Down a Dark Hall (13 page)

“It is two o’clock in the morning, scarcely
an hour to hold a conference.” Madame Duret’s voice was crisp and cold. “I must say, Jules, that you are not showing the
best of judgment.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Jules said. “Kit woke up while she was at the piano. Of course she started asking questions.”

“But to bring down everyone!” Madame was wearing a crimson dressing gown. Her long, black hair, loosed from its usual coil,
hung down her back in a great cascade, and her face, void of makeup, had an almost skeletal look in the lamplight.

“I made him,” Kit said. “Whatever it is that’s happening here involves all of us. I don’t care what time of night it is.”

She spoke with a firmness that surprised her, and she could see a flicker of grudging respect in Madame’s eyes.

“And you?” Madame’s gesture took in the other three girls, who, in robes and slippers, were now gathered in the parlor. Professor
Farley, wearing an overcoat over his pajamas, was seated in an armchair by the window. “You wish this—this confrontation?”

Ruth nodded quickly. Her face was flushed with excitement. Sandy hesitated, her eyes wide and frightened. Then she nodded
also.

Lynda glanced blankly at Ruth.

“What is it she’s talking about?” she asked. “Why are we all down here?”

Ruth turned back to Madame Duret. “Lynda has to hear it too. She may not understand, but you’ll have to tell her. It’s only
right.”

“Very well,” Madame said. “I had planned, of course, to disclose everything in good time, just as I did with the girls at
my former schools. I had hoped it could wait a bit longer, however. We are still so close to the beginning. There is so much
distance still to be covered before your relationships are secure.”

“What relationships?” Kit asked.

Madame did not answer immediately. Instead, she turned to gaze past them, out the window into the darkness that lay beyond
the pane.

When she did begin to speak at last, it was slowly, as though she were searching for the perfect words.

“Most people in this world are like children. Their lives run on one level only, the physical level of the here and now. From
day to day they go, seeing the material things that surround them, believing that there is nothing beyond that.

“But they are not correct. There is a second level of reality, a spiritual level that is as real as the physical. It transcends
the first level and exists beyond it. A few special people are blessed with an extraordinary sensitivity to that spirit world
and can bridge with their minds the space between those two realities.” A note of pride crept into her voice. “I am one of
those people.”

Kit stared at her. “Do you mean to say that you’re a
medium
?”

“I find that word offensive,” Madame said stiffly. “It carries with it a flavor of fakery and parlor tricks. I do not lend
myself to such demonstrations. I believe my gift is too valuable to be abused in such ways. It must be used only for the good
of humanity.”

“Which is how?” Kit asked.

Madame continued as though she had not heard the question.

“Today the average lifetime is over seventy years, long enough for a great number of accomplishments. But this development
has occurred within the present century. Before that, people tended to die much younger than they do today, and among those
early deaths were those of many brilliant and talented people who had much to give the world. It is those people to whom I
reach out. It is to them I offer the opportunity to return.”

“To return!” It was Sandy who spoke now, her voice expressionless with shock. “But people can’t come back once they’re dead!”

“Not in physical form,” Madame said. “But in spiritual form they can, if there is a place for them. By this, I mean that there
must be a receiver, a young, clear mind, still uncluttered by worldly problems, impressionable and sensitively tuned. Such
minds are unusual, but they do exist. They can be found.”

“And you found them in us.” Ruth made the statement in a matter-of-fact manner. She did not look or sound surprised. “Through
those entrance tests, you were able to tell.”

Madame nodded. “My tests took years to develop, and they are dependable. Here at Blackwood, I was fortunate in finding a place
of perfect atmosphere. There have been spirit occupants here before. Mr. Brewer was in his own way a medium of a sort. He
was able to recall and surround himself with the spirits of his deceased family. Their vibrations remain here still, a part
of the house. The trip to Blackwood from the plane beyond is a short one, made along a well-traveled path.”

The parts of the puzzle were in place now, but Kit could not believe them.

I’m going to be sick,
she thought,
right here on the parlor floor
.

But she wasn’t. Instead she simply sat there, staring at the tall, red-gowned woman in growing horror. Could they be true,
the things that Madame was saying, could they possibly be true?

“I told you,” Ruth said, “that you wouldn’t be able to accept it.”

Kit turned to her in amazement. “You already knew?”

“I guessed,” Ruth said. “Remember earlier, when we were walking by the pond and I told you I wanted to check something out?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I did,” Ruth said. “Tonight after dinner I went into the library and looked up a few people. One of them was a woman
named Emily Brontë, who wrote under the name of Ellis Bell.”

“Who?” Sandy asked.

“Emily Brontë . . . she wrote
Wuthering Heights
. She lived in England during the nineteenth century. It was a time when woman writers weren’t taken seriously, so she and
her two sisters decided to write under male pen names.”

“Ellis, my Ellis, is
Emily Brontë
?!” Sandy shook her head. “That’s impossible. Emily Brontë has been dead for years.”

“She died in 1848,” Ruth said. “Of tuberculosis.”

“I don’t believe it!” Sandy’s voice rose hysterically. “Ellis is just as alive as I am. She writes poetry—”

“She dictates poetry,” Ruth corrected, “and you write it down for her. You’ve admitted yourself that those poems don’t come
out of your own head. She’s using you, Sandy, to get onto paper the words she didn’t have time to write while she was alive.”
She turned to Madame. “Isn’t that right?”

Madame nodded. “Control yourself, Sandra. There is nothing to become so upset about.”

“Nothing to become upset about!” Sandy cried. “With dead people walking through my mind!”

“You haven’t been hurt, my child.” From his chair in the corner, Professor Farley spoke for the first time. “You have simply
been part of a unique experiment. You should feel privileged, not exploited.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to Kit,” Jules said.

“Privileged!” Kit exploded. “By having my mind used as a receiving unit?” She turned accusingly to Professor Farley. “And
you—you’re in on this too?”

“Of course,” the professor said. His kindly old face held no trace of guilt. “I became acquainted with Madame Duret in London
while doing research for a paper on psychic phenomena. When I learned about her school in Paris, I was fascinated. I encouraged
her to open another, similar institution in England, and later I accompanied her to America to assist with the establishment
of Blackwood.”

“I think,” Kit said, “that it’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“What’s so terrible about it?” Jules asked her. “You ought to be proud.”

 “Proud of what? That I’m being used, like a tool of some kind?” Kit exclaimed incredulously. The voices from the dream came
back to her, and she shuddered uncontrollably.

“ ‘She must play for me!’ ‘I want her tonight!’ ‘I haven’t used her yet!’ It’s the way you talk about an object, not a person!”

Lynda was looking dazedly from one speaker to another.

“What is all this?” she asked in bewilderment. “
Who’s
an object?”

“You are!” Kit cried. “We all are! Don’t you understand at all, Lynda? It’s not you who is creating those beautiful pictures
we’re so impressed by! It’s a famous landscape painter who died over a century ago. No wonder they’re so good!”

“That’s not true,” Lynda said. “I painted all day today. Look—I can prove it.” She held out a slim, delicate hand smudged
with green paint. “That’s from doing the grass. There’s a lot of grass in my new picture.”

“And who wants it there, that grass? Who planned the picture? Who guides the brush?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That night in your room,” Kit said in exasperation, “when I brought up your tray, you said, ‘There is so much to be done.
He
wants so much.’ Who were you talking about, Lynda? Who is this ‘he’?”

“I never said anything like that,” Lynda said with a catch in her voice. “I think you are all mean. First Ruth says I’m tracing,
and now you say that somebody else is doing the work for me. You’re jealous! Here’s the first thing I’ve ever really been
good at in my whole life, and you can’t bear to see me get the credit for it.”

“Let her be, Kit,” Ruth said. “She can’t take it in. Can you blame her? It’s an incredible concept. It will take some getting
used to for all of us.”

“Well, you can get used to it if you want to. Personally, I don’t intend to!” Kit turned to Madame Duret. “I’m going home!”

“You cannot do that. Your parents are away.”

“I’ll stay with friends! I’ll call Tracy tonight. Her parents will be here by morning.”

