“Ella,” I said, only half-believing it. But it was her; it was my mother. I recognized her from the magazine spread. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. When she heard her name, she ran up the stairs and out of sight.
I followed, realizing with a start that my footsteps made no sound on the tile floor, or the marble stairs. It was instantly disorienting, like trying to talk when your ears are stuffed.
Ella swerved to the left. I followed. The hallway was so long it had to be a trick—I’d seen the house from the outside. It was big, but not like this. I jogged past one door after another, trying each one. I thought I heard a giggle behind the third, but it didn’t sound like it came from a child.
The seventh door I tried opened onto a tiny room. A typewriter sat on a writing desk between two windows. Next to it, a cigarette wedged into a green glass ashtray sizzled down to a stub. An inch of ash hung from its tip. Through the window was a different day than the one I’d left, one where a gray sky pressed against winter-crisped grass.
I tiptoed to the typewriter to see what was written on the page curling out of it, in dense, irregular print.
When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.
My neck tingled like someone was close behind me, reaching out with pinching fingers. I sprinted from the room and closed the door.
The hall had changed. Now it was a brighter place, shorter, ending in a glass-ceilinged conservatory flooded with green. Sunlight poured in over trees I recognized and some I didn’t, and some I swore I’d seen just now in the woods. I walked slowly forward with my arms held out. The air was dense and damp and sweet. On a pool of grass so bright it had to be fake sat a chrome-fronted radio the color of strawberry sherbet.
I crouched down and turned on the radio. The light outside dimmed as the music came up. It was the song I’d heard on the bus, sped up into a dance tune. When I snapped it off, the light outside bounced back and swelled, till the brightness hurt my eyes. I threw a hand over them, backing out of the room and into something warm and solid.
“My god,” he said, because it was a man I’d collided with. “Won’t you ever leave me alone?”
It was night again. He shrank away from me in a pool of artificial torchlight. We were in an orange-lit, faux-medieval billiard room with knotty wooden walls. The man wore a rumpled tuxedo. He looked like a duke Barbara Stanwyck might’ve fallen in love with on a steamship crossing, before ending up with a cabin boy played by Cary Grant.
He’d dropped a very full highball glass when I bumped him. The sharp scent of gin stung my nose. In the other hand he held a gun. Not like Harold’s, a blunt-nosed black thing made for violence—this gun was long and elegant as a greyhound. The man carried it propped over his shoulder like a boy playing army.
“You can see me?” I said. I wasn’t sure what the rules were here—whether I was a ghost. Whether I would die if shot by a gun.
“You’re all I see. It’s driving me mad. It’s driven me mad!” His voice was arch, but his eyes were wet and desperate.
“Who are you?” I asked, reaching for his sleeve. “Who do you think I am?”
He stumbled back. “Get away, you foul thing. I’m getting free of you even if she can’t. Your touch may be cold as the grave, but I know you come straight from hell.”
He walked unsteadily through a pool of whiskey-colored light, disappearing into the darkness on the other side. From the silence came a single gunshot.
When I ran from the room, my ears popped. Listing with vertigo, I staggered down a wide, ruined hall, its tiled floor grown over with moss. Ivy grew through a shattered windowpane, and everything smelled like rot. It ended in a sitting room with water-stained walls, where a pair of striped folding chairs flanked a crushed-velvet sofa. On the table between them lay a stack of fashion magazines. Christy Turlington stared vacantly from the cover of the yellowing Vogue Paris on top. November 1986.
Behind me, someone knocked out “Shave and a Haircut” against the doorframe. It was Ella, looking older now. Eight, maybe. She smiled self-consciously, her lips closed over her teeth, then ran away.
“Ella,” I said, but the air ate it up. When I moved a hand in front of my face, it warped a little, like I was looking at it through flawed glass.
I staggered forward, falling as I crossed the threshold. My knees landed in the deep nap of carpet the color of old ivory. To pull myself up, I grabbed onto the silken skirts of the bed sitting just within reach.
It was a fairy-tale bed, hung to the ground with tattered curtains. Where they were sheerest, I could see the shape of someone lying motionless inside. Dripping candles in tarnished silver holders circled them, releasing a honeysuckle fragrance that filled the air like a drug.
I didn’t want to see what lay on that bed. I didn’t want to be in this room, or in this place. None of it fit together; it was a scrapbook of times and places and someone else’s memories. Althea’s, or Ella’s, maybe. Was the Hazel Wood even real? Had it ever existed? Wherever I was, it wasn’t a house. It was a kaleidoscope. I moved to the window, thinking I could climb out, but I wasn’t on the second floor anymore—somehow I’d made it to the turret. The lawn was a taunting green sea below.
The thing in the bed made a tiny sound, a groan or a sigh, that set the hair from my scalp to the small of my back alight. I ran from the room—
And slid to a stop in a dingy yellow kitchen. A light buzzed overhead, and the stench of dill and old coffee turned my stomach. Thin spring light fell through a dirty window onto a sideboard cluttered with cups. Loneliness clung to every surface, thick as dust. On a mint-colored Formica table sat an empty mug, a water-stained copy of Madame Bovary, a pair of scissors. And a stack of clipped-out newspaper articles.
My hand shook as I touched the top one, splaying out the stack. Upstate Community Rattled After Attack. Search for Missing Jogger Enters Second Week. Link Suspected in Upstate Homicides. Five Victims Later, Mystery Persists in Small-Town Murders. Remains Found, Questions Remain.
Althea had known, then. What she’d let escape, and what they did out there.
A long scream from behind me cut the air in half. I spun around, knocking the mug to the floor. A blue enamel kettle shrieked and steamed on the stove, and a creaking step sounded somewhere beyond the door.
For one electric second I considered running for the window. Instead I stayed still, muscles jumping in my shoulders. The step came closer, closer, then stopped outside the door.
Silence stretched till I couldn’t stand it—the thick, waiting quiet of someone listening for something. I slid forward on the tile, put my hand on the knob, and jerked the door open like ripping off a Band-Aid.
And stepped out into a wall of voices and music and bodies, wrapped in a haze of wax and perfume as thick as syrup.
I was in a ballroom, barely lit. A chandelier heavy with half-melted candles swayed over a crush of dancers, moving to glittery, atonal music that could’ve been the soundtrack to a party in hell.
The dancers swarmed so close together they looked like a mosh pit on a subway car, moving with the music’s headache rhythms. Bits of candlelight caught at teeth and eyes and sweat and the shine of white wax, dripping into their hair and hardening.
I thought I saw Ella in the swing of bodies—older again, but not yet grown. She smiled up at her partner, too worldly, and shifted out of sight. I moved closer, trying to reach her, and the crowd pushed back.