The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(58)
The house bobbed closer, gaining detail as I walked. It was perfect, from the lawn all the way to the widow’s walk circling the high attic tower, where I once imagined my bedroom would be when Althea finally invited me to stay.
I hesitated at the front door. Not because I thought it would be locked, but because I had no sense of what lay beyond it. The Vanity Fair photographer wasn’t allowed past the lawn, and my fantasies always took place out here: horseback riding, picnics. Even the daydreams about my bedroom mostly took the form of me pacing my widow’s walk, surveying the swells of green. I read too much Wilkie Collins as a kid.
So whatever I found inside might be closer to the truth. Though truth, I sensed, was a relative concept here. I grabbed the doorknob, a puffing golden face shaped like the Wind sliced apart by Hansa, and turned.
The foyer I stepped into was vast, flanked on each side by a curving staircase. Stubs of unlit candles perched between each spindle. Between the flights was a pink stone fountain so big you could swim in it. Three stone women glared impassively from its center. One held a birdcage, one a translucent quartz cube, the other a dagger. Through windows taller than me came the tilted, dust-colored light of Sunday afternoon.
The scale of everything was so vast, it took me a minute to take it all in. As I did I saw bits of humanity elbowing in on the splendor: A glittery, cheap-looking cardigan hanging over a banister. A blue toy boat floating in the fountain.
And a hum, just audible over the patter of water. When I listened hard, it resolved into the secretive tones of a child singing to herself. The tune was “Hickory Dickory Dock.”
I looked up and saw a little girl sitting in the bend of the left-hand staircase, watching me. When our eyes met, she went silent.
“Ella,” I said, only half-believing it. But it was her; it was my mother. I recognized her from the magazine spread. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. When she heard her name, she ran up the stairs and out of sight.
I followed, realizing with a start that my footsteps made no sound on the tile floor, or the marble stairs. It was instantly disorienting, like trying to talk when your ears are stuffed.
Ella swerved to the left. I followed. The hallway was so long it had to be a trick—I’d seen the house from the outside. It was big, but not like this. I jogged past one door after another, trying each one. I thought I heard a giggle behind the third, but it didn’t sound like it came from a child.
The seventh door I tried opened onto a tiny room. A typewriter sat on a writing desk between two windows. Next to it, a cigarette wedged into a green glass ashtray sizzled down to a stub. An inch of ash hung from its tip. Through the window was a different day than the one I’d left, one where a gray sky pressed against winter-crisped grass.
I tiptoed to the typewriter to see what was written on the page curling out of it, in dense, irregular print.
When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.
My neck tingled like someone was close behind me, reaching out with pinching fingers. I sprinted from the room and closed the door.
The hall had changed. Now it was a brighter place, shorter, ending in a glass-ceilinged conservatory flooded with green. Sunlight poured in over trees I recognized and some I didn’t, and some I swore I’d seen just now in the woods. I walked slowly forward with my arms held out. The air was dense and damp and sweet. On a pool of grass so bright it had to be fake sat a chrome-fronted radio the color of strawberry sherbet.
I crouched down and turned on the radio. The light outside dimmed as the music came up. It was the song I’d heard on the bus, sped up into a dance tune. When I snapped it off, the light outside bounced back and swelled, till the brightness hurt my eyes. I threw a hand over them, backing out of the room and into something warm and solid.
“My god,” he said, because it was a man I’d collided with. “Won’t you ever leave me alone?”
It was night again. He shrank away from me in a pool of artificial torchlight. We were in an orange-lit, faux-medieval billiard room with knotty wooden walls. The man wore a rumpled tuxedo. He looked like a duke Barbara Stanwyck might’ve fallen in love with on a steamship crossing, before ending up with a cabin boy played by Cary Grant.
He’d dropped a very full highball glass when I bumped him. The sharp scent of gin stung my nose. In the other hand he held a gun. Not like Harold’s, a blunt-nosed black thing made for violence—this gun was long and elegant as a greyhound. The man carried it propped over his shoulder like a boy playing army.
“You can see me?” I said. I wasn’t sure what the rules were here—whether I was a ghost. Whether I would die if shot by a gun.
“You’re all I see. It’s driving me mad. It’s driven me mad!” His voice was arch, but his eyes were wet and desperate.
“Who are you?” I asked, reaching for his sleeve. “Who do you think I am?”
He stumbled back. “Get away, you foul thing. I’m getting free of you even if she can’t. Your touch may be cold as the grave, but I know you come straight from hell.”
He walked unsteadily through a pool of whiskey-colored light, disappearing into the darkness on the other side. From the silence came a single gunshot.
When I ran from the room, my ears popped. Listing with vertigo, I staggered down a wide, ruined hall, its tiled floor grown over with moss. Ivy grew through a shattered windowpane, and everything smelled like rot. It ended in a sitting room with water-stained walls, where a pair of striped folding chairs flanked a crushed-velvet sofa. On the table between them lay a stack of fashion magazines. Christy Turlington stared vacantly from the cover of the yellowing Vogue Paris on top. November 1986.