How to Love a Monster: A Scream in The Night

The scream came from somewhere deep below the floorboards, or perhaps from the rafters above, its origin impossible to place as it ricocheted through the corridors of Ravenscar Hall and shattered the silence of the small hours.

Seraphina Marsh sat upright in bed, her heart slamming against her ribs as though it meant to break free. The sound had been raw, animal, a single note of such pure terror that it scraped against the inside of her skull. Then it was gone, swallowed by the house, and in its wake the darkness pressed in close and absolute around her.

She listened. The wind moved against the windowpanes with a thin, papery sound. Somewhere in the eaves, a bird, or perhaps a bat, scratched and scrabbled. Her own breath came shallow and quick, loud to her own ears.

Then, faintly, a second sound. A sob, or a whimper, trailing off into silence.

She found her tinderbox on the bedside table by touch. Her hands were not quite steady. The sulfur match flared, a brief orange bloom in the dark, and she brought it to the wick of the candle that stood waiting beside her book. A circle of yellow light pushed back the shadows, and with it came the small mercy of being able to see the corners of her own room.

The chamber she had been given lay at the end of the east corridor, a modest but airless room furnished in the manner of a house that had not thrown out anything in forty years. Rosewood chairs with sagging seats. A washstand whose pitcher was chipped at the spout. A landscape above the mantel so dim with varnish it might have been painted in soot. Her portmanteau sat where the chambermaid had set it, still half-unpacked, her brushes and gloves and the small framed daguerreotype of her mother visible in the candlelight.

She had been at Ravenscar for four days. Four days, and already the house had begun to settle around her like a great slow beast deciding whether to swallow or to spare.

Seraphina pulled on her wrapper and thrust her feet into the cold leather of her slippers. The stone floor leached the warmth from her soles as she crossed to the door. She pressed her ear to the oak. Beyond it, the corridor breathed its own particular silence, the silence of a place that held too many rooms and not enough people.

She opened the door a hand's width and listened again.

Nothing.

She stepped out into the passage, holding the candle ahead of her like a small, inadequate lantern. The flame bent in some draft she could not feel, and the shadows on the plaster walls moved with a life of their own. Doors to other chambers stood shut along the corridor, each one identical in its dark graining, each one giving up nothing of what lay behind it.

The sob had come, she was almost certain, from below. From the ground floor, perhaps, or from some lower story still. The east wing of Ravenscar Hall was built on a slope, she had been told, and there were rooms beneath it that had been closed up since her employer's father had died. Closed up, and locked, and forgotten, the housekeeper had said, in the tone of one who did not wish to be asked any more questions about them.

Seraphina had been given a position. A position as companion and reader to Miss Graves, the elder daughter of the house, a girl of twenty who had not spoken above a whisper since some calamity the family did not discuss. The salary was handsome. The duties were strange. She was not to be curious. She was not to wander. She was, the housekeeper had impressed upon her, to keep to the prescribed rooms and to ask permission before venturing anywhere else.

She had nodded. She had understood. She had, of course, intended to do exactly as she was told.

Now she stood at the head of the principal staircase, the candle trembling in her grip, and she listened to the house for any further sound.

The grandfather clock in the great hall below began to chime. One. Two. Three. The bronze tone hung in the air long after the mechanism had stilled, and the silence that followed was somehow heavier than the sound that had preceded it.

Then, from somewhere she could not name, a footstep. Just one. A single soft fall of weight upon boards, somewhere far away and far below.

Seraphina descended.

The staircase curved as it dropped, and the banister beneath her free hand was cold and faintly tacky, as though someone had recently varnished it and the surface had not fully cured. She kept close to the wall. The candle flame threw her shadow forward onto the steps, a tall, spindling thing that led her down as though it knew the way better than she did.

At the landing she paused. Below her, the great hall opened out, a cavern of dark timber and dark stone that smelled of dust and something older, something almost vegetable in its sweetness, like the inside of a long-closed cupboard. A grandfather clock stood against the far wall, its pendulum still swinging with a small, mechanical patience. Portraits hung in rows above the wainscot, and she did not look at their faces.

