Great mischief (10 page)

On the first evening he spent in the house he got himself something to eat in the new clean kitchen. He sat with his feet on the wood range and tilted his chair back; he dipped his toast in his tea and it tasted hot and sweet. Freedom, he found, could be dizzying and cosy at the same time.

His study was still in confusion, so when he had piled the tea-things in the sink he went up to the front room on the third floor which he had chosen as his bedroom because of the water-view. Before the fire stood a treasure, a high-backed armchair with a curved and carven frame, close cousin to the pair Penelope and Mr. Dom-bie used to occupy by the dining-room fire. He had pounced on it in the secondhand shop from which he had furnished his house; among the dusty bedposts, tables, towel racks, bidets, sitting in a haphazard circle of sociability, it had reared up dignified and familiar, its deep-tufted horsehair upholstery very nourishing to

some obscure sense of privation. He had had it carted home at once to ensure his possession of it.

Now he sat down in it with an air of triumph and stretched his legs to the blaze he had kindled in the open fireplace—for this outmoded dwelling had not progressed so far as coal grates. But his self-importance quickly ran out. He had never stayed alone in a house before; his parents, Penelope, the Golightlys, had hung round him like parlor curtains whose absence left him feeling draftily exposed. Even Polio's presence would have helped, but the boy went home every night when his work was done. The bedroom seemed cheerless in spite of the salmon-pink walls. Queer noises in the yard below disturbed him; he made a trip downstairs and applied one eye to a crack in the back door, but it was only the brindled cat crunching the fish-heads Polio had thrown out after dinner. "Scat, Grimalkin!" Timothy cried, dashing a pail of water over her. With a snarl she streaked off into the black yard.

He went upstairs again to the drumming of his own footsteps against the closed doors on either hand. The empty rooms oppressed him, waiting behind their blank doors. He caught himself thinking, Sister would have had this one, Mr. Dombie that. Unexpectedly he grieved for the clutter of the old house, the books, the plump sofa modestly skirted with fringe that touched the floor, the crowded pictures—even for The Last Judgment.

The armchair by his fire was comfortable enough, however, and he slouched in it, his hands clasped

behind his head, looking rather like a bat if the truth were told, with the dark hair about his face, and his thin arms making sharp black angles on either side. Presently he took the bankbook from the table beside him and looked over it. Although his purchases had eaten a hole in his fortune, as he liked to call it, a substantial balance still showed in his savings account. The figures produced a comforting warmth in his middle region. . . . Confound it! I forgot to take out any fire insurance! Imagine my not even thinking of it. . . . But he felt somehow that there was no point. Well, he had certainly been psychic about paying the premium on the other house, he remembered a little smugly. Or had some hovering presence cynically guided him in this act?

The night passed peacefully except for a nightmare he had about the shop. He stood outside in a drowning rain looking through the window; the gas at the end of the long pipe winked wanly on the shelf bottles, the potbellied stove was cold and black, unfilled prescriptions for desperate ills had drifted against the counter, the little wafer-thin weights of his apothecary's scales lay scattered on the floor like wet leaves. Someone else, someone he couldn't distinguish, clumped about with queer, uneven footfalls, one soft, one hard and heavy, as if the owner wore a metallic shoe. He was rattling the crucibles and long-necked bottles, brewing a lethal draught which Timothy had somehow had a hand in. Choked with horror at his own complicity he tried to reach the door, but the deluge that was sweeping every-

thing away dragged at his legs; the shop came loose and floated out of his reach, he woke up swimming and thrashing in hideous distress.

In the daytime life went more cheerfully. Timothy and Polio weeded the dreary strip of yard running from the house to the front gate and dug in some manure from the livery stable. He did not know yet what he would plant in the garden; he lived from day to day waiting to see what the next would show forth.

The neighborhood into which he had moved began to interest him. He had passed through this street a number of times, but without seeing much above the pavement. Resting from his digging, he leaned on the front gate and looked along the block. The small, unimpressive houses seemed strung together by a thread of sheer tension. Negroes and whites lived side by side, with brown faces predominating, but race had nothing to do with the jostling, irreligious gait that characterized the quarter. The cookshop leaned sidewise and shoved against the colored church with the subhuman perversity of wood and tin; and beside the curb of the unpaved roadway the grass had already began its crawling assault on brick and stone.

