The rooms were full again, crowded with all manner of beasts and wonders, with creatures gathered from every land. The museum workers strode up and down the corridors with clipboards held in their industrious hands and with eager eyes, checking lists and putting everything into order. I felt more settled during their working hours, soothed by the hum of new noise, by the weight of the new inhabitants of Lockwood.
But at night, my nightmares had returned, and they took the same form every time.
I would find myself standing in one of the rooms of Lockwood, a different room each time, with no memory of how I had got there. I would be searching for something, something small—a young hare, a leveret, orphaned and shivering, that had been brought inside for safety—but it was nowhere to be seen.
I knew where this dream had come from but not why it was repeated each night, why I felt so deathly afraid.
When I was a child, perhaps six years old, I had found an abandoned leveret in the gardens—though later, when I knew more about animals, I wondered if it had really been abandoned, and not just waiting in the long grass for its mother to return from foraging—and brought it inside in a cardboard box, declaring that I would care for it and raise it.
My mother, who looked at the world through kinder eyes back then and was indulgent of my childhood games, swiftly fetched a plate of carrots to feed it and a bunch of straw from the farm to help line the drawer she pulled out of my chest, and cooed over it with me as I stroked my fingertip over its back and tried to comfort it.
“What shall we call it?” she asked, chin resting on the heel of her palm, legs crossed in the air behind her.
I didn’t remember if I had answered her, or if I had ever named it, but I remembered my father arriving at the nursery and how I had chattered to him excitedly about my new pet before he had sighed and said, “It’s not worth it, darling, it won’t survive for long inside the house. Your mother is cruel to get you so excited.”
“I am the one who is cruel?” my mother had replied with a strange laugh. “And why shouldn’t it survive, if we’re careful?”
She set out to prove him wrong and slept on the couch in my nursery so that she could help tend to the leveret at all hours, gathered all sorts of foliage from the gardens, and quizzed the gardeners and the farmer and the cook for advice, spending hours next to me watching it, trying to play with it as we let it loose in the room and it cautiously hopped about.
When I thought of that week now, I felt such a tenderness toward her, the lady of the manor marshalling all her resources to keep an orphaned animal alive, at how dedicated she was at trying to make my wishes come true. But my memories were also colored by knowing that she failed, that my father was right.
The leveret had been too young to be parted from its mother and Lockwood Manor was no home for a wild animal. One morning, we had woken to find it listless and poorly, and not even my returning it to the patch of grass where I had found it—in some childish repentance for bringing it inside, for trapping it within the walls of our house—could save it.
Now, years later, I was searching for the same leveret in my dreams, my chest tight with panic as I raced down the corridors of my home, darting in and out of every doorway, desperately following the quiet scrabble of claws, the soft hush of fur brushing against a doorway, the thump of feet on hardwood floors. But Lockwood was a maze, even more so when I was asleep, and each night, as I continued my panicked search, I became convinced that the leveret had returned to one of the rooms I had already searched, that something terrible was happening to it there, behind me, where I could not see, or far at the corner of the house, in the shadows.
And in the very worst of these dreams, I would run after it and find myself in a strange room, with blue wallpaper crawling with horrible shapes, with a cobwebbed chandelier swaying violently as if the whole house was shaking apart, but when I tried to leave and scrabbled at the door, it was locked, and the leveret was gone, and terrible eyes were staring out at me from the fireplace and I was trapped there, alone with some horrible creature—
And then I would wake with a cry caught in my throat, hands grasping for a doorknob, for the soft silk of the leveret or its warm, trembling sides, finding only the cold, still sheen of my bedclothes in their place, and weep.
The next day, I would find myself leaving doors ajar, nervously double-checking their handles and locks, or scurrying outside to spend my morning under the open sky with the grounds and the hills unfolding before me. Later, when I returned inside, I would see a dropped scarf that I supposed was the leveret and leap toward it excitedly before I remembered that there was no leveret, or pass a book on a table in the parlor and think it an animal crouching and waiting for me.
It was such a silly nonsense dream to cry over, to let affect me, and yet the notion that I should be searching for something in the house, that there was something that I was not paying attention to, something that I could not see, could not be swept away like the grains of sleep from my eyes. It was only that the museum had just arrived, I told myself. Once its occupation had become more commonplace, my nerves would soothe, and I might begin to dream of other things again. The blue room I found myself trapped inside did not exist, after all, and that hare that I had rescued as a child was long gone, there was nothing I could do to save it now, nor any way I could turn back the clock to happier times when my mother had still been here with me.