From here, the footstep did not repeat. The house had resumed its listening.

She moved along the corridor toward the back of the house, where the family rooms lay, and where she knew Miss Graves had her chamber. The door was shut. She stood outside it and listened. Nothing. She raised her hand and knocked, very softly, with her knuckle.

A pause.

"Who is there?" The voice from within was thin and reedy, the voice of a young woman long accustomed to being startled.

"It is Miss Marsh," Seraphina answered, keeping her own voice low. "Forgive me. I thought I heard something."

A longer pause. Then the sound of small feet crossing the floor, and the door opened inward a cautious inch. In the gap, a slice of a face: pale, sharp-boned, ringleted, and very watchful. Miss Graves had not lit a candle either, and the only light in her chamber was the thin grey wash of moonlight through a high window.

"Go back to your room," the girl said. There was no malice in it. There was something closer to a plea.

"Did you hear a scream?"

Miss Graves looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes in the moonlit sliver of her face were dark and very still.

"You should not have come down," she said. "You should go back."

"Miss Graves."

"Go back, Miss Marsh." The girl shook her head, a small, tight motion. "If he knows you heard."

She did not finish the sentence. She pushed the door closed, gently, with both hands, and Seraphina heard the lock turn and then the small soft sound of a body sliding down the inside of the wood until it sat upon the floor.

Seraphina stood for a moment with her candle and her questions and her creeping unease. Then she went on.

The kitchen corridor was at the back of the house, narrow and smelling faintly of yesterday's roast and of lamp oil and of stone that never quite dried. A single lamp still burned on its bracket at the far end, where the servants' passage turned toward the stillroom and the back stairs. She followed it.

At the foot of the back stairs, a door stood ajar. Beyond it, a flight of stone steps descended into a darkness the lamp did not reach. The air that drifted up from below was markedly colder, and carried with it a smell she could not at first place. Wet earth, perhaps. Or old, damp wool. Something organic and closed.

She set her candle on the top step and listened.

From below, very faintly, came a sound. Breathing. Someone, or something, was breathing down there in the dark, the breath catching and hitching as though the breath were afraid to be heard.

Seraphina picked up her candle again. She put her foot upon the first step down.

"Who is there?" she called, and was annoyed to find that her voice came out smaller than she had intended.

The breathing stopped.

A long moment passed. Then a voice came up the stairwell, low, rough, and carrying with it the strange flatness of a man who had not spoken to another person in some time.

"You ought not to be here."

The accent was English, but worn at the edges, as though it had been knocked about in foreign ports and only recently put on again.

"And yet," Seraphina answered, with a steadiness she did not quite feel, "here I am."

A sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been a sigh, drifted up from the dark.

"Go back to your room," the voice said, and now there was something almost gentle in it, almost tender, and all the more alarming for being so. "Nothing here is for you to see."

"Someone screamed."

A silence. Then, very quietly:

"Yes. Someone did."

The candle flame guttered in the draft from below, and Seraphina's shadow on the wall behind her leaped and shrank.

"Who?" she said.

The voice below her did not answer. Instead, she heard the sound of a body shifting in the dark, the scrape of a boot against stone, and then footsteps, retreating deeper into the cold below. The breathing faded. The smell of damp earth thinned.

She stood alone at the top of the stairs with her single candle and the lamp at her back, and she understood that whoever had screamed, whoever had answered her, had chosen to withdraw into the deeper dark of the house rather than be seen by her.

She looked down into the well of the stairwell for a long moment. Then she lifted her candle high and began, very carefully, to descend.

Seraphina reached the bottom of the stairwell and found the cold of it waiting for her like a held breath. The stones beneath her slippers were slick with something that was not quite water, and the air tasted of old iron and lime. She held the candle out at arm's length and let its small circle of light do what it could against the pressing dark.

