Alice

Last night I read the picture book, the one my mother read to me as a child. It brought me comfort, whether from recollections of the warmth of my mother’s lap or from something of the story itself, I cannot say. The story frightened me, I remember, and the ending was all the sweeter for it, as was the glow of the lamp and the shelter of the arms around me. I suppose now that this was the purpose, to cause fear to bubble and swell in a child, all the better to feel the balm of safety after.

Perhaps it was this book that brought me here. Perhaps I never would have fallen so irrevocably into something that felt like love if the story had ended with the little mouse dying, instead of dreaming of fruit and cheese beneath its quilted coverlet. My own quilt is starkly white, and I do not dream of fruit. My dreams are all of death, and I sleep only when I cannot remain awake.

I saw the house first from the driveway. The moon was high and full, and the steeply gabled turrets stood like guardians above the lamp lit veranda, beckoning visitors with a welcoming glow. The architect had foregone symmetry in favour of a sense of organic assemblage, and the house, to my eye, took the appearance of a foreboding grandfather, known by those took the time, for his kindly ways. Beyond the glow, the house was framed by the huddled darkness of trees, the lawn an island upon which we might step unhindered by their treacherous roots. It so closely resembled the house in my book that I felt certain that something wonderful awaited me.

The evening was a grand one, and music spilled out from downstairs windows along with splashes of yellow light. Women in silk and satin danced with straight backed men, each couple turning in rustling arcs about each other couple, until the room span like a kaleidoscope before my eyes. There have been no parties for many months, and no callers either, though often at night, as I fight the tug of sleep, I am sure I hear high, bright voices from the rooms below.

I was dazzled by that first party. Bewitched, perhaps, and perhaps too I had more wine than was wise, for I had the sense that harm was far away and all must be well in the world. I wore the green dress, the one my mother had bought me the summer before. It was a dress that caught the eye, the way it caught the light, and rippled as I moved, and Charles, I know now, takes whatever catches his eye.

He was charming to me, at first. I returned to the house many times over the months that followed the party, spending more and more time with this man and his promise of happy endings. My mother bid me exercise caution, told me that a man of his circumstance could never love a woman of mine, but only desire her. Would that I had heeded her words, but we seldom see our own innocence until we are rid of it. He is not charming now. Charles is a devil in the body of a man, and I his hapless bride.

Even after the wedding, he was attentive and generous, and I believed I was proving my mother wrong. She wept as I packed the trunk he had sent for my belongings the week before I was to join him in this house. The trunk was small and there was much of my old life I left there, in the room of my innocence. I brought only a few clothes, the scant jewellery I owned, and the five books that sit now on the nightstand, books I imagined sharing with my own daughter one day. Now I do not believe that day will come.

At first, I thought he was doing me a kindness in allowing me time to settle into marriage, for he didn’t touch me at all for some months. We dined each evening at the long table, veiled by the flames of the candelabra between us. The talk was light and pleasant, and at least once each week he would lay out a new dress for me and we would have company, and I would be made to feel like the prize I so wanted to be. We would spend each morning together, riding out if the sun was not too bright, playing parlour games if it was. Charles was, as I have said, attentive, and I wanted for nothing, and yet it began to vex me that he showed no interest in exploring the nocturnal intimacies which I knew were a part of married life. That was until that day in the library.

The library was a high ceilinged room, with a moulded plaster ceiling below which dark bookshelves laddered themselves to the floor. Though there were inviting, well stuffed chairs in which an afternoon could be comfortably spent in reading, I never liked the room. The boards of the floor were carpeted not by wool or silk, but by the skins of a lion, a tiger and a leopard, their once fierce eyes gazing blindly at the plaque mounted heads of their prey displayed proudly between the shelves, a room of collected trophies. A large window at the north of the room was partially obscured by a leather padded desk, and it was here Charles was sat, as I moved about the shelves, idly examining the books in their uniform rows.

I was searching for something I might read, to pass the afternoons, which I had to myself. As I walked about the room, I ran my fingers across the gold embossed titles, but saw little to take my fancy. It was when I came to a series, bound in the softest creamy leather, and each with its title, a single name - Emily, Charlotte, Marguerite - indented discretely upon the spine, that I felt a shift in his demeanour. Curious, I pulled one from the shelf, disturbing a faint waft of tobacco and frankincense, but before I could peer within he was beside me, his hand on mine, his breath hot in my ear. “Don’t open it” he said, his voice husky with urgency held in restraint. But something had been awakened in him, and I felt the pain of him entering me for the first time as I stared into the glass eyes of that lion. After that, he visited my bed often, but more often still, he took me back to the library, where we had at last consummated the marriage.

Now my belly swells, and when he visits me, it is not to lay in my bed, but to sit beside it. Now he entreats me to tell him each detail of my life, writing my words across page after page of white paper as I speak. I do as he asks, for I will not incur his wrath again, not since I have seen it take form within him, once when I danced with another, and again when I told him I was with child. I thought that he would be happy, but as the child grows inside of me he becomes more sullen. Now he only visits to take down my story, and to rub sickly sweet oil into the skin of my stomach. “Think nothing of my mood, only I had hoped to keep you like this, all for myself, a little longer” he told me once. He must not have been himself that day, for he failed to lock my door as he left.

That night, I returned to the library. Moonlight lay in silver bands across the room, making monsters of the fleshless creatures watching my passage. I do not know what drew me to them, but I felt compelled to look again at those strange books, to open their supple covers, to see what secrets lay inside to have brought about such a change in Charles that day. In the pale light, I took Emily from the shelf, resting the satiny spine in my palm, and peeling open the first page. As I read, a voice filled my ears, high and bright, as if reading aloud the story of a girl, Emily, so very like me. Enraptured, I did not hear him enter.

Now he never leaves my door unlocked, even as he sits and writes my words amidst the cloying smell of the frankincense oil he applies to my skin, and I speak on in the hope that one day my unborn child might hear the voice of her mother, might feel the touch of my skin beneath her fingers, might come to know something of me, just as I had with Emily. I hope that she might heed my warning that there is no safety at the end of this story, and run.

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Written for Kenny Penn's Gothic Stories challenge, which you can find here: