The Midnight Estate
by Charity Wilkie
Another week went by in the mansion and Marie was still trying to convince herself that she wasn’t pregnant. She was no longer
feeling ill all of the time, but there was a definite thickening around her waist now—not quite a bump, more of an all-round
swelling. The thought of confirming pregnancy filled her with panic—she had no idea how to parent, let alone parent on her
own. And besides, a baby would be half her and half Rupert and how on earth would she ever come to love it?
Every now and again Silas mentioned a trip to the doctor and she told him “soon” and they went about their business. He was
working and she was doing most everything else, and some nights, Ernest came to stay.
He was a chatty, charming boy, with an imagination as expansive as his father’s, and he quickly bonded to his aunty Mae, so much so that he would throw his arms around her the minute he saw her.
Sometimes Ernest would ask Marie to read him his bedtime stories instead of Silas, even though she lacked Silas’s ability to do the good voices and to make even a dull story sound exciting.
He was forever asking her to play with him, and that meant climbing around on all fours when he was pretending to be a dog or building blanket forts in the ballroom when he wanted to play camping.
He even loved to spend time at her end of the upstairs floor—it seemed a treat for him to use her bathroom, to stop to look around in her bedroom, even to draw with his crayons in the office Silas had established for her.
One night, Marie took Ernest upstairs to clean his teeth in her bathroom. As he was scrubbing, she left him just for a minute,
to go into her own bedroom to find her night cream. When she returned, he was standing in front of the sink, staring guiltily
at the floor.
“What happened, Ernie?” she asked gently. He looked up at her, brown eyes swimming with tears.
“I’m sorry, Aunty Mae,” he said. “I’m bad.”
“What did you do, sweetheart?”
“I was playing and they fell. I’m sorry.”
“What fell?” she asked, bewildered, and then she looked to the sink—where her wedding ring was resting beside the open drain,
and her engagement ring was nowhere to be found. She’d taken them off some days earlier because her fingers were swollen and
besides—she didn’t have to wear them anymore.
She moved the wedding ring away from the drain, then peered down into the dark recesses below, but she couldn’t see the ring
there. Maybe it was already gone, flushed away when Ernest rinsed his teeth.
She knew the ring was worth a lot of money but she felt entirely numb at the thought that it was gone. Not quite excited to
be free of it, but disappointed only because she had hoped to sell it, maybe to try to give the funds to Silas even though
she knew he would refuse.
“It doesn’t matter, Ernie,” she said. He looked at her in surprise, as if he couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to get scolded
for what he’d done. “It was just an accident, sweetheart. Now let’s get you to bed.”
There was one flashpoint in her new life in the mansion and it was something she didn’t quite know how to talk to Silas about.
Marie could tolerate Silas’s messiness and his disorganization and even the way he could go for days at a time caught up in a story, disinterested in conversation.
The only problem was that the man could sleep through a hurricane, and even this wouldn’t have been a problem at all, except that Ernest would not sleep through a hurricane.
He wouldn’t sleep through a light breeze.
Several times a night he woke demanding attention—a drink of water, help visiting the toilet, or maybe he was too hot, or
too cold, or too hot and then too cold and then too hot again, which happened one particularly frustrating evening. Marie was walking around in something
of a sleep-deprived daze, and she was startled to find that if Ernest so much as whimpered in his sleep, her eyes would spring
open. And by the time she thought to close her door, Ernest had figured out that he got much better results calling for her
in the night than calling for his own father.
Besides, after everything Silas had done for her, how could she complain?
And so, on those nights, Marie was up as soon as Ernest cried out, and she’d get back to sleep only for him to cry out again,
and then she was out of bed with Ernest when he woke for good, often before the sunrise, sometimes as early as 4:00 a.m.
She resigned herself to the fact that those nights when Ernest slept over would be rough. When he came for a visit late in
her third week, she said good night to Silas and went to bed not long after the little boy did, hoping to get a few hours’
sleep before the chaos erupted. She drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep, but woke with a start some hours later.
Something was different.
Unlike other nights, Ernest was not calling for her by name, not following up his tearful “Aunty Mae!” with the details of
some new need, real or imagined. This time, Ernest had woken her with a blood-curdling scream that pierced through the darkness.
She sat up in fright, blood thundering through her body. Whatever the threat was, Ernest clearly believed it to be life or
death.
She told herself it was surely just a nightmare—even well-adjusted children had nightmares, didn’t they? And Ernest did have
such an impressive imagination. He could invent entire worlds as he played in the day; why would the nights be any different?
Marie dragged herself out of bed. Her whole body ached with fatigue, but she made her way towards the hallway. Just as she
reached her door, the grandfather clock struck midnight. The bells echoed out in waves all around and through the mansion.
Ernest’s scream had faded into heartbreaking, heart-wrenching sobs—he was crying for her and his mother and his father, and
Marie turned into the hallway, about to burst into a sprint, to run to console him.
It was a full moon that night. The windows above the front doors bathed the staircase and the hall at the top in a red-and-gold-and-green-painted
light and glinted off the thousands of crystals in the chandelier. Marie thought if she were not quite so weary she might
even admire the beauty of that light—but then she heard a sound out of place in a house she was already coming to think of
as home.
A low voice was coming from Ernest’s room. A threatening voice. She knew those rhythms and tones and even that accent all
too well.
“Be quiet. Be quiet or I’ll make you be quiet. I don’t want to hurt you, kid, but you have to shut up!”
But it was impossible. Marie told herself her mind had to be playing tricks on her—it simply couldn’t be that Rupert was there,
not here in the house of a stranger, not on the other side of the world. So many times in their marriage he had felt omniscient
to her, but the distance and peace of those last few weeks had convinced her—had reminded her—that he was not all-knowing and all-seeing after all.
But maybe she’d been right the first time.
Maybe Rupert was godlike in his control and his ability to harm her. What other explanation could there be for his presence
there that night? And hadn’t he warned her?
You’re mine. I will never, ever let you go.
Each inhalation and exhalation came in a desperate little pant and she was feeling lightheaded with the lack of oxygen and
the racing of her heart—and why were her hands and her feet tingling so? Why couldn’t she think clearly?
If he caught her, he would kill her. She had no doubt at all about that. Maybe he knew about the baby—if he was powerful enough
to figure out where she was hiding in a one-horse town on the other side of the planet, psychically sensing that she was carrying
his child was probably a piece of cake. Maybe he’d drag her home and keep her alive until the baby was born, maybe toy with
her for the last few miserable months of her life.
If he caught her, that would be the beginning of the end for her, one way or another.
If the moon had not been full that night, the hallway would have been dark enough to hide and perhaps then she could have
escaped down the stairs. She could have run to Silas’s car. She knew where he kept the keys, and that gave her one advantage
over Rupert, who surely had no clue.
But she couldn’t leave that child screaming in terror while his father snored across the hall. And besides, the moon was full that night. If she tried to run, Rupert would inevitably come out from Ernest’s room to see her flying down the stairs.
The only place she could go was further down the eastern wing, but if he was checking room to room, he’d be upon her within
minutes.
She took two careful steps towards the stairs, then pressed herself into the small shadow against the wall, tight against
the grandfather clock. The clock was large and bulky and she could hide herself there—but she’d be hidden for seconds, not
minutes. The instant he passed it he would see her.
Her mind was cloudy but her thoughts were racing. She tried to force herself to take deep breaths, to calm down for her baby’s
sake if nothing else, but her rib cage felt as locked as the rest of her body. She was a tiger, crouched and ready to strike
out of pure instinct in the absence of any higher cognitive function.
There was sound in the hallway now, light but steady footsteps. There was no time to second-guess herself, not even time to
be sure it really was Rupert, no time to be certain this was the right course of action. All she could do was to try to slow him down long enough to get past him, so she could run to Silas’s room, to rouse the heavily
sleeping gentle giant who had come into her life at just the right time and who now offered her, once again, her only chance
at survival.