“And they can drop me at the bus stop in the village.” Sandy moved to stand beside Kit. “I’m not going to stay in this place
a minute longer than I have to. And you’d just better wait until my grandpa hears about this. He’ll blow a fuse!”

“Girls, you are being ridiculous.” There was a cold edge to Madame’s voice. “You cannot back out at this point. The connections
are still in the process of being stabilized.”

“That’s great,” Kit said. “I’ll break them off before they do become stabilized. I’m getting out of here while my brain is
still my own. If you think I’m going to sit here and let some wandering spirits take possession of it, you’re out of your
mind!”

“That is sufficient, Kathryn,” Madame said icily. “I ask you to remember, please, that you are a young lady, and you will
mind your manners accordingly. I do not enjoy listening to yelling, particularly in the middle of the night. It is you who
demanded this explanation, and you have now had it, and as far as I am concerned, the discussion is over. You will all please
return to your beds. You need your rest in order to be alert for your morning classes.”

“I’m not going to be here for classes,” Kit told her angrily. “By tomorrow I’ll be with the Rosenblums on the way back to
the city!”

And then she stopped as the realization came to her that she was without her cell phone and there was only one telephone at
Blackwood. It was located in Madame Duret’s private office.

The next few days moved past in a
blur.
Nightmare days
was the way Kit thought of them. The last of October became the beginning of November, and the final leaves drifted from
the branches of the trees around the pond, leaving them stark and bare against the heavy gray of the overcast sky.

Outside the air was damp and chill with the promise of winter, and within the walls of Blackwood a different sort of chill
prevailed. Even in the daytime, the house seemed filled with shadows, and in the evenings the girls gathered in the parlor
to share the bright reality of the glowing TV screen, with a sense of relief at finding the banal programs still the same.

“It’s as though
this
is the real world,” Sandy said thinly, gesturing toward the screen on which a rubber-faced comedian, tossing her hair flamboyantly,
was imitating a famous pop star, “and we are the make-believe. Sometimes I wonder if I’m real at all.”

“You’re real, all right,” Kit told her. “We all are. But for how long? We’ve got to get out of this place as soon as possible.”

“How?” Sandy asked hopelessly. “We can’t get to the phone. Madame keeps the office locked at all times. The gate at the end
of the drive is padlocked, and there’s no way of getting over the fence. I know because I went down to check. Those spikes
on top aren’t decorations. They’re for real.”

“I think you’re making too much of this,” Ruth interjected. She reached over to turn down the volume of the TV so they could
talk more easily. “We’ll be going home at Christmastime. That’s not very far off. In the meantime, how many people our age
ever get to be intricate parts of such an original experiment?”

“Honestly, Ruth,” Sandy said in amazement, “I actually think you’re enjoying this. You don’t seem to be upset by it at all.”

“I was in the beginning,” Ruth said, “before I understood what was happening, but now . . . well, I guess I’m more excited
than anything. Imagine having an opportunity to be in on something so significant! It’s a breakthrough in science. And the
insight it’s giving me is incredible. I have a grasp of mathematical concepts that I never would have believed were possible
before.”

“But it’s not you who’s grasping them,” Kit objected. “It’s somebody else, working through your mind!”

“Not entirely,” Ruth said. “That’s the difference between our situations. You feel that you’re being used as a vehicle. You
don’t have any understanding of the music that’s coming through you. You simply let it flow through you, mechanically, the
way Sandy does her poetry. But in my case, I
am
able, just barely, to begin to get the meaning of the knowledge that’s coming through me. Math and science are my thing,
they always have been. I feel now as though I’ve been sitting all my life inside a box, and suddenly someone is lifting the
lid and I can look up and see the stars.”

“Then there’s no actual personality coming into your consciousness?” Kit asked her. “Not the way there is with Sandy and me?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Ruth told her. “I think perhaps what I’m receiving is a pool of knowledge from a lot of different
minds. There may be a hundred different mathematicians and scientists pouring all of their accumulated thoughts and theories
into my head, and if I can receive and handle all that and eventually grow to understand it, there will come a time when it’ll
be
my
knowledge too.”

