The Story We Used to Tell

This is the story that Y and I used to tell, used to tell in the quiet of the night, in the hours of the quiet of the night, and the moonlight would come, moving forward, moving close; used to whisper to each other in the night …

And I, Y would say, had to go first. With the moonlight making white patterns in her hair, she would shake her head and say: I had to go first. Remember, she would say. In this very house. That night. Remember? And the picture, and the moonlight, and the way we laughed.

We had sat on the foot of the bed, the way we used to when we roomed together in school, talking together and laughing sometimes in spite of the grief that filled Y’s great house. It was only a month or so after her husband’s funeral, I remember, and yet being together again, just the two of us, was somehow enough to make Y smile sometimes, and even occasionally laugh again. I had been wise enough not to remark on the fact that Y had closed off the rooms of the house in which she had lived with her husband, and had moved into an entire new wing of the old place. But I liked her little bedroom, quiet and bare, with no room for books, and only the one picture on the wall.

‘It’s a picture of the house …’ Y said to me. ‘See, you can barely see the windows of this very room. It’s before my grandfather-in-law remodeled it, which is why the new wing isn’t there.’

‘It’s a beautiful old place,’ I said. ‘I almost wish he hadn’t changed it so much.’

‘Plumbing,’ Y said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with plumbing.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’m glad you’ve reopened the old wing … it must have been a gorgeous place in – say – your grandfather-in-law’s time.’

And we looked at the picture of the old old house, standing dark and tall against the sky, with the windows of this very room shining faintly through the trees, and the steep winding road coming through the gates and down to the very edge of the picture.

‘I’m glad the glass is there,’ I said, giggling. ‘I’d hate to have a landslide start on that mountain and come down into our laps!’

‘Into my bed, you mean,’ Y said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep, with the old place overhead.’

‘Grandpop’s probably still in it, too,’ I said. ‘He’s wandering around in a nightcap with a candle in the old barn.’

‘Plotting improvements.’ Y pulled the covers up over her head.

I told her, ‘God save us from all reformers,’ and went across the hall to my own room, pulled the heavy curtains to shut out the moonlight, and went to bed.

And the next morning Y was gone.

I woke up late, had breakfast downstairs with a first assistant footman or something of the sort presiding (even Y, married for four years into a butler-keeping establishment, had never found out which one to send for to bring tea in the afternoons, and had finally given up completely and taken to serving sherry, which she could pour herself from a decanter on the sideboard), and finally settled down to read, believing that Y would sleep late and come down in her own sweet time.

One o’clock was a little late, however, and when the menagerie began announcing lunch to me, I went after Y.

She wasn’t in her room, the bed had been slept in, and none of the menagerie knew where she was. More than that, no one had seen or heard of her since I had left her the night before; everyone else had thought, as I did, that she was sleeping late.

By late afternoon I had decided to call Y’s family lawyer, John, who lived on an adjoining estate and had been a close friend of Y’s husband, and a kind advisor to Y. And by evening Y’s lawyer had decided to call the police.

At the end of a week, nothing had been heard from or of Y, and the police had changed their theory of kidnapping to one of suicide. The lawyer came to me one of those afternoons with a project for closing up the house.

‘I dread saying it, Katharine, but –’ He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’

‘How can she be?’ I kept crying out, I remember. ‘I tell you I was with her all that evening. We talked, and she was happier than she has been for weeks – since her husband died …’

‘That’s why I think she’s dead,’ he said. ‘She was heartbroken. She had nothing to keep her alive.’

‘She had plans … she was going to sell this house, and travel! She was going to live abroad for a while – meet people, try to start life over again – why, I was going with her! We talked about it that night … and we laughed about the house … she said the picture would fall on her bed!!’ My voice trailed off. It was, I know certainly, the first time I had thought of the picture since I had left Y in her room, with the moonlight coming in and shining on her pale hair on the pillow. And I began to think.

‘Wait until tomorrow,’ I begged him. ‘Don’t do anything for a day or two. Why … she might come back tonight!’

He shook his head at me despairingly, but he went away and left me alone in the house. I called the menagerie, and ordered my things moved into Y’s room.

The full moon had turned into a lopsided creature, but there was still moonlight enough to fill the room with a haunted light when I lay down in Y’s bed, looking into the empty windows in the picture of a house. I fell asleep thinking miserably of Y’s cheerful conviction that the old man was loose in the picture, plotting improvements.

The moonlight was still there when I woke up, and so was the old woman. She was hanging on the inside of the glass of the picture, gibbering out at me, and she looked twenty feet high, standing in front of that picture of the house. I sat up in bed and backed as far away from the picture as I could, realizing, in the one lucid moment I had before the cold terror of that thing hit me, that she was on the inside of the glass, and couldn’t get out.

Then suddenly she moved aside and I could see the road leading down from the house, and, while I watched, Y came through the gates, running, and waving desperately at me. I could feel my eyes getting wider and wider and the back of my neck getting colder and colder, and then I knew that I had been right and that Y had been caught in some malevolence of the old house, and I began sobbing in thankfulness that I had found her in time.

I picked up my slipper and smashed the glass of the picture and held out my hands to Y to hurry her on toward me. And then I saw that the old woman, no longer hanging on to the inside of the glass, was now free, and in the room with me, and I could hear her laughing. I fell back on the bed in a wild attempt to shove the old woman back into the picture and I could just see Y, dropping her hands in helpless grief, turn around and start slowly back up the road to the house. Then the room went out from under me, and the glass on the picture closed around me.

‘I was waving at you to go away,’ Y was saying over and over. ‘You should have left me here and gone away. We can’t ever get out now – either of us. You should have gone away.’

I opened my eyes and looked around. I was in the dining room of the house, but so changed and gloomy! It was dark, and there was no furniture, no ornamentation. The place was still, and damp.

‘No plumbing, either,’ Y said dryly, noticing the bewilderment on my face. ‘This picture was painted before the improvements were put in.’

‘But –’ I said.

‘Hide!’ Y whispered. She pushed me into a corner, out of the light of the one candle on the floor.

‘Oh my God,’ I said, and grabbed Y’s hands.

Through the doorway came the old man, giggling and pulling at his beard. He was followed by the old woman, silent now, but with glittering grin, and half waltzing.

‘Young ladies!’ the old man called in a shrill, cracked voice, looking eagerly about the room. He picked up the candle and began going to the corners with it. ‘Young ladies,’ he cried, ‘come out! We are going to celebrate! Tonight there is to be a ball!’

‘Y!’ I said. He was coming toward us.

‘There you are, there you are. Lovely young ladies, shy over their first ball! Come ahead, young ladies!’

Y gave me one look, and then moved slowly forward. The old man waved the candle at me, calling, ‘Come along, don’t be too demure, no partners then, you know!’ and I followed Y into the room. The old man waved at the woman then, saying, ‘Let the musicians start now,’ and our first ball began. The music did not materialize, but the old man danced solemnly, first with Y and then with me, while the old crone sat dreamily in the corner, swinging the candle in time.

While the old man was dancing with Y, he would wave at me roguishly as they passed, calling out, ‘Wallflower!’ and something that was very like a grin would come over Y. And once when he was dancing with me and we passed Y, sitting on the floor in abject misery, he cried out sternly: ‘Come now, look gay! Honey catches more flies than vinegar, you know!’ And Y actually began to laugh.

No one could possibly say that I enjoyed myself at my first ball. But, you see, I still thought I was lying on Y’s bed, dreaming of the picture. Later, when the old man had limped off to bed, after kissing our hands gallantly, Y and I sat on the dining room floor and talked about it. In spite of the icy touch of the old man’s fingers which lingered on our hands, in spite of the chill of the stone floor and the memory of the old crone’s cackling, we sat there in the dark together and told each other that it was all a horrible dream.

Y said: ‘I’ve been here for a long time. I don’t know how long. But every night there’s been a ball.’

I shivered. ‘He’s a lovely dancer,’ I said.

‘Isn’t he though,’ Y agreed. ‘I know who he is,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘He’s grandpop-in-law. He died in this house, crazy.’

‘You might have told me before I came to visit you,’ I said.

‘I thought he’d stay dead,’ Y said.

We sat there, not talking, until finally the room began to grow lighter, and the dusk in the house was brightened with sunlight. I ran to the window, but Y laughed. ‘Wait,’ she said gloomily.

Outside the window I could see the trees that surrounded the old house, and the road down to the gates. Beyond the gates the trees prevented my seeing much, but I did manage to make out light, and color, and … the outlines of Y’s bed.

Y came over to the window and stood beside me. ‘Now do you know why I keep saying I’m dreaming?’ she demanded.

‘But …’ I turned around and looked at her. ‘But you aren’t,’ I said.

‘No,’ Y replied after a minute. ‘I’m not.’

We stood close together then, looking out over the trees and the gate, and beyond them, ridiculously, maddeningly, to the room that would mean freedom.

‘Y,’ I said finally, ‘this isn’t true. It’s –’ I began to laugh, at last. ‘It’s outrageous!’ I shouted. And Y began to laugh, too.

And for a time Y and I, hidden away among the trees around the house, planned an escape. ‘We’re completely helpless unless someone comes into the room,’ Y said, ‘and we’re completely helpless as long as these two old wrecks wander around loose.’

‘Remember how I thought you were waving me on when I couldn’t hear you through the glass,’ I said.

‘But if the old woman hadn’t been there …’

We looked at each other. ‘Why is she here?’ I said finally. Y shook her head. ‘It’s not as though she wasn’t already dead,’ I began, and finished weakly – ‘probably …’

And that night, while the old man prepared the room for the ball, Y asked him who the woman was. And, ‘One of your aunts, my dear,’ he chuckled, pinching Y’s cheek, and, ‘And I never saw a prettier girl, at that.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She’s aged a good deal since we’ve lived here, though. Not so pretty nowadays, are you, old hag!’ he screamed suddenly, and ran over to the old woman to give her a shove that sent her rocking back and forth, giggling wildly and nodding her head.

‘Has she been here long?’ Y asked timidly, but the old man skipped back and forth, pirouetting with exaggerated grace. ‘No questions, young ladies, no questions! Pretty heads should be empty, you know!’

That was what decided Y and me. The next day our plans were made, and it all had to be done fast. I do not like to remember what we did, and Y swears now that it is all gone from her mind, but I know as well as she does that we stuffed a pillow over the old man’s face while he slept, and hanged him to a tree afterward, in an ecstasy of hatred which spent itself on him, and left us little eagerness for the old woman. But we finished it, and never went back to the forest behind the castle, where the two bodies still hang, for all I know. It’s as Y said, then: ‘We don’t know if we can kill them, but we do know that if they’re not dead, they’re still tied up …’

And then, weak and happy and laughing, we lay all day in the sun near the gates, waiting for someone to come into the room.

‘How long has it been, Y, that we’ve been held here?’

‘A year, I guess –’ This muffled, from Y’s face hidden in her arms. ‘Or maybe more.’

‘It hasn’t been more than a week,’ I said.

‘It’s been years,’ Y said again.

And how much longer was it that we waited? The room, which we could see from the gates, had been dismantled. How bitterly we repented of the time spent away from the view of the room, the time lost while someone had taken up the carpets in the room, had taken away the linen and the mattress from the bed, had taken down the curtains and stripped the room bare of everything but dust! Where had we been, and who would come now to an empty and forsaken room? But it was Y, as always, who thought of it first.

‘Why didn’t they take the picture down, then?’ she said. ‘They’ve emptied the room and left the picture still hanging!’

‘They must know something! They must believe that the picture has something to do with us!’

‘They’d know the room was haunted, since two of us disappeared from there …’ Y began.

‘And no one will ever come into it for that reason,’ I finished.

We were there long enough for the ivy on the house to grow a quarter inch before someone came to rescue us.

We had often speculated as to who would come. Both of us had believed that it would be a stranger, come to see for himself if he could solve the secret of the room, but when our rescuer finally arrived one evening, it was John. I saw him first, while Y slept, and when I woke her to tell her it was John, she cried for the first time since we had given up hope. We lay in the grass before the gates, waiting for the moon to rise so John could see us and let us out.

We watched him put down a blanket on the empty bed, and lie down to stare directly into the picture. In the half-darkness that meant the moon was rising, we saw him lying there, watching for us. And as the moon rose slowly, coming toward the picture, we stood by the gates, clinging to each other and trembling with excitement.

Even before the full light was upon us, we were racing down the road to him, to the glass that he must break. I remember falling once, and stumbling to my feet to run on, with blood on my face and hands, crying out to John, and I believe now that it was during that moment wasted in getting to my feet that I knew exactly, because I heard Y’s voice calling, ‘Come, John, come on, John, come on!’ And I knew that I was screaming, too, and shrieking at the top of my lungs.

And John was sitting up in the bed, and screaming, too, and he put up his foot and kicked at the glass and broke it – at last.

 

And that is how we tell it, Y and I, in the quiet of the night, in the hours of the quiet of the night, with the moonlight moving close, while we wait in the secret of the night, and John runs constantly about the house, screaming and beating the walls. For I have no partner now, in the evenings, and Y and John do not like to dance alone.