word count: 2,027
This is a piece of creative writing I did for my second year Victorian Gothic Literature module. I am still quite proud of it as it tackles quite a lot and (dare I say) quite well, in a tight word count, and one day wish to explore more of the world I created, hence why I am posting it here.
Themes of the uncanny, disinformation, (repugnant) sexuality (in this story taking the form of pseudoincest), breakdown of traditional familial ideals, endemic loneliness and others are present. Please make sure you are happy to read about such themes before continuing.
This piece was also posted on the Superlove archive under the title "Reunion of Strangers". If you have an account and want to leave your thoughts, please do leave me a comment. Thank you.
Sent from Bleakholt Estate, Tuesday 25 March 1975
To the desk of Dr. Laurence Isaak,
Dear Laurence,
I hope you are well. Not going to beat around the bush here: I’m in need of your professional insight. Would you mind coming up to visit me?
Fair warning to you: The roads will be muddy. I’m not sure if you have the weather we do, but the April showers arrived a week early here. It has been utterly brutal in its relentlessness. Looking out now, a landscape once so familiar is obscured completely. These storms seem limited to daylight, but it keeps us confined to the house.
Yes, us. You read that correctly. Friday night, I received a guest. Honestly, I hadn’t thought she’d come, but there she was. Helena. In flesh and bone. I had hardly recognised her until she spoke. Hearing her voice for the first time in years. ‘I’m drenched through. Will you please let me in?’
She looked peculiar. Perhaps because she’d grown thinner and older – the Helena I know, entrapped in memory, is never older than fifteen. Perhaps because she was soaked. Her titian hair slicked down. It’s longer than I ever knew it to be, darker wet. Her coat, one of those hippie ones, pulled tightly around her waist.
Her manner has been overly taciturn. She’s treating me more like an associate than family. Suppose that is to be expected. It is business she’s here for. I asked her to help with some personal affairs, a matter of misplaced documents related to the estate, required by the solicitor. I can understand her reserve. She’ll be wanting her inheritance and with it all tied up as it is following Uncle Matthews’s death… I can hardly expect her to fall into my arms for comfort.
While Helena dried, we sat in the sitting room. She was stripped down to her slip, her hair in a towel, blanket on her knee, clasping a Bovril I had forced upon her. She spoke dryly, asked me about the house, its condition and where the staff were. I said I had sent them away, that I only keep a few rooms active. Much of the house, like me, hates to be disturbed.
She had hummed, remarking ‘It’s a big house.’ I acquiesced, said that I keep to where I keep. I then offered to retrieve her cases from her car, that I didn’t care getting wet. I’d been wearing the same clothes for a week. Strange how the days bleed together.
Helena seemed very pleased when I asked what she drives. Eyes wide, shinning bright with sincerity that suits her greatly. It’s a red Mini Austin. Seem she had plans to drive all the way down to Mousehole in the summer.
‘Honestly, Elliott, driving gives me immeasurable pleasure,’ she said, handing me her keys. ‘The freedom of it is one of the only consistent joys I could name.’
Her room is almost untouched, looking much like it had when we were kids. Father simply locked it when she left. Monkees posters from her teen years still adorn the walls. Helena once told me she loved Davy’s ‘lovely’ dark doe eyes. ‘You can tell how kind he is,’ she had sighed. ‘I wish I could find someone like that.’
I scratched them out with the dull point of a butter knife. Boyish crushes on girls are founded in cruelty. Those of men fester in it.
It worked. She went to me for consolation. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew they were listening to me.’ She would tell me no more. Weeks later she had gone.
I escorted her upstairs to her room. She was polite, regarded it all quite impassively. ‘Whatever did happen to the little girl who lived here?’ A genuine question.
I couldn’t answer. ‘I’m down the hall. Knock if you need me.’
I paced that night feeling a great hole ripping through me.
The following morning’s breakfast was a silent affair. I got to observe her in the daylight. Her baby fat is gone. There sits a sallowness instead, under the eyes is blueish. Hair pulled back tight. Tight one-piece too. She had a pinched brow as she pushed cold porridge around the bowl.
She suddenly asked what documents I needed for the solicitor. I listed them, where I thought they were and that we’d cover more ground if we worked together. She nodded and then, as if unable to avoid the inevitable, she asked about the chapel. If I’d be going tomorrow for Sunday mass? Tentatively asked, but it was there. The same prying curiosity as her – our – mother, like an old crow who does not realise the hunter already has it in his sights. That familiar, repulsive trait.
I told her I hadn’t attended with any consistency since our parents died. ‘Too many bad memories.’
She was quiet for a second. ‘I thought you’d have entered the clergy.’
I admit I haven’t laughed that much in a long while. I think that may what took her aback the most since being here. Not my change in piety, but the sharpness of my laugh. In all honesty, I struggle even looking at the chapel. It is a stain on the view from my desk where I now write. A squat thing, heather circles it, blooming like a bruise. I need a contractor to check the woodworm, but there’s a sick part of me that wishes it to eat the interior away.
I didn’t tell Helena any of this. But I suspect she knows. She understands me more than she realises.
Now the reason I write.
That night, my lack of sleep had caught up to me. I woke up to Helena, or rather the sense of another body’s weight next to me on my bed. The sound of laboured breath and the prickle of burgeoning fever stirred me. I stroked her head like we had many times as small children. Close to me, she smelt like citrus, lavender, a butcher’s offal bucket.
‘Elliott,’ she whispered, confidentially, raising herself slightly. ‘I don’t feel well.’
Now here is where my stupor may have confused events. I carried her back to her room. The bed felt cold and damp when I placed her on it. I brushed hair from her face revealing her glossy eyes. As I got up, she lunged forward to embrace me. Her hair around me like a pall, she hid her face in the crook of my neck. I could feel her trembling, her face damp again my skin and then a sharp, gripping pain causing me cry out. She pushed me away with unnatural force and I woke suddenly in my own bed. Daylight.
I know will attempt to placate me with notions of dreaming. Laurence, I trust you to believe me when I say this happened. Though there are no marks but a slight mottled bruise, I’m certain she bit me. Perhaps one or both of us is unravelling as you’d phrase it. I cannot leave her alone. I’ve taken her car keys. With the weather what use does she have of them?
I value your professional opinion and guidance above others. Please come within the week, or earlier.
Yours,
Elliott
-break-
The rain; the lattice window frame; a red smear of my car on the drive below; that horrid paperweight with the dead bat inside it; a photo of Elliott, my mother, and his father in a bronze gilded frame.
The chair I’m sitting on, restricting movement; the cool of the breeze through the window on permanent latch; the weight of my mother’s perfume in my pocket; the ache in my back.
The rain; the pen across the page; Elliott’s footsteps on the floor above, like a hammer, dull and evenly spaced.
Must, damp, deep and warm, like black mould that grows in coastal Cornish cottages. Base notes of my mother’s perfume, Joy, on my skin, inner wrist, elbow crook: civet, musk, sandalwood, rose - and over-ripe fig, the skin splitting, white foam on the surface.
My own tongue, decay in my mouth.
Past: Emperor (Reversed)
Present: Queen of Swords
Future: Five of Swords
Daily pull was not good. Rather than the usual one card, I did three. I needed guidance at where I am on my current pathway and sometimes only the subconscious can help. I ground myself to stop my heart from coming out my chest. Elliot is wearing boots inside. All I can just hear, bang… bang… bang as he walks with that peculiar gait of his.
We are strangers to each other, yet he calls me sister. We are not blood and yet he sees a shared history. I knew him for eight months, ages thirteen to fourteen, and those memories are kept away from waking thought. I have spent longer without him in my life than I have with him in and yet. And yet he feels he is entitled to me. I suppose it is loneliness. He has no staff here, which is ridiculous. It is a big house. Although it is more white sheet than house at this point. A child’s first Halloween costume disguised as a house.
I asked him why it was like this. He shrugged and said he only keeps the essentials prepared and ‘I hate to be disturbed.’
I said something about him often being alone. ‘Not alone. Just hate being disturbed.’
The isolation here is unhealthy, some disturbance would do him good. A television, telephone, anything. He didn’t attend church yesterday. Not like I judge. Nor did I.
Last night, in the sitting room, Elliott sat next to me as I was reading. He lay his head in my lap, and I tried to disguise my tension. I wanted to stand up, to push him away, but felt compelled to stay, pinned by his bulk. I stayed for what felt like hours before he said a non-sequitur. The dreaded ‘I wish you’d come to the funeral.’
I remember I held back a sigh – swallowing all frustration – and I had brushed the fringe out Elliott’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t. I should have helped you, you know, organise.’
‘No, I… Bodies are buried fast. I had Laurence come help me with it.’
‘Laurence?’
He rolled in my lap, the look on his face between a sneer and disbelief. His eyes were completely in shadow. Utterly animal in that moment. ‘You’ve met Laurence,’ he said, indignant, brusque. ‘You… He’s a childhood friend of ours.’
I dared not correct him. Smiling, I lied. ‘Oh, of course. Sorry. Someone from work I know shares that name.’
He mentioned more that attended, all I’m supposed to know. I don’t recall. I was stuck on that Laurence. He spoke with such intensity I can only believe I must know his Laurence too. I fear to contradict him. We speak in circles. I feel like he wants his reality to be mine. That he wishes me to bare his anachronism. I hate to say he creeps me out, but he does. That veneer of politeness of his is wearing thin.
I hid myself away after that. He stayed downstairs waiting for the solicitor. I investigated my mother’s bedroom under the guise of looking for paperwork we missed. He discouraged me from visiting the third floor alone. I went anyway. We’ve finished checking the offices - mother’s, his father’s, the housekeeper’s. Not this room yet.
The master bedroom is mainly sheets. Bookcases covered by thick sheets and thicker dust. I rip the sheet off the vanity, coughed dust, heavy, filling my lungs. My mother’s hairbrush still has her hair wrapped in the bristles. Her perfume still on the desk with her Elizabeth Arden lipsticks. I pocket the perfume and a lipstick, a bright pink, Arden Pink. The reek of cigarette smoke is baked into the carpet.
The room is a tomb, untouched. I feel like Howard Carter.
Untouched except the bed. The bed’s sheet is fresh, pulled tight, like a clean bandage over skin.
I can see out the window now. The rain has stopped. On the lake, a single candle-white swan bobs, ebbs, bristles with the wind.