Candle in the Attic Window(41)

Inside the mill, he would lead me up and up and up to the top room, beyond all the gears and strange mechanisms that made this building-machine work. He would draw me to his side with a whisper and then dance me across the old wood floor. That flooring made a music beneath our feet every so often, depending how we stepped. I was conscious of it only for a moment and then there was only the warmth of his arm around me and the soft clouds of fog that began to intrude into the room.

The walls were rough slats and smelled of old corn, and they splintered under my fingers as he pressed me backward into them. I dug my fingers into the old wood, thinking to shatter the entire windmill under my force. Much as I tried, it never came to pass. But his mouth did pass across my own, his breath mingled with mine. He had lips as would any human man, lips that tasted of wintergreen oil, but his eyes were far gone – and so, too, his nose – and yet, in the dream, this did not bother me. It simply was. His hands were no longer those of a man, either, but skeletal. Long, pale bones stroked over my cheek, my hair, and curled around my throat. I thought I should scream, yet the touch was warm, rousing, and I leaned into it. Even when he bade me not to, even when he told me only I could stop him.

I didn’t wish to.




I first saw the man on the rocks near sunset. He stood on one of the highest outcroppings of jagged cliff stone, his face toward the churning lake. The tails of his greatcoat whipped in the wind, snapped at the gathering mists like bird wings, while the wet rope of his hair lashed against his cheek. He reached up with a gloved hand to tuck the sodden mess into his coat collar.

The wind threw more rain against the windowpane, beginning to freeze into flakes of snowlit ginger by the remote sunset. I wondered why anyone would venture out on such a dismal night. I pressed a hand against the glass and could hardly tolerate the cold that slid into me. The man seemed small under my palm, as though I might wrap him in my fingers and thaw him. At the least, I could take him a mug of cider, but when I lowered my hand and looked again to the rocks, he was gone. A thin layer of snow dusted the ground, snow that was not disturbed by a single footprint.

“... gone and lost your mind. Turned 17 and it’s just gone.”

I turned away from the chilled window, to free the golden velvet curtains from their loops. Wrangling their considerable weight across the windows helped close out the frigid night from Aunt’s house. Once done, I turned to look at my sister. Across the room and bundled before the crackling fire, Louisa clucked her tongue at me. Like an old woman might, though she was all of 15, black hair smoothed into a shining cap that my own hair could not manage. Louisa looked like a butterfly tangled in its own cocoon, with – With my sketchbook across her knees!

“There was someone out there,” I murmured.

“I meant this.” Louisa jabbed a finger into the sketch she had exposed.

I lunged for the book, grasping it by the corner to pull it out of Louisa’s lap. She didn’t try to keep the book and I closed it against my chest, upset that the man outside had distracted me. No one was allowed to see these drawings. No one.

“It looks like the cliff without the house,” Louisa said, turning the small tie that bound her hair. “Tangled thorn bushes, shadowed skeleton men caught inside ... Why do you draw such awful things?”

Because I dream them, I would have said, if I wanted to gift Louisa with the truth. Being that I didn’t – for she would simply brush my answer to the side, again – I shrugged. Still, I couldn’t stop my heart from lurching into a frantic rhythm. A shadowed skeleton man, not in the black thornbushes of my mind, but on the snowy rocks, pressed beneath my palm for the merest of moments. I could feel all the ice that covered him melting in my palm, running down my lifeline, over the pad of flesh near my thumb, down into the shallow loveline where it would greedily overflow.

The book made a gentle protest as I closed it, its binding groaning under the slight motion. It was an old book, a gift from Grandmother. She claimed it had been her own as a girl my age, though she had never used it. And now? Now, it was seeing use, with a fresh set of pencils from my mother, who came into the room just then, offering Louisa and me cider. Louisa took hers, but I was content to let mine sit, hugging my sketchbook against my chest, looking to those ugly velvet curtains.

“Making lists, then?” our mother asked, and settled onto the couch, which Aunt had always claimed was host to the cream of the celebrity crop. Why any of them had ever come here was beyond me: this small town, with its ancient windmill, and roads in need of decent service. Perhaps people came here to escape the modern world, but – I laughed at that idea. No one came here to escape, but maybe to get lost.

“Aunt kept a green-striped scarf, didn’t she?” I asked, before Louisa could reply to Mother’s question.

Mother’s nose wrinkled, but soon enough, her frown turned to a laugh. “Why would you want that old thing?”

I shrugged, for how could I explain that such an item would be perfect for the man upon the rocks? “Just a keepsake,” I said, and that was when Louisa launched into how strange I’d become since we had arrived. Aunt’s house was clearly haunted and the spirits were sinking down into my bones, taking me over, turning me into someone I was not. I said nothing, but slapped Louisa lightly on the head before I left the room, climbing the old staircase up and up and up to the small corner room that had always been mine.