House Haunted (5 page)

But Bridget would be his; she had promised him. And she had returned so many times to renew her promise that he believed her. For his sanity, he had to.

He opened his eyes and stared at the concrete wall. If he touched it, his finger would come away with a bead of wetness on it. The lights had not gone out yet. The screaming of the young boy had stopped.

He rolled over on the cot and sat up, his feet lying heavily on the floor. He felt numb, a dead man made of damp concrete.

He wanted Bridget now. He wanted not only to imagine but to see her, to touch her. He put his hand gently to his groin and found himself hard. He tried to conjure her up, as she had appeared to him that first time, on the day they took him. He tried to see her now.

She was as young as Jan. Her eyes were the color of blue spring sky over the river. He had seen such a blue sky one day when he was fishing with his father, when he was twelve, and the Vistula River was so cold and clear that it reflected the purity of the sky and seemed to make it twice as blue and clean. They were large eyes, in a round face, not the face of a peasant but not one of royalty, either. She had fair skin, with freckles lightly set around her nose. The freckles were so faint he could only see them when he was close enough to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her now. Her mouth was full and large, her teeth almost perfect, small, white and even.

Her hair was red, not the dull red of some Warsaw girls, not the flaming wild color of some of the Irish girls he had seen on magazine covers, but a rich, dark red, the color of harvest plums. It was cut neither short nor long, cropped straight around her neckline. It looked as though it might once have been very long, over her shoulders. It was hair that should be allowed to proliferate, to grow the way wet rich plants grow. In his mind, he had put his hand through it, and though it was straight and thick there was a softness to it, a fineness, that was one of the most sensual things he had ever felt. He thought of it as the full feeling of water at the exact, cool temperature to tingle and refresh the skin of the hand on a hot, dry day.

Her hair and her eyes together made her extraordinary. She was short, with pale hands, and, like her nose, the backs of her hands were sprinkled with freckles. The skin was clean as milk, nearly as white. Her body was thin, with the delicate bulges of small breasts that stood straight out from her body, capped by large dark areolas and wide red nipples. He thought of the delicate line of her thigh where it merged into leg . . .

Her smile showed hidden depths, like that of the female attendant with chin hair. But where the attendant's gaze was direct, Bridget's came from under her eyes, as she bowed her head forward, shading her ocean-blue eyes, almost, and smiling from under the exquisite face, the freckles on her nose, the lips of her wide mouth parting slightly, showing the whiteness of her tiny, perfect teeth. He had imagined the way her tongue would feel against his mouth, his face, within his own mouth. He had imagined kissing her, knowing that her tongue would be sharp and thin, that it would greatly excite him.

His hand had moved down behind the long, badly cut, rough-stitched prisoner's overalls he wore; he took himself in his hand. He wanted Bridget,
now
.

And suddenly she stood before his cot, her face bent slightly down to him, the ring of her plum-red hair framing her face like a Rembrandt portrait, the luminous vision of her filling him.

“Jan, my poor one.” She smiled.

She was as real as his own flesh, standing naked as she had that first day. For a moment, he felt a need greater than that in his loins. She represented all that was left of sanity to him. She was the earth itself, not its dying bowels, but its living surface, the warming sun enfolding it as he longed to enfold her in his arms.

“
I want you
,” he almost sobbed.

“You will have me soon.”

He tried to get up. She put her creamy white hand on his shoulder and he did not move.

“Have me,” she whispered, her smile deepening, taking his hand and pressing it back to the hardness at his groin, “like that.” He put his hand back behind the trousers and began to milk his hardness, his eyes locked on hers.

“Yes. Yes,” she whispered. “Jan, do you remember the day they took you?”

For a horrible moment he was sure that his greatest fear was realized, that she, too, was part of what they did to him in the room of pain. He felt the jab of a needle in his arm, the taut pull of a strap around his middle, around his arms and legs, the sharp blurt of electricity through his head, the swim of lax white faces over him, asking him, asking . . .

“Oh, God . . .”

“No, Jan, they don't own me. You own me. Don't you remember?”

She let his hand, a finger, touch her as he came. “Never forget, Jan,” she said.

She moved away from him. Her form mingled with the wet, cold walls. “Soon,” she whispered. He felt the wetness in his hand, and, for a moment, he possessed her. She left him slowly, her head slightly tilted, her shaded blue eyes, with her smile, vanishing . . .

He fell back on the cot, turning to the weeping wall, his lust and need draining away into the cement, the damp floor, sucked into the mole-tunnels of the underground world that had captured him. He heard screaming, his own, and a long time later, he awoke from dreamless sleep to see that his hands were bloody and that the wall before him, the weeping cement wall of his cell next to his wooden bed, was stained in blood, showing the perfect outline of a hand, the imprimatur of a weeping man, the red copy of perfect fingerprints.

He brought his reddened hands to his face and cried.

“Soon . . .”

Standing on tiptoe on the highest limestone shelf of his mother's roof, Ricky could just see the water.

That made him proud. It was said that there was almost no place in Bermuda where the water was not in sight's distance. He had always thought that their house, the lowest in the line of houses on the road, blocked in back by a line of trees bordering the golf club, hampered in front by hedges and the sweeping curve of the winding roadway, was one of the few exceptions. But now, in his fifteenth year, after a spring of sudden growth that had stretched him to two inches under six feet, Ricky caught sight of a thin crystal-green ribbon of water.

He had climbed up to the roof to make sure the water trough was clear. The roof's white limestone tiers were pure white, clean as a baby's bottom, and after clearing the remains of a dead bird from the water gutter that ran to the tank at the side of the house, he stepped up to the very top of the roof and stood tall against the sky. He imagined for a moment that this little, square, pink stucco house, in the middle of this road whose silence was broken only by the waspy buzz of a lost tourist's motorbike or the mail car, was in another place. The sun, high above, between the puff ball clouds, was a spotlight. He was standing on the flat bright wood of a Broadway stage, bowing for an audience that had come to see him dance and sing, he, Ricky Smith, the equal of Ben Vereen, Tommy Tune, Gregory Hines, a Broadway star as great as any.