The vendors who called their wares along the street made Timothy's housekeeping easy. As he hung over the gate a fat colored woman came by with her barrow, selling oysters. Timothy sent Polio to the kitchen for a pan and engaged her in conversation while he waited. Did she live in this part of town, he wanted to know. Near by, she said, but the noncommittal syllables scarcely

constituted an assent. He had just moved here, Timothy explained—an unnecessary remark; she would have known all about him from the moment he had come with the keys to look at the house. Her glance was watchful; not hostile, simply without trust. "Well, your oysters look fine and fresh," he said, pumping friendliness into his voice. He took the pan from the returning Polio and held it out. "I'll take a quart today."

The oysterwoman, without response, dipped her ladle into the cedar bucket in the barrow and poured the exact measure into the outstretched pan. Timothy paid her and sent Polio to the corner store for a piece of ice. "Stop by again; I'm very fond of oysters. You have a new customer now."

A flick of white showed between the woman's lids as she spread a newspaper over the bucket to keep the sun ofiE. She had no intention, he saw, of giving him a nod, a beck, a nail-paring, that might be used against her should he prove to have come here under the wrong auspices. Without a "Good day" she picked up the handles of her barrow and rolled fleshily away over the flagstones.

On Sunday he went to the Golightlys', who had hospitably given him a standing invitation to Sunday dinner. As he sat in the parlor he could hear a stifled argument going on in the dining room where Will had gone to mix the toddies. Anna Maria whispered something he couldn't catch, but Will could never more than half throttle his natural roar, so Timothy distinctly heard: "Oh, you are better at this sort of thing than I am," Then Anna Maria, more sharply: "Not I. He's your relation—you'll have to tackle him."

Timothy stalled his rocking chair and listened. The Golightlys, with the good taste often shown by clumsy people, had withheld comment on his failure to go to church since the fire, though Timothy had been in constant dread of the day when they would mention it. He braced himself and tried hurriedly to assemble some logic for his skirting the church doors. Wasn't it generally understood that lost souls dared not go to church? But he was not quite sure about his soul; and if it was lost he was getting on surprisingly well without it.

Presently Will, having drawn the short straw apparently, came out alone to "tackle" him. When they had each had a swallow of the toddy he plunged in. "I declare, you're looking right sassy these days, Tim, in spite of Father Time. Well, I dare say we all look older, but you've just turned thirty-five, and oughtn't to mind— Look here, old man, you better do something about your hair." He softened his remark with a solicitous grin. "Black or white, green or grizzled, I don't care which, but just make up your mind to one. You can't go trotting round town like a piebald pony—"

Timothy passed his hand dreamily over his head. In his relief at having escaped the subject of church, he took his cousin's frankness amiably. "That's so. It must look a little odd. But I don't seem to mind being piebald and I'm the only one it matters to."

When they joined Anna Maria at table Will gave her a wink no one could have missed; and the meal went

off in cousinly affability. Anna Maria was a large-boned, kindly woman not unlike her husband, and their daughters were built to scale. Timothy found the noisy, hearty Golightlys in their big dog-ridden house a little tiring and returned with pleasure to the narrow proportions of his own rooms, which did not make him feel dwarfish. On Monday morning, however, he stopped in at the Palace Shaving Saloon and had his hair cut to the gray line. He couldn't escape a pang at the sight of his raven locks on the floor around the barber's chair; still, in his present queer state of mind he had ceased to anticipate either youth or age. . . .

His cropped head made him more than ever a marked man. People looked at him sidelong; women, hanging out of windows in his street, fell silent as he passed. The horrors of his experience had set him off from the common touch, and this realization fed his craving for privacy and anonymity.

A few of his old customers began to seek him out, poor whites and colored folk largely, but his supply of roots and herbs had gone up in smoke with the other stocks of his apothecary's trade. They gave him, however, an idea for his well-prepared garden beds. The season had passed for gathering roots; this was the time to move plants in from the woods, to make unguents and tinctures from their leaves, so he took several jaunts into the country and nosed around with a basket and trowel. He and Polio set out his cullings in neat rows along the walls of his little strip.

Coming home from an excursion one evening he found himself nervously exhilarated, as if the kitchen physic he carried had started to work on him. He looked about with heightened sensitivity at the life burgeoning in the quarter to which he had moved; its denizens, he concluded, belonged to a vegetable empire, their sap rose instantly in response to the warm time of the year. Cows, goats, chickens, milled in the streets in defiance of city ordinances; blows and curses sounded in the saloon, feet scuttled through the twilight, and shutters banged to. The pushcarts of the vendors streaked the dusk with the flame and soot of their lightwood flares. The constant movement raised a film of dust down the middle of the roadway.