“The way Lynda’s painting is hers?” Sandy asked bitterly. “She’s living in a world that doesn’t even touch ours anymore.”

“Well, Lynda’s different,” Ruth admitted. “She’s kind of gone nuts.”

“She’s possessed,” Sandy said.

“We have to escape.” Kit made her voice firm. “There has to be a way—”

She broke off the sentence at the sound of voices in the hall. Professor Farley appeared in the doorway. His crinkled old
face was as friendly as ever, and his white hair and little pointed beard gave him the look of an underweight Santa.

“Nine thirty,” he said pleasantly. “It’s time for you young ladies to be climbing the stairs to get your beauty sleep.”

Glaring at him, Kit got to her feet.

“I don’t need beauty sleep. All I need is to get out of here and go home. My stepfather is an attorney, did you know that?
You just wait until he finds out I’ve been held here against my will. He’ll put you in jail.”

“Now, Kit,” the professor said, “we don’t need that kind of talk. Your parents have placed you in our charge for the semester,
and it would be very lax of us indeed if we let you go charging off in all directions. You are our responsibility, both legally
and morally.”

“Morally?” Kit growled. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. What about all the letters we’ve written to our friends and
families, the ones we’ve laid out on the hall table for you to mail for us in the village? You stole them! Do you call that
‘moral’? It’s not only wrong, it’s illegal.”

“Nobody has stolen anything,” Professor Farley told her calmly. “Your letters are in a neat pile in Madame’s office, and you
may have them back anytime you so desire. And some of them did go out—the early ones in which there were no disturbing references
to ‘strange dreams’ and ‘odd things happening.’ I’m sure your parents were delighted to receive them.”

“One thing I’ve been wondering,” Ruth said. “What happened to the other schools, the ones in Europe? Madame had two of them
there. Why did they close down?”

“For various reasons,” the professor told her, “none of which have anything to do with Blackwood.”

“What about the girls in those schools?” Sandy asked. “What kinds of talents did they have? Did they compose music and write
poetry?”

“Indeed, they did,” Professor Farley said. “Many beautiful contributions to the culture of the world came forth from Madame
Duret’s previous students. I think I may go so far as to say that some of their creations were masterpieces.”

“Then where are they?” Kit asked him. “What was done with them? Why haven’t we ever heard about them?” She paused as a thought
occurred to her. “The Vermeer—the one Madame said she discovered at an auction! She didn’t buy that painting at all! It was
painted by a student at one of her other schools! Madame got a fortune for it! She sold it as an original!”

“It was an original,” Professor Farley said. “It was the work of Vermeer, no matter whose hand it was that held the brush.”

“But couldn’t experts tell the age of the painting?” Ruth asked in bewilderment. “The paint would be different and so would
the canvas.”

“You are forgetting,” Professor Farley said, “that Madame is herself an expert on art. She supplied her students with used
canvases of the proper vintage, scraped down to the original gesso. She was also able to supply paints made from lapis lazuli
and cochineal. The final look of aging is not difficult to achieve. We baked the paintings in a hundred-degree oven for two
hours and then rolled them to bring up the craquelure. No one can tell the painting is anything but authentic.”

They had thought of everything.

I won’t go to sleep,
Kit told herself.
I may sit here all night, but I will not close my eyes
. It was a futile vow, and she knew it. Sleep waited behind her door like an all-encompassing fog. The moment she stepped
into her room a heavy drowsiness would fall upon her, almost as though she had been administered a sleep-inducing drug, and
her eyes would be falling closed before she reached the bed.

Tonight she fought it by crossing to the window. Pressing her forehead against the cold glass, she stared out into the night.
At first she could see nothing but darkness.

Then, as her eyes became adjusted, she saw the black shapes of the trees begin to emerge against the sky and realized that
somewhere, too high to be seen from the house, the moon must be hanging bright in the sky.
This is the wing,
she thought,
where the Brewers slept. Perhaps the Brewer babies were born here. This is where they had their nursery and where the parents
had their big master bedroom
.

Suddenly, there sprang into her mind a vivid picture of a woman, perhaps a little younger than her own mother, standing at
this window just as Kit herself was doing now.