And then his eyes had caught a pencil-thin flash of pure green light, and there, at the top of his height, with his arms above his head, his feet on tiptoe: there was the water.

He was filled with happiness and pride, because he was within sight of water as the tourist brochures bragged, and his mother's little pink house was not so little and insignificant after all.

He stood admiring his discovery, savoring his Broadway dream, until a bulging line of gray-bottomed clouds from the east moved in, blotting the sun, his spotlight. It had rained only once in the past two weeks, a brief night shower dropped from a low scudding storm front that was gone almost before it was noticed. Since then there had been high wisps of cloud only momentarily obscuring an otherwise perfect string of blue, high days. Perfect June weather. The Royal Gazette had taken note of it every day, mentioning repeatedly, for the sake of the tourists, that this was why everyone came to the Islands of Bermuda—and, of course, why they would certainly come back again.

But today looked as though it might be different. The gray clouds had elbowed their way in and looked ready to stay. The air smelled thicker, less fresh and open. The tourists wouldn't be happy.

Neither would Mr. Harvey.

Ricky made his way down the steps off the road, lowering himself to the ground and calling out, “Roof's fine—off, Mum!” through the half-open doorway. From somewhere inside he heard her say, “Bye,” as he pulled his motorbike from the wall. He boarded it and kicked off.

Any day, rain or shine, was too good for work. He'd much rather be with Spook and Reesa and Charlie, down at the ferry dock, jumping with a shout into the clear water, scattering the angelfish. You could see straight to the bottom, which wasn't always a good thing, since some of the tourists chucked their Heineken bottles from the boats, messing up the seafloor. Ricky had once caught Spook chucking a ginger beer can off the quay and had pushed him in after it, telling him he might as well be a tourist himself. Spook had laughed it off, but later on, when Ricky was talking to Reesa alone, sitting at the far end of the pier, bouncing his naked feet off one of the huge rubber bumpers that held the ferry off the concrete of the dock, Spook had snuck up behind and lifted him up under the arms and into the water, the soda can following.

“Off with you—and pick it up yourself!” he shouted, only he had been laughing so good-naturedly that Ricky had only come up from the warm water, laughing himself, with the can.

But today there would be no swimming. He sped by the turnoff for the dock, consoling himself with the fact that even if Reesa and the others were down there, their swimming wouldn't last when the storm came.

Ricky braked, then gave the bike a little gas, pulling out carefully on the Somerset Road, eyes alert for reckless Americans on motorbikes or the occasional bus driver with his mind on his wife or his rum, and took the long, slow curve into the village, past the cluster of shops and the Bank of Bermuda. In another moment he had passed the police station, giving a quick lookout for Constable Wicks, who wasn't in his accustomed spot, leaning against the doorway, looking at the weather, lost in cop's thoughts.

Not seeing Wicks, who didn't like speeders, Ricky gunned the bike, skimming right and then left to the Cambridge and then Daniel's Head Road before turning abruptly into the short lane cut into the curb that led up to the house.

He parked the bike on the side drive, jumping off, moving with a springing step to the back door. The front was locked tight from the inside, the historic house open only on Tuesdays and Thursdays to visitors. The shuttered windows, too, were locked, because Mr. Harvey liked the place closed tight when it wasn't open to the public. Which made it quite stuffy and uncomfortable inside. But Mr. Harvey cared more about protocol than about stuffiness.

He expected the old gent to meet him at the back door. But instead there was a note. It read, “GONE THE DAY TO ST. GEORGE'S, DO THE BACK ROOMS,” and was signed, James Harvey, in the old man's florid script. Mr. Harvey fancied himself original stock and acted accordingly, constantly commenting on his former duties with the Tucker family, as well as other former governors. Ricky knew the truth, be-cause the old man's wife had told him one day with a wink behind his back, that he had come from Ireland in 1965 and she with him. But Ricky had never said anything, letting the old man have his dreams, just as he himself did. Just like everyone in the world did.

Ricky knew his own dreams well enough. His mother laughed, and Spook did too, and sometimes even Reesa, though none of them, especially Reesa, ever laughed mean at him, only gently, shaking their heads and giving him looks that said,
dream, Ricky, dream
. But he would make his dreams come true. He would go to the High School for the Performing Arts, just like the one in that TV show
Fame
he sometimes saw off Mr. Bigg's satellite dish, and he would learn to dance, and be at the head of his class, and go to Broadway and be more famous than Ben Vereen. He loved the way Ben Vereen danced, but Ricky knew he would be even better.

He would dream, just like Mr. Harvey did, and someday he would make his dreams real. But for now he would do the back rooms like Mr. Harvey wanted.

He lifted the note off the door. He was fishing out the key when he saw a shadow pass lightly between the half-closed shutters on the window next to the door.

He shivered, something he might not have done had the sun been out. But then the shadow, if it had been one, was gone.

There were stories about Chambers House, of course. There were stories about nearly every house in Somerset Parish that was over fifty years old. Springfield, another old Bermuda family home a mere half mile away, which had been restored as the Somerset Library, certainly had its share. And there were others. But Chambers House was the oldest, and because people craved superstition so much, there were more stories about it than most. It was one of the earliest built on Bermuda, which made it a tourist attraction. There were more rooms than in most houses on the islands, which again made it a topic of conversation. There were stories of piracy, of murdered slaves and buried treasure, which made it all the more romantic, a great lure to Americans especially, whose movies filled them with a lust for adventure.