House of Leaves (58 page)

So they took up
Jonah,
and cast

him
forth
into the
sea: and the sea

ceased from her
raging.

(Jonah 1:
15)

[
392—Johanne Scefing’s
The Navidson Record
,
trans. Gertrude Rebsamen (Oslo Press, May 1996), p.
52.]

It seems a somewhat bizarre reference, until Haven and Slocum produce a second PEER table documenting what happened once Navidson entered the house on Ash Tree Lane:

POST-EXPOSURE EFFECTS
RATING

0: Alicia
Rosenbaum: headaches stopped.

0: Audrie McCullogh: no more anxiety.

1: Teppet C. Brookes: improved sleeping.

1: Sheriff Axnard: end of nausea.

2: Billy Reston: decreased sensation of cold.

3: Daisy: end of fever; arms healing; occasional echolalia.

1: Kirby “Wax” Hook: return of energy and potency.

4: Chad: better goal-directed flow of ideas and logical sequences; decreased aggression and wandering.

1: Karen Green: improved sleeping; no more unmotivated panic attacks [Dark enclosed places will still initiate a response.]; decreased melancholia; cessation of cough.

1: Will Navidson: no more night terrors; cessation of mutism. [Evidenced by Navidson’s use of
the Hi 8 to record his thoughts.]

The Haven-Slocum Theory ™ — 2

Even more peculiar, the house became a house again.

As Reston discovered, the space between the master bedroom and the children’s bedroom had vanished. Karen’s bookshelves were once again flush with the walls. And the hallway in the living room now resembled a shallow closet. Its walls were even white.

The sea, it seemed, had quieted.

“Was Navidson like Jonah?” The Haven-Slocum Theory asks. “Did he understand the house would calm if he entered it, just as Jonah understood the waters would calm if he were thrown into them?”

Perhaps strangest of all, the consequences of Navidson’s journey are still being felt today. In what remains the most controversial aspect of The Haven-Slocum Theory, the concluding paragraphs claim that people not even directly associated with the events on Ash Tree Lane have been affected. The Theory, however, is careful to distinguish between those who have merely seen
The Navidson Record
and those who have read and written, in some cases extensively, about the film.

Apparently, the former group shows very little evidence of any sort of emotional or mental change:” At most, temporary.” While the latter group seems to have been more radically influenced: “As evidence continues to come in, it appears that a portion of those who have not only meditated on the house’s perfectly dark and empty corridors but articulated how its pathways have murmured within them have discovered a decrease in their own anxieties. People suffering anything from sleep disturbances to sexual dysfunction to poor rapport with others seem to have enjoyed some improvement.” [393—Of course as Patricia B. Nesseiroade, M.D. noted in her widely regarded self-help book
Tamper With This
(Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1994), P. 687: “If one invests some interest in, for example, a tree and begins to form some thoughts about this tree and then writes these
thoughts down,
further examining the meanings that surface, allowing for unconscious associations to take place, writing all this down as well, until the subject of the tree branches off into the subject of the self, that person will enjoy immense psychological benefits.”]

However, The Haven-Slocum Theory also points out that this course is not without risk. An even greater number of people dwelling on
The Navidson Record
have shown an increase in obsessiveness, insomnia, and incoherence: “Most of those who chose to abandon their interest soon recovered. A few, however, required counseling and in some instances medication and hospitalization. Three cases resulted in suicide.”

XVIII

Ashe, good for caske hoopes: and fneede require,

plow worke, as alfo for many things els.

—
A briefe and true report of the newfound land of Virginia
by Thomas Harlot servant

to Sir Walter Raleigh
—
“a member
of
the Colony, and there imployed in difcouering.”

Though Karen
and Navidson both went back to Ash Tree Lane, Karen did not
go
there
for
the house. As
she
explains in a video entry: “I’m
going because
of Navy.”

During
the first week of
April, she
stayed in close contact with Reston who made the
long
drive from Charlottesville more
than a
few times. As we can see for ourselves, Navidson’s car never moves from the driveway and the house continues to remain empty. In the living room a closet still stands in place of the hallway, while upstairs the space between the master bedroom and the children’s bedroom is lost to a wall.

At the start of the second week of April, Karen realizes she will have to leave New York. Daisy and Chad seem to have shaken off the debilitating effects of the house and their grandmother is more than happy to look after them while Karen is gone, believing her daughter’s trip will take her one step closer toward selling the house and suing Navidson.

