Victoria

I’d always been proud of the view from the den. The large bay window overlooked the slope which ran from the house to the fence in a long, grassy sweep and from there the wooded hillside fell away to the village a mile farther down. The road wound its way to the village from the other side of the house and left the green view unmarred from the glass enclosed seat which dominated the room’s western wall. Victoria loved to sit there in the afternoon sun reading, which in my eyes made the sight all the more beautiful.

Today the magnificence of the scene was distorted by the liquid lines of rain trickling down the glass, and the green lawn was pale, disheveled seeming beneath the gray sky. The forest was dim and brown, fading into the dripping mist which completely obscured the village below. I sat on an island and stared into an endless, morose sea which could form no true horizon. I turned away from the window with a sigh.

The room offered no cheer. No fire burned beneath the mantle opposite the window, dust blurred the titles of the shelved volumes, and cobwebs softened the corners of the room. I could, I suppose, light a fire, dust, clean, but Victoria had done these things and without her I just didn’t care. The melancholy of the view and the degenerate condition of the room suited my mood. I didn’t feel the dampness and chill, I just felt the aching loss.

She was gone, you see, Victoria had left me. She didn’t even tell me where she was going, she simply packed and departed into the mist. She’d cried, quite a lot, in the days before she left. I’d asked what was wrong, begged her to tell me, but she seemed inured to my pleas, sinking deeply into her own sadness. I suppose that I could take comfort in her depression, feel some satisfaction that even as she ignored and left me there was enough care for me in her heart to make her hurt too. I tried to feel so vindicated as she walked out the door that last time, but I simply couldn’t. The sight of her pain and the loss of her presence were far worse than the diminished attraction of the window. 

So here I sat, alone and ignorant. I could not think of anything that had changed. Nothing that might have caused her to turn so solidly from me came to my mind and even the longing of my shattered heart could not imagine a way I might have maintained her regard. Those final days before she left had seemed interminable. The pain of her tears had torn at my soul and my inability to communicate with her, to help her salvage even a shred of happiness from the wreck of her emotions, left me desolate. I remembered no care for myself, recalled no savor of food nor drink. All such things had faded into the obscurity of my existence without her. My ineffectiveness weighed me down and now lay sculpted in dust around me. 

So, I wandered. I drifted through the silence of the house, little noting its neglect. Nothing mattered, nothing at all, and my wanderings seemed inevitably to draw me back to the window in the den. I just stood, looking through the distorted lens of my former pride until that view began to encompass my being and I sobbed with the rain.

Time ceased to have meaning. Dreary minutes became dreary hours which seamlessly became hopeless days. The room and the lawn below it became shabbier, dustier, all of it a neglected monument to my depression. I gazed from the window into the mist-shrouded countryside and moaned in pain. “Victoria! Please come home. I’m lost, so lost!” The dripping mist crowded closer and the echoing silence mocked me with her absence. My cries and screams fell muted into the dust, as ineffectual as my pleas against her departure.

People appeared, I don’t know when. A couple of young boys at first, pointing at me through the window with gape-mouthed insolence. I screamed at them to leave me in my agony and so they did, swiftly, but others came. They blurred into one another, all at once or each separately, it was impossible for me to say. Boys, girls, eventually men and women, they all came pointing and gasping, their expressions becoming stupid and fish-like in the dripping fog as they reveled in my discomfort.

I hated them. Their presence offended me, tarnishing my memories of Victoria and compounding my misery. I screamed and shouted, bidding them away, and they left, some running, but it wasn’t enough. My hatred grew and I wanted them dead, all of them. How dare they enjoy my loss? If I could not live with Victoria, why would I wish to live with them? I seemed to feel the pulsing of the blood in their veins and wished to see it on the grass, thinning in the falling rain, soaking into the earth beneath. I couldn’t do it. In the end, each visit returned to the overwhelming sadness which had come to define me. I screamed, I shouted, I threatened, but eventually I sobbed and cried, feeling nothing but my loss.

There was no time. I looked from the window into a fog which never lifted and ached with a longing from which there was no surcease.  I watched the stupid gawkers, hating them, despising their freedom from such misery. I cared for nothing, house or self, nothing but Victoria deserved care and she had left.  Victoria was gone and these fools came to emphasize it, to constantly remind me of what was lost.

I stood at the window, gazing at the now empty lawn, now tangled and overgrown. I was crying again. I could not seem to stop though the echoes seemed to laugh at me, mocking my pain. My weeping was disrupted by the crashing of the front door. Victoria! Had she returned? I rushed into the hall and turned to see the door broken and two men standing in the opening. I suppose that they noticed me then and perhaps I surprised them, because their idiotic mouths opened, and their eyelids spread wide.

All of my pain and longing erupted in my hatred of these interlopers. They dared, DARED! Break into my home and impose themselves on my grief. I rushed at them, blinded by my rage, and they fled, one making it through the door as I hurled myself at his companion. I carried my despite, anger, my aching loss, into his body, hoping to rend it apart by main strength.  Passion and hatred were my weapons.

I reached him and passed through. My rage was as useless as my tears and I watched him flee with his companion, leaving me standing with my broken door and my broken heart, screaming into the rain.

The following is an excerpt from the Florence Gazette:

Two men claim to have been attacked by an enraged spirit after breaking into an abandoned mansion. The house, built by timber baron Evan Williams for his young wife, Victoria, has long held a reputation as haunted. Locals claim to see a man, thought to be Williams, who died in a mill accident in 1884, looking from a west facing window on rainy days. The phenomenon has been witnessed by dozens of people and is often accompanied by sobs and screams…