Walking in the crowd with his basket Timothy felt the contagion all around him. It was as if a touch at his elbow, a word at his ear, would bring this flighty element within his grasp. Before his empty house he paused, for he had an instant impression of some dissonance in its welcome, some invasion during his absence. For a few moments he stood under the lamf>-post near his gate, feeling slightly sheepish at his unwillingness to leave its comforting refulgence. He glanced down at the yellow circle of light laid almost explicitly at his feet, and saw that it enclosed a little slough, a low place along the curbstone where rain collected. Stamped on the black mud the print of a cloven foot had filled with water and lay there golden in the falling light.

Timothy took a second look, then he went diffidently up the path to his door. Not a lock had been disturbed, not even the stuffy air of the closed rooms seemed disarranged by this intrusion.

The next morning he went into the yard to set out his plants. All the time he was working over them curiosity tugged at his elbow, and presently he dropped his trowel and walked out to the lamppost. In the clear light of morning the footprint was distinctly there, but no longer golden, a drying footprint of what might easily be Mrs. Sweegan's cow. The lowings of this animal frequently woke him up in the morning, Mrs. Sweegan's cowshed being against his house. "But," he said aloud, "if Mrs. Sweegan's cow's footprint can look like the Devil's, couldn't the Devil's footprint look like a cow's?" From what he had seen of Mrs. Sweegan she was not a person of imagination who would lend him her cow to see if its foot would fit the discarded slipper.

That evening Timothy sat by his hearth dispirited in spite of himself. The weather continued warm and enervating. He had let the fire die down; the big iron kettle that was his hot-water supply hissed faintly in the ashes. His shoes lay parrytoed on the hearth where he had kicked them, and unable to concentrate on his reading he sat and listened to the silence, wishing it were time to go to bed. But silence never lasted long in this neighborhood; a harsh cry broke out somewhere down the street, followed by a stillness just as singular. He raised the window and listened: nothing. Whoever uttered the cry roused no interest, no succor. He went downstairs several times to investigate noises in the backyard, but his lifted lamp showed only brickbats and dead leaves on the bare ground.

Coming back from his last descent, he thought he heard a noise in the empty room opposite his own. Plucking up his nerve, he opened the door and looked in. Nothing out of the ordinary greeted his eye except for a lacy semicircle of soot around the empty fireplace. As he stood there more soot rattled down the throat of the chimney; a chimney swift perhaps—he tried to remember when the swifts came south. The rattle ceased, and he returned to his room across the hall leaving both doors open behind him. As he crossed the threshold Will's deerskin rose a little on the floor to meet him, the dun flanks heaved with a panting life; Timothy clutched the lamp, which almost slipped from his fingers—then the skin fell dead again and lay sleek on the boards. The draft from the open doors and windows which had given it a similitude of breath petered out, whining.

Timothy set the lamp on the center table and lowered the sash. Then he planted a chair on the deerskin and sat down on it to trim his lamp, which was smoking this evening, owing to Polio's inattentive ministrations. Scarcely had he seated himself when a scratching began on the roof, a padding as of foot-soles, a rattle of loosened plaster down the tiles. Once more he raised the window and leaned out, craning to see past the edge of the dormer; but all that his narrow angle of vision disclosed was the bell-like curve of the roof fading into the darkness. As he drew his head in there came a sudden fall of soot in the next room, a quick rustle, a felt presence. He stood perfectly still facing the window, unable to summon the force to cross the hall again. He could hear each of his heartbeats, loud as a leaf falling in the quiet of night.

When he turned round he saw a woman standing in the door of his room, her skirts still blowing with the immediacy of her arrival. She was small and strangely dressed; her skin had a curious deep flush, and a trace of the same color seemed to stain her long yellow hair. Dark smudges encircled her eyes, or perhaps the great tawny fringe falling over her forehead gave them their smoky look. She came a little farther in on delicate bare feet.

Timothy said baldly, "Who are you?"

"A visitor," she said, "just calling on a person of importance who has moved into the neighborhood. Natural, isn't it?" Her smiling mouth had in its fullness both cruelty and the capacity for enjoyment. "And this narrow, leafy house, I've always liked it—it's my kind of house as well as your kind." The lamplight shone in her eyes and died out again as they moved about the room. "You've made yourself a nice retreat up here on the top floor. You imagined you'd get away from everybody, didn't you?"

