The Mad Woman in The Walls
“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but
me, or ever will.”
-
The Yellow Wallpaper, page 652
Although
I know the old familiar halls of this house in daylight intimately, at night
they shift. It seems to me as though the poison in these walls seeps out across
the floorboards, moulders in the darkest corners, to pool in shadows of the dim
gas lamps. And, of course, I know better than to be trapped in the flickering
lamplight, yet I find myself pausing as I pass a common-place mirror. Like a
gullible child, I am locked in the tricks of the light, twisting the shadows on
my pale glowing face in the oppressive hall.
A modestly sized mirror contrastingly set into a
garishly ornate frame, twice the standard size and intricacy for such a mundane
object. I appraise my features, beginning with the tight seam of my mouth. I
press the fatty slivers together firmly, squeezing away the rosy blood, then
releasing, a flush returning into their fleshy confines. Continuing north I
observe my nose, jutting from my face in a manner I once thought handsome, but
now I cannot shake the likeness in my mind to that of a thick and gnarled tree
root. The two sprouting branches of which forming my eyebrows cast shade down
over my deep-set eyes.
The breath catches in my throat, the swell of my
Adam’s apple dips erratically in my reflection. The irises to my muddy retinas
swipe side to side as I note how they appear too far inset, too deeply
shadowed, and slowly my eyelids peel back little by little, past the point of
acceptable and into the realm of uncanny. These are not my eyes, but the eyes
of my dear Cousin.
I had watched as my uncles hauled her away, tendrils
of her dark hair flying about her wet face down from their carefully pinned
curls. The sound of her bare feet slapping against the flagstones of the
entrance hall ricocheted from every wall. Slick and oily fluids of birth still
dripped down her thighs and blood splotched across her nightgown, her womb
barely empty of her new babe. Still a young boy, I told myself I didn’t
understand and followed the parade of bodies up the stairs and across the
landing silently, some primitive instinct causing fat tears to streak my
cheeks. She made so much noise, but I can’t remember what she said, I’m not
sure I understood at the time either. Her father, my uncle, spoke soothingly to
her, his eyes weeping but his grip firm.
I remember backing away as I recognised the door which
we were headed towards, but my small, quivering, shoulders were braced by the
leaden hands of my father. He wanted me to watch, to see what we were made to
do. Dear Cousin had fallen silent by then, limp as a doll in the arms of her
father as she was coerced into the nursery. As the door swung to close, she
locked her eyes with mine, and a strangled whine escaped her gaping lips. I
never saw dear Cousin again.
My father had told me “The house is hungry. Son, I
know you’re frightened but this is a burden our family must bear.”
I
understood then, at that moment, the answer to questions I’d never thought to
ask. It starves every moment of every day. It waits patiently, and when a child
is born, it demands a sacrifice, else it take away that which has only just
drawn breath. Growing up I had been haunted by the vacant spaces where I
thought a mother should be. But I grew up in a family where mothers were few
and far between, and thus let the worry be.
Since that night I swore I would get out as soon as I
was old enough, and never return. But life is funny like that. Release a hound from
its cage and it runs far away towards its new-found freedom, but sooner or
later, the creature realises it doesn’t know how to live without the safety the
cage provided, it has the choice to comes back, or starve. We were starving.
A chime of a clock somewhere nestled deep within the
house takes me from the cold place where my mind was pawing. My eyes are my
eyes alone. I turn and stride away from the things in the mirror, the soothing
thuds of my footsteps hush my soiled mind.
Although
we have only spent one full season under this roof, the moment we stepped over
the threshold Caroline began to grow fat with our child. And every moment since
I have clawed through my mind for our escape. There is only one option I can
think of, and it robs me of what little sleep I still retain.
As we both ready for bed, I explain my plans in full
to my partner. She is patient, but I can read the unhappiness in the hunch of
her shoulders and the tightness of her eyes.
“Not for long, my dove. For not nearly as long as
you’d think, just until you are well, and our baby is safe. We’ll come back home,
and it will be as though not a second has passed.”
She is still, and she is silent.
“Yours and our child’s safety is the
most important thing to me, I want you to understand that. You do understand?
Caroline?”. She takes hold of my hand.
“We don’t have to leave.” She snaps, her porcelain
pale thumb burrowing into the palm of my hand from where it rests on top of the
covers. “The nursery is just a ghost story… What happened to your cousin was
barbaric, but by the hands of her father, and not any curse.”
The knuckles under her silken skin blossom white from
the subtle shaking strain of her hand, clawing into my own. I pry her fingers
out of my flesh with my free hand, red and weeping crescent wounds adorn the
back of my hand and a single deep gauge in my palm from her offending thumb.
Her voice changes from her regular sonorous chirps and
sighs, dissolving into a hollow, guttural moaning. “Sometimes I want to just
shake you, rattle you loose of all of those ghosts that you allow to fester, of
all the shadows and of all the cold and of all the rot behind your eyes.”
