Candle in the Attic Window(35)

I shook my head slowly. “No,” I answered. “Everything does look in order, however, so why don’t you wait outside if you’d like to. I just want do a little exploring on my own, to get an idea of how much work it’ll take before Amelia – before Mrs. Parrish and I can move in.”

Larabie nodded. “Upstairs, you’ll find we pretty much left everything alone. May be dusty, though. Didn’t even put dropcloths down much above the second floor.”

“I think you’ve done an excellent job with what I’ve seen so far,” I assured him. I took a deep breath then looked at my wristwatch and glanced toward the front door. “I shouldn’t be any more than an hour ....”

I waited, gazing up at the main staircase, until I heard the outside door close, then turned to the back hallway and the kitchen. On my left, I passed the downstairs parlour first and then the dining room, noting the bay window in the latter – the first-story bulge that jutted out onto the side veranda, forming the base of the four-story tower. Once in the kitchen, I took a deep breath. I saw, at least in my mind’s eye, the stains. I thought for some reason of the ink I had spilled, myself, on Larabie’s floor as I imagined my mother calling me, saw her standing over the sink, the door that led to the yard and the woodshed behind the house still yawning open, her hands red with blood.

My mother’s hands. Why?

I watched as she washed them then followed a trail of water stains, this time – pale, clear drops diluting a deeper red – back toward my father. It circled, minced, avoided expanding pools of crimson, as it reached the telephone in the hallway, then returned to the door by the pantry that led to the back stairs. The stairs my mother would never use because, as she used to say, “It isn’t proper.”

The stairs that rose toward the outside wall then curved and spiraled up through the tower, until they angled back into the attic.

A child’s “secret passage”.

I followed the trail.

I heard my mother’s voice.

“Joseph,” she said, as we climbed the spiral, “you must forget everything that you’ve seen. It’s only a game, like the games your father played down in the village. Games I might have been told about, but had never believed until he came home, more drunk than usual, early this morning.”





We reached the top, where the stairs straightened out again for their final climb up to the attic, and the sun suddenly shone through the windows, filling the tower with spotlights of blood-red.

“While he was sleeping,” my mother continued, “I thought of a game, too.”

My mother had always used the front staircase. The back stairs were dusty. And one had to stoop to get from the attic into the tunnel beneath the front gable. But this was different – this was a game.

I straightened up, bumped my head, realized I stood in the attic, myself, now.

I had trouble breathing the stuffy air. I leaned against a rough brick column – the front parlour chimney, my memory told me – and felt the flange where it thrust through the roof brush against my shoulder. I blinked my eyes, hard, to clear my vision and, when I opened them up again, I saw what still looked like a pool of blood.

Again, a memory – a recognition. I was already within the front gable. The red that I saw was the light of the sun, spilling out from a second low arch where the gable roof met the tower’s final top level. I heard my mother’s voice warning me to be sure to brush my pants carefully before, once the game we would play was ended, I went back downstairs. I saw my mother kneeling next to me as we crawled through the final tunnel.

We came to a child’s hidden pirate castle. A room of oval stained-glass windows that served as portholes, of worn-out sheets and ropes, carefully hung from the open beams of the dome roof above as a ship’s sails and banners.

I helped my mother build a tower within the great tower’s uppermost room, helped her make a stair-like heap of the boxes and trunks I’d dragged in for years from the main attic proper as pirate treasure.

“Now you must help me with one thing more,” she said, when we were finished. She climbed to the top and began to pull on the ropes that hung toward her. “Hold my legs. That’s right. And now I want you to promise me that everything that has happened today will be our secret. Do you promise, Joseph?”

“Yes, Mother,” I said. The memory was clear now.

“I want you to think of this as a game. Like playing pirates. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mother,” I said again.

“Good. Now your mother must walk the plank – just as in a game. As soon as you feel me move my feet, I want you to push me off these boxes and knock them over, just as if you were a real pirate captain pushing me off the plank. I want you to go downstairs after you’ve done that, without looking back. Some men will come later and all you must tell them is that your mother went away. Do you promise, Joseph?”

I had promised.

I blinked again. I stood alone in the tower now. Raising my eyes to the dome above me, I gazed at my mother, her flesh long since shrunken into a parchment against her body, still hanging in the red light of the windows, just as I had left her.

And somehow, for no reason whatsoever, I thought of Amelia, who so resembled her, walking down the front, formal staircase. Amelia, my bride, also somewhat reclusive, who, I was sure, as soon as the house was cleaned and ready, would come to love it and make it her own.