The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense (9 page)

The restaurant kitchen is windowless, so she can turn the lights on there to cook her meals. She usually eats at the desk in the chef-manager’s office, while reading a book.

Reading is her favorite pastime, as it was for Daisy Jean Sims. In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see.

If she gets hungry for fresh cashews or fine chocolates, the nuts-and-candy counter on the ground floor offers a smorgasbord.

She takes nothing but food from Broderick’s, and she pays for it by organizing tables of sweaters and pants and other clothing that the day’s shoppers have left disarranged, by better cleaning places that the store’s own maintenance crews have left less than spic-and-span, and by making sure that Eleanor’s, in particular, sparkles.

During the fourteen months that she has lived mostly here, she has kept her tiny studio apartment as a mail drop and a place to do laundry. Her days off are Sunday and Monday, but she leaves the store only on the second of those days. Monday nights, she sleeps in her apartment, and she yearns to be once more in Broderick’s.

She has chosen this way of living not to save money on rent, but in the hope of finding again the security that she knew before her family was slaughtered. Life on the streets has toughened her, but it has not restored the sense of stability and permanence that she once enjoyed.

Perhaps even Broderick’s can’t give her back that most precious aspect of her childhood. But alone within its walls, she feels safer than she feels elsewhere. Except on those occasions when Crispin pays a visit, her only company is who she meets in books, as well as, in various clothing departments, a community of mannequins, none of whom can rob her of her virginity or kill her. She enjoys over 380,000 square feet of living space, surely the largest home in the world, and the longer she lives here without incident, the more easily she can make herself believe that this place is not merely a home but also a fortress.

The first time Crispin sneaked into Broderick’s with his dog, before closing time, he might not have made it safely through the morning without setting off an alarm or being caught on his way out. Thanks to Amity Onawa, he now knows how to come and go with almost as much stealth as the spirit of a nine-times-dead cat.

And now here they are, friends for almost a year, and except for Harley, each of them is the other’s only confidant.…

Over the final little cakes, Amity says, “I saw your mother at tea with some women about two weeks ago.”

“What—here?”

“At that table,” she says, pointing.

“I thought you worked in the kitchen.”

“Sometimes now, if a waitress drops out of a shift at the last minute, I take her tables.”

“What did you think of her?”

“She’s even more beautiful than her pictures. And very sure of herself.”

“Don’t ever serve her again,” Crispin warns. “Serving one of them in any way … well, it gives them a hook in you, I think. They can pull you into further and darker service as if you’re a fish on a line.”

“I don’t believe I’d be that easy. Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever have another chance to serve her. Certainly not soon. I overheard her tell the other women that she and your stepfather were jetting off to his home in Rio the next day for an extended stay.”

“No mention of her children, I suppose.”

“She said you, Harley, and Mirabell were doing well in boarding schools in London.”

“Jolly good,” Crispin says sourly.

“Will you ever confront her?”

“She’d kill me on sight.”

“Or you her.”

“I might.”

“And now that Theron Hall is empty?”

“A few staff will still be there, three or four.”

“But mostly empty,” Amity persists.

Crispin favors silence.

She reminds him: “You told me once that something happened there that you need to better understand. Something you need to go back and see again.”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“When the cards tell me it’s safe.”

“Have you consulted them recently?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Everyone should be afraid.”

After a long silence, Amity says, “There’s a cool display in the toy department. You’ve got to see it.”

As Amity slides out of the booth, Crispin says, “You mean now?”

“I didn’t know you had a busy schedule tonight.”

He gets up to follow her, and she points to the wall of tall windows. “Look. Snow. So beautiful.”

With the dog between them, they cross the room and stand at the huge panes of glass.

The first flakes are as large as silver dollars and look as soft as little pillows. The heavens shed their bedding on a city seeking sleep, crystalline goosedown spiraling through darkness, through the million feeble night-lights of a civilization always one dawn away from obliteration.

Crispin is nine and under the influence of a malign spell following Mirabell’s flight to Paris.…

Only much later will he think of himself as spellbound, but whether that is the truth of his condition or not, he passes August and September that year in a curious state of detachment, with little energy for a boy his age.

He reads books that he enjoys, but days later he can barely remember the stories.

He plays board games and card games with Harley, but he doesn’t care—or recall—who wins.

He sleeps a lot, daydreams when he isn’t sleeping, and finds himself some nights and afternoons in Harley’s room, sitting bedside, watching his brother sleep.

Mr. Mordred still homeschools them, but he teaches with less diligence than ever and requires of them no homework. Sometimes Crispin feels as if the tutor does not intend to educate them, only to maintain a pretense of education, that there is nothing for which they will
need
an education.

For a while, Harley continues to search for the three white cats, but by mid-August, he loses interest in that quest.

Crispin sees little of his mother, less of his stepfather. Those infrequent encounters support the exceedingly bizarre perception he has that Theron Hall is much larger than its official square footage and that it is growing bigger all the time.

He sees much of Nanny Sayo, both waking and in dreams. In the waking world, she is always affectionate toward him and respects her
role as a surrogate parent. In dreams, she is usually the same as in real life, though now and then a sudden wildness overcomes her and she springs on him, tearing at his clothes and nipping at his throat without breaking the skin, all in such a way that frightens Crispin but also strangely excites him.

Sometimes the dream nanny looks exactly like the real woman. But at other times she will have one different feature: this time, the yellow eyes of a lizard; the next time, reptilian teeth or scaly hands with beautiful pearly claws.

Mirabell telephones again from Paris, once in late August and once in mid-September. She speaks with her mother, with Harley, with Nanny Sayo, and even with Mr. Mordred. The first time that she calls, Crispin is sleeping late, and no one thinks to wake him. On the second occasion, he is in bed with the mysterious fever that never lasts more than a day but that comes upon him every few weeks.

When eventually he flees Theron Hall, he will marvel that so many clues to the truth of that place and its denizens were offered to him without triggering his suspicion, let alone his alarm. If he was spellcast, it must have been a spell disabling his ability to make even obvious connections, to reason from evidence, and to hold in memory proofs of the conspiracy in the web of which he was caught.

Two days after Mirabell disappears, Crispin comes out of the miniature room and sees the matriarch, Jardena, crossing from the elevator to the door of her suite. She seems to be unaware of him, but he is struck by two things about her.

First, although she still wears one of her long dark dresses, she moves quickly and gracefully. Gone is the hesitant shuffle of an arthritic old woman.

Second, if her face was a withered apple before, it looks now, in the glimpse of it that he has, like a fresher fruit, the face of a woman fifty years old instead of a hundred.

Weeks later, near the end of August, as Crispin is staring out a window, daydreaming, a limousine pulls up to the front door of the house. The chauffeur assists from the car a pretty woman of perhaps thirty-five, wearing a tailored dark suit that flatters her figure. She oversees the unloading of many shopping bags and parcels from the trunk of the vehicle.

The junior butler, Ned, appears and hurries down the front steps to help the overburdened driver. As the woman precedes them up the steps to the front door, Crispin is struck by her resemblance to the young Jardena, of whom framed photographs can be seen on the piano in the music room and elsewhere in the house.

If some grandchild or grandniece of Jardena’s has come to visit, Crispin is not told about her. And he never sees her again until a night in late September.

That he does not reach a disturbing conclusion about those two encounters is perhaps understandable. Less explicable, however, is how he could chance upon his mother kissing one of the housemaids, Proserpina, and fail to be thereafter deeply troubled by it or even to remember the incident except now and then just before falling asleep at night.

Wandering the house one afternoon, not seeking three white cats but in the grip of his peculiar conviction that Theron Hall has
grown and is still growing, mentally vague and half inclined to lie down and take yet another nap, Crispin opens the door to the sewing room and finds them in a clinch. Proserpina stands with her back against a wall, and Clarette presses hard against her, grinding her hips, their mouths locked. They are breathing as if something has excited them, and their hair is disarranged. Clarette’s blouse hangs half unbuttoned, and the housemaid’s hand squirms inside, as if searching for something.

They are at once aware of the intrusion, but they are not in the least embarrassed to be discovered kissing. They smile at him, and his mother says, “Did you want something, Crispie?”

“No, nothing,” he says and at once retreats, closing the door behind him.

He hears a burst of laughter, both of them amused. Mortified, as if
he
is the one caught in some transgression, he means to flee, but instead he leans against the door, listening.

“By the way,” his mother tells Proserpina, “the dates have been chosen. September twenty-ninth, the feast of the archangels, and then October fourth.”

“The feast of Saint Francis of Assisi,” Proserpina says. “Good. One close after the other. I’m tired of this city.”

“Who isn’t?” his mother says. “But I’m not tired of you.”

Crispin thinks they are kissing again, and he hurries away to the library. He spends some time wandering the stacks, looking for a book to read.

If he remembers what he interrupted in the sewing room, he has pressed it from his mind for the moment, as if between there and
here he encountered a hypnotist who commanded him to avoid all thoughts of women kissing.

He believes that he is seeking an entertaining novel, one of high adventure, but the book he finds is in fact the one for which he is looking:
A
Year of Saints
. He sits in a wingback armchair and pages through to September 29.

The feast of the archangels includes Saint Michael, Saint Gabriel, and Saint Raphael. The three are depicted in a painting and seem more fanciful than anything in a boy’s adventure story.

He pages forward to October 4, the feast of Saint Francis, who is shown feeding birds and adored by various animals. Crispin reads three paragraphs about this saint, learning nothing, except that any feast honoring the man probably doesn’t include meat.

He doesn’t consciously turn to July 26, the night of Mirabell’s migraine and the eve of her departure for Paris. He stares at the two-page spread for a while before he realizes what he has done.

This day in July is the memorial of Saint Anne and Saint Joachim, the parents of the Virgin Mary. He reads about them but is only further mystified.

Two nights later, he dreams of Nanny Sayo and Harley. The two are on Harley’s bed. The boy wears pajamas. Nanny is in pajamas and a red silk robe. She’s teasing Harley, tickling him, and he’s giggling with delight. “My little piglet,” she says, “my little piggy piglet,” and between his giggles, Harley oinks and snorts. She tickles him mercilessly, until he says, “Stop, stop, stop!” But then at once he adds, “
Don’t
stop!” She tickles him to exhaustion, until gasping he declares, “I love you, Nanny, I love you so much,” as if
this is a confession that she has been demanding from first giggle to last. Upon hearing the boy’s admission of devotion, she says, “Sleep the sleep,” and Harley at once collapses backward onto his pillows, out cold. For a moment, Crispin thinks his brother is feigning sleep, but it is no act. To the boy who can no longer hear her, Nanny Sayo says, “Piglet,” but this time with no affection, in a voice that chills Crispin. In the dream, he had opened the door to Harley’s bedroom without Nanny being aware that he was at her back. Now he closes it softly.

As September unravels toward October, Crispin once in a while remembers this little nightmare, and sometimes he thinks that it was a scene from real life before he dreamed it, that he actually chanced upon Nanny tickling Harley. Perhaps he has forgotten the event itself in favor of remembering it as a dream, because the real moment was too disturbing to consider. But that seems unlikely.

Day by day he spends more time alone, in part because Harley has concocted a silly fantasy about little people who live in the house and who are as elusive as the cats. In fact, the white felines have now become “little cats” to Harley, though he never previously said that they were small. Inevitably, a seven-year-old kid can from time to time be an annoyance to an older brother, and this is one of those times.