Nothing moved. The corridor stretched away to her left in a long, shallow curve, its walls hung with framed canvases whose faces had been turned to the wall, leaving only the gilt of their frames to catch the flame. To her right, a door stood ajar, its hinges gone brown with rust. Beyond it she could hear, very faintly, the sound of water moving somewhere underground, as though the house had a slow pulse she had never noticed in all her months of employment.

She thought of calling out. The word formed itself on her tongue, "hello," small and foolish, and she swallowed it. Whoever had spoken to her from the stairwell had chosen silence over her, and she would not give him the satisfaction of knowing she had come looking.

Three steps into the corridor, she stopped.

The draft had shifted. Somewhere above her, very far above, a door had been opened, and through it came a thread of colder air carrying with it the faintest breath of something she could not, at first, name. Not smoke. Not damp. Something sweeter and sharper at once, the way a struck match smells before the sulfur burns away into the ordinary air.

Then, from somewhere to her left and above, a sound. Not the scream she had first heard, but smaller, more private: a single muffled cry, like a creature caught in a snare, and then a hush that seemed to swallow it whole.

Her candle flame bent sideways as if pulled by an invisible hand, and she understood that the draft was coming down the grand staircase. The one she had been forbidden to climb since her first week at Graveswood, when Lord Victor had taken her aside in the library and told her, with a politeness that did not quite cover his teeth, that the upper galleries were not for the staff, and that what happened in the west wing was the business of the family alone.

She turned back. Her slippers made no sound at all on the stone.

The corridor she had come from gave onto a narrower passage that ran along the back of the house, past the cellar mouths and the disused servants' stair, until at last it ended at a low arch hung with a curtain of beaded strings. She pushed through them and felt them click cold against her wrists, and there, rising up before her in the gloom, stood the grand staircase.

It was an extravagant thing even by the standards of Graveswood, a sweep of pale oak that climbed in two long flights to a gallery hung with portraits whose eyes she had never quite been able to meet. The banister was carved in a pattern of vines and small, strange beasts, and at its newel posts crouched two stone griffins whose faces had been worn soft by generations of trailing gloves.

Seraphina put her hand upon the banister to steady herself as she began to climb.

It came away wet.

She drew her fingers back and held them up to the candle. In the thin gold light, the smears on her fingertips looked almost black. Not water. Thicker than water, and with a faint warmth to it that made the skin of her palm prickle as though she had brushed against something that should not have been touched.

She held the candle closer to the banister itself. There, smeared along the curve of the wood in a long, dragged stroke as though a hand had been pulled along it, was the dark stain. It began low, at the foot of the stairs, and ran upward in the direction of the west gallery, growing thinner as it climbed but never quite disappearing.

She did not think. If she had thought, she would have gone back to her room and pulled the coverlet up to her chin and pretended she had heard nothing at all. But the house had its hooks in her now, and she set her foot upon the first stair and began to climb, following the dark smear upward as a child follows a trail of crumbs through a wood.

The stair creaked under her. Each step had its own small voice, some high and some low, and she tried to step so that she made no sound at all, but the wood had been waiting for her weight for some time and would not be silenced. Halfway up, she paused to listen.

The house was full of its small noises, the settling and the ticking that old houses make when they believe themselves unobserved. From somewhere below and to her right came the faint metallic note of a clock that had not been wound in years, and from somewhere above, the sound of a door being very carefully closed.

She went on.

At the landing, the stain on the banister turned and ran along the rail of the upper flight, and she turned with it. Her candle was guttering badly now, the wax having crept down the brass and pooled in her palm, but the light held. She could see, ahead of her, the gallery stretching away to the left and to the right. To the left, the portraits. To the right, a long corridor whose doors were all shut, and at whose end a single lamp burned with a small, steady flame in a red glass shade.

The stain led toward the right.

She followed it, and as she walked, she became aware that the air was changing. It grew colder, and there was a smell now of something she could almost place: dried lavender, perhaps, and beneath it the sharper note of camphor, and beneath that, threading through both, the iron-and-lime smell she had noticed in the lower passage, only stronger now, as though whatever it was had been brought up from the cellars and laid out here to air.

The first door on her right was closed, and she passed it without slowing. The second was ajar, a thin line of darkness visible beyond it. The third stood open onto a small sitting room hung with green velvet, the chairs all shrouded in Holland covers, and through its far window she could see the bare branches of the elms tossing in a wind she could not feel. The fourth door was shut and locked, the keyhole stuffed with a twist of paper. The fifth was shut, but from beneath it came a thin thread of light, and the sound, very soft, of someone breathing.

She stopped. The stain on the banister ended at this door.

Seraphina stood for a long moment with her hand lifted to knock, and did not knock. The breathing beyond the door was slow, and even, and carried with it the suggestion of great weariness, as though whoever was within had been holding themselves upright for a very long time and had only just now allowed themselves to rest.

She thought of the voice in the stairwell. Low, rough, the edges of an English accent worn down by foreign air. She thought of Lord Victor's warning, delivered in the library with a politeness that had not quite concealed his teeth. She thought of the woman she had been told she would meet, the widowed doyenne of the village who kept the lending library and ran the afternoon circle, Mrs. Adelaide Aldridge, who had taken such an unaccountable interest in her when she had first arrived, and who had said to her only last Tuesday, in that crisp and clipped way of hers, "My dear, if ever you find yourself in need of someone who will not ask questions, you have only to send for me."

She had not understood, then, why the woman had looked at her so strangely. She understood a little better now.

She lifted the latch.

The door swung inward on hinges that made no sound at all, as though they had been oiled very recently, and she found herself looking into a long, narrow room that had once been a nursery. The paper on the walls still carried its faded pattern of nursery-rhyme figures, a cat with a fiddle, a dish that ran away with a spoon, a cow jumping over a moon that had been partly torn away. A bed stood against the far wall, the coverlet drawn up over something that lay very still.

The lamp on the table beside it was the one she had seen from the gallery, a small brass thing with a red glass shade that threw a circle of warm light onto the white of the pillow and the pale hand that lay curled upon it.

The hand belonged to a man.

He was turned partly away from her, his face hidden against the pillow, but she could see the line of his jaw and the dark fall of his hair, and the way his shoulders rose and fell with each slow breath. His shirt was undone at the throat, and on the skin above his collarbone she could see a mark, dark and livid, that might have been a bruise and might have been something else.

He had heard her. She knew it by the way his breathing changed, by the almost imperceptible tightening of the hand upon the pillow, but he did not turn.

"You ought not to be here," he said, and the voice was the one from the stairwell, low and rough and carrying with it the strange flatness of a man who had not spoken to another person in some time.

"And yet," Seraphina answered, "here I am."

A silence, and then a sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been a sigh, drifted up from the pillow.

"Then close the door behind you," he said, very quietly, "and do not tell anyone that you have seen me."

The door clicked shut behind her with a sound too soft for the weight of what she had just done. She stood with her back to it, her hand still upon the latch, and the brass was cold enough to sting the palm.

The man upon the bed did not move. His breathing had steadied again, or perhaps she had merely grown used to the rhythm of it, the way one grows used to the ticking of a clock that has been running in an empty room for longer than anyone remembers.

"You heard me," she said. It was not a question.

"I hear most things." His voice came muffled against the pillow, the words half-swallowed by linen. "It is one of the few advantages of being unable to sleep."

She stepped forward, and the floorboard beneath her foot gave out a single creak that seemed, in the stillness, loud enough to wake the dead in their vaults below the chapel. She stopped. He did not turn.

"Then you have heard," she said carefully, "a great many things that no one else in this house has heard."

A pause. Then, very slowly, he turned his head upon the pillow until one eye, dark and glittering in the lamplight, fixed itself upon her. The rest of his face was in shadow, but she could see enough to know that he was younger than she had first supposed, and older than he ought to have been, and that there was something in the set of his mouth that she had seen before, in the faces of men who had come back from places they could not describe.

