The House That Jack Built (41 page)

    'Yes,' said Norman, without much enthusiasm; and it was then that Brewster looked around and saw the candles burning and the mirrors and the bowls of herbs.

    'You people having some kind of a party here?'

    'More of a ceremony,' said Pepper.

    Brewster prowled around the candles and peered into the bowls of herbs. 'My grandma used to do something like this… said it chased away the evil spirits. That's not what you're doing here?'

    'Well, no, not exactly. We're just… housewarming.' Brewster stood still, and looked around, and then he said, 'I've been surveying houses in the Hudson Valley since I was twenty-four, and I've been in houses like you wouldn't believe. I've been in houses where the person who built it was dead for twenty years, but you can still feel them there. You can feel their pride. You can feel their arrogance. Sometimes you can feel the love they had for the countryside around them; or the person they built it for.

    'But this house…' He shook his head. 'It wasn't built to live in. Nobody builds a house like this, not just to live in. This was built for a very special purpose. The windows are out of proportion, the doors are too wide, the floors are built like no floors I ever saw before. This is like the crazy house they have at the carnival. It was deliberately designed to make a visitor feel small, and unsettled, and indecisive. Two staircases in the hall, both leading to the same landing? Which one are you supposed to take? And when you do, the risers are slightly higher than normal, to make you feel small. Stained-glass windows of nuns with their eyes closed and people with their backs turned? The Garden of Eden, gone to ruin? This house was made for something; I can tell you. I just can't figure out what.' Norman had opened the manila envelope and pulled out some of its contents. They looked to Effie like large black-and-white photographs. He frowned at two or three of them, and then he shoved them back.

    'Norman?' asked Effie.

    'Maybe you should see these later.'

    'Why, what are they? Let me see them now.'

    'I don't think so,' said Norman, uncomfortably.

    Pepper snatched the envelope, went through the photographs very quickly, her face expressionless. Then she handed them to Effie. 'You'd better see them. That was what Harry Rondo was talking about.'

    The photographs were very dim and lacking in contrast. They showed a bedroom with an iron-framed bed in it, a small fireplace and a window overlooking a rooftop. Effie recognised the bedroom at once. It was the blue-carpeted bedroom where she had heard a woman sobbing. When Effie had ventured into the bedroom, it had been bare. But in these pictures, there was a nightstand and a closet and religious pictures on the walls.

    And on the bed, a woman. A woman whom Effie recognised.

    She was naked, tied hand-and-foot with ropes. Her white skin was blotched and bruised; although the photographs weren't clear enough to show her injuries in any detail. She was obviously pregnant; six or seven months, Effie would have guessed.

    In another photograph, she was covered in masses of cockroaches. They were crawling all over her, and she was powerless to brush them away. A close-up showed cockroaches crawling in and out of her mouth, and up her nose. Her eyes were staring directly at the camera, unblinking, as if she were dead.

    There were more photographs, and they were all worse. Although she knew that this must have happened almost sixty years ago, Effie was still appalled. She found herself biting her left thumbnail, digging her teeth into it, which was something she hadn't done since she was at high school. She glanced at Pepper and Pepper looked back at her: but Pepper's face was unreadable. Effie had the feeling that a long time ago, in her Woodstock days maybe, something like this may have happened to her.

    She didn't want to go on looking but she did. Every photograph was a cold, straightforward record of unspeakable degradation - degradation without any meaning or purpose, except that the woman was helpless, and her persecutor could do with impunity whatever he chose.

    She glimpsed a photograph in which a man appeared to be holding a long needle close to the woman's left eye. The expression on the woman's face was so terrible that she pushed all the photographs back into the envelope, her heart racing and her cheeks flushed. 'You know who this is, don't you?' she said. She felt so disoriented, so angry, and yet so excited too.

    Pepper nodded. 'Gina Broughton. The woman who agreed to stay for three days and ended up staying eighteen months. The woman who was blinded.'

    'Why?' Effie demanded. She was almost screaming. 'Why did she let Jack Belias do that to her?'

    'You remember what Harry Rondo said. She let him do it because he could. She let him do it because her husband agreed to stake her in a game of cards. What did anything matter, after that? Three days, three weeks, three months. It didn't matter any more. At least Jack Belias wanted her enough to degrade her. Her husband didn't want her at all.'

    'My God,' said Effie. She was hyperventilating. 'We are dirt, after all, aren't we? We're all Lilith; none of us is Eve.'

    

    

    While Pepper finished setting up her arrangement of candles and mirrors, Norman and Brewster went around the house one more time to see if they could find any sign of Craig.

    'He could have tried walking, or hitching a ride,' Pepper suggested, but Effie knew that she didn't mean it. If Craig had wanted to leave Valhalla early, all he had to do was ask Norman to drive him. He was paying Norman's wages, after all.

    'This house has been waiting for somebody like Craig for years,' Effie said. 'The very first time we drove up here, it drew him, almost like a magnet. You don't know how completely that mugging destroyed his self-confidence, his pride in himself. It must have been bad enough knowing that somebody else can hurt you like that, and get away with it. But to have them damage your whole manhood like that…'

    Pepper said, 'It isn't the house that wants him. It's Jack Belias. He wants to live again, for real. He wants to live in the here-and-now, and if it means that he has to live in somebody else's body, then that's what he's prepared to do. It's just too bad for you that he found Craig.'

    She lit another row of candles with a long sandalwood spill. Her eyes shone silver. 'When you first saw Jack Belias running down the stairs, he saw you, too, but only as an unreal figure, the same way that you saw him. In other words, you were haunting him in 1937 as much as he was haunting you. You were both caught in the same psychic disturbance, which is like somebody thumbing the pages of a book backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, so that two events become superimposed on each other and you can't tell which is which. Like a flicker-book. He must have realised then that you and Craig had arrived in his life, and you were his chance of escape.'

    Effie said, 'Maybe I should go look for Craig, too.'

    'Unh-uh. I wouldn't if I were you. The psychic disturbance is very strong. You never know what might happen.'

    'I'll just take a quick look in the kitchens.'

    She left the ballroom and walked through the library. Half of the floor was still under repair, and the gaping hole through which Morton Walker had fallen was still covered with a tarpaulin, but she was able to walk around the right-hand perimeter of the room, and out into the hallway. She stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs, listening to the wind whistling through the ill-fitting window-frames, and the intermittent tapping of overgrown branches against the glass, as if some skeletal visitor were trying to attract her attention.

    She climbed the stairs a little way until she could see the lumpish plaster figure on the far side of the landing. Since Norman had waterproofed the roof, it had begun to dry out, and a gaping crack had appeared beneath its nose, so that it looked as if it were just about to speak to her in some hideous, occluded voice. Its eye was less glutinous, too, and looked more focused and accusing.

    'Craig?' she whispered. 'Craig? Are you there, Craig?'

    There was no reply. The wind sang secretly under the bedroom doors, and sucked the air out of empty fireplaces. Effie paused, still listening, but she knew that Craig wasn't there. Craig might, in fact, have been nowhere at all. Not here, not today, but in another time altogether, beyond her reach. She could search the whole world and never find him, and that was as good as his being dead.
'Gut ist der Schlaf…'
the stained-glass window reminded her.
'Der Tod ist besser.'
Now she understood what it was trying to say.

    Now she understood the nun amongst the lilies, and the man with his back turned. A woman of pure appearance but filth at heart, Lilith, who defied man and consequently defied the will of God. Jack Belias' primary intention hadn't been to destroy the men with whom he played cards. He had been showing that their women were nothing more than dirt - quite prepared to cuckold them, and to betray them, and then to desert them when their money ran out.

    She retreated slowly downstairs. She waited in the hallway a moment longer, and then she went through to the kitchens. They were silent and chilly, even though the evening was still warm. A tap was slowly dripping into one of the sinks, which showed that Norman must have reconnected the water supply. Through the dusty kitchen window she could see the newly-cleared garden, with stacks of overgrown weeds and vegetables ready to be burned.

    'Craig?' she called again, and her voice echoed in the scullery.

    No reply.

    She opened the door to the cellar, and immediately she heard a thick, rushing noise somewhere in the darkness below her.

    'Craig?' she called, quite loudly this time. 'Craig, is that you?'

    But then she heard the scrabbling of claws along water pipes, and she realised that what she had heard was rats. Hurriedly she closed the cellar door and turned the key in it. She loathed rats. In fact she loathed anything that scurried or crept or slid itself along the ground. Maybe that was proof that she wasn't descended from Eve after all, she thought, wryly: she would never have been tempted by a serpent.

    She was walking back across the kitchen when a dark movement in the garden caught her eye. She stopped, her scalp tingling, and looked at it again. At first she couldn't see anything at all, only a scraggy line of rusty-coloured broom that bordered the vegetable beds. But then a man appeared, a man dressed in black, with a black wide-brimmed hat, and he was walking quite quickly towards the house.

    She couldn't see his face clearly. He kept passing through sunshine and shade, which gave his progress an odd flickering effect, like an old movie printed on deteriorating stock. He seemed almost to appear and then disappear. I shall never completely die.

    Effie walked swiftly out of the kitchen and back across the hallway. She reached the ballroom at the same time as Norman and Brewster, back from their search of Valhalla's upper storeys, and almost collided with them.

    'I've seen him,' Effie said breathlessly. 'He was out in the garden, coming this way.'

    'Craig?' asked Pepper.

    'Craig, Jack, I don't know. Either, or both. I couldn't see his face.'

    Pepper stooped down and picked up her mandrake root. She held it up, and watched it, and for a long while it did nothing more than it had before, wound and unwound. Then suddenly Effie heard a thin, high-pitched scream. It was so piercing that it left the taste of salt in her mouth, and she felt as if her ears had been boxed.

    They all looked at each other in astonishment, except for Pepper.

    'Did you hear that, too?' asked Brewster. 'That was like somebody screaming inside of my head.'

    'Mine, too,' said Effie.

    Norman dug his finger in his left ear and twisted it around. 'Like, I'm going to be deaf for life now.'

    'That was the mandrake,' said Pepper. 'It screams when you pull it up, and it's supposed to scream when murderers come near.'

    'You're kidding me,' Brewster told her. 'A plant made all that noise?'

    'There's a perfectly logical psychobotanical explanation for it. Their juice is sensitive to human alpha waves; and people who are capable of killing other people have distinctively different alpha waves from the rest of us. The mandrake isn't actually screaming in fear. It doesn't have any imagination. But all the same, it's screaming.'

    She picked up her two-branched hazel twig. Effie glanced at her in concern, but she said, 'The seven-branched twig isn't sensitive enough. It's like trying to eat cake with a dental dam in.'

    Brewster said, 'Do you mind if I stay for this? Your son here was telling me all about it; all about that library floor and everything. I'd be fascinated.'

    'Long as you stay at your own risk,' Pepper warned him.

    'You mean this is dangerous?'

    'Is an earthquake dangerous?'

    Effie stood close to Pepper, among the candles and the mirrors. Pepper slowly moved the hazel twig from one side of the room to the other, her eyes still open, her lips slightly parted.

    She carried on sweeping the room, very concentrated and very patient. Brewster started to say something but Norman pressed his fingers to his lips. 'Have to have silence. Sorry.'

    After only two or three minutes, the hazel began to shudder and twitch. Suddenly, its stem jerked up in the air, and it stood erect, quivering so fiercely that Pepper could hardly hold it.

    'Holy cow,' breathed Brewster. 'I never saw anything like that before.'

    Pepper gritted her teeth. 'It's strong today, it's very strong. And it's very chaotic, there's no order to it, it's like everything's fluctuating all over the place. Music, can you hear it? And then different music. And voices!'