Bile bites at the back of my throat and I open
my mouth to speak, but before the words can fully form her free hand clasps my
upper arm. A whimper stretched long and thin escapes her parted lips.
I look at her now for the first time in a long time.
With eyes bright as new pennies and lips as bowed as a willow, she is ethereal
in the nearly-light. Her hair drips in flat locks down her shoulders,
disappearing beyond the cotton that covers them to flow down her back. The
swell of her engorged stomach drags acid up to scorch my insides. I swallow
back slippery panic.
Rasping, I clear my throat and rumble firmly.
“To sleep now, love. To sleep”.
It no longer comes as a surprise to me that I often
find myself in the final twilight hours of the day, scrutinising the wallpaper
of the nursery. Never do I recall the journey to the room, nor the compulsion
that drove me to do so. I simply feel as though I blinked a second too long,
lingered behind the enveloping darkness of my eyelids, and re-emerged into the
world. Always in the nursery.
Tonight, I quench the candle flame beside our bed, and
I settle. I stare unblinkingly for as long as I can stand into the inky sea
above me. Until the sea seems to shift and morph, in the way the night would
when I was a child. A parade of shapes dance to an unperceivable drum. A
menagerie of twilight creatures writhe to the surface, so close I could reach
out and grasp one, then swiftly they descend back to the nothing from which
they were born. A pattern begins to emerge, one which I can’t follow when I
focus on it but appears in the corners of my vision. It seems to me as a great,
messy string of fleshy things, of veins and sinews and other gore. The creature
pulsates and writhes in synchronisation with my pounding heartbeat, and a bead
of sweat worms its way into my wavering eyes, forcing me to blink.
Yet somehow, I am confused when they open, to perceive
the pale moonlight slicing through the barred windows to reveal the mouldering
nursery wallpaper. Glowing in the evening dim, the pattern appearing as the
mottled and puss-ridden skin of a leper.
And those eyes which aren’t mine pierce through the tattered
wall, a wide stretched mouth gapes within the nooks of the wallpaper. All at
once the walls surge towards me, and I am pinned, crushed beneath the plastered
ceiling and suffocated by countless arms of rotting wallpaper. The arms and
hands caress, claw, squeeze and tear at my body. With each touch a building
cacophony of sounds flood my ears. Frantically I claw at my head, the sensation
akin to wild birds cawing and clawing from within, as desperate as I for
freedom. My fingers are bloodied from clots of scraped up gore, the clear and un-wavering
screech of a baby’s cry ringing throughout every nerve in my body.
“Please!” I cry, I snatch and tear at the wallpaper
enveloping me. My vision is blinded by shades of yellow, red and black, my
fingers fly to my eyes and I dig my fingers in the wet and weeping sockets. In
the following seconds, minutes, hours, or days I wrestle with every muscle in
my being to escape my torture. It seems that every time my fingers find
purchase under a layer of wallpaper and tear it away it becomes less and less
clear to me where the wallpaper ends, and I begin. At some point, I begin to
register dull sparks, blossoms of throbbing cold in areas of my face, arms and
head.
Finally, I glimmer of light trickles into my vision, I
kick and crawl with the last of my strength towards hope, and finally, the
walls retreat. I manage to claw back from the walls as much of myself as I can
distinguish and collapse to my knees. There is a steady stream of hot liquid
streaming from my right eye, dribbling down my chin and dripping in heavy drops
onto the rough, splintered floorboards. In an instant, I feel as though I have
woken from a dream, a dream in which I was lost so irreversibly yet, as with
all dreams, I have awoken at last.
I am kneeling in the centre of the nursery; the air is
thick with dust and the repulsive stench of rot. The light shines stronger, and
I see it is a lantern held just beyond the entrance to the nursery. I am barely within myself, feeling as though I
float several feet above and adjacent to my crumpled form.
Caroline’s pale and pinched face appears before me,
the lantern casting a sickening yellow tinge to strangle her soft features. The
sockets of her eyes are deep and cast further into shadow by the light, an
unnatural shimmer reflects the steadily flickering lantern light. I want to
reach to her, to hold her and our unborn child close and tell them all is okay
now, for father is here. But in that moment, shaking with uncontrollable fear
and disgust, a trembling scream explodes from my wife, who now wears dear
Cousin’s face. The sound is unbearable,
it cuts through every nerve in my skull, the image of her face stabs my eyes
like pins pressed slow and hard into the retina, and all I want is for the pain
to stop. She is still making that terrible sound when a puddle forms around
feet, and her hands fly to clasp at her swollen stomach.
But I cannot bring myself to focus now, it appears as
though every thought in my mind has been split down the centre and divided
irreparably. A single phrase ricochets inside my mind.
“The house is hungry. And it must be fed.”
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