"And who," he said, "are you, to be wandering the corridors of a house that is not yours at an hour when decent people are asleep?"

"I am Seraphina Marsh," she answered. "The niece of the Reverend. I arrived this evening with my uncle and Mrs. Aldridge."

Something moved in his expression. It might have been recognition; it might have been fear; it might have been the shadow of a smile that had died before it reached his mouth.

"Marsh," he repeated, as though tasting the word. "The Reverend's niece. Then you will know, if you have been in the village for any length of time, that there is a room in this house that no one speaks of, and a name that no one speaks either."

"I have been told," she said, "that there is a monster in the east wing."

His eye, which had been fixed upon her with the particular steadiness of a man measuring the distance between himself and danger, closed. He turned his face back into the pillow.

"Then you had better go," he said, "before you find out whether they are right."

She did not go. She came a step nearer, and then another, until she stood close enough to the bed to see the mark upon his throat in the lamplight. It was not a bruise. She knew enough of such things to know that. It was older than a bruise, and uglier, and it curved across the skin above his collarbone in a pattern that looked, to her physician's eye, like nothing so much as the scar a leash might leave upon the throat of a dog that had tried to pull free.

"You are hurt," she said.

"I am tired," he answered, without turning.

"And you are lying," she said, "which is a different thing."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he sat up, slowly, as though the motion cost him something, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His shirt hung open at the throat and she could see now that the mark was only the worst of several, a tracery of older scars that crossed his chest and disappeared beneath the linen. He did not try to hide them. He looked at her with an expression she could not read.

"You are very bold," he said, "for a niece of the Reverend."

"I have been told that before."

"Then you have also been told," he said, "that boldness in this house is a quality that does not long survive the telling."

He stood. He was taller than she had expected, and thinner, and he moved with the careful precision of a man who has learned to make his body do as little as possible. He took a step toward her, and then stopped, as though something had arrested him, and his face, which had been set in an expression of wary patience, changed.

"Get away from the door," he said, very quietly.

She did not understand him at first. She was still looking at the scars, and trying to fit them into the pattern of what she had been told, and what she had guessed, and what she feared. Then she heard it, the sound that he had heard before she had, the soft shift of weight upon the boards behind her, and the almost inaudible drawing of a breath that was not her own.

A hand closed around her wrist.

The grip was sudden and absolute, and so fierce that she felt the bones of her forearm grind together beneath the fingers. She cried out, or tried to cry out, but the sound was smothered by the other hand that came up to cover her mouth, and by the body that swung her around and away from the bed as easily as though she had been a child lifted from a puddle.

He was behind her, the man whose room this was not, or rather the man whose presence in this room had not been meant to be known. She could see him now only in fragments, the way one sees a thing through lightning, in the flash before the dark returns. His shirt was untucked, the tails of it hanging loose over a waist that was thinner than a man who ate as well as Lord Graves ought to eat. His eyes were wide, and in them there was something that she recognized, because she had seen it once in the face of a soldier who had come back from a campaign he would not name, and it was the look of a man who has been afraid for a very long time and has at last found something to be afraid for.

He did not speak. He only held her, his fingers hard upon her wrist and his other hand still across her mouth, and he backed her out of the room and into the corridor, and the door swung shut behind them upon the man who sat upon the bed and watched them go with an expression of something that might have been relief and might have been regret.

The corridor was darker than the room had been. The lamp in the gallery had been extinguished, or had burned itself out, and there was nothing now but the thin grey light that came through the tall window at the far end, and the sound of their breathing, and the distant, unanswering ticking of the clock in the hall below. The air smelled of dust and old wood and something else, something sharper, that she could not name.

Lucien Graves, for she understood now, without being told, that this was Lucien Graves, did not loosen his hold upon her. He walked her down the gallery at a pace that was just short of running, his fingers leaving white marks upon her skin where he gripped her, and when she tried to pull free he only tightened his hand and made a sound low in his throat that was not a word. It was the sound a man makes when he is holding something he is afraid of dropping.

