A Mischief in the Woodwork Read online

  A Mischief in the

  Woodwork

  Harper Alexander

  Copyright © July 2012 by Harper Alexander

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this product may be reproduced

  without prior written permission

  from the author.

  Original cover images courtesy of:

  mizzd-stock.deviantart.com

  fire-walker.deviantart.com

  dovestock.deviantart.com

  xmitchellgoldsteinx.deviantart.com

  Cover design and art by:

  Laura Gordon (dormantparadox.deviantart.com)

  Prologue –

  The Echoing Place

  Somewhere beneath the rubble, there was a story to be told. But if anyone read the testimony of those long dusted-over textures, it was only the looters.

  The history of this place has crumbled. Scarce is the memory that ties better days to this wilderness. Once, there were golden things alive and well in the world. Screen doors slammed carelessly into the afternoon, in the wake of those embarking into the homey territory. The windows were thrown open.

  Now, what windows there are lie in large part shuttered. The rest are broken. And the doors – the doors are all locked.

  It didn't happen overnight, but it may as well have, where the history books are concerned. Dar'on reached a point very quickly that saw its livelihood retreated indoors. Anything uttered echoed in the streets. Sometimes there was the great sound of rubble shifting, of a building buckling and the rumbling landslide of shards. We would hear it, and be certain to stay away from the windows. We were beyond the fringes of the city, but we knew that when things shifted, it was the doorway to something happening. In the fragile aftermath of a great haunting, any shift in what has settled may well be the shift that cracks the balance, and awakens something.

  For those of us who had to tread into that city, we could only hope not to be caught out in the open when a shift took place. So far, I had been lucky. But encounters with that place were no less haunting. One suffers a disturbing sense of morbidity at the epic disgrace that lies in heaps. As if the mounds are piles of bodies, and the shards a twisted mosaic of broken spirit.

  The University is one example of the early, astonishing ruin. I looted there once.

  When I stumbled upon it, I marveled at the threshold. There had never been so much ruined glory all in one place. It was a battlefield. A place where great things died. Akin to the realm of the gods brought to its knees, for all its destroyed grandeur.

  Even as a slave, it was the most humbling thing I had known.

  Sheafs of architecture layered the ground, as frivolous as old wallpaper peeled from its host. Pillars lay like felled trees, rolling pins to the rubble, broken off from splintered half-bases or pathetic stump-like nubs. The beams that pitched the vast ceiling bowed before the disarray, foundation at its most demeaned. Great cracks swam through the arches that still stood. There were small splinters of beauty, but it was dull behind a layer of powder.

  I swallowed against the parchment coating in my throat.

  A treacherous urge took me. There in the colossal chamber of artful decay, I spoke.

  It was taboo in the open city – as good as forbidden. What had settled was not to be disturbed. But I could not leave it like that, a place once so vivid and vivacious strangled in tainted peace. The silence in that place was so great that it almost hummed by itself.

  I broke that taut vigil. My voice strutted over the debris like a rock skipped over water. I glanced about, fearfully, half expecting the walls to start rumbling with the wrath of my treachery. Almost as if it had been an experiment.

  The dust did not even stir.

  One was not to breathe a sigh of relief, though. The powder that coated everything was a treacherous specimen. Even shallow breathing invited it to settle in my throat, to coat my tongue, to line the roof of my mouth. It sifted into my hair and became a film on my skin, a residue in my clothes. Whatever I commenced as upon leaving Manor Dorn, I returned as a respective albino.

  Indeed, that was the slang going around for those, like me, who were sent out looting.

  We were the Albinos.

  What did we find on our missions? No quest was alike. I often returned with books to burn, drape scraps for mending, tile pieces – when they were whole, or essentially intact – to reinforce the decaying floorboards in Manor Dorn's worst corners, candlesticks, flint, used nails and splintered boards for makeshift barricades, crockery, shovels, and maps.

  As Albinos, it was important to try to get our bearings in the new layout of the crumbled city, and document it for reference.

  Sometimes, we found bodies. We did not look too closely – whether from the vertigo of being decently appalled, or the guilt of stealing their boots and clothes right off of their bodies.

  For food, we had our own gardens. In those early days, they were somewhat neglected in the shadow of the dangers that lurked outside, but we learned to smooth our fears and do what needed done, and they always managed to sustain us. That was, of course, largely thanks to Letta's green thumb, regardless of our tending habits. The Masters would never think of it as anything but black (her thumb), but I knew better. The soil in these times was unruly. Crude and barren. She was a miracle-worker.

  Miracle-workers were crucial in these times of survival. We were lucky we had one.

  Others were not always so lucky.

  News was scattered here, encounters scarce and brief, but we heard things. Bleak accounts of the mischief that took people.

  It was the new testimony written all over this age.

  Something vital had failed here. One could run his fingers over the stone left standing and feel it in the bones of the ruins: an element was missing in the foundations. This place had been built on faulty principles. The founders, bless their hearts, were the lords of great folly.

  But they were dead. Long dead. And we were left to inherit the harrowing truth:

  This place was forsaken.

