A mold-ridden couch collapsed beneath Ellis, breaking her fall as she crashed down onto it from the room above. Instinctively, she held her forearms in front of her face, her eyes held tightly shut. She felt the floorboards, strips of wooden lathe slats and a cloud of crumbling plaster rain down about her.
“Ellis!” She could hear Jonas call desperately down for her from somewhere above. “Are you all right?”
She held her breath, daring not to move until the debris had settled.
“Ellis!” Jonas called more anxiously. “Please! Answer me! Are you hurt?”
“Only my pride, I think,” Ellis responded.
Ellis tentatively shifted her arms, venturing to open one eye. The plaster dust still hung in the air but there was sufficient light from the hole in the ceiling to see the extent of the room. It was nearly a match in size to the one above it although in this case its walls were wainscoted with dull, gilded edges. There were a number of furniture pieces in the room, a second couch and several chairs. The upholstery on each was swollen and the stuffing bulging outward from tears in the fabric. It appeared to Ellis to be some kind of sitting room or antechamber, although to what she could not guess. The arrangement of the rooms in this place was still baffling and without any reason that she could fathom.
Ellis moved with deliberate caution as she sat up. She looked up and was surprised to see that the ceiling was over fifteen feet above her. The anxious faces of Alicia and Jonas were staring back at her, silhouetted against the light from the dome of the room above.
Ellis brushed the splintered wood off of her traveling suit, her legs still slightly uncertain as she stood up. “What about the girl? Is she still there?”
“What girl?” Jonas asked.
“There was a little girl on the far side of the … oh, never mind.” Ellis could see from the expression on Jonas’s face that if there were any little girl in the doorway before she was most certainly not there now. “I seem to have taken a detour.”
“We’ll get you out in a minute, Ellis,” Alicia said, her voice wavering slightly, betraying her uncertainty.
“I don’t see how.” Ellis shook her head. “Unless either of you have been carrying a ladder or even just a good length of rope that I don’t know about.”
“Listen. I’ve found a long gallery up here that should keep us ahead of Merrick,” Jonas called down to her from the ruined ceiling above her.
“And what happens if he catches up with us?” Ellis asked.
“Just stay where you are”—Jonas had already vanished from the hole, his voice distant and echoing—“and I’ll find a way to get you out.”
“Don’t worry, Ellis,” her father said to her. “It’s just a game.”
Ellis shivered. The memories of her past kept bubbling up into her conscious mind. They were not complete: only phrases or lines from people whom she suddenly cared for deeply and yet, at the same time, still felt removed from. It was like a badly scratched phonograph record that would play a few notes of a familiar song and then skip entirely to a completely different tune.
She concentrated on the room, trying to keep the memories at bay for the time being. Like the room above, there were six exits from the room—one at each side of the end walls and one in the center of each of the longer sides—although here the oak doors with the dull finish were all shut. There were paintings mounted to the walls above the wainscot in a patchwork of frames that encircled the room. Each lay in shadow with no light shining directly on their canvases.
Ellis took a step closer to one of the longer walls, peering intently at the largest of the paintings there as she approached it.
She stopped.
It was a depiction of the Curtis lighthouse during a storm. The waves crashed against the island’s eastern rocks, rising up and seeming to engulf the structure. The lighthouse stood against the threatening darkness, its beam cast outward through the rain and over the sea. Two small figures could be seen silhouetted against the lamp: a woman and a small child both clinging to the railing and threatened by the storm.
Ellis shifted her gaze to another, smaller piece of art next to it. This depicted a nursery with a bassinet near a window but there was something wrong in the composition of the painting. The light coming through the glass illuminated an empty rocking chair in stark light while casting the more prominent cradle in shadow. Beyond the glass was a bright garden with a picket fence and a gate.
Ellis looked closer.
There, beyond the gate, was the shadowed figure of a man.
“Jenny!”
The name echoed, as though being summoned from a distance.
