Wild Fell (22 page)

I tried to scream but he’d sealed my mouth with his own. I struggled under his weight, trying to free myself from his implacable grip on my wrists.

I shoved hard, as hard as I could, and then—

—the impact of falling to the hard floor woke me, still thrashing, still trying to throw off my nude father. I blinked, gasping for air, unable to breathe.

All around me was pitch darkness and, for a moment, it was unclear to me where I’d landed. I was pinned to the floor and thrashed about on the hard wood trying to free myself from the tangle of sheets that had restrained my arms and legs. Then I remembered that I was in the yellow bedroom at Wild Fell. I was on Blackmore Island, in Alvina, and I’d just had the worst nightmare of my life. But if I’d just had a nightmare, then it seemed to have followed me out, because I’d gone blind. Then I realized why. The fire in the grate had gone out, and the room was full of thick black smoke from the fireplace. Choking, eyes watering, I struggled to disentangle myself from the sheets and quilt. I stumbled over to the window and opened it wide, leaning out over the sill and taking in great heaving breaths of air.

My eyes streamed with tears from the smoke. When I found I could open them again, when I was able to focus, I saw that the storm had stopped and an enormous moon had risen above Devil’s Lake, and that the water beyond the overgrown lawn was smooth as glass.

Just beyond the lawn, closer to the stairs leading down to the water, the figure of the woman I thought I had seen earlier that day stood motionless, as though watching. When I rubbed my stinging eyes again with the back of my hand, she had gone.

I turned back to the bed and shrieked aloud at the sight of the naked man with the lunatic’s rolling eyes standing in the yellow moonlight beside my bed.

But only when he also screamed did I realize that the terrified man was me, and that I was looking at my own reflection in the full-length mirror at the foot of the bed.

I gathered up my clothes where I found them bunched up at the foot of the bed, tangled up under the sheets and the quilt. I dressed quickly and hurried out of the room. The nightmare of my father straddling me had been too horrible and vivid for me to even consider returning to the bed in the yellow room that night, let alone fall asleep there. Remembering the chill of the lower part of the house, I stepped back into the moonlit room and retrieved the quilt from the floor. I took care to close the door behind me, though God only knew who, or what, I thought I was locking in that room. I left the window open so that the rest of the smoke could escape and give the room a good airing at the same time.

The upstairs corridor of Wild Fell was unearthly quiet, but I found the staircase and made my way carefully downstairs. The Oriental runner on the stairs under my bare feet was soft and worn, but cold like the rest of the house.

The fire I’d left burning in the parlour fireplace had died down to embers, but with very little effort I was able to coax it back to life. I threw on more logs and settled into a chair to think. My throat was still raw from the smoke, but I had no intention of leaving this room until the sun came up, not even the short distance to the kitchen for a glass of water. Instead, I sat and watched the flames and tried to deconstruct what had occurred in the yellow bedroom.

First point: I fell asleep fully dressed, but I had woken nude. The explanation for that was simple enough: I had undressed in my sleep. The room had grown too hot, and I had been uncomfortable. Then, the smoke had woken me, and all of it was mixed up in those images of unspeakable, unnatural foulness.

Second point: The erotic dream had obviously been a dream of Ame. While I hadn’t thought of her consciously for a very long time, perhaps I had been suppressing feelings of loss—the loss of our marriage, the loss of those months I’d spent in the hospital recovering from the car crash that took away part of my memory; the loss of my father’s memories to Alzheimer’s; and mostly, my loss of
him
to the disease, and my abandonment of him to come here to Wild Fell, to chase some entirely ludicrous fantasy of opening a summerhouse in the middle of Georgian Bay. The dream was a synthesis of those various intertwined lusts and guilts. Likewise, the figure I thought I’d seen outside the window.

As for the scents, which were as clear to me in the dream as the voice and the outrageous presence of my father in that perverted context—the violets, the liquor, the warm flesh—these could only have been preambles to my brain identifying the smell of smoke.

Also smoke-related had to be my imagining that I had seen the figure standing on the lawn. My eyes had been streaming with tears, my vision had been blurred. My brain had simply plucked another fantasy from my distraught state earlier that evening when I arrived at the house and replayed it. In both cases, what I thought I’d seen proved to be an illusion on second glance. There was no woman standing on the lawn of Wild Fell either this evening, or half an hour ago. I was alone on Blackmore Island and alone in the vast house.

Thank you, Herr Doktor Freud. Very comforting.

But I was not comforted, not at all.

