Emily Winters                                                                                                                        

The Lady in the Night

            I heard the footsteps pacing restlessly above my head. I had awoken in the midst of the night for some unknown purpose and that’s when I heard them. Back and forth. I only pondered them a moment however before turning over and drifting into a dreamless sleep.

            The following morning, I accosted my landlady with my questions regarding the previous night. Mice? Never in Wisteria Manor.

            Wisteria Manor, that’s where I was staying in my brief sojourn. In the interest of supplementing my pen with creative coal, I was presiding here, in this great old plantation. Years had done the house no ill: it looked almost the same as it had one-hundred years prior. There was one small difference: the wisteria, this residency’s namesake, had devoured it almost whole. This attributed to the old structure being more wisteria than it was manor.

            I am a curious being. It’s in my nature; it’s engrained in everybody’s skin… or at least that’s what I believe. After staying here for almost a month, and finding no source material for my novel, namely anything supernaturally intriguing or pagan-like meeting in the basement, I was going to leave. I had every intention of leaving… if only I had.

            The footsteps in the attic. This of course, brought my insatiable curiosity and rather morbid fantasies to the foreground. Every night from that point, whether I knew it was a point while I was drifting through my slumber the evening of the incident, I waited. I never slept. I waited with bated breath and a thrill in my gut, knowing that this was something, that maybe everything in my life had led up to this something, and I drew comfort from the fact that perhaps this was why everything other than this seemed dull and uninspiring.

            There were no more footsteps.

            I once again questioned the owner of the manor, but this time, I left out the mice. At that point in time, I did not think it was mice. I did however get one answer to a question I did not ask: the house, it did not have an attic.

            Was I frightened? Of course not; I was thrilled, fascinated! Every moment that I heard the creak of a floorboard somewhere in this ancient house, my heart, it was in heaven, leaving my body behind in a state of nirvana.

            The next night, I took up my letter opener, which I had been brandishing as a weapon throughout the course of these midnight watches. Because there was at the moment no-one and nothing to brandish it against, I passed the time feigning attack with myself in a well-worn mirror perched upon my bureau.

            That night, why that night, I have never quite figured out, there was a change in the routine that I had so foolishly become comfortable within. As I was practicing stance under the stern glare of my familiar, I noticed… nothing out of the usual. I merely turned my eyes skyward for a brief second, believing that the footsteps had returned, and when my eyes met with my reflection once again, I could have sworn that my counterpart gave a grin. I however, was not smiling.

            I awoke in the morning with a start and the realization that I had dozed off. What had awoken me? The window. It was open a crack and the chilled morning air filtered through the claustrophobic confines of the room; it brought with it the stark light of the day while driving out the madness of the night.

            I cannot remember the days of my stay at the manor, only the nights. The nights: that was when nothing and everything happened. That evening, the very evening of the day that had begun so promising, so… in the light, ended in a bliss that was almost fitting the blinding brightness of the hatchling sun.

            That evening – oh the splendor! It was she. A fair maiden that seemed to have hopped from the very pages of the storybooks that had been engrained into my head as a child… a knock, a knock on my door, a knock on the fibers of my heart! Before I had only craved mystery, a thrill was the only thing that mattered! But after that night, my heart, it desired only her. The one without a name, without a whisper in the wind to caress her cheek; what I would give to be that wind! If only…

            The morning came and she was gone and the bed was cold. It was as if my soul were a battleground that had awakened with the sun to find every last trace of blood washed away by a midnight rain, and the field is left only to discover that the feeling of the bayonet is everlasting. She was my phantom limb.              

            I found the oak table staring back at me in all its mute glory; I also did not say a word that morning. I did not eat. My ears – why there was nothing wrong with those! – there was no beautiful song to fill my head, only the song of a nagging old witch. It was I who was accosted. Why had I not touched my food? Why had I not spoken a good morning to a fellow human being? Enough! But then… she stumbled in.

            The tiny nook seemed not big enough to contain such a star as she! Beautiful even in her morning daze, she walked with her eyes nearly closed; yet they were closed to even me, not just the rest of the world.

            How could it keep on turning? Spinning at such a speed that I could feel myself falling – the world would stop at her command, all of time could cease if only she sings her true feelings… show me your heart!

            But no… she sits at the very table as I and yet she says not a word. I will her eyes to meet mine. They are as green as the tops of the forest’s trees and as vibrant as the grave, but there is no spark, no illumination that speaks to me of recognition.

            She eats and leaves. Nothing. There was nothing. I was not sure of what game that she was playing, but much like the cat that is toyed with by the ever cunning mouse, I was not sure that I did not like it.

            The day passed in an excruciating blur. The harder I searched for the mysterious lady in the night with whom my heart belonged, the more hidden she seemed from me. Was it all a midnight-induced dream?

            The stars hung low over the fields and the dew-kissed grass reached up to meet her dreaming brethren. I could hear the clouds sighing in relief as the wind gently stroked the shutters. A knock startled me from my reverie – I sprang from the end of my bed and could not reach the doorknob quick enough.

            The glass could have shattered under the pressure of my beating heart. I turned the fixture and – no one was there. The corridor was empty. My heart nearly collapsed under the weight of my hopes and fears. That was until I saw it: glancing down as if propelled by the spell of her love, I saw a rose of the most passionate crimson.

