The Lady, as she was called in the letter, was dressed in bed clothes from another time; what Rachael deduced to be from whenever the house was last lived in. A simple white night dress was worn underneath a much more elaborate dressing gown of satin, royal blue with embroidered lapels and cuffs. The cord was left untied and the gown hung loosely at her sides, swallowing her hands.
In the dim light of the bedroom and through Rachael’s milky eyes, her silhouette could have been something like a portrait, shrouded in dust and only recently discovered in an attic cupboard where it had laid hidden for centuries. Her poise seemed elegant and, Rachael thought, quite regal. Perhaps something about the styling of the Lady’s hair reminded her of the Queen, and everything about her as she stood seemed so deliberate, just as a royal would hold themselves in a painting.
For a moment they only looked on one another and, quite subtly, the mood in the room began to change, becoming baleful in the most disturbingly slow way. Rachael’s skin rippled with a shiver where she lay but she did not make any movements and could not think of anything clearly, only aware of the cold in the room and the stare from the Lady’s masked eyes, deepening with every passing moment.
Noise came between them, a quick tearing sound and a drawn scrape. Rachael realised what it was; a stunted footstep as one leg was lifted, hauled and dragged across the bedroom floor to be followed soon after by another step.
Rachael watched the woman as she walked towards her, from the doorway to the bed, in stunted steps. While she moved closer, Rachael’s eyes became more accustomed to the dark, though she would sooner have remained unseeing. The Lady became less of a silhouette, progressing through the shadows to take a more substantial form. With every ragged step forward her body swelled into a more recognisable shape and her features grew in definition.
The desiccated fingers of her right hand wrapped about the high metal foot of the bed, the knuckles whitening to a translucent veil of skin over jagged and brittle bone. The left hand landed on the duvet, its fingers spread wide apart. The fingernails were long and unkempt, all broken in uneven places, their edges like cut-throat razors and discoloured as though the blades had been left to rust outside in the open rain and wintry air.
Dismissing the blue line of dirt under the fingernails, Rachael noted the violet veins of the hand and the papery wafer of grey skin that blanketed and held them there. Extending from the skeletal hands were skinny wrists with giant bulges of bone protruding at the joints, only visible now that the billowing sleeves of the dressing gown had receded and left them so openly exposed.
The skin was dry and chapped, except for where sores had openly wept wan tears, tinged by leaking blood as a watercolour might merge and melt wetly into itself. There seemed no end to those wounds, so that the whole body must be coated in them, like a scaly and sodden pelt where there once was a woman’s soft skin.
Hands pressed harder into the bed as weight was placed on them, with the body being dragged further into the glum light. A head was peering out from the dark, bowed and bald. Now, where the hair had at first seemed perfectly placed, it was clearly ruined. A wrecked tangle of unkempt locks that were stunted and apparently burnt at the tips, with clumps of hair, skin and scalp missing, as though it had been forcibly torn from the head.
The face lifted to meet Rachael’s own. An expression of pain plastered across every deep set line, and the lifeless lips trembling as though trying to form words. Rachael stared at them, trying to understand, and watched their pale colour sinking slowly into the rest of the face. Rachael realised that she was moving further and further away from the Lady, but not by choice, and she tried to make sense of what was happening.
The Lady reached a quivering hand to her eyes as Rachael left her dream, the eyes were the only part of the body left undistorted and they held something indescribable in their rusty brown rings, deeper than anything that can be named. They gave a forcibly clear command in a way that can only be felt, never sounded or explained, though it was powerful as an instinct. An obvious forewarning was held in those dark eyes, telling Rachael to get out.