I
knew
I hadn’t woken because of the smell of smoke; I had woken because of the sound of a man’s voice in my ear muttering obscene carnality and from the weight of my father, who, though more than four hundred kilometres away, was somehow on top of me, trying to fuck me. The sensation of the tongue in my ear had been so vivid that even remembering it caused me to reach inside with my index finger to dry it or to wipe it clean.

In particular, I was horrified by the memory of the voice I’d heard: it had been an educated man’s voice, but there was violence underlying the veneer of civility, even in addition to its liquor-cured coarseness. It had been the voice of a man whose rage was normally kept on a very short chain like a murderous animal, the voice of no man I had ever known, least of all my father. And I was quite sure it had been a real voice.

All of this I pushed away, as much for my own sanity as anything else.

It had to have been a nightmare, nothing more. It had nothing to do with me except for the fact that I had been the nightmare’s vessel. None of it had happened. I recalled Scrooge’s words in
A Christmas Carol
as he dismissed the appearance of Marley’s ghost as something imaginary:
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

I pulled the quilt around me and curled myself into a semi-foetal crouch, longing for daylight and for the sound of the city—any city—waking up and coming to life.

Sleep eluded me that night as I lay on a divan in front of the fireplace in the parlour, but I must have nodded off again at some point, because when I opened my eyes again, the sun was shining through the panels of stained glass above the shuttered windows along the wall opposite the hearth.

I went to the window and opened the shutters just a crack. The fresh air that blew in off the lake was soft and cool and magnificently clean after the rain. When I pushed them open all the way, light flooded in, utterly transforming the room. Whereas last night I had seen only shadows and smothered opulence in a Victorian mausoleum, this morning the room was gracious, even welcoming.

Further, I felt it welcoming
me.
Where the sunlight touched the ancient white paint, the old furniture, and the dark hardwood floors, there was now depth and dimension and the promise of actual beauty in the offing. And it was all mine.

What had that lunatic Fowler woman said?
The house and everything in it.

This morning, in this sunlight, there was nothing sinister in her words. I had made an extraordinary real estate investment. For the first time since buying it under such unorthodox circumstances, I saw Wild Fell as a home—
my
home—not just a house or even a guest house; and certainly not the white elephant I had feared. I walked to the front door and opened it, letting the light into the front hallway. I felt the cool fresh breeze on my face from outside, smelled water, good fresh earth, and wildflowers. When the sun touched the rich mahogany, the grain seemed to pulse with a sumptuous crimson radiance all its own.

I put on my shoes and stepped onto the veranda, then down the great concrete steps to the gravel driveway. In the darkness of the storm last night, I had only seen the exterior of Wild Fell in flashes of lightning through the rain.

In the morning light, however, I saw that my house was more than just a house. It was a masterpiece of gothic revival architecture on par with any manor house I’d ever seen in books or magazines. The old stone exterior walls were shades of grey and taupe. They had acquired a patina over the decades, one that blended perfectly with the surrounding natural palette without challenging it. From where I stood on the driveway, I could clearly make out the complex silhouette of turrets rising from what could only be some sort of anterior wing. I walked the perimeter of the house, feeling ludicrously lordly as I surveyed it and the acres behind it, the wildly overgrown formal gardens that spread out across the acres to the place where the fields sheared downward and became the granite cliffs I had seen from the lake on arrival.

As I came around the part of the house that I knew would lead me back to the veranda and the portico, I noticed that one of the clapboard-sided porticos had fallen into a state of complete dereliction. There had obviously been a fire there at some point. The intact timbers showed signs of having been charred. The other wall had been taken out completely and its burned boards had collapsed. There had been no structural damage to the wing to which it was attached. The porch had a sealed doorway to the rear of the house and its flanking walls were concrete. If the fire had spread, I would be looking at a ruin right now, so perhaps the house was blessed in some ways other than its apparent agelessness.

I allowed myself to imagine Wild Fell with additional furniture, modern furniture, and the all the amenities of a modern guest house, all of which I could afford. I saw new paint, new wallpaper, paintings bought or maybe discovered in the attic, new beds, the gardens restored—if not with the doomed Queen Mary’s black roses, then at least with the best rosebushes money could buy.

An adventure waiting to happen. The loathsome cliché be damned, my heart felt as though it could soar right up into the blue sky—
my
sky, over my house and my island.

Back inside, I opened the shutters in the library, as well. The effect was the same; the light transformed the room. There were more books than I had noticed last night. The shelves were deeper than I had first surmised and many of the volumes were pushed back against the farthest recesses of the shelving, which was why I hadn’t seen them in the gloom, thinking the bookcases more or less empty. I brought a handful of books closer to the edge of one of the shelves, aligning the spines. It turned out to be a five-volume 1825 leather bound set of
The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser
, magnificent, if a little dusty.

On the shelf immediately adjacent, I noticed three or four rows of books that seemed far older than the works of literature I had perused on the first shelf. These were outsized, the bindings hand-tooled. I read the titles on the spines. Some appeared to be in Latin, but without any real proficiency in ancient languages, I could only guess.

Here then was what appeared to be an actual sixteenth century edition of
Malleus maleficarum, maleficas, &
earum haerisim, ut phramea potentissima conterens
by Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, the famous
Hammer of Witches
published in Cologne in 1520. I recognized the title from a paper I had written in my second year at university on the European witch burnings of the seventeenth century. Also here was Jean Bodin’s
De la demonomanie des sorciers
from 1586; Pierre Le Loyer’s
A Treatise of specters or strange sights, visions and apparitions . . . also of witches, sorcerers, enchanters and such like; Daemonolatreiae libri tres
by Nicholas Remy.
It would have cost a fortune to assemble a collection of first edition antique books and folios of this calibre.

There were other titles here too—some in English, others in French and German, all of them apparently pertaining to the history and practice of witchcraft. While many appeared to be genuine first editions from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, others appeared to be from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, published in English, with titles like
To Call the Ancients
,
Grimoire of the Nine Stars
,
The Eye of Horus
, and
Lore and Summoning of the Bridge-Builders of Time.

I frowned. In my newly minted role as proprietor of an ancient library, I took one of the newer volumes off the shelf to buff it gently against my shirt to try to clean it.

As I did so, something fluttered out from its pages and landed lightly on the faded Oriental carpet at my feet. I laid the book on the trestle table and bent down to pick it up.

Holding it up to the sunlight from the window, I saw that it was a faded sepia-toned nineteenth-century photograph of an imperious-looking young woman. A rip in the emulsion ran halfway across the surface of the image, cutting across the woman’s mouth and neck. Oddly, the effect of the rip, which technically obscured the woman’s mouth, was to stretch her smile in a way that stopped just short of the grotesque without any compromise to her beauty.

Her hair was gathered in a loose knot behind her head, tendrils of which tumbled with contrived casualness down the back of her neck. The dress she wore was modest in design, the under-sleeves trimmed with lace, the bodice buttoned, and flaring out into a wide skirt. Though relatively plain, it was obviously the garment of a woman of significant wealth. From the way the photographer had highlighted the folds of the dress, I took it to be organza or some other expensive silk that caught the light and held it.

Her head was inclined slightly, as though barely deigning to acknowledge the camera—indeed she seemed not to acknowledge any imperative to be pleasing at all, though her beauty was such that she couldn’t be anything less.

When I looked closer, I made a discovery that astonished and delighted me.

The woman had been posed regally, at a three-quarter angle with her hand on the back of an elaborately carved chair in the classic Victorian style, but I saw that the image was a clever optical illusion.

While she was indeed posed against a photographer’s seamless backdrop, the photograph wasn’t of a woman in front of a backdrop; it was a photograph
of the reflection
of a woman standing in front of a backdrop, as recorded in the glass of an ornate mirror, the frame of which I could see at the frayed edge of the photograph.

I turned the photo over. There was writing there in violet-coloured ink, now long faded:
To my dearest brother Malcolm from his best-beloved only true love, Rosa, Wild Fell, Alvina, autumn 1872.

I reached for the book on the trestle table and opened it. Inside the cover was another of the floral bookplates I’d found yesterday in the small book of Wordsworth’s poetry,
Ex Libris Rosa Blackmore
. I felt a thrill of proprietary detective excitement. The woman in the photograph was Rosa Blackmore, daughter of Alexander Blackmore, the man who had built Wild Fell. I looked closer at the bookplate. There was a diamond-shaped lozenge in the lower centre of the design. Inside the lozenge was a heraldic griffin holding what appeared to be a Scottish thistle.

I carried the book out into the hallway and retraced my steps backwards from my arrival last night. I looked up at the archway at the carved coat of arms. The shield was the same as the design inside the lozenge on the bookplate.

The coat of arms on the archway was clearly that of Alexander Blackmore. As his daughter, Rosa would use her father’s arms in a lozenge, as befitted a lady born into the antiquated traditions that Alexander Blackmore had clearly intended to perpetuate here in what must have been rough, rude country.