            Pulled down the stairs with rose in hand, my marionette strings tugging with every beat of my heart, I reached the kitchen – the very place where I had so morosely mused that very same morning! Could it be the same day!

            I searched through every cabinet, trying not to awaken the house, but secretly desiring to shout with my every being that everything was well. I was looking for a vase.

            The utmost cabinet, the very last one I pursued, contained my prize. Although coated in dust, it could have shined if polished by the moonlight. Filling it with water and inserting the rose, I admired the only evidence of the nighttime. That’s when I saw it, the strange consistency of the water.

            It seemed to be billowing in the meager light cast by the moon. A dark swirling cloud cast on my happiness, it encircled the stem of the rose and encircled my heart, squeezing it like a vise. Was this a sign?

            Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop. This sound, the sound that I had not heard before, filled my head. What could it be? Looking around in dismay for the source of my madness, I soon discovered the culprit: my bleeding finger, casting away its blood like it is unfit to inhabit the same body as love. Strange, I do not remember cutting myself.

           

I met her eyes again. She looked away quickly, glancing off into the distance, into some realm into which I could not follow. I admired her from afar.

            She walked. I followed. She sat. I sat nearby. There is an overgrown hedge-maze in the yard and she seemed to enjoy following its twists and turns. As the adolescent sun beat down on my bare head, I quietly stepped through the grass, trying not to trample any budding flowers, trying not to make her hear my frantic mind lest she run from my love.

            Her head turned slightly in my direction. Wildly I made a desperate move to run; haphazardly I twisted my neck in all of its possible ways, searching for an escape from this confrontation. Why had I wanted to avoid meeting her face to face? Did I fear rejection in its most vile form – the love lost by a closed door shut by the one you most covet? I do not know. I wanted to leave that place and never return, yet my heart strings were tuned to a different melody, one that continued on and on even after my brain ceased to listen.

            “Why do you continue to follow me?” Her voice was a thousand bells in a chapel guarded by the most sainted of angels.

            “I do not know,” I responded. How do you answer to the one whose voice dares to hold you in purgatory? The one whose song holds the key to your iron chains?

            “I am frightened by you.” Frightened! I never meant for it to be so! I am the one who is frightened – how does she not know!

            “I am in love with you,” I said in the most gentlest of whispers. She paled. I continued, “The rose is so lovely; thank you.”

            “Please let me be.” Then she fled. I did not follow.

            That night was one of agony. I returned to my room in bitter anguish. I no longer cared about footsteps or smiling reflections – my heart was broken. My only comfort was the rose: a flower that both reflected her in its youthful petals and served as a memento, something that had been cradled by her gentle hands. I might have preferred a dagger.                It was because of these feelings that I found comfort in this flora. I spent hours gazing at it, willing her with my mind never to wilt, never to leave me too. I fell into an empty sleep.

            The following morning, the rose was black and decayed; the petals lay in a puddle around the vase, helter-skelter in all their morbid pride. I could have cried. If only my tears could have served as heaven’s rain, then maybe they could have made her rose live once more.

            I did not leave my room that day. All day I expected something, maybe a sign that maybe I was right in staying here, maybe a sign that she did in fact know who I was; I waited in vain. The cloak of that sorceress named the night floated gently over the shoulders of the hills, warming the frosted tree limbs, yet chilling my empty bones. I sat there, in my pocket room, watching the darkness seep in through the window. I sat there shivering.

            This time there was no knock, and I did not want there to be one (or so I told myself). She flew into my room. The door was unlocked, but I suspect that she would have broken it down in her haste.

            “Why do you do these things? I have told you to leave me alone!” She screeched at me from across the narrow room.

            “I do not know what you are speaking about.” I did not, but my heart responded to her voice in the most ungentlemanly manner.

            “You came to my room today, you cretin. You brought a rose with you, thinking it could buy me. I shooed you then, but now this-”

            “Excuse me, I haven’t left my room all day, but I would be pleased to know what it is that I have done.”

            “It’s just, it is too… I mustn’t speak of it. I barely got up the nerve to tell you off,” she responded red with embarrassment but quivering with anger.

            “I am not sure what I did, but I do love you, that much is true.” I tried to be gentle. I tried to tell her in a way that would make her see.

            “You stay away from me…” I hadn’t realized it – I had crossed the room in bounds to reach her. I was not even conscious of my body’s movements – only my soul’s greatest desires, needs! “I’m warning you!”

            Her voice rose louder and louder, and despite its sweetness, I grew weary. “Please quiet down…”

            “Back away from me sir!” She brandished my letter opener, the tool that I had used as a weapon those so futile nights what seemed so long ago. I made a move to back away, yet she plunged the blade into my gut. Her eyes, they seemed so changed. They were no longer green. Perhaps that was the humanity searing away from us both that blinded my sight to the color of her irises.

            We spoke no more. If we had, I would not have recollected. My blood was pooling around my feet much like the rose petals had gathered around the glass, much like it had billowed within its confines along with the stem of the rose – prompting it to grow unto death.

            The lady in the night: only in the evening had my life been both a living hell and a dazzling splendor… I gathered her in my arms, the woman who contained so much evil within the confines of her silky skin, and as she stood paralyzed with shock at what she had done, I dove through the window. We fell.

            As our corpses lay tangled in the rose bushes, and our bodies shed the last tears post-mortem, you sit there pondering the recording of this tale. However did I survive such a fall?

            The answer is simple: I didn’t.