The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

14

Nine-year-old Crispin on the afternoon of September 29, the feast of the archangels …

Two minikin cats on a tiny window seat in small-scale Theron Hall react as one, bolting away from the giant boy who peers in at them. They scamper through the modeled drawing room, into the hallway, gone.

He might have hurried window to window in search of them, but before he can do so, he remembers what happened on the night when Mirabell disappeared. The sight of the cats is a purgative, flushing from him all delusion, all spells and enchantments. Everything he has forgotten — or has been made to forget — returns to him in a flood of memories.

How he pretended to sleep when Nanny Sayo stood by his bed. How he sneaked into Mirabell’s room. The rose petals in the bathtub, the silver bowls, the missing toys, the empty closet. His sister’s plea blooming like a shellburst in his mind: Crispin, help me! His parents’ bedroom so ornate that its richness and lush textures suffocated him. Crispin, help me!

Now his legs grow weak. He drops to his knees beside the scale model of Theron Hall.

He recalls also hurrying through the mysteriously deserted house, the servants neither working nor in their rooms, no one to help him. The south stairs winding down to the locked basement door. The voices beyond. Chanting.

In memory, he turns to climb the stairs. Towering over him is Cook Merripen in a black silk robe. Holding a thermos from which he has unscrewed the lid. This might be the same thermos in which Nanny Sayo left chicken noodle soup for the boy when he was ill. The cook slams Crispin back against the locked door. The boy cries out, the thermos tips, and a torrent of something warm and vile gushes out of the insulated bottle and into his mouth. It tastes like chicken soup but rancid, the noodles slimy. Crispin chokes on it, tries to spew it back, but is forced to swallow. As his vision clouds and darkness spills through his mind, the last thing he sees is the hate-distorted face of Merripen as the cook says, “Piglet.”

Having collapsed entirely on the floor of the miniature room, further weakened by the very recognition of his weakness in recent days, shamed by his gullibility, torn by guilt over his failure to help his sister, he weeps for a while … until his weeping begins to sound pitiable. Soon it is worse than pitiable — like the wretched complaint of a wounded and helpless animal.

The whimpering boy he hears is a boy he doesn’t want to be, a boy who is not the truest Crispin that he is capable of being. Shamed anew but for different reasons, he gets to his hands and knees, and then to his feet, swaying but sure-footed.

He has known since waking this morning that this is September 29, the feast of the archangels, but with his new clarity of mind, he suddenly knows what the date portends.

“Harley,” he says, and when he speaks his brother’s name, his tears seem to dry in an instant.

At 3:37, the afternoon is waning, but there is still time. They are two now, two little bastards, piglets to some. If Crispin is worth anything, if he has the potential to be the boy he wants to be, then he will deny them their feast, disrupt their celebration, and leave Theron Hall with his brother unharmed.

At all costs, he must appear to be clueless, neither suspicious nor afraid. He hesitates in the miniature room until his legs are sturdy under him and his hands have stopped trembling.

Crispin descends to the second floor and proceeds directly to Harley’s room. He is dismayed but not surprised to find that his brother isn’t there.

The boy’s toys have not disappeared. His picture books are here. His clothes have not been removed from his closet. Time remains to rescue him.

In Harley’s bathroom, perhaps a triple score of candles flicker in glass vessels. In the opposing mirrors, legions of flames burn in ranks receding to infinity.

Two silver bowls have been left on the floor.

A film of water glistens in the bottom of the bathtub. No rose petals here. Instead, stuck to the enameled surface are a few kinds of sodden leaves, some of which might be basil, for that is what he smells.

On July 26, the celebration was held in the late hours of the evening, after nine-thirty. Most likely the same schedule will be followed this time. With perhaps six hours until that event, Harley is alive but being held somewhere.

From his brother’s room, Crispin dares to take the north stairs to the basement. At the bottom, the door is not locked. He opens it, steps into darkness, and switches on the hallway lights.

For a long moment, he stands listening to a silence deeper than any he has heard before, as though the basement is not part of the house but is, instead, part of a ship drifting in deep space, far beyond the light of any sun, in a vacuum through which no sound can reach it.

Fear creeps the chambers of his mind, but his duty to his lost sister and to his still-living brother is a leash by which he brings the fear to heel.

The corridor separates the front of the building from the back. Toward the front, the west, are two doors. The first opens to a hundred-foot-long swimming pool, and the second serves the heating-cooling plant.

Harley is in neither chamber.

On the east side of the hallway are two doors. Behind one is a storage room, and Harley is not there, either.

Judging by the dimensions of the storage room, the space behind the next — and final — door must be about eighty feet by thirty-five. This huge chamber is accessed not by a simple metal fire door like all the others, but by a cold slab of stainless steel hung on a continuous barrel hinge. It is locked now, as always.

When he raps one knuckle against the door, it sounds solid enough to stand against battalions with sledgehammers, an impossible challenge for a nine-year-old boy.

If Harley is in there, he is lost. Leaning his forehead against the steel, however, Crispin convinces himself that the boy is not yet in this mysterious room. He is certain that he would know if his brother was this close and restrained; he would surely feel some of Harley’s despair.

He turns out the lights and retreats to the ground floor.

By the time he reaches the library, he decides that he must call for help. But call who? Giles Gregorio might be the richest man on Earth, and Clarette says that he is friends with not just the chief of police and the mayor, but also with kings and presidents all over the world. Crispin is a mere boy, with no money of his own, with no friend but his brother.

Firemen. Firemen are brave. They risk their lives for people. Maybe a fireman would believe him.

In the library, after ascertaining that no one lurks among the maze of stacks, he snatches up the telephone handset to call the fire department. No dial tone. He repeatedly depresses the plungers, but the line remains dead.

He doesn’t need to go room to room, trying other phones. He knows they will all be useless to him.

Clarette, Giles, and members of the staff have cell phones. But Crispin would have to be invisible to slip among them and steal one.

Before coming to Theron Hall, they didn’t have computers. But they never use those here, Mr. Mordred has not taught them, and Crispin doesn’t know how to send an email.

From a library shelf, he snares a book, another boy’s-adventure novel. He doesn’t intend to read it, only to use it as a prop.

Pretending to be immersed in the story, he wanders the house, apparently reading as he walks, pausing here and there to sit, hoping that when he is seen, he will not appear to be engaged in a desperate search.

After an hour and a half, Crispin has ventured everywhere that he is able, without discovering any hint of Harley’s whereabouts. He has even dared to enter his parents’ suite to search it.

Other than the basement room behind the steel door, the only places inaccessible to him are the servants’ quarters on the ground floor and Jardena’s suite on the third. If he thought Jardena might be out shopping, he would risk entering her domain, but in light of the approaching celebration, the matriarch is almost certainly at home. Preparing.

He suspects that Harley isn’t in Jardena’s suite or locked in one of the servants’ rooms. His perception in recent days that Theron Hall is bigger than it appears to be, that it’s continuously growing larger, now serves as a basis for a new conviction that the house contains secret passageways and hidden rooms that he must somehow find if he is to rescue his brother.

At six o’clock, he is in the children’s dining room, as they expect him to be, pretending to read his novel at the table, when Arula enters with the serving cart.

“I don’t know where Harley is,” Crispin says. “Probably playing something somewhere. He’s always losing track of time.”

“Oh, I guess no one told you,” Arula says, as she sets his plate before him. “The poor thing had a toothache. Your mother has taken him to the dentist.”

“Do dentists work this late?”

“For a child of a man as important and admired as Mr. Gregorio, people are willing to make all kinds of exceptions.”

After Arula leaves, Crispin stares for a while at his food: two chili-cheese dogs and french fries. He will never eat another bite of anything prepared in Theron Hall.

Anticipating a visit from Nanny Sayo, Crispin conceals an entire chili hot dog and a torn-off piece of the other one, plus a handful of fries, in a drawer of the sideboard, between folded tablecloths. He returns to his seat and wipes his messy hand on his napkin.

Soon Nanny appears. She is already dressed for bed in black silk pajamas and a red silk robe.

He is holding the prop book in his right hand, pretending to have paused in his eating, riveted by the tale.

“Sweetie, you’ll get sick eating so fast.”

“I’m starved, and it’s really good,” he says, hoping that she isn’t suspicious.

She pulls out the chair next to his, turns it sideways, and sits facing him. “What’s the book about?”

Eyes riveted to the page, he says, “Pirates.”

“Exciting, huh?”

“Yeah. Sword fights and stuff.”

She lays her right hand on his right arm. “I love a good story. And you read so well for a boy your age. Maybe we could snuggle in bed together, under the covers, just the two of us, and you could read to me. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She has never been under the covers with him. He does not know if she means this, why she suggests it, what he should say.

He meets her eyes, which are large and black and pretty. Her stare is so sharp that he half believes she can cut through any lie he tells and see the truth he’s hiding.

Nevertheless, he says, “That would be cool. But maybe you could read to me. I’m kind of sleepy.”

“Are you, sweetie?” she asks. “So early?”

He stifles a phony yawn. “Yeah. I’m really bushed.”