Above her, Alicia gasped.
It sounded as though it came from the direction where Ellis thought the stairs might be.
“Jenny!”
Ellis spun to her left. It was a deeper voice calling this time and closer from beyond the long wall on her left.
“Oh, Ellis,” Alicia said, her voice now tightened to a fearful squeak. “They’re getting closer!”
“Quiet!” Ellis called up in hushed tones. “Where’s Jonas?”
“I don’t know!” Alicia looked about her, her voice quivering. “He left … I don’t know where he went!”
“Jenny!”
“Jenny!”
“Jen-ny!”
Multiple voices this time. Ellis thought they were coming from the end of the room that would have been back toward the staircase.
The voices were getting closer.
“You’ve got to run!” Alicia whispered hoarsely from above.
“Why?” Ellis asked, her eyes fixed on the closed doors at the end of the hall directly beneath where Alicia stared down at her. “They’re looking for Jenny, not me. We’re all looking for Jenny!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Alicia called desperately back at her. “After what you did to Merrick’s play, running like that from the theater … if they catch you, there’s no telling what he’ll do to you!”
A sudden knocking shook the door behind Ellis.
She jumped at the sound, turning. She waited a moment but nothing happened. She took a step toward the door.
“Ellis!” Alicia whispered frantically from above. “Don’t open it!”
Ellis glanced up. “Maybe it’s Jonas.”
Silence filled the space for a moment. Ellis reached hesitantly for the stained brass doorknob.
“Run,” Alicia whimpered. “Oh, please, just run.”
A thunderous knocking shook the door in front of her so violently that she could see the upper corner separate from the frame.
Ellis jumped back, turned and ran.
She ran for the far end of the room, twisting the doorknob and throwing open the door. The hall she entered twisted mazelike deeper into the ruins. The doors to either side were open as she fled down the corridor, weak light streaming in from each one as she rushed past. There were voices coming from the rooms as well, echoing in the abandoned space. Sometimes muffled and sometimes entirely too clear.
“That is a completely inappropriate question for Sunday School, Sister Harkington! I shall speak to your mother about this immediately after…”
“From what lurid magazine did you copy this story, young lady? Ellis, do not deny it! You could not possibly have written anything this well on your own…”
“She’s a Harkington! No one who is anyone speaks to the Harkingtons. They’re such a disgrace…”
“Gee, Ellis, I’d really like to take you to the dance but there’s this other girl…”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see dark, shadowy figures standing in the rooms but she kept running. The memories each voice sparked were painful, vivid and, worst of all, entirely her own. Each incident rushed up into her mind with painful awareness. The Minister’s Wife, the Teacher, the Girls from her class, the Boy in the empty classroom; each memory with its disappointments, pain and shame rushed at her out of each open doorway like a terrible jack-in-the-box of the mind, springing hurtful memories at her from her childhood.
Ellis steeled herself against them, running faster down the twisting gauntlet of her childhood.
Other voices, too, were still heard behind her.
“Jenny!” they called like hounds at her heels. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
The hallway abruptly ended at a door. She pulled it open with vehemence, charging into the room beyond.
She nearly collided with the broken bed in the corner of the room. Rebecca, her childhood friend when Ellis was only eight years old, lay in it coughing weakly and covered in the measles. She reached out her blotched hand for Ellis, calling her name. Ellis swept quickly past the bed to the next door beyond, forcing it open with her shoulder.
She stumbled onto a landing at the top of a steep, spiraling set of stairs. Ellis went right instead, following the corner to a short hall on the left. She was running now as much from the memories as from the baying voices still calling for Jenny.
At least the calling voices seemed to be receding and she thought wildly for a moment that she might have a chance of losing them in the Ruins. Perhaps she could find a place to hide, catch her bearings and perhaps find her way back to Jonas and Alicia.
The hallway ended at another door. A ball that Ellis had lost when she was three lay in the corner. She willed herself to ignore it and pressed on through the doorway.
Ellis stopped abruptly on the other side.
Snow was gently falling beyond the tall windows on the far side of the room. The polished, sumptuous oak paneling was practically aglow from the warm light of the fire raging in the large, marble fireplace to one side. Opposite the fireplace and set in one corner of the room, an enormous evergreen tree stood decorated in bows, strings of popcorn and berries as well as paper ornaments and candles.
Candles her papa had lit for her.
Ellis drew in a shuddering breath.
There he sat, her father in his favorite wingback chair.
He was too plump and his cheeks were, perhaps, a little too rosy. He was still wearing his tuxedo slacks but he had draped his coat over the back of the couch that sat opposite him and had opened the front of his vest. The tie was nowhere to be seen. He had even somehow managed to be rid of his polished shoes, favoring instead his tattered and far more comfortable slippers. He sat with his legs outstretched, crossed at the feet, and peered at a book he held in his hands.
He looked up and saw her.
He smiled.
He closed the book and held his arms out wide to her just as he had when she was fifteen years old. Her mother was still out at the Cabots’ party trying to get the support of Elise Cabot for Mother’s latest social project. Papa had managed to slip away early and take refuge in the parlor. Ellis had heard him and come down from her room, far too excited on Christmas Eve to sleep.
“You’re still up, my girl?” His voice was warm and welcoming, as familiar to her as anything could be. The joy in its memory wounded her heart with longing. “Come on, my girl! Give me my present early! A little hug for your old father, eh? How about a story?”
How could she have forgotten this night? She had carried it with her down through the years, a precious moment of her own never to share, never to lose. The silent snow falling outside and only the crackle of the fire to disturb them. He had lit all the candles on the tree for them—just for them alone—and then they had settled into that great chair together, her in her father’s lap with his left arm cradling her and his right hand steadying the book. It was Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and, with her mother away for the evening, her father did not skip over the ghostly parts but performed them with relish for his appreciative audience of one. Curled up on his lap, it was the safest she had ever felt or would ever feel. It was the memory she recalled when nothing else could bring her peace.
Ellis stepped across the room, tears welling up in her eyes. She fell to her knees next to him, throwing her arms around her papa’s waist and resting her head against his chest just as she had those many years ago.
“Oh, Papa,” she sobbed. “I’ve missed you so!”
“There, there, my dear girl,” her father said. His hand began to stroke her hair. “It’s Christmas! Everything is just fine. Your mother will be at the Cabots’ a while longer. Let’s have some time of our own.”
“The Cabots’?” Ellis chuckled through her tears. “And this is good old Boston…”
Her papa grinned down at her. He had been at the dinner in 1910 and heard the toast himself. That he had taught it to their daughter was a source of never-ending grief for her mother. He dutifully delivered the next line. “The home of the bean and the cod. Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots…”
They finished the toast together.
“And the Cabots talk only to God.”
They laughed heartily together, then, overcome, Ellis once again buried her face against her father’s open vest, breathing in the smell of his clothes and his pipe tobacco.
She took no notice of the voices approaching beyond the walls.
Ellis closed her eyes. “Please read to me, Papa.”
“Of course, my girl!”
“And do all the voices,” she said.
“I always do all the voices,” came the deeper, darker-sounding voice of her father behind her.
She opened her eyes wide.
The floorboards in the room were rotting through in places. The oak paneling was warped and cracking from neglect. The tree was entirely gone but the old wingback chair remained, its fabric torn and stuffing exploding outward from the holes.
Her father was gone.
She leaped upward, trying to run, but a strong hand gripped her wrist and spun her around. She tried to strike the face that was suddenly before her with her free hand but he managed to grip that, too, pulling both her hands back behind her as he held her close.
“You left my party too soon,” Merrick said, staring down at her with his pain-filled eyes. “You owe me a dance, Ellis. You most definitely owe me a dance.”