  O n e –

  Manor Dorn

  “Avante! The curtain!”

  I paused just past the dusty ribbon of light streaming through the window and sighed, laden with dishes, before doing as I was bade. I set the rusty tray carefully across the corner of the nearby bookshelf so I could tend the lackluster curtains. The stream of sunshine bent onto my face as I stepped up to the window and wistfully snicked the peaking drapes closed again. The older slave that barked the order was only seeing that things stayed as they should, but as one who went into the city, I was not afraid of a little sunshine peaking through the window. Was a taste too much?

  The room became dim again, but I could still see the floral pattern of the wallpaper where an angelic glow circumferenced the window. The edges still leaked.

  It wasn't as if the room was a glorious thing to behold, by any account. But there was a hominess in the peeling wallpaper and crudely-patterned floorboards, the stained lacy tablecloths and bleached furniture fabric. And in the corner, of course, my pride: the handiwork of makeshift tiles – different shapes, sizes, patterns and colors – that were slowly replacing the diminished floorboards.

  Hominess was not a luxury we afforded, though. It was part of Manor Dorn's religion in this time, to keep the curtains drawn – especially those where the shutters on the other side had been stripped away by the recurring winds.

  I moved to retrieve my tray, and the dishes rattled as I raised them. Then I continued on my quest to deliver lunch to the Masters, where they stayed cooped up in their rooms upstairs. That was also part of the religion here at Manor Dorn; the Masters never came out. They stayed huddled amongst themselves behind closed doors,
as if in a state of hibernation, waiting for the strangeness of our days to blow over. The rest of us held down the fort and scraped together the daily means of survival – essentially running the country, because it was like this everywhere. If the country had not been in ruins, we might have recognized the value in that very convicting point: that this land was run by slaves, and we could easily revolt. We could take it. We would remove the backbone from the ranks of the masters, and what was left of their reign would crumble into submission.

  But there was nothing of value to take for ourselves. Who would fight for a sick land?

  I would still just as soon leave the Masters to rot, but the others wouldn't have it – at least, not the ones with chocolate skin, from Serbae. It was not their way. Even after all they had been forced to endure, they would not act on resentment.

  And so I took the Masters their lunch, because I respected the Serbaens and loved their ways, in general context. They were frightfully compelling with their code of kindness. I felt guilty if I didn't match it.

  I tripped over the stairs as I hazarded their climb. They were nothing but a dark, creaking ascension. Soup lapped over the edge of a bowl, a warm glop on my knee. I cursed. We couldn't afford to spill what little we had. But never mind. It was out of the Master's bowl, and I wasn't going to bother with it. They certainly did not own my sympathy that far.

  I continued on, counting the stairs to the landing. I skirted a mouse hole that I knew by habit, and turned into the equally-dark hall. On the left was the locked door to the library. In its prime, it had been that warm glow of a room, teeming with old books just waiting to be cradled in the hands that loved them. Now, it was as good as empty. It was locked because we shut off all the rooms we didn't need, hoping their disease would not spread, that we could starve out the disease in the small places we used – but we kept the key for when we needed books to burn. We had orders to always burn the ones I looted first, but supplies often ran low. The library had slowly dwindled to a devastated shell, with a scant few victims lined up on death row.

  Next, on the right, was Victoria's room. Respectively, her old room. The Masters kept themselves all safe inside a single chamber now – the master bedroom at the end of the hall. But a decade ago, in the first years of the mischief that crept into the woodwork, they had maintained a civilized arrangement as a family. Back then the incidents had been fewer and farther between – stories, mostly, or nuances that caused concern, but nothing to obsess over.

  How swiftly that way of life had changed and become consumed was astonishing. How quickly the symptoms had evolved.

  I passed Lesleah's room next, the jealous middle sister, and then Christopher's. He was the little brat of the family, or had been last I had seen him. I hadn't laid eyes on him in six years.

  Aunt Felicity's room passed next. As far as I was concerned, she had infected this poor house herself. She was the sternest of them all – the one who whipped us when we erred, who slapped Christopher cold on his cheek when no one was looking, who spoke down to Lesleah like she would never compare to her sister, who uttered terrible grievances to Victoria's suitors in secret to chase them away. Whether or not I was fond of the family, the latter of these things grated on me like nothing else. To hear Felicity dishing out offenses in Victoria's oblivious name, or bad-mouthing Victoria herself, almost undid me as a docile slave. The injustice boiled up inside me where I eavesdropped. When you were an invisible slave, you could do that. Eavesdrop, that is.

  But that's what stayed me, in the end: that I was an invisible slave. I had no authority. I had no conviction. I didn't exist, except to do as I was told. Victoria would never take my word for it. After all, a slave and his master were not on favorable terms. So why would I warn her of treachery, unless I had ulterior motives? I would not be trusted to look after her interests.

  So I maintained that I was a creature of silence.

  And became a tormented creature of silence.

