Madame Mercury

Evidence ID# - EJ234-00012

The Journal of Sam Glass

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May 28, 2006

Dear Journal,

I think it’s weird that I am writing to you as if you are an actual person. That is what I’ve always seen in the movies. People always address their journals and diaries as if they can respond back. I don’t know. It’s weird to address an inanimate object. I’m gonna give it a shot anyhow.

I was told to do this, I’m obviously a beginner. My shrink told me that it might help me to think through things more clearly. I can’t believe that I’m even seeing a shrink. I don’t feel like I’m going crazy, but I must be going crazy because of what happened. Cheryl, the cook, she told me about my new shrink. Cheryl apparently goes to see her once a month, and has been for several years now. I respect Cheryl, she is always there to listen when Madame is being particularly difficult. Maybe that is how she got to be such a good listener. She is passing along the shrink’s wisdom.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning, well before the business with the cat happened. I came to work for Madame the same as everyone. I was recommended to it by one of the people already on the staff. One of the older butlers knew my parents and brought me on when a spot opened up. When you start to work there, you are put in front of a bunch of lawyers and told in not so uncertain terms that if you talked about what happened at the house to anyone that didn’t work at the house that you would be sued and summarily fired. I even saw it happen once. A gardener was complaining at the local bar about Madame, and he was canned immediately and sued for “breach of contract.” The sap left town soon after and we haven’t heard from him since.

Before I was hired, I was having a hard time finding a job, and the salary was remarkably good. It included benefits, paid time off, the works. It was a pretty good gig in a smallish town. As with a lot of jobs when you start doing it, you don’t realize how much time passes; and before I knew it, I had been there for six years. I’m one of the butlers.

Wait, let me back up a little bit. Let me tell you about the House. We all call it the House, but its official title is Mercury Manor. It is on the public registry of historic places. It is an old Victorian-style mansion. The stone for the building was brought over from England, so the whole place had an old-world feel to it. It must have cost a fortune even then. The stone was grey, and the architecture was gothic looking. I never got an exact date on when the house was built, but just standing near it, you could get a sense of the age. This was an old place. The rest of the grounds matched the facade of the building. There were perfectly manicured lawns on the north and west sides of the main structure. To the south was a pond, and to the east were the ancient woods. These were the oldest trees in the area, having been protected from the lumber yards by the owners. There were even a pair of swans that glided on the lake. If you were to see the place, you would be forgiven if you thought you were in 1870’s England.

The inside was a different story altogether. When I first pulled up, I thought I would see suits of armor and old tapestries on the walls of the old place. But upon entering the front door, I was astounded to find that everything, every room was decorated in the most Easter-ish pastel colors. The carpet, the wallpaper, the paintings on the walls, the furniture, everything was pink and robin’s egg blue, and teal, and violet. Done correctly, I could imagine the living spaces of a home being nice in those colors. But the way that Madame had decorated the place, well… let’s just say that Madame is known to take things to the extremes. The total effect was just terrible. God, if anyone were to ever get their hands on this journal, I’d be in such huge trouble.

Now, Madame. We all call her Madame. She has never once allowed a staff member to use her name when addressing her. Her name if you are interested is Helena Charlotte Irina Alexandrova Desmoda Mercury, neé Brux. It’s definitely one of those obnoxiously long names that only historically monied families give their children. Not that I could ever imagine Madame as a child.

So my job as butler had me do basically anything that the Madame asked of me. I would dust the parlor, run to the grocery store, help her use the computer, assist her getting down the stairs, and most bizarrely, I would hand deliver her correspondence. That is what she called it, her “correspondence.” Every Tuesday, she would call me into her office, a mauve nightmare, and have me wait as she addressed invitations to tea that weekend. She wrote them all out by hand, every week, making sure to spritz them with a flowery perfume that perfectly matched the House’s decor. I would then put on my finest livery and would have the driver take me in the beautiful old Rolls Royce to each of the other old mansions in the area with Madame’s invitations. I got to know the staff at those other houses on my weekly excursions, but I knew I never had to wait for a response from the owners. It was always a no, and there was no return “correspondence.”

Yet every Saturday, Madame would dress for company, have the staff ensure that the House was spotless, and set the solarium for afternoon tea. Madame would sit there, in the sea-foam green room, surrounded by her poufs and cucumber sandwiches, petting her cat and waiting for guests that would never come. I would have been sad to stand there and watch this weekly display, if they weren’t followed up by Madame yelling at us in her creaky, high-pitched voice. Saturdays were the worst day to work, and the head butler made sure to rotate the staff to ensure that none of us had to deal with this side of her too often.

All in all, working for Madame was a job. A unique job for sure, that requires you to get used to all sorts of abuse and stress, but a job. I liked the rest of the staff, and the hours weren’t terrible. But I’m not sure if this job is worth me losing my sanity over.

So I mentioned the cat earlier. Madame makes sure that the creature is in the solarium with her every Saturday. It is an aged Persian that the staff takes care of more than Madame does. Somehow that cat, named Baba, knows who its master is and will only “listen” when Madame calls. Anyway, the other day, God this is so weird to recollect. The other day, I was called into Madame’s office. I had already delivered the invitations the day before, so I was confused why Madame would call me into that room. It was very late in the day, the sun was setting making the purple furniture in the room even uglier. Madame said to me, behind her great oak desk that was painted a pale violet, “Poor little Baba died today, Sam.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that, Madame.” I replied back to her.

“Yes, it is a shame. I’m going to need you to take him and bury him. I’d like you to do it near the old well. And I’d like you to leave a marker. How about you use this stone?” She said.

“Of course Madame, I’ll take care of it, is there anything else you might need.”

“No, Sam. That will be all.” she said, gesturing me away with a wave of her hand.

So I picked up the body of the cat and the stone that Madame had pointed to and went out by the old well. I had also brought a shovel and dug a small hole, put the cat inside, and buried it. I put the stone on top and that was that. I had the next few days off, and I didn’t see any of the other staff until I came to work on Saturday. I didn’t mention the cat and neither did anyone else.

When I walked into the solarium that afternoon to attend Madame’s afternoon tea, she was holding a cat. I asked her, “Madame, what’s your new cat’s name?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Sam, what do you mean? New cat? This is Baba.”

“Baba? But Baba died.”

“No, Baba is right here, sitting in my lap.”

The cat’s blue eyes were locked onto mine. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Madame was looking at me with the same expression as the cat’s. Her face was one of contented amusement. I was dumbstruck. That was the same cat. The same one that I had buried. Madame started to laugh at me, the cat’s tail was flicking back and forth like it was joining in on the fun. I backed up and bumped into a hutch near the door. Madame’s laughter was increasing in volume. It was a horrible, cackling noise. I turned and opened the door and ran out of the room. The laughter followed me. Still follows me.

The rest of the staff didn’t believe me, they looked at me with concern when I told them what had happened. They told me that the cat hadn’t died, they had all seen the cat around the last couple of days. But I had held the dead cat, felt the stiffness of its rigored body. I didn’t understand what was happening. That was when Cheryl recommended the shrink. I’m tired now, I’ll be writing in this journal again soon. I feel better though, being able to see the words written on the page. I buried that cat, I swear to God that I did.

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June 2, 2006

Dear Journal,

Something is very wrong at the House. The cat went missing. The head butler had the whole staff looking for it. We looked in all of the rooms, even the ones that had been shut for years and went unused. I checked the attic and the third floor bedrooms, but all that I found was layers of undisturbed dust. I was relieved. The cat seemed to follow me when I was at work. Of course I couldn’t talk to anyone about that. I didn’t want them to think I was losing it anymore than they already were. I thought if the cat had run away then perhaps I would get some peace, that I wasn’t going completely nuts.

Madame called me to her office again. This was the first time she had spoken to me since I left the solarium last Saturday, listening to her laughter. “Sam,” she said, “did you hear about poor little Baba?”

“Yes, Madame.” I said, with a quiver in my voice. I was afraid.

