“Giselle’s thoughts. She’s . . . she used to live here in this house. I think she reaches inside my head sometimes— Mum, please . . . stop saying you don’t understand and just listen to me! I’m . . . I’m trying to tell you that I need help!”
But her mother just kept repeating that she didn’t understand. Over and over again like a broken record. Then Chloe heard her father’s voice ask something in the background and she heard her mother’s fraught response: “I can’t understand a word she’s saying! She’s been speaking in French for the last five minutes.”
“I’m
Her hand gripped the phone, tight enough to crack the plastic casing, and a cold sweat formed at her hairline as she babbled incoherently, quite unable to understand herself any more than her mother could. A dreadful, appalling sense of isolation pressed down on her as she found herself suddenly unable to communicate in any human language. All those words she’d taken for granted all her life and had unthinkingly used to shape the world and shape herself were now gone, leaving her no different from and no better than the lowliest animal. But then, finally, something clicked – shifted savagely in her head – and Chloe could understand her own words once again.
“Mum, Mum, am I speaking English now?” she gasped. “Am I speaking in English or in French?”
She breathed a sigh of relief at the answer, then went rigid with indignation a moment later. “No, I haven’t been drinking!” She wiped the clammy sweat from her brow as she listened to the stern voice at the other end of the line. Finally she said flatly, “All right, Mum. Yes. Yes, I will. Yes. Bye.”
She hung up and stared at the phone for long moments before turning away from it, trying to shake the strange feeling that this was the last time she would ever speak to her mother.
She went upstairs to take a shower – as if the feeling was one she could wash away with hot water and soap. Steam filled the room as Chloe stripped off her clothes and stepped into the bath, the water from the showerhead pummelling her back and shoulders for a moment before she turned her face directly into the oncoming jets. She picked up the vanilla shower gel and slowly, methodically, began to wash herself from head to toe, the sweet, sugary smell mixing pleasantly with the hot steam. She breathed deeply and felt herself start to relax a little.
Chloe was almost finished in the shower when the bell rang. Her head jerked up and she froze, listening. It could have been the front door, of course, that was a definite possibility, but it was one that Chloe did not even consider. She was sure it was Giselle, ringing the bell in the fifth bedroom as she often did – as if she wanted to be found, as if she was calling out for help in the only way she could.
“I don’t know where you are,” Chloe whispered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to get to you.”
She listened out for it but the bell didn’t ring again so she squeezed some more shower gel into the palm of her hand and leaned down to finish washing her legs and feet. The vanilla gel glided over the smooth skin of her thigh, down her shin, towards her ankle. And then Chloe’s fingers made contact with the skin of her foot and it was not smooth and supple as she had expected but old and leathery and tough. She jerked her hand away with a cry, causing flakes of something crusty to lodge beneath her fingernails as she pulled back to stare down at her feet.
They were the feet of an old, old woman. An old woman whose feet had been permanently deformed through years of rigorous point dancing. The thick, yellow toenails were sorely in need of a cut; the skin between the toes was flaky and had split in places, exposing the raw, red flesh beneath. There were hard calluses on the outsides of both little toes, like barnacles clinging to a sunken ship, and she could feel swollen, pus-filled blisters threatening to burst beneath both her heels.
Chloe screamed and jerked away from those hideous feet that were hers and yet weren’t hers at all. She immediately slipped on the wet surface of the bath, feeling several blisters pop beneath her weight, smearing yellow pus and thin blood across the white ceramic. Her flailing hands gripped the shower curtain and she tore it down, rings and all, as she fell out on to the cold tiled floor in a pool of water. The impact jarred her horribly but she hardly felt the pain since she was struggling too desperately to sit up and examine every inch of her body, horrified at the prospect of finding that the rest of her had shrivelled up into wrinkles and calluses too.
But her body was still smooth and supple and young. Her body was hers – even her feet had gone back to normal – pretty and neat and dainty with pink-painted toenails and not a callus or a blister in sight. Chloe scrambled to her feet and wiped the steam from the mirror with the palm of her hand to reveal her own wild-looking face staring back at her. Her face and no one else’s.
Two days later – almost two months after moving into Arietta House – Chloe woke up in the middle of the night to find herself sitting outside in the garden. The cold was like a hundred icy knives stabbing into her flesh and the soles of her feet as she gazed down upon the still water of the filthy lake. Night-time mist slid past her skin like wet velvet, making her shudder, and she wrapped her arms around herself, stood up and turned back to the house. The single light shone from the middle upstairs window again. Chloe counted them and was sure this time that there were too many windows – almost as if another room had appeared inside the house while she’d been out. The non-existent fifth bedroom.
She started forwards so eagerly that she didn’t look where she was going, and instantly stubbed her toe upon something hard and cold. She’s assumed she’d been sitting on the stone bench as usual but when she looked down she saw the old wicker wheelchair right there before her, and for long moments she stared at it, wondering whether she could really have taken it down from the attic and brought it outside in her sleep without waking up. But then a shape passing across the lighted window upstairs drew her attention and she tore her gaze from the wheelchair. Giselle was there inside the house, Chloe knew it. She was there in the fifth bedroom, waiting for her.
Almost tripping over herself in her anxiety, Chloe abandoned the wheelchair by the lake and practically ran back into the house, throwing the front door open just as the bell rang, the red-and-white striped flag waving frantically in the dark little window for bedroom five. Chloe’s bare, frozen feet slapped loudly upon the wooden boards as she thumped up the stairs, and she saw the new door as soon as she reached the landing. She knew that it had not been there before, and she would have known it was the door she was looking for even if the music for
Chloe placed a trembling hand upon the cold brass knob, took a deep breath, and twisted it quickly before her nerve could fail her. The door swung open soundlessly upon well-oiled hinges as the melancholy oboe continued to drown itself in guilt-stricken grief.
The first thing she saw when the door opened was the rack of costumes. Luscious fabrics in pinks and whites and blues, muslin, and tulle, and velvet, and voile, trimmed with the finest lace and the smoothest silk. Fitted bodices and powder-puff skirts – exquisite costumes, all lovingly cherished and preserved. Soft leather and pink satin ballet slippers were lined up beneath the rack, tied up with slim ribbons. By the light of a single candle placed in the window, the sequins and beads of the costumes sparkled and shone.
The room smelled of perfume and powder, and Chloe saw the glass bottles neatly positioned upon the dressing table, along with a silver-backed mirror and hairbrush – long, thick black hairs caught up within the bristles. Above the crackle of fine music playing on a scratched record, Chloe said softly, “Giselle?”
Her heart hammered with anticipation. She was going to see her. At last, she was finally going to see Giselle and to talk to her. She stared around the room wildly, wondering whether Giselle would appear to her as she had been before her accident – a young, strong, graceful prima ballerina – or whether she would look as she had when she died – a feeble old woman confined to a hated wheelchair.
But Giselle was not in the room. No eyes – young or old – met Chloe’s as she gazed around. There was just an empty bed and an empty wheelchair by the window, pushed right up against the wall, fixed to which was a brass bell push. And that was when Chloe realized that there
The tip of one gnarled finger rested lightly upon the bell push. The liver-spotted hand rested on the arm of the wheelchair, one finger still laid upon the bell, as if someone was sitting there, but all Chloe could see was that veined old hand. The rest of the chair stood in a pool of darkness but it wasn’t so dim that Chloe couldn’t see that the chair was quite empty except for a hazy, smoky shadow that might almost have been human-shaped. If she
