The First Sign of Madness

by Madeleine Donahue

None of them had really wanted to go. They were London kids. Even Anna, the youngest of the five at ten years, had learned to feel at home among the bustle and traffic. Tom, the oldest, felt it the most, in his opinion. However, London during the Blitz was not a place their mother was prepared to leave her children without their parents. Their father was off in France, and she had just received a telegram from her sister in Bristol who had had an extremely premature baby and needed looking after, so she was sending them off to stay with her mother-in-law in the country. The woman was a bit off, but she was a kind old thing and Tom, the oldest, could take care of the family and Esther, the second oldest, could cook well enough. And so, she packed their luggage and sent them on the train.

“This is horrible! How could you do this to me, mum?!” Lizzy was only thirteen and thoroughly assured that every event in her life was earth shattering. Tom, however, had taken his new job as head of the family straight to his head, and immediately told Lizzy off.

Once their mother had seen the little family troop off at the station, Tom took charge of the expedition. As the head, he felt obligated to keep the others in check. The girls, for the most rest were all girls, felt obligated to inform him he was being an ass. When they got off in the rain, an old farmer met them in his extremely rustic farm cart. Maggie instantly fell in love with the old brown draft horse. She had always been nuts for animals. Maggie was third, between Esther and Lizzie, and fourteen years old now.

Through the whole of the ride from the station to the little country town, up the long tree-lined road, the farmer talked of nothing but his cattle stock. That is, until he let them off at the old house. After he handed down their luggage, half-glanced at them and remarked, “She may seem a nip off her rocker, but it doesn’t pay to. . . well, just don’t assume it’s all cow dung,” Maggie looked a bit disconcerted, but Tom said he reckoned it just meant to keep an eye on the old lady.

“Sure does like his cows, doesn’t he.” Esther rearranged her hair and then scooped up some of her bags and headed inside.

“Right. Well, come on, the lot of you. Get your bags and head inside to say hello. Come on.” Tom grabbed his luggage and shepherded the girls inside. Lizzy rolled her eyes and muttered.

“Yes, general.”

The children now could see for themselves that Grandma Eleanora was “a bit off.” She smiled, but it was a dreamy, distracted smile. She often seemed to be looking at something tat wasn’t there, and she murmured quietly to someone no one could see. As Tom made introductions and talked to her about plans for rooms and dinner, she replied to him but also glanced behind him and nodded or shook her head frequently, as if signaling to a person just behind Tom’s shoulder.

“Well, just head on up. You should find ribbons of different colors tied to the handles of your bags. On the second floor you will find matching ribbons tied to you individual doorknobs. Dinner should be ready around eight-ish, or some such time.”

“Shall we have our own rooms, or just our own doorknobs?”

“Hush up, Anna,” Esther hissed, pulling Anna back behind her by the straps on Anna’s dress.

“Well, I really couldn’t say, dear. They can play tricks sometimes. If I were you, I’d go and check.”

Without another word, Anna spun on her heel and scampered down out to the hall. As they carried their marked bags up the stairs, Esther turned to Tom. “Odd sort of maid, isn’t it? Tying colored ribbons to doors.”

Over the next few weeks, they discovered more of their grandmother’s eccentricities, as well as some oddities about the house. For one thing, none of the children ever saw anyone actually doing any work. They never saw anyone cleaning, or fixing up the house, or tending to the garden, and yet it all seemed to get done. There were no stable boys that anyone could find, and yet their grandmother’s small collection of horses was always well groomed and fed. When Esther asked Grandma Eleanora about her servants just after breakfast, the woman replied that they were all fairies. At first, the children thought that she meant that they were light on their feet, but soon it was discovered that she actually meant that they were fairies, like out of a children’s book or some old tale.

At this, Tom pasted a very superior and worldly expression onto his face. “Grandma, that’s ridiculous. Fairies are just stories for kids. I don’t believe in them. I’m all grown up. You don’t have to tell us stories.” As he said this, he leaned a bit closer and spoke a bit louder, looking her sternly in the eye, as if the more proximity he had to her the more she would be impressed by the fact that he was an adult now, and very mature.

Grandmother Eleanora looked at him for a moment, then said, “Well, I’m very sorry, young mad, that you felt the need to grown up so quickly. As I was saying, I don’t have the funds to hire people, so I hire fairies instead. They get the work done much faster, and at a better quality anyway, and they’re quite interesting. There on the wall is a picture I made of my head gardener, a gnome.” The children turned to see a watercolor of a short, round old man, almost engulfed by brown hair and beard, dressed in frilly green clothes with a rather wicked expression in his eye.

“Bit of an ugly thing, isn’t he?”

“Lizzie, that’s rude! You should apologize!”

“I wasn’t saying the painting was ugly, just the little man. Well, really, look at him!”

“Oh well, thank you, dear,” the old woman said through her grin. “But it’s not me you should be worrying about. Gnomes are quick to take offense, you know.”

“Really, I had no idea,” Lizzy said with a grin, “Well, I’m off. I’ll be back before lunch.”

“I suppose, she’ll find out soon enough,” Grandma Eleanora said to the gnome painting fondly. Then she shuffled off out the back door.

“Well, that doesn’t sound so good,” Esther said to no one in particular, unless it was to the gnome.

“It’s the first sign of madness, you know. Talking to yourself.” Maggie had been sitting on the stairs and was ginning cheekily down at her. “Don’t worry. You know grandma’s a little funny.”

Oddly enough, they were all woken up at 6:30 the next morning by a blood-curdling scream from Lizzie’s room. They all rushed in, Esther holding a candlestick, to find Lizzie lying in bed. Several clumps of her hair were tied to the bedposts, and odder still, there was a collection of moss and large pinkish-white mushrooms growing about her feet.

During the first part of that night, Tom had had a most peculiar dream. He dreamed that he was out in the woods behind the big old house, and he was on a treasure hunt, just like when he was a little boy. He went running around the woods, and when he got to the X, he dug up a huge wooden chest.

The next morning, after breakfast, Tome went on a bike ride around the trail in the woods. He was not on a treasure hunt, of course. He was much too old for that sort of nonsense. He was merely going for some good exercise. Eventually, he came across a person. It was his grandmother, sitting in a chair and surrounded by her many pets, forest animals, and a bunch of small people. No, of course not. He had though for a moment that he saw a group of small angular people with weeds in their hair and clothes, gathered around Eleanora’s shoulders and knees. But there were only her pets.

From the time of this incident, Tom began to see odd things. In the yard he saw a group of small round men pulling up weeds, but no, they were just bluejays picking at grubs. A collection of little men and women cleaning out the sink became one of Eleanora’s rabbits, for some reason nesting in the washbasin when Tom took a second look. It wasn’t until Tom specifically saw a cat walk through a wall that he stopped trying to figure out exactly what was going on in his grandmother’s house. The old fluffy gray cat had been sitting at the foot of his bed when it rose at the sound of the bell signaling its dinnertime. First he placed his pink nose at the wall, where it disappeared. The he continued, as if slipping through a hole that was a bit too small. He raised his back legs very high as they stepped through until only his tail was left. With a final tug, it too disappeared into the wall. At this point, Tom decided he would no longer worry about possibility or impossibility in this house, and no longer concern himself with the ways of being an adult. If this made him childish or mad, he didn’t much care.