“I have an idea about where Baba might be.” She said.

“Where would that be Madame?” I replied, my anxiety rising.

“Baba loved to go play around that old well, could you please go check it to see if the little baby is there?”

“The old well, Madame?”

“Yes, Sam, the old well. Have you been there before? I could draw you a map if you need one. It is over by the edge of the property.”

“I know where it is Madame.” I said. I didn’t dare mention the time I buried that same cat there and marked the spot with the stone.

“Good,” she said, “let me know what you find there.”

I felt as if I were a pawn in a game. Like I was just being toyed with, the butt of a cruel joke. I asked one of the other butlers to come with me this time. We went out toward the old well. It wasn’t very tall, the rock barrier about two feet in height. But it was wide, and it was deep. The aperture was dark and ominous in the afternoon light. The only sound that we could hear as we walked the last few feet to the well was the wind blowing and the buzz of insects. The two of us were quiet as we approached the well, nothing to focus on but the fissure in the earth. As we got closer it became painfully, fearfully apparent that there was something on the other side of the well.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the old lady was right. The cat was there, but it sure wasn’t playing. That cat was dead. Again. This time though, it didn’t look like it was going to be making a surprise return. When I saw the state that the cat was in, I vomited. I found the edge of the well and let loose. The cool and the dark rising from its depths seemed infinite. I felt like I was on an edge, and it wasn’t because I was looking into the well. I had no idea what was happening, I felt again like I was going crazy. I looked to the other butler for confirmation of what I was looking at and I said, “You see this, right?”

He looked queasy. “Yea,” he said, “that is the cat right?”

The cat was flayed. I think that is the right word. The cat’s skin was pulled back from its muscles. I was reminded of the time in high school when we had to dissect a frog, but this was infinitely more horrible. There was blood everywhere, the cat’s face contorted into a terrible grimace. The cat’s intestines were piled on top of a stone, the same stone I was told to use as a grave marker. I puked into the well again. I’m still having trouble processing what I was seeing. The other butler saw my state and told me to go back to the house. He said he would take care of the cat, but he wanted me to tell Madame.

Had I been with it mentally, I would have traded jobs with the other butler. I was dazed though, so I walked back to the house and went back to Madame’s aubergine office. I told her, trepidatiously, that her cat was dead. She seemed overwhelmed, her body shaking with grief. But when she looked up at me, I swear that I could see that her eyes were dry. She wanted me to see this. She wanted me to look and see what happened to the cat. How else could she have known where the cat was, exactly where to look. She wanted me to know. To know that somehow, it was her. She who never left her suite of rooms in the House. She who lived in her pastel cocoon. A chill went down my spine, I excused myself so I could leave the room. Her eyes didn’t leave me though. Even through the moans and sobs, she had her eyes on me. I was reminded of the well: Deep and cold.

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June 5, 2006

Dear Journal,

I think it has happened. I think I’ve finally lost it. All of the business with the cat brought me to the edge, and now the stuff in the cellar ... I think I’m completely crazy. I asked everyone, even called up the people who weren’t working today and asked them about the third door, and no one had any idea what I was talking about. “The third door,” I kept saying to them, “the third door!” I was met only with confused silence and a bit of fear.

Madame called me to her office again today, and this time she asked me to organize the cellar. As far as I knew, no one had ever been asked to organize the cellar. It was notoriously cluttered, and only the older staff had any idea where anything was down there. I typically avoided the place, as I was not the biggest fan of the dark, and it gave me the creeps. There were two entrances to the cellar. One was the double-doored ramp on the outside of the house for loading deliveries. The other was through a spiral staircase just off of the kitchen. Above that door was a large Roman numeral for one, an I.

I asked some of the other staff if they would help me or mercifully do the task in my place. They all demurred, so I was stuck doing the deed alone. I took one of the heavy flashlights from a hook near the cellar door and descended the spiral staircase slowly. The first thing you notice about the cellar when you enter it is that it is wider than the house that sits above it. Meaning, the cellar was positively huge.

