01 - The Quiet, the Quiet

Funny Games We Used to Play, a serial novel

Photo by Julian Guttzeit via Unsplash

The Old Woman melted into the queen-sized mattress, drowning under the plush white comforter, then labored onto her side, facing away from Miss Walls and towards the large windows looking out into the forest. It was the middle of the night—she guessed 3 or 4 in the morning—but now she felt strangely awake. Nights were days and days were dim and dreamlike. Is this how it always felt, when one was dying?

A small amount of light escaped her window and fled into the night, painting a tiny square of tree trunks in the forest across the cobblestone driveway, and she could see the rough surfaces of the oaks, their bark like some ancient, etched thing, while behind them the darkness hovered. She reached one of her hands over to the other and slowly stroked her inflamed knuckles, her liver spots, her bulging, tired veins. She felt like the weathered bark, light shining on her, the dark shadows close behind.

“Must you wander the house at night?” Miss Walls asked quietly as she tapped the Old Woman’s shoulder, then nudged her gently, and it was less a question than an accusation. “Turn this way. Say, ‘ahh’.”

“I’m not a child, Walls.” The Old Woman refused to roll over and face her caregiver.

“Mum,” Walls said, hand on the Old Woman’s shoulder. “Come, turn around now. Open up.”

“These pills—ridiculous.”

“They’re to help with the pain, Mum.” Now Walls hands were on her own bulging hips, her jaw clenching.

The Old Woman didn’t have the strength to fight. “Fine,” she said, sighing, a fragile rolling over, opening her mouth a fraction.

The pain was there, always at the edges, waiting to overcome her. She hated the pills, how they made her feel, how they dragged her down into restless sleep, but she also hated the pain, and in these middle-of-the-night hours she just wanted to escape. It was a constant battle—take the pills, rob the pain of its serrated edge, and fall into a deep and nightmarish sleep? Or abstain, keep her wits about her, and live with that twisting, sharp edge in her bones?

Walls’ face changed from reproach to sadness, and the Old Woman recognized it, and the look made her feel helpless. She snapped her mouth closed, nearly biting Walls fingers, which had been approaching with the pill.

“You don’t have to pity me.”

Miss Walls jerked her hand back and rolled her eyes. “No one is pitying you. Why would we? You make us all crazy. You bark so many orders we don’t have time to pity you. We can’t wait to get rid of you. Now, open up.”

The Old Woman twisted her mouth, shook her head, and opened wide. Walls placed one of those bitter pills on the tip of her tongue. The Old Woman turned away again and slipped the pill into the soft spot inside her lower teeth, muttered something, then reached for her glass of water and drank it down. The pill, however, remained under her tongue, lodged there, a pearl.

“This wandering the house at night in your sleep is terrifying. Vicki will quit soon, if you don’t stop.” Miss Walls moved about the room like a force of nature, the embodiment of storm and tide and wind, sweeping up anything that didn’t belong into her wide-open arms and spewing it all back out so that it magically settled in its rightful place. “One of us will have to spend the night in here with you, and I know you would love that.” She threw a load of laundry into the hallway to be collected later. The Old Woman watched.

Recently, she felt she was seeing Walls, really seeing her, for the first time. This woman who had cared for her, cared for her home, watched over her little Lucy as she had grown . . . the Old Woman had always seen her as part of the house, a piece of furniture or a solid baseboard. But in these last days, she had begun to see Walls for what she was: a human being. And she felt a deep thirst to somehow recover all the years that had been lost, to know Walls. To really know her.

“It’s not so much the sleep-walking as it is your eyes,” Walls said, returning to the bedside, and she shuddered. “Like you’re staring into nothing.”

“I’ll stare wherever I want to stare, at nothing or something.”

“I’m sure you will. In any case, stay in bed, or I’ll have to bring in the spare mattress.”

“Are you threatening me, Walls?”

“Yes, very much so.”

“I can sleep on my own, thank you, and the fewer threats, the better. No one has shared my room since Charles died. I certainly won’t have you in here, snoring away like some old, broken-down saw.” The Old Woman snorted and huffed, genuinely annoyed.

Charles. What would he have said about these nightmares? Just your overactive, childhood imagination, rearing its ugly head. She could hear him, that light condescension, that hinting at all the ways he had saved her from her poor, innocent little self. She had told him about her childhood and the strange things she had experienced, only once, and had mistaken the steady look on his face for belief; moments later, when he had started laughing, she knew he had been waiting for her to laugh and say she was making it all up.

“Goodness,” he had said. “And for a moment I thought you were being serious! That would make a wonderful child’s tale.”

Would she have had the resolve to insist to his face that, no, these dreams she was now having were something more, something tied up with reality, her past or future? She knew the answer before the question had fully formed in her mind: she would never have had that kind of courage, not when it came to Charles—he would have waited a moment, and then he would have laughed and laughed.

“Right,” he would have said, shaking his head. “Right. God, your imagination!”

And a burning anger swelled in her chest, that she had never stood up to him, that she had never insisted on anything.

“I don’t snore,” Walls insisted defensively. “But that’s beside the point. You need to stay in bed.”

“When someone sleep-walks, they’re asleep. You do realize that, don’t you? It’s not as if I’m choosing to wander the house.” The Old Woman rolled back onto her side, facing the window and the darkness beyond the glaring reflection of her bedroom. She found herself nearly crying, though she didn’t know why.

“Yes, of course,” Miss Walls said, unaware of her lady’s emotion, and then there was the sound of Walls gathering the previous day’s glasses and teacups onto a tray, one by one, the handles clinking together. “Well, poor Vicki. When she woke up two nights ago and found you gone, I thought she was going to keel over. She could barely breathe, sprinting around the house like a panicked rabbit.”

The Old Woman admitted, at least to herself, that aimlessly (and unwillingly) wandering around at night proved to be a problem, not only because it was frightening the help, and not only because walking was painful, but also because her house was enormous: ten bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, multiple sitting rooms, a large game room in the basement, a kitchen the size of a small house, three dining rooms, and various other rooms one has when you need rooms to hold things that help take care of the other rooms. The hallways that connected the rooms reminded her of the underground tube in England, where she had grown up, always winding in on each other.

Charles had insisted they purchase the house soon after they were married, and she had agreed to it because who didn’t want a massive house on land with gardens and barns and walking paths through the woods and servants bustling here and there and little lambs bleating in the spring, feeding from their mothers, their tiny tails flitting back and forth. She made sure she wasn’t on the property when the lambs were loaded up and taken away. That was too much. But besides that, all was well.

Or, mostly well.

“And now you wake me in the middle of the night with your thrashing and moaning. Hopefully that pill will put you back to sleep.”

She had lived in this house almost her entire adult life, but she couldn’t say for sure whether or not she had ever been in all of the rooms. Now that she was older, there were entire sections of the house she hadn’t been to in decades, and these days, these final days, she seemed to be on a loop between her bedroom, her bathroom, and, occasionally, the kitchen.

But lately she had also felt drawn to the nursery, strangely enough, and more often than not she would wake up there, sitting with her back against the crib, looking over the furniture that had not changed since her daughter had been born, over fifty years earlier. Well, “not changed” wouldn’t be completely accurate: anything bright had faded, and anything white had yellowed, and the carpet and drapes looked tired, but all of that was her fault because anytime Charles had mentioned renovating the nursery, perhaps changing it into another guest room, she had become insistent to the point of tears, and he had, uncharacteristically, backed down. So, there had been that. He had always let her have her way when it came to the nursery. But had he actually backed down, given her what she wanted, or had he also secretly wanted to leave the room as it was?

In any case, she had recently been waking up there, confused by both the dream and the location she found herself, and then she would wander the hallways until she was exhausted, or until a flabbergasted Miss Walls would come stumbling around the corner, exasperated and worried.

Or Vicki would find her. Poor, young Vicki, biting the side of her mouth and nervous that she had lost the Old Woman, afraid of what Miss Walls would say. Poor, beautiful Vicki with the sad eyes and weighed-down shoulders, slight as a sparrow, and those tiny hands. Such tiny hands.

“Shhh, shhh,” Vicki would insist, leading her like a child down the long, third floor hallway to her bedroom. They had tried, continued to try, to get her to take one of the bedrooms on the main floor. Something about all those steps wearing her out, and what a fall it would be if she lost her balance, but this was her bedroom. She hadn’t ever slept in a different room. She had never traveled, never wanted to try flying, and she would never, ever, ever step foot on a train. Not after what had happened.

If she had known the house was within reach of the sound of the train tracks, she never would have agreed to move here. Not even with the land and the house and the sheep. Not even, shockingly enough, if it had required standing up to Charles.

The Old Woman cleared her throat. She wanted Walls to leave her alone, let her spit out the pill dissolving under her tongue and lay there for a few hours alone before breakfast. But she also wanted to keep talking to Walls, because another part of her didn’t want Walls to leave. These recent nightmares were terrifying, and what if she fell back to sleep?

Walls turned out one light. Then another. The Old Woman felt a certain kind of fear lodging in her gut, planting a seed in the same place the pain originated.

“She’s a bit dim, that one,” the Old Woman said nervously, rolling over and facing Walls, trying to keep the dying embers of conversation alive.

“Vicki? Dim?” Miss Walls looked at her and smiled a sad smile. “First in her class, she was. And you know that well enough. You pointed it out on the application. When I wanted the other girl, you said, ‘Look at that class rank. Can’t go wrong there.’”

Ah, yes, she had forgotten that. Still, the girl was quite lost in her own head most of the time. Which was a relief, actually, because it meant freedom in these final days. The last thing she wanted was some old drill sergeant forcing her to roll over in bed every five minutes and timing her naps and checking under her tongue to make sure she took her pills.

“Yes, well,” the Old Woman said, as if that settled it. Whatever “it” was.

Miss Walls sighed and walked to the door. “Now that I’m up I might as well go look in on the kitchen.”

“Walls, it’s 4 in the morning.”

But Walls kept going, only stopped to turn out one last light and throw some words back over her shoulder. “And I’ll start the laundry. I’ll be back in a few minutes to make sure you’re sleeping.”

The Old Woman imagined the long hallway beyond the closed door, the one that led the length of the third floor. They had always left that hallway light on. Charles had insisted. She had never asked him why.

She leaned over the edge of her bed in the dark room, head hovering above the trash can Miss Walls had placed there ever since nausea had joined her other symptoms. She searched her mouth with her tongue, feeling along her cheeks, the divot inside her teeth.

Where was that damn pill?

She sighed, regret, her eyes already growing heavy. Only one slanting bar of light came in where Walls had failed to close the door completely. One narrow band of light coming in from that long, long hallway, that empty hallway with its dozen windows looking out into the woods and its countless empty rooms and the quiet, the quiet, the quiet. And the light was growing fuzzy, as if dust was floating through it, as if the house had turned into an old growth forest with a heavy canopy and the distant sound of dark things waking up.

Damn. The pill.

She must have swallowed it.

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For Chapter Two, “Special Delivery,” head HERE.