Timothy sank against the window sill, gripping the ledge with both hands. He thought of the three-story drop to the ground below and stayed where he was. Besides, among his churning emotions he felt the strong bite of curiosity. "Perhaps I was hoping for privacy," he said alter a moment; "but I don't know why you should come after me. I'm not a person of importance—" He snatched up mediocrity like an invisible cloak and flung it round him. "I'm merely a bush-rabbit pharmacist—"

"Not a person of importance? Why, the whole town has been talking about you since the lamentable death of your sister and her friend from which you miraculously escaped." Her sarcastic smile parted her thin red lips again. "People are puzzled about you, they have a feeling in their bones that the burning of your house was not an accident."

Her words thudded against Timothy's breastbone. He swallowed and said, "I don't know what you mean."

"Shall we go into it a little further?"

"There's nothing to go into." He drew himself up and was uncomfortably aware of a falsity, a bed-slat absurdity, in his bearing.

"Well, you're a little careless with fire, it seems to a mere outsider. To go off and leave that—book burning, and all those papers around. But you always had a fine Promethean way with matches and combustibles, if I remember your dossier correctly."

Tall as he pulled and stretched himself, Timothy could no longer cage within his ribs the actuality he had spent these last weeks ignoring. He turned as red as his visitor and sank against the sill again.

"Yes . . . it's true. I wished their deaths. I felt them there on my back all the time, a load that pressed me down so all my juice ran out. I had to get them oflE somehow."

His visitor was enjoying herself. She gave a light crowing laugh, surprising, as if a canary crowed. "And disposed of them in handsome style! But I must warn you that you don't get an encumbrance off your back by such easy and primitive means. It will simply shift its form. 'Perpetual in perpetual change.' " And she took another step into the room.

He was struggling to collect himself, to recall if his books had given any practical advice about the taming of hags and apparitions, but the creatures flew and batted about in his mind in too distracting a company. He could only think, the trip to England doesn't seem to be necessary.

Timothy rose from his crouching position and also took a step toward the middle of the room with a sort of hopeless scheme of keeping the table between them. As if she read his thought the hag came soundlessly up to the table and placed her finger-tips on the marble top. The lamp sent up a furious small eruption of smoke at her approach and by the light that came through the blackened chimney he saw she was younger than the word "hag" implied. Not a wrinkle marked her strange glistering skin; she was neither young nor old. She smiled slightly, her tongue between her teeth, a frank smile of hunger and anticipation.

A Bible! Timothy thought wildly, if you read the Bible backward . . . But he had burned his up, of course! His tottery self-confidence collapsed in ruin. He dodged past the table; sheer desperation carried him into the hall, he plunged down the stairs, stumbling, slipping, his ankles twisting under him. But when he reached the black hole at the bottom he knew he had not come alone; a light burden hung at his back. He sprang forward in a shuddering revulsion at the touch of its cold small fingers like a caterpillar on his neck. Bursting through the door somehow, he raced down the path.

He was without volition now except the frantic urge to get away, to shake his burden by speed—the only idea left in his disintegrated mind. Sometimes they seemed to stand still while the spaced circles of lamp light rushed at them and splashed them with flecks of yellow foam. His stockinged feet thudded softly on the pavement; at his ear he heard a high thin whistling like the wind, or like the hag's breath coming faintly through her teeth.

Not a living creature stirred—if indeed they still traveled the territory of the living. The fear of Retribution parched his tongue. Far down the church aisle of his memory he heard the familiar denunciations; the sound of sin beat down from scowling pulpits and rattled in his hollow head. Trees lined his road, their bare limbs straining and streaming back in the hideous wind; prophets like bass-horns shouted after him, but he was too fleet for these evangelical threats. Faster than sound he ran ahead of their brassy syllables—

By this time his lungs were bursting. The hope of escape strangled and died. He felt the roadway soft under him like an unpaved street. . . . But even this shred of consciousness flowed away in the wind as he lurched, fell, and gave in at last to the luxury of defeat.

The shred of consciousness tightened about his brain again and squeezed it once or twice. How weak our hold is on time, a voice seemed to be saying; and truly he had no idea whether hours, days or years had passed over him since . . . But now space moved in about him, black and cramping. Space was rectangular, he discovered, with narrow chinks of brightness, the very shape of a tomb. Above his face as he lay on his back a slab of blackness pressed down. In his utter deflation of mind and body he rested content to be a corpse, until suddenly consciousness coiled round him again and gave a venomous squeeze—for if it was a tomb he was alive in it. He twisted on his side, started up, staggered about, and struck a vertical object, tallish, bony, and slick to the touch. The rectangle tipped and swayed. . . . Then the sheer force of his grip on the upright seemed to steady the rocking walls, which settled with a jolt to their proper orientation. It was his own room that enclosed him, the hard ribby frame of his armchair that his fingers clutched.