The first thing that I did was to make sure that there were no broken bottles or spills near the wine racks. There were rows upon rows of racks full of old and expensive wine. The bottles were laid up hopefully in expectation of the dinner parties that would never come. Luckily, there wasn’t anything to organize near the wine stacks so I could quickly move on to another part of the cellar. A little past the wine racks were the shelves full of canned goods and bagged dry goods for the cooks to use. They kept this part of the cellar clean and well organized as well. My job at this point seemed to be much easier than I thought it was going to be. I figured that I would go ahead and take a look around to see what specifically needed to be organized. I started moving deeper and deeper into the cellar. There seemed to be enough furniture down here to decorate the house a dozen times over. There were old oak bed frames, hutches, china cabinets, boxes of keepsakes, gallons of paint. This stuff was more haphazardly placed and would need rearranging. The deeper and deeper I got, the more I realized I was looking at older and older stuff. I felt like a geologist looking at a cliff side, each layer more primordial than the one above it.

That was when I came across the second door. It was shaped exactly like the entrance to the cellar, a stone lined arch with a door recessed into it. Scratched into the stone above the door, was II. I didn’t know that this door was here, and when I pushed against it, it gave way with a shriek of old metal. Behind it was another spiral staircase. I went down these stairs as well. The steps were well worn, like they had seen a lot of use, but I wouldn’t know who would have been coming down here. Surely the staff rarely, if ever, came this far down.

The lower level of the cellar was similar to the first. More furniture, more stuff. Yet everything down here was even more ancient. I saw a leather bound book on top of a decrepit and rotting barrel. I flipped open the cover and saw it was dated 1756. “Surely,” I thought to myself, “the House isn’t over two hundred years old.” I continued to explore among the ruins, as this is what they felt like, when my flashlight started to flicker. I knew that if it were to fail while I was on the lower level of the cellar that no one would be able to hear me, so I rushed for the staircase. But I barely made it twenty feet when the flashlight died.

The dark was all consuming. It was claustrophobic and terrifying. I screamed uselessly for help and bumped into things on all sides as I thrashed around in the dark. I’d never been so scared. Until I saw something. I saw a light in the dark, smaller than a pinprick against the oppressive blackness. I felt my way to it, stumbling on unseen obstacles, holding the dead flashlight like a weapon. The light seemed like hope, like salvation, but the closer I got to it, the colder I became. A small part of me was trying to pull back, to retreat from the light, to find some other way. I had to know, had to know what was shining there in the black. I was a moth, held in deadly rapture to a candle’s flame.

The light wasn’t a light at all, but rather a keyhole. It was a keyhole. A keyhole in a door with a light behind it. The light coming through it was sickly and pale pink. Like the color of Madame’s bedroom. I got close and knelt down so that I could see what was causing the light, maybe an escape, I hoped.

But alas, all that was behind the door was another staircase. I tried the brass knob to open the door, but it was locked. I pushed harder and harder to no avail. I wasn’t getting through it. I sat back against the door. So cold now and wondering what to do. I tried the flashlight again, and by some miracle, I was able to get it to produce a modicum of light. I leapt up, looked quickly at the door behind me and saw, etched into the stone as the other doors, III.

I didn’t stick around to explore the other stuff but just ran as quickly as I could back the way I had come to the second staircase and back up to the main floor of the House. Like I said, I questioned everyone, “What is the third door? What is behind the third door!?” But everyone said there are only two doors in the cellar. I must be crazy, I must have hallucinated. I must have imagined the whole thing, even the book that said 1756. But they seemed so real. They were so real.

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June 6, 2006

Dear Journal,

I can’t stand this anymore. I have to know. I have to know what is behind the third door. It’s a little after midnight, and I’m going back to the house and going into the cellar. I’m going to find out what is behind the third door, what is causing all of this crazy stuff that keeps happening to me. I’m going to confront Madame about it, too. Old Madame Mercury. I have to know what is happening to me. I’m not crazy.

I swear. I’m not crazy.

I swear. I’m not crazy.

I’m not.

Crazy.