Apple Bruise

Libbie had so many things to do before Alex woke from her nap.

The first, and most important of these, she’d just finished: send Caspar to fetch the doctor. She’d been quite vague with him about Alex’s symptoms, but Caspar Eckhart did not require details to do what he’d been asked. Right away, he’d headed out in the carriage with Max.

Now she needed to find Addie and Hanna and explain some of Alex’s current delusion. Not so much as to embarrass Alex once she recovered, of course, but enough so that the women could be of assistance to Libbie if Alex attempted some additional act of lunacy before the doctor arrived.

She’d heard Hanna in the kitchen when they’d come in, and it was Thursday, so Adelaide was likely up in the tower, readying for their lesson. They’d have to skip it tonight. Addie would be disappointed, but that couldn’t be helped, not with Alex in such a state.

Libbie just needed to change out of this sweaty skirt and blouse—which still held the rotten smell from The Orangerie—then she’d go find them.

And her bruise. She needed to look at her bruise—it was throbbing again.

In her bedroom, standing naked in a puddle of her skirt, Libbie tried to look down the length of her body at the bruise. But the way the light played on her skin, the sharp jut of her hip bone, the contours of her stomach—all of this made it difficult to properly see.

Instead, she looked ahead into the tall gilt-frame mirror along the wall, stepping forward into better light.

She gasped as she did. She could not help it.

The bruise was darker than when last she’d looked, purple black and the size and shape of an apple. A Black Oxford, Readers. It was even swollen so that it appeared convex like an apple, pressing out the side of her hip, almost as if you could slice her top layer of skin, peel it back, and pull it free from her body.

The more Libbie looked at it, the more it throbbed. It made her feel faint even to think of touching it, but something now compelled her hand. She knew it would hurt, when she did, oh the pain was certain to be unbearable, but she must trace her fingers over it.

She watched her reflection as her pale fingers drew nearer to it. It did not feel like she was moving her arm to make this happen, but she could see that she was, there in the mirror. Her hand hovered over the apple’s surface when—

“Mrs. Brookhants,” Adelaide said from the doorway. Despite all that had occurred between them these past months, or maybe because of it, Libbie moved her eyes away when they found each other in the mirror. “I’m sorry to startle you. I think you’d better come with me. Miss Trills is in the tower and she seems unwell.”

“I left her sleeping,” Libbie said unhappily, though she knew it wasn’t much of an explanation. “I wanted to talk to you and Hanna both before she woke.”

“She’s awake now,” Adelaide said. “And her eye looks very bad—what I could see of it. She wouldn’t let me get near to her.”

“You mustn’t take it personally, Addie.”

“She seems upset with me,” Adelaide said. “More so even than usual. She wouldn’t—I almost think she’s frightened of me.”

“She’s not thinking clearly,” Libbie said. “That’s all it is.” She felt pulled from a dream.

“Here, let me help you,” Adelaide said. She went into the dressing room and emerged just as quickly with a simple day dress that did not require a corset. She stood behind Libbie, but when she went to help Libbie pull it on, she also saw the bruise and gasped.

“I know,” Libbie said, both of them looking in the mirror at the black apple on her hip. “I can’t see how it hasn’t healed.”

“Hasn’t healed?” Adelaide said. “Oh, but it’s gotten so much worse!” Without either of them quite understanding what was happening, Adelaide’s fingers—only the lightest touch of the tips of one hand—were now upon the bruise, trailing against it. Instead of the pain Libbie expected, watching those fingers in the mirror before her, Adelaide’s touch felt cool and welcome.

“You must tell the doctor, Mrs. Brookhants.”

The doctor. That did it. That broke the spell. “There’s one on the way,” Libbie said.

Adelaide looked rather stunned by this news, and she pulled her hand back.

“For Miss Trills, I mean. Caspar and Max went to bring the doctor for Miss Trills. You’re right that she’s not well and what’s wrong isn’t only her eye.” Libbie was now pulling on the new dress, the fabric tight and painful against her hip.

“Please don’t hurt yourself rushing,” Adelaide said. “Hanna’s waiting with her up in the tower.”

“Oh, she is?” Libbie said, feeling some relief. “Oh good.” Now if she could keep Alex away from Addie until the doctor arrived with a sedative or some other plan. “Was she looking for me?”

“Hanna?” Addie asked.

“No, Miss Trills. Is that why she went up in the tower? She tends to avoid it if she can.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Adelaide said as if she was thinking. “But I don’t think she was looking for you. She was after a photograph, she said, one of the late Mr. Brookhants. This was part of her agitation. It was the page from the book that started it, which was confusing to us, because we thought Miss Trills would be so pleased about us finding it.”

This mention of a page from a book caught Libbie like a steel hook in the spine. “What did you find?” she asked, turning around even though Adelaide wasn’t finished fastening her dress.