“I’m sure you are,” Nanny Sayo says as she glances at his plate. She meets his eyes again, her right hand now tenderly massaging his arm. “Maybe you can read to me tomorrow night. Nanny’s tired, too.”

She’s lying. Crispin’s surprised at how obvious her lie is to him. He is not sleepwalking anymore. He’s alert. She isn’t tired at all. She’s excited and barely able to contain her excitement.

Over two months have passed since July 26, the night they took Mirabell down to the basement. They’re eager to have Harley. And they think they will have Crispin, too, in just five days, on the feast of Saint Francis.

Nanny Sayo scootches in her seat a little, perhaps not aware of what she’s doing, like a small girl eager to leave the table.

“Tomorrow night, I’ll read to you,” Crispin says. “I’ll read you to sleep.”

“That will be nice,” Nanny says. “Won’t that be nice?”

“Sure. Really nice.” And then, without knowing what he means by it yet aware that it is the right suggestion to make, he says, “Just the two of us, and we don’t have to tell anybody.”

Her stare seems to drill right through him and out the back of his head. At last she whispers, “That’s right, sweetie. We don’t have to tell anyone.”

“All right,” he says.

She leans forward, her face inches from his. “Give Nanny a good-night kiss.”

Although he has always before kissed her on the cheek, he knows intuitively what he must do to ensure her trust. He leans forward and clumsily kisses her full on the mouth.

“Sleep tight, little man,” she whispers.

“You too.”

After Nanny Sayo has been gone for a few minutes, Crispin dumps the rest of his dinner into the sideboard, between the folded linens.

In his room, one of the maids has turned down his bed earlier than usual.

With spare blankets, he tries to shape the body of a sleeping boy. He stuffs one of his pajama tops with a rolled towel to fill out an arm of it, and he arranges things so only the arm lies outside the covers, the hand apparently under his pillow. The head of this fake boy is beneath the covers, as well, but Crispin often burrows when he sleeps, and she will have seen him like this before.

He places the pirate novel on his nightstand and dials down the lamp to its dimmest setting.

In the dark closet, leaving the door ajar an inch, Crispin waits impatiently for forty minutes before Nanny Sayo returns. She goes to his bedside and gazes down on what she thinks is her little man.

Unlike the night of July 26, she does not pay a lengthy visit, tarries perhaps half a minute, not long enough to wonder that this sleeping boy is breathing too shallowly to be heard. When she leaves, she hurries in a silken rustle and closes the door less quietly than usual, convinced that his dinner has undone him.

After waiting a few minutes, he cautiously leaves his room. The second-floor hallway is deserted. The stillness that has settled on the house reminds him of the ominous hush on that terrible night in July.

The time is only 7:42. On that other night, the night of Saints Anne and Joachim, Theron Hall was not this quiet until nine-thirty. Maybe this feast will begin early.

Certain that Nanny Sayo’s eagerness is shared by all the rest of them, that something bad might happen to Harley sooner than anticipated, Crispin makes no effort to be stealthy. He races along the hallway to the central stairs, which servants and children are never supposed to use.

Between the second and the ground floors, two staircases sweep down the walls of a round foyer, forming a kind of harp when you look at them from below. He takes the nearest, descending two steps at a time, and dashes across the marble-floored entry to the front door.

He intends to run into the street, flag down vehicles, bring traffic to a stop, look for a police cruiser. He’ll tell them that terrorists have broken into Theron Hall and taken everyone hostage, his parents and brother and the entire staff. Terrorists with guns, and they’ve taken everyone to the basement. Crispin will make so much commotion that the police will have to send in a SWAT team like they always do on TV, and when that starts to happen, nobody will dare do anything to Harley. They won’t dare.

When he yanks open the front door, he discovers a uniformed policeman standing on the doorstep, not facing Crispin as if about to ring the bell, but facing the street as if guarding the house. He is a big man, and when he turns to the boy, he’s got a billy club in one hand. His face is broad and hard and, in the stoop light, red with anger.

“You should be in bed, piglet.”

Crispin lets go of the door, backs away as it swings shut. The policeman can be seen in silhouette through the beveled and lightly frosted glass in the top half of the door, but he does not attempt to come inside.

Crispin’s heart is knocking hard against his breastbone, as if it wants to break out of him.

He sprints through the house, into the deserted kitchen. This should be a busy place right now, because dinner is always served to Clarette and Giles promptly at eight o’clock. Nothing simmers on the stove, and the ovens are off.

A cop stands also on the back doorstep. In fact, it seems to be the same officer or his twin, facing the door this time, billy club in his right hand, rapping it menacingly into the open palm of his left.

“I have my assignment, piglet. You’ll find me at every door you open.”