That broken window always let the chill in and all the warmth out. Like a great gaping void leading into the darkness with its shattered teeth around the perimeter it had always stood. All the rest of the Noctifer house stood an epitome of renovation and restoration but for this one window up in the attic where the wind blew in the most cold. Whenever Ms. Noctifer was asked why she would not have it fixed, she replied ‘because I cannot.’
…
The attic had once been a playroom in its former days; what romping it did see! The curtains covering the sole window in those days would help shut out the cold as sunlight beamed against them like a veil in the mist that laced across the floor in changing patterns. In the corner, there near the window, lay the crib where younger Noctifers would remain, watching their kin play till they themselves could control their own pink, fleshy legs. In the other corner sat a cabinet too high for little hands that still tried to uncover its adult secrets. These children would be well disappointed, for all that laid within were spare towels and clothing too out-of-date to use yet too dear to sell. The walls were dotted with the occasional captured landscape portrait but the floor was spread free (with a few dust bunnies here and there). It was open and wide like the planes of Wyoming—or so it must have seemed to the newly America-ed settlers—upon which the children could shoot Indians and ride horses. They would roll across that floor and scream and cry till the adults had no choice but to come up and do some of their own. But oh, the imaginations of children! What games they created; what places they discovered! Such things leave an impression on a room. But just as the children, the room grew old. With age, tokens of childhood become sad and faded because back then they seemed so much brighter, bigger, grander. But one can never go back.
In those days, it always smelt of rosemary. Now all that was left was a gloomy resin of mold and a waft of bergamot.
…
The Noctifers had been a grand family, full in numbers and merit. Many had gone on to become very rich and famous in their chosen fields, contributing to institutions the public itself could identify. But time passed and one by one they had been lost to history books, forever cursed to be pried apart by teachers and ignored by students. There was only Ms. Noctifer now, the last of a dying breed, and she knew it well.
On the very verge of growing old, she was an elegant woman, wrapped in a pallid complexion and dark eyes, the soulless windows of an ancient family’s ghosts. She was neither a social woman nor a selfish one. She gave when needed and heeded otherwise, and no one seemed to mind. Her grace and her beauty only made them sigh and wonder ‘what a poor girl.’
It's doubtless she even heard them. She lived alone in that old house, like a conquered queen on her pedestal and without a soul looking out over her lost lands.
…
Normally the attic remained closed off from all but that inevitable temporal visitor, except for this day. This day of all days the ghost of the Noctifer house swept across the marble mantles and empty velvet chairs, shifting dust a quarter-of-a-century-settled on the mirrors, so that a faint glimmer showed from their darkened surfaces and awoke the souls in Ms. Noctifer’s eyes.
She wore a pale, blue dress, teased back with a white bow. There was a ribbon in her hair and on her left breast a golden pin in the figure of a butterfly that caught the light of the morning sun as though to take flight, yet held back by the wheel of the rust diseasing her fragile wings.
As the day reached twelve and one quarter, she ascended the double flight of stairs to the attic. The dying age of a family, once whole, could be counted in the dried drippings of twelve beeswax candlesticks that lined the stairway beyond any comfort of light. But Ms. Noctifer noticed none of this. She had lived so many years here and with no one else to fill her company, that she had taken notice of everything then forgot it. None of it was liable to change anytime soon.
At the top of the stairs, there was a door no larger than the height of a child with a tiny brass knob well below her hip. Ms. Noctifer paused and ran her fingers over its carpentry. Engraved were ancient words, perhaps symbols of some forgotten cryptic infantile secret, long lost now from years of visits such as this. She sighed as she opened the door, groaning only slightly like a guard awakened from a rather uneventful vigil. The light split upon her as her eyes showed the stirring of the ancients. It was May 12.
She took a step into the room and pondered: thirty-nine years since the day. The broken window sucked in the sunlight, letting stray bits cast odd reflections off its sharp teeth. It stared at her and she at it, till a patch on the borderlands of her poor heart shook, and she stepped away into the shadows of the room.
Jhonny and all of them had played there, every Noctifer at some point in their life had. One day, Jhonny, Sarah, Jill, and Hans romped here, while baby Cathrien rattled the bars of her crib in the corner, mixing the shrieks of glee with peals of jealousy. The adults were down below, readying meals and trying to ignore their maternal or paternal privileges with chatter of politics and their various achievements in the world. All the family came together, a rare occasion only seen once or twice a year for a holiday.
Ms. Noctifer stirred with a gasp from her aged thoughts and closed her eyes. The chill from the window made her shiver. She approached the old cabinet, she now taller than its summit, and opened the tallest drawer. There was little to be seen but a pair of dull red trunks and moth-eaten lederhosen. Ms. Noctifer lifted them as though they were sewn from the silk of spider's webs. She moved the lederhosen over and retrieved the tiny frame it hid. Taking it slowly to the light, she touched the artifact gently, gliding her fingers around its form. It was a picture of a voluptuous Raphaelite and her cherub daughter, both faces shining with some unknown pleasures beyond the frame of the viewer. They had found it one day—that same day—in one of the dark corners of the kitchen and brought it up there. Sarah was the one who said they should all sign their names on the back, like a vain attempt to compare to the Neanderthals who carved their pictures on stone walls as a form of immortality. Ms. Noctifer turned the picture over and there encarved on the thin and rotting wood frame were six names:
Jhon Noctifer
Hans Noctifer
Rose Noctifer
Jilian Noctifer
Sarah Noctifer
Cathrien Noctifer
Jill had written Cathrien’s name since she was still too young to write. In a second column were scribbled their deaths, written in a much older hand, except the date beside Jhon.
Ms. Noctifer put the frame away and held her chest as she strayed to the other side of the room, where a crib once sat. Now all that remained was the imprint where less dust had fallen, barely visible in the intense shadows. Ms. Noctifer could almost feel its bars and splintering wood. She mimed its existence in the stale air. Suddenly, a mark of white on the ground caught her eyes where, had the crib still remained, the white objects would have been cast forever in darkness and misplacement. She bent and drew them forth from the dusty floor and held them close to her face till she could make out their scribblings:
1 Admission for The Witche's House of Salem
They were two tickets, old and wrinkled (with even the hint of brown along its edges). Their time had long faded and there was doubt that the ‘Witche's House’ still existed even then, but Cathrien, in her infantile wails, still wanted them. Jhonny said he had found them so they were his, as he reached his hand with the tickets over her crib in a show of dominance. Cathrien snatched them from his palm and Jhonny slapped her till she let go of the slips of paper. Sarah yelled at him and he yelled back till everyone agreed: Jhonny must be punished.
…
Ms. Noctifer was once a child in this room, before she was Ms. Noctifer. She was known then by a much softer name, Rose, or sometimes Rosa. She slept in her crib, played on its rosewood floors, and grew up here just as any Noctifer. She had heard of her great heritage and learned all her expectations in this room. And so that meant that she was also a part in it. And just as she was a part of the room, the room was a part of her, binding her down and filling her full with the souls of all her ancestors, swarming within her and peering out of her listless eyes at the world they created, but never once the one they destroyed right before them.
…
Ms. Noctifer stood before the window now, the fading light of a ruby sunset setting her face aglow as she trembled from the cold. They all had loved the window, adults and children all, for it was the only source of light in this upper story. All the children would gather around it in the last hours of the day as though to soak up the final fruits of its gaieties. Jhonny had loved the window best, watching the birds flutter outside while the others played.
After he’d slapped Cathrien, Sarah called for some punishment to be taken into action, for no man should slap a babe. Jhonny cowered, clutching his paper-thin reward to his fragile chest, but Jill and Rose took up the call and surrounded him. Sarah stuck her finger out at him in damnation and said he must do his time for his crime. Jhonny buried his face in his hands, sobbing as they crowded in. He cried that he was sorry and that he didn’t mean to do it. But Sarah patted him on the shoulder and told him calmly that this was the only way to justify Cathrien, the only way to purge him of his sin.
The window was left partway open that day to let in the warm weather of May. Jhonny retreated to atop the window’s ledge. Tears streaked down his guilty face as his companions chanted at him. He looked down at them and cried out once more but had no choice. He slipped, falling softly as though without motion off of the ledge. His head cracked against the glass as it followed so that the window shattered into a thousand pieces of fallen stars that fell after him. He floated for a moment then dropped quickly from sight, with a cry from his throat as he vanished farther and farther away, mingled with the strange cries of the children above. The parents had come, but it was too late. They found him curled up in the rose patch below, neck broken and tears mixed with blood torn from his pink cheeks by the thorns of the romance flowers. That night, young Rose took their secret picture frame from its hiding hole and wrote the first of their deaths down in ink, beside the name Jhon Noctifer.
They had once been such a grand family.
…
That broken window always let the chill in and all the warmth out. Like a great gaping void leading into the darkness with its shattered teeth around the perimeter, it had always stood. It was now nighttime as the glimmer of the stars danced off the eyes of Ms. Noctifer. The spirits whispered as she gazed out of the window’s girth, reflected in its broken pieces. She thought to herself, I am old. And as the moon gleamed upon the moldered wings of her fragile butterfly, she could feel the window beckoning her on, pulling her deeper and deeper into the darkness. She crept forward.?