The woman was plump and dreamy-eyed, and she loved her home; she loved to stand here and gaze out at the summer garden and
the stretch of smooth, green lawn leading to the sparkling pond.

The world seemed to shift, the night lifted from Kit’s eyes, and she could see before her the same scene that the woman saw:
a lush garden abloom with flowers and a sunlit lawn on which three little boys were playing. A baby carriage was parked in
the shade of an oak tree, and a uniformed nurse wearing a sun hat was leaning over it to speak to the tiny occupant.

How lovely,
Mrs. Brewer thought.
How happy I am! What a beautiful, beautiful life this is!
Kit felt the glow of the woman’s happiness sweep through her as though it were her own. Then, as quickly as it had come,
the vision was gone. She was herself again, Kit Gordy, and it was November, and outside the night lay thick across the brown
lawn.

Turning away, Kit went over and sat on the edge of the bed. Madame’s words came back to her:
Their vibrations remain here still, a part of the house
. Somehow, in his desperate grief over the loss of his family, Mr. Brewer had managed to call them back to him, the gentle,
sweet-faced wife, the romping children. He had closed his doors to the outside world and continued to live with his spirit
family just as he would have if they had been with him in body.

It was too much to contemplate.

Sleep was pressing upon her now. Kit could feel the weight of it upon her eyelids.
I won’t give in,
she told herself vehemently.
I won’t!

Softly, at the edge of her mind, she heard the music, faint and far away, but ready to move closer, to close in upon her and
take her over if her consciousness faded even slightly.

Go away,
Kit cried silently,
whoever you are—go away! You’ve had your time on earth! This is
my
time! Mine!

The bed was soft, tempting, drawing her backward. Her head touched the pillow and sank helplessly into its feathery depths.
Above her the wine-colored canopy seemed to sway, dizzily, hypnotically, and in her ears the music grew louder. It was not
just the sound of a piano this time, but strings, the high, sweet voices of violins, the richness of violas, the melodious
ripples of a harp. And then there came a flute, shrill and true as the song of a bird.

“No,” she wailed. “No!”

But her resistance was gone, and it had closed upon her, and she was a part of it, being carried along on the sweeping tide
of sound.

“You must write it down,” the dream man told her. How easily he came to her now, as though he belonged there, at home within
the confines of her mind. “You must put this on paper. It is too great to lose.”

“I can’t,” Kit replied. “I don’t know how to write music.”

“I will tell you. Get up from the bed. Here, take my hand, let me lead you over to the desk. Pick up a pencil.”

“I don’t have any music paper. You should know that.”

“You do. See!”

And she did. It was there, a music notebook with the staffs outlined in pale blue, awaiting her use. Someone had brought it
and placed it in her room while she was down in the parlor. Madame? Jules? The same person who had come into her locked room
on another occasion to remove Lynda’s first portrait? Once the question would have seemed important, but now it did not matter.

One or another of them, it was all the same.

“I don’t want to,” Kit said. “I don’t want to write down anything. You can’t force me to do something that I don’t want to
do.”

But even as she spoke, her hand was reaching for the pencil. Her fingers closed around it and she lifted it and drew the paper
toward her.

“Kit!” Through the pounding of the music there broke a familiar voice, calling her name.

“What? Who?” With a decisive wrench, Kit tore through the barrier between the two worlds.

It was Sandy who was standing in the doorway. She was dressed in pajamas, her hair was mussed from the pillow, and her freckles
stood out in startling relief against her white skin.

“It’s so cold in here,” Sandy said, wrapping her arms around herself. “Is your window open? How can you sit there like that
when it’s like the inside of an ice—”

She did not finish her sentence. The pencil in Kit’s hand flew from her grasp and broke with a loud snap in midair. As though
fired from a gun, the pointed end shot straight across the room. Sandy screamed and threw her hands up to cover her face.

In horror, Kit watched the stream of blood burst forth from her friend’s forearm.

“Sandy!” she cried. “You’re hurt!”

Slowly, the red-haired girl lowered her hands and stood, gazing in bewilderment at the thin shaft of wood protruding from
her arm. Dazedly, she reached over with her other hand and drew it out.