She stumbled over the hem of her gown, and he did not wait for her to find her footing. He lifted her, or half-lifted her, his arm about her waist and his hand still upon her wrist, and she felt the heat of him through the linen of his shirt, and beneath it the fine tremor that ran through him like a wire pulled too tight.

"Let me go," she said, when at last his hand slipped from her mouth.

"No."

"You are hurting me."

"Yes."

She would have said more, but he had turned her, suddenly, into the narrower corridor that led to the small chamber that had been prepared for her, and the door was already opening under his hand, and she was being put inside, or rather being pushed inside, with a force that sent her half a dozen steps into the room before she could catch herself against the edge of the bed. The candle on her table flared and steadied, and threw their two shadows, long and entangled, upon the wall.

She turned. He was already closing the door.

"Why," she said.

He did not answer at once. He stood in the doorway with his back to her, and his shoulders rose and fell once, twice, and she heard him draw a breath that was not quite steady. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough, and came from somewhere far back in his throat.

"Because," he said, "you were not supposed to see him. And because you were not supposed to see me. And because, if you had stayed in that room for one minute longer, he would have told you what he is, and what I am, and you would have run screaming from this house before morning, and my father would have known, before the sun was up, that everything we have worked to keep hidden has come undone."

"The work of keeping it hidden is what is killing him," she said, before she could stop herself.

He went still. For a long moment he did not move at all, and she thought that he might have stopped breathing, and then his hand, which had been resting upon the door, tightened, and she heard the wood creak under his fingers.

"You know nothing," he said, "of what is killing him, or of what is killing me, or of what my father has done, or of what my father will do if he learns that either of us has been seen."

"I know," she said, "that the man in that bed has been beaten, and starved, and locked away like a thing that is not fit to be looked at, and that someone in this house has done it, and that someone is not you."

He turned at that. He turned and looked at her, and in the thin light from the candle she could see his face for the first time as something other than a shadow and a pair of wild eyes. He was not handsome. He was not the sort of man that the young ladies of the village would have pointed at and sighed over. He was the sort of man that mothers would have warned their daughters away from, and daughters would not have listened, and mothers would have been right. There was a scar that ran from the corner of his left eye down into the line of his jaw, and his mouth was set in a way that spoke of words he had swallowed rather than spoken, and his eyes, when they met hers, were the eyes of a man who has looked at his own reflection and seen something he could not bear.

"You think," he said, very softly, "that you understand. You do not. You will not. And if you are wise, you will go back to your uncle in the morning, and you will tell him that you have changed your mind, and you will leave this place, and you will forget the name of the man who lies in that bed, and the name of the man who stands before you now, and you will never speak of either of them again."

"And if I am not wise?" she said.

His mouth did something that was almost a smile, and almost a grimace, and was neither.

"Then you will learn," he said, "what it costs to be wise too late."

The latch clicked. The key turned in the lock, the sound of it deliberate and final, and then his footsteps went away down the corridor, and there was nothing but the silence, and the small sound of the candle guttering in the draught from somewhere she could not see.

She sat upon the edge of the bed for a long time, with her hand pressed to the place upon her wrist where his fingers had been, and she could feel, beneath the sting of it, the shape of his grip like a brand upon her skin. The skin was already darkening. Tomorrow it would be black, and she would have to hide it, and she would have to lie, and she wondered, as she sat there in the dark, whether lying was a thing one learned in a single night, or whether one had always known how to do it, and had only been waiting for the occasion.

She had come to this house to nurse a sick man. She had found, instead, two of them, and the marks of their sickness were not such as any physic she knew could mend.

Somewhere in the house, a clock struck three. Somewhere below her, she heard the boards creak as though someone were walking a long and careful path from one room to another. Somewhere above her, in the east wing, the lamp with the red glass shade was still burning, and a man she had not known was there was sitting upon a bed with his head in his hands, and he was weeping, very quietly, in the dark.