Mist

The house was dark in a way that felt deliberate, like someone had taken a pair of big hands and pushed the daylight back from the glass. All the curtains were drawn and pinned from the inside, each one a black lid clamped over an eyeball.

Magnus stood in the main hallway with his shoulders hunched and his hands balled into fists, staring at the cupboard door opposite the coat rack. It was a plain door, painted the same tired cream as the skirting boards, and at one time he had remembered it hid a huddle of umbrellas with bent ribs and a plastic crate of scuffed shoes. Now . . . it hid something else.

From behind the door came the sound of frantic scratching and barking, insane little bursts that hit the wood and crawled up inside Magnus’s scalp. The handle shivered. The whole door shivered.

He didn’t breathe for a count of five. Maybe ten.

The key stuck out of the cupboard door like a metal tongue. It was turned to the right. Locked. He didn’t know what was inside, nobody did, not really, not in a way anybody would swear to. And for all the reasons that mattered, they knew not to open the door.

Daphne stepped into the hallway behind him and touched his elbow. The touch wasn’t much, but it was enough to crack the ice he’d frozen himself in.

He turned.

The candle she carried scooped a small, buttery orange out of the dark and cupped a warm glow around their faces. She had been crying. He could see the clean tracks like snail trails drying at the edges of her eyes.

“Come on,” Daphne whispered. She took his arm, firm as a mother and gentle as a nurse, and pulled him away from the door, away from the noise, down the hall toward the little sitting room with the cold grate. The candle made a moving circle on the old rug. Behind them, the scratching came again, the bark that was nearly a scream.

She set the candle down on the mantel, and the flame jumped taller in thanks. Magnus looked at her through the light. He could read her expression, and knew.

“Did you talk to Dad again?” he asked.

She nodded once. The candle made the nod look slow and heavy.

“Is he coming soon?”

She hesitated. Her eyes slid to the cold grate, then back to him. She didn’t answer.

“I want us to be.. together,” Magnus said. He heard his voice wobble and hated it. “I don’t want to leave the house without him. I miss him.”

“I know, Moonbeam.” She put her hand on his cheek for a moment. Her palm was cool. “Come with me to the library.”

He shook his head before the rest of the sentence could climb out. “I don’t want to… he’s in there.”

“I know, Moonbeam,” she said again, and wrapped herself around him like a blanket. “But please. Do it for me.”

He looked past her shoulder toward the hallway and the cupboard door he couldn’t see any more, but he could still hear. Then he nodded.

They went quietly. The candle flame leaned and straightened as they moved, losing its shape on every draught and regaining it stubbornly, an acrobat on a rope stretched between rooms. Daphne’s steps were sure. Magnus’s were small. He walked in the safety of the candle’s orange and pretended it was a bubble that nothing could push through.

The library doors were heavy timber, scarred and cross-grained, the kind of doors that hold secrets the way trees hold rings. Daphne put her shoulder into one and it yielded with a sigh. The breath of the room met them, old paper and dust and the sweet rancidness of leather that had been too long in the dark.

There were no windows. The room had been built like a vault, a place where books could sleep forever and never notice the weather. The candle’s world shrank. Blackness gathered at their shoulders like wolves jogging just out of sight. Shelves rose around them in ranks, high as chapel walls, full of spines that gleamed and spines that didn’t, and books with titles that seemed to read themselves if you stared too long.

They walked deeper, their footsteps soft on the wooden floor. The glass room sat in the library’s heart, a hexagon with steel edges and glass panels, a specimen case for something dangerous or precious. As they passed it, Magnus saw the door was open. The dark inside the glass was an even darker dark, like the dark had pooled there on purpose. He looked away.

They cut across to the far side. A desk sat at the mouth of another aisle of shelves, a rough old captain’s table run aground in a sea of paper. Parchment spilled from it, old books piled in heaps like bricks. Someone moved behind the piles, just a shiver of lamplight and a shadow that slid and reshaped on the back wall.

The man at the desk looked up. He was small and thin in the way of men who forget to eat while reading, a pair of spectacles perched low so he could peer over them and through them without choosing. He was nobody’s idea of a threat, which in some houses makes you the most dangerous thing there is. He looked slightly annoyed to be disturbed, but it wasn’t anger; it was the look a cat gives when the dog walks in.

“Still here, I see,” he said.

“I need to talk to you,” Daphne said, and there was nothing soft in it. “I have a favour to ask.”

The man examined her the way a man might examine handwriting and hear the voice in it. He sighed, long and theatrical. He slid open a deep drawer and took out a second oil lamp, squat and brass, its glass chimney smudged by thumbs. He tilted the burning lamp and kissed the wick of the second with its flame. Then he turned to Magnus.

“Boy,” he said. “Take this. Careful with it. Go fetch that book you like. I will tell you if a secret story hides within.”

Magnus looked at his mother, lamp heavy in his hands. “Can you come with me? The library scares me.”

Daphne dropped to one knee so her face was level with his. She put her hands on his shoulders and squeezed until he felt the press in his bones. “No, Moonbeam. I need to have a grown-up chat quickly. The library is the safest place in the house. You know this. I’ll be right here, okay?”

He nodded. It felt like his head belonged to someone else. She pulled him in and hugged him tight, until the oil lamp’s heat was too much, and she released.

“I love you, Magnus. Everything is going to be okay.” She held his gaze. For a moment they spoke without words, and the words were all the things she didn’t want to say aloud because if you say them aloud they turn into something you can touch. “Go get that book, Moonbeam. When you see Daddy, you can tell him you know the secret story.”

He turned because she told him to, and because turning is what you do when the person you love pushes your shoulders gently. He set off with the lamp, the flame standing up prime and bright now that it had a job. He disappeared down an aisle, and the dark took him as if it had been waiting to.

Daphne stood. She wiped at her eyes with the side of one knuckle, the way you do when you’ve sworn not to cry and your body doesn’t care about vows.

“You’ll get lost,” the man said.

She turned back to him as if she’d forgotten he was there and then remembered and wished she hadn’t. For a second surprise showed on her face, quick and naked. He had said out loud the thing she had only allowed herself to think in a thin whisper.

“What else can I do?” she said.

“You can wait.”

“They know,” she said.

He considered that, chewing on it behind his eyes. “And you think getting lost is the answer?”

“I… I might not get lost.”

He chuckled, a dry sound like paper sliding against paper. “How many times do you think somebody has said that?”

She let that pass. “Look after Magnus… I will come back.”

She blew out her candle and put the brass holder on the desk beside the man’s papers. Smoke curled from the wick in a grey snake that wanted to be alive and never quite managed it. Then she turned and walked down the aisle, her shape thinning, becoming part of the library, the dark closing behind her like theatre curtains after the audience has gone home.

“You won’t,” the man called softly after her.

Her footsteps slowed. He heard the hitch of hesitation and then the stubborn smallness of steps that keep going anyway. After a while he didn’t hear them at all.

Another set of footsteps approached, more tentative, and this one brought its own light. Magnus reappeared with the oil lamp held carefully in both hands and a book clamped under his arm. He laid the book on the desk like an offering. The man took it without ceremony and turned it over with a careful thumb, reading the binding with his fingers.

Magnus’s eyes were drawn to the candle in it’s brass holder . . . extinguished. He swallowed and lifted a hand to wipe a tear.

The man noticed and said nothing. He lifted his own lamp. “Boy, how much do you know about Napoleon?”

“Who’s Napoleon?” Magnus asked.

“Ah,” the man said, as if someone had proved his point for him. “That’s what I thought. Why don’t we go and see what we can find in the library.”

He put a hand on Magnus’s shoulder. The hand was light, but it was not his mothers. They set off between the shelves, the lamp painting ribs of light on the leather spines. They turned left and then right, past a row of tall folios that smelled like a basements smell in the dampness between spring and summer.

“Mom’s gone to find Dad.. hasn’t she?” Magnus said.

“Yes,” the man said.

Magnus was quiet. They took another turn. The books seemed to lean, curious. Their titles were muttered names that didn’t want to be said aloud. Somewhere a draft slipped in and touched Magnus’s ankles like a cat.

“I want you to teach me how to stay,” Magnus said. “Like you.”

They made another turn into an aisle where the dust motes thickened into a galaxy suspended in amber. The man didn’t answer. He lifted the lamp and read the shelf with his eyes like a piano player reading a score. He reached up and pulled down a book whose spine was worn and scratched like a dry lakebed. He put it into Magnus’s hands.

“I want you to teach…”

“I heard you the first time, boy,” the man said, with tepid heat.

“Will you?”

“We’ll see.”

They retraced their steps and eventually the desk hove back into view like a raft. The man put his lamp down with a small clink. Magnus looked at the book in his hands then, properly. The letters on the spine were old gold and flaked a little when you blinked.

Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène.

The words meant nothing to him, but the way they felt in his mouth when he said them softly under his breath made him think of cold salt wind and men with their hands behind their backs staring toward a horizon they couldn’t have.

Daphne carefully eased the front door closed behind her until the latch kissed home and clicked. She stood for a moment in silence, listening to the eery hush of nothingness pressing in all around her.

Gravel crunched under her shoes when she stepped down from the porch. Each crunch sounded too loud. It fluttered out into the quiet and was swallowed whole. The sky was a sunless white belly and the mist was everywhere.

Visibility . . . only a few steps ahead.

Her white blouse showed pale against the haze, a fragile flag that the mist seemed eager to claim.

Then . . . she heard it. Loud, but distant, off to her right.

That was good. Far away meant time.

She continued to walk down the gravel pathway and into the mist.

A figure moved in an upstairs window of the house behind her. It beat at the glass with both hands in a steady rhythm, mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, words being made and unmade in the same instant. The sound didn’t come through. It was like watching a film with the volume turned down.

And then . . . she was gone.