Page 42 of Mesmerized

Olivia started down the dim hallway, lifting her skirts to avoid the dust on the floors. Belinda stuck to her side like glue. The sobbing came yet again, seemingly from another narrow staircase, and they followed it down and into the corridor below. The crying continued, faint but persistent, and they pursued it along hallways and up and down staircases, past closed doors and open rooms where the furniture stood shrouded in dustcovers. There was utter silence except for the occasional burst of weeping, always somewhere in front of them, and the only light came in around the sides of the heavy draperies, closed to protect the carpets and furniture from the sun.

“I don’t like it here,” Belinda said in hushed tones.

Olivia had to admit that it was a gloomy, eerie place, where one could easily imagine things jumping out at one. She was growing increasingly uneasy, yet still she pressed on, determined to track down the source of the weeping.

It led them up the stairs again and into another of the cramped hallways under the roof. They hurried along the corridor, the crying floating in front of them, and turned a sharp corner. Something drifted over their faces, clinging and unseen. They shrieked and jumped back, clawing at their hair and faces where it still clung.

“A cobweb!” Olivia gasped, disgust mingling with fright in her shaking voice.

“Let’s go back!” Belinda cried, frantically trying to remove all traces of the cobweb.

Olivia took Belinda’s hand firmly and started down the hall, listening, waiting for the crying to start again. They reached another set of stairs and stopped. There was no crying. Olivia and Belinda glanced at each other. The minutes seemed to stretch agonizingly in silence.

“It’s gone,” Olivia said at last, her voice dropping with disappointment. “Blast! We’ve lost it.”

She turned and opened the door nearest her and looked in. It was empty. She stepped across the hall and opened the next door. There was a rickety narrow bed, several of its slats broken and with no mattress. She opened several other doors in close proximity to the stairs and found all the rooms empty or close to it. There was certainly no sign of a person.

Olivia sighed. Whoever had been leading them did not appear to be hiding nearby. She—or he—had probably slipped quietly down the staircase, and there was no telling where the person was by now.

“I suppose we might as well return now,” she said.

“Yes. Let’s.” Belinda glanced first one way down the hall and then the other. “Which way is that?”

“You don’t know?” Olivia asked, a little surprised.

“No. I don’t really know this part of the house. It has been shut off forever, and Mama would never let us play here, because she was afraid we would get lost. Anyway, it was always sort of...scary, really. It’s so empty and quiet.”

It certainly was that, Olivia had to agree. She, too, looked up and down the hall. “I don’t think I could retrace our steps. We’ve gone up and down and turned down this corridor, then that, so much that I’m completely lost.”

“But we have to get back,” Belinda protested, panic rising in her voice. “It’s getting dark. There’s nothing lit in this part of the house, and when the sun goes down—”

“I know.” Olivia tried to sound reassuring. It was already getting quite dim; she didn’t suppose that it would be long before darkness fell completely, and then they would be trapped wherever they happened to be, unable to find their way out without light. She wished that she had thought to light a candle to bring with her, but, of course, in the heat of pursuit, it had never occurred to her.

“First thing,” she told Belinda, taking her hand, “is to go downstairs. These attic corridors are the worst. There are more windows downstairs, so we’ll have more light, and if we go to the ground floor, we can find a door that goes outside. That will be the simplest way to get back—just walk around to the main wing.”

Belinda brightened at that idea, and they went down the narrow stairs to the very bottom. They struck out along one hall, only to find that it ended in a wall. There was a window, however, and they tugged aside the heavy curtains to let in the light. There was not much of it, for they could see that the sun had slipped behind the trees. Soon it would disappear altogether.

“We must be on the west side of the house,” Olivia ventured.

Belinda, looking out the window, nodded. “Yes. We’re as far as we can get from the main wing. But I’m pretty sure there’s an outside door on this side of the house—and one or two in back, as well. Some old St. Leger—I think it was during the restoration—loved building things, and he kept adding on wings and halls and rooms. And that was after his father had already added on to the place.”

They retraced their steps down the hall, and at the next intersecting hallway took a right, assuming that it would lead them to the rear of the house. It led, in fact, only to another corridor. They turned left and kept walking, and at last came to a closed door at the end of the hall. When they turned the knob, however, it would not open.

“It’s locked!” Olivia and Belinda looked at each other in consternation. There was no convenient key in the keyhole beneath the knob.

“I suppose they would lock the outside doors,” Belinda said. “They wouldn’t want people to be able to come in at will.”

“No, I guess not.” Olivia frowned, thinking. “They are probably all locked.”

“We can’t be sure.”

“No, but we don’t want to waste all of the daylight we have left trying to find the outside doors. It would probably be best to find our way back into the main house.” She thought for a moment. “All right. We shall look out the windows of a room, and we can orient ourselves in relation to the rest of the house. For instance, if we are looking out on the south lawn, we will know we have to go to our left, because the main wing is east of us, right?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

They did as she said, going into the nearest room and pulling aside the drapes from one window. Belinda, peering out, declared they were, indeed, looking out on the side garden, south of the wing they were in and also west of part of the main wing.

They set off down the corridor briskly, for it was almost dark in the hallways now, even though they paused to open any drapes they found along the way. Dusk had fallen outside, and in here, they were increasingly unable to see. Their steps slowed, and even so, they ran into a small table in the hall before they realized they were on it. Olivia put her fingers lightly against the wall as they continued forward, walking ever more hesitantly.