On April
9th,
Karen heads south to Virginia. She checks into a Days Inn but instead of going directly to the house makes an appointment with Alicia Rosenbaum. The real estate agent is more than happy to see Karen and discuss the prospects of putting the house on the market.

“Oh lord” she exclaims when she sees the Hi 8 in Karen’s hands. “Don’t point that at me. I’m not at all photogenic.” Karen sets the camera down on a file cabinet but leaves it on, thus providing a high-angle view of the office and both women.

Karen probably planned to have a short discussion with Alicia Rosenbaum about the sale of the house, but the real estate agent’s uncensored shock changes everything. “You look terrible” she says abruptly. “Are you alright, honey?” And so with that, what was supposed to have been a business meeting instantly becomes something else, something otherly, a sisterly get together where one woman reads in another signs of strain invisible to a man and sometimes even a mother.

Rosenbaum fills a mug with hot water and hunts around in a cabinet for some tea bags. Slowly but surely Karen begins to talk about the separation. “I don’t know,” Karen fmally says as she stirs her chamomile tea. “I haven’t seen him in almost six months.”

“Oh dear, I’m so
sorry.”

Karen keeps turning the spoon in small circles but cannot quite stop the tears. Rosenbaum comes around the desk and gives Karen a hug. Then pulling up a chair tries her best to offer some consolation: “Well at the very least, don’t worry about the house. It always sells.”

Karen stops stirring the tea.

“Always?” she asks.

“After you came to me with that whole mysterious closet bit,” Rosenbaum continues, ignoring the phone as it starts to ring. “I did a little research. I mean I’m as new to this town as you all were, though I am southern born. Truth be told, I hoped to find some kind of ghostliness. [She laughs] All I found was a pretty comprehensive list of owners. A lot of ‘em. Four in the last eleven years. Almost twenty in the last fifty. No one seems to stay there for more than a few years. Some died, heart attacks that sort of thing and the rest just disappeared. I mean we lost track of ‘em. One man said the place was too roomy, another one called it ‘unstable.’ I went ahead and checked if the house was built on an old Indian burial ground.”

“And?”

“Nope. In fact, definitely not. It’s all too marshy with winter rains and the James River nearby. Not a good place for a cemetery. So I looked for some murder or witch burning—though I knew, of course, that had all been Massachusetts folk. Nothing.”

“Oh well.”

“Did you ever see any ghosts?”

“Never.”

“Too bad. Virginia, you know, has a tradition of ghosts—though I’ve never seen one.”

“Virginia does?” Karen asks softly.

“Oh my yes. The curse tree, the ghost of Miss Evelyn Byrd, Lady Ann Skipwith, ghost alley, and lord knows a whole handful more. [394—See L. B. Taylor, Jr.’s
The Ghosts of Virginia
(Progress Printing Co., Inc., 1993) For a more international look at hauntings consider E. T. Bennett’s
Apparitions & Haunted Houses: A Survey of
Evidence
(London; Faber & Faber, 1939); Commander R. T. Gould, R. N.’s
Oddities; A Book of
Unexplained Facts
(1928); Walter F. Prince’s
The Psychic in the House
(Boston: Boston Society for Psychical Research, 1926); and Suzy Smith’s
Haunted Houses for the Million
(Bell Publishing Co., 1967).] Unfortunately, the only thing distinguished about your home’s past, but I guess it’s part of everybody’s past around here, and it’s no mystery either, would be the colony, the Jamestown Colony.”

It is not surprising
The Navidson Record
does not pause to consider this reference, especially considering that Karen is far more concerned about the house and Navidson’s whereabouts than she is with 17th century history. However having some familiarity with the bloody and painful origins of that particular toe hold
in
the new world reveals just how old the roots of that house really are.

Thanks to The London Company, on May 2, 1607, 105 colonists were deposited on a marshy peninsula where they established what soon became known as the Jamestown Colony. Despite pestilence, starvation, and frequent massacres carried out by native Indians, John Smith effectively held the village together until an injury forced him to return to England. The ensuing winter of 1609-1610 almost killed everyone and had it not been for Lord De Ia Wart’s timely arrival with supplies those still living would have fled. [395—Consider the interesting mention in Rupert L. Everett’s
Gallantrie and Hardship in the Newfoundland
(London: Samson & Sons Publishing Company, Inc., 1673), where a colonist remarked how “Waif in Fray sure was all tabled Balls, full with much Delight and of course strange Veering Spirit.”]