  It was maddening, now, knowing they cohabited behind the same door. I longed to reveal the beast in their midst. Whether or not that particular urge was aimed at their best interests, I couldn't rightly say. In a sense, it felt purely mischievous. A way to see to wicked Felicity's humiliation and downfall, or simply a way to stir something up.

  Stirring things up was the last thing one should dream of dabbling in at a time like this, but when there was scandal abroad it was human nature to meddle, to put in my two cents. To tip the balance because I knew something. It made me feel important. The unexpected informant, rather than a mere slave. Someone who could become a friend to one of them, instead of a nobody.

  It was all fantasy, though. They stayed behind that locked door, only communicating as a voice through the crack. When I delivered food, I was to lay it by the door and rap a code on the old wood, and only after they heard my footsteps recede would someone throw back the latch and open the barricade long enough to whisk in the offering.

  We had phantoms for masters.

  Good riddance, though, really. Who missed that wicked aunt, that bratty child, that jealous sister, and that brooding Mr. and Mrs. Dorn? Victoria was really quite agreeable, but the irony of the situation lay in the fact that matters were better for the slaves in these times. We may have been charged with danger-riddled tasks, but it was because of the unorthodox arrangements in the household that we had the run of the house, for once. For the first time, we had established a homey dwelling downstairs. It lay in shadow more often than not, but the only reason I could miss that hominess when the drapes were drawn was because we had been allowed to develop an uninhibited connection to the place in the first place. For what slave was known to be fond of his home?

  I retreated downstairs, where my fellow slaves were huddled seeing to the mending. There was a fire going, a stack of books on the hearth.

  Enda – the eldest woman with dark skin – sat by the window, stealing its tentative traces of superior light. The dark children, Dani and Viola, sorted thread in the middle of the floor. Dani, the boy, was ten. Viola was eleven. They had been bought, with their mother, just months before the Masters went into hiding – and when the Masters shut that door against the rest of us, they kept the mother with them. Of all the slaves to designate to waiting on them behind closed doors, I thought disapprovingly – she was in there, separated from her children, when it could have been one of us instead.

  Dashsund tended the fire. He was a middle-aged Serbaen. Always stoic, but in an amused way. Quiet but very lighthearted.

  Henry was like me – white. But he was old. He had been with the Masters a long time, longer than the rest of us. He was also a very kind soul, but wouldn't tell of how he came to be a slave. It was a curious thing, but I didn't wonder too much. He was likely the same as me.

  I was a slave because I was an illegitimate child, and nobody wanted me. A victim of a moment of thoughtless, selfish passion.

  In the beginning, the young ones told me I was awfully beautiful for a slave. The older ones didn't see things in terms of physical beauty. They thought everything was beautiful, in its own way. It was a lovely perspective – part of their culture, I assumed, when I saw the sadness (yet agreement) in their eyes when the youngens made these claims; the culture here was rubbing off on them, changing them. I wished they wouldn't call me beautiful, because I didn't like the sadness in those eyes. I didn't want to lend to what was changing them. I liked them the way they were, and wished I could have known them the way they first came to this country. So I rubbed soot around my eyes, hoping to look beaten and bruised, but they said it only made my eyes more beautiful. I left it sometimes, though, because the color likened me to them. Them whom I admired and looked up to, in our arrangement.

  The older ones did not resent me being beautiful – they knew it to be true, by the white man's standards. I was well-bred, just scandalously so. Illegitimate by matters of matrimony, but not by blood.

  Such a shame, such waste, my people had said of me. I was exquisit
e, yet I was trash. They might even have kept me around because I was so pleasant to look at, or could have warmed a bed like a queen for someone in their circle, but when they fell on hard times there was no question as to the greater benefit I would be to them as a profit, and a mouth taken off their hands.

  Of course, for them 'hard times' meant dusty chandeliers and a lack of the finest wine for their suddenly 'quainter' banquets. I fell below all those things. I was not worth the dust on their chandeliers.

  I folded myself onto the ground in the slaves' midst, and picked up an article that needed mending. We worked together in silence today. Sometimes, we took turns telling stories. The Serbaens told wonderful stories. We would sit around with the fire crackling its friendly tune and even get to laughing once in awhile. But today, all of our bones seemed to agree on weariness. Even the bones of the house, creaking around us.

  I finished mending my article, and then put it aside. I reached for another, but Enda stopped me:

  “It's getting dark, minda.” Minda was their native word for 'dear', or 'love'. A term of endearment.

  My eyes went to the window. Only the barest whisper of twilight seeped through around the edges. My fingers hovered over the material of Victoria's dress.

  Twilight was the hour I lived for, by design. The hour for which I had been bought.

  The hour in which, every day, I was to come out of the woodwork.

  T w o –

  The Ritual

  It was my specific charge to perform a special ritual each day. I had been bought for a very distinct quality: my voice.

  Manor Dorn, being a lonely manor on the outskirts of town, was vulnerable on all sides. We were a plot surrounded by open land – a beacon of a victim. Utterly exposed. We may not have been able to predict the shifts in the city, or what would come of them, but there was one thing we could count on: