped. He was sure that the closer he got the more likely it was the phenomenon would cease suddenly but the rhythm kept up, the volume did not change, the light remained constant. Laying his socked feet silently upon Winterhurst’s two-hundred-year-old floorboards, Crossett stood within the furthest reaches of the light. It was the glow of candlelight, soft, losing itself in the darkness as it wandered further from its own source. It emanated from the library, whose door was cracked enough to let the light spill forth and the music drift out. As he approached the door to push it open, he could not even bear to think where his courage was coming from. This was as unthinkable as opening again the closet door in Maude’s room, in the deepest dark of the night without the surety of man’s electric light. It was as unthinkable as creaking up the attic stairs from within the closet to the little room beyond that revolved in its own universe, moving to its own tempo, shifting on its own axis of time.

His steady hand
touched the heavy paneling of the library door and pushed it noiselessly open until it stood ajar framing this modern man in his rumpled overcoat and gartered socks. The dresses of the women within swished gently along the floors as their owners moved in time with the music. The tail coats of men were lifted slightly into the air as their owners turned to reach for the outstretched hands of their partners. A graceful dark-haired woman of about thirty stood by the mantel fanning herself slowly, bending her head almost imperceptibly this way and that as her eyes followed the movements of the dancers. The brass sconces along the walls that Crossett kept so carefully polished glowed with the dancing flames of their candles. His 1790 silver candelabrum lent its light as well. For the first time in 110 years, his camphene-fueled solar lamp was burning. As soon as they appeared, charcoal shadows that hovered on the ceiling were chased away by the leaping flames. Enraptured, Crossett stepped over the threshold into the room, and as soon as he did so, the lady by the fireplace steadied her gaze on the doorway, and the room and hallway lit up with a different kind of light, so suddenly Crossett was sure he heard a snap and a buzz. He threw his hands to his eyes with the sudden brightness, and when he drew them away there was nothing there but his favorite room lit up as if for a party, with every electric lamp burning. His blinking eyes rested upon the waxy, white, untouched wicks of the brass sconces and the metal cap of the solar lamp swinging gently from its chain as if someone had recently snuffed its wick tube. But there was no smell of fuel in the air, because its reservoir was empty, Crossett knew, because he had not filled it in fifteen years. The glaring silence of the room threw its muted gaze to Crossett, daring him to believe that there was any more to his favorite room than what he witnessed there at this moment in the blaze of electric current.