I stopped in my bedroom doorway.
I noticed the bed first: The cover had been pulled all the way down and trailed from the end of the bed like a bridal veil. On the table next to the bed, the shade of the lamp had been removed, and placed next to the bald light—which had been switched on—was a figurine I recognized from one of the glass cabinets in the morning room, depicting Salome cradling the head of John the Baptist in her lap, looking rather sorrowful; I could not think where Dottie had acquired it or why she had thought it worth money. The figure now sat under the glaring light of the lamp, John the Baptist’s unseeing eyes staring upward.
The wardrobe door stood partly open, and one of my cardigans had been pulled from it, half in and half out. The waist of the cardigan rested inside, and the neck and arms were drawn out the wardrobe door and onto the floor, the sleeves raised pitifully and eerily lifelike, as if someone inside the wardrobe drew the cardigan in against its will. The room’s only chair had been placed next to the wardrobe, and a pair of my shoes was set beneath it. A set of my stockings dangled empty from the seat to the shoes, one of my skirts lay on the seat, and one of my blouses hung unbuttoned from the chair’s back, the sleeves folded decorously on the lap of the skirt. The entire display, looking oddly like a woman sitting in a chair, was topped with the shade from my bedside lamp, balancing like a misshapen head.
My numb fingers dropped the camera case and the tripod to the floor. There was no thought in my mind that someone in the house had done this—not one of the family or one of the maids. I listened to my breath rasp loud in the still air and stared again at the wardrobe, the pitiful cardigan, its deliberate message, its unmistakable display.
Frances saw a door, David Wilde had said. The things she saw coming through that imaginary door were dead. She was showing me. She wanted me to see.
“Frances,” I whispered.
I looked again at the figure in the chair. It looked withered and dead, inhuman, the head misshapen and eyeless, and yet it was a woman. Posed in a chair with her hands in her lap. Was she standing sentry over the awful doorway? Or mimicking the pose in the portrait I’d just seen? You’ve seen me, the hideous figure seemed to say. I see you. We see each other.
I made a strangled sound. I should run. I should pack my bags, call for the motorcar, and leave this house, never to come back. Find some other way to make a living. I should not stay here, sleep in this bedroom, anymore.
And yet despite its monstrousness, the figure in the chair was pitiful. There was something about the lifeless way the empty sleeves were folded, the weakly dangling stockings. I had taken a step forward again, my hand out to knock the lampshade off the chair, when I remembered the camera.
This was what I had wanted—to be able to take pictures so someone outside my fevered mind could see. I crouched and fumbled with the latches of the camera case, and I had removed the camera before I remembered Mr. Crablow’s lecture about light. I’d need powerful artificial light to shoot indoors, he’d said. I did not have a flash.
Still, I raised the camera, balanced it on my crouched knees—I did not bother with the tripod—and snapped a picture of the chair. I rotated the film, then snapped another. I rotated the film again, angled the camera toward the wardrobe, and snapped a third.
“I see you,” I said aloud.
It was the best I could do. I could not look at the eerie chair anymore. I put the camera down and stood. I found myself staring at the lampshade as if it were a set of features looking back at me. I quickly turned and left the room, closing the door behind me.
In the corridor, I paused. I looked down at my hands, which were trembling but not shaking. My throat was tight, but I could still breathe. She wanted something—from me. She wanted it so desperately she was willing to come back, to come through the door she had feared in life, to beg it of me. That what I had just seen was a violation of every rational belief, I knew very well. But I also knew an act of desperation when I saw one. I knew what it was to want something that badly. To feel that deeply.
I would not run screaming. Frances had come to me; so I would go to her. I would go to her own places, her private places, as she had been to mine. I would start with the place where she died.
I turned toward the stairs and headed for the roof.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN