Candle in the Attic Window(44)

“Come to me,” he said and I woke up, tangled in the green-striped scarf.

I flailed in an attempt to free myself, for it seemed a snake, a tentacle, something cold and slimy, meant to hold me down. I flung the fabric onto the floor and stared at it, slowly coming to believe otherwise. It was just a stupid piece of fabric. Nothing more.

If this house was our place to dream, I thought that I only need go home. Perhaps I had conjured him to life, from the photograph or the sketches, or some combination thereof. Driven mad by my sister’s need for social media, even in the midst of a winter storm, I sought the opposite refuge, that of imagination.

But when I saw the footprint, I reconsidered. The footprint gleamed in the low afternoon light, just inside my door. As if someone had been walking in snow and paused here, long enough to leave a wet impression. Was the snowman melting?




According to the police reports – and sadly, there had been such a thing, because the neighbours didn’t know who else to call – Aunt was found just outside the door to the windmill. She was in her nightclothes and barefoot, her hair unbound, as though she had just come from bed. Being a woman of some seventy years, no one had been too surprised by her death, but its means remained a mystery. Had she simply wandered outside, fallen, and perished there in the night? The medical examiner thought that the most likely scenario and Mother seemed to accept it well enough – for it was easiest. Asking more questions was tricky.

Why had Aunt been wearing such a smile? Did the dead smile? Why had Aunt been carrying a spring of rosemary? (It had been broken from the large rosemary bush she kept in her kitchen, dirt scattered around the pot as though she had been in a hurry.) The old do curious things, so I was told, time and again. Who could truly understand the mind? I wanted to, but how did one understand a mind that had already moved on?

If there were clues in the house, I could not see them. Everything looked ordinary. The kitchen felt as though Aunt had stepped out, but would be right back; even the teakettle that Mother had heated left me thinking it had actually been my aunt, for there sat her favourite cup with the white violets on it. Her room was still scented with the fragrance of her powder and there, by the bed, sat her slippers. Slippers she had not put on the night she had wandered outside to her death.

“Curious old lady,” I whispered, as I turned circles in her room, looking for something, for anything.

When I noticed the thin line that ran up the far wall, I stopped spinning. The wallpaper was slightly curled up, yellow on its underside. The paper crackled when I touched it and I thought it was unlike Aunt to leave something so worn. She was proud of her house, though she wanted the public to stay away; she made certain it was well-kept in all ways. Yet, here was an oddity.

I ran my fingers along the paper, beneath it, where the glue had turned hard and had, in some places, flaked off entirely. There was still a little scattering of glue bits on the floor there, which I was prodding with my shoe when a hidden latch disengaged and the wall swung outward.

Alice in Wonderland was familiar enough to me that I was wary of such doors. I peered inside and saw a bare lightbulb with a dangling chain. One tug on the chain sent light spreading over a small space that looked like a closet, but that featured stairs leading upward. At the top of the stairs (Of course I climbed those stairs, which groaned and seemed likely to give way before I did reach the top) there was another door, shorter. Through that door (for how could I not go on?), yet another door, and this one had me crawling through a small space that seemed more like a heating duct than it did storage. Surely, nothing was kept up here – but I was wrong.

A small box sat at the far end of the space. I pulled it toward me, through the dust of ages, and pried up the small latch that kept the lid closed. Inside the box sat another box, and inside this box, a delicate ring. It was nothing complex, a loop of white gold or silver, holding one small diamond aloft in a simple filigree swirl. It seemed a thing a bride would wear.

There came a shout from the lower part of the house and I jumped into motion, wriggling out of that small space, even as I jammed the ring box into my jeans pocket. I came down to find the bedroom quiet and dark. A glance out the windows showed me that, somehow, the day had flown. I closed the secret door and left Aunt’s room, but as I stepped into the hall, a terrible cold seized me.

“Louisa! Mother!”

There was no reply from them. I was shivering by the time I reached the stairs and pulled myself back before I slipped down them, for they were coated in ice. Long daggers of ice draped the banister and small bits of snow swirled in the air. I stood there for the longest time, thinking I was dreaming, but a sharp twist of the skin near my wrist seemed to prove I was awake.

I picked my way down the staircase, only slipping once when I neared the bottom. I thumped down those last steps and entered a world that seemed unreal. Snow had drifted to the foot of the stairs and against every wall. The wind blew a gale from one end of the house to another, ice and snow tracing over every wall, window and door.

It was the front door that was open, a mouth for the storm to howl through. I could not close it, for the snow had drifted in such a way to make it impossible. I cried out for my sister and mother, again –

“M?dchen.”

It was his voice, though, not theirs, that rose above the shriek of the storm. I turned, fully expecting him to be there, but I was still alone in the snowy house. All around me, the house moaned, like Aunt once had as the cold burrowed into her, down to her bones. Oddly, I wanted to soothe the house, make it better, but instead, I fled.