With the help of John Rolfe’s tobacco industry, the marriage of Pocahontas, and the naming of Jamestown as the Virginia capital, the colony survived. However Nathaniel Bacon’s fierce battle with the tidewater aristocrat Sir William Berkeley soon left the village in flames. Eventually the capital of Virginia was moved to Williamsburg and the settlement quickly decayed. In 1934 when park excavations began, very little remained of the site. As Park Warden Davis Manatok reported, “The marsh land has obscured if not completely consumed the monuments of the colony.” [396—
Virginia State Park Report
(Virginia State Press, v. 12, April
1975),
P. 1,173.]

AU of which is relevant only because of a strange set of pages currently held at the Lacuna Rare Books Library at Horenew College m South Carolina.

Supposedly the journal in question first turned up at The Wishart Bookstore in Boston. It had apparently been mixed in with several crates of books dropped off from a nearby estate. “Most of it was dreck” said owner Laurence Tack. “Old paperbacks, second rate volumes of Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, and the like. No one here paid them much attention.” [397—Personal interview with Laurence Tack, May 4, 1996.]

Eventually the journal was bought for a remarkable $48.00 when a Boston University student noticed “Wart” penciled inside the cover of the badly damaged volume. As she soon discovered, the book was not De la Wart’s but one he had kept in his library. It seems that prior to Warr’s arrival, during “the starving time” of the winter of 1610, three men had left the Jamestown Colony in search of game. As the journal reveals, they traveled for several days until they stumbled onto an icy field where they camped for the night. The following spring two of their thawing bodies were found along with this priceless document.

For the most part, the entries concern the quest for game, the severe weather and the inevitable understanding that cold and hunger were fast colluding into the singular sensation of death:

18 Janiuere, 1610

We fearch for deere or other Game and aiwayes there is nothing. Tiggs believef our luck will change.

[
398—This sporadic “f” for “s” stuff mystifies me,
[399—Mr. Truant has
mistaken
the long
“S” for an
“f.”
John Bell the
publisher for
British
Theatre
abolished the long S” back in 1775. In 1786. Benjamin Franklin indirectly approved of the decision when he wrote that “the Round s begins to be the Mode and In nice printing the Long S Is rejected entirely.”
—
Ed.]
but I don’t care anymore. I’m getting the fuck out of here. Good thing too, fince I’m also being evicted from my apartment for failure to pay. It took them all of January, February and moft of March to do it but here it is the end of March and if I’m not out by tomorrow, people will come for me. My plan’s to leave tonight and take a southern route all the way to Virginia, where I hope to find that place, or at the very least find some piece of reality that’s at the root of that place, which might in turn—I hope; I do, do hope—help me addrefs some of the awful havoc always tearing through me.

Luckily, I’ve managed to put enough money together to get the hell away. My Vif a was canceled a month ago but I had some good fortune selling my mother’s locket (though I kept the gold necklace).

It was that or the guns. Which may surprife you, but something about that dream I remembered changed me. Afterwards, juft looking at the dull silver made me feel like there was this horrendous weight around my neck, even though I wafn’t even wearing it. In fact, the idea of getting rid of it was no longer enough, I had to hate it as I got rid of it.

At leaf t I didn’t rush things. I found an appraifer, approached some ftores, never budged from my af king price. Apparently it was defigned by someone well known. I made $4,200. Though I will say this, as I was handing over that ftrange fhape—letter included—I felt an extraordinary amount of rage surge through me. For a moment I was sure the scars along my arms would catch fire and melt down to the bones. I pocketed the cafh and quickly ducked away, hurt, full of poifon and more than a little afraid I might try to inflict that hurt and poifon on someone elfe.

Maybe in some half-hearted attempt to tie up some loofe ends, I then dropped by the Fhop a couple of days later to say goodbye to everyone. Man, I muft look bad becaufe the woman who replaced me almoft screamed when she saw me walk through the door. Thumper wafn’t around but my boff promifed to give her the envelope I handed him.

“If I find out you didn’t give it her,” I said with a smile full of rotting teeth. “I’m going to burn your life down.”

We both laughed but I could tell he was glad to fee me go.

I had no doubt Thumper would get my gift.

The worft was Lude. He was nowhere around. Firft I tried his apartment, which was kind of weird, to find myfelf after more than a year slipping acrofs that same awful courtyard where Zampanô ufed to walk, and there’s still not a cat in sight, juft a breeze rustling through a handful of dying weeds warning away the illufion of time in the same language of a cemetery. For some reafon juft being there filled me with guilt, voices converging from behind thofe gloomy curtains of afternoon light, almoft as if drawn out of the dull earth itfeif, still bitter with winter, and gathering together there to accufe me, indict me for abandoning the book, for selling that stupid fucking locket, for running away now like a goddamn coward. And though no clouds or kites marred a sun as yellow as corn, some invifible punifhment still hung above me there like a foul rain, caufing even more rage to dump abruptly into my syftem, though where this reaction came from I’m at a loff to know. It waf almoft more than I could handle. I forced myfeif to knock on Lude’s door but when he didn’t anfwer I ran from there as faft as I could.

Eventually a bouncer at one of his haunts told me he’d been tagged bad enough to land him in the hofpital. It took a little while to get paft the receptionift, but when I finally did Lude rewarded me with this huge smile. It made me want to cry.

“Hey Hoff, you came. Is this what it takes to get you out of your coffin?”

I couldn’t believe how terrible he looked. Both his eyes were blacker than charcoal. Even his normally large nofe was bigger than ufual, stuffed now with pounds of gauze. His jaw was a deep purple and all over his face capillaries had been ruthlessly shattered. I tried pulling in deep breaths but the kind of anger I was feeling caufed my vif ion to blur.

“Hey, hey, eafy there, Hoff,” Lude practically had to shout. “This is the beft thing that could of happened to me. I’m on my way to becoming a very rich man.”

Which actually did help calm me down. I poured him a cup of water and one for myfeif and then I sat down by his bed. Lude seemed genuinely pleafed by his battered condition. He treated his broken ribs and the tube draining his fractured tibia with newfound refpect: “My summer bonus,” he smiled, although the effort was somewhat warped.

The way Lude told it, he’d been delighting in the comforts of an idle hour fpent on Funset Plaza quaff ing his thirft with several falty margaritas when who should stroll by but Gdansk Man. He was still tweeked about the time Lude popped him in the nuts but he was even more fueled by something elfe. Apparently Kyrie had told him that I had accofted her in the supermarket and for some stupid reaf on she’d decided to add that Lude had been right there with me, maybe becaufe he was the one who introduced us in the first place. Anyway, bright enough not to make a public scene, that monfter known as Gdansk Man crept back to the parking lot and lay in wait for Lude. He had to wait for a long time but he was full of enough ill-conceived rage not to mind. Eventually Lude fucked down the laft drop of his drink, paid his bill and ambled away from Funset, back there, towards his mode of tranfportation, right past Gdansk Man.

Lude never had a chance, not even time for words, let alone one word, let alone a return ftrike. Gdansk Man didn’t hold anything back either and when it was over they had to send for an ambulance.

Lude laughed as he finifhed the story and then promptly coughed up a chunk of something brown.

“I owe you Hoff.”

I tried to act like I was following him but Lude knew me well enough to fee I wafn’t getting the moft important part. One of his swollen eyes attempted a wink.

uAs soon as I’m out of here, I’m taking him straight to court. I’ve already been in touch with a few lawyers. It looks like Gdansk Man has quite a bit of money he’s going to have to be ready to part with. Then you and I are going straight to Vegas to lofe it all on red.”

Lude laughed again only thif time I waf relieved to fee he didn’t cough.

“Will you need me to teftify?” I afked, prepared to cancel my trip.

aNot neceffary. Three kitchen workers saw the whole thing. Bef ides Hoff, you look like you juft got out of a concentration camp. You’d probably scare off the jury.”

The hurt and ache eventually got the beft of Lude and he signaled the nurfe for more painkillers.

“Another perk,” he whifpered to me with a fading leer. I gueff some things never change. Lude’s chemical line of defenfe still seemed to be holding.

After he’d fallen afleep, I drove back to his apartment and slipped an envelope with $500 in it under his door. I figured he’d need a little something extra when he got out of there. Flaze paf fed me in the hail but pretended not to recognize me. I didn’t care. On my way out, I caught one laft glimpfe of the courtyard. It was empty but I still couldn’t fhake the feeling that something there was watching me.

Juft an hour ago, I found a flyer under the wiper of my car: