Aeonian: Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Five
“That night there was no celebration of Christmas. The invitations that had gone out to the neighbouring genteel families of the surrounding area were swiftly cancelled and the dishes that Nancy and Bess had so diligently prepared were stowed away. The servants went to their quarters, or to their families, and Anna and I sat quietly in the schoolroom until it was time to go to bed. We ate nothing and said little. The horror of the day appeared to have stolen our words, and our appetites.
The household was silent, the neighbourhood in shock. Waves of soft snow fell with the shadows of the night. The light wind was the only noise that could be heard. Everywhere there was silence.
I would have called it a peaceful time, to have, or so it seemed, all noise and chatter removed from the lands about us, but the silence did not seem restful, it felt restless. As if the world waited for something, or someone to start talking, and to make the fears which rode within the blood of all the souls of this place, vocalised, and heard. But none did speak. Perhaps none dared.
I put Anna to bed that night with a heavy, sorrowful heart. Although I had barely known Miss Elizabeth, I had lost a friend that day. I had admired her stoic assessment of her life and prospects, her practical method of viewing the path of her own choices, and perhaps, perhaps most of all, I had felt in company with an equal when I talked with her. I had little experience with friendship, but I had thought that within this other woman who spoke so candidly of her wishes and aspirations had lain the possibility of such a relationship.
It was not only that which disturbed me. The manner of her death was so brutal, so perverse, that I could not rest that night for thinking on it. It was as if she had been left there as a message for someone, the reverend perhaps, mocking his God and his church, the safety of the civilised world. Each time I closed my eyes, after I had left Anna to her own dreams, after I had lain down in my own cold bed, I could see nothing but images of the bloody rents down the back of Elizabeth’s nightgown, the speckled white of pieces of her skull held in the tresses of her hair, her desperate fingers sunk deep into the ground where she had tried to crawl away from whatever, or whoever sought to end her life.
Had it been the beast which had attacked Anna and me? Had it been the same thing which tore apart the poacher, Brune? It seemed it must have been an attack of some ferocity, but if it was a beast, if it was an animal, why had it not fed upon the body of the young girl it had hunted? And if it was a person, a person capable of doing such things as this, why choose such a girl as Miss Elizabeth Grose to murder, and why in such a place? I wondered at the place we had found her body. Had she been trying to reach the church itself? Had she thought a castle of God might protect her against whatever it was that hunted her that night? What had she seen with those eyes now dull and flat with death? Had something convinced her that the house of God could protect her against it? Had she believed that the thing which hunted her had been evil?
She had been in her nightgown. How had she left her house without being noticed? Had she been drawn out, or deceived into leaving a place of safety during the night?
I thought of the beast I had struggled with in the forest at the edge of the coast path, and I shivered. If that had been the creature which had taken life from Miss Elizabeth, I could readily understand why she would have turned to the place of God in desperation. I could understand why a reverend’s daughter, no doubt brought up to view God as an unquestionable reality, might have turned to the Almighty for help against something she believed to be an agent of the purest evil. But God had not saved her. The thing which had killed her, if a thing it was and not a person, was not daunted by the church, but had struck her down in the sacred grounds. Man, or beast, the thing which took the life of my almost-friend was not awed by places which others considered holy.
I turned over in my bed and sighed, staring up at a ceiling obscured by darkness. I could not sleep; there were too many thoughts, fears and concerns floating in my mind. It was then that I heard a noise coming from the corridor outside, a creaking of floorboards, in a manner which made me believe that someone was treading upon them. My first thought was of Bartholomew, that he was creeping to my bedroom, perhaps to seek to take from me that which I would not give freely. I hastened to my door, my heart pounding with fear, as I sought to get a chair pushed up against the doorknob to seal the lock on it. But as I reached the door, I realised the steps upon the boards were heading away from my door, and they were too light, even for the cat-like Bartholomew, to make. Setting the chair gently aside, I opened my door a crack and looked into the hallway.
It was dark, almost impossible to see much besides the grey shapes of the banisters and stairs which loomed and shrank in the darkness, lit only by the shifting clouds in the skies which caused the moon’s light to wax and wane upon the interior of the house. But just at the place where the staircase turned, I thought I saw a glimpse of a white nightshift, and a flash of dark hair, as someone headed down the stairs.
I pulled open my door. “Anna?” I whispered into the still darkness, feeling my heart pound faster even as I spoke. “Anna?”
There was no answer. I stepped from my room into the coldness outside, shivering and staring down the flight of stairs. I was almost sure I could hear light feet disappearing through the house. I turned for Anna’s room, and pulled the door open gently. If it was not her then I had no wish to disturb her sleep. But as I looked into the room, I saw an empty bed with the covers pulled back. I feared that the person moving with such stealth through the house was indeed my charge.
“She must be sleepwalking,” I muttered to myself, and grabbed the blanket on her bed, throwing it around my shivering shoulders as I made to go after her. I stopped; there was a noise below me of a door opening, a door to the outside.
The thought of Miss Grose in her nightgown, taken outside by something or someone, flashed through my mind, and I was suddenly alive with terror.
I rushed to Anna’s window and pulled back the thick winter curtains that covered them, looking out into a dark world which glittered as the spare light of the moon hit the whirling and dancing flakes of snow which fluttered from the skies. Thick drifts were starting to fall, covering the forests and land with a blanket of white. I wiped the window, steamed with my breath, with my palm and noted a small figure in white walking out on the front lawn of the house. Even from here, I knew it was Anna. I could see dark curls bobbing in the light wind and saw the shape of her small hands as they stretched out from her sides. She brought her arms up, as though in benediction of the night, of the moon, of the snow and the stars, and she stood on the front lawn, standing still, snow floating around her in the darkness.
It would have been a picture of true and sheer beauty, if I had not been so terribly afraid for her. Whatever it was that took Miss Elizabeth, whatever it was that had tempted those other girls from their house, it had been done in the middle of the night when no one was around. Although I could ascribe no rational thought or reason to the fear which struck deep into my heart, I seemed to believe that my charge was in terrible danger. I turned and ran from the window, not even stopping to put on shoes as I raced down the stairs, sped through the servants’ corridor at the back of the house, and reached the porch, but as I did, I came to a swift halt.
Standing at the front of the house, on the porch, were two figures, which were looking on the figure of Anna calmly, standing in the garden. Their backs were to me, but it was not hard to see from the graceful figures and red hair that it was Bartholomew and Beatrice. For reasons I could not explain, I ducked behind the door which led from the servants’ corridor to the porch, and spied on them through the tiny crack where the half-open door met the wall.
For just a moment, as my heart boomed inside me, and my breathing was all I could hear, I thought that this was irrational. Surely, I should go to Anna, and show my cousins that I too had been awoken by her nocturnal ramblings? Surely that would be the office of the good governess, ever sensitive to the needs of her charge? But something stopped me, something deep within me held me back. It was a primal feeling, a warning, which seemed to speak to me from the very base of all my senses. It spoke of danger, of a reason to hide myself from my employers. It spoke of something I could not even put into words, but could only feel, the most primitive and ancient of all senses.
“It is almost time.” The voice of Beatrice drifted to me as my breathing calmed. She sounded serene, as she stared on the figure of Anna who stood still with outstretched arms on the front lawn.
“It is,” came the lazy drawl of Bartholomew.
“Do you think that you could restrain yourself for a few nights, brother? After all, we have waited for this opportunity for so long; I would have thought the return of our beloved one would be enough for you?”
“I will curb my spirits, for you, sister.” There was amusement in his voice. “But do you not see, it is due to the excitement that I am turned so restless?”
She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Turning her face for a moment from the figure of Anna on the lawn, I saw her smile her beautiful smile at him. “Of course, Bartholomew,” she assured him, nodding, “but now that we are so close, I would hate to see anything get in the way. We must be careful.”
“Nothing will.” He inclined his head to the figure on the lawn. Distantly I could hear Anna muttering in a strange voice. Those words again, those strange words which were of no language I knew, the words I had seen her speaking to herself in the mirror, the words which she had used to banish the beast in the forest. She was muttering them again. With her hands raised in benediction to the skies, and those strange words falling from her lips, it was as if she was praying, but in such a way to make my blood shiver. My breath came hot and fast against the wood of the door as I cowered behind it.
“The spirit grows strong within her,” observed Beatrice, something like awe in her voice. “Who would have known that such a worthless vessel could indeed hold something so precious?”
“She will not be complete, without the blood,” said Bartholomew.
Beatrice shook her head. “No,” she whispered, “but it must be at the right time. So long, so many generations, so many lost chances, and now, finally, we have all that we need.” She turned to him, and her face no longer smiled, but there was an expression of peace and happiness on it. “No more to be alone, Bartholomew, no more for it to just be the two of us, just us two souls wandering this life without one to guide and love us. When she returns…”
“All will be well once more.” He breathed in and sighed. “There is still much to prepare,” he said. “I will go this night; you stay and watch the vessel.”
“There is no need,” replied Beatrice, “let the spirit commune with the night. She will find her own way back when she is done.” She turned to him. “I will come with you, brother, I was always the one who was better with the arts required.”
He nodded. “As you wish.” He pointed at the figure of Anna. “She is done already, it would seem, in any case.”
The little muttering figure had dropped her arms and was turning to walk back into the house. As she walked towards the two figures in the doorway, they moved aside, with almost reverential bows, as if in the presence of royalty. Anna walked past them as though in a dream; she seemed to float through the house, her eyes open, but staring blankly ahead of her, her hands at her sides. She drifted past me, like a ghost, and made for the stairs.
Bartholomew and Beatrice watched her go and looked at each other.
“Would you like to race, this night, sister?” he asked with a wicked grin.
“Why bother?” she smiled, “you never do win, you know?”
Faster than I would have imagined possible, they seemed to vanish from the doorway. There was a sound, something like the rushing wind as it passes through the leaves of trees, or like the far-distant sound of a train, and they were gone. I crept around the door, and I could see no trace of them. It was as though they had taken to the air, flown away.
I stood there shivering for a moment. Staring at the space where they had vanished and looking back at the place where Anna had walked past me. What was going on in this house? I could understand none of it, but I knew, I knew with everything that was true and honest within me, something dark was within my two cousins. I knew nothing of what their talk meant, but it seemed to me that something was going to happen, was going to happen to Anna, which had nothing of goodness in it. Were my two cousins linked to the murders? Could Bartholomew even have been responsible for them? What had Beatrice said, something about containing himself? And what was this about Anna being a vessel? They had used words like that before, had they not? What were they planning to do to this young girl, about whom they had ever seemed so dismissive? The manner in which they had moved aside for her to pass, it was reverential. They were never like that with her during the day, so why now, as she sleepwalked? And why were they watching her so calmly as she stood in the snow in her nightgown, muttering those strange words?
Those words, they chilled me too, making me feel cold all through myself. What was the language Anna spoke? When she spoke it, she always seemed… I thought back to the attack of the beast, to the dream-like manner in which she stared at the mirror, to the blank look on her face as she had passed me this night. Whenever she spoke that language, those words, she seemed like a creature possessed, as though Anna herself was not there, and something else, some other presence was.
“As though she is someone else,” I whispered, and looked about me fearfully in case anyone could hear. I turned from the porch, running up the stairs as quietly but as swiftly as I could. I opened Anna’s door, fear pounding through my heart, but found her curled up in bed, covered with her blankets, sleeping as though she had never been disturbed. She looked so angelic, I could barely believe all that I had seen this night and this day had ever happened. As if her innocent and restful face meant that there was no room for evil in the world.
I went back to my own room with a troubled heart. I did not know what was going on, but something was, and I knew it concerned Anna in some way I did not fathom. But I knew something else as well. Whatever it was that threatened my young charge, my young friend, I was not going to let it harm her. Whatever strength and spirit there was within me, I would use to help and to save her, if I could.
“I will not let them harm you, Anna,” I mumbled as the first lights of the dawn started to stretch over the skies, and I fell into a light and restless sleep. “I will not let anyone harm you.”