echo Cold.
All she felt was the cold.
It was hard for her to imagine that just a year ago, she had always anticipated the season of frost. She loved to curl up in front of the fireplace as Mama and Papa sang songs and read wintertime stories to her – stories of the frost fairies, the Snow Queen, and the snow pixies. She loved her parents’ warm embrace amidst the biting chill air of the season. She loved when snowflakes kissed her red cheeks, like Mama always did before bedtime, and she especially loved it when the snow in the garden piled up, so that Papa would build snowmen with her. In a cruel twist of fate, the spirits of winter took her Mama and Papa away. It was a freak accident, a tragedy beyond words. The carriage her parents were in turned over on the icy, slippery roads en route home. From that instance, poor little Yvette Browning understood what Death was at the tender age of six. To her, Death wasn’t the shadow of a hooded man with a scythe, the dark residue of greater evils beyond the grave looming over the tragic ones who will meet their impending eternal slumber like what the stories told. No, to little Yvette, Death was a force of nature, a cold gust of wind that reaps away the joy of the innocent.
In the weeks that followed her parents’ tragic demise, Yvette was immediately sent to live with her closest relative by law. She sat in the carriage and trembled with fear. The journey was silent and brought her great discomfort. In the silence, she remembered everything; she felt everything; she dreaded everything. She felt the chill of the wind trying to seep through the windows. She felt the snowflakes grow daggers as they tried to pierce through the roof of the carriage. The feeling of being dragged away from her parents’ gravestones at the cemetery haunted her. The feeling of being carried away from her old home haunted her just the same. Oh woe, is the poor little girl, ripped away from what remained of childhood joy. Yet at this young age, Yvette refused to cry – she knew it was a sign of weakness. From then on, she never shed a tear, and only felt the numbness of the cold. She was sent to a mansion far away from her old home, a place called Rosewood Manor. According to the man who dropped her off, this was the home of her aunt, the sister of her Mama. Little Yvette never had an inkling that such an aunt existed – her Mama and Papa never mentioned any grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The men who dropped her off at the entrance left without any care, they left as if Yvette was just a ghost to them. The young girl stood at the gate of a mansion engulfed by thick fog, her heart pulsating with unease. As she waited outside, she plucked the weeds that were growing at the edge of the large metal gates.
“What on earth are you doing, girl?” a voice croaked from behind her. “Dirtying your hands with weeds?”
Yvette stood up immediately, dropping the weeds and hiding her hands behind her back. A man clad in fine clothing who looked to be in his 60s squinted his eyes to look at her through the thick fog, trying to figure out who the little girl was.
“No Sir, just looking at the flowers,” she said in return.
“Pah! Do flowers grow in the winter?” the man asked, his voice coarse and harsh, like he had never had any water in days. His teeth were all crooked and yellow, and his breath smelt of ash. He thrusted his handheld lantern towards Yvette’s face, and observed her intently. He raised an eyebrow, as if beckoning an answer.
“N-no, Sir,” she replied, voice trembling.
“No need to lie, child,” said the man as he chuckled lightly. Yvette looked up and smiled awkwardly at him in return. “You must be little Miss Yvette Browning. We’ve been expecting you.”
Yvette gave him a meek smile in return.
“My name is Joseph Pembroke, the butler of this household,” he continued, his voice now warm and inviting as he drew his lantern. “My apologies, little Miss Browning, we may have to enter through the stables. If you’re wondering why, Lady Northolt requested for the gates to be closed at all times.”
“Why, Mister Joseph?” Yvette asked, following behind as she was led to the stables.
“You may have to ask the lady of Rosewood Manor yourself, little Miss Browning.”
In the weeks that followed, it was made clear to Yvette that Mrs. Felicity Northolt was impossible to talk to. Mrs. Northolt had an icy demeanour towards her niece, no incidents would make her falter, no accidents would worry her… except for those pertaining to the children of her own blood. To make things worse, the manor itself with its many rooms and halls overwhelmed the young girl, especially her newly assigned room. There was no doubt it was beautiful and spacious, but Yvette constantly felt a chilling presence in her room that she had never felt in her previous home. The antique closet that faced her bed scared her the most – it was painted in gorgeous ivory white with intricate floral carvings trailing the frames and borders of the closet, yet as innocuous as it looked, there was an eerie aura swarming around it that Yvette could not put her finger on, a cold air that permeated through the air and sent chills down her spine.
There was an instance where on her first night in her new room at Rosewood Manor, Yvette had a terrible nightmare in her slumber during the early hours of the morning. She dreamt about a monster shrouded in the mist of Death crawling out of her closet, creeping towards her. The creaks and thumps grew louder and louder as the monster approached her, scraping the floorboards with its dagger-like claws. Then it dawned on her that she was alone in her room, and the monster was definitely aiming to feast on her soul. She screamed so loudly that the housemaids immediately rushed into her room to comfort her, and her cousins tried to comfort her. Lady Northolt was the last person to check in on her, yet not a word left her breath, and no sympathy was spared. It was as if Yvette was nothing to her at all. In striking contrast, Mr. Northolt was a nice man with a gentle soul, and made her feel like she was their daughter. In the days following her nightmare, Mr. Northolt insisted on reading her bedtime stories to calm the poor girl down. He even tried to move the closet out of her room, but its weight made it impossible to move. As a solution, he chained up the closet to make sure that ‘the monster would never come out to scare little Yvette’. It was a pity, however, that he was rarely home, as he always wandered around the world and embarked on expeditions. Mrs. Northolt thought it was pathetic that a child was so scared by an allegedly haunted closet, and perceived Yvette as a skittish brat who was scared of everything, unlike her perfect cousins.
Mr. and Mrs. Northolt had three children together, all blonde with the prettiest emerald green eyes that Yvette had ever seen. The cousins got along extremely well, but to Yvette’s dismay, Mrs. Northolt seemed to dislike her so much that during playtime, she was never allowed to play with her cousins, and was instead ordered to play with Odile Pembroke, an amiable young girl her age. Despite being Mr. Joseph’s granddaughter, they looked nothing alike – there were rumours she was born out of wedlock and was taken in by him when she was a wee bairn. Odile and Yvette became inseparable after their first playdate together, so close that her cousins were convinced the friends were more like family than Yvette was with the Northolts.
As more winters passed, the girls slowly grew up into young ladies. They strolled around the garden that had a pantheon of exotic plants Mr. Northolt brought back from his various expeditions. They all looked barren and sullen during the wintertime, along with their shrivelled up, frost-clad leaves. Yvette was rather fond of the wilted flowers as they brought her a certain kind of comfort; she felt as if they were waiting for the right time to prosper and bloom, and were just sleeping until the right time arrived. She hoped that they had more sleep than her, and that no threatening evil force like her closet would hinder their rest. They walked past the large, rusted gates of Rosewood Manor that remained shut for over two decades.
“I wonder when they would open those gates,” said Odile, her eyes filled with wonder. “The Rosewood Manor looks too beautiful to be shut in forever.”
“Perhaps when Mrs. Northolt finally loses that unpleasant attitude of hers,” Yvette said with a faint sly smile on her face. “I jest.”
“How insolent of you, Miss Browning!” Odile exclaimed, rolling her eyes.
“I wonder why Mrs. Northolt insisted on keeping the gates shut, there must be a reason behind it, and I intend to find out,” said Yvette with some level of nonchalance as she ignored her companion’s jab of honesty.
“I wonder why you still insist on keeping that closet of yours chained up, and I intend to find out as well,” Odile replied as she gleamed with snarky glee. “I jest.”
“I told you countless times already, there is a monster in my closet,” Yvette sighed and dropped her head down, her face turning as pale as the thin layer of snow on the ground. “I’m certain of it, it appeared in my dream and has haunted me ever since.”
“Pah! Don’t be silly, it was a childhood dream. How can you be so sure of its mere existence if you have not seen it with your eyes?”
“Must I show you physical evidence that such a malevolent being resides in my closet?” Yvette replied, a little disappointed by her friend’s blatant dismissal of her lifelong fear.
“That won’t be necessary. We just have to open that closet of yours, then we can determine the credibility of your claim. It has been more than a decade by now…Oh, great Heavens! You can’t avoid it forever! Why are you still so scared of a closet that has done you no real harm?”
Yvette stared at her companion blankly, and could not hail an answer. By all means and circumstances, she should have been able to conjure up a sensible explanation to her obsession and fear of the closet. Why was she still afraid of it, indeed? She only started fearing monsters and evil spirits after the demise of her parents, and only believed in them solely due to her nightmare. Should a person be judged for her fear of the unknown? Is her fear so pathetic that even as an adult, she could not handle it still? A bombardment of mental questions had begun to swarm around Yvette’s head that challenged her fears and doubts of the malicious monster in her closet.
“My grandfather told me a few nights ago he knew the reason why she kept the gates closed,” said Odile in an effort to break the silence. “When Lady Northolt was still a young child, she and her sister – your mother – made a promise to protect each other from the cruel world outside their home. She was bitter when your mother broke their promise and married a random man she met on the street. In her rather immature stubbornness, she ordered to never let the gates open to ward away greater evils, and to send a message to your mother that she was not welcomed home.”
“My Mama is never coming home,” Yvette murmured. Her aunt was more similar to her than she had anticipated. “I suppose that brings a close as to why she always avoids talking about my parents…”
Yvette gave it more thought. If her aunt just accepted the fact that her mother was never coming back, and forgave her for leaving their home in their youth, the gates would be open, and she might treat Yvette better. Yet this never happened because her aunt refused to accept her mother’s permanent absence from her life. Then again, had she ever truly accepted her parents’ death? She knew that they were never returning to her, yet she could not let go of the fact that her parents were gone. She always ruminated about another life where she was able to be in her parents’ arms together, a world less cruel than the one she was in. She dreaded her life in Rosewood Manor, her current life without her parents. She wanted a better world, a world where monsters and evil spirits did not exist. She never accepted the existence of Death, the shadow that claims the happiness of victims. Perhaps she had avoided the matter at hand for far too long.
A wave of energy suddenly rushed towards her, like the spirits of the wilted flowers giving her the motivation to go – to rush to her bedroom and to face that dreaded closet in her room. Odile followed behind her and kept calling for her, but she could not stop. It was as if a force took over her, a sense of bravery she never had, possessing her to unchain that closet, and she abided by that force. She gripped the knobs of the closet doors tightly. In her moment of brief hesitation, she heard the voice of her mother, gentle and warm, encouraging her to open it.
“O’ Death, I fear you not now,” Yvette declared, her voice mellow and firm. She knew she sounded pathetic and odd to Odile, but she could not care less. Then she opened them.
Nothing. She saw nothing.
“What was I even afraid of?” Yvette questioned herself as she traced over her mother’s name that was etched inside. There was no monster after all, there were no evil spirits that were out to get her. For the first time in her life, she allowed herself to cry, to grieve. She finally decided to let go of her fear and grudge of Death. Odile rushed over to her and hugged her tightly, comforting her. A wave of warmth washed over her – it was as if the closet was comforting her too. She had nothing to be afraid of. Embracing Life had lifted the dread of Death off her shoulder.
Perhaps one day, Mrs. Northolt will also be able to confront her past and let go of her grudge. Perhaps one day, the gates will open, and warmth will flood into Rosewood Manor just the same.
Written by: Julia