Libbie’s interest in this topic seemed to further confuse the maid. She continued on, now more careful with her words. “It was really Hanna who found it, though I suppose I helped. We were dusting the shelves in the stairwell. I knocked loose some books—those shelves are so full, it’s easy to do—and they came crashing down the stairs and then when we were gathering them, we found it. The page. We thought it had come from one of the books but when we looked it didn’t match any of them. It must have only been—”

“Placed in a book it didn’t belong to,” Libbie said for her.

“Yes, that exactly,” Adelaide said, nodding and speaking faster now. “And we both remembered during the blizzard, when Miss Trills had been so upset about the missing page in her book. So we thought, mightn’t this be it?”

“Where is the page now?” Libbie asked. She was already crossing the room to the hallway, though her dress hung open in various places.

Addie was at her heel, attempting to pull the sash and close the back of Libbie’s dress as they went along. “I expect Miss Trills has it with her. She came down looking for me—I think she was looking for me—and that’s when Hanna showed it to her, and soon, she was shouting at me, she wouldn’t be calmed. There were some markings on it, someone’s notes. Those seemed to upset her.”

“Oh no,” Libbie said. “No, no, no.”

The tower had never seemed farther away. Now Adelaide was like Libbie’s shadow, the two of them moving through the too-quiet house in a swish of skirts and steps.

As they landed in the front hall, Libbie heard the hum of the yellow jackets.

It was as it had been that night in the bathroom, soft to start. Soft until they started up the dim tower stairs. Then the hum deepened, attaching itself to her body and reverberating there. Louder and louder as they climbed, Addie still too close, her breath wet and heavy against Libbie’s neck, the tunnel of the stairwell dark and steep, the buzzing thick and awful and pounding in her bruise, making her wince.

They rounded the last turn.

Orange light spilled down from above. Each stair climbed brought more of the room into view. Libbie’s desk, and right behind it, a flash of Alex, who was sitting on the floor against the shelves, bent over something in her lap.

“Stay behind me, Addie,” Libbie said quietly.

Outside the sun was setting and throwing the last of its light in through the windows. As Libbie fully stepped up and into the study, her eyes took a moment to adjust. She had to walk a few feet into the room before she saw it clearly.

She turned to Adelaide, who hovered in the dark of the stairwell, watching. “Hanna’s not here,” she mouthed.

“She was!” Adelaide whispered.

Libbie continued across the room, stepping slowly, softly. But Alex did not notice her. Not yet.

Her back was against the shelves and her arms extended on either side, each hand gripping an edge of the long frame that lay across her lap. She had her head bent over it.

Libbie was now close enough to see what it was, this thing that had Alex entranced: the panoramic photograph of a séance at Harold’s (in)famous redwood table. The photo hadn’t hung in the tower since right after he’d died. Libbie had taken it down when she’d removed many of Harold’s other photographs and prints. It was so large that she’d placed it at the very bottom of a stack, where it had, for years, collected dust on a lower shelf. (Even Hanna was not good about remembering to clean that pile.)

What could Alex want with it now? Libbie glanced again at Adelaide, who was still half hidden like a phantom in the darkness of the stairwell.

Libbie made herself speak calmly, even a touch brightly, as if her own false sunshine could rid this gloom. “Alex, what are you doing out of bed?” she asked. “You were going to sleep, remember? Sleep first and then, later tonight—”

“Oh, oh,” Alex said. “Now you’re here.” She wrenched her head up from the panoramic to look at Libbie through her good eye—her other eye still swollen and actively weeping yellow gunk, which had built up and crusted like pollen. Libbie was relieved when Alex again dropped her face to the photo.

Carefully, slowly, Libbie knelt beside Alex, wincing at her apple bruise as she did. “I’ve been here. I thought we had a plan.”

“We did have a plan! Such a charming plan. But the devil’s in the details, isn’t he, Library?”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, darling.” She was still trying for calm.

“I do know!” Alex said. “I do finally know.” She slid the frame on her lap forward to reveal the book, Libbie’s copy of Mary MacLane’s story, and atop it the missing page, there in the folds of Alex’s skirt.

While they’d been speaking, the buzzing had thinned, but as soon as Libbie saw the book, the page, the proof of what she’d done, it again threaded itself to her veins and thrummed insistently.

“You lied to me, Library,” Alex said. “Again and again. Here we live in a thicket of lies.”

Libbie nodded. She waited for what she deserved, Alex’s listing of her misdeeds. Instead, what she got was:

“And I lied to you,” Alex said. “Harold’s awful bargain—oh how I wanted you to take it. I sold it to you for them, so that I could come here and be with you. So that we could be together.”

“We are together,” Libbie said weakly.

“Oh no. No, not here we aren’t. Here the very trees and soil come between us.”

Alex tapped the book in her lap with her pointer finger—tap-tap. “I wonder, did you forget that Sara had inked her provocations? When you gave this to the girls? Or did you mean for them to see her message to you?”

“Of course I didn’t mean for them to see it. I would have told you—”

“And so did you intend to find a Harold for Flo and Clara, too? Was that your plan? Did you think you might introduce one or the other of them to a man with the correct sum to his name and a parcel of land? Tell me, Library: How would you have continued to advise them as they made their way, these girls in love?”

“Alex,” Libbie started, but it was no use. “You’re so tired and confused, darling—you’re spinning all around.”

“I’m no longer confused,” Alex said. “Not even a touch. Why do you think the few students who remain here gather in the woods to talk of horror? Our whole world’s gone dark and rotten, its belly bloated with worms, and you let the answer hide on a shelf in our home.”

“What you’re saying is madness.”

“I’ll show you the extent of my madness,” Alex said, yanking Libbie’s arm, hard, so she slid closer to Alex in the jerk of the rough movement. Alex then pulled the frame back to her lap, so that it again covered the book and its once-missing page. Libbie could see that the panoramic’s glass looked freshly cleaned. There were no finger smudges, no dust, nothing to hide any of the séance’s participants.

“Look here,” Alex said, pulling until Libbie was bent down over the frame.

“You’re hurting me, Alex,” Libbie said.

Alex did not hear Libbie. Or if she did, she did not care. “Look at their faces,” she said. “Who do you see? I want you to take your time. I won’t show you. I don’t need to because you’ll find her. And then you’ll know how they played us from the start.”

Libbie couldn’t concentrate. The buzzing filled the room, poured in her ears and thickened her thoughts. When she did look down at the photograph, it seemed to hover, almost as if she was viewing it through a stereoscope. The last of the daylight flashed against the glass, charging white spots across her vision. The buzzing was now so intense within her it seemed almost to toggle her vocal cords, as if she was making the hideous sound.

“I can hear it, too,” Alex said.

“You can?” Libbie did not feel at all comforted by this.

“Of course. It’s part of this, but you have to tune it out. Concentrate on the faces and you’ll see. You’ll see what I see.”

From what seemed very far away, Adelaide asked if she should look for Hanna. Libbie had forgotten about her waiting on the stairs. She now looked up to find Addie standing just inside the room. She was rightly afraid to come closer.

“Never mind her,” Alex said. “Look at the photo.”

Libbie did as she was told. She started at Harold, who was easy to spot, his smile wide and proud. This was, after all, his grand gathering. She then worked her way around the table, studying each face as she encountered it. Madame Verrett was next. She was easy too, with her jewels and scarves. Then came a few friends of Harold’s Libbie had met once or twice. A Spiritualist out of Baltimore. More men and women she did not know, at least she didn’t think so—swooped hair and trim moustaches, eyeglasses and drooping jowls, starched lace collars, a thin, bird neck and a round face framed in curls, a man and a woman and a man and a face and a face and a face and no one she knew that surprised her, no one that meant anything at all. This was true all the way around the table until there, seated next to Harold on his other side, his right side, with features part in shadow—though there was no obvious cause for that and it affected no one else in the image—but still, was it, it might be . . .

The buzzing wrapped Libbie’s heart and rattled her spine. She squinted again, shifted even closer to the photograph, which caused her breath to fog the glass, but—

“I’ve brought some water and a bandage!” It was Hanna, finally, there on the last stair with a pitcher and glass in hand. “And I think I heard them coming up the road with the doctor.”

Her voice seemed to enter Alex like the thrust of a knife. “Stay back!” she yelled. “You stay away!”

Hanna, stunned, did not move from that final stair. So Adelaide took the items from her, set them on the edge of the desk, and rushed to the windows to look for the promised carriage.

Alex still gripped the picture frame at both ends and now pressed down on it with too much force as she moved to stand. The glass snapped, first with a crack and then with a scuttling spiderweb. The thin pasteboard backing gave too, snapping the long photograph in half. Alex seemed not to notice. She let go of the frame, took Mary’s book in her right hand, and leveraged it against the ground to help push herself up. Shards of glass spilled from her skirts like salt and Sara’s marked page fluttered to the floor to lie atop the glass.

Alex was now on her feet. “We know your tricks, Hanna Eckhart,” she sang horribly across the room, the desk no longer blocking her view. She turned her good eye toward Hanna. “We see you now. I see you.”

“Did you really hear the carriage?” Adelaide asked. She was still at the windows, scanning the ground below for the promised doctor. “I can’t see it.”

“That’s because she lies,” Alex said, triumphant. “She’s only ever worked for Harold. Even now, she works for him.”

“Are they really here?” Libbie asked Hanna. It seemed impossible that Caspar, Max, and the doctor should have arrived so soon from town.

As the others were speaking, Alex had crept her way along the wall toward the stairwell. Now she seized her chance, taking off, full force, toward Hanna. She had Mary’s book held out before her, each hand gripping a side as if she were carrying a sign in a march. Her intention was clear, clear to Libbie and to Adelaide and especially to Hanna: Alex would shove her, hard, so that she toppled over like a chess piece and fell back down the stairs.

Alexandra Trills was only a blur of hair and flesh and book.

The buzzing had reached an impossible pitch. It was the air itself.

And then, the awful crash of bodies.

Except—

At the final moment, Hanna flattened herself against the stairwell wall, pressing her body into the books that lined it. She had to get the timing exactly right, and even then, it didn’t seem like it should quite work, the stairwell was so narrow.

But it did work, Readers. Hanna made it work.

It was almost as if the books and shelves became something less than solid, something more like flesh, with enough give for her to press her body into their embrace. They let her in.

Alex, with her weeping eye, her skewed perspective, was now at the top of the stairs, but where Hanna should have been was a gap, empty space, humming air. There was nothing for her to collide with, and so instead she dove—outstretched book, then head, then body—down and down, into the twisting darkness.

The buzzing ceased at once, like the popping of a balloon.

Alex did not scream or cry out as she fell, but her body, hitting the walls and knocking loose volumes, careening the corners and bouncing on the stairs, made a terrible kind of gasping, thudding noise that drew quieter the farther it descended.

There was no doctor waiting for our Alexandra Trills when she crumpled into stillness at the bottom of the staircase. This was because the doctor had not yet arrived and would not do so for another hour.^*

Alex, smart, strong, devoted Alex, of course did not survive her fall. Her neck had snapped on the first turn of the staircase. Not unlike the glass in the séance photo, first came the solid, murderous break, and then came a spiderweb of smaller cracks throughout her body’s other bones—both wrists, a femur, several ribs.

By the time Spite Manor’s gravity stopped her at the bottom, Alexandra Trills was no longer of our world. She’d drifted from it somewhere in the stairwell, fluttering up over the pages of the many books that lined her fall.

I will not linger here describing all that came next, such as the wailing sob that accompanied Libbie’s harried slipping down the stairs, whereupon she flung her own body over that of her lover and stayed for so long that what they were to each other would never again be denied by anyone who saw.

When, much later, Hanna had tried to help her stand, Libbie screamed at her to get away. Even after Max had pulled his mother from the room, still Libbie screamed, on and on. She was in such a state of rage and terror that the doctor, who had finally arrived, gave her a knockout drop and had her carried to her bed. He hoped that rest would cure her shock.

But in the coming days, whenever she came to, Libbie would not let Hanna Eckhart near her. And even if Hanna stayed away, Libbie would soon grow so agitated at the thought of her somewhere on a floor below that the consulting physicians (for now there were several of them) felt they had no choice but to give her another sedative to quiet her fear. And then the process would begin again. Libbie would rest. Then wake. Then shudder, or scream, or lash about in a hysterical rage over Hanna and her evil machinations. For a week, she did this.

And then—

Adelaide caught our Libbie with a bit of lit kindling she’d pulled from the fireplace. Libbie was trying to light her bed on fire. She did, in fact, light her bed on fire, and the hem of her nightgown too, but they got it put out in time. And so they knocked her out again and sent for her brother, the senator, who was then down the coast in Washington. He arrived with the intention of escorting her back to Chicago, to convalesce with their parents, but when this was explained to Libbie, she again became so violent and unreasonable that the idea of sending her on a cross-country journey now seemed out of the question. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that this was her least favorite brother.) At any rate, soon after she was committed to the Rhode Island State Asylum for the Incurable Insane, where she was further confined for more than a year.

But this ending is not Libbie Brookhants’s ending, Readers. She’ll have to wait for that.

So for the moment, let us leave her wearing a black mourning gown and sitting in a stiff chair, in a drafty room, while she stares at the crack in the plaster wall and tries not to hear the sound of the buzzing, tries not to see the twitching head, and now the cellophane wings and sticky legs, of a yellow jacket as it appears in that crack, tries not to remember all the things she’d prefer to forget. The doctor will be in soon enough and he’ll make her remember, and worse, he’ll make her speak those things aloud. And then he’ll tell her they’re only delusions, only figments of her own invention. He’ll have one of the white-cap nurses with him, the kind who smirk but never smile, who pinch and scratch her when his back is turned. This while the doctor tries to tell her, calmly, so calmly, that these things she remembers are only delusions, only figments of her own invention.

This when she